In the perpetually gray town of Gloaming, where the sun never quite broke through the clouds, Marlowe the Chandler was the only one who knew how to make real light.
His candles didn’t just burn—they remembered.
A bride’s nervous laughter woven into the wax would glow blush-pink. A dying man’s whispered confession would flicker in somber blue. The townsfolk paid in memories, and Marlowe’s workshop was a cathedral of floating light, each flame a captured moment suspended in glass jars.
But his masterpiece—the one he never sold—was the Last Candle.
Tall as a man’s forearm, its wax the color of old bruises, it was made from the silence between heartbeats. The wick? Braided from the last breaths of seven suicides.
“Light this,” Marlowe would tell his apprentice, “only when you’re ready to see what the dark has been hiding.”
Then came the night the town’s clocks all stopped at once.
No wind. No noise. Just the creeping sense that something had slid between the seconds and gotten stuck.
Marlowe knew before he looked.
The Last Candle was burning.
And no one had lit it.
The flame was black.
Not dark—black, a light that ate the air around it. And in its flicker, Marlowe saw them: figures standing shoulder-to-shoulder in his shop, in the streets, in the spaces between houses. Not ghosts. Not quite.
Things that had been waiting for the light to go out.
His apprentice screamed as the nearest one turned its head—too far, too smooth—and spoke in Marlowe’s dead wife’s voice:
“You promised you’d join me.”
The candle guttered.
The thing smiled.
And Gloaming’s last light snuffed out.
Now, travelers who pass the abandoned chandlery swear they see a single, swaying glow in its attic window.
But the townsfolk know better.
They’ve seen the other lights moving in the dark lately—floating just beyond their doorways, bobbing gently as if carried by unseen hands.
Waiting.
Watching.
And burning down.
