Salt and Light

Callum Ashworth has kept Morrow's flame for nineteen years. He knows the exact weight of the brass reservoir, the angle at which the lens throws its blade of light across the water, the precise moment the wick will spit sulfur and singe your knuckle. The sea has taken everything else from him, and he has made a life from the taking. His days are measured in matches struck and embers watched. His nights in the beam's slow rotation over dark, indifferent water. He is content in the way a man becomes content when he has stopped hoping for more. Then the rhythm breaks. An arrival at the base of the tower shakes the salt from the walls and the certainty from his hands. Someone who sees the keeper behind the flame. Someone who does not flinch from the years of silence or the weight of what was lost to get here. The light that Callum has spent two decades pointing outward begins, for the first time, to turn inward. He must decide what Morrow's beam is for: a warning to ships in the dark, or a signal that the coast is no longer safe to keep alone. The sea will not give back what it has taken. But it may, for the first time, let him set something down.