CHAPTER ONE

THE LANTERN-BEARERS

	“Willoh!” calls a voice from beyond your door, startling you from the morning stupor you’d been in moments ago, the warmth of your bath’s water still soaked into your skin. You scramble out of the door’s view, quickly pulling your vestments over yourself. The knock at the door becomes more insistent as you affix your mask to your face, until your supervisor barges into your quarters just as it’s on.

	You chirp a quick “Yes, sir!” as though you’d not been ignoring him for all that time.

	“Haven’t you got ears, Bearer?” he scoffs, “At least you’re not still in bed.” His weary eyes size you up. For all the progress you’ve made in your ranks, his gaze has become no more kind and makes you feel no less small, though you tower over him. His is a familiar sort, here; a plain human, with gradually graying hair and wrinkling skin, worn down by decades of fighting the good fight and passing on his waning fire to the next generation. It makes sense that he’s so harsh, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it. “Get to the grand hall. The Lantern is getting impatient with your research, so you’d better have something to present to them.”

	“Oh…” you begin, your voice wavering a bit as you peek from behind your mask at a desk drowning in a sea of parchment. You, of course, were trying. You’re the studious sort, but… perhaps you’d talked up your academic prowess just a bit too much. “Um, I may—”

	He cuts you off, “Hope you’re ready for field work, Willoh. Have to make up for the time you’ve wasted somehow,” evidently seeing straight through your stammering equivocation. He shuts the door in almost grimly gentle fashion, and disappears down the hall before you can do anything to defend yourself.

	You rifle through the hopelessly disorganized papers, cherry-picking the most relevant among them. As you do, you can’t help but feel a twinge of distress at how light your body of work is. You stand in front of your mirror, papers clutched in gloved hands, trying to gather your courage.

	You’re an impressively tall figure, and you try to project a formal confidence with a strident, upright posture, though the heavy, dark robes you’ve chosen to wear pad out your form—true to your name, you’re a rather willowy individual beneath it all. Like most things here, your black robes are minimalist, dashed with only two sources of color: a gold silk sash, and a single, simple emblem, depicting a golden cage lantern encasing a bright white sphere. That of the Lantern-Bearers. A hood covers a head of long, slicked-back dark hair, and a white mask lined with streaks of golden filigree obscures a gaunt visage of dark gray complexion, two holes giving way to shimmering, golden eyes.

	Sucking in a deep breath, you steel yourself as best you can… although you once again have to stop the moment you’re at the door and repeat the whole process again. Field work? With what training? He was joking, right? Right?

	You shake yourself out of it and push through the door and into the halls. The quarters here are cozy and small, but those words couldn’t be applied to any other part of this building. Splitting the rows of rooms is a sparsely-lit hall with huge, arched supports, all painted black and minimally decorated. This hall was always unsettling, but now it is at its worst; you look up and into the arches, and see among them hundreds of draped golden sashes.

	A subtle memorial to those who gave their lives in the field.

	They hang heavier than ever above you as you make what feels, with each step, more like a death march. It’s as if their silken tendrils could reach down and wind around your throat at any moment, and pull you into the rafters with them. No, no. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just field work. It’s just the rains! They’re easy enough to handle, right? Just don’t get caught without cover. That’s all. That’s all.

	Out onto the campus you go. It’s early Autumn, now, and an unusually cold one at that; a sharp chill has seized the forest still, and it seemed like one day the greenery was flourishing under the sunlight, and the next it was all dead, gnarled and orange. The sky was clear as ever, though, and you could feel the Architect’s judgment at your back, oddly sweltering sunlight on your shoulders as you navigate the twisting paths up the mountain. The ‘initiates’, as you are called despite your lifelong service for the Bearers, live some distance from the main hall.

	It’s a calming walk, usually. A long opportunity to gather yourself and prepare presentations or merely to relax, with gentle, cold mist rolling down the mountainside and spilling over the paths and between small, patchy arrangements of flowers. These miniature gardens were a noble, if endearingly weak effort by the other initiates to add a splash of color to the otherwise harshly minimalist facilities here. But this time, it’s merely a long obstacle; far too long to spend alone with your rising anxiety.

	Facing the Lantern is never a particularly fun event, even in the best occasions. Their glaring, uncomfortable light threatens to sear every shadow from your mind, to burrow into your skull and extract every secret. More than once you’ve felt the urge to kneel at their altar and just spill everything that ails you in an assuredly ugly display. You’ve even seen other initiates do it, and the worry that it too might flay you open that way someday is… well, terrifying. The Bearers allow you so little, but at least they have left your privacy mostly intact.

	As you stare off down the mountain, losing yourself in your thoughts, another of the initiates comes practically careening into you. She shoulder-checks you, seeming startled out of her own trance just as you are out of yours.

	“Oh, Willoh!” she plants a hand on your shoulder, making sure you don’t take one more step forward without hearing her. “Hey, hey, how are you doing? Is everything alright? I’ve seen that look, I know you were thinkin’ about charging off into the woods.” How did she— “I’ve had that thought lots of times myself, but hey, stick it out!”

	You blink a few times, and she stares at you from behind her mask as if she can hear the cogs turning in your skull. “Um… hi, Nemara. I’m okay, I was just heading to see the Lantern…”

	A slightly more… dour look crosses her face, her eyes quickly darting away from yours. “Oh! Did you come up with any good research? You were working so hard, surely you…” Before she can finish her sentence, you just solemnly shake your head. “Uh… okay. You should be careful, Willoh. The Lantern seemed a little off-kilter today, y’know? Maybe just one of those days. Do mystical light beings have off days?”

	A long and sharp pause occurs, as the information she has volunteered is promptly swallowed into the writhing mass of anxiety increasingly straining the inside of your skull, and she thinks over the question she’s posed. After a moment of you staring vacantly through her, she seems to come to a realization and just speaks a little more lowly. “Just tread lightly, hon.”