This week’s story prompt image harks back the Isle of May Trip earlier this year. In all honesty the photo wasn’t taken with the intent of using it for anything. I was trying (with minimal success) to get better at catching moving subjects. This one was on the boat-ride in. The fog-laden air progressively filled with birds. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with the invading band of darkness. For readers of a nervous disposition, I promise it wasn’t there to the naked eye. Thinking about it, perhaps that makes it worse.
Izzy stood on the cliff edge and gazed out to sea. In the distance a solitary puffin struggled out of the waves. Its little feet slapped frantically against the water giving its wings an extra boost to keep it ahead of the roiling darkness that followed close behind.
It was enough. Just. The puffin took to the air. Its wings flapped frantically as it flew for safety. Izzy smiled. She knew it would make it.
She tightened her grip on her staff, drawing comfort from the gnarled patterns carved onto the surface. The Darkeness was nearly upon them. It would soon be time.
In other cultures, all around the world, there were festivals of lights. Ceremonial lightings of decorations. Traditions of lighting lamps and candles. The meanings were various. Frequently religious. Occasionally cynically commercial. Sometimes highly specific. In other places vague, the origins lost to the depths of history. But always lights. Always now.
For Izzy and her people, on the last island at the edge of the world both traditions and lights were as tangible as the great wall of dark that loomed over the sea. This darkness was not that of night. It was thicker. Stifling and dense. It was Darkness incarnate. For centuries, Izzy’s people had stood against it. The Cult of Candles. That was the name that legend had given them. Stupid, really. It made Izzy and her sisters-in-light sound crazy. Which was unfair. Among her sisters there was no fanaticism. No arcane belief systems. Only one ritual. Barely even that, when it came down to it. Just this.
The Darkness rolled over the sea, clipping the breakers as they began to roll over the shallows. Izzy raised her staff and planted it in the loose gravel at her feet.
“I stand. A light against the dark.”
Yellow fire sparked at the staff’s peak. No heat, just a flickering glow. It seemed too small against the mass of blackness that approached. It was.
“I stand separate. A candle against the night.”
Along the headland more candle-flames lit. The Darkness slowed.
“Separate, but not alone. Together we stand. The candles against the Darkness.” On the final phrase Izzy’s took on echoing layers of harmony. Her voice joined with her sisters-in-light. She loved that part. Her heart soared with it. The many candle-flames flared bright. The Darkness stopped. Bound in place.
Power thrummed from the Earth into the staff to feed the cold flame. Izzy felt it take hold as the staff grew roots. It would hold itself aloft and alight until the spring, when the Darkness would once again recede. Her job was done.
Izzy stepped back. A sharp sound froze her in place. It couldn’t be. Could it? In over a thousand years this had never happened. Not since the Dark Days before the first sisters-in-light formed the original Cult of Candles. In all that time no staff had ever faltered.
But there it was. The top of her staff had cracked. The tiniest glimmer of light leaked in a hair-thin line from the apex a hand-span downward. Izzy looked on in horror as the fissure widened.
Brandon Lim 