The-Light-Wont-Keep-Itself
He played for six hours, and did not notice the night go.
The quest was *The Lantern at Greywater*, and step by step it gave itself up to him, and he understood with a slow ache that it was not really about a lighthouse at all. Wenna led him up the cliff path, and as they climbed she talked — not the stiff repeated barks of an ordinary NPC, but loosely, warmly, the decision-pattern engine pulling her responses from somewhere that knew him. She teased him for fighting the shore-crabs badly.
> **Wenna:** *"Level 3. Three. We've had this game out for over a year and you're level THREE. You only ever made the one character, didn't you."*
He laughed out loud, alone, in the dark, and then put his hand over his mouth because the laugh had a sob in the middle of it.
The lighthouse, when they reached it, was lit. They had come the whole way to learn who was keeping a dead keeper's light burning, and the answer, the seventh step revealed, was the keeper's daughter — Wenna herself — who climbed the stairs every night to light a lamp for a father who would never come home, because the lighting of it was how she kept him near.
> **QUEST: The Lantern at Greywater**
> Step 7 of 7 · *Final*
> **Wenna:** *"Everyone tells me to let it go out. They say he's gone, the light helps no one, ships have radar now. They're right, probably."*
> *"But I think a light isn't only for guiding ships. I