The Keeper's Ruins

The dead were restless tonight, and that meant someone was dying on my shore.

I felt it in the binding first. A tightness in my chest like a fist closing around my heart. Three hundred forty-seven years wearing this blood-cursed leash, and I still couldn't ignore a heartbeat struggling to keep going. Even when I should.

Especially when I should.

The storm hit wrong. All storms on Wraith Rock hit wrong. Blood magic twisted weather the way it twisted everything.But this one smelled like roses and ozone. Like something pretty dying. I stood at the top of the lighthouse, bleeding onto the lens the way I did every night, watching my blood slide across the carved blood diamond and feeling the binding pull tight.

The light didn't shine out. It never had. It shone in, into the space between worlds where the supernatural dead clustered like moths. I could feel them pressing against the veil. Vampires with fangs gone black. Werewolves frozen mid-shift. Necromancers whose magic had eaten them from the inside out. Four centuries' worth of things that refused to die properly, all held here by my blood and my duty and my goddamned inability to just let go.

The lens flickered.

That was impossible. Hadn't happened in two hundred years. Not since...

The thought cut off as I heard the body slam into the rocks below. Wet and heavy and still alive. Barely.

"Fuck," I said to the empty lighthouse. To the dead pressing at the windows. To myself, mostly.

I should leave them. I knew that. Three companions in three centuries, each one dead, each death resetting my humanity just enough to keep me sane. Just enough to keep me capable of this half-life. The price was clear: care too much, love too deep, and the blood magic fractures. The binding abhors change. Love is nothing but change.

But I was already moving, taking the stairs three at a time, because three hundred forty-seven years and I still couldn't ignore a heartbeat.

She was heavy. All muscle and scar tissue and the kind of compact density that came from a life spent fighting. I dragged her up the rocks—jagged volcanic stone that cut my hands, not that it mattered, I'd bleed anyway—and her head lolled against my shoulder.

One eye brown. One eye milky white.

Hunter's mark. Vampire tried to turn her and she killed it mid-bite.

"Shit," I breathed, and felt the binding twinge in warning.

I got her inside and lit the fire. Blood magic. A slash across my already-cut palm, drops hitting the wood, flames igniting silver. The heat was real but the light was wrong, casting everything in shades of mercury and bone.

She had broken ribs. Hypothermia. And something else, something wrong pulsing under her skin where the vampire's venom was still trying to finish what it started. Trying to kill her or turn her or both.

I was examining the wound when her good eye snapped open and she lunged.

Fast. Trained. A blade appearing in her hand like magic.

I caught her wrist. Twisted. The knife clattered to the stone floor.

"You're the keeper," she said. Not a question.

"And you're dying," I said. "We're both excellent at our jobs."

She didn't fight my grip. Just stared at me with that asymmetrical gaze, one eye warm brown, one eye dead white. The dichotomy of her. Living and dying all at once.

"How long do I have?"

I released her wrist. Stepped back. "In this storm? Until dawn. After that..."

The lighthouse groaned. The dead were pressing harder now. I could hear fingernails on stone, wet breathing that shouldn't exist, the weight of centuries of supernatural hunger pushing at the walls.

The lens cracked.

Just a hairline fracture, but I felt it in my chest like a second heartbeat trying to start.

"Fuck," I said again, because what else was there?

Dawn didn't come.

The storm swallowed the sun, and I knew the binding was unraveling. Not because I'd failed in my duty. Because I'd succeeded too well. I'd become as dead as the things I kept.

I cut deeper for the emergency maintenance. Opened both forearms, let the blood flow thick and dark across the lens. The dead's presence intensified, visible now through the windows. A vampire woman in a rotting flapper dress. A werewolf with amber eyes and too many teeth. A necromancer whose skin had gone translucent, showing the death magic consuming him from within.

"Why do you keep doing it?" Mara asked. She'd told me her name at some point between the shivering and the watching me bleed. "The binding. You could just... stop."

"The dead would consume the coast within a week," I said, bandaging my arms with practiced efficiency. "Thousands would die."

"Is that really why?" Her voice was too steady for someone dying. "Or are you just afraid of what comes after?"

I didn't answer. What was there to say? That I'd had three companions and each death had destroyed me? That the grief reset my humanity, yes, but the price was remembering how to feel loss? That I'd sworn never again, but three centuries of isolation was killing me slower than any wound?

"Here." She reached for my hand. Started rebandaging the sloppy job I'd done. Her fingers were calloused. Warm. Alive in a way I'd forgotten warmth could be.

Our fingers touched.

The binding reacted. My eyes bled actual blood, streaming down my face like tears I couldn't cry. The lens cracked further, a web of fractures spreading like ice on a winter window.

The dead began scratching at the glass.

"I came here to die," Mara said quietly, still holding my hand. Still grounding me even as the blood magic screamed. "Heard rumors. Beacon's End. The lighthouse that summons the dead. Thought they'd finish what the vampire started."

"Why?" The word came out ragged.

"Because I'm tired." She looked at me with those mismatched eyes. "Thirty years of hunting. Fighting. Killing things that used to be people. The Ordo Argent taught me to be a weapon. I'm good at it. But I don't... I don't remember what else I am."

I understood that. God, I understood that.

"You make me want to remember," I said, and the lighthouse screamed.

She kissed me.

The lens shattered.

The dead poured in like a flood. Through the cracks, through the windows, through the goddamned walls. The binding couldn't hold them anymore. Itcouldn't hold anything, because blood magic required stasis and love was nothing but change.

I fought. Cut my forearms open, let the blood become weapons, whips of crimson light that severed the vampire woman's throat, burned through the werewolf's chest. Beside me, Mara moved like violence incarnate. Blessed silver knives flashing, hunter's training making her deadly even dying.

We fought back-to-back. Her ribs were broken but she didn't slow. My eyes bled rivers but I didn't stop. The dead kept coming.

"I didn't come here to be saved!" she shouted, driving a stake through a vampire's heart.

"Neither did I!" I lashed out with blood-magic, caught the necromancer across the face. He dissolved into frost and fury.

But we were losing. Too many. Too broken. The lens was shards now, glittering on the floor like diamonds made of carnage.

The vampire woman's voice cut through the chaos: "Join us, keeper. You're already one of us."

And she was right. I was. Three hundred forty-seven years of existing without living. What was I but another corpse that refused to lie down?

I looked at Mara. Blood on her face. Fire in her eyes. Dying and alive and more human than I'd been in centuries.

I could fix this. The binding had rules. A companion's death reset everything, restored my humanity, repaired the magic, locked the dead back in their prison.

One cut. Ritual knife across her throat. She was dying anyway.

The knife was in my hand before I'd consciously reached for it. Blood magic, helpful like that. Always giving you the tools for violence.

Mara saw it. Didn't flinch. Just looked at me with those eyes, brown and white, living and dying, acceptance and challenge all at once.

"Do it," she said. "Save them."

I'd been alive...well existing for three hundred forty-seven years.

I'd never made a choice for myself. Not once. Always duty. Always the binding. Always the cost.

I threw the knife into the sea.

And took her hand instead.

The binding broke.

I felt it snap like bones...my bones, maybe, or the lighthouse's bones, or the bones of the world itself. The blood magic drained out of me in a rush that would've dropped me if Mara wasn't there, holding me up even with broken ribs and poison in her blood.

The dead... stopped.

Just stopped. The vampire woman paused mid-lunge. The werewolf's claws halted inches from my throat. The necromancer's frost magic dissipated like morning fog.

Without the binding, without the light, they had no anchor. No reason to stay. No prison to rage against.

The vampire woman looked at me. Something almost human flickered in her dead eyes. She nodded once, acknowledgment, maybe gratitude and faded. Not violently. Gently. Like smoke on wind.

The werewolf's rage drained away, revealing the man underneath. He looked at his clawed hands. At me. Mouthed words I couldn't hear but understood anyway: Thank you.

Then he was gone too.

The necromancer crumbled to ash. But the ash smelled like peace.

One by one, the dead released. Four centuries of supernatural prisoners, finally free to finish dying.

The lighthouse went dark.

I could feel the mortality flooding in. My heartbeat, suddenly mortal-fast. The cold that actually bit. Hunger that was real, not remembered. Pain in my cut arms that wouldn't heal in seconds anymore.

I was dying. Slowly. Finally.

"You destroyed everything you were for me," Mara said. She was leaning on me as much as I was leaning on her. Both of us bleeding, both of us broken, both of us something like free.

"No." I pulled her closer. Used my blood, mortal blood now, nothing special, to seal her wound. Not to heal. Just to share. "I destroyed what I'd become. You reminded me what I was."

"What now?"

The question hung between us. The lighthouse was just stone. The island just rock. The dead were gone. We were just two mortals watching the storm finally break.

"Now we're both dying," I said. "Slowly. Together."

She smiled. Actually smiled. "I can work with that."

We sat on the lighthouse steps as dawn finally broke. Real dawn, no longer held back by blood magic. Her hand in mine. Both of us bleeding, me from the broken binding, her from the wound. Our blood mingled on the stone.

The dead were gone. The duty was gone. The immortality was gone.

And I could finally see.

Not with the light. Not with magic. Just with these mortal eyes that would dim someday soon. But for now...for whatever time we had, I could see her. See the sunrise. See the world without the weight of centuries pressing down.

The lighthouse was dark.

But I was, for the first time in three hundred forty-seven years, alive.

That was enough. Actually, that was everything.