When Lanterns Fade

I was sixteen the first time I realized our village was wrong.

Not in the usual ways people complain about. It wasn’t just that we scraped wax for lanterns while the rest of the country used floating solar bulbs. Or that our school’s single, cracked chalkboard had been passed down like a family heirloom. No, it was something quieter, crooked under the skin of the place. The kind of wrong that did not shout. It breathed. There was a persistent, intrusive sensation that followed me everywhere—a faint metallic taste that tinged the back of my tongue, like the air itself was rusting.

My goat, Pip, chewed the corner of my notebook while I watched the horizon flicker. Lights from the futuristic cities to the west stuttered near our border. This happened every night. A smooth ribbon of neon would approach the dark hill at the edge of our land, then fray like a thread being pulled apart. The lights would glitch, jump, then vanish.

Pip looked up at me with a scrap of paper hanging out of her mouth.

I sighed. “You ate the page about ancient history, Pip.”

She blinked. If goats could shrug, she did.

I was supposed to finish an essay explaining why our village of Roamer’s Rest remained lantern-lit while the rest of the world soared through holograms and walking tech. The official answer was tradition. The real answer was what I was trying to figure out.

I flipped my notebook shut and pushed Pip’s head away gently. “You are the worst study partner.”

At least she never argued.

The lanterns in Roamer’s Rest were old. Every house had two: one for inside and one for hanging outside the door each night. They were made of thick hand-blown glass, tinted amber like honey, and they cast a warm glow that made everything look older than it was. Even me. Sometimes I caught my reflection and thought I looked like a girl who had already lived a long life, but didn't realize it yet.

People liked to say our lantern light protected us. They never explained from what.

That was the first thing I wanted to understand.

The second thing was why no one ever talked about the ancestor.

The story was whispered sometimes, usually by old people with loose memories, and always with the same tone you would use to describe a person who once set something on fire by accident. Apparently, many years ago, someone in my family had sabotaged the first power grid intended to connect Roamer’s Rest to the rest of the world. He cut wires, smashed devices, and threw a junction box into the river. It caused a blackout across several districts.

That, according to the rumors, was why tech could not step near our village now. The glitching lines. The flickering horizon. The strange electronic failures that happened every time someone tried to bring a digital device across the lantern border.

My parents said the ancestor was a traitor.

The elders said he was a prophet.

I figured he was probably just a very dramatic man with poor impulse control.

I rubbed Pip’s head. “One day we are going to figure out what he actually did.”

Pip bleated loudly, which I interpreted as moral support.

That night, I stayed at the edge of the lantern border long after the last house lights went out. Our village was one of the only places where the world still had a true night. When the lanterns dimmed, the sky became enormous, heavy with stars that seemed to hum like insects. Sometimes the silence felt like a blanket. Sometimes it felt like a threat. On occasion, a distant, modern sound—a barely perceptible drone or a muted city hum—nudged the quiet, making the stillness feel precarious, as though the silence could be shattered with the slightest sound.

My grandmother once told me the silence here was older than the village.

I had no idea what that meant.

Pip nudged my leg, restless.

“All right, fine,” I whispered. “We should go home. But I will come back tomorrow.”

I had no idea that tomorrow everything would start unraveling.

My goat woke me before sunrise by stepping on my face.

I sat up, groaning. “Pip. I have a nose. I need it.”

She stared at me with her round eyes. Then she stepped on my stomach, which I guessed meant breakfast time.

Living with a goat meant giving up any sense of personal space or dignity.

We ate quickly and set out before most people woke up. Today I had a plan. I was going to break into the old archive.

It sat behind the council hall, locked with a rusted chain no one had bothered to replace. It had not been opened in years, maybe decades. The elders said it contained old legal papers and taxes that were no longer relevant. But old people lied with an ease that should be studied.

I reached the back window, found the loose hinge I had discovered months ago, and slipped inside. Pip squeezed through after me and immediately began chewing a map.

“Please,” I whispered urgently, “do not eat evidence.”

The archive smelled like dust and ink. Stacks of parchment lined the walls. A few boxes of metal parts sat in a corner, tagged with peeling labels. I found what I was looking for in the farthest cabinet: a thin leather book tied with a frayed ribbon.

The initials on the front matched the ancestor’s name.

J. R.

I held my breath.

The diary inside was full of thin, looping handwriting. On the first readable page, he wrote:

The lanterns are almost ready. I hope this will work. They said time is bending, and I saw the proof myself.

I frowned. “Time bending?”

I flipped the page.

Tomorrow, they plan to activate the grid. They do not understand what they are inviting. The future refuses to touch us. If it enters, we lose the present.

I looked up sharply.

The future refuses to touch us.

That did not make sense. The adults always said the future could not cross because the lanterns blocked it. Not because the future chose to avoid us.

Pip bumped my leg. I almost dropped the book.

I kept reading.

This place cannot survive the weight of two timelines. Something must be removed. Better the village than the world.

I felt cold all over.

“What did he remove?” I whispered.

At that moment, I heard footsteps outside the window.

I shut the diary fast, stuffed it into my coat, grabbed Pip’s collar, and escaped through the other window just as an elder unlocked the archive door.

We hid behind a barrel until the coast was clear, and then I sprinted home with Pip trotting after me.

The diary felt like a stone in my pocket.

The ancestor was not sabotaging anything. He was trying to stop something from happening. Something to do with time.

And something to do with the lanterns.

That evening, I returned to the border. Pip followed, chewing a piece of grass like a tiny criminal.

The horizon glitched again.

The test failed. The lantern border is barely stable. The village drifts. I do not know if we can be returned to our place in the timeline. I must do more.

Only now I noticed something new. The glitching lights were not just flickering. They were repeating. I watched the same ripple move across the neon strip twice in exactly the same way.

A loop.

I whispered, “Pip, this is bad.”

She sneezed.

I cracked open the diary again, under the dim glow of my lantern.

The next pages were worse.

Drifts.

My stomach turned.

Our village was not stuck in the past. It was not cut off from technology. It was literally drifting out of time, like a ship losing its anchor.

Another entry:

My future self came to me tonight. He warned me that I would not live long enough to finish the anchor lantern. He will try to return it to me, but he may not reach me in time.

I felt dizzy.

Future self.

Anchor lantern.

Loops.

I closed the book and leaned my head back. The sky was too still. The stars almost looked like they were watching me.

Pip curled beside me and rested her head on my foot.

She bleated.

I could not help it. I laughed, shaky and half terrified.

“Pip,” I said softly, “I think we are not where we are supposed to be.”

By the next night, I had made a decision. It was stupid and reckless and probably deadly. Which meant it was very in character for someone related to the ancestor.

I was going to blow out the last lantern on the border.

According to the diary, I had done this before. I had no memory of it. Which meant the loops were real.

I felt my pulse in my throat.

I needed to break them.

It was just me, the dark, and Pip. The last lantern was tall and ancient, shaped like a teardrop. The flame inside wavered gently, almost like it was alive.

“All right,” I whispered. “Here goes nothing.”

I leaned forward and blew.

The lantern went dark.

For a long moment, nothing changed.

The glitching horizon did not surge in.

The wind did not shift.

The world did not break free.

A long, quiet silence stretched across the hill.

Then I felt someone behind me.

I turned slowly.

And froze.

It was me.

She stepped forward.

“I remember this night,” she said quietly.

Pip screamed. Then he head-butted her.

Older. Tired. Eyes hollow like she had seen too many endings. Her hair was streaked with gray and pulled back in a loose braid. Her jacket was scorched on the sleeve. She looked like someone who had survived a war I did not remember fighting.

The older me winced. “I forgot about the goat.”

I stared at her, shaking. “Who are you?”

“You know who I am.”

“No. No, I really do not.”

She looked at the dark lantern. “Every time you do this, we slip further. Every time you try to break the border, the village is pushed deeper into the wrong part of time.”

I blinked hard. “You mean blowing out the lantern makes it worse?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do I keep doing it?”

Her expression softened. “Because you want to save us. You always have.”

She reached into her coat and pulled out something wrapped in cloth.

She handed it to me.

Inside was a lantern I had never seen before. It was made of gears and glass plates. When I tilted it, it hummed softly, like it was alive.

“You will build this someday,” she said. “The anchor lantern. It is the only thing that can return the village to the timeline.”

“Then why did you bring it to me now?”

“Because in every loop, you never live long enough to make it.”

My breath caught.

She stepped back. “You need to break the loop before time breaks us.”

The wind rose, swirling around her feet. She became almost transparent.

“Wait,” I whispered. “Tell me how to use it.”

She smiled sadly.

“You figure it out.”

Then she vanished.

Gone.

Just gone.

I did not sleep that night. I sat in my room with Pip curled against me, staring at the lantern made of gears.

It pulsed faintly.

The diary said nothing about how to use it. Only that it anchored the village to the correct timeline.

I thought about my ancestors. About the future self. About the loops. About the glitching horizon. About the way the stars seemed too still.

I realized the lantern border was not a block. It was a thread. A weak, flickering connection to the real timeline.

If the village was drifting…

Then this lantern was the rope.

I needed to light it.

I placed a candle inside, but the lantern did not react.

I tried a match. Nothing.

Then I remembered something from the diary.

The anchor must remember the present.

I frowned. “Remember the present.”

I thought of the way the stars hummed. The silence. The glitches. The loops.

I thought of Pip chewing my homework.

I thought of my grandmother’s stories about silence older than the village.

I thought of the moment older me looked at me with sadness.

I pressed my palm against the lantern glass.

I whispered, “I remember.”

The lantern flared alive.

And something inside me clicked.

Light exploded out of it, not warm like fire or bright like electricity, but a strange, shifting glow that felt like it came from every direction at once. Pip bleated and hid behind me.

Outside, the air shuddered. The ground vibrated. I felt pressure in my chest like I was being pulled in every direction.

The light grew stronger. My vision blurred.

For a second, everything was nothing.

I woke up in my bed.

Sunlight streamed through the window.

Real sunlight. It looked different. Brighter. The color was less honey, more gold.

Pip was asleep on my feet.

I sat up, heart pounding.

My room looked the same, but the air felt different, like something that had been tight for years had finally loosened.

I ran outside.

People were gathered in the square, confused but unharmed. The lanterns glowed steadily. The sky was brighter. The horizon to the west was no longer glitching.

The border lights from the future stood steady and clear. No loops. No stutters. No gaps.

The world had aligned.

I swallowed hard.

I had done it.

We were back in the timeline.

For the first time in maybe a century.

Pip trotted up beside me and nudged my elbow.

I knelt beside her and laughed, breathless and shaky. “We survived the Lantern War.”

No one else understood what that meant.

But I did.

My ancestor had pulled the village out of time to protect it. I had anchored it back.

And somewhere, in some other version of time, the older me was smiling.

The air tasted different. The light felt new.

I whispered, “I remember.”

And for once, the world remembered.