In the gaslit labyrinth of Veilwick Borough, where the streets rearranged themselves each night, only one man could navigate the shifting alleys—Theodor Finch, the last lamplighter.
His lantern didn’t burn ordinary oil.
It fed on lost time—the minutes slipped between couch cushions, the hours mourners spent staring at graves, the years old men wasted repeating the same stories. Theodor collected these fragments from weeping widows and regretful drunkards, distilling them into a shimmering blue fuel that kept the borough’s lamps burning.
"Light chases the dark," he’d say. "But time is the dark."
Then the lamps started going out.
Not flickering. Not dimming.
Vanishing—glass, brass, and all—as if plucked from existence.
Theodor followed the trail of missing lights to Mercy Asylum, where the borough’s forgotten languished. There, in the crumbling courtyard, he found them—his stolen lamps, hanging in a grotesque imitation of his route, each one burning black.
And beneath them stood Dr. Ephraim Voss, the asylum’s long-dead director, his pocket watch fused to his skeletal fingers.
"You took what wasn’t yours, Finch," the corpse whispered. "Those moments weren’t lost. They were stolen."
Theodor’s lantern guttered as the asylum’s patients emerged—not as they’d been in life, but as gaps in the air, human-shaped absences that drank the lamplight.
He realized too late:
His fuel wasn’t lost time.
It was unfinished time.
And the forgotten had come to collect.
Now, Veilwick’s streets writhe like a dying serpent each midnight. The few remaining lamps burn a sickly green.
And if you stand too long beneath one, you might notice two shadows—
—yours,
and the one counting the seconds until you turn around.
This is one of the best authors I know: [Literature] Charles Dickens: The Lamplighter 1/9