The Lantern Keepers

In the heart of the city that never slept, beneath its clamour and steel, an ancient society thrived. Known only to a handful as The Lantern Keepers, this covert group had guarded knowledge long forgotten by the modern world--fragments of the truth too dangerous for daylight but too sacred to die.

Every year, on the longest night of the year, the keepers would gather beneath the Tomeveil Archives, a seemingly abandoned building wrapped in ivy and rumours. To most the building was a condemned relic, but to the Keepers, it was a gateway to their sanctum. Behind a false bookshelf in the Archives basement lay a stairwell that spiralled deep into the earth, lit by flickering lanterns that never seemed to extinguished.

At the bottom of those spiral stairs, was a room, a circular chamber, walls lined with ancient tomes, glass cases full of artifacts, and a dome overhead painted with constellations no longer mapped. This was the Sanctum lēoht-fæt--the Sanctuary of Lanterns.

There were nine keepers, each selected by the pervious generation, their identities veiled even from one another. Each wore a cloak the colour of the night and a porcelain mask with a unique sigil on each. They went by names rooted from the old language like ūle, wulf, fearn and Lodema.

On the night that this story begins, a tenth mask was placed on the central pedestal in the chamber.

"A new keeper must be chosen," Fearn said, their voice a soft whisper of rustling leaves.

"The time has come," ūle replied. "The sigil of the Mirror has appeared."

The Mirror Sigil was a prophecy, a mark meant to surface when danger stirred in the folds of the forgotten history of the world. It meant one thing: someone outside the society had seen something they should not.

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Clara Norwood never considered herself extraordinary. A researcher, fresh out of university, working in the dusty library of the city museum. Her days were filled with cataloguing books that no one had touched in decades. But curiosity was her best friend and her worst enemy.

One evening, alone in the library basement, she came across a wooden crate. There was no record of its existence. She hesitated for only a moment before prying it open.

Inside was a lantern--small, black and intricately carved with a sigil of a mirror framed in fire. The moment she touched it, the flame inside the lantern sparked to life, though she could see no oil to fuel it. The shadows around her twisted, and for a split second, she the dome of the Sanctuary of Lanterns--the constellations painted across its ceiling.

Then, darkness.

Clara awoke on the cold stone of the libraries basement. The lantern was gone. In its place was a folded piece of parchment.

"Come to the Tomeveil Archives at Midnight."

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Clara stood before the Tomeveil Archives at one minute to midnight, breath fogging in the cold. The building loomed like a watchful God. As midnight tolled from the clock tower a few streets away, the door creaked open of its own accord.

She stepped inside the 'abandoned' building.

Bookshelves stretched into the darkness. Dust danced in the shafts of moonlight from the broken shattered windows. She moved towards the back, where a open book rested on a table. The page turned on its own, revealing a map of the archives and a single word: "Below."

She made her way to the basement of the archives, there she found a cloak as dark as the night and a porcelain mask. There was another piece of parchment that was placed on the cloak.

"Put these on and descend."

She found the stairwell and began her descent into the earths depth.

The chamber she found herself in took her breath away. She saw the cloaked figures, dressed like she was.

She looked around the room at the constellations, the same ones from the vision, the ever burning lanterns.

"You have been summoned," one of the mask figures said. "You saw what should be hidden."

"I didn't mean to," Clara replied, her voice trembling.

"Yet the lantern chose you."

Another masked figure stepped forward. "The Mirror Sigil binds you now. There is no going back."

"What is this place?" She whispered.

"A bastion of truths," the figure in front of her replied, "and of burdens."

They told her what they protected: not merely knowledge, but dangerous wisdom--maps to cities lost to time, rituals that bent reality and machines that whispered in forgotten tongues. Clara, whether by fate or folly, had touched one of these truths.

"You must train," ūle said. "The world shifts. A darkness awakens that seeks out our flame."

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Clara's initiation was relentless. She learned to read languages that had been long forgotten by this millennia, meditated under the flickering lanterns until visions came to her, and deciphered puzzles meant to break weaker minds. All the while, the other Keepers remained at a distant, their mask never removed, their real names never spoken.

But Clara, scēawere, the mirror, had one gift that the others did not possess, she could see glimpses of the future.

She first saw it in the Dome Room while Fearn was making her mediate. A fire engulfing the Sanctuary. A man in red robes breaking the lanterns. And above, a symbol she had only seen once before--tattooed on the arm of a stranger who had brushed past her days earlier in the museum.

She warned the keepers.

"The Crimson Order," Lodema said gravely. "We thought them gone."

"They seek to extinguish us," Wulf stated. "To claim the truths for their dominion."

"The we act," seax added. "Strike before they strike us."

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The Keepers tracked the Crimson order, to the catacombs beneath the city that never slept. Clara led them, guided by the power that only she possessed. They moved through the tunnels veined with the forgotten glyphs and rituals burned into the stone.

They found the Order mid-ritual. Red-robed figures circled a giant crystal, dark energy pulsing from within.

A battle erupted.

The Keepers wielded relics and knowledge as weapons. Lantern-light burned bright, driving back shadows that escaped from the figures of the Crimson Order. Clara held the Mirror Lantern, its flame guiding her through the chaos

She stood now in front of the Order's Leader--the man from the museum. His black mask had fallen from his face in the chaos of this fight, his eyes were black voids.

"You don't understand what you protect," he sneered.

"I understand enough," Clara returned, raising her lantern into the air. "Truth is not for tyrants."

She cast the light from her lantern on to him. He screamed as his form twisted, the truth unravelling the lies that held him together.

The ritual collapsed and the crystal cracked

Silence returned as the dust settled on the ground.

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The lantern Keepers returned to the Sanctuary, weary but victorious. The sigils on their masks shimmered faintly-- a sign of approval from the ancient power that the group served.

Clara stood before the central before the central pedestal. The others backs towards her.

She removed her mask and placed it on the centre pedestal, and before her eyes, on the forehead of the mask, a symbol was being carved, the Mirror Sigil.

Once completed she picked up the mask and put it back on her face, concealing her identity once again. The others turned around and now faced her

"You are one of us now," Lodema proclaimed. "By light and by shadow, by truth and by will."

Clara return to where her lantern stood, the flames in it burning brighter.

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To this day, no one speaks of the Lantern Keepers in the world above. But beneath the city, in the Sanctum lēoht-fæt, ten cloaked figures gather, guarding the truths of worlds long forgotten to this age.

And among them, the Mirror watches still.