Chapter 4 — The Ruined Lighthouse
The cast-iron steps still groaned as I came down from the top. But they were no longer the groans of tired metal; they were breaths. As if each step of the staircase exhaled in my place. I stopped halfway. The notebook beat against my chest, impatient, like an extra heart unwilling to accept my pace. And behind me, the foreign breathing climbed.
I was not alone in the lighthouse.
Oil lamps that hadn’t burned in decades lit up one by one, without any visible flame, like eyes opening in reverse. The air vibrated with a salty tension. I pressed my hand against the railing; it pulsed, warm, as though the metal had blood running through it.
I descended further. At every landing, a noise. Not footsteps. More like hisses. Like pages flipped too fast. My fingers brushed the notebook: it wanted to open, but I resisted. When it decided on its own, the page showed a single line, scrawled in a handwriting I hadn’t seen before:
Lighthouses do not guide. They watch.
A chill ran down my neck.
On the ground floor, the lighthouse door had closed. I hadn’t heard it. The wood creaked under invisible pressure. The salt-clouded windows began trembling, as though from an interior wind. In their reflections I saw stars. Not the real night outside, but stars forming impossible angles, twisted constellations no atlas records. They pulsed in rhythm with my breathing.
Then the voice spoke. Not a word, but a flux of syllables, like a radio hesitating between a thousand stations. Yet I recognized my name within it: Ivo. Ivo. Ivo.
I stepped back. The floor of the lighthouse was no longer wood planks. It became damp stone, carved, inlaid with shells. Stairs descended further down, deeper than the foundations, as if the lighthouse had rooted itself into the sea itself. I was caught in a choice: flee through the closed door, or descend where the voice invited me.
I chose to descend.
The Entrails
The sea was there, but not in the right way. Sheets of water hung from the ceiling like liquid draperies. Translucent fish swam in the air, orbiting me like satellites. The notebook opened again: this time, diagrams—circles, spirals, a lighthouse repeated a thousand times, each larger than the last, until it blurred. Beneath one, a note:
Debug Beacon R0.4 — do not touch the horizon.
I raised my eyes. The horizon was there, deep inside this submerged corridor—except it stretched inward. As if someone had folded the ocean and pasted a fragment into the lighthouse’s belly. And that horizon… flickered. Each time it went dark, the world lost a fraction of coherence: the fish stopped swimming, my breath paused, my thoughts emptied like a blue screen.
I understood then: this wasn’t a cellar, nor a crypt. It was a control center, a server masked as a lighthouse. And the flickering horizon was the source code of the sea.
A laugh rang out. Dry, metallic, familiar. My double, Ivo’, stood at the edge of the horizon. He was motionless, but his reflection in the water moved.
“I told you—you couldn’t save both,” he said.
“And you? What are you doing here?”
“Executing the scripts you refuse to read.”
He brandished his notebook—his, the one with blank pages. But this time, the pages had blackened. No words. Constellations. The very same I’d seen in the windows.
“This lighthouse doesn’t light ships,” he said. “It lights the gods.”
The Architects
The horizon’s flicker quickened. The translucent fish scattered, fleeing something unseen. A rumble rose, low, deep, but not earthly. A compression. As if air, water, stone, my own flesh, everything was being pressed into a box too small.
And then, in the strobe of light, I saw silhouettes. Not gods. Not men. Something worse: the Architects.
They had no stable form. At times a spiral, at times a swarm of eyes, at times a simple impossible angle that still wounded my pupils. I tried to look away, but my eyes kept recording. The notebook burned in my hand, then wrote by itself:
Do not describe them. You will lose yourself.
But I described them anyway. I couldn’t help it. And the more I described, the more my memory unraveled. My mother’s name vanished. The taste of coffee too. My memories shrank to defective lines of code.
Ivo’ smiled.
“You see now? We are not the investigators. We are the anomalies.”
The Alarm
The flickering horizon began to wail, a foghorn multiplied a thousandfold. The lighthouse walls shook. Water poured from the ceiling in reversed cataracts. My notebook projected a melody—the one Fiora had written in Florence five centuries ago. The notes aligned with the wail, trying to patch it, like a software fix.
A voice cut through, clear above the chaos:
“Hold on, Ivo!”
It was Mara. Not physically present, but her voice came through the bread I’d eaten earlier, like a dream lingering in my body. I felt the crumb in my stomach contract, like an organic beacon.
The Architects recoiled, slightly, displeased. The horizon’s flicker slowed. My double, Ivo’, shook his head.
“You shouldn’t cling.”
“And you shouldn’t let go.”
I pressed the notebook against the horizon. The pages ignited with black light. Water, lighthouse, constellations—everything tilted. And as I was about to give way, I heard one last sentence, whispered directly in my ear:
“The next door isn’t here. It’s in the city. Watch for the feathers.”
I opened my eyes on the lighthouse floor. Everything seemed back to normal. The broken mirror, the sea outside, the faint lamp. But the notebook had changed: on the open page, a single line, written in glowing ink:
Tomorrow, it will rain feathers.
And already, a white feather settled on my coat, fallen from nowhere.
Winners SECRET , ECU and pepe TOKEN IS
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