The Lighthouse of Paper
The lighthouse wasn’t made of stone—it was made of pages. Each night, the keeper climbed a spiral stair of bound chapters, carrying a lantern that smelled faintly of ink. Ships didn’t follow the beam; they followed the story it told, a ribbon of sentences laid over the dark sea.
One winter, a fog arrived so thick it swallowed punctuation. The keeper opened the oldest volume and found a paragraph that had never been there before. It described a door hidden in the margin of the world, and a small brass plate nailed beside it with a single number etched cleanly into the metal: 73918.
He traced the digits with a thumb, and the paper-lighthouse sighed—like a book closing somewhere far away. Outside, the fog thinned just enough for the nearest ship to read its way home.