Elias stared at the glowing rectangle of his phone, the blue light competing with the weak winter sun filtering through his kitchen window. It was 11:07 AM on a Sunday. Outside, the world was hushed by a light dusting of snow, but inside the Chrome browser tab, things were chaotic.
Elias felt a prickle of electricity on his neck. His grandfather had been a keeper at a station three towns over until it was automated in the eighties. The old man used to mutter the exact same phrase into his tea whenever the fog rolled in. Screenshot_20221218_110753_Chrome.jpg
The screen showed a grainy, sepia-toned chart of a coastline that didn't seem to exist anymore. In the bottom right corner, a hand-drawn ink illustration of a sea serpent curled around a compass rose. But it wasn't the monster that caught his eye; it was a tiny, handwritten note scrawled in the margin of the digital scan: “For those who find the way, the lighthouse never went dark.” Elias stared at the glowing rectangle of his
The phone saved the image: .