The sky over the city of Etheridge was the color of ancient, corroded lead. A century had passed since the sun last bled its gold upon the earth. In its stead, hung the "Great Heart"—a colossal, churning steam engine suspended in the heavens, pumping a sickly, anaemic radiance. It was a light just bright enough to distinguish the faces of the dead from those yet to perish.
Elias, the Merchant of Reminiscence, sat within his cramped, suffocating vault. In this wretched world, light was never a gift; it was a debt. To kindle a single lamp for a night, one had to surrender a memory. A fragment of warmth: the scent of a mother's baking bread, the prickle of fresh grass beneath bare feet, or the ghost of a first kiss stolen in a damp alleyway.
A young woman entered, her eyes hollowed out like twin graves. She placed a glass phial, empty and cold, upon the obsidian counter.
"I need one hour of the White Light," she croaked, her voice brittle like dry parchment. "My son is fading... I will not have him die in the choking dark."
Elias peered at her with a gaze petrified by indifference. "The price?"
"I give you my wedding day," she whispered, a final spark of grief flickering in her pupils.
Elias reached out, his fingers tracing the cold skin of her brow. He felt the phantom heat of her joy, the distant echo of music, the vibration of a laughter that was about to vanish forever. Then, he pulled. The woman's eyes instantly turned to a vacant, frozen void. He exhaled the memory into a copper basin, where it swirled into a plume of sickly violet smoke.
"The tithe is paid," Elias intoned, handing her a candle charged with the stolen luminescence of her past.
The woman drifted out, no longer remembering why her cheeks were wet with tears. As the heavy iron door groaned shut, Elias turned to his reflection. His face was a featureless mask of pale skin; he had long ago bartered his own essence to buy the longevity required to manage this cursed shop. He no longer remembered his true name, the silhouette of his mother, or the purpose that had once driven him.
In Etheridge, everyone possessed light, yet no one possessed a reason to smile beneath its fractured rays. They illuminated their homes with the smoldering wreckage of their souls.