Chapter Two
What the Tide Left
The tower smelled of lamp oil, wet stone, and tea that had been allowed to go cold on purpose. Odile Aldous sat at the top of it, in a chair that had been bolted to the floor, with a blanket over her knees and a logbook open on the sill.
“You are late,” she said, though the ferry had been ten minutes ahead of schedule. “Sit. Not there. That is where the draught lives.”
Wren sat where she was told. Below them the sea was doing its slow arithmetic, folding itself against the rocks and unfolding again, and the great lens above their heads turned the grey afternoon into something that looked almost like gold.
Sample text from “The Lantern Keeper”, an original demo story written for BookDeep.