Once, in a village nestled between whispering woods and a silver river, there lived a girl named Lirien. She was no ordinary child—her shadow flickered like a candle flame, never quite staying still. The villagers whispered that it was a curse, a mark of something stolen from the night itself. Lirien didn’t mind the whispers; she loved her restless shadow, for it danced when she sang and twirled when she laughed.
One autumn evening, when the leaves glowed like embers under a crescent moon, Lirien found an old lantern buried beneath the roots of an ancient oak. It was small, no bigger than her fist, carved with swirling runes that shimmered faintly in the dusk. When she brushed the dirt away, the lantern flared to life, casting a soft, golden light—but her shadow vanished. Not flickered, not danced, but disappeared entirely.
Panicked, Lirien ran home, the lantern clutched tight. Her mother, a weaver with hands rough as bark, gasped. “That’s no ordinary light,” she said. “It’s a Shadowkeeper’s lantern. It traps what’s lost—and sometimes what’s not meant to be kept.” She told Lirien of the Shadowkeepers, ancient beings who roamed the edges of the world, collecting shadows that strayed too far from their owners. But this lantern was cracked, its magic leaking, and now it had taken Lirien’s shadow instead.
Determined to reclaim it, Lirien set out at midnight, the lantern swinging from her hand. The woods parted before her, revealing a path of glowing moss that stretched beyond the river. She walked until the trees thinned and the air grew cold, arriving at a clearing where the stars seemed to hang low, like fruit ripe for picking. There stood a figure cloaked in twilight—a Shadowkeeper, tall and thin, with eyes like polished obsidian.
“Your shadow came to me,” the Shadowkeeper rasped, its voice a rustle of leaves. “It was too wild, too bright. I keep what wanders.” Behind it, shadows swirled in a vast, shimmering web—hundreds of them, some human, some animal, some too strange to name. Lirien spotted hers, leaping and spinning among the rest.
“It’s mine,” Lirien said, lifting the lantern. “And I’ll trade for it.”
The Shadowkeeper tilted its head. “What can a child offer me?”
Lirien thought of her mother’s stories, of bargains struck in moonlight. She didn’t have gold or magic, but she had her voice. “A song,” she said. “One you’ve never heard, to fill your lonely nights.”
The Shadowkeeper paused, then nodded. Lirien sang—a melody of rivers rushing, of leaves falling, of shadows dancing free. Her voice wove through the clearing, and the trapped shadows swayed, as if remembering their own songs. When she finished, the Shadowkeeper sighed, a sound like wind through a hollow tree. It plucked her shadow from the web and pressed it into the lantern’s light, where it flickered back to her side, wilder than ever.
“Keep your light dim,” the Shadowkeeper warned as it faded into the trees. “Or I’ll come for more than your shadow next time.”
Lirien returned home, the lantern now dark in her hands. She buried it again under the oak, vowing never to disturb it. But sometimes, on quiet nights, she’d sing to her shadow, and it would leap higher, as if it remembered the web and the song that set it free. The villagers never spoke of curses again—they said Lirien’s shadow was a gift, a spark of the world’s hidden magic.
And so, in that village by the silver river, the tale of the Lantern of Lost Shadows was born, whispered from one generation to the next, always on nights when the moon hung low and the shadows danced.
