PlotiarSide by Side, Page by Page.

The lighthouse stood where the land gave out — less a building than a warning, a crooked finger of pale stone pointing at something no one should look for. The village had stopped sending keepers three decades ago. The last one had walked inside on a Tuesday and never walked out.

Elena climbed the final ridge and stopped. The air tasted wrong — metallic, like a key held under her tongue. Three hours from the village, following marks her grandmother had scratched into trees with a knife, described in letters that arrived months after the funeral. "You'll know it when you see it," the old woman had written. "The light will find you before you find it. Do not answer what it asks."

The light shifted, and for a single breath the entire coastline seemed to hold still — not peaceful, but frozen, the way an animal freezes before it bolts. Below, the sea pulled back from the shore like something recoiling. The lighthouse beam swept once, twice, and on the third pass Elena saw it — a door in the rocks that had not been there before. She was certain of that. She was also certain the door was breathing.

She hadn't noticed the pattern before — the way the shadows fell exactly the same each evening, regardless of where the sun sat in the sky. Always pointing inland. Always pointing away. "Just a walk," she'd told herself that morning, lacing her boots in the empty cottage. But her hands had been shaking before she finished the first knot.