Twenty-three minutes before final inspection, the Lantern Vault goes dark.

Mera Coal-Wick is an apprentice lamplighter in Thorn-Hold, where a massive mirror-and-lantern system illuminates an underground chamber the size of a cathedral. Tomorrow is First-Light Festival — the hold's biggest celebration — and the western quadrant just failed.

She's halfway up the maintenance gallery, wrench in hand, when Tomas Flint-Record appears in the dark. He's a junior archivist. He's holding fourth-century maintenance ledgers. He found something relevant and decided midnight was a reasonable time to climb six flights of stairs to deliver it.

Mera has disliked him since he won a procedural dispute about whether charred paper qualifies as a document. Tomas has the sort of face that looks built for candlelight and being infuriatingly right.

They have until dawn to fix the light. They have a lot of opinions about each other. Most of them are wrong.

A cozy romantic short story set in the Thorn-Hold Universe. Free to download.