The Lamplighter

In this story there are four: the <font color='red'>Castle</font>, the Lamplighter, the Prisoner, and the Narrative. The <font color='red'>Castle</font>: metastasizing, labyrinthine, twisting. Depredations of rot and fungus. A musty and ominous stench. Uncomfortably moist. Once grand, now it plays host to a group of demented inhabitants so hidebound by generations of TRADITION that they cannot deviate from it. They are like puppets moving on sticks along grooves, performing rites and rituals that they inherited from millenia ago. Generations of Lamplighters, Chefs, Torturers, born and bred for their singular purpose of upholding TRADITION. Rooms collapse then spawn elsewhere like a pulsating organic mass. Only the Inhabitants understand the workings of the <font color='red'>Castle</font>. The Lamplighter: the Lamplighter of the <font color='red'>Castle</font>: a delicate waif of a girl with owlish eyes and a thin frame, cloaked in tatters and perpetually swinging a brass lantern from her skeletal hand. It is she who has inherited the millennia-old task of guiding the Prisoner through the <font color='red'>Castle</font>'s stygian depths. Her light shines the way. The path of ESCAPE is determined by a system of soothsaying, written in hoary books sequestered in labyrinthine libraries under an organization system so arcane that only the Librarian can understand (and he is not telling, it is forbidden, it is not done, there is no Rite of Imparting Knowledge). The Lamplighter is frail yet feral, innocent yet demented. The Lamplighter is an inhabitant of the <font color='red'>Castle</font>; the Lamplighter thus also participates in grotesque esoteric rituals as she guides the Prisoner through the <font color='red'>Castle</font>. The Lamplighter is decreed by ceremony to be the Prisoner's guide to E S C A P E. The Lamplighter knows nothing outside of ritual and tradition. She is like milk: too pure, made to be spoiled. Lamplighters only ever guide a single Prisoner: they 【别名】中文别名:点灯人,提灯者

In your dreams the <font color='red'Castle</font looms. Spindly chimneys spew noxious smoke, stone gargoyles leer from crumbling masonry, and jagged spires shed…