A couple inches beneath the last lamppost of the night, miming as though to cradle a gnarled wick from the cool evening breeze, Teofan presses her thumb and ring finger together. With a quick snap of her right hand, a spark crackles in blue and white, then fades into a modest orange flame. She slides the curved iron hatch open, carefully turns the knob to release gas in, and the flame jumps from her fingertip into the lamp. Teofan shakes the rest of the spark off her fingertip and climbs down her city-issued stepladder.

“Arqa!” A drunk man across the street spits phlegm onto the cobbles. “Careful youn’t blow up the street, hah!”

Teofan pretends not to notice, puts the top rung of the stepladder over her shoulder, and hurries up the street, towards the piers. Lucky me, she thinks. This point of her evening route was nearly half a mile removed from the busiest spots of Hamzun’s nightlife, but in the past few weeks, with the days longer and the night air warmer, she had noticed far more inebriates wandering at dusk. Many of them were sailors.

She looks back over her shoulder to find the man gone. Slowing her pace, Teofan takes a deep breath; salty ocean air mingles with the faint, wisps of smoke that drift about the city. The scent of tobacco and sweat, coffee and roasted figs, sweet mustard and fried dough. Nightfall in Hamzun brought about sensory temptations of every kind, designed to lure travelers and sailors in by the nose. Teofan glances up at the terrace of a nearby brothel, at a man with a silken white shirt bearing dark stains—wine stains, Teofan supposes—and at the ring of smoke he blows out from a silver-banded cigar. His collar hangs open, revealing a knot of purple scar tissue radiating from beneath the center of his chest: a rift. This man is—or perhaps was, in years gone by—an arqalim. Their eyes meet for a moment, and the man smiles at her; she feels the face seems familiar, somehow.

Her mind reaches back for a moment as she recalls the more dissolute students of Rezmaiq. Often the profligate sons of prominent officials, cutting classes to gawk at each other’s new Hem-Ollen motorbikes, or crafting spark bombs of paper lanterns, the ones whose positions at the school were all but guaranteed the moment an administrator set eyes upon their family name seemed, at least to Teofan, the least invested in making something of themselves. Yet here I am, she thinks to herself, still lighting streetlamps.

She looks out at Hamzun’s west bay, one hand on the edge of the footpath’s side wall, the other limp against her stepladder. The sun drags the last of the sky’s orange veil beneath the waves. At the other edge of the bay, six bright, beautiful silver torches sit atop six smooth-hewn spires; the furthest across the bay lights up, then the next, lighting up clockwise until bright blue flames have erupted from all corners of the citadel, illuminating from beneath the multitude of battlements, bridges and murals which adorn Rezmaiq’s central facility. She watches figures as small as beetles descend from the spires, crawling across parapets and lower, back behind the large sandstone walls. She adjusts the ladder back over her shoulder.

Her evening route zagged across Hamzun’s waterfront districts, and the walk from her last lamp to Araci’s place was vastly a straight shot. Taking a walk along the pierside was a detour, though a mild one, adding some ten or twelve minutes on her way back each evening. It was a detour Teofan had not missed once in her two years of lamplighting.

Taking care not to make noise of any creaky flooring along the balcony walkway, Teofan quietly unlocks the door to Araci’s unit. As she shuts the door to the last of the light outside, moving by memory of the place alone, she gingerly sets the stepladder by the door, tosses her smoke-tainted linen coat over a wooden chair already bearing a pile of books, and snaps a spark to life on her fingertips. Kneeling down, she holds a finger out to the wick of a jasmine-scented candle before shaking the remnants of flame off. She picks the bronze saucer holding the candle up off of the ottoman-turned-coffee table, and falls deep into its match, a wide green L-shaped sofa. Propping her head up with a pillow in the crook of the sofa, Teofan reaches for the top book of the chair’s stack, a thick-spined text with an embossed leather cover reading Vimarqan: On the Potential of Medicinal Spellcraft and begins to read by candlelight.