#the lantern

The universe keeps giving me just enough to stay a little longer.

Just enough hope. Just enough timing. Just enough people arriving when I need them most.

Sometimes it makes me wonder about fate, about where I'm supposed to be.

Because I don't think I was meant to make it this far.

And yet I have.

I've met the right people at the right moments, in ways that feel too precise to dismiss entirely.

Maybe there's a reason for that.

Maybe I'm meant for something more.

Or maybe "more" is smaller than I imagined.

Maybe it's making someone's day. Being there when they're falling apart. Saying the thing they needed to hear before they gave up.

I know I've touched lives.

I know I've helped people find themselves.

And sometimes I wonder where they would be if I hadn't been here.

It's strange.

I spend so much time helping other people find their way,

while still searching for my own.

But maybe that's part of it.

Maybe my purpose isn't to lead the journey.

Maybe it's to carry a lantern for a while until someone else can see the path.

And maybe, for now,

🌲 Over the Garden Wall AU — "The Lantern":D

He was not born a monster.

He was made into one.

A witch mother.

A failed pregnancy.

A man who left.

And a child who became a reminder of everything she could not survive.

So she rewrote him.

Not into something loved—

but into something that could be endured.

The Beast.

---

🕯️ The lantern does not run on oil in this world.

It runs on blood.

And every week, he feeds it.

Not because he wants to.

But because he must stay alive inside it.

---

A Woodsman.

Not married. Not whole.

A girl named Anna, found in the woods like a forgotten prayer.

Taken in. Kept safe. Loved, in the quiet way broken men love things they refuse to lose.

---

And then—

a wound.

an axe.

a retreating shadow in the trees.

The Beast should have disappeared.

But hunger does not forgive mistakes.

So he returns as a man.

---

Homeless. Harmless. Lost.

A perfect lie.

He is taken in.

He is fed warmth instead of blood, for once.

And he learns something dangerous:

what it feels like to stay.

---

Mondays belong to the forest.

To the lantern.

To what he has to become again.

He leaves.

He kills.

He comes back at 2–3 a.m.

Always softer. Always worse.

---

And still—

he stays.

Longer than he should.

Closer than he was meant to be.

Human in ways that were never part of the curse.

Six months is all it takes

for something inside him to break pattern.

Attachment.

Familiarity.

Love, maybe—if monsters are allowed such things.

---

But the lantern does not care about love.

Only hunger.

---

So he becomes two things at once:

the thing that feeds it…

and the thing that wants to stop.

---

And somewhere in the middle of it all—

a man with an axe

a girl in a cabin

and a monster learning what it means to stay