Re: the lighthouse, inside.
Even inside the circle of ailing stone, she knew that false answers weren't harmless at all. They were there own kind of prison, one made up of lies told often enough they felt real, and it was its own incarceration, the inability to say things as they were. Tongue twisted, and the lightkeeper would have a harder time with that than with the isolation that came with creaking lights that warmed everyone but her. And while he was too unobtrusive to shove himself down anyone's throat, the lightkeeper was just the opposite, and she felt trapped and without a gullet to ram herself down into.
"You're real," she said with that force that banked against walls in demonstration of her will. She would will him into reality if he stayed there long enough, because she liked things she could close her fingers around and leave marks on. "This is real," she said of the structure that housed them, trapped them. This murky cage made of stone ribs and mortar sinew.
In the dark, the sound she made when he stepped back was a hurt one, surprised and keening. The wail resembled the creak of the light as it turned for the world outside, and she wasn't expecting the denial of something so unimportant to him, and yet crucial to the glacial lightkeeper. There was a naivete to her; she didn't expect cruelty until she felt its bite.
The denial eroded, and she pressed herself back against the stones, the water that bled along them soaking into the white of her garments and making them even more oppressive. But she didn't ask again, and she took the lantern and walked down the steps with it, unlit and abeyant in her hand.
At the bottom step, she stopped, and the packed earth was wet now. She sloshed into the damp and she stood before the immotile door. She pulled on the bar, and it didn't open. From the heavy folds of her dress she pulled a key, and it glinted in the single sliver of light from the diminutive window, and she slipped it in the lock, and it did not open.