Name: Tamsin Lanternward
Race: Human
Role/Class: Lighthouse Runner
Appearance: Tamsin Lanternward is built for distance: lean, wiry, and deceptively strong, with the kind of posture that comes from running cliff paths in wind that tries to shove you sideways. Her skin is heavily freckled, her cheeks often raw from salt spray, and her hair is dark auburn kept in a tight braid that never comes loose—even in a gale.
She dresses in practical runner’s layers: a fitted storm-wool tunic, wrapped leg guards, and an oilskin half-cloak that doesn’t flap. Leather bracers protect her forearms from rope burn and rock scrapes. A bandolier of small lantern tins crosses her chest—each one stamped and numbered—and a hooded lantern is clipped to her belt with a quick-release hook. Her boots are reinforced with traction wraps and silent soles for wet stone.
Backstory
Whitecap and Cliffwatch rely on routine the way other places rely on walls. When fog rolls in and the cliff routes vanish, the difference between safety and disaster becomes a chain of lights kept burning in the right sequence—lantern posts, beacon runners, and shift-rotation couriers who keep the system alive.
Tamsin is one of them.
She was raised in Whitecap by an aging lantern keeper who treated the route like sacred ground. Tamsin learned the path markers by feel: the way a certain stone dips, the rope knot that means “turn left,” the lantern bracket that always leans because the wind never forgave it. She learned to run in fog without panic, to listen for surf direction when sight fails, and to carry flame like a living thing you protect with your body.
When her mentor died during a winter gale—collapsed at the base of a lantern post after finishing the run—Tamsin took over without ceremony. Cliffwatch asked her to rotate shifts between hamlet and tower, carrying sealed lantern tins, replacement wicks, and coded messages between patrol routes and beacon platforms. It’s thankless work until it fails, and then it’s the only thing anyone can talk about.
Rumor says Tamsin has walked paths no runner should: cutting through black fog when the bell post was silent, making it to the tower when every rope bridge was supposedly down. She never confirms it. She just shows up, soaked and breathing hard, and hands over the tin like the world didn’t try to kill her on the way.
