Ascending the stone stairway, our shadows grow long behind you even as they become distinct from the surrounding darkness. Halfway up, you startle at a splintering crash from the far side of the rocky spire, the groan and crack of breaking wood, giving way to worried voices, quiet, but not few.
You approach the light on the peak of the rock island, and look down at the shore about a hundred feet away, but with the bright beacon at the top of the rock so near, it's impossible to see much in the darkness around.
The beacon itself is a glass globe four feet in diameter, capped at the bottom with a bronze disc, affixed by five columns to a base set into the stone ground. within is a strange sort of a flame - red and brilliant enough to be painful to look at directly, it does not flicker like normal fire, but is perfectly still, caught in a single prolonged moment, as though the glass contained not just the flame's heat, but the passage of time itself.