Alrighty, follow along.

There was once a Lightkeeper who came to hate his job.

Lightkeeper, because he only cared for the light. The Lighhouse itself, after decades in vigil over its perpetually fog-blinded cliff, had been repaired and converted and upgraded against its enemy until it no longer needed a human touch; every mechanism it ran itself, every problem fixed in-house, every material extracted from right below its concrete basement floor with a loud hum that would no doubt send any man into the throes of madness.

But the light needed a mender. The fog loathed that grotesque obelisk's eye, enough it came and broke the thing to pieces every other week, attacking viciously its repair mechanisms until they permanently stopped functioning.

Lightkeepers were sent in one after the other, disappeared one after the other, leaving no message or explanation. Had the fog eaten them, as it did many others? Had it sent a beast to stalk the coiling intestines of their Lighthouse, while they sent it lunch and dinner both? Well, the light always came back, so surely they were reaching their destination at the very least?

So the role of the Lightkeeper gained a name, and a religious fervor behind its meaning. The Town depended on the seas for trading and fishing, so to sacrifice yourself in this pilgrimage was to carve your own name into its very history as the bravest of heroes. Every week or two, young men from the second sons of nobility to emaciated despondents from the slums lined at the town's square, eager and fearful in equal measures, looking forward to which of them would go next.

One day, that newly consecrated duty fell to the Hill.

The Hill was the Hill because he had always been a hill, of bones and muscles but those are just details. Word around town was that when the Hill's mother was about to give birth, you could trace his head through the lining of her abdomen; when he was a child, he could look an adult in the eye, and when he became a man, adults had to stand on chairs and ladders to look onto his; when he walked, pavement cracked, and when he talked, the the roof did; his muscles bulged so violently he couldn't even half-assedly flex his bicep without bursting the skin.

As all boys of sufficient size and body did, he was sent off to the War. The War. A conflict that lasted all of but two years yet sent the world spinning into madness, a conflict in which weapons never meant to see the light of day were in every soldier's hands, a conflict in which forest turned to wastelands and wastelands were not safe to even be looked at, and from which the Hill emerged a different person.

His body was all callus and scar tissue; his eyes were dull and useless; his face was mostly gone, save for his mouth; his sleepless body spasmed uncontrollably whenever he stood still. He did gain some, however: he was so sharp he could pick a cigarette being lit from half the Town away, so mighty he wrestled beasts and won untouched, so dexterous he could walk from corner to corner on his hands and never fall over, and somehow he had gotten even taller.

It wasn't enough. The Hill lived from gigs. His employers tried to pretend they weren't repulsed by his presence and failed miserably. So week after week he had to find new labor so he could eat cheap food from the gutters of filthy streets, getting half what the job was worth and a new rant about their goodness of his bosses' hearts and how selfish he was to demand more wage.

He didn't much care for what others thought of him, but eventually, a nagging little bug in his mind started biting and puking garbage into his wound: was this really the way to live? His mother would have said he was worth his weight in gold, but she had died when he was still a kid; his father would just have told him to toughen up, but he died when he was slight less of a kid; his sister would have shrugged and gone "meh" but she had died when he was slight lesser of a kid.

Might as well take the plunge, he figured.

So he set off to a chorus of cheers and sobs that went into an ear and out the other. The way to the Lighthouse was mostly unremarkable, not that he could see the vistas, other than that it was too quiet. some hours later, skin damp from the dense fog and mud slippery under his cane, he began to hear a strange rumble from deep into the earth. He had reached his destination.

Unlike the journey, the objective was a nightmare. In the bowels of the monster, the Hill struggled to decide which of the cacophony of feelings that hit him immediately inside were the worse: Was it the heat just a couple of degrees away from skin-melting? As if he had any. Was it the orchestra of clangs and creaks and pows playing from all angles off a perfectly circular podium? That was just the Town on a busy day. Was it that pungency of oil, tinged with gastric acid and bloody copper and medicine sweet? He had cleaned latrines and morgues before.

No, they were the hallways, built for men half his size to squat through, forcing him to crawl like an animal across a sprawling mess of looping intestines while seared alive by pipes and lines and grates that pushed at his body from all sides. He found a staircase that went up, then instantly ran into one that went down, corridors that actually never ended and required shortcuts, dead ends emitting ominous chants, footsteps that seemed to enter solid walls.

Finally, however, he opened a door and was met with cold rain and strong wind, like being buffeted by a hail of needles. He had, at that point, gone through most of his supplies, an offering that should otherwise have lasted the way here, back, and then some, leaving him to scratch his head on what he was supposed to do.

Well, them the breaks. He had a job to accomplish, why not actually put his hands to work rather than mope about his uncertain future?

From regular to bad to regular again. The lighthouse provided all the parts and even guided his hips to an extent. He was not too unused to making repairs to machinery, but something this bulky yet finicky was a first. Like performing surgery or sewing, neither which he was very good at.

He finished quickly and was rewarded with a blast of light even his milky eyes felt. In comparison to the days, or hours, or minutes, or seconds stuck inside the machine, he barely felt it.

Sore, burnt, tired, hungry, he felt his way to the nearest railing, strangely distant, and pulled the last and best of his goodies out: a pack of cigars. At least the rain had stopped, and he could-

He had no lighter.

Had he left his at home? He never left his lighter at home. Could he have dropped it? Maybe while crawling through his way here... But wait, had he not lost his lighter, wouldn't it have exploded inside his pocket? And he didn't recall hearing any explosions. Was this why they hadn't packed him any either? But then why the cigars?

Maybe the Lighthouse had a lighter.

The Hill turned around, words seconds away from leaving his tongue, when he heard the unmistakable sound of metal bending. He fell before he could move again.

The fall was not an easy one, of course, but the Hill survived. His legs broke, his arms shattered, his hipbone changed shape, and most his ribs went to live somewhere around his esophagus, but he survived. He coughed, tried to stand up

The cliff gave away.

The fall to the crags was not an easy one, of course, but the Mountain survived. His hands crumbled, his feet bent like snakes, his neck divorced his spine, and his brain did a g > y > 1 against the back of his skull, but he survived.

For a moment, but he absolutely did.

The Lighthouse watched all this, impassive as always. Its purpose was to help the ships reach port, anything else explicitly beneath its concern. Alas, though it was old and wise, it was not a creature with any space to fight its own nature, so following the its next programmed step, it reached deep below for iron bars and mesh to replace what it had just lost.

But even it could complain. What poor design! Its last masons had run out of material and budget from their miserly mayor, so they kludged something together with whatever they had on hand, cheap metal on shallow reaching screws done as fast as possible to deliver the product on time, and somehow it still jutted too far, on too small supports! But nobody noticed, the mayor liked the aesthetic even! All you had to do was stay far from the tip, the foreman had said, so they shook hands and called it a job well done.

So faithfully, the Lighthouse rebuilt itself just the way its programming required it to, soon returning to the eternal vigil over its perpetually fog-blinded cliff, hoping the next poor sod would have better luck.