The Lantern Granny
Five li north of Mist Creek a foggy fork swallows night travelers. Homeless since a gambler sold her daughter and her husband froze, Granny Lantern walks the fork each night with a bean-oil lantern, leading the lost home. Asked where she lives, she has no home that is a place. She refuses a house lest she stop walking. Years later she lights a lost salt train home and does not return; her spent lantern hangs frosted on a pine. The town raises a wordless lantern-post.
The Lantern Granny
Five li north of Mist Creek Town a fork splits three ways into the hills; at night the fog rises and travelers lose themselves. The townsfolk fear the dark road and say the fork "eats men."
Granny Lantern lives in the roadside shrine beyond the town, past seventy, hunched, a paper lantern of bean-oil in her left hand, its shade gone yellow with smoke. Each night she walks the fork; when she finds a lost soul she stands by the way, lifts the light, and leads them home. She knows the paths by heart and could tell the three roads blind—which leads home, which to the cliff.
She was not born homeless. She wed a gambler who, losing, sold their only daughter Ah-fu to a passing medicine man for three strings of cash. She searched three years, wore out seven pairs of shoes, and found nothing; her husband drank cold wine and died in the snow. With no kin she took the shrine and began lighting the way for others.
One twelfth-month a boy named Ah-he was traveling by night to his kin, lost in fog, crouched at the fork and wept. Granny came with her light, asked his way, led him wide of the broken cliff to the town's edge. "Granny, where is your home, that you walk here every night?" She said, "I have no place that is not home, and no home that is a place. Go, and do not look back." He looked back; the lantern was already far, its yellow glow wobbling in the mist like a star that would not go out.
The town pooled money for two thatched rooms. She waved it off: "Build me a house and I'll not want to leave; not want to leave, and I'll not light the way." She kept her nightly lantern.
Ten years on, a train of salt merchants was caught in fog at the fork; she lit them home one by one, and did not return. They found her paper lantern hung on a low pine at the cliff's edge, oil spent, flame dead, a film of frost inside the shade. At the fork they raised a wordless lantern-post with a small light set in its crown, lit on every foggy night.
The Chronicler says: the world holds many who have no home; Granny Lantern made of her one body a lamp for other men's houses. What she lit was not the road but the one returning.