The Wrecker’s Beacon

We never meant to be villains. Only to survive.

They built their cities like ships—heavy, slow to turn, and always taking on water. They said we were lawless, reckless, cruel. But we knew how to read the current. We knew when a vessel was doomed before the keel cracked. They mistook our lanterns for malice. But the truth is: no one lights a fire unless they want someone to see it.

They call us wreckers. But we never pulled down anything that wasn’t already falling.

It’s always the same: a new wave of planners, promises dressed in glass and steel. They don’t see the shore. They don’t see the tides that change faster than any drawing board. And when it all comes aground—when the money dries, when the work stops, when the scaffolding hangs like torn sails—they look for someone to blame.

And find us.

But we’re not ghosts. We’re not stories. We’re still here. Waiting. Watching. Not for ships—but for chances.

We lit a new beacon last week. No flame. Just a cracked screen on a half-dead lamppost that glitched in rhythm with the waves. Some people stopped. Most didn’t. That’s alright. Beacons aren’t about answers. They’re about directions.

We’ve seen what happens when you wait for rescue. When you hope the tide will turn itself. It never does. The tide is turned by hands. By grit. By knowing when to let something sink, and when to pull something from the wreckage and start again.

That’s what we do.

We salvage what matters. We break what needs breaking.

In the days when the sea gave more than the land, every house in New Brighton held echoes of the wrecks. You’d sit on a captain’s chair to eat bread you bought with coin pulled from a tidepool. Barrels of rum stood in kitchens like old sentries. Mirrors still held the salt-glint of distant oceans. We didn’t just take—we remembered. Every table, every lamp, every plank of repurposed oak held a name, a storm, a longitude. And when the lights lie, we light our own.

They think the world ends when a ship runs aground.

But sometimes, that’s just the moment you finally touch land.

RW