The lantern doesn't ask the candle where it learned to burn.

The lantern fly knows; it follows the source of the heat, wherever it's found.

It lands on the glass and feels the warmth without touching the flame — is that wisdom or just distance?

From one side of the glass, it looks like survival. From the other side, it feels like safety.

Safety is a room with no doors. Survival is knowing which ones open from the inside.

To a lantern fly, both feel like traps. Somewhere in-between, something glows from within.

The glow that isn't borrowed. The heat that isn't performed. The thing that hums in a stone on a shelf when no one's watching.

No one tells a firefly how to glow; sometimes sitting beneath the lantern reminds it what one tiny flame can do. Sometimes that heat is enough.

Enough. The word the world forgot. The lantern doesn't need to be a sun. The firefly doesn't need to light a city. The candle on the table doesn't need to justify its burning.

Enough. A cold chill daring the lantern's flame to dance, and in the flicker of a shadow, the candle looks brighter than anything else.

In the flicker — that's where it lives. Not in the steady burn but in the almost-going-out. The moment the flame remembers it could stop and doesn't.