The old folks in the village called her the Sentinel of the Shore. To anyone else, she was just Elara, the quiet woman who lived in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, long after the light had been automated. Every day, as the sun began to bleed into the horizon, she would walk to the same jagged outcrop of rock, smooth from decades of her presence, and she would wait.She would watch the sea, her shawl pulled tight against the salt-kissed wind, her eyes scanning the endless, shifting grey. She never waved. She never called out. She simply stood, a solitary figure