The Lamp and the Oil

In the poem light is nobody’s problem, because the dead have no use for it, and Dante is the only one going down with mortal eyes: the game takes that difference and makes it the resource everything rests on. The oil is tallow, and it has three faces at once: carrying it makes you smell, burning it makes you see, running out makes you blind but odourless. There is no right choice, only three ways of being in danger, and it holds from the dark wood down.

A full tank holds seven minutes of flame out of a capacity of ten, and the reserve in the satchel goes to eight. The light reaches twenty six metres at full and four when the oil is running out, and below twenty two per cent of the tank the flame starts to die, narrowing before it dims, because losing reach is felt before losing brightness. Every hundred seconds of oil on you, tank and reserve together, is worth one and four tenths of a unit of load on the trace: hoarding everything and walking slowly is not a strategy, it is a different way of being found.

The game begins in the dark, with the lamp lit on the ground three metres away, and until you have picked it up the key does not answer: the light is not yours by right. With the flame out, after three seconds a short blue halo opens, which is not light in the world but the eye adapting, and it is enough to see where the floor ends. The torch does the rest: it burns six minutes, costs two cells of satchel, can be thrown, and never goes out completely, because it is there to tell you where you have already been and a signal that disappears is not a signal.