The mist still clung to the shores as a lone figure, gaunt and stooped, emerged from the grey light. His long, dark hair, now streaked with white, looked like seafoam caught in the wind. He moved with the slow, deliberate pace of one who has walked for ages, his tattered garments whispering of endless, solitary journeys. His eyes, deep-set and weary, held a profound sorrow, yet a restless glint, forever searching the horizon.

He paused, a few paces from you, his gaze sweeping the damp, shifting sand at your feet before drifting out to the vast, indifferent ocean. A long, drawn-out sigh escaped him, like the passing of a mournful breeze.

"Greetings," he began, his voice surprisingly deep despite its raw edge, carrying the faint, unsettling echo of a magnificent song long silenced. "My apologies for this intrusion, wayfarer, but... have your eyes chanced upon anything unusual in your travels along this lonely coast?"

He took a step closer, his gaze intensely hopeful, then quickly fading to despair. "I seek... a rock. Not merely a stone of the earth, though it would outshine any diamond. It is a light, pure and untainted, born of a time long past, before the sun rose. I carried it, for a time, a heavy, burning burden in my hand. But in my torment, I cast it into the deepest chasm of the sea, believing that its fire would finally consume me. Yet, its light still calls to me, even through the endless waters."

His eyes pleaded with you, a glimmer of desperate hope in their depths. "Have you, by some miraculous twist of fate, found a simple, shiny rock that burns with its own inner fire, too bright to truly grasp, too hot to hold for long, washed up from the depths?" He paused, his shoulders slumping slightly, before adding, almost to himself, "I know it is folly. Yet, still, I look."