# Lanternlight v3b — The Companionable Duet (celesta lantern + piano companion)

`caves-lantern-v3b` — levels: `calm.mp3` · `activity1.mp3` · `activity2.mp3` · `danger1.mp3` · `danger2.mp3`

The BOLDER take on caves-lantern: warm companionable house in G major (dorian color), 84 BPM, with the danger section stepping up to 108 for a real encounter escalation. Where the faithful take is 'your lantern alone' (one rising celesta with a single soft-pluck echo), this take re-instruments the coziness as a small DUET — the caveCelesta is your own lantern; a warm struckPiano (tone WARM, intimate and mellow, the right voice for a hearth-underground) is a companion working beside you who ANSWERS each celesta phrase a sixth below. Intimacy, not vastness: two close voices in a warm bubble, never a dissolving cathedral of echoes. The lead states the HEARTH round (the only fully-cadencing motif family — 'home is wherever you've stopped and lit something') made curious and rising; the piano answers it. The bed is a warm-pad glow with a literal soft SUB HEARTBEAT (two gentle pulses a bar, a resting pulse) plus a dorian-colored inner counterline that reaches the F-natural (the b7) over the G tonic once per phrase — the 'open door' the dorian color asks for — and an occasional celesta glint (ore catching torchlight). Activity L1 (ch4-5) is the celesta lantern melody + its ONE soft-pluck echo (the single echo the brief insists on). Activity L2 (ch6-7) ADDS NEW MATERIAL, not volume: the struckPiano companion answering a sixth below (call → answer, the duet — a distinct second instrument in the lead's gaps) plus a soft hatTick lantern-sway pulse. Danger L1 (ch8-9) is unease/the approach: the cozy tune gone apprehensive — the warmth drops to a low darkDrone on the tonic G (the retired cave-air 'Depth' rendered as a pitched pedal, not noise), a slow deepBoom heartbeat (the mountain muttering), sparse far stoneTom debris and a soft kick pulse — real material, the cave-in coming. Danger L2 (ch10-11) is a GENUINE intensity jump for active fight/flee: the section runs FASTER (108) and the full kit crashes in — a driving doubled kick + snareDrum backbeat (ch10) and dense rockfall (falling stoneTom) + crackTick pebble-fall + hatTick (ch11). The ceiling deciding. New rhythmic instruments and a faster section, NOT danger1 with the fader up. Dread is abstract — register, density, tempo, the warmth withdrawing — never chromatic darkening (fully diatonic G major throughout) and never a literal collapse foley; the debris percussion is abstract rhythm, not a sound effect of the mountain.
