The Quiet Fire
A Winter Tale
A Short Story
The Quiet Fire: A Winter Tale is a short story inspired by Ravyn Vale’s Christmas and Birthday Wishlist.
Disclaimer: The Majority of the items Ravyn would like for Christmas and her birthday in January from this story can be found on her Amazon Wishlist and Walmart Wishlist.
In The Quiet Fire, a woman worn by grief and endless responsibility discovers a strange ember of magic kindling in the darkness of her home. What begins as a quiet night at her desk becomes a stirring encounter with a mysterious presence that brings warmth, understanding, and long forgotten hope. As shadows and firelight shift around her, she is offered a moment of renewal that challenges the weight she carries and invites her to remember the strength she thought she had lost.
The Quiet Fire
A Winter Tale
Winter had settled over the North like a verdict.
Not the gentle kind that clothed rooftops in lace, but the old winter—heavy-boned, full of teeth—moving through the world the way sorrow moves through a tired heart; quietly at first, then all at once. The sky hung low and dim, as though even the sun had shouldered too much and needed rest.
In a small house at the end of a snow-buried road, a woman sat before the faint blue glow of an aging screen. Her desk: glass, brittle, and cold, reflected her as if she were a ghost haunting her own life. Below it, her legs flickered in the glass like pale shadows, a reminder of how exposed she felt even in solitude.
Her keyboard clattered like broken bones, the spacebar refusing to obey unless coaxed or struck. Eight years she had used it. Eight years of worn letters, fading light, and stories typed through grief, anxiety, and the frantic bustle of a household that needed her for everything: doctor’s visits, schoolwork, meals, meltdowns, medicines, schedules, survival.
Tonight, she tried to write again. Tried to return to the dark-fantasy world that waited inside her like a loyal hound, patient and aching to be fed.
Her fingers hovered.
Her heart stuttered; literally and painfully. The flutter came like a misfired spell, leaving a cold bloom of fear beneath her ribs. She waited for the rhythm to right itself.
It did. Eventually. It always did.
But tonight, as the winter pressed against the windows, the ache behind her sternum felt deeper, older. The kind of ache that knew grief by name.
Sorrows never left. One wore the shape of a child she once held but could no longer touch. Others followed her like silent winter shadows, curled in the corners of every room.
She closed her eyes.
When the fear came—of her heart, of her failures, of the quiet depressions that seeped into her bones—she always reached for grounding spells: the ritual of a keyboard, the promised worlds of Azeroth, the slow steadying of crafting, streaming, creating, anything that kept her from drowning in thoughts too sharp to name.
Escape was not weakness. It was anchoring. It was oxygen.
Her laptop wheezed. A dying thing. Ten loyal years it gave her everything. Now she had asked for one more day. One more chapter. One more escape. It could no longer run her games without overheating. It crashed during scenes she fought to write. She had factory-reset it more times than she could count.
Still, she whispered, “Not yet. Not tonight. Please.”
The screen flickered in reply.
Outside, the wind changed.
A hush swept through the room, cold and electric, as if something ancient had stepped across the threshold of the world. The air thickened. The shadows lengthened. The glass desk trembled as a figure made of winter midnight and ember-light stepped silently into the corner.
The Wishkeeper.
She was not a creature of holidays or hearthfire cheer. She belonged to an older order; those who answered only when a spirit had been worn so thin by sorrow and burden that its quiet wish became a beacon.
She studied the woman in the chair.
Here was a heart that had held grief until its seams frayed. Here was a soul that had walked hospital corridors too often, carrying children and anxiety in equal measure. Here was a woman who survived child loss, house loss, transportation loss, sleepless years, trauma upon trauma, all while tending a household that believed her endless.
And beneath all that lived a longing she barely let herself feel:
I want something that is mine. I want to remember who I am. I want to go home—south—to visit my family, my older children, my friends… but I have not seen them in years and the ‘missing’ aches like frostbite.
The Wishkeeper bowed her head.
A life like this did not ask for extravagance. It asked for breath.
So, she moved through the room without sound.
First, she touched the broken keyboard. It shivered, then fell still, as if relieved someone finally understood its struggle. A whisper of magic slithered across the desk; white and bright, the promise of keys that obeyed, that glowed softly under tired hands, which did not fight her words but carried them.
She touched the laptop next. It exhaled, a death rattle of warm air. The Wishkeeper brushed her fingers over it with something like mercy.
Behind her, a shadow coalesced into the shape of a tower; sleek, powerful, humming with quiet potential. A curved monitor rose behind it like a moon cresting over a dark horizon.
“A scribe,” the Wishkeeper murmured. “A world-builder. Let her worlds run as smoothly as she deserves.”
She drifted across the room and back to the woman’s desk.
Where her hand passed over the worn mousepad, the thin plastic face unfurled into a wide realm of soft-lit magic; something worthy of long nights shaping novels and slaying demons, both fictional and internal.
Near the window, a shimmer coiled into the shape of headset—open backed, white as winter light. Beside it, a microphone glowed like a bottled voice, waiting for the day she would speak freely again, crafting or gaming or simply existing without fear of being seen too much. A stream deck flickered into being, fifteen keys like fifteen tiny constellations.
Her dark gaze shifted to the wardrobe corner. A soft fold of red and black fabric appeared there. A Jey Uso hoodie and jogger set, the colors warm like firelight, the meaning rooted in something deeper. It would bring moments of unity, of her household gathering to watch wrestling together, the rare times they all breathed in the same rhythm.
On the nightstand, five notebooks appeared. Blank pages. New beginnings. A place to set down the worlds inside her before they drown her.
A white glint materialized; a watch that could help call for help if her heart faltered, that could track the misfires, that could whisper, you are not imagining it. You are not alone.
Warm boots settled by the door, sturdy and welcome in a winter she was unprepared for.
Gift cards flickered softly: clothes, books, warm drinks, small comforts she had not allowed herself to enjoy.
A Demogorgon plush blinked at her from the bookshelf, a character from one of her favorite shows. Its monstrous grin; oddly protective.
A stainless-steel tumbler gleamed in the half-light, ready for water and vitamin water, the quiet lifeblood of her days.
On the desk, Scrivener’s essence shimmered, a constellation in software form. A tool for building novels from broken hours.
Near the door, a faint scent of salt air, magnolia, and old memories curled upward.
A trip southward.
The Wishkeeper held that one longest. It pulsed with longing unlike anything else in the room.
Her mother’s voice. Her older children’s laughter and stories. The friends who once knew her before the weight of the world settled on her shoulders. It had been years since her feet last stood on the soil of the place she once called home. And oh, how it hurt. How absence bruised deeper than the distance.
She set the magic of the journey gently beside all the other gifts.
Last of all, she breathed into the shadows, and a velvet chair appeared—warm water steaming beside it. A manicure. A pedicure. Not vanity, ritual. Reverence. Care. Pain lifted from calloused feet. Tenderness granted to hands that had carried entire worlds without the luxury of rest.
The Wishkeeper stepped back.
The room glowed faintly, not with holiday cheer, but with something older; sacred, solemn, born of winter truths.
She approached the woman, who had not noticed a thing; humans rarely saw magic when burden sat too heavy on their backs. The Wishkeeper brushed a single finger against her shoulder, and warmth seeped quietly into tired bones.
“You are not made only of service,” she whispered. “You are made of quiet fire.”
And in that moment, though no gifts had yet been opened, though no journey south had yet begun, the woman felt something shift inside her chest.
A loosening.
A thawing.
A Remembering. Something like hope.
4 comments
Love it cuz so good couldn’t stop reading it
Thank you so much! I appreciate that you read it and I love that you enjoyed it.
I like it!
Thank you! Miss you 🙂