In a village as small as the Crossroads, patterns did not stay secret for long.
People here noticed things.

They noticed when a chicken that liked to roost on the grain store roof failed to show up for three mornings in a row. They noticed when a new crack crept down the side of the stone trough after a hard frost, spider-fine at first and then slowly widening as the seasons tugged at it.

They noticed the way the windmill sounded different depending on the weather—the shallow, almost cheerful creak on sunny days; the long, deeper groan when storms were building over the western hills. Children could tell what kind of day it would be just by listening to how the mill complained.

They noticed when someone’s laughter grew shorter over the course of a week.
They noticed when someone shut their shutters one evening and didn’t open them the next morning.

And they noticed, perhaps more than anything, the way Crumb walked.

If any of them had kept proper calendars, they could have inked it in like clockwork.

Each morning, once the first loaves had cooled enough to be handled without burning fingers, once a few had been sold or set aside for those who needed them most, once the warm, bread-thick air in the bakehouse began to thin—

Crumb left.

He did not rush.
He did not bolt for the door the instant the last loaf left the oven.

He finished arranging the bread on the counter so the loaves did not crowd one another. He wiped his hands carefully on his apron, then on a clean cloth, rubbing flour and faint streaks of dough from his fingers until only a pale dusting remained.

And then, almost always at the same quiet point in the morning when the sun had just cleared the hills but dew still clung to the grass, he reached for his lantern.

Always the lantern.
Always that gentle, steady glow.

To strangers, it might have seemed unnecessary. The sun was up. The roads were, by most measures, safe enough in daylight. But the villagers had stopped questioning it long ago.

Crumb carried the lantern the way others might carry a walking stick or a charm—a thing that had walked with him so long it felt wrong to leave it behind.

He did not take it for admiration; no one trailed after him just to marvel at the little circle of light it cast. He did not take it for trade; whatever errands he ran were never about coin.

He certainly did not take it for exercise’s sake, though the tangle of paths leading out from the Crossroads would have given him more than enough of that.

Crumb walked because some part of him lived on the roads as much as in his bakehouse.
Because something in him seemed to move with the morning light itself.

Some villagers assumed he carried the lantern because of the shadows pooling in the dips and hollows of the roads beyond the fields. Fog clung there on certain days, turning ruts into hidden traps and making stones look like holes and holes like stones. A lantern was a sensible companion in such places.

Others thought it must be habit.

“Maybe he learned it as a child,” Old Mara would say, watching him through the steam rising from her tea. “Some families won’t walk between villages without a light, even in full day. Old stories die hard.”

A few of the elders, though, spoke in quieter voices when Crumb passed.

They had seen many lanterns in their time—oil lamps, fat tallow candles, flickering rush-lights. They knew how flame behaved: how it bent when the wind pressed against it, how it fluttered and thinned when a wick was old or poorly trimmed, how it sometimes spat sparks when the oil was wrong.

Crumb’s lantern did none of those things.

Its light never blazed. It never flared. It never demanded attention.

It simply burned.

Soft, steady, warm.

It did not stutter when a stiff breeze swept down from the hills. It did not dim when mist wrapped around it. On days when other lamps in the village struggled and needed to be relit, Crumb’s simply kept glowing—as if wind and damp had made an agreement not to trouble it.

“It feels different,” Liora had said once, fingertips hovering just over the glass. “Like a piece of dawn that hasn’t realized the sun has already risen.”

“You’re being poetic again,” the Miller had replied—though the way he frowned thoughtfully at the lantern suggested he wasn’t entirely unconvinced.

Whatever the truth, Crumb took the lantern with him every day.

Its glow brushed the hem of his cream cloak and turned each fold into a soft-edged line of light and shadow. Seen from a distance, he looked like a small, walking ember moving through the gray-blue of the early hours.

Before he stepped out, though, there was a ritual that belonged not to the road but to the door.

Crumb pulled it closed behind him with a careful hand, fitting the warped wood into its place with an extra little nudge that only he seemed to know. Then he slid the simple bolt across—a single bar of wood held by brackets hammered into the frame long ago.

Anyone with enough determination could have broken it with a shoulder and a solid shove.

Crumb locked it anyway.

Not because he feared thieves. There was little inside worth stealing beyond flour, a few coins, and his tools—and those, he trusted, the village itself would guard in his absence as naturally as they guarded their own.

He locked the door because it was a way of saying I am gone for now.

A silent message to the villagers: if you come seeking bread or advice or a listening ear, I am not here. Come later, and I will be.

The Crossroads understood such courtesies.

He walked with short, steady strides, his boots whispering over the packed dirt. In the brief stretch between his door and the main road, the village’s morning rearranged itself around him.

A broom rasped across a doorstep as a woman swept yesterday’s dust into today’s street. The Miller’s whistle hopped down from the hill as he unlatched the mill’s lower hatch, bright and surprisingly tuneful for such a large man. From farther off came the faint clink of flint on steel from Liora’s shop, followed by the soft foomph of a fresh candle catching flame.

A boy carrying two sloshing buckets to the trough broke into a grin when he saw Crumb.

“Morning, Crumb!”

Crumb lifted a hand in greeting, his fingers still bearing thin crescents of flour along their nails.

The boy’s gaze flicked to the lantern and softened. “Going walking?”

“As long as my feet remember how,” Crumb answered.

The boy laughed and hurried on. He did not ask where Crumb was going. No one ever really did.

They trusted that wherever he walked, it would be somewhere it mattered that he had gone.

Under his free arm, nestled like something fragile, Crumb carried a single loaf wrapped in a clean cloth.

He almost never set out without it.

It was not his breakfast. He rarely ate much when he walked; a heel of bread and a bit of river water were enough for himself. The loaf in his arm was for whoever needed it more than he did.

Sometimes that meant a trader whose cart had lost a wheel half a day’s walk from his next meal. Sometimes it meant a shepherd stuck away from home with a sick lamb. Once, it had meant a child who’d followed the wrong path out of a neighboring village and found herself sobbing under a willow tree at dusk.

Crumb did not know who would need it when he stepped out his door each day.

He only knew that someone often did.

That was the way of things.

The farther he walked, the more the village loosened its grip.

The tight cluster of homes thinned into lone houses with wider yards and larger vegetable patches. Those, too, fell away, replaced by scrubby hedges and fields stitched with low stone walls. Chimneys grew fewer. The clatter of dishes and the bleat of goats faded.

The smell of woodsmoke gave way to open air: damp earth, crushed grass underfoot, the faint tang of distant riverwater.

Ahead, the Crossroads opened like the first page of a book.

Faith ran north and south, a straighter band of packed dirt lined where many boots had marched in tidy lines. To the north, it climbed toward the hazy outlines of distant peaks, their crowns often capped in blue-white. To the south, it trailed into softer hills and warmer lands, where the air always seemed to hold just a little more sweetness.

Fate crossed it east to west in its more meandering way.

Eastward, it wound between scattered groves and small copses of trees, vanishing behind folds of land that suggested secrets and side paths. Westward, it sloped gently down toward the line of hills where the sun made its nightly descent, disappearing into a haze of light at certain times of day.

Crumb reached the place where the roads met and stopped.

He always did.

It wasn’t a dramatic stop. He did not plant his feet as though making a proclamation. He simply slowed, let his steps fall quiet, and stood for a moment at the invisible center where Faith and Fate crossed.

Locals who happened to see him there—passing with carts or on their own errands—might glance at him and think, There he is again, choosing.

But that wasn’t quite what he was doing.

He did not look up at the sky for signs. He did not close his eyes, spin, and walk in whichever direction he happened to be facing. He did not weigh pros and cons in his head like a trader at market.

He listened.

Not with his ears, though they took in the rustle of wind through the grasses, the distant creak of the windmill, the chatter of the river.

He listened with some quieter part of himself.

Some mornings, he felt the north tug at him—a faint pull like a memory of snow and sharp air. Other days, warmth to the south felt like a hand on his shoulder. Sometimes the east bent his thoughts toward shadowed hollows where fog liked to hide. Now and then, the west lay heavy with endings that needed gentling.

He could not have put any of this into words if you’d asked him.

He only knew that standing where Faith and Fate crossed, there was always a moment when the world seemed to lean in one direction more than the others.

And he always stepped that way.

A small act—so small most people never thought to mark it in their minds.

But it was the first hint that Crumb did not walk only because he was kind enough to.

He walked because something in the world called to him.
And because, somewhere deep in his chest, something in him answered.

On one particular morning, the call came with fog.

It lay low over the fields, a pale blanket that smoothed the land’s rough edges and erased the smallest dips and rises. Grass tips and fence posts poked through in stiff little spikes, and the lower halves of distant trees vanished into a white nothing.

The air was wet enough that droplets gathered on Crumb’s lashes when he blinked. His cloak grew heavier where the mist clung to it. The lantern in his hand cast a small, clear circle that pushed the fog back just enough for him to see the ground immediately before his boots.

Everything else was soft and uncertain.

He reached the Crossroads and, as always, stilled.

For a heartbeat, the valley felt as if it had inhaled but not yet exhaled. The wind paused. The river’s chatter quieted, as if caught under a damp cloth.

Crumb tipped his head slightly, as though listening for someone just outside the door.

The lantern’s glow warmed his face. Inside its glass, the flame steadied, then brightened by the slightest margin, as if it, too, were waiting.

Crumb closed his eyes.

To anyone watching, it might have looked like a man caught in indecision. To the valley, which had watched him do this for longer than any one person could remember, it was something else:

A familiar question, asked without words.
An answer, given without sound.

Crumb opened his eyes and turned east.

He had taken only a few steps along Fate’s quieter arm when a sound pricked his attention.

Small.
Too sharp to be the sigh of a bending branch.
Too delicate to be the rustle of a larger animal.

A chirp.

He slowed, lifting the lantern almost without thinking. Its warm light spilled across the pale fog, revealing slender saplings, dew-beaded ferns, and a fallen twig whose bark had peeled back like an old scab.

Nothing moved.

Then the sound came again.

Not exactly a chirp this time. There was a questioning lift to it, an upward curl at the end that made it sound like a tiny voice asking, Well?

Crumb’s mouth tugged at the corner.

He stepped off the road with care, boots seeking solid ground beneath the damp grass. The fog thinned slightly under the trees, hanging higher off the ground in a diffuse veil.

He raised the lantern higher.

Its glow reached farther, wrapping the undergrowth in amber.

And there, perched on a low, moss-darkened branch barely a handspan from his face, was a sparrow.

Small. Round. A little too fluffed for dignity.

Its feathers were soft shades of tan and pale brown, like crumbs scattered across a tabletop. Its eyes were black, bright, and sharp, set in a face that managed to look both comically serious and dangerously curious.

It puffed its chest out as he looked at it, as if making itself larger might help compensate for the fact that it could have sat comfortably in his hand with room to spare.

The sparrow chirped again.

Louder this time.

There was no mistaking it now: this was not the scattered chitter of a bird singing about nothing in particular. This was a sound with intention.

Crumb blinked, surprised and amused in equal measure.

The sparrow blinked back, unimpressed.

“Hello,” Crumb whispered, because anything louder felt like it might break whatever delicate moment had settled here.

The bird edged closer along the branch.

Crumb, very slowly, lifted the lantern so its ring of light rose to meet the sparrow’s perch. The warm glow washed over the bird’s feathers, turning the soft tans to honey-golds and the little beak into a burnished point.

The sparrow ruffled itself, fluffing its feathers until it resembled a small, indignant ball of light.

Crumb’s smile deepened.

“Well,” he murmured, his voice barely more than breath, “aren’t you brave?”

The sparrow cocked its head, one dark eye narrowing, as if weighing whether this was a compliment worth accepting. The look it gave him could only be described as: Obviously.

Crumb reached, very slowly, for the wrapped loaf under his arm. He did not want to startle the bird. The sparrow watched his fingers with keen interest, more attentive than afraid.

He broke off the smallest corner of the loaf—no bigger than the nail of his smallest finger—and held it out on his open palm.

The bird hesitated for a single heartbeat.

Then: hop, hop.

Two quick steps along the branch, a third to the edge where wood met nothing, and then a light flutter as it landed on his hand.

Its claws were pinpricks against his skin, not painful but surprisingly firm.

It pecked the crumb with rapid efficiency, tilted its head back to swallow, and then looked down at his palm as if to say, That was acceptable. More?

Crumb chuckled softly, the sound wrapping around them like another kind of warmth.

“You’re a bold one,” he said.

The sparrow puffed its chest again in agreement.

It hopped from his hand to the lantern’s curved handle, claws tapping lightly on the metal. For a moment it tested the perch, head darting this way and that, wings half-open for balance.

Then it settled.

Of all the places in the valley it might have chosen—branch, stone, shoulder—it chose the lantern.

Perched there in the circle of golden light, the little bird looked like a piece of the flame that had decided to sit outside the glass for a while.

“As if you belong there,” Crumb murmured.

The sparrow chirped once, sharp and sure.

Crumb watched it, something warm stirring in his chest that was not entirely the loaf against his ribs or the lantern in his hand.

“Kindle,” he said quietly, the name arriving without any need to think it over. “That’ll do.”

Names, he had always believed, should fit as comfortably as a well-worn cloak.

This one did.

The bird—Kindle now—ruffled his feathers and let out a short, decisive string of notes. It sounded very much like acceptance.

Crumb straightened slowly, careful not to jostle his new companion. Kindle adjusted as Crumb moved, riding the motion with the ease of someone who had decided that this was, from now on, his rightful place in the world.

Fog curled around them still, but the lantern’s circle of light felt larger now—stretched, somehow, by the simple presence of the bird on its handle.

Crumb glanced back once toward the village, distant now in the mist, then ahead along the road that slipped through the thinning trees.

“One baker,” he murmured. “One sparrow. One lantern.”

Kindle chirped sharply, as if correcting him.

Crumb’s smile widened. “You’re right. One baker. One very important sparrow. One lantern.”

He stepped forward.

Kindle stayed.

The lantern glowed with its soft, steady warmth. Kindle’s small body rose and fell with the rhythm of Crumb’s stride, feathers catching the light with every tiny shift.

They walked east together—one man, one bird, one light—into the quiet, damp morning.

No trumpets sounded.
No omens cracked open the sky.
No watching eye of destiny swung to fix on them in that moment.

But somewhere in the weave of Faith and Fate, something took note.

Not of a hero’s proclamation or a battle’s beginning, but of a much smaller thing:

A lantern that walked.
A bird that chose to stay beside it.
And the simple, quiet truth that warmth recognizes warmth and answers it.

The lantern glowed.
The sparrow sang.

And in ways the world was not yet ready to understand,
a legend began its first, almost unnoticed steps along the road.