Kindle stayed.

That was the first surprise.

Sparrows were known for arriving like half-forgotten thoughts and leaving the same way—darting in, snatching up what they wanted, then whisking themselves away at the first hint of something more interesting. They belonged to the wind more than to any particular place or person, restless as leaves in a playful breeze.

They came when crumbs were offered.
They left when the crumbs were gone.

But Kindle did not behave like other sparrows.

He clung to the curved handle of Crumb’s lantern with the certainty of someone who had already made up his mind and would not be persuaded otherwise.

When Crumb at last turned back toward the village that morning, loaf lighter for the piece he had shared and heart inexplicably heavier for the small life now perched beside his light, Kindle remained where he was.

The path sloped gently upward toward the Crossroads. Fog still lingered in the hollows, pooling in shallow dips like spilled milk. Wind slid down from the low hills and tugged at Crumb’s cloak, teasing it back, snapping the edges against his legs.

Kindle rode it all.

When the breeze pulled at the cloth, he shifted his weight, claws tightening on the metal, small wings flaring just enough to steady himself—but he did not fly away.

When Crumb paused, half-turning to glance up at him, the sparrow only puffed his feathers and blinked back with a look that said plainly, Yes?

Crumb lifted a hand and tapped the lantern’s rim very gently with his fingers.

“You can fly off now, little one,” he murmured. “You don’t need to come all the way back with me.”

Kindle ruffled his feathers in a full-body shake that sent tiny droplets of mist scattering from his wings. Then he tucked them neatly against his sides and let out a single, resolute chirp.

He was staying.

Crumb, who had spent most of his life being the one who went to others rather than the one others came to, had never thought of himself as someone a creature might choose. The realization settled over him like a cloak he hadn’t known he owned.

He walked on, a soft, incredulous laugh tucked under his breath.

Entering the Crossroads was usually a quiet affair.

The roads narrowed as they approached the village, the wide openness of the valley giving way to the clustered shapes of homes and fences. It was the kind of place you slipped into rather than arrived at, as if the village had been gently set down in the path of travelers rather than built to impress them.

But that morning felt particularly delicate.

Fog still clung low, refusing to lift fully despite the steady rise of the sun. It coiled in loose ribbons around Crumb’s boots, tugging at the tops of the stones that lined the path. Fences and low walls emerged from it in broken stretches, making the village seem half-built out of cloud.

The lantern’s golden circle cut a small tunnel through the pale, swirling air. Within that tunnel, the world gained shape and color—the brown of wet earth, the darker gray of stone, the faint green of moss. Above it all, Kindle rode like the captain of a very small ship gliding through a very quiet, very white sea.

The village was just beginning to wake.

From one doorway, a woman stepped out with a basket of kindling on her hip, her hair still in sleep-mussed braids. She paused when she saw Crumb, squinting past the fog.

“Is that you, Crumb?”

“It’s me,” he called back.

“And… something else?” she added, peering at the faint smear of movement atop the lantern.

Kindle answered for himself.

He let out a bright chirp, the sound carrying cleanly on the damp air, and lifted his wings in a brief, showy flare that broke the outline of the lantern’s glow.

The woman’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, look at that,” she murmured, a smile curling at the corners of her mouth.

Up on the hill, the Miller was already at his work, because the mill’s wheel never turned itself. He stood in the broad doorway of the lower level, one hand braced against the frame, a sack of grain slung across his shoulder.

He squinted down the slope through the fog.

At first he saw only the familiar shape of Crumb: small figure, cream cloak, gentle light.

Then his eyes narrowed.

“Crumb?” he called, voice rolling comfortably down the hill. “Is that… a bird on your light?”

Crumb, who had been half-hoping to slip into the village without too much notice, lifted the lantern slightly in answer.

Kindle responded as if he’d been waiting for precisely this moment.

He puffed up to nearly twice his resting size, chest thrust out, tail feathers spread and angled just so, giving him an air of comically exaggerated pride. His small claws gripped the handle with what could only be described as theatrical seriousness.

The Miller stared for half a heartbeat.

Then he threw back his head and laughed.

The sound was big—too big for a fog-softened morning—but it fit the Miller, whose every reaction seemed to arrive at full volume. It rolled through the valley like rocks tumbling down a riverbed, loud but not threatening, and a few nearby crows startled and took off from the grain store roof, scolding him for the disruption.

“Well,” he said when he’d caught his breath, “looks like you’ve got yourself a guardian. Or a thief. Hard to say which.”

Kindle snapped his beak and chirped a rapid, offended trill.

Crumb stroked the side of the lantern with his thumb, as if calming it. “We’ll hope for guardian,” he replied gently.

He continued down toward the square, the Miller still grinning after him, shaking his flour-dusted head.

By the time Crumb reached the heart of the village, the children had begun to appear.

They gathered in small knots, coats crookedly buttoned, hair hastily braided or barely brushed. They carried smooth pebbles in their fists, prized from the river or the edges of the fields, ready to be traded or used for their toss-and-hop games in the square.

When one of them saw the familiar lantern glow breaking the fog, a cry went up:

“Crumb’s back!”

Another voice quickly followed: “And he’s got a bird!”

In the span of a few heartbeats, the children were upon him, feet scuffing little half-moons in the damp earth, voices bubbling over each other like water at a shallow crossing.

“Is it lost?”
“Does it bite?”
“Can it talk?”
“Can I pet it?”
“Is it yours?”
“Can I have it if you don’t want it?”

Kindle’s reaction was instantaneous.

He hopped a little higher up the lantern’s curve, as far from reaching fingers as geometry would allow, and flared his wings in a way that made him look briefly larger and, in his mind, no doubt fearsome.

He let out a bright, sharp chirp that had all the crisp edge of a small warning bell.

The children froze.

Crumb bit back a smile, one hand lifting slightly in a calming gesture.

“Kindle,” he said, voice warm but gently chiding, “prefers admiration from a distance.”

The children absorbed this for a moment, expressions serious. Then, as one, they nodded.

It was as if he had announced a sacred rule: fire may be warmed beside but not touched; bread may be smelled before it is passed; Kindle may be adored without being grabbed.

A girl with freckles across her nose clasped her hands behind her back. “All right,” she declared. “We’ll only look.”

A boy beside her, still buzzing with questions, whispered, “Does he sleep on the lantern too?” but he asked it softly enough not to startle the bird.

Kindle gave them a regal tilt of his head, as though acknowledging his audience, then settled his feathers again, satisfied that the proper boundaries had been established.

Crumb moved on, lantern swaying gently with his steps, and the children watched him go with the kind of wide-eyed fascination usually reserved for traveling performers or storytellers with bags full of secrets.

Back inside the bakehouse, the world shrank to familiar walls and stayed warmth.

Crumb hung the lantern on its usual iron hook by the small window, the place where its light could reach the deepest into the room when the day grew dark. Kindle fluttered up before the lantern had finished its lazy swing, landing with precision on the table beside a large wooden bowl of flour.

A few stray grains lay scattered near the rim where Crumb had measured carelessly in his earlier rush.

Kindle pecked at one, tasting it with the same scrutiny he’d given the bread crumb on the road. It was not especially interesting, but it was acceptable. He ate another, then fluffed himself once, content.

Crumb watched him, wiping his hands absently against his apron.

“You’re staying, then,” he murmured.

Kindle blinked, once, very slowly.

The gesture was small, but something in it felt like an answer.

Crumb’s shoulders eased. “All right,” he said. “Then you’ll have to learn the rules of a bakehouse.”

Kindle chirped, the sound short and confident, as if to say: I expected nothing less.

The first rule:
Don’t step on the dough.

Kindle discovered this one rather abruptly.

At some point, curiosity drew him nearer to the covered bowls where fresh dough was rising. The faint smell of yeast and flour and warmth was too intriguing to ignore. While Crumb’s back was turned, the sparrow hopped from table to stool and then onto the edge of one of the bowls.

The cloth dipped slightly beneath his weight.

He considered it, head cocked, then hopped again.

His tiny foot sank into softness.

The sensation was shocking—cool and yielding and sticky. He sank nearly up to his ankle, and the dough clung around his toes in a way that felt, to his bird mind, like being caught by a very polite swamp.

He froze.

Crumb turned at the tiny half-gasp Kindle made—more feeling than sound—and saw the sparrow standing stiff-legged in the center of his carefully risen dough, eyes wide with horror.

“Oh,” Crumb breathed, equal parts surprise and amusement. “Well. That answers whether you’d try it.”

He crossed the room with the unhurried speed of someone very used to disasters in their smallest forms. With gentle fingers, he scooped Kindle up, one hand supporting the bird’s body while the other carefully loosened the dough from his tiny toes.

Kindle stared at his own foot, scandalized.

“This,” Crumb said, voice kind but firm, “is why we do not step on the dough.”

Kindle chirped a small, embarrassed note.

Crumb placed him on a clear patch of tabletop and reached for a damp cloth. He wiped the dough from the offended foot with the care of someone cleaning flour from a child’s hands after their first attempt at baking.

Once Kindle’s toes were clean and no longer sticky, the sparrow lifted the foot and shook it as if to ensure it was still attached and functioning. Then he hopped away from the dough bowls with great dignity, as though the entire incident had been a calculated experiment.

Crumb reshaped the dough with practiced hands, tucking the small disturbance back into the whole.

“Now you know,” he said.

Kindle did not go near the bowls again.
Not that day, at least.

The second rule:
Seeds are not the same as flour—eat the wrong one and you’ll be very disappointed.

Kindle learned this one the hard way.

On a lower shelf by the table, Crumb kept small jars of ingredients: salt in one, sugar in another, yeast in a third. The yeast jar, on that particular morning, was open, with a teaspoon resting beside it—Crumb having been interrupted mid-measure by a knock at the door.

While Crumb spoke quietly with an early customer at the threshold, Kindle’s wandering eye fell upon the tiny, grain-like specks in the jar.

To a sparrow, they looked promising.

He hopped down, leaned over the lip of the jar, and scooped a beakful.

The taste hit him like a surprise slap.

It was bitter and dry and strange, a flavor like almost something but not anything his mouth understood as food. He jerked his head back, beak open, making a sound that, if translated, would have been something like: What in all the skies was THAT?

He shook his head violently, scattering a few stray granules across the shelf. Then he glared at the jar, puffing up as if personally offended.

Crumb, returning just in time to witness the aftermath, paused.

His eyes flicked from Kindle to the jar to the yeast sprinkled on the wood. For a moment, silence stretched.

Then he laughed.

Not a big laugh, like the Miller’s, but a soft, unguarded one that unrolled from his chest and filled the little room. It was the first such laugh he’d let out in days—one with no weariness hiding in it.

“I did try to tell you,” he said, though he hadn’t, not about this rule. “Some things look like food and aren’t meant for you.”

Kindle let out a grumpy chirp and hopped to a higher shelf, beak still working in distaste.

From that day on, whenever Crumb reached for the yeast jar, Kindle watched with suspicion, as though keeping an eye on a known trickster.

The third rule:
If you chirp too loudly near the oven, the loaves can fall.

This was less a law of the bakehouse and more a superstition soaked into its walls, but Crumb believed in it enough to pass it along.

Steam rose in soft sheets when the oven door opened. The room filled with the low symphony of crusts crackling, wood popping in the fire, and Crumb’s quiet movements.

Kindle, overwhelmed with joy the first time he saw an entire tray of golden loaves emerge from the oven, burst into a string of triumphant, piercing notes.

Crumb winced.

“Careful,” he said gently, closing the oven door with his hip. “The bread is still deciding if it wants to be good bread. We don’t startle it.”

Kindle quieted, chastened. He watched as Crumb set the loaves down and listened to the tiny crackles that meant the crusts were settling properly.

From then on, Kindle tried to keep his joy to polite levels near the oven.
He did not always succeed.

Sometimes, when a particular loaf looked especially handsome or when a tray came out perfectly browned, a bright chirp would escape him before he could swallow it.

Crumb never scolded.

He only smiled and said, “We’ll risk a little joy.”

For all his small disruptions, Crumb did not try to fold Kindle into his routine as an inconvenience to be managed.

He adjusted himself instead.

He moved a little slower when Kindle hopped about on the floor, so as not to risk a careless step. He began humming a touch louder while he worked—low, steady notes that matched the pitch of Kindle’s softer trills, turning their shared air into a kind of simple, wordless duet.

He learned to pause mid-motion when Kindle decided his arm was the perfect branch. The bird would ride there, tiny claws gripping his sleeve, chest rising and falling in time with Crumb’s breath as he moved from table to oven to counter.

Kindle, for all his tiny size, grew larger in presence with each passing hour.

He hopped to the highest shelf near the oven and surveyed the bakehouse with the air of a general inspecting his post—head turning sharply, eyes tracking every move Crumb made.

He discovered the joy of steam—darting through it when Crumb poured water into the hot oven, then swirling back out like a feathered comet, his body briefly ghosted in white mist.

He took to perching on the lantern whenever Crumb reached for it—as if the two belonged together, light and bird, and one ought never move without the other.

By the time the sun had climbed well above the hills, the entire village had heard about the baker’s new companion.

They came, at first, out of curiosity.
Then, out of something else.

People began to pause at Crumb’s doorway with reasons that thinned under examination.

“I came to check if you needed more flour sacks,” someone would say, even though they had just delivered a fresh stack three days before.

“I was already headed this way,” another would claim, though their usual route took them past the well, not the bakehouse.

Some admitted more honestly, cheeks flushed with amusement. “Is it true? About the bird?”

Crumb never turned them away.

He worked as he always did—measuring, shaping, setting loaves to rise—but he let their presence fill the room. He let their laughter at Kindle’s antics bounce off the beams. He let their wonder settle alongside the smell of baking bread.

Kindle perched proudly on the lantern’s hook or the edge of a shelf, receiving their attention with the composure of someone doing them a favor.

“Look at him,” someone would breathe. “Right there on the light.”

“Like he belongs,” another would say.

“Like he’s guarding it,” a third would add softly.

Those words, said half in jest and half in something else, looped themselves into the weave of the day.

When Liora the Candlekeeper came by, it was under no pretense at all.

She stepped into the bakehouse with a small bundle of tapers wrapped in linen, the faint scent of beeswax following her. Her eyes, already used to reading the language of flame, went straight to the lantern.

Kindle was there, of course.

He stood on the curved handle above the glass, chest slightly lifted, feathers catching the golden light. The flame inside burned steady, undisturbed by the shifting air of visitors coming and going.

Liora stopped in the doorway, letting her gaze take it in.

“It suits you,” she said at last, attention flicking briefly to Crumb. “A light that carries its own spark.”

Kindle chirped once.

The sound was not his usual bright chatter. It was softer, almost measured, as if he somehow recognized in Liora a kindred respect for all things that glowed and burned and remembered.

Crumb’s eyes softened. “He found me on the road,” he said.

“Or,” Liora murmured, stepping closer, “the light found him.”

Her thumb brushed gently along the lantern’s handle, feeling the faint warmth of the metal beneath her skin. The flame inside gave a small, almost approving flare.

Crumb’s gaze drifted to the lantern—its clear glass, its unwavering flame.

For a heartbeat, the busy noise of the bakehouse muted. The world shrank to the circle of that light and the little bird perched above it.

Something moved behind his golden eyes.

Not fear.
Not confusion.

Recognition.

As if, all at once, he was seeing not just a helpful tool he had carried for years, but something that had been quietly walking beside him with its own purpose.

He did not say any of that aloud.

He simply nodded once, half to himself, and turned back to his loaves.

Liora watched him, then the lantern, then Kindle, and filed the moment away like a candle set aside for a night she knew would need it.

That evening, when the last loaf left the counter and the lingering warmth of the oven sank slowly into the stone, the village tilted toward night.

The sky deepened from blue to indigo, then to the soft velvet of oncoming dark. A thin crescent moon began to carve itself into the sky’s edge. The sounds of the Crossroads changed: talk quieted, doors shut, laughter faded into murmur.

Crumb stood alone in the bakehouse, the day’s echoes around him.

He dipped a small taper into the oven’s glowing coals, watching it catch fire. The flame climbed the wick eagerly, fresh and bright. With that newborn light, he touched the wick of his lantern.

The old flame accepted the new fire, blending with it until there was no telling which heat was which.

He closed the lantern’s little door with a soft click.

The glow that filled the glass was, as always, gentle. Tonight, though, with the memory of Liora’s words and the weight of Kindle’s steady presence in his thoughts, it felt somehow… fuller.

He lifted the lantern from its hook.

Before he could take a step, Kindle fluttered down from his shelf and landed on the familiar handle with all the ease of someone coming home.

Crumb opened the door.

The air outside was cool and tasted faintly of stone and river-mist. Somewhere, down in the hollow where the water ran under the road, frogs were beginning their evening conversation.

The scent of bread still clung to Crumb’s clothes and hair and skin—cooling loaves, flour, a whisper of smoke.

Above, the first stars had begun to appear, timid at first, then bolder, freckling the darkening sky.

Crumb stepped out into it.

He did not have a destination. He did not have a list of people to visit or tasks to complete. The pull in his chest was the same one he felt each morning at the Crossroads—subtle but insistent.

So he walked.

The lantern’s light pooled gently ahead of him, brushing over stones and grass, turning puddles into coins of pale gold. Kindle’s small silhouette crowned the circle of glow, his head moving in quick, alert turns as he watched the world slip past.

Where fireflies drifted up from the roadside grasses, Kindle chirped softly in greeting, their brief green-gold flashes reflected in his dark eyes. A few seemed to hover nearer the lantern’s light, the two kinds of glow mingling for a heartbeat before the fireflies faded back into the dark.

Villagers who happened to glance out their windows or step briefly into their yards saw them—the small figure of the baker, the steady lantern, the tiny bird.

None of them would have been able to say exactly what they felt in that moment.

A loosening of something tight in the chest.
A softening of the day’s hard edges.
A simple, quiet hope that the dark beyond the fields was not empty after all.

Light, even a small one, looks larger when it walks.

And Crumb’s lantern—now with Kindle perched above it like a little beating heart of feather and song—looked brighter that night than it ever had before.

They walked on, one step and then another, into the gathering night.

Neither the baker nor the sparrow knew yet what roads waited for them, or what stories would grow from the simple fact of their walking side by side.

But the world, in its own deep and patient way, had begun to notice.