The Fire and Its Friend

“Walk until you can’t,” Reni’s father told her, gripping her shoulder tight and not letting her look toward the sounds of gunshots. “And then keep walking. Look at me! You understand?”

Reni didn’t understand.

“No running. You run, you sweat. You sweat, you freeze. Don't freeze. Understand?”

Reni still didn’t understand, but she nodded anyway.

“Only light a fire if you have to. Use this.” He pushed a match into her hand. “And take this.” He slipped something else into the pocket of her coat. A book?

“I’ll come for you when I can. I have to hold them back. Go, Reni. Go!”

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Reni’s feet ached, and the frost that bit at her ears and nose and fingers had long since faded into numbness when she saw the building through the trees. She found that she was running. Buildings could mean warmth, or food, or ---

She broke past snow-covered pines into a clearing filled by a frozen pond, its surface a dusty white. Beyond it rose a small stone structure, only a single story tall, with a sloping roof and glass windows that might have once been stained with color. The wall closest to the pond was in ruins, a gaping wound littered with fallen bricks and mortar, coated by a slick layer of frost. There was no motion within, no flicker of lights or echo of voices, no smell of food or fire. Reni drifted hesitantly closer, then poked her head around the corner of the ruined wall and gasped. In her nine years, she’d never seen a place like this.

It was a library. Rows of shelves filled the chamber from as high as Reni could reach all the way to the floor. They looked like they'd all been filled with books once, but now many of them were empty, and the books that remained were older and more battered than any she'd ever seen.

Don't freeze.

Reni moved further inside, away from the cold and the wind.

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“You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

The fire popped and sizzled. Fire shouldn’t be like that, Reni knew. It should burn long and steady, not fizzle and spit like a spoiled child, but she was glad for the conversation anyway.

“Me too.”

She’d scoured the area around the pond for as long as she could handle the cold, and only come up with enough dry twigs to build the smallest of fires. The uncertain flames washed the walls of the library with flickering light as the sun slipped behind the trees outside. As the temperature dropped, so did the flames.

“Where are you going?” Reni asked. “Please… Please don’t leave me.”

But it didn’t seem to care. Perhaps it had other places to be. Icy chill was seeping in through her coat now, and Reni cast desperately about for anything that might convince the fire to stay. Her eyes fell upon the shelves of books.

The first one she selected was old and tattered, the lettering long gone, the binding barely able to hold the pages. Reni offered it, cautiously placing it among the coals.

The fire poked at its gift, hesitated, then swarmed over the pages in a rush. Reni went to find another.

Many of the books nearest the caved-in wall were too damp to ever burn, but she was able to build a small pile of those that had been hidden further in, and as she sat down next to her new friend, Reni selected the top one off the pile.

“The Duchess and the Fool,” she read.

She felt something in her coat as she got settled, and pulled it out. The book her father gave her. The cover was plain brown leather, simple and rugged, stitched with his initials. It even smelled like him.

Tears welling up in her eyes, Reni found that she wasn’t able to open it. She dropped the journal to the stone floor and pulled her knees up close, and for an unknown amount of time she rocked back and forth, sniffling in the cold and thinking of home.

When the tears had dried up, and the raw pain receded into something duller and formless, her eyes fell on the other book she’d pulled from the pile. Wiping the last moisture from her cheeks, she opened to the first page.

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Reni was only halfway through The Duchess and the Fool when she noticed that the fire was fading again.

She glanced at the book in her hand. It was just the type she loved, where a clever heroine outsmarts a conniving, greedy villain. It was the type of story her father would read aloud to her before bedtime.

“You can’t have this one yet,” she told the fire, and grabbed another from her stack -- a beaten, wrinkled thing that hardly resembled a book at all. “Here. Try this.”

The fire accepted with glee.

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Reni’s eyes raced across the shadowy pages with rapturous attention. She knew the light was fading, she just had to…

She slammed the book closed with triumph. Done. The Duchess had become the Queen in the end, and the fool was sent to work on a pig farm, as he’d deserved.

She gave the fire a stern look. “It’s rude to beg.” She waited until it looked thoroughly cowed, then handed the book over. There were several little pops, then tiny flames went skittering across the dusty old cover, chattering eagerly amongst themselves. “You’re welcome,” Reni said, then started digging for another.

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Morning came, and Reni’s father hadn’t arrived. She’d read through a dozen books over the course of the night, skimming where she lost interest, chewing on every word when a story or chapter struck home. Each book became food first for her thoughts, and then for her friend, and together they made it through the night.

But the sunrise brought no relief from the cold. A smothering storm swept in, a siren-like wind careening through the trees and the exposed rafters of the library, snow hanging like a white curtain between Reni and the world beyond the ruined wall. The air was somehow even colder than at night, and fingers of frost crept across the ground outside the reach of the fire’s warmth.

There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit, and read, and try to stay warm, so that’s what Reni did.

The Seven Kings of Sevalia was short but fun, and Reni finished the whole thing before feeding it to the fire.

A History of Architecture proved impressively boring, and Reni barely got through a single page before it went up in a shower of sparks.

The Ever Ending Path was all poems. Reni hated poems. Luckily, the fire didn’t seem to share that opinion.

Then there was Beedlebuggle’s Bugle Brigade, a wild adventure, and Reni read it twice from front to back, shoving other books into the fire with her foot as her eyes ripped from page to page.

The snow fell, and Reni read, and her fire burned.

Her pile of books dwindled as she kept her friend from going hungry, and it wasn’t long before she was racing to finish the last pages of whatever new adventure she found before passing it over to the weakening flames just in time to keep them kindled.

“Don’t leave me,” she would whisper to the fire in the times between stories, when her mind would drift back toward home and the tears would inevitably well up again. “Not you too.” And as long as she kept feeding it pages, it didn’t leave her.

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She wasn’t sure how long she sat in there, while the wind screeched outside and snow drifted down into the rafters, but she found sooner than expected that she was running out of books. She’d scoured the shelves of the small library and grabbed anything that looked like it might burn, but her pile of books had dwindled to only a few spare pages now.

“Almost out,” she whispered. The fire hissed its displeasure. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m hungry, too.”

The fire strained toward her, as if wondering whether she might be worth consuming, and Reni hunched back.

“Hey, stop--”

Then she realized the fire wasn’t reaching for her. Her eyes fell on her father’s journal as the flames stretched for it, and she picked it up. It was the last book left. She’d purposefully buried it beneath the others, hoping she wouldn’t have to look at it.

Now, it was all she could see.

“No,” she told the fire, then she opened the journal. The writing didn’t start until halfway down a torn page, and it looked like many pages were missing.

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June 14

Snow’s falling. Bombs dropped four years ago, been cold for the past two, and now folk are muttering that the enemy is finally coming for us.

Got a letter from Ted. He’s up north. Says they’re building a place to hide from it all. They’re calling it the Preserve. Says they’ve got room, if we can get there.

I can’t just give up my home, but I have to get Reni to safety.

What a fucking mess.

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He wrote like he talked -- short and to the point -- but it reminded Reni of home, and the memories stung.

Blinking away tears, she read on, flipping page after page of scratchy handwriting.

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July 2

No attacks yet, but it’s not getting any warmer. Colder, maybe. Been teaching Reni what I can. How to build a fire, find the right food. If we ever make the trip up north, she’ll need to be ready. Who knows what’s out there in between us and the Preserve.

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July 7

Marcus saw a convoy out past the wheatfields yesterday. We don’t know if they know we’re here. We can’t do much but sit and wait.

I need to get Reni out of here.

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The fire was fading. Reni could sense the shadows creeping in from the edge of her vision, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from her father’s journal. She huddled close to the smoldering coals, shaking with cold, eyes straining for every word.

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July 12

Tomorrow is the day. Ted was able to get a letter through to me, with a hand-drawn map inside. Still haven’t seen anything from the enemy, so we’re going to make a run for it.

Tomorrow morning. I’ll make sure everyone will be safe while I’m gone, then I’m getting Reni out of here. Tomorrow.

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It ended there.

A howling wind filled the library, and the world was a canvas of white beyond the broken wall. The book slid out of her numb fingers and clattered against the floor, and her eyes slid down to the fire.

A single, small ember still glowed orange beneath a cloak of ash. Desperately, Reni collapsed to her knees and blew, coaxing it back to feeble strength. “D-don’t leave m-me,” she pleaded.

There was only one option. Hot tears turning cold on her cheeks, Reni began ripping pages out of her father’s journal and feeding them one by one to the tiny tongue of fire.

“P-please d-don’t leave me…”

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She’d fallen asleep. Blinking, Reni sat up, stretching cold limbs. She felt something strange on her skin.

Sunlight.

Reni leapt up. Beyond the wall, the storm was gone, burned away by a yellow sun.

At her feet, the fire was finally gone. Only cold ashes remained.

“I’m sorry.”

She realized she was clutching something in one hand. A single sheet of crumpled paper. With clumsy fingers, she smoothed it out to reveal a crude map.

“To the Preserve,” she read aloud.

Across the pond, in the direction of home, dark smoke rose above the treeline in thin tendrils. She couldn’t go back there, and she couldn’t stay here, not without any books to burn for fuel. If her father really was coming for her, then he’d start by checking with Uncle Ted, wouldn’t he?

“Thank you,” Reni murmured to the ashes of her friend.

Then she carefully folded the map into a coat pocket, and set off north.