The Wound

Snow ticks against hide walls. The tribe sleeps in a tangle of breath and furs – infant stirs against its mother, settles – dreaming easy, trusting without knowing they trust. At the centre of the camp, the fire thins towards ember. One figure rises. She rises because lying still while the fire gutters would make her someone else. Someone smaller. Someone she spent a lifetime refusing to become. She crosses the cold ground. Her knees press the frozen earth. She feeds the fire a branch, then another. Beyond the firelight, something paces – the wolves circle every night, waiting for the flame to fail. They will wait forever. She is someone who does not let fires die. Not for the sleepers. Not for thanks. For the self she has built, night by night, through the unrecorded choices that became her name.

The Path

The fire thins. You rise. Your body knows the ritual now – the cold ground, the crack of dry wood, the slow negotiation with ember. There is a way to stack the wood that the fire loves. Your hands remember. Ten thousand vigils. Tonight, kneeling in the dark, you feel the ache beneath the ache. The silence in place of gratitude. The weight of labour no one sees, no one names. For the first time, the thought crosses your mind: letting the fire die. Just once. You imagine the tribe waking to cold ash, shivering into sudden understanding. Or being seen – one pair of eyes opening at the exact moment you lay the log. Someone, finally, knowing. The fantasy warms you. Then comes the shame – cold and sudden. The shame of lying still while the fire fails. The shame of becoming someone who would let it die. You realise the sleepers' ignorance was never the wound. The wound would be yours: the private knowledge, held forever, that you betrayed the self you built. You are your own only witness. And you cannot look away. The fire does not know whether you are bitter or glad. Only whether you fed it. You feed it. Your hands are warm. The fire you keep is keeping you. Beyond the light, the wolves have slunk back into the black. Not tonight. Around you the sleepers are breathing softly, held in safety they will never know you made. The silence where wolves had been. The morning they will wake into, certain it simply arrived.

The Shadow

She tends loudly – clattering the wood, groaning as she rises, making certain her exhaustion is visible to anyone who might stir. The Debt-Counter has turned the vigil into theatre. Each log is an entry in a ledger; each cold night, a debt the sleepers owe. When they wake and stretch towards the warmth without a word, her love curdles into scorekeeping. She dies bankrupt, bitter that the sleepers did not wake to applaud her sacrifice. Another tends in perfect silence, kneeling always at the edge of the light. She refuses to let the heat touch her own skin, making service into a wall – a way to be necessary without ever being known. She believes receiving the warmth would corrupt the gift. The sleepers sense it. They feel the chill in her care, the wall behind the gift. They drift towards other fires, ones that warm both ways. She does not understand why they leave. She gave everything. She dies kneeling. Still tending. Still frozen. The fire she fed for years reaches towards her one last time.

The Cut