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By the time Allison reached the bottom of Seminary Ridge, her legs were jelly. The ride had done what it was supposed to do — burn off the worst of the restless energy, quiet the loudest of the mental noise, and put enough distance between her and her living room. The TV playing long-lost home movies now felt like something that had happened to someone else.
The smell of the beach still lingered, even now, threading faintly through the air, following her closely through every twist and turn. But it had softened enough that she could almost convince herself it was just her overactive imagination again.
Her client’s deadline, however, was not imaginary. It was real, and it was tonight, and she’d spent the morning crying over a magic pen and her late father’s smile instead of writing the fifteen-hundred-word article due by eleven p.m. that would put an extra $75 in her pocket. The guilt of that — the familiar, grinding guilt of time lost to things that weren’t “productive” — sat in her chest like a stone, sharp and cold, making her breath hitch with regret.
She needed food. She needed coffee. She needed to force words onto a page that someone would actually pay her for in a place that wasn’t her house. And she needed the creature comforts of home that wasn’t home, only the Jagged Cliff could provide.
The café appeared around the bend on Chambersburg Street — a converted 1860s brick building, three stories of warm history tucked between storefronts. The ruddy brick was already heating up in the sunshine, almost hot to the touch. Allison coasted to a stop, swung off the bike, and leaned it against the side of the building where she always did.
She pulled her backpack from the rear basket — heavy with a notebook, the special Quill, and the Sparkkeeper card she’d tossed in earlier with all the reverence of someone stuffing a receipt into a DOOM drawer. The bag swung over her shoulder, its weight oddly comforting. She stepped inside.
The smell hit her first, the way it always did — freshly roasted coffee beans and something baking, warm and yeasty and sweet. These aromas layered over the faint scent of old wood. The original floors creaked beneath her feet, wide-plank and worn smooth by a century and a half of footsteps. The walls were warm wood and exposed brick, hung with paintings and photographs from local artists — landscapes of the battlefield, abstracts in jewel tones, a watercolor of the town square Allison had eyed for months but couldn’t justify buying. Wooden doors. Original hardware. This was the kind of place that felt like it had stories soaked into every surface.
It was a weekday. The café was calm, cool, and mostly empty — the lull between the morning rush and the lunch crowd. No line. Perfect.
She stepped up to the counter. The cashier was new, young, a little bashful, probably a student from the college who’d just started. Allison ordered the ever-changing daily special—an iced white chocolate blueberry mocha— and her favorite, the Simple Sensation sandwich—turkey, provolone, avocado, lettuce, tomato, and a generous smear of tangy house-made mayo on toasted, seedy, whole-grain bread. It was comfort food with a bit of flair, and she needed both today. The iced coffee would keep her wired enough to make the deadline. The sandwich would keep her alive long enough to care.
Card swiped. Receipt signed.
“I’ll be up on the third floor,” she told the cashier, but then Allison stopped and looked back at the girl. “Oh, hey, are you new here?” Allison asked, catching the slight nervousness in the girl’s movements.
The cashier nodded, smiling bashfully. “Yeah. I just moved into the dorms.”
Allison smiled warmly. “Welcome to Gettysburg. You’re doing just fine. You’ll see me around — I’m here often. Thanks.”
The cashier smiled back, already prepping the iced coffee with the slightly over-careful precision of someone who hadn’t yet learned to do it on autopilot and an extra pep in her step now after their exchange. Allison remembered that feeling. She didn’t miss it.
Upstairs was her sanctuary.
The third floor of The Jagged Cliff was always quiet—a series of small rooms connected by narrow hallways. The original layout of the house is still visible in the building’s bones. The wooden stairs creaked with every step, announcing her arrival to the empty rooms above. She climbed past the second floor. Busier, louder, tables closer together. Then up to the third. The ceiling sloped. The windows were tall. The world felt far away, but close enough to people-watch between paragraphs.
Her favorite table sat by the tallest window, bathed in morning light. She claimed it the way she always did—bag down, chair out, a silent sigh of arrival. The view looked out over Chambersburg Street: rooftops, treetops, the gentle roll of the tree-covered mountains beyond. From up here, Gettysburg looked like a postcard. Quiet. Unchanged. It was the kind of place where nothing extraordinary ever happened, except during tourist season or when a movie was being filmed somewhere in town.
She chuckled to herself as she pulled from her bag: her notebook and the Spark Quill, settling them on the table. Then her phone, which she checked quickly — no messages, no missed calls, no magical interventions from raccoon-adjacent entities.
“Nope. No messages. Good,” she murmured, putting her phone face down on the table. “I’ve got too much to do to be bothered right now. I have to finish this article. It’s due tonight. Let’s get to it.”
The Sparkkeeper card, which had been riding at the bottom of her bag, had somehow migrated to the top during the trip. When she pulled the notebook out, the card came with it — sliding free and landing on the table, face up, centered, gilded edges catching the window light. It sat there like a place card at a dinner party, marking her assigned seat.
Allison stared at it. “How did you get in there?” she said, bemused, completely forgetting she had tossed it in her bag along with everything else.
She nudged the card so one end was tucked under the edge of her notebook, which she propped open to a clean page, and picked up the Spark Quill. She always preferred to start her writing projects in an old-school analog way: with pen to paper. The brass of the pen was warm in her hand, grounding her as anxiety squirmed in her stomach. The nib caught the light, adding a strange thrill to her determination. She had approximately seven hours to write 1,500 words on sustainable packaging trends for a client who sold eco-friendly shipping supplies, and the pressure of every second made her pulse throb.
She put the nib down, touching it to the tooth of the paper, and the Quill buzzed immediately.
“No,” she said firmly. “Absolutely not. Not right now. I don’t have time.”
The buzzing intensified — that same persistent hum from the morning and the night before, traveling through her fingers and into her wrist. The nib hovered above the page, trembling with eagerness, angling toward the paper like a dowsing rod that had found water.
“I said no. Not now!” She tightened her grip. The Quill pushed back with the relentless persistence of a dog who wanted a walk and had all day to stare you down.
Allison bent over to reach for her backpack when a little glowing firefly cautiously poked its head out of a fold of fabric when the flap was lifted. It stood on the bag’s hem, spread its wings, and took off. It buzzed to and fro around the room without a pattern, then finally settled on the corner of Allison’s notebook for a rest.
“What a curious little thing you are? It’s not firefly season yet. You have months to go, yet,” she said sweetly with an air of annoyance as she pointed the end of the Spark Quill toward the firefly. “You’re welcome to stay and keep me company, but I have some important work to do if you don’t mind.”
The firefly kept a careful watch on Allison, then started flying around again, but this time it hovered around the pen as Allison tried to start writing. It looped once around the Quill, settled on the nib’s tip, and pulsed. Allison swatted it away, but it just did the same loop and landed back on the pen.
“Oh ho, so you’re one of those magical ones. Did Thimble send you? You know what? Fine. Whatever.” She exhaled through her nose, frustration tightening her jaw. “Do what you want. Sit there. But I’m working. I have a deadline. Tonight. An actual, real-world, someone-is-paying-me deadline. So whatever magical shenanigans you and this pen have planned, it’s going to have to wait,” she snapped, voice barely above a whisper but quivering with tension.
She loosened her grip on the Quill — just slightly, just enough to let the nib touch the page — and tried to steer it toward the first sentence of her article. Sustainable packaging solutions have become increasingly important in—
The Quill veered left.
Not her words. Not her article. Not sustainable packaging. It was writing something she hadn’t thought, hadn’t planned, hadn’t intended in that small, in that tidy luminous script that it wrote in her journal the night before.
“Oh, come on,” she groaned.
There was no point in fighting it. She knew that, so she resigned herself, picked up her coffee with her free hand, took a long sip, and let the Quill do its thing.
Exasperated and irritated, she shouted at the pen, “Cat, darn it! Go right ahead, be my guest. You’re gonna do what you want anyway. Doesn’t matter what I want, does it? Or whether I need to pay my bills. Who cares. Write away.”
She just huffed and took another swig of coffee, tapping her foot so loudly she hoped the powers that be knew, without a shadow of a doubt, how much she hated all of this.
The words that appeared on the page weren’t a memory this time. This was something else—older, deeper, less personal, and more universal. It felt mythic. It felt like a parable.
The Quill wrote about a key left in plain sight, but no one ever picked it up because they’d forgotten what it was for. Then the Quill wrote about a trickster raccoon who stole truths from people who didn’t want them and left them in the pockets of those who did.
It wrote about an echo hiding in a doorway, and fireflies — tiny, living sparks — that weren’t insects at all but seeds of stories that grew into worlds if you fed them, and withered into dust if you didn’t.
One line lingered on the page longer than the others, the ink glowing brighter, pulsing with that heartbeat rhythm: Be careful what you feed the fireflies. The Quill stopped. The buzzing died. The nib lifted from the page and went still.
Allison stared at the words. She hadn’t written them. She knew she hadn’t written them. And yet they were there, shaped by her hand and whatever spirit possessed her pen, the Spark Quill. The story was beautiful. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this.
She set the Quill down on the notebook’s fold and pushed the whole thing away from her. Her arms felt heavy. Her head felt full. Whatever the Quill had just pulled through her had left her drained.
Her stomach growled—incredibly loud in such a quiet room. She looked over at her sandwich, still sitting on its plate, untouched since the Quill had commandeered her writing hand. She pulled the plate close, picked up the sandwich, and took a bite.
The flavors hit her like a hug. She closed her eyes and chewed slowly, savoring it, letting the simple pleasure of good food ground her back in the physical world.
“Yeah,” she thought, her eyes still closed, her head nodding, and her body wiggling back and forth as she does when her food makes her exceptionally happy. “That’s precisely the right answer. Yum.”
When she opened her eyes, the firefly was perched on the Spark Quill, its opaque and translucent pairs of wings opening and closing in slow, rhythmic beats. The golden glow from its body pulsed in time with an inaudible rhythm.
She put down her sandwich. She wiped her fingers on her napkin. Leaned forward. And pointed at the firefly with the energy of a woman who had reached the absolute limit of her patience with magical creatures interrupting her workday.
“Not. Now.” She whispered it in a tired voice. Look, I don’t know what this is” — her hand made a broad, encompassing gesture at the firefly, the pen, the card, the shimmering ink, all of it — “but I actually need to get real work done today. Now that the Quill was done doing whatever it was doing, your little song-and-dance was getting tired, and I’m getting fed up.”
The firefly flashed at her. Once. Twice. Then it lifted off the Quill, drifted upward in a lazy spiral, and settled on a nearby windowsill, where it sat with its wings folded, glowing softly, looking for all the world.
“Thank you,” Allison said indignantly.
She pulled the notebook back, flipped to a clean page, and picked up the Quill. This time, it behaved. The nib met the paper and produced exactly what she told it to — her words, her article, her sustainable packaging content. The ink was still purple and shimmering, but this time, at least the words were hers and in her normal handwriting.
She settled into the familiar groove of client work. It wasn’t exciting but necessary, and it worked just fine for her and her skill set. It was the kind of writing that paid the bills, kept the lights on, and didn’t require her to feel anything at all or think too terribly hard, which was exactly what she needed after a morning of feeling everything.
The firefly watched from the windowsill. The Sparkkeeper card glowed, barely perceptibly, at the edge of the table. And the Spark Quill wrote what it was told, obedient for now, its deeper purposes temporarily shelved to let his charge do her work.
She was three hundred words short of her target word count for her article when she heard the footsteps.
They came up the creaky wooden stairs slowly — light, deliberate, unhurried, and knew exactly where they were going. Allison’s fingers paused on the Quill. She’d chosen the third floor specifically because nobody came up here during the afternoon lull. The whole point was solitude. In her irritation, she made a very low, quiet growl in her throat.
Maybe they’ll go to a different room, she thought, and kept writing, trying really hard to ignore it.
The footsteps reached the top of the stairs and stopped. A throat cleared — soft, almost apologetic.
Allison looked up, over her glasses, which had slid down her nose.
A woman stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs. She was about Allison’s height, maybe a little shorter, with an unremarkable build and an expression that was anything but. Her eyes were dark and bright, with the intensity of someone looking at you and seeing more than was visible.
She wore jeans and a black-and-gray striped shirt, and a brown leather messenger bag hung from her shoulder, the strap crossing her chest. In one hand, she held a drink that looked like an iced chai latte. In the other, a bowl of baked oatmeal with raspberries and milk, still hot from the kitchen.
And then the fragrance. Allison caught it the moment the woman passed her table — raspberries. Fresh, sweet, unmistakable. Underneath was the faintest trace of forest, damp earth, green things growing, and Rain on leaves.
Their eyes met, but the woman’s gaze didn’t linger on Allison. It landed on the firefly. The same firefly, which had been sitting on the windowsill with the quiet patience of a saint, lifted its wings and pulsed — a single, bright flash, like a greeting.
No, Allison thought, her heart accelerating. Can she see that? There is absolutely no way.
The woman smiled. It was familiar. Everything about her seemed familiar. Allison couldn’t place her exactly, but she was giving off the same vibes as Thimble. The woman nodded once, as if confirming what Allison was thinking.
Then she spoke in a low, gentle tone—as if they were sharing a secret — “Careful what you feed the fireflies.” She turned and walked toward the far room. By the time the woman reached the threshold, she was gone. Vanished.
Allison sat there, heart thudding, mouth agape, and the task at hand was all but forgotten. The room was very quiet and still. The only sounds were the blood rushing in her ears and the firefly’s wings lifting it off the windowsill.
She looked down at the notebook. At the line on the page, still shimmering: Be careful what you feed the fireflies.
She glanced toward the doorway through which the woman had disappeared and back at the notebook.
“Was that…” she began to whisper, but the thought dissolved before she could finish it. Was that who? Was that what? She didn’t have a framework for the question, let alone the answer.
The scent of raspberries lingered in the air. The woman replayed in her mind. Allison’s chest tightened because she now knew why the woman seemed so familiar. It wasn’t a woman at all. It was Thimble.
Allison couldn’t focus after that. She tried. She really tried. She stared at the article, reread her last paragraph three times, picked up her phone, and checked it. But her brain was done cooperating. The gears had seized. Every thought circled back to the woman, the words, the firefly’s greeting flash, the raspberries she could still smell even though the woman had been gone for ten minutes.
She glanced at the clock on the wall above the door. It was getting late — later than she’d realized. The coffee shop would be closing soon, Spud needed to be let out, and the deadline wouldn’t meet itself. She could finish the article at home if her brain would actually behave long enough to do it.
She packed up quickly, picked up her plate and cup, and carried them to the self-bus station beside the door.
Outside, the afternoon sun was warm and bright. She tucked her backpack into the rear basket, unlocked the bike, and swung a leg over the seat. The ride home would be short — a straight shot, no detours. She had work to do. Real work. The kind that paid.
As she pedaled away from The Jagged Cliff, the woman’s voice echoed in her mind — soft and sure and impossibly familiar. Careful what you feed the fireflies. She didn’t notice the firefly perched on her handlebars, its golden wings folded, its tiny body pulsing with that same mysterious rhythm. It watched the road ahead with something that looked very much like purpose.
Spud greeted her at the door like she’d been gone for a century — a scrambling, bouncing blur of white fur and frantic tail wags, his whole body vibrating with relief and accusation in equal measure. She laughed, crouched down, and let him lick her face while she rubbed behind his ears.
“You are never going to believe what happened at the café today,” she said, scratching his chin. “Honestly? I don’t even think I believe it.”
Spud licked her nose. He didn’t care about cafés or fireflies or mysterious women who smelled like raspberries. He cared that she was home, and that was enough.
She locked the door, set her bag down, and let Spud out into the backyard. While he conducted his usual forensic investigation of every square inch of grass, she leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, mind churning.
The firefly, which had followed her home without her noticing, rested on the handlebars of her bike where she’d parked it behind her couch. It pulsed once — slow, patient, content — and folded its wings.
It could wait. It would have to. She had an article to finish.
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