A Flame for Yuletide: Magical Short Stories, #4

By T. Thorn Coyle

The bite of cold winter air. The darkness of the longest night. The warmth of a flickering candle flame…

 

These five holiday stories reach into our hearts, to the places where ghosts and memories live, where we open to new love, vanquish greed, and celebrate the renewal of the sun. 

Leather daddies, bad Santas, Yule cookies, and the kindness of strangers…

Every single story in this collection comes from a wish for a more magical world.

Even during difficult times, magic offers the promise of hope.

 

Volume includes:

The Gift of Holly

Piece of Santa

The Ghost of Solstice Past

A  Gift for Solstice

To Celebrate the Sun

• Language: English
• Publisher: T. Thorn Coyle
• Release date: Dec 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393690337

T. Thorn Coyle

T. Thorn Coyle worked in many strange and diverse occupations before settling in to write novels. Buy them a cup of tea and perhaps they’ll tell you about it. Author of the Seashell Cove Paranormal Mystery series, The Steel Clan Saga, The Witches of Portland, and The Panther Chronicles, Thorn’s multiple non-fiction books include Sigil Magic for Writers, Artists & Other Creatives, and Evolutionary Witchcraft. Thorn's work also appears in many anthologies, magazines, and collections.  An interloper to the Pacific Northwest U.S., Thorn pays proper tribute to all the neighborhood cats, and talks to crows, squirrels, and trees.

Book preview

A Brief Introduction from the Author

The bite of cold winter air. The darkness of the longest night. The warmth of a flickering candle flame…

These stories reach into our hearts, to the places where ghosts and memories live, where we open to new love, vanquish greed, and celebrate the renewal of the sun.

Leather daddies, bad Santas, Yule cookies, and the kindness of strangers…

Every single story in this collection comes from my wishes for a more magical world. Even during difficult times, magic offers the promise of hope.

And we all know, even when it seems impossible, a little hope can keep us going for one more day.

Here’s a collection of five stories, most written with the support of my amazing Patreon friends. Included are two Jasper stories and one from Jax and Gabe. I’ve written multiple stories with those characters, and while they may get their own collections someday, they wanted to be included here, as well.

I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoyed writing them.

No matter what time of year you are reading this, I offer you the magic of Yule.

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T. Thorn Coyle

Portland, Oregon

2020

1

The Gift of Holly

T. Thorn Coyle

book cover. holly, lights and sparkles, and a faded pentacle star.

It was a beautiful, cold night up on Mount Tabor. The lights of Portland glimmered through the trees, and Orion the Hunter stalked the skies above. 

Tempest was bundled up in layers of scarves and sweaters beneath her thrift store jacket. Her head was covered by a bright blue knit cap, an early Yule gift from her girlfriend Ruby. They would exchange more gifts tomorrow, on the Solstice proper. 

But tonight was all about the magic of Solstice Eve. 

Even bundled up as she was, Tempest shivered. But it was worth it. She wore a triple-layered mask just like everyone else in the rough and ragged concentric circles at the top of the ancient cinder cone volcano the city was built around. 

It was still strange, as a person with chronic illness, seeing so many people equally concerned about getting ill. She always had to be so careful, and now, even the healthiest and most cavalier of her friends were being careful.

She wondered how long that would last.

Even through the layers covering her mouth and nose, Tempest smelled the soft, melting honey scent of beeswax candles, and the subtle mixture of hemlock, fir, and pine. 

She stood, in her own little circle of space, within a mixed group of heathens, witches, Yoruba practitioners, and a scattering of radical Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and some atheist activists. Usually, such a group would be hard pressed to join together, but every person on top of Mount Tabor this night had all worked together in the past, trying to keep Portland safe from a variety of evils. 

So they stood—or sat in wheelchairs—at the invitation of a group of activists who followed the old Norse ways. Some stood alone, others in pairs or threes, or in small family clusters, within a circle of trees near the big concrete base that used to hold a statue of Harvey Scott, Indian hunter and newspaper founder. The statue had been toppled earlier in the year. 

The old ways were dying, and maybe—with all of their work, and by the grace of the Gods—a new way would be born. 

A candle flickered in the jar she held in her fleece-gloved hands, its flame echoed by the other points of light carried by the people clustered beneath the trees. In the center, candles on the ground formed shapes of the runes the heathen community wanted to call in for the coming year.

It had been a very hard year. A year filled with more protests in the streets, dodging nightsticks, tear gas, and rubber bullets. A year of more confrontations from white supremacists, despite routing them the year before. It was a year of fires and increased poverty. A year of gathering and delivering food to those who needed it, all while trying to protect against the strange disease that meant Tempest’s coven had not met in Raquel’s attic for months.

Oh, the coven had some outdoor gatherings, for sure. But always distanced, spread out in parks or back yards. She missed the cozy magic of Arrow and Crescent, her coven, and found family. They should’ve been in Raquel’s warm attic on this longest night of the year, sitting close together. Instead, they were here, spaced far apart, faces covered, only recognizable by general body shapes and the candle flames reflected in their eyes.

At least Tempest had a cat at home for companionship. And she also had Ruby this year. Tempest smiled. If it weren’t for those two, this year would have been a lot more difficult to get through.

At least her health was slightly better. Though her chronic illness never went away, she was coping better now. Tempest glanced across the circle at her covenmate Selene. She knew Selene struggled with depression, though their boyfriend Joshua helped with that as well. Joshua stood next to Selene, his top hat incongruous, but no more strange than the cloaks and robes some of the heathens wore. 

Ruby had stayed back at Tempest’s garage apartment, baking gluten-free cookies and mulling apple cider, awaiting Tempest’s return.

Tempest did not know the runic alphabet very well, but could discern the shapes formed by the candles in the hard packed dirt center of the trees. Flickering light spelled out the shapes of strength, prosperity, protection, and beauty.

Tim, the large red bearded heathen who had been with the coven in the streets many a time protecting city raised a curved drinking horn and lifted it to the sky.

Mothers of Night, we honor you! His voice was as clear as the winter air. We honor the cold and dark of winter, at the end of a very dark year. May the sun be reborn tomorrow! May the flames of these candles be a light in our hearts! 

A woman stepped forward. Her name was Bronwen, and Tempest had only met her a couple of times. She wore a hooded cloak and held a fat