The Tinder Box

Set in the fictional European kingdom of Allesheim, the story follows Magnus Tresti, a forty-six-year-old soldier discharged after taking a musket ball in the thigh, and Jannae Mirchella, a reclusive widow and secret witch, whose lives converge around a supernatural artifact.

Mag returns from four years of war to find Allesheim devastated by King Frederick's campaigns to claim the neighboring thrones of Ehrlich and Pozhka. The populace fears both the crown and the Ghost Army, a decentralized insurgency opposing the war. Unable to find work, Mag arrives at Jannae's crumbling manor outside the village of Rubik and is hired for meager wages. Over sparse meals, they share their histories: Mag describes years traveling with an Italian saltimbanco, or traveling salesman, with whom he discovered romantic love with another man, while he secretly witnesses Jannae performing magic and concludes she is a witch.

A demon then crashes into Jannae's garden: a massive humanoid with ram's horns and black leather armor. The corpse is surrounded by a barrier that repels Jannae's power but allows Mag to pass. She offers him payment to search the body. Mag retrieves numerous artifacts but secretly pockets a tinderbox. When Jannae detects the theft through magic, she enchants a knife to find the missing item. The blade points at Mag, and he flees.

The narrative shifts to Jannae's backstory. Born Jannae Kveck, she watched her father beat her mother to death when she was fourteen and fled at sixteen. She found a mentor in Bruna Sozen, a self-taught doctor and secret witch. Jannae learned that Wilhelm Gluck, the king's white-haired adviser, was a warlock who had authored the Verbot gegen Hexen, the edict condemning witches to burning, while practicing magic under royal protection. The bond with Bruna ended when Jannae carelessly revealed Bruna's abilities to friends, who reported her to the authorities. Bruna confessed and fabricated a story making Jannae out to be a spy, saving her apprentice at the cost of her own life. Consumed by guilt, Jannae retreated into isolation and eventually married Karl-Albert Mirchella, a rural landowner whose mind she destroyed through sustained magical manipulation. When the demon fell, she recognized its possessions as the power she needed.

Arrested for vagrancy in the town of Fuldenschau, Mag tries to start a fire in his freezing cell with the stolen tinderbox. A blinding flash produces Keal, a red-skinned devil bound to obey whoever holds the tinderbox of Captain Apirox. The striker's three saddles each summon a different devil: Keal, Dorsa, and the colossal one-eyed giant Borrigor Tromaktikes. Together they help Mag escape the city, and he acquires gold and a white stallion he names Swift.

Jannae pursues Mag westward, tracking him with her enchanted knife. Meanwhile, Gluck presents the Royal Privy Council with a plan to crush the Ghost Army by arresting three hundred hostages, the families of fighters, to be hanged unless the fighters surrender. He has also detected a Visitation, the term for a demon-fall event that deposits magical artifacts, near Rubik and suspects Mag possesses a powerful relic.

Mag's attempt to pose as a margrave, a minor noble, at a hotel in the town of Helm collapses when the city watch is summoned. In the scramble, he accidentally summons Borrigor, who kills a watchman and kneels beside the body, grieving. Mag flees on Swift, shot in the shoulder and thigh. At the river Anhaas, Jannae intercepts him, but Mag throws himself into the flood rather than surrender the tinderbox. An angel appears afterward, demanding the box and insisting the devils must be destroyed, but Mag refuses to deliver them to execution.

Dorsa heals Mag's wounds, and Keal reveals the history behind the artifact. God, called Elohim, created the angels using the logos, the divine creative word, then demanded it back. Some angels refused, beginning an eternal war between Heaven and Hell. Keal, Dorsa, and Borrigor were soldiers who organized a pacifist movement, arguing the war was futile. Betrayed and captured by Captain Apirox of the Panoptes, Hell's internal police, they were imprisoned in the tinderbox after being forced to reveal their comrades' names in a notebook.

Mag proposes a bargain: The devils will help him kill King Frederick, whose death would end the war, and Mag will destroy the tinderbox and free them. All three agree, though Borrigor stipulates he will not kill. They retrieve from Hell the Audacious Sunderer, a living weapon capable of destroying the tinderbox, and Dorsa inscribes its command words on Mag's palm: dialege (target), proetoimaze (prime), and belaze (fire). When the moment comes to designate a target, Mag's courage fails and he leaves the weapon aimed at nothing.

At Königsbrücke, the capital, guards search all containers for the tinderbox. Mag hides it on a passing brewer's dray, or delivery wagon, but loses track of it. He locates the wagon behind an inn, where Gluck ambushes him, having foreseen this location through a painful divination artifact. During the brawl, Jannae, hidden by invisibility, steals the tinderbox. Gluck carries the unconscious Mag to the palace donjon, a fortified prison tower, and suspends him in a strappado, a device that hoists a prisoner by bound wrists, among scores of hostages. Gluck, who has spent a century amassing supernatural power from demon-fall sites, wants the living devils as sources of cosmic knowledge, but Mag refuses to reveal the tinderbox's location and is sentenced to burn.

The tinderbox will not respond to Jannae because it still belongs to Mag. She contacts him through a spell and learns ownership must be freely given; in exchange, she swears to burn Apirox's notebook and places a charm on Mag to shield him from burning. Now commanding the devils, Jannae learns that Mirko Blauer, her former coachman, has been arrested for his association with her. Dorsa reveals that Jannae's recurring dreams of Bruna are genuine visitations from Bruna's ghost. Using the copper bracelets from the demon's body, Jannae summons Bruna, who counsels her to build rather than destroy. Shaken, she has Keal incinerate the notebook in Mag's presence, fulfilling her oath, then allies with Lieselotte Reger, a red-haired witch of the Ghost Army, to plan a coordinated assault.

On execution day, Mag is chained to a stake and set alight. Borrigor breaches the palace walls to free the hostages, the Sunderer advances as a diversion, and every spectator in the square, all Ghost Army fighters, reveals hidden weapons and attacks the guards. Dorsa's beasts drag Mag from the flames. Keal and Dorsa assault Gluck, but his looted artifacts withstand them. He banishes both devils into the tinderbox and uses a charm of compelled affection to force the paralyzed Jannae to reveal how the tinderbox works. Jannae bites through her own tongue to break the compulsion and declares she gives the tinderbox to Magnus Tresti.

Gluck places the tinderbox in Mag's hand and demands he gift it. Mag transfers the box to his left hand and, with his right, reads the command words inscribed on his palm, finally targeting the tinderbox itself. The Sunderer fires, obliterating the box, Mag's left forearm, and punching a hole through Gluck's torso. The warlock's protections, all of Hellish manufacture, are destroyed with the artifact.

Mag sleeps seven days while Dorsa heals him. He wakes to find King Frederick deposed, the war ended, and a new parliament installed with Jannae and Reger among its members. Jannae has imprisoned Gluck's consciousness inside a tinderbox of her own making to defend the fledgling republic. Borrigor remains on Earth, adopted by the children he rescued, who call him Bergmönch after a folklore giant. Keal and Dorsa return to Hell to resume their pacifist campaign, inviting Mag to join them and offering to restore his lost arm. Mag accepts, and the three depart together.