Threewise
A Twelfth Night Tale - Flash Fiction
Greetings, Talebones Readers!
Hey folks! This here is my first short fiction of 2026, and—appropriately—it’s a pretty simple little ditty, more of an exercise.
I wanted to capture the feeling of mystery and memory associated with holiday traditions, so I decided to focus in on Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany. It was a bit tricky to get it written before tonight, but I did my best! 😂
I hope you enjoy!
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This story is set in the ever-expanding universe of Ferris Island. Click here to read more Ferris Island Tales!
On the eve of the Epiphany, a special cake is made in every household, making use of the remaining apples from the previous year’s harvest. These apples are, by this time, usually quite sweet and soft and easily incorporated into a dough through cooking down into a mash. Failing that, cider is used.
After supper, these cakes are placed upon the stoop of every house, before the front door, in preparation for the passing of the Threewise. This particular iteration of the three wise men bears little resemblance to its scriptural origin. On Orchard Island, the Threewise are characterized as three holy and hungry travelers passing through the woods and fields in search of food, a singular and unique mystery of Twelfth Night.
If they find an untouched cake upon the stoop, the travelers bless the house with threefold blessings: providence for the coming year, special weight to the family’s prayers, and a guardian spirit to protect the home.
But should the Threewise find a house lacking or the cake spoiled, they ostensibly take away what would have been given: a curse on the pantry, a curse on the prayers, and a soul removed from the house, prefiguring a likely and imminent death in the family.
This is reflected in the formal benediction and greeting on the tongue of every islander during Christmastide:
“Supper, succor, and a soul upon you.”
(Excerpt From Ferris Island: The First Hundred Years by Owen B. Nesbitt, 1905)
Lyla rose and kissed the winter morning, misty through the bedroom window. The heady perfume of apples turning to sugary fluff wafted up from the kitchen downstairs.
She dressed quickly, heart beating fast with a complicated fear.
Down the stairs she crept on stocking feet to find her mother in the kitchen, standing at the stove, stirring the fragrant contents of the heavy iron pot.
“A soul upon you,” said her mother, over a calico-clad shoulder.
Lyla returned the greeting softly, staying just outside the kitchen’s warmth, avoiding the stare of her grandmother’s old oak chair under the kitchen window. The old woman should have been there, laughing, giving instructions, gesturing to heaven with a gnarled old finger for emphasis.
But she wasn’t there anymore, and the kitchen felt too big and empty without her, dwarfing Lyla’s mother, lonely at the stove.
“Fetch out the pan for me, would you?” said Mama.
Lyla had half-hoped she wouldn’t ask it of her. She crossed the invisible boundary and entered the kitchen, kneeling down at the cupboard along one wall where Mama kept the special dishes reserved for holidays. She opened the creaking door to the smell of old cedar and crinkled paper, and she pulled the cake pan from its shelf. It was an old copper thing, a round fluted mold that made a pretty cake with a hole in the center.
It felt heavier than usual.
“Set it here,” said Mama, patting the counter beside the stove. Lyla did so and then stepped back, a reverent gesture. Mama glanced at her.
“Do you want to help with the cake this year?”
Lyla didn’t know how to answer without hurting either of them. She froze, looking into her mother’s eyes, hoping it would be enough.
It was. Mama smiled kindly, turned back to the stove, and said, “Papa is clearing boughs from the road. I’m sure he could use the extra hands.”
A kindness, graciously given. Lyla relaxed, bundled herself in her coat and hat and mittens, and ran out into the winter air.
*******
The little town always woke early, even in winter. The night sentinels returned from the Orchard to their beds by the thin light of dawn, followed by lithe hounds with lolling tongues. All up and down the row of houses, folk were out, sweeping the front paths and tidying their gardens in preparation for what would pass overnight in the Twelvemas dark.
Lyla felt an itch at the base of her spine, a desperate desire to tear out of town and run and run and run the length of the island, and not return until Epiphany was over and done with. But something kept her steady, walking down the road to find her papa with her hands in her pockets.
She found him with a handful of other men, clearing brush after the latest storm. Their small island was sheltered from the worst of the sea winds by the larger island to the west, but sometimes a mercurial winter wind from the east—strange and snow-crisp from rolling off the distant mainland mountains—would slide up the sound and buffet the town and its Orchard without warning, leaving the weakest trees flattened and a thatching of evergreen boughs on the roads.
“A soul upon you, Papa,” said Lyla as she drew up beside him.
He looked surprised to see her, but not displeased.
“Little Lyla,” he said. “I thought you’d be helping your mother with the cake.”
She bent to pick up an evergreen spray, still wet with rain and dew, a tuft of feather-soft usnea lichen clinging to it like a strange sea-animal.
“She doesn’t need my help,” Lyla said.
Papa glanced at her. “Something wrong?”
She shook her head. But replied, “I’ll only ruin it.”
He frowned. “Ruin what, then? The cake?”
She nodded.
“And what makes you think you’ll ruin it? You helped last year, didn’t you? And that cake was pretty as a picture.”
Lyla didn’t reply. Yes, she had helped the year before. Her and Mama, dancing around the kitchen in perfect rhythm while Granny directed from her chair, singing the old songs, speaking the old rhymes, giving instructions in that warm-honey voice of hers, kind but firm.
A family recipe. Every family on the island has one, and this is ours, little Lyla-bird.
But that was last year. And Granny was gone, taken from them only months after Epiphany.
It was a perfect cake, or so she thought. But not enough.
“I’ll only ruin it,” Lyla said, in a voice so quiet only the bough in her hand could hear.
*******
At supper, Lyla ate very little. Her stomach twisted with trouble and turmoil so that not even one of her favorite meals of the year could satisfy. The golden beeswax candles on the table flickered and danced with every breath, as Mama and Papa spoke and laughed and sang the Twelvemas songs.
Supper, succor, and a soul upon you!
The three blessings of Epiphany’s eve, but Lyla felt only unholy fear at the thought of the Threewise passing by. Three travelers, some said. Three magicians, three beasts, three heads on one body…no one knew, because they passed in the dark of night when no one was awake to see them.
They found an untouched cake to satisfy their wandering hunger, and they blessed the home in thanks.
But last year, she must have ruined it.
Because last year, they took her grandmother.
When it was time to take the cake outside, Lyla hung back and watched Mama take up the platter, and she and Papa carried it with reverence to the door.
It was a pretty cake. Mama had done a lovely job, but alone. Lyla felt a little sorry for that, but she knew it was for the best.
It will be perfect, she thought. No fear of losing a soul this year.
They set the cake on the front stoop, closed the door against the cold, and said a last prayer before sending Lyla up to bed.
*******
Lyla lay awake for a long time, staring up at the beams of her ceiling. She wasn’t sure what she was listening for. Mama and Papa sang softly to each other as they cleaned up the house, the kitchen. They laughed in the way they only did when they were alone. It was a sweet sound, but it made them sound like strangers. Characters from a book. Untouchable.
When they went to bed, still laughing quietly, the house settled around them like wings. And Lyla stayed awake, listening. For three pairs of footsteps on the path outside, perhaps. For the ringing bells of a traveler’s wagon, or the hoofbeats of a patient pony.
But there was nothing. Just the January wind, nosing against the window-glass.
Lyla fell asleep in that silence. She did not know how long she had been sleeping when she woke again.
There had been a sound downstairs. Her ears had heard it before her mind woke up enough to listen.
Her heart-pace quickened, fear turning her fingers and toes tingly, and she rose from her bed, staring into the black of her room, eyes adjusting.
There it was again, a low sound, coming from the kitchen.
Lyla pushed herself out of bed, left her room, and descended the stairs as quietly as she was able. A moon just-past-full illuminated the front garden and seeped in through the window, turning the kitchen’s dark edges silver.
The Twelvemas songs and prayers still seemed to hang in the air like dust motes.
And there, on her chair in the kitchen, bathed in moonlight, sat Granny.
Lyla stood and stared, unable to speak or move. But the old woman gestured kindly.
“A soul is upon you, Lyla-bird,” she said, and it was Granny’s voice, alright.
Lyla approached slowly, cautiously. As she drew closer, she could see that there was something uncanny about Granny’s face, but not unpleasant. It was Granny, sure enough, but not always the same as Lyla remembered her. The generously wrinkled old visage that she knew seemed to dance like a living veil over a face ever-changing, sliding through the ages from child to crone, but always herself.
She was Granny, but thoroughly.
“Granny,” said Lyla, and there was a question in her voice, “I’m sorry I ruined the cake.”
The old woman’s eyebrows rose in subtle surprise. “Ruined the cake? What do you mean, sweet girl?”
“Last year.” Lyla’s voice broke upon the words like a tide.
Granny understood, and shook her head, and opened her arms wide.
“Little Lyla,” she said, “have you been burdening yourself with such thoughts?”
Lyla felt the itch of emotion in her throat, her eyes, the corners of her lips. She reached the old woman and climbed up into her arms, finding them stronger and sweeter than she had ever known them to be when Granny was alive. Her smell was familiar and good.
She wept softly into Granny’s shoulder, missing her, and missing the way Twelvemas used to feel, and missing a time when she never worried that the cake was anything but perfect.
“It was a good cake,” Granny murmured into her hair, “because you helped to make it. A perfect gift for those passing by. The Threewise didn’t take me, sweet Lyla. Age did that, as it often does. But they gave me back to you, because this house always feeds them well.”
Lyla pulled away, and Granny reached up to wipe the tears from her cheeks with a soft thumb. Her face—now a child, now a woman who looked a lot like Mama, now her wrinkled self, then back again—bloomed with a smile.
“Next year, I hope you’ll help your mama with the cake. I know I will.”
*******
The next morning, Epiphany dawned clear and bright and cold, and Lyla woke in her own bed, the shadows of Twelvemas sliding away like mist, the memory of the night before hazy and dreamlike.
When she padded downstairs to the front door, the cake was gone from the stoop.
And Granny’s smell—familiar and good—lingered in the winter air like a three-wise blessing.
Want more short Talebones fiction? Try this:
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Beautiful. You captured the child-self, which is close to the surface and vulnerable this time of year.
A lovely bit of folklore!