## Preface

Candles
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/21229334.

Rating:
  General Audiences
Archive Warning:
  No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
  Gen
Fandom:
  Critical Role (Web Series)
Characters:
  Bren Aldric Ermendrud, Una Ermendrud, Leofric Ermendrud, Caleb Widogast, Nott (Critical Role)
Additional Tags:
  Backstory, Sad, But I Repeat Myself, Childhood, Stealth Jewish Headcanon, Jewish Headcanons, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language:
  English
Series:
  Part 1 of oyfn pripetchik
Stats:
  Published: 2019-10-29 Words: 2,014 Chapters: 1/1

# Candles

by batyatoon

Summary

> There are traditions in Blumenthal that young Bren Ermendrud grew up with, and that Caleb Widogast still remembers.

Notes

See the end of the work for notes

## Candles

1.

When Bren is three years old, his mother cuts his hair for the first time. She tells him this means he isn’t a baby anymore, and holds him in her arms in front of the polished brass mirror so he can see himself. He isn’t sure he likes the new Bren with short hair, and he screws up his face, uncertain about whether or not to cry.

His mother swings him back and forth in front of the mirror and calls him her beautiful bright boy, her clever little man, and sings him that little song about going to school and learning to read, and he decides that crying isn’t called for after all. He can already read a little bit, and if being a big boy instead of a baby means that he gets to learn more, then maybe this is all right.

When his mother lights the pair of candles at sunset, every seventh night, she still picks him up so that he can watch the flames dance while she murmurs the little song that goes with lighting the candles. There are a lot of little songs in Bren’s house, some that he understands and some that he doesn’t, and his mother and father tell him that he’ll understand them all when he’s older. Which is as good a reason to get older as any he’s ever heard.

He loves watching the flames almost as much as he loves listening to his mother sing, almost as much as he loves looking at his father’s books. The letters twist and dance across the paper the same way the flames twist and dance at the tops of the candles, always on the verge of meaning something.

2.

The winter holiday means bonfires in the village square and evergreen boughs on the outside of their houses, because that’s how they celebrate in the Empire. But it also means the special many-armed candelabrum indoors, because that’s how Blumenthal celebrates.

Bren goes out into the woods with the other older children, once he's old enough to use the kindling axe without his father’s supervision, to cut the thickest and greenest branches. They throw snowballs at each other on the way there and back, and come home soaked with snowmelt and sticky with pine sap, arms laden with glossy dark green. He helps his mother hold the branches in place over the door while his father nails them down.

As the sun sets, they gather in the town square to sing and to watch the village elders light the bonfire, and one member of each household lights a candle off of it to carry a piece of the fire home. By the time it’s dark, there’s a little blaze of tiny lights in every window, all through the valley, like scattered stars.

The winter he’s ten, Bren first carries the candle home from the square by himself. His father’s hand is steady and encouraging on his shoulder, warm even through the double thickness of his winter coat. His own hand is cupped carefully around the flame to shield it from the wind. It stings his palm a little, but he won’t draw back; it’s bad luck, he knows, if he lets it go out.

His feet know the way home; his eyes are only for the flame.

3.

It’s a bad autumn the year Bren is twelve, cold and wet, with firewood growing harder and harder to find. When his father comes home with the kindling axe and the wheelbarrow, sodden and shivering, half of the time the wood he’s found is too wet to burn.

Twice a week, then three times a week, Bren has to take an armload of the wet wood to the village bakehouse and ask the baker’s permission to spread it out near the bake-ovens to dry. The baker is a woman named Dvasha Hoenig, whom he will always remember as enormously tall and enormously fat and almost as beautiful as his mother. She’s kind, when it suits her to be, and she likes him -- everybody likes him -- so she lets him sit indoors where it’s warm while the wood dries. He tucks himself into a corner of the kitchen to wait, surrounded by the heavenly scents of baking bread and sweet pastry, and traces out words and patterns he remembers from books he’s read in the flour dust on the floor.

(You can’t possibly know that, he remembers some friend of his father’s saying when he was seven, you only saw it one time when that traveling bookseller came through and that was two years ago. He remembers not understanding the man’s objection; remembers answering but I saw it, sure that it was as complete an explanation as anyone could ask for.)

He stays until the wood is dry and then carries it home through the cold, with the wood wrapped in his coat if it’s raining again. Better he gets wet than the wood; so long as it stays dry, it can warm him when the fire’s built up, but if the wood gets wet, they all stay cold.

And then one night, with all the village streets churned to chilly mud and a cruel wind lashing freezing rain into his face, the banked coals go out before he gets home. He finds his father crouching to blow fruitlessly into the cold gray ashes, his mother rubbing her hands together with a look of such unhappiness that it makes his stomach try to turn over. His father gets to his feet and comes over to take the wood from him with a wordless look of mingled approval and worry, and starts stacking the thinnest pieces neatly in the fireplace, ready to light. Except that there’s nothing to light them with.

They don’t have many candles left either -- his mother has been cutting them in half to light the two flames every week, and has been considering cutting them into thirds -- but she takes one and hands it to him, and asks if he’ll go out again to their neighbor and beg a light.

Bren takes the candle, and turns to go dutifully back out into the cold wet wind, and pauses. But what if I could light the fire without it, he hears himself thinking, what if I could --

There’s a phrase in a language he doesn’t know, but he can see the pronunciation written out in the letters of Common speech on that once-glimpsed page, and there’s a complex gesture that ends with a pointing finger, and he points to the dry wood in the fireplace and says the last syllable.

And fire follows the motion, a spark and a streak and a blaze.

Red-gold light paints his parents’ faces in identical expressions of shock, until the shock is burned away by a dozen other emotions: delight, wonder, relief. And pride, from both of them, such overjoyed pride.

His mother lights the candle after all and puts it in the window, an extravagant gesture that he somehow understands is for him. He doesn’t understand fully until the next day, when he goes with his mother to market, and hears neighbor after neighbor ask her about the candle in the window the night before. Oh, that was for my Bren, she answers with palpable satisfaction, again and again; he’s going to need to start studying more soon.

Later, years later, he will remember how quickly his mother's pride in him became general, how the whole town rejoiced with her. One of our boys could be a real wizard, the word spreads, a Blumenthal boy might go to the Academy.

4.

Rexxentrum is big. Big and grand and wealthy, and everything home is not.

The Academy building itself seems half the size of the village, full of strangers rushing past, so intent on their own errands that no one even pauses to notice the new arrivals staring about them. Everything is polished, solid, orderly; everything looks like it's been standing for a thousand years and will stand untroubled for another thousand. Everything gleams.

Bren works for hours to scrub the mud from his boots, for months to scrub the Zemnian from his voice. Neither one ever quite comes out entirely.

It isn't just the language, or even just the accent: he has to drop all the embarrassing rural traditions, all the turns of phrase, all his father's little sayings, all his mother's little songs. Anything that marks him as peasant, as Zemni, as anything but good loyal Empire.

He's grateful, when he realizes it, that his parents gave him a name that doesn't sound too much like where he came from. That's the loyalty they taught him, he knows, and if there's more in himself that he needs to leave behind in order to be worthy, he can do it. He can.

But he can't suppress the little leap of his heart when he first hears that the eight tall towers that ring the palace, the seat of all power and glory in the Empire, are nicknamed "the Candles."

It feels like a sign. Like a consolation. He may have to leave behind everything of his home, but he'll have new things to replace them, new traditions to learn, new songs to sing. New lights to love.

They call them the Candles. He'll be all right here, maybe.

5.

"Caleb, what are you -- oh." Nott is already talking as she ducks into the room; her scratchy voice goes faintly startled, no doubt at the sight of him sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, gazing steadily at the thick stumpy candle he’s set up there. "Is this a spell? Should I leave you to it?"

"Nein," he says with a sigh, and leans back. "Not a spell, I am just … meditating, I suppose. Do you need me for something?"

"Just came to tell you a couple of the others are going out to pick up supplies," Nott says, "and to ask if you need anything. Besides ink and parchment, I'm already getting those."

(The others. It's still so strange to have others in the picture at all; he hasn’t quite become accustomed to it, in the two weeks since they met in Trostenwald. Maybe he’ll start to, once they’ve been here in Zadash for a while. Maybe not.)

“No, nothing,” he says, still studying the flame.

Out of the corner of his eye he can see Nott looking at the candle with interest that shades into puzzlement. “If it’s not for a ritual,” she starts to ask, and trails off.

He could evade the implied question; all the easier when she hasn’t actually asked it. But he’s suddenly weary, years’ worth of weary, and the idea of dodging or blocking another question just seems like harder work than answering it.

“It’s a tradition, where I come from.” His voice sounds light and distant in his own ears. He watches the flame, wavering gold at the edges, steady and blue around the tiny red ember at the center. “To light a candle and let it burn down, on the jahrze --” For a moment even that barely-there voice fails him; he draws a slow steadying breath, and finishes. “On the anniversary of a parent’s death.”

“Oh,” says Nott, stricken. “Oh Caleb, I had no idea. I’m so sorry.” She moves closer, and her hand rests timidly on his shoulder. “Which … which parent have you lost?”

“Both of them,” he hears himself say, still distant, still uninflected. Melted wax trembles on the lip of the candle, clear and shimmering in the golden light.

“I’m so sorry,” Nott repeats, and squeezes his shoulder. “Is it … do you light one for each of them, on each day, or …?”

The flame dances, bright and blameless; the faintest thin ribbon of smoke rises from it, barely more opaque than the heat-tremor in the air. A drop of wax spills over the edge and runs down the side of the candle, beading up and hardening halfway down.

“It’s the same day,” Caleb says, and doesn’t say anything else.

## Afterword

End Notes

> The word Caleb does not finish saying is jahrzeit.

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