## Preface

Letters
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/32107099.

Rating:
  General Audiences
Archive Warning:
  No Archive Warnings Apply
Category:
  Gen
Fandom:
  Critical Role (Web Series)
Characters:
  Bren Aldric Ermendrud, Caleb Widogast, Essek Thelyss
Additional Tags:
  Backstory, Sad, But I Repeat Myself, Childhood, Stealth Jewish Headcanon, Jewish Headcanons, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Canon-Typical Angst, Also Liam-Typical Angst
Language:
  English
Series:
  Part 2 of oyfn pripetchik
Stats:
  Published: 2021-06-22 Words: 1,995 Chapters: 1/1

# Letters

by batyatoon

Summary

> More traditions of Blumenthal, and the ways that Caleb Widogast carries them with him.

Notes

See the end of the work for notes

## Letters

The word holy isn’t spoken much, in young Bren’s house.

Not spoken much in the whole of Blumenthal, really. Holiness is for clerics and paladins, for priests of one or another of the approved gods of the Empire. They’re just farmers and craftsmen and a few retired soldiers, here -- with the sole exception of old Mother Hanna, the perpetually cheerful and half-drunk cleric of the Dawnfather, who holds services once a week in the little chantry off the town square and teaches the youngest children on all the other days. She talks about grace, and kindness to the unfortunate, and repairing what’s broken in the world, and never seems to say much about holiness. (Or, strangely perhaps, about the Dawnfather.)

Holy isn’t a word they use much here. Sacred isn’t either.

There are traditions. There are practices. There are little sayings, little songs, little habits that nobody thinks of much -- or at least nobody talks of.

Blumenthal does not have an unapproved god.

-----

In the Cobalt Soul library in Zadash, Caleb moves too quickly around the corner of a table and jostles a book. His frantic grab comes a moment too late, and the volume thumps to the floor.

The thump isn’t very loud, but he automatically stage-whispers “Sorry,” anyway, to any other scholars who might have been disturbed by the noise. Hurriedly he scoops up the book, and -- just as unthinkingly, just as automatically -- presses a swift kiss to the binding before laying it back down on the table.

-----

The day every child between the ages of five and seven can read through the alphabet without making one mistake, Mother Hanna distributes little honey-and-almond candies to all of them. So they should remember, she says, that learning is sweet.

(Learning means many things, of course, but first and last it means the written word.)

Bren chews blissfully on his candy, and eyes the single shelf of books at the front of the little schoolroom, and lays plans to conquer it.

-----

There is a particular combination of smoke smells that is the worst thing in the world: the warm richness of burning wood, the high sweet rottenness of burning flesh, and the acrid sharpness of burning paper.

Any two of those together can leave him shivering and staring for long minutes. All three together … he would just as soon not know what effect that might have.

It’s been years, but he remembers.

-----

Caleb’s memory is exact and reliable, and always has been. He can close his eyes and picture a page, any page in any book he has ever read, and copy it out as accurately as though he had the original in front of his eyes, down to the handwriting if he so chooses.

His father’s handwriting was stiff and large and careful, like a child’s. His mother’s was more fluid, easier, correspondingly messier. His own (when he writes in his own hand and not in studious mimicry of another’s) is tiny, meticulously legible, cramped but precise.

He has samples of all three on pieces of scratch paper, folded into the second book he carries.

-----

There’s a story Mother Hanna tells the children, about a man who knew a secret way to write four times as fast by holding four pens between his five fingers, but who wouldn’t teach anyone else how to do it, so the secret died with him.

At the age of eight Bren is outraged to the point of tears by that story, and demands in gulping sobs how anybody could know something so useful, so important, and never teach it.

-----

A book flies out through a broken window, as though flung with desperate force, covers flapping like wings.

The image has lived in his head for years, unconnected to anything else. He doesn't know for certain what it is: a dream, a memory, a memory of a dream.

-----

Banishment is an Abjuration spell, requiring arcane words, gestures, and a material item distasteful to the target.

Caleb does not know enough about the Laughing Hand to have a firm idea of what it might find distasteful, and does not have time to consult with his friends about it -- but it’s a creature of malice, of violence, of meaningless laughter; it seems to hate everything.

What he reaches for, with no time to think, as a cleric might reach for the symbol of their god, is his second book.

This is love, he thinks in the twisted creature’s direction as he raises it overhead and chants the syllables of the spell. This is love, and meaning, and memory, and a promise to unmake a great evil. This is a rejection of you and everything like you.

The spell fails. He tries not to wonder, later, whether that means anything.

-----

Every year in late spring, seven weeks after the spring solstice, there’s a day that isn’t exactly a holiday but is nonetheless treated like one. By Blumenthal tradition it’s a day off of working, no matter what day of the week it is, and the night before everybody stays up until sunrise to tell stories and then talk about them. Tradition also involves little cheese pastries sweetened with honey and shaped like flowers, and Bren can never decide which he likes better, the pastries or the stories.

It's some hours past midnight in the little chantry, the year that Bren is nine years old, and Mother Hanna has perhaps had a few more nips from her bottle than is entirely wise, when she tells a story that none of the children in the village have ever heard before.

"There was a great scholar, long long ago," she says, "and the king declared his scholarship to be outlawed. But the scholar persisted, and the king sent soldiers to take him prisoner."

Bren listens, round-eyed. "Was he wicked? The scholar."

"Oh -- no, child, no. The king and his soldiers were. This was long ago and far away, you see. Nothing to do with King Dwendal, or the good Empire men."

"Oh." That makes him uneasy to think about, that a king could be wicked, that the soldiers serving him could be anything but noble and brave. But he keeps listening.

"They sentenced him to death, and the wicked king decreed that he be burned alive, in a fire built of all his books."

That makes Bren catch his breath in horror. Burn a man to death? Burn his books? Any king who would order such a thing, he decides, any soldier who would carry out such orders, they must be wicked indeed.

"But a magical thing happened," Mother Hanna says, opening her own old eyes wide, so that a little candle flame burns reflected in each dark pupil, "a miraculous thing. The scholar's students gathered around weeping, for their master and for his books, but he raised his head and he told them, look: the pages burn, but the words fly upward into the air. And they looked, and it was so. The words flew upward, and survived, and perhaps … perhaps the scholar's soul escaped with them. Who’s to say?”

Sometime the following afternoon, after everybody’s slept and awakened, Bren sees a few of the village mothers in the front yard of the chantry, talking very quietly with Mother Hanna. None of them look happy.

He never hears the story again.

-----

The written word is not a living thing, everybody knows that. A book cannot suffer; a book cannot perceive respect or the lack thereof, and become angry or hurt. This is true, and no one really believes otherwise.

Nevertheless: in Blumenthal one does not treat a book carelessly. One does not allow a dropped book to remain on the floor, or stack other objects on top of it, or leave it open and unregarded -- not for fear of damaging it, but because it would not be right; because it would be, in some way, an insult. A violation.

And if, heavens forfend, a book is damaged beyond repair, beyond any possible use ... one does not toss it out with the garbage, or tear out its pages to wrap food or wipe spills, or use it for kindling. One takes it to the little hill just beyond the town cemetery, and buries it there. There is no grave marker, because a damaged book is not a dead body, but nonetheless the place where written words are buried is never used for anything else.

Just another of the many little village superstitions, Bren tells himself in Rexxentrum, that he needs to leave behind. Something born, no doubt, out of a long-ago scarcity of paper and ink, and of people who could both read and write; some awe of an arcane-seeming skill that gave his ancestors an undue reverence for what is, after all, just another tool.

And yet he finds himself disquieted -- no, shocked -- the first time he sees a tattered scuffed thing in a street trash bin that on second glance is unmistakably a book. A cheap printed paperback, barely twenty pages thick, more of a pamphlet than a book really; hardly anything of great scholarly importance, no real loss.

But it’s a book and you don’t throw away books, and he has to forcibly stop himself from turning around and running back to rescue it.

-----

“Will you do it?” asks Essek, and in all his life of so many different kinds of pain, Caleb has never felt this ache before.

I’m sorry, he thinks, I am so sorry. To his parents, yes, but also to the village that helped raise him, to Mother Hanna, to the centuries-dead wizards of Aeor who left behind so little of themselves, to the historians of the Cobalt Soul who will never have this piece of history. To these ancient books and papers themselves, which after all are surely blameless. To himself seventeen years ago, screaming and sobbing at the threshold of his burning home. To himself five years ago, one year ago, writing endlessly in his second book, desperately hoping that if he only searched and studied hard enough and long enough, somehow it would save him.

Dust, and then fire; and if words fly upward from the burning, he cannot see them.

-----

He buries the book of letters in the earth between his parents’ graves.

He’s learned from his friend the grave cleric that there are many ways of honoring the remains of the dead, and that those which seem distasteful to some are the highest honor to others. But he is a child of Blumenthal, and burning the dead will never feel any more right to him than burning the living. No funeral pyres here, only the long rest and return to the earth.

(They bury the dead in the Blooming Grove, as well. The similarity of names has not escaped him, blumenthal being old Zemnian for valley of flowers, or blooming valley. If the congruence means anything, he doesn’t know what it might be; but it brings back that old feeling of fate, like all the other name similarities, like the recurring nines. Like something is written there, in the patterns of their lives, in letters too big to ever read.)

He doesn’t think about holiness or gods here, sitting on the ground where his parents are buried. He thinks about grace, a little, and about kindness, and mostly about repairing what’s broken in the world.

As he gets to his feet, he takes from one of his pockets a small stone, a piece of rubble tucked into a folded scrap of paper that reads Aeor: T-Dock Project Chamber in his own precise handwriting. The paper he crumples and stuffs away into another pocket without a second glance; he won’t be needing it anymore. What he needs to put right in the world isn’t there.

The stone he sets down carefully on top of the grave marker, among the handful of other little stones left there by other visitors, before he turns to go.

## Afterword

End Notes

> The new series title, "Oyfn Pripetshik," is the title of a Yiddish folk song. Lyrics, translation, and links to various recordings can be found here.

> I started writing this after the episode where Caleb used his second book as a material component in trying to cast Banishment on the Laughing Hand, and it sat half-completed until the finale gave me the last pieces I needed.

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