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When you were young, you could never keep yourself warm. You’d find matches to light, study their flickers and ignite your fingers just as bright. It burned, and you’d feel sweat running down your arms. It never scarred. The fire itself never scarred, but everything else did. And when you let go, when the match burnt down to cinders, and your eyes are as dull as embers, you realize you haven’t been warmed at all.
It was hot in the summer outside Rexxentrum, the sort of heat that left you sticky with bugs surrounding across you, singing at a pitch that left you dizzy. It was the bugs, bugs you burned with a vengeance if they got too close that left you wanting to throw up when you stood out in the field between your classmates, his eyes studying every inch of you. Evaluating you. Watching and waiting for any sort of flaw, hungry for you to step out of line. It was the sun beating down on you that made you flinch at every touch. It was your body’s rebellion, involuntary. You told yourself this, and eventually, you think you managed to believe it.
And even with the summer’s heat, you were not warm. Your heart was cold, getting colder every day. You remembered the ghost of your mother’s kiss on your forehead and how you would curl your small form onto your father’s lap for him to hold, and those ghosts are the closest thing you had to the fire in your chest. But the more you reached for the memories, the farther away they seemed.
You used to love fall, when you were even younger. Your mother held you up on her shoulders as you reached for the changing leaves, for far longer than she should’ve considering how quickly you grew. But the reds and oranges don’t mean rebirth to you anymore— they just meant crisper winds. They meant the darkness came sooner, and with the darkness came returning to the house. With darkness came creaking floorboards and the half second terror that came with guessing whether the approaching figure was Astrid, Wulf, or your teacher.
Practice in the fields might leave you tapped of your magic, an empty vessel useful only for your puppeteer to maneuver home, but you preferred to be empty then. Emptiness, in mind and in magic, left the pain distant, and when the days were long, pushing you long past your limits, you didn’t fear him. You didn’t fear anything. But when the darkness fell early, you couldn’t escape your own mind.
You couldn’t escape your own fear, and when he saw you were afraid, it was always worse.
The cold of winter got beneath your skin. It got into your bones. You layered on cloaks as you stepped out into the world coated in snow, and you melted it away. You melted everything away, and every spell you slung left you colder. This was magic to you, and it was your greatest comfort. Astrid and Wulf’s touch threatened to reach the real you, tucked away inside the cold that wouldn’t quit, but when they withdrew, they brought whatever warmth they’d managed to kindle with them. And when they were freezing all on their own, you couldn’t protect them. You couldn’t even protect yourself.
This was magic to you, and this was power.
And now...
You have not found the warmth that the child Bren carried as easily as breathing. You run cold, with safety never expected and trust a prize to be earned. You are still haunted by who you aren’t and what you can’t feel. Instead of ice in your veins, there is a simple certainty: you have been changed forever. Your scars fade over time, but they will never disappear.
Some days, you find the rage you suppressed for so long rising in you, too powerful for you to even speak for fear of something escaping. Sobs or the words to a spell designed to do nothing but raze, you can’t tell. Some days, you are at peace. Most days, you are neither. Most days, you just are a man.
You do not find your light in the past nor in yourself. You reach out with arms outstretched, and those that catch you do so with no conditions attached, with no time limit bearing down on you. It’s not that nobody’s looking to catch you out— you are subject to scrutiny in everything you do, as a teacher, as an ex-Scourger, and as a legend. But there is nobody that can drag you away from them now, and if someone were to try, then they would not stand by in fear of making your punishment worse.
They would fight for you.
They have fought for you, and they’ve won— you won.
And now you stand in a room very much like the ones you attended as a student, hands trembling. The wood floors you’d spent much time staring at, to avoid prying eyes, feel firm beneath you. You rest a hand on the desk that they say is yours now, and you’re not sure you believe it entirely. You’re not sure you’ve earned it.
The standards are low; you know it’d be hard to do as much harm as Trent did to you even if you tried.
(You have friends that would stop you.)
You’re still afraid. It’s been a couple of weeks, moving your bags into your quarters, planning lessons, and spending sleepless nights worrying, and you’ve seen students who didn’t leave for the holidays wandering through the halls. The students who don’t have families to go back to, from death of some sort: their death or the death of their child’s trust. Some of them are so familiar, in the way they walk and the way they don’t talk easily and don’t trust at all, that it’s like looking into a mirror.
You are dizzy, all of a sudden, at the scale of it all. You’ve fought monsters and men, the sort of men that made those monsters look kind, and the thought of children who walk with shadows like armor is enough to bring you to your knees. You will have to look them in the eye and know there is so much you will not be able to do— you will not be able to burn away the dark on your own, and there will always be those you cannot save.
You think of the Scourger in the cells beneath Roshona, who burned so bright. Her smile was crooked as she’d reached for you, blade in hand, the bolts already tearing into her skin. How she must’ve walked these halls. Would she have sit in the back, raising her hand rarely and blending into the shadows that Trent taught the both of you to make a home, or, had once upon a time, reached for attention like a sunflower turning towards the sky?
You wonder if she’d remembered her youth, before he taught her that the world was made of simple calculations. If she remembered what if was like not to fear the touch of another. It is likely that she sat in the back rows, you think. You did, after all, and so did Astrid and Wulf. It was not because you didn’t want to learn— you did— but often the teacher’s attention meant the rest of your class’s. It was not that they were all cruel— many were, but that was besides the point. You were guarded as children, quiet before he took your hands, and said that meant you could be strong. You believed him then. That if you were different, it had to be for a reason.
You have already rearranged the seats, and you intend to move the desk away in favor of sitting among your first class, and you have told the handful of students who have crossed your path to call you Caleb. None of this professor nonsense. These are breaks from tradition, like so many of the things you have planned, and some of the other professors who have come looking to inspect the now-legendary Bren— they mean Widogast, of course— have been surprised to see the change. The more honest ones have expressed their disapproval openly, saying that it will undermine his authority and make his students not respect the natural hierarchy. The ones who pride themselves on being nice and yet, were equally as complicit, said they were confused instead.
(You have not told any of the other professors to call you by your first name, and word spreads quickly among the faculty that your name is not, in fact, Bren Aldric Ermendrud, even if they have heard Astrid or Wulf address you as such.)
If these changes raise eyebrows, you are quite certain some of them will have heart attacks when they hear of what else you have planned. The idea of seeing your colleagues in such a state of shock makes you chuckle somewhat. This is not a miraculous cure; you are not a god. There will be no sealing shut of the wounds this world leaves in its young, whether this world is all of Exandria, the Empire, or the academy alone. You are quite arrogant at times but not in regards to this. You only hope that you will be able to offer the same light to others as others have done to you.
You hope to be a match, for your students to start their own campfire and not to burn themselves on.
You pray you will not let anyone else burn.