Lighting the Candles
Posted on April 4th, 1998 by Tempest Rainbird

Part One

There is the brink of a moment right before beginning to cry where there’s an aching in the soul that’s almost sweet. In a split second it is gone, swallowed by other, stronger emotions, but for that instant there is a harmony: a balance between sadness and joy. The great composers who emerged from Germany understood this balance, and used it as a tool to sculpt their works. The chilling note of a violin as it sings its eerie song evinces that sad desperation only to be ameliorated by the mellow tone of a piano, and the soul is carried halfway between despair and elation where, for the briefest of moments, it floats in peace.

So did the soul of the owner of a pair of pale hands.

They dragged the valise to the edge of the room, and pulled the silver zipper back. A small mantelpiece, a portable altar, was dredged up from the recesses, and set upon the ground beside the valise. In quick succession a lace cloth and a small black pedestal were also pulled out, and these were set reverently upon the mantle. Next, the hands pulled a small object, shrouded in white cloth, from the bag, and labored to peel away the layers that protected it, exposing the glossy coat of a porcelain wolf, frozen in a grimly prideful stance.

Shaking, pale hands placed the figurine on the pedestal.

 

Tempest, six years old, sat in the darkness and cried. Her mama was somewhere far across the desert, too far to ever find, and she would never see her again, and she’d die and rot and the wolves would eat her.

As if at the command of her thought, a wolf howled in the distance, and Tempest was frightened into silence. She pulled the small wrap her mama had given her before she’d gotten lost around her shaking shoulders, and closed her eyes, trying not to imagine that the stars were wolf eyes. She shivered, half out of fright and half because of the freezing weather, and wondered why, for a place so hot during the day, the desert had to be so cold at night.

“Mama,” she whispered, though she’d given up hope that the cry would bring her. “Mama.” Only the howling of wolves replied to her.

Tempest lurched to her feet. She could not settle down to sleep here, where the wolves would come. She had to find her mama. Sand cut into her feet, and her bare hands and toes were getting numb, but she stumbled on in spite of them. She would find her mama. She would.

As she walked, the only thing Tempest could see was the twinkling of the stars, and for once they did not seem friendly. Her daddy had come from the stars, she knew, and had left to be among them again, but there were other things in the stars now. Dire things. If only she could find her mama, perhaps they’d go back to being nice again.

Tempest walked straight into a pair of low hanging stars. She yelped, and leapt back, and in an instant, the stars metamorphosed into pale green wolf eyes. The wolf moved forward, the light of the real stars bleaching his silver coat, and five more pairs of eyes emerged from the darkness.

Tempest would have screamed, but the first wolf moved forward and nudged her hand with his muzzle. In an instant, Tempest’s fear fled, and she raised a hand to pat the wolf on the head. The wolf licked it.

The other wolves moved forward too, and Tempest gazed at their intelligently canine faces. With the ultimate innocence of a girl of six, she asked, “Can you help me find my mama?”

Six silver wolves led the barefooted girl across the desert to her mother, and, for the rest of the night, six pairs of green eyes watched over her from the shadows.

 

The pale hands rested on either side of the pedestal, and graceful brows furrowed above closed gray eyes. The hands were perfectly motionless, no trembling of the fingers or changes in the curvature of the wrist to betray the fact that they belonged on one living. Perhaps because the soul connected to those hands contemplated only the dead.

The porcelain wolf stared at the hands through glassy eyes, and a soft, high voice incanted the twisting modalities of a meditative chant.

 

The drums beat a merry rhythm, and Tempest’s feet moved lightly to it. At twelve she was light on her feet and well on the way, many said, to being the most beautiful woman of her generation as her mother had been before her. Tempest smiled flirtatiously at one of the boys who passed her way, and he smiled back shyly. At any other time of year he would have passed without such niceties; Tempest was the daughter of a sky-traveler and the mothers feared their sons going too near such a girl. But today was Tempest’s twelfth birthday, and the festival of New Life on Serpent’s Eye, and all divisions had been dissolved.

“The hunting party is back!” A woman called, from beyond the dancers. “They have a kill! No, two kills!”

It was fantastic news, and the people rushed to congratulate the hunters on their success. By the time Tempest reached them, a clump had formed, but she could hear the pleased cries of those closest to the kills.

“Venison for the feast tonight!”

“And such a large deer too…”

“A wolf! A good omen!”

“It has a silver coat! Doubly good!”

“There should be enough venison for everyone…”

Tempest’s face drained of color. A silver wolf? They’d killed a silver wolf? She fought her way through the crowd, darting beneath raised arms, ducking between legs, and stared at the young hunter proudly holding his kill aloft. The silver muzzle was turned toward her, and its eyes were clouded over, but she knew them in an instant. That muzzle had nudged the hand of a six year old girl and guided her, shivering, to her mother. That wolf had saved her life. And now it was dead.

The crowd, well gorged upon the excitement, dispersed, but Tempest stayed beside the warrior and his kill, and kneeled beside the wolf, a tear dropping from her eye onto its silver coat. She offered a prayer to the gods, and dared to run her hand through its fur, but something in her grieved that the instrument of her salvation had been killed by her people.

In an instant, all the sounds of merry making in the back ground ceased. Tempest turned her head back to the dancing grounds, and saw four men, sky-travelers, standing in the middle of the crowd. The elders stared at them reproachfully, and the children with fear, but no one said a word. No one even moved.

One of the sky-travelers spoke. “The planet Serpent’s Eye has been ceded to the Cardassians in a treaty with the Federation. Its immediate evacuation has been ordered.”

A gentle murmur rose up in the crowd, and Tempest pulled herself to her feet and walked over to her mother and step-father. The two turned away from her, and whispered to each other in hushed tones; fretting, Tempest picked up her abandoned half-sister, Lipoe, and hugged her close. By the time she thought to look back at the silver wolf, it had vanished.

 

The tongue was still, and the hands leapt to life again, bringing a scented stick out of the valise, and breaking it in two so that the fragrance spilled into the air. Runnels of scented smoke streaked across the porcelain wolf, leaving great ashen stripes along its sides, and worked their way in twisting designs up to the ceiling above.

The pale hands waved the smoke into the face of their owner, and she inhaled deeply the heady aroma of spices.

 

Joyfully, Tempest breathed in the air of her homeworld. Serpent’s Eye had been massacred in the Cardassian retaliation attacks against the Maquis, but the air was still the same. If it hadn’t been for that, it would have been difficult to realize this was the planet she’d grown up in. The small villages had been razed, and only a dilapidated building, slapped together as a Maquis headquarters broke the line of the horizon.

A thrill of anger coursed through her again. Every time she thought of what the Cardassians had done to her world and her people and what the vaunted Federation wasn’t doing about it her temper reared its ugly head. Every time she thought of her mother’s brazen refusal to acknowledge the depths of the atrocities, with new rage Tempest renounced her family. Tempest tried to grab the reigns of her wayward thoughts, and approached the headquarters.

Kala Skyfeather, the Maquis agent who had recruited Tempest, responded to her approach. “Tempest! Come in. We’ve assembled your crew.”

Nodding, Tempest followed her in. The lights were dim and the walls, coated in peeling paint, threatened to bow in. Knowing that her people were in such a state, how could her mother turn a blind eye?

Kala smiled, and gestured at a group of men seated at the table that dominated the room. “Tempest, your crew.”

There were five of them, silver-haired and green-eyed, whose features bore such similarity that there was no doubt that they were brothers. Even in the dim light, Tempest thought she saw a sparkle in their eyes that was reminiscent of other green eyes that had stared at her from the darkness.

Fragments of the stories from the ancient mythologies streamed back to her; animals that transformed into humans, spirits that guided humans on their paths. For an instant, the thought flickered in her mind — could they be? “No,” she breathed. “There would be six of them, not five.”

Then she remembered the lifeless green eyes that had stared at her from a dead silver wolf eleven years ago…

 

Part Two

A candlestick was shaken from its careful packaging and set upon the mantle. Pale hands set its likenesses beside it: a second, third, fourth, fifth, and, with a momentary pause the sixth, though its fine casting had been shattered and only glue applied with loving care prevented it from disintegrating. Each was then adorned with a single, white candle, and a single matchstick was prized from the china jaws of the porcelain wolf, as the coyote had given the burning brand to man in the ancient mythology. Grasped between trembling fingers, the match ignited, and was left to burn for precious moments as the ancient words spilled from lips pale with sorrow.

“Long life to thee, brother of my heart, though the world turns without your presence…”

The flame spread from the matchstick to the first candle, and slowly molten beeswax plunged down to greet the earth.

 

Air rushed past her, and Tempest fell to the floor, feeling a sick twisting in her ankle where the contact was made. “Damn it,” she breathed, through teeth gritted in pain. She stared up, and for a moment she saw her mother’s face through the pooling tears, but soon her vision cleared and she saw the tiny command center of the cargo vessel the Maquis had converted to a fighting ship. “Help me,” she appealed.

One of the silver-haired brothers moved from his station, and, reaching down, caught Tempest’s arm. “Tempest, are you all right?” Gently, he helped her rise to her knees, and from there to her feet, her ankle protesting the necessity of carrying her weight, but nevertheless doing so.

Tempest began to topple, and caught hold of his shoulder. “I think it’s twisted. I’ll be fine.”

“Brace yourselves! They’re coming for another pass!” another of the brothers shouted, clinging to the sides of the tactical station.

The first brother shoved Tempest down into the command chair, and threw himself to the ground. The ship quaked, and a great roaring sizzled through the air. “Is everyone all right?” Tempest screamed above the din, trusting to luck that her voice wouldn’t drown in it.

Affirmatives poured in from all sides of the tiny cargo vessel, a sole meek protest coming from the brother who had earlier helped her up. He had hit his head against the bulkhead when he fell, and blood was pouring from the wound.

Tempest jerked her head at the brother who was working tactical. “Get the emergency med kit. See to him. I’ll take tactical.”

The brother nodded and scurried off. Tempest called up the tactical schematics that would show her the condition of the vessel: inertial dampeners were close to failure and the weapons were off-line. In the face of the three Cardassian warships that were facing them, they were worse then sitting ducks.

“They’re coming again!” Tempest shouted, as one of the Cardassian vessels powered its weapons and headed toward them.

A phaser shot cracked against their shields.

A fissure developed in one of the bulkheads, and around the force field that automatically sprang up to close it, steam began to pour out where the vacuum met with the opposing force. The ship’s shields were depleted to hazardous levels and the amount of energy that could be spared to maintain the forcefield was minimal. If one or the other failed, the crew was done for.

Another shot quickly followed, mangling their engines and main computer core, and presently the tactical console began spitting sparks. Tempest threw herself away from it as quickly as she could, her ankle screaming at the motion, and landed safely away as the console exploded, sending scraps of metal flying into the air.

One drove its way into her arm, and she propped herself up to see the damage, instead finding herself staring into the dead eyes of the brother who had helped her to her feet…

 

The match burned out, and the flickering shadows its light had cast upon the mantle faded from existence. Pale fingers shook it to ensure that it would not burst into flame again, and reached for another.

“Though men whose eyes are closed do not see thee, be assured, brother of my heart, that you shall not be forgotten…”

The finger carrying the match rose to carry the spark to the second candle, and the wick burst into flame, searing its way through the darkness.

 

In an instant both the primary and secondary power sources failed, and the ship was plunged into darkness, lighted only by the ephemeral flash of Cardassian weaponry. Tempest stumbled to her feet, all too well aware that she might be standing on the corpse of a man who might have saved her life bare minutes before, but nevertheless driven to find the engineering access panel. If respecting his death meant the deaths of the rest of them, it accomplished nothing at all.

On small cargo vessels like this one, not meant for combat, the access panels were designed so that one could manipulate them by feel. This sacrificed some of the precision a battleship needed, but allowed Tempest, once she’d groped her way to it, to use the panel to coax precious energy that was being wasted trying to maintain the defunct weapons systems to power the lights.

They flickered on, disturbingly pallid.

“Brother Amoc is dead,” Tempest announced, the stress of the situation keeping the nervous quaver out of her voice, as well as the sobs that threatened. “Are the rest of us accounted for?”

One of the brothers was incapacitated, nursing a wound. He nodded

“Good.” Tempest seated herself at the remains of the helm station.

The others were scurrying around the ship, looking for salvageable parts and seeing how much of the damage they could clean up. Turning, Tempest appealed to the inactive brother. “I’ll need your help,” she told him. “I want to see if we can throw anything at the Cardassians — anything at all. We don’t have to destroy them, or even disable them, just confuse them. Confuse them for long enough to…” Tempest’s glance fell on the mask-like face of brother Amoc. “Use the engineering panel. Do we have any power at all? Is there anything left in the backup generators?”

Wetting his lips, he complied, opening the engineering access panel, and searching through the energy use logs. “All the power in the backup generator is being used to maintain the lights, life support and limited computer function.” He swallowed. “At current rates it will only be able to do so for another ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes? We have to find a way to do something with the computer in ten minutes…” Tempest called up schematics of the current situation. In other circumstances the Picard Maneuver might have worked, but they had no engine power to use to flee. Tempest’s Starfleet training as a pilot was sketchy, she’d been so intent on becoming a counselor, and the few Maquis tricks she’d learned so far didn’t seem to be able to help her in the current situation. “What on Earth can we do with the computer?”

The wounded brother was still intent on the engineering panel. “If we reduce life support by ten percent, we can shunt the plasma back through the relays, so it flows into space.”

“But what good will that do?” asked Tempest.

“Here,” the wounded brother said, coming up behind Tempest and pointing to a section of the diagram. “The engines are leaking inbronine. Combined with the plasma that ought to ignite. At the very least it should cripple the Cardassians’ sensors.”

“And ours.”

“Yes,” the brother agreed. “But what use can we make of them now?”

Tempest nodded. “Very well, reduce life support and shunt the plasma.”

The brother entered the commands, and a high-pitched whine permeated the ship. Plasma poured out into space, and, sure enough ignited the inbronine. But the explosion was not minor, it struck out toward the vessel.

“My God!” Tempest screamed. “It’s going to blow!”

The brother with the wounded arm shoved her to the back of the ship, and began to run himself, but he was caught too close to the bulkhead as it exploded, and was trapped on the other side of the forcefield that was erected to contain the ship.

 

The second match flickered, and died out.

Before reaching for the next match, the fingers paused to blot an eye, and their dampness prevented the match from lighting as it was first struck. The second try yielded a flame, and the lips formed themselves into the chant.

“While thy body lies in dust, brother of my heart, thy soul shall be carried into eternity bonded with mine…”

The match was raised to light the third and fourth candles.

 

Part Three

Tempest stared at the force field, incredulous. Her parasympathetic nervous system kicked in and her adrenaline rush fell away, leaving her muscles to quake with exhaustion. Nikos had joined Amoc in oblivion.

“What do we do now?” she breathed.

There was no reply.

Tempest turned to survey the ship. The damage was too extensive to repair, and she doubted any of the stations had survived functionally. She glanced over at the open engineering panel; it had been shielded from the explosion by the rise of the tactical station and was reasonably intact. But after that they didn’t have any energy to play with.

The ship jolted, and Tempest’s ankle gave out. Swiftly, one of her brothers was at her side, but she managed to drag herself to her feet without his assistance. “What now?” she muttered, and he pointed in the direction of the viewscreen.

The ship was in the grip of a tractor beam.

“Terrific.” Tempest grabbed one of the bulkheads and used it as a support while she dragged herself to a better vantage point. “It looks like they’ve decided they want prisoners of war. I don’t suppose there’s any hope of us getting out of the tractor beam?” There was silence.

Tempest dragged herself to the remains of the command chair and lowered herself into it. “That’s what I thought. I suppose we’d better see if there’s any salvageable circuitry. Maybe we can fashion a communications–” It struck Tempest that it was too silent. She looked behind her. All her brothers were standing in a clump at the other end of the vessel.

“Tempest,” one of them said softly, pointing to her right.

She turned to see a Cardassian holding a disrupter aloft so that it was level with her heart. He sneered at her and waved her toward her brothers. Painfully she managed to reach them, careful not to glance down as she passed brother Amoc’s body.

One of her brother’s offered her his arm which she gratefully took. The Cardassian stared at them and grunted, then turned his attention to the viewscreen and the few surviving displays below it.

“Damn it,” Tempest mumbled, “what I wouldn’t give for a phaser about now.”

One of her brothers nodded.

There were only four of them on the ship. Even if the Cardassian weren’t carrying a disrupter, it seemed entirely likely that he’d be able to kill two of them before the other two managed to contain him. With the disrupter it was virtually impossible that any of them would survive.

On the other hand, if they allowed themselves to be carried back to Cardassia, all that awaited them was torture, betrayal and, finally, execution. Tempest made a small gesture to her brothers. When she signaled they would attempt an attack.

Tempest waited for the Cardassian to make a mistake. He had positioned himself with his back to the Maquis, obviously considering them no threat, and if he remained so the element of surprise could be on their side. Hesitantly, Tempest nodded.

It was all too easy for one of Tempest’s brothers to leap onto the Cardassian’s back. Another seized the rope-like wrist and managed to divert his attention while the first attempted to beat him to the ground.

The Cardassian wasted no time trying to deal with his human attackers. He merely grunted something into his communicator.

Weapons fire began again, and the ship quaked.

Tempest was catapulted to the ground. She groaned and tried to pick herself up, but her ankle refused to function and she could not find purchase on the floor.

Her hand hit something cold and hard. For an instant her unbelieving eyes wouldn’t register what it was; then it dawned on her. It was a phaser.

Even if her feet refused to function, her hands were not disabled and she grasped it. She could hear the soft ticking that indicated the power cell was nearly drained, but it was still warm. She had a shot. Probably only one.

She started to stand, but it occurred to her that if the Cardassian knew she was uninjured, her chances of making a clear shot at him would be greatly diminished. So she merely turned her head and tried to blink the haze away from her eyes.

He was standing not far from her: no more then a few feet. Hesitantly she brought the phaser to bear, calculated her aim, and fired it.

The whine of the weapon alerted the Cardassian, and he moved to avoid it, sparing his chest the shot, but catching it full in the arm. He grabbed at it and looked up, startled and in pain. His eyes lit on something behind Tempest, and before she had a chance to realize what it was, he fired. One of her brothers screamed and crumpled to the ground.

Tempest couldn’t choke back the cry that rose to her throat, and her hand spasmed sending the weapon clattering to the floor. The Cardassian’s predatorial eyes located her instantaneously, and he raised his disrupter, preparing to fire.

There was a high pitched groaning, and an instant later, the Cardassian was crushed beneath a heavy beam.

Tempest pulled herself to her knees, and found herself staring at the mangled corpse of another of her brothers. His arm protruded from beneath the beam like a doll’s limb, and an engineering tool spilled from the remains of his hand. It was used to detach beams from their moorings.

And with that, the match burned out.

“Thy memories and thy being shall never be sundered from the Earth, brother of my heart, for I shall labor all my life to sew them again…”

The fifth candle was lit, the tip of its wick turned ashen and crumbled beneath the heat.

 

The Cardassian’s skin turned immediately to a shade of waxen gray, and Tempest looked away, unable to fight back the tears that were streaming down her cheeks. Amoc was dead. Nikos and Hortl were dead. Yezdi was dead. She clung to the heavy security of her last brother.

The ship quaked again.

The computer’s monotone rang out. “Backup power will cease to function in forty seconds.”

He held her for a moment, then took her hands and turned to her. “Tempest, they’re going to destroy us in a moment.”

“I know.”

“They don’t have to get us both. There’s an oxygen generator in one of the live cargo containers. If we shut down all the systems, we’ll have enough power to kickstart it, and to send the container far enough into the atmosphere of Serpent’s Eye to land safely. With luck, the explosion of this ship will shield it…” He moved to the crate in the corner of the ship, lightly guiding her alongside him with a touch on her arm. “I’ve already equipped it, Tempest. Get in.”

“No!” Tempest turned her tear-stained face to him. “How could I? I can’t leave you to die!”

“You can and you will,” her brother said, holding her with both hands so that she could not look away. “Tempest, you have a career in Starfleet. You could change things for the Maquis, not grasp at straws to help us win another battle and still lose the war.” He brushed her cheek. “I love you, sister of my heart, and I give my life of my own will. Get in.”

Tempest’s thoughts choked up in her throat. “You … are my only family, now that … the other brothers of my … heart are dead … I won’t leave you!” Tempest threw herself at him, crying frantically.

“Backup power will cease to function in twenty seconds.”

“Get in, Tempest!” The last living brother of her heart pushed Tempest into the pod, careful not to injure her, but allowing her no way to turn around. He secured it, ejected it, and sealed his own doom.

Tempest’s only comfort was that she did not have to see him when he died.

As the rigged escape pod sped through space, Tempest cursed the Cardassians with every breath in her body. They had raped her colony, corrupted her mother and killed the brothers of her heart. They deserved no mercy.

When the chronometer in the escape pod turned to zero hundred hours, April fourteenth, Tempest’s twenty-third birthday, she lost her grip on consciousness.

And the great tempests that wracked Cardassia began.

 

With a last guttering sigh, the fifth match burned to its end.

The pale fingers paused before finding a match with which to light the sixth candle, the one with the cracked glaze. It alone among those on the mantle was pristine; never in the many years the ceremony had been observed had this candle been favored with it.

The match was grasped and struck against the side of the wolf, so that it cast watery reflections in the porcelain fur. Lifted almost to the wick of the sixth candle, it paused midair, poised to descend.

“Captain Blackthorne to Counselor Rainbird. Please come to the bridge immediately.”

The pale fingers loosed their grip on the match and it tumbled to the mantle. It was only a brief moment before the ship’s computer recognized the abandoned match as an uncontrolled hazard, but in that moment, a face burned brightly in the flame. But it was not the face Tempest supposed it to be. It was her own.