“You think they’ll leave?” I asked Mrs. Kine as we sat at the far end of the room.

We’d sat with the mayor for the first hour or two as other people were summoned to speak with him. Sometimes we were asked questions, but as time went on that slowed.

“Martha, why don’t you get these two a bath and something to eat,” had sealed our fate.

It was now three hours later and easily a hundred people had been through this building. Sometimes they were groups of men, other times they were alone. From what I could see of the door there was a line of people outside.

“Leave?” Mrs. Kine said, “That’s a hard ask when you’ve no proof. I’m guessing they will send someone to see if our tale is true. Likely they’ve already been sent.”

“What do we do?” I asked finally thinking about the future again.

“We’ve got a single purse of coins, a cart that only you can haul, and no other belongings.”

“Let me see if I can remedy one of those,” she said with a smile as she got up.

“No. You stay here, I’ll be just a moment.”

She spoke with Martha who was currently standing at the edge of the crowd around the Mayor. There was some pointing and then a few nods.

Mrs. Kine interrupted the conversation to ask the Mayor something before she returned to our table.

“Let’s go see if we can fix the issue with the cart.”

“The issue with the cart?” I asked.

“Yes. The issue being that I’m the only one who can pull it.”

I expected a wagon maker or some sort of leather worker perhaps to rework the harness for two people. We ended up off the main road in a building without a ceiling.

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There were stone benches on the ground floor and wooden benches in the balcony behind a wooden railing.

There was a small knee-high raised platform of dirt. Weeds grew there at the end of the building and I imagine it was some sort of play house or musical production.

Mrs. Kine had walked in like she owned the place. Not that there was a door in the door frame to knock on.

“Hello the temple!” she called out, and I realized it was the oddest temple I’d ever seen. No religious works of any sort. No sculptures or gold or big guys nailed to medieval torture devices.

“Hello?” a man responded as he came through the doorway at the back. He had a robe on, like the men in the second ambush party had worn, but it was stained with multiple dinners. One of which he was currently eating.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

“He’s unawakened,” she said, “we were wondering if you could help?”

He frowned at me and then looked at her.

She nodded.

He frowned again.

“I’m not sure what kind of joke this is, but I’m not seeing the humor in it.”

“He’s been exposed to memory fog from the deeps and he’s unawakened.”

“You cannot lose a touch from the divine,” he said with sneer.

“If it’s a matter of coin,” I suggested, my experience with priests being restricted to several thousand years of Earth’s history.

“Fine,” he said moving the meat he had in his hand to his mouth where he took a bite of it to hold it as he wiped his hands on his robe.

He mumbled something to me as he stepped forward and I suddenly felt like letting him touch me wasn’t something I wanted to do.

He said something again as he reached out with both hands and grabbed my head.

I remember having to take the rugs just inside the doors to my grandmothers house outside and shake them violently to get the dust and dirt off. If you did it just right you could get the other end to snap. Then you rotated it and repeated, then hung it over a clothesline and beat the dirt out of it with a broom.

I felt like the rug and collapsed as soon as he let go of me.

He was saying something but my ears were ringing and Mrs. Kine’s face was very close to my own. She sounded funny when she talked and I laughed and laughed.

Then the world tilted and my head bounced off the ground.

My left foot was on fire while my right leg, the whole leg, cramped up.

My mouth tasted like salt and my vision was doubled.

The ringing in my ears slowly went away. I turned my head to the side. It felt like it was ten times too large and full of heavy stone.

Mrs. Kine was laying on the ground next to me, looking at me.

I asked her something but the words were the wrong color and the floor burped.