Later, after I meet with the paladin my memory becomes clear. Better than clear, perfect in ways I couldn’t describe before I experienced it. Like a man getting spectacles later in life and realizing that previously he was all but blind.

But my memories of the time in the swamps after I died are, thankfully, murky and disjointed. Things don’t always link up correctly or make sense. Even after my memory clears it is only new memories, or very old memories. The memories of my time in the swamps remain murky and almost insane.

The memories are there but I can’t really access them. I lack the means to tell one night from another.

They aren’t a thinking man’s memories, organized into things that happened before or after other events. Instead they are sorted more by experience. I can remember the hunts, both the long drawn out runs chasing deer and the short quick grab as a rabbit or turtle came within reach.

There is no delimitation between events. All the hunger pains bleed into one long endless memory. All the hunts into another.

The memories of those first days are even more scatted and broken. They are filled with endless hunger, burning pain, and howling rage.

As murky as those parts of the memory are there were surprisingly sharp parts too. Concentration during the hunt and the utter satisfaction that came while feeding stand out clearly in my memories. Also the comatose stupor I fell into as the murky light warmed the muddy waters or burned me.

In time I grew to understand that feeding brought on the bliss and daylight brought on the stupor. The smell of blood might bring on the feeding frenzy but more often than not the memories of hunts start first by noticing movement.

It’s hard to tell what I did in the moments before I noticed a prey animal, perhaps I simply stood or squatted where I was for hours at a time.

I was more feral animal than man in those swamps and my memories are those of an animal, the concentration of the hunt, the scent of prey.

The feast.

The famine.

I couldn’t say exactly how long I was out there lost to the world. For all I knew it could have been months.

The plague had come in the very early spring to herald the ending of the world. I was in the city for a long time after that. At least four weeks, maybe six. Time wasn’t one of the things I had paid attention to once I began coughing and crying bloody tears. Then I died in that swamp and changed into a monster, and again, I failed to keep track of time as a man would.

I likely died on a cot sometime in the summer. I spent the last of the summer and some of the fall as a mindless monster in the swamps.

The sun burned me, so I slept below the muddy waters in the swamp, the whole day gone in a blink of unremembered time.

At night I ran, sometimes on all fours, to catch prey. Be it boar or deer, or wandering man. I had incalculable strength and an ability to heal from mortal wounds. Sometimes, after I’d slacked my hunger, I might notice bolts or arrows sticking out of my body. Most of the time the flesh had already healed around them. When I pulled them free the pain that accompanied the healing was somehow distant. If they bled at all, and they didn’t always, it was a thick black blood that didn’t seem healthy at all.

By fall I was starving. The big lizards were difficult to kill with hands and teeth and I had not yet regained a thinking man’s ability to fashion tools or traps.

I’d seemingly killed everything else around me that was smaller or slower. I obviously didn’t roam the whole swamp, yet I can’t ever remember feeling bound or leashed to one place.

Yet I’m forced to conclude I hunted only a small territory of the swap, never venturing further out, even as food grew scarce.

I knew the food was scarce, but I couldn’t seem to make myself leave. As I slept each day away in the same mud beneath the same bank, perhaps even where I was first dumped when they cleared the dead and dying from the Slums.

In my hunger I attacked men who weren’t actually men at all. They moved but their blood flowed no better than mine did. I killed them in a rage tearing or breaking them spitting out the bitter black blood before returning to the hunt.

When the sun rose, whether I’d eaten or not, I fell to a stupor. A mental fog that swept my thoughts and memories away so that all I could ever remember was that, as the sun rose, I began to forget what I was doing.

When the sun had set, I was once again in the muddy depths. I had no memory of anything that happened during the daylight hours.

Being an animal I had no curiosity as to what happened to me during those times. Did I rise like a shambling man? Did I die again, only to live at night? Did I sleep?

My tongue probed at the hole at the top of my mouth more often than I liked. When I pressed the tip of my tongue into the hole I would get sick to my stomach and feel queasy, as if it was wrong to do such a thing.

At the time I never paid attention to what was inside, but I saw it after the change, when my memories and mind were sharper and I birthed a sense of curiosity about how I had changed.

As an animal I felt the white-hot healing fires when the stinger inside the hole occasionally ripped out and had to regrow, but was distracted by the bliss that spread through me every time I attempted to use it.

The stinger was a flimsy small multi-jointed crab leg looking thing with a transparent outer exoskeleton that some how folded up inside and above my mouth. It didn’t extend that far past my front teeth when fully extended. Inside, visible through the exoskeleton was a single thin vein, sack of greenish venom, and a tiny stinger.

I didn’t need to use it while feeding, but while I was feral I was compelled to, if for no other reason than it brought about the bliss.

I could run a deer down, break it’s neck, and tear open it’s insides eating all of the organs and drinking the blood easier than I could bite and sting the leaping animal. Yet I would bite down on a deer whose neck I just broke, letting the stinger inject it’s stupor into the dead flesh. Then, as the Bliss coursed through my veins, I’d eat and drink.

Sometimes, when my instincts were in charge, I tried to use the stinger to bring the animals down. My jaw would open far past it’s normal extension. The skin extending to either side of my lips would tear and break and I’d sort of smash my face down onto the animal.

When it worked the stinger would extend out from the roof of my mouth lightning fast, strike the animal, and assuming it got through their hide, instantly paralyze it. When it went wrong the stinger often stayed in the flesh, hide, or scales and tore free from my mouth.

The pain was beyond anything I’d felt while alive. The painful jaw position and tearing cheeks paled in comparison to the agony of losing the stinger. Then the bliss flooded into me and any other pain faded as the white-hot healing fires concentrated above my mouth rebuilding the stinger.

While I could use the stinger on the deer or boars with some success, the big swamp lizards had tough scales and often twisted and fought.

When the bliss would come upon me I no longer cared to hunt. If there was an animal there I’d eat, but I couldn’t hunt in that state. Which meant if I used the stinger, or attempted to and lost it, I was done hunting for the night.

Over time I spent more time a slave to the bliss than I did hunting. I lost weight and the headaches were a constant annoyance.

Between the bliss and the stupor I remembered little of worth from my time in the swamps.

While in the swamps I remembered little of my previous life in the Slums. When I was in the swamps I existed in the now. How I imagine animals live. I can’t recall any real decisions I made. I can’t remember planning.

I operated on some sort of instinct.

At some point something changed. I assume it was lack of food that drove me back to the Slums. This time hunting people.

People were easier to hunt than animals.

Softer.

Slower.

Stupider.

When I’d fed enough, clarity began to return. Or perhaps the clarity of mind came with the passage of time as I don’t remember being that clear minded in the swamps, even after eating.

Then again I wasn’t able to gorge myself in the swamps like I was in the Slums.

Either way, my mind slowly returned to me, or parts of it did. I felt no remorse at killing. I felt no shame or fear or anything excepting the concentration of the hunt and the satiation after feeding.

The first noticeable changes, at least noticeable as I looked back on the memories, were small functional things. How to set traps or wait for the prey to come to me.

Something as simple as throwing a rock or brick ahead of a man walking to force him to turn and run toward me. Previously I would have simply chased him down.

I’m not sure I noticed the change at the time, but using tools of any sort was something I hadn’t done in the swamps.

I learned how to pick off the stragglers, and to limit what I ate to just one a night. For a while that was all the farther my mind progressed. Hunting became easy and I went back to just existing.

I’d wake in odd places, under rubble, in the sewers, in some half burned building, or in a room with what remained of my previous meal.

While the blood hummed to me directly after a kill, the next night that same blood was flat, empty, and devoid of whatever it was I craved. I would still eat the dead when I grew hungry, even days after they were killed, but that would only satiate my hunger, not my need for whatever power the blood carried.

I can remember eating the dead, not the shame of it, or even embarrassment, but the mechanical movements of it, the rote motions of separating flesh from bone and breaking it down.

I can remember the difficulty of eating human flesh with human teeth. Gnawing the flesh from a human arm or leg without a knife is actually a difficult task, but if you bend your will to a task you can often accomplish it.

Hunting became scarce as fewer people traveled at night, and when they did they traveled in larger groups. I was forced to change tactics. I shifting from laying in wait for prey to hunting them.

I listened for prey huddled behind closed doors or hidden away in secret places.

I had to tear through doors or climb in through windows to reach people barricaded in homes. It was during those tasks that my mind expanded again, if only slightly. My ability to plan and problem solve grew with the challenges I faced. I started using simple tools like a plank of wood as a lever or battering ram. Whereas before I would have just clawed at the door not caring that I’d rip fingernails out in the process.

Eventually enough of my mind returned that I understood what I was doing, even if I didn’t understand the how of it, or the why.

I had brief windows of understanding but they were all without an emotional attachment.

I was a monster, like the ones Cook told stories about when I lived in the attic, but I felt no remorse or shame about it.

I often had those introspective thoughts only after feeding, and often little time remained before the sun rose so that I didn’t spend too much time at all thinking about what I was doing.

Eventually I found myself in a kitchen. Not a fisherman’s kitchen in a small home, but something fancier, something larger. An inn maybe, or a tavern. The getting into and out of the kitchen aren’t actions attached to the memory, just the kitchen itself, a kitchen Cook might have cooked in.

The decision to kill myself came rather easily when it came. There were some knives, and I was a monster, and it was the job of good people to kill monsters.

The slit wrists healed with burning pain even as the thick black goo welled out from the gashes. I had to slash at my arm over and over, but I could tell that was ultimately a waste of time. With my limited problem solving skills I focused on the next best thing and drove the knife into my belly.

If I knew then what I knew now about the paths blood took around the body, I’d have cut the inside of my thighs, but I wasn’t really thinking.

The decision to kill myself wasn’t so much a plan as a reaction to the realization I had the means of killing a monster. That the monster was me seemed not as important as the killing part.

The loss of the thick oozing blood from my stomach drove me into a feeding frenzy.

I woke the next evening lying in the remains of three women and a few children. Able to move and function again the plan remained, still without emotion.

I couldn’t say why the memory about killing monsters remained from my previous life when nothing else seemed to, but the plan was still the same.

Kill the monster, like Cook would have wanted.