I’d seen replica weapons and armor hanging in shops or displayed on wooden stands. The leather workers that made the bandoleers that held potions for firebombs used wooden pieces painted to look like iron or glassware to better display their own wears on top.

When I saw the size of the mace he carried down the stairs my first thought was that it had to be a replica made of soft wood and good paints. It was longer than I thought it would be with a much larger head. It had to be very very heavy.

The shaft was some dark pitted metal, as if it had rusted away and then had the rust scrubbed off leaving only the pits, yet it didn’t look weak at all. The head was made up of thick fin-like pieces of different metals. The one with the greenish tint was probably copper, there was silver, and gold, and-

He held the mace out between us in one hand. It wasn’t pointed at me but held sideways as if to give me a better look.

“Moria’s mace,” he said and I looked from it to him, “with my arm, she delivers the blow.”

His face had changed. He looked less like a helpful old man and more like a serious warrior. He looked years younger though this hair and mustache were still white and his eyebrows bushy. I lacked any emotional response to his words, but nodded on the off chance he was waiting for a response.

“It might be better if you kneel,” he suggested.

So I did, then I leaned forward so that I was in a crawling position on my hands and knees staring down at the slippers he was wearing. They were soft leather, with wool visible near the edges. They looked comfortable.

“Anything to confess?”

I thought about it. Likely if I began confessing it would take too long.

“No.”

“Guide my hand true,” he whispered. His words had an odd ring to them. Nothing dramatic, nothing obvious, but they had the sound of an oft spoken prayer backed by something more than his voice.

There was a change in the quality of light in the room. The fairy light was somehow flat, as if it wasn’t really there even as it illuminated the rooms. I couldn’t say what exactly changed, because he started swinging after his simple prayer, but it was as if there was suddenly real light in the room.

I saw the powerful blow start in his slippers as he rose up on his toes.

Things happened so closely together that I can’t separate them in memory.

His heels dropped and he grunted and his knees began to bend.

Then there was a huge ringing silence that moved through me like a ship striking a dock at speed. A wave of power pushed through me and in front of me a shadow-like thing slammed down into the wooden floor. It was the back of a head, with shadow like arms that splayed outward. It held it’s shape for only a brief moment. Then it seemed to collapse into black shadowy soot, except the soot didn’t stay on the floor but rose away from it in tens of thousands of tiny puffs of smoke.

The ringing silence was exactly like the huge Church bells, except instead of a huge sound, it was a huge silence.

The silence held, and held, and then broke. Again I couldn’t say what changed as it was still silent afterward, but it was the normal lack-of-sound type silence, not whatever it had been before.

“Huh,” the paladin said.

I leaned back my hands sliding across the rug until they rested on my knees. I was kneeling again as I looked up at him. He looked at the head of his mace and then at me.

“That’s never happened before,” he said.

He looked from the mace to me and back to the mace.

“Let’s try outside,” he suggested with childlike glee.

The madness of the situation, overwhelmed me in that moment.

Whatever it was that had blocked my emotions was gone and a wild mad laughter twisted into wracking sobs of sorrow and horror.

Then the smell hit me. I’d always smelled it but it had never mattered before. Now it filled my world. And the taste. It filled my mouth with filth.

The filth caused me to retch and I tried to stop the vomit with my hands. Which only covered them in the regurgitated pieces of organs, flesh, and the black remnants of consumed blood.

The paladin was speaking, but I was staring at my hands. Not at the current layer of vomit, nor even at the crusted filth worked into the skin. I was seeing bits of memory, reliving the foggy recollections of using these hands to not only kill but to consume. Again I vomited, though nothing else came up.

Then I was lost to the madness as surely as I became lost to the stupor.

What there was of my mind could not contain or exist with the things I had done.

I went away for a while. I could not explain what happened, even though my memories would be, from the mace strike forward, crystal clear.

When I examine the memories of that time later there is no way to navigate them. They feel slimy and gritty and unformed. More akin to the memories of my time before the mace than anything else after it.

I stopped remembering because I stopped experiencing.

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There are some memories that come into focus. The feel of the rough cloth as he scrubbed my shoulder while I was submerged in a tub of warm water.

The shuddering revulsion and worm-like twisting I did as he probed the hole in my mouth with a finger.

The hunger that filled me when I was presented a soft loaf of hot bread covered in honey and spices.

There was a confused memory as I stared at the fire. I watched it burn down to ash, then turned my head to see what the paladin was doing. When I looked back, the fire place was once again stacked with burning wood.

I ate fruit, and drank tepid flat water, or hot tea. There was bread and some sort jelly that wasn’t sweet but stout and had the consistency of fat but tasted of butter, honey, and a strange otherworldly spice.

I became aware of time passing. I have a clear memory of seeing the sunlight outside the window. I struggled to get up, not understanding I was naked until I was standing. I picked up one of the blankets I’d been setting on and wrapped it around myself.

Like touching the roof of my mouth there was a revulsion that rose up in me as I reached a hand toward the light streaming through the window and into the room.

Like the magical light that lit the rooms, the sunlight seemed half formed, flat, ethereal.

I hesitated momentarily then pressed forward, jerking my hand back from the heat and pain. I retreated from the window and stared at my hand. The white-hot fire of healing burned on my finger tips. They weren’t blackened and charred but they were were sort of deflated. Almost like the jerky they loaded onto ships for long journeys. Yet almost wrinkled like your fingers got after being in the bath too long.

My hand began to shake and I looked up, meeting the paladin’s eyes. He was working in the kitchen and watching me.

“Tea?” he asked.

“What?”

“Would you like some tea?” he asked.

“What?” I repeated.

“Oh,” he said with a smile as he held up a small glass jar containing leaves, “I’m not sure what kind it is at all. I’m not sure it’s even tea really. I make it from the leaves of one of the berry bushes. From the ridged leaves anyway. The squarish leaves make a weak acid and the barbed leaves make a sort of sneezing poison. The greenish berries will put a bull to sleep and the red ones make you constipated. But these leaves, these leaves make a soothing tea. In comparison anyway.”

“What?” I said again. I wasn’t yet well and from the various expressions that passed over his face he realized the same thing.

“Why don’t you sit,” he said, “and I’ll make tea.”

“How am I awake?” I asked instead, turning back to look out the window.

This started an hours long questionnaire where I asked everything I could think of and learned he didn’t know much of anything, not for sure. I answered his questions when he asked, holding nothing back about what I’d done. It didn’t occur to me until half way through the conversation that paladins often served as magistrates and lawmen in places where there were no others to be found.

There was only a brief moment of mad laughter that bubbled up out of me when I realized I might yet still be killed for my crimes, no matter the clarity that had come to my mind.

Whatever had happened to me clearly wasn’t over with. I hadn’t been healed, not if the sun burned me. What if it was temporary? What if I started to again loose my mind and became again like an animal?

I asked the paladin as much and he asked me what I meant by being like an animal.

We talked and I learned nothing while he learned much. He seemed to be continually either making food, or eating it.

When I suddenly had the urge to urinate I was flooded with foggy memories of simply pissing when I had to go with no regard for my clothing.

I was about to ask if I could use the privy when a casual thought about how many cups of tea I’d drank floated through my mind.

Not only did the answer of sixteen come to me instantly, but I could remember every single cup.

This caused some confusion and panic as I discovered my ability to remember and recall was vastly enhanced compared to any other point in my life. I could still remember Cook’s story, but in that normal foggy way where you weren’t really sure if it happened like you remembered, or if you remembered it because you told yourself the story so often.

Then I could remember every single question the paladin had asked me after I burned my fingers.

I shook my hand after I recalled the memory of burning them in the sunlight.

My mind spun with panic and confusion and a hundred different things. Thankfully the driving need of my bladder cut to the forefront.

The paladin was kneading dough in the kitchen and sighed at my question.

“I go outside, but I don’t think that will be safe for you for a few more hours. Unless-” he paused.

“Come with me. Try the light in the garden. The garden itself is very close to Fairy if not a bit of it broken off. It might be the light there doesn’t harm you.”

We went down the stairs into a bowl shaped room. The same half walls filled the room but the boulder’s curve was sharper here so the shape of the outside walls were vertical curving to flat somewhere beneath the floor.

There were benches and beds built into the curved walls, which were still covered in curving wooden planks. There were crates in several spaces breaking up the open layout.

The whole space had a general feeling of disuse and abandonment.

He opened the back door and indicated I should touch the light streaming through.

The smells hit me, wild and full of life. Floral and citrus and something meatier, earthier but also with a sharpness like potent cat urine or a skunk’s spray.

I reached out a hand, and that same wave of revulsion swept through me. I paused, then pushed just my smallest finger forward.

I jerked my hand away and took several steps back with my hand tucked under my armpit. I’d let go of the blanket and almost tripped on it in my haste.

I turned away from the old man as he bent down to lift the blanket up.

He handed it to me and I snatched it away. Wrapping it around myself as best I could.

“Can I see the finger?” he asked.

I looked at it for the first time as I held it out.

“Odd,” he said, “does this-” he never finished the question as I jerked my hand away as he pressed into the withered flesh. The pain was nothing compared to the sunlight but touching it caused more pain to layer on top of what was already there.

My other fingers were still burning with the healing fire, though little had changed with their appearance.

“What?” I asked when I realized he had said something while I was staring at my finger tips.

Then, before he could repeat himself, I remembered what he’d just said.

“You’ll have to go behind a crate.”

He repeated himself half a moment after I recalled the memory.

“You’ll have to go behind a crate.”

“What?”

This time the question was because I was confused. His expression said he thought I was losing it again.

“You’ll have to shit,” he said slowly, “over there somewhere. Pick a room, do your business, then come up.”

“Just shit on the floor?” I asked.

He began to nod and then stopped.

“It’s like the fire,” he said as he began to turn back toward the stairs.

“What is?”

He paused for just a brief moment as he considered the question.

“All of it. Shit, use the blanket to wipe with, then drop them both. Walk away and turn back to look. I’ll leave another blanket at the top of the stairs.

I didn’t have to shit. So I set the blanket on a crate took a few steps into what I could best describe as an unused rounded corner where the puddle wouldn’t get anything wet, and pissed.

When I turned around to get the blanket I found it was gone. Only in the searching for it did I happen to notice that the floor was dry where I’d just put a substantial puddle.

The same blanket, or one strikingly similar, was folded on the floor at the top of the stairs. The paladin was staring at it. I grabbed it before coming all the way up and wrapped it around myself.

He didn’t so much cook as prepare plates of from vegetables and fruits as we ate. He prepared several pots of tea. Time slipped forward until he produced a book and set it down on the table.

He tapped the cover and said, “I know what you are.”