Questions, questions

Once again, Candlemass dropped in early to see how I've been doing. Apparently, he's right on the trail of something, but now he has to wait and see what he is suspicious of is really true.

I asked him a few questions that had been bugging me for a while. Namely: How does time work, and why is it so different?



His response (I actually wrote it down lol): "It's like this, Chickadee: Time in our planes runs differently. Because you're closer to the nexus where time and space meet, you exist on a mostly straight line, which is why your plan conceives of time in a linear fashion, with very slight undulaitons.

"My plane, however, is much farther back- time moves more slowly, reality isn't as concrete as it is here. Planar material is much easier to break through. Time seems to exist in a linear fashion, but it's incredibly malliable. So this is precicely why, though I appear to be roughly thirty years old, I'm much, much older to your plane. By the time I reached my thirtieth birthday, your country has already reached the zenith of its life."

And when I asked him why he had decided to hang out with me in the first place, my second burning question, his face became very wistful, almost pained. 

"That was a difficult time in my life, Chickadee. I was still a young Punisher then, and I was newlyweds with a beautiful girl named Valeria. We were still only really children when she was taken away from me by a peddler of death. 

"He pretended to come to town selling tonics and tinctures; I was away on patrol when Valeria was tempted to buy an uncture from him. She was dead by the time night fell. I found her on the floor in our kitchen when I had come home." Here, he shuddered and passed a hand over his face, and his shoulders hitched like he was about to start crying. "The poison had turned her into something awful, my poor Valeria."

I asked him, quietly, what had happened.

"It had weakened her bones. The skin had flayed itself from her body. Her head, it had split in two." He stopped, and I didn't press him to go on; he had shut his eyes tightly, as if he was reliving the moment he'd found his young wife split open on the floor.

When I expressed how sorry I was, though, he briskly shook his head and waved his hand to dismiss my pity. "It was a long time ago, even for me." But he lifted his head and stared at the ceiling for some time, blinking rapidly, before he was able to stand and press a kiss to my forehead in farewell.

"Good-bye, Chickadee, and keep safe. I'll be back upon the morrow."