A New Friend

My house still seemed to be Candlemass's most comfortable domain, but I started seeing him around more places than just my bedroom. Usually, I would catch a flash of something bright, or the reflection of light in some shiny surface, and he'd be there, leaning against a table or counter or door frame, staring at me. Candlemass had these really sharp blue eyes, which were slightly unsettling to look at. It was almost like looking at an electrical storm.



 He also started talking to me more. Before, he'd tell me stories about different people he'd been assigned to punish, none of which had sounded like children to me. I can still remember a couple of them. But around that time, he had started to actively take an interest in my life.

"Where do you go, Poppet, and leave me all alone in the middle of the day?" Was something he'd asked me once. He didn't seem to really grasp the concept that I went to school, sometimes even during the summer. At that point, he was also beginning to ask to show me different tricks, but I was always too shy to say yes. I thought the things he could do with fire was cool, but I was too afraid and doubtful that I could do them myself to want to try. He seemed to sort of want to be my friend, in all honesty. As I got older of him, I became less frightened of him. We were sort of pals.

I guess this sort of registered in my behaviour, though. My mom was always concerned about me- me emotional state had become kind of turbulent and I wanted to spend time with kids my own age less and less. Candlemass, in turn, began to up his interest in me.

He told me he was a sort of punisher of wrongdoers many, many years ago. But even if I visited graveyards to look for these people, I would never find them, because they were generally buried en masse, which went to show how repugnant these people were.

 He told me, even, that I could become a member of the order, like him, despite my age. I actually became pretty obsessed with the concept of it all. I can't remember the exact name of the order that he belonged to.

It was pretty lengthy, but I remember very well the sort of details that surrounded it. Because the town he had lived in had been a sort of a fortress town, they would erect walls made of entire, sharpened tree trunks surrounding the village to keep it safe from the "natives", wild animals, and the beasts. The slightest infractions were punishable offenses, but the sorts of things Candlemass was in charge of were people who consorted with those beyond the village, murderers, adulterers, and rapists. Each Punisher had their own method of punishment, and Candlemass's had been hanging and fire. The people he would hang by the neck, according to his own judgement, from the wall of the town, where they would eventually suffocate, or their necks would break.

Even today, I can still remember some of the knots he taught me to make, which are unlike any I have seen since. What he used fire on wasn't people, though, but something else completely different. If something had been determined as "unnatural", Candlemass would dispose of it with fire.

Unlike with normal human subjects, the Punishers would sort of assemble to determine what the best course of action would be against any certain thing. Once it had been decided, they would chose among them who would be best suited to dealing with it. Because almost anything can burn, Candlemass was often chosen to deal with such things.

He told me, with no small pride, that that was how he became one of the very best of the Punishers. He was often chosen to deal with the "devils of the woods". He told me quite a few stories, often in graphic detail, of how he would go to battle with these things, and, upon finishing, would burn their corpses.

 One of the stories he told me was about what he called skraelings. I'm not sure if they're skraelings in the traditional sense (if there is a traditional sense of the word), but he described the village coming under attack one night by a band of things that weren't like anything the village had ever seen before.

 He said it had been a dark night, and a close one. There were no moon or stars that night when the things came boiling out of the woods. They climbed from the trees like animals with great dexterity without using the limbs of the trees, and ran with their hands and feet both touching the ground. And all the while, they issued the most hideous screaming as they came in waves.

They had small bodies, and were the same color as tree bark, but their faces looked like a beast's. In no time at all, they had swarmed up and over the walls of the village, and they immediately fell upon any cattle they could find, ripping the beats apart limb from limb even as they screamed in terror. A drover, he said, met the same fate, but it was lucky they had attacked so late, because everyone else was inside, and could take cover quickly.
 He said that they even swarmed the watch towers, which was how he got the scar on his face. The council for the Punishers didn't even have time to meet properly, and Candlemass took matters into his own hands. He said he dispatched great numbers of the things that night with flaming arrows. Even if he didn't hit them, they were extremely susceptible to flame, and if one caught fire, it would run about, and catch others on fire as well.

 They were one of the main problems of the village, Candlemass was later to tell me. He didn't defeat the band that night, and he knew there were many others. But they were particularly stupid, and slow to learn, and so they were a more minor trouble.