Judgement, Final

Here is the rest of the "Judgement" story Candlemass told me.

The weather was already beginning to lose the last tinge of warmth from autumn, and the first year's snows were being carried on the breeze when Candlemass finally felt well enough to be restless.

Hospital food was beginning to sicken him, despite the fact he still couldn't eat solid foods, but he could now take walks around the hospital, and sit outside when the weather was warm.

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?

The Skraelings (retold)

I was asked for more details on the skraelings story from Candlemass, so here it is.

Candlemass had said it was nearly midsummer's night eve, and the guard had already changed twice by the time he went on patrol. The moon was sitting, swung so it sat nearly on the horizon, so it almost seemed like a part of the houses whose lights shone steadily in town. The wall was, as always, ablaze with torches set in brackets on the wall's walkway itself at a regular ten foot interval, and the entire place smelled of tar and pitch.

The evening had been particularly hot and close- it felt like the night was a blanket, pressing in on you, closing in wetly on the perimeter the torches cast. It was a close darkness, and watchful. Even past the firelight, Candlemass could see eyes, glinting at him from the darkness.

Some, he knew, were probably wild animals. But only some.

Questions...

Someone just mentioned this to me- I never did think to question why Candlemass decided to hang around me in the first place. This will definitely be something I ask him, as well as the apparent age-time differences a lot of you have pointed out to me, and I never thought of asking him about, either.

While you were gone...

So apparently what was going on was a great deal more than I had expected. Candlemass had mentioned the Red Skull scare wasn't the worst of his problems in the village, but I had no idea how far that extended. But I'll tell you what Candlemass told me.

wtf wasps?

I just found a huge old wasp's nest in the kitchen, chilling on the sideboard.

My mom doesn't know how it got there, and neither does my dad, and I'll be fucked if I put it there.

I threw that motherfucker right in the garbage. Screw that shit.

A Better Morning

My day just got infinitely better. Candlemass showed up right after the dude did, maybe with about an hour leeway. He loomed out of the shadows right next to where I was working, looking ominous. Startled me pretty badly, seeing something yellow and billowing out of the corner of my eye where nothing had been before.

Furthermore, his nose and forehead were bloody, and he was wiping his face with the back of his wrist even as he was speaking to me. "Chickadee, are you alright?" Apparently, he'd gotten wind of what had happened earlier this morning due to the fact that the person was actually a village council member who was incredibly sore that his hero Candlemass wasn't around for him to fanboy on. He also assured me he'd given Crow a drubbing for what he'd done to me, the rest of the council be damned. He was the one who recalled Candlemass for the Red Skull scare, which hadn't been nearly as serious as Candlemass had thought.

As straight from Candlemass's lips: "Nathaniel Crow needs to get a life. He has to understand that what I'm doing here has importance, too." I'd never seen him look so serious before- his eyes have a habit of getting much bigger, and his mouth thinner, so he looks a bit older than he really is when he does that.

After making doubly sure I was okay ("I'm okay, Candlemass, I'm okay!") he told  me he had to go again. He was handling a particularly troublesome case back in the village at the moment, which he promised to tell me about when he gets back.