The wind slowly started to pick up, and the night blew cold and rainy over the streets of the capital. The lamplighters had been through already, igniting their charges as the first and last line of defense against the blackness of a night that held the potential for terrors both of and beyond the imagination of man. Huddled near one of these lanterns, slowly losing the battle in his urge to crawl under one of them for the paltry heat it provides, was Martin. He stood there waiting for Dillion, his friend and coworker, to emerge from the bar and head home.

  Martin, or rather, the current Faceless Man who had taken over his body, had known Dillion almost from the beginning of his tenure with this body, and it was no exaggeration to say he was one of his closest friends. And Dillion’s relation to the real Martin stretched back far longer than that, and yet, there was still much he didn’t know about his friend. He knew that he lived with his mother somewhere near the Northeast docks, but the exact address was a complete unknown. He knew Dillion had a smile that seemed a crude parody of some Cosmic being trying to replicate what he had only been described in novels. And he knew Dillion came to work with scratches on his face that no cat could have possibly made, and yet there was no explanation forthcoming. So Martin, driven by curiosity and a perhaps misplaced sense of duty, stood out in the gathering cold, waiting to follow his friend to some semblance of the truth.

  Finally, Dillion emerged from the inn with Sly. The two exchanged a long, drawn out goodbye—as if they weren’t going to see each other tomorrow—and went their separate ways. After a moment’s pause to make sure Sly was out of sight. Martin slipped out of the shadows and began to follow Dillion. Dillion was not the most alert man when sober, and when drunk, Martin could have marched behind him dropping all the glasses in the empire to the pavement without Dillion noticing. Despite this though, Martin remained clinging to the shadows, watching behind himself frequently, and trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.

  Dillion’s path led them away from the bars and public houses towards the quieter residential areas. Sure enough, Martin quickly realized they were not far off from the street where he had first encountered the bearded, whistling man he believed was the Grey Man. Here, there were few out given the conditions of the time, and even the houses seemed to stand closer together, their stooped forms bearing witness to countless stories that had unfolded within their walls.

  Finally, Dillion stopped before a modest, two story house, its facade worn by time but still kept with care. Martin watched as Dillion entered, the door closing softly behind him. Driven by his need for answers, Martin approached cautiously, peering around at the streets and windows to see if he was being observed. He hadn’t been near the window long when voices began to drift out towards him.

  “Oh good, you’re back,” an elderly voice was saying. “I’ve gotten so cold since—“ the kindness in her voice evaporated, replaced with fear and confusion. She suddenly cried out “You’re not my son! My son is gone, taken by the shadows! Get away from me you… you thing!”

  Dillion’s response was a study in patience and unwavering love. “Mother, it’s me, Dillion. I know you’re scared, but I’m here to take care of you, just like I always have. Please, try to remember.”

  “No. No! I won’t fall for your trickery.”

  There came a sudden sound of something breaking. It sounded like a dish. It was the kind of noise that used to be heard at Martin and Boudica’s house. Martin hesitated a moment before deciding to back away from the window and head home. He had heard enough, and noises like that were likely to bring someone out to check. It would be pretty hard for him to explain himself.

  Martin made it to the street without being spotted, but hadn’t made it far when the door to the house was thrown open loudly. A woman was standing there in her nightgown. Her thin knees shook wildly in the cold and her eyes were wide in fright.

  “Mom, come back,” Dillion’s voice cried out from the house.”

  The woman made eye contact with Martin and dashed out in her slippers. She made it nearly to him by the time Dillion made his way to the door.

  “Mom, you’ve got to—Martin?”

  Martin didn’t have a chance to answer before the woman was on him.

  “Help me, please. A monster has taken my son. You’ve got to—.” Whatever he had to do was lost to a coughing fit. The old woman’s knees gave out. Martin reached out and grabbed hold of her, lowering her softly to the ground.

  “Are you okay,” he asked. “Do you need me to fetch a doctor?”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “She’ll be okay,” a voice said above him. Dillion was standing there, looking down in sadness. He removed his jacket and wrapped it gently around his mother. Once her coughing fit passed, she seemed to have lost the energy to fight and walked, unresisting, between the two men back into the house.

  Dillion gestured for Martin to take a seat while he helped his mother into bed in the other room. A few moments later, he returned, rubbing his head as if to ward off an ache.

  “Dillion,” Martin began. “I can’t pretend I understand what I just saw, but if there’s anything—”

  Dillion held up a hand to stop Martin. Martin lapsed into silence and gave Dillion some time. After a moment and a heavy sigh, his shoulders slumped with the force of a riverbank being swept away in a flood.

  “That woman is my mother,” he began, “and she’s been… unwell ever since I can remember.”

  Dillion wandered over to the table and leaned against it. His eyes drifted to the floor as if looking for some crack to escape into.

  “She was a painter back when I was born. Apparently her work was somewhat in demand, which is how we were able to afford this place. I was always a quiet child, or so I’ve been told, and used to prefer going off by myself to playing with the other children. Whatever I was doing I barely remember, likely living in a day dream, but one day my mother found me in one of the upstairs rooms, sitting in the middle of the floor, and I wasn’t alone.

  Its arms were around me, she said, slowly letting go as if they had just withdrawn me from some shadowy place and dropped me on the sunny floor. She watched them retreat back through the window, and at the window, she saw a face, ghostly pale with no nose and eyes black as the night. She locked eyes with it, and you know what she claims that monster did? Smile at her. From that moment on she was convinced—I wasn’t her son. I was a monster that had been swapped with her boy. Some damnation visited upon her for some unknown crime”

  Dillion trembled as he relived the memory.

  “She was on top of me before I even realized she had climbed the stairs, her hands grasping at my face, fingers in my mouth, trying to rip the skin clean off. I pleaded and pleaded, but she was beyond listening. That creature’s smile spoke enough to drown out any amount of pleading. Luckily for me, my screaming drew my father, who was able to pull her off before she succeeded in actually pulling off my face or causing any permanent scarring, but the mental damage, that had already been done.

  Over the years my father tried everything, church healers, doctors, resurrectionists, herbalists. Quacks, the lot of them. They seemed to only know how to take my father’s money and leave him with an ever dimmer candle of hope. The money ran out by the time I was old enough to start working, my father didn’t last much longer than that. And I was left with a mother who on a good day wouldn’t acknowledge my existence, and on a bad day, well, you heard the bad day, and we've had more bad days than good recently. Sometimes I wonder if there really was something there that day, and it really did take something from me.”

  Martin reached out a hand and placed it gently on Dillion’s slumped shoulder.

  “Dillion, I—I had no idea you were carrying such a burden.”

  “I do what I can but, I, I just don’t know what else I can do.” His shoulders began to shake. Dillion, who had smiled through every jest and insult Martin had ever seen thrown his way, who had kept his composure through the worst backups and overtime the dockyard could muster, who had drunk with him and Sly until the wee hours of the morning, and not batted an eye when one of them had thrown up or gotten them into a hopeless scrape and needed back up. That Dillion, one of Martin’s oldest friends, began to cry.

  Martin said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. He simply kept his hand on his friend’s shoulder and let him cry. His eyes kept up toward the door, as if he was on watch from someone who might try to barge in on this intimate moment. Dillion’s weeping continued for some time until slowly the tears began to slow. Martin fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and offered it to Dillion, who accepted it with a nod of thanks. He excused himself to the bathroom for a moment and when he came back, he was much the Dillion Martin remembered, but the smile, usually stretched just a bit too wide across his face, was still nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m sorry, Martin,” he began. “I don’t like to talk about it because I end up like that.”

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for, Dillion. I’ve.. seen some things myself,” Martin began. Here he was doing it again, a bit of his truth mixed with his image of the real Martin. “Some of the things I’ve seen… children, wives, families. Those that are touched by the Cosmics, or just by mankind’s cruelty. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but cry.”

  Dillion was silent. His embarrassment at being so vulnerable in front of his friend now superseded by shock at a confession he never imagined hearing from the grizzled veteran.

  “I’m not sure what I can do to help that all those doctors and priests and scam artists haven’t already tried, but what I can say is you don’t have to face this thing alone, not if you don’t want to, and for what it’s worth, you’re human as far as I can see.”

  “Thank you, Martin.”

  Martin took his leave shortly after. It had started to rain while he was inside, and the dark rain fell gently over the city as he made his way home. It fell softly on the house where a woman slept, tormented by nightmares of a stolen child. It fell on the house he shared with his wife, who lay tormented by the Church Retribution that may befall her brother, and of a husband who had done little but give her cause to worry. It fell softly on the corpse of an orphan, her face taken and her body left to rot in an alley. It fell on a Faceless Man, powerless to prevent the deaths of those he held most dear, powerless to remember more than the most trifling of details of them, and powerless and lost to find any way to bring them vengeance. The rain continued to fall, and there among the drops, slowly falling to the dirty streets of a city that had no mind to notice them, were the tears of a Faceless Man.