They were approaching the old man, praying face down in front of an empty white field. The atmosphere of the place pressed on four newcomers, both physically and mentally. Something was obviously wrong. Something caused fear and apprehension. It's like a nightmarish event had happened, which is difficult to imagine. You don't know about it, but you feel how every particle, molecule of the air has absorbed this memory and is trying to tell you about it with an inexplicable metovis.

The old man himself was dressed in poor clothes of orange and yellow colors. He had a bald head and a shoulder-length gray beard. His whole frail and tortured appearance resembled an unsuccessful toll collector hoping for a miracle, but he had no miracle, no money, and even simple bourgeois shoes, only white icy feet with long, cracked nails.

Once they were two meters away from the old man, they took a few steps forward without lifting the soles of their shoes from the ground, as if they were riding on skis, leaving behind a barely noticeable rut, through which fallen leaves peeked out from under the snow. Homer found a working kerosene lamp on the first floor of the bell tower, and now it was swinging from side to side, making an iron creak, with a fire, small and pristine, which was revived after a long sleep. The old man did not move an eye, complete indifference to what was happening around him. He continued to pray and ask someone for forgiveness.

"Are you Matthew?" Egon asked.

The old man froze, looked at the field in front of him for a few more seconds, then picked up his cane and leaned on it and got up and dusted off his knees. He turned around and saw a group of four people. He greeted them with a bow and said in his trembling low voice:

"Ay. That would be me."

"We were told to find you, they said that you are one of the greatest fighters against the Inquisition."

Matthew not only did not smile, but rather wilted at such a statement. He turned away and looked at a small snowdrift near him, took a handful of snow, brought it to his mouth and ate it, as if he had eaten stuck rice. Then he took some more and washed his face. No one understood what was going on, and the old man was in no hurry to talk. He stared at the young people, looked into everyone's eyes, turned back to the field and finally said:

"Aah reckon, aah cain guess who sent y’all to me, but aah don’t see why."

"We would like to talk to you."

"Talk to me?" the old man asked politely, slightly surprised. "Today aah am right in demand."

"We're not the first ones, are we?"

"Nah. Ye’r not."

Egon felt that Matthew was disposed to talk, he answered politely, but he pronounced the words in a kind of incomprehensible form, like he was in a distant world of memories and thoughts. He tried to recover and return to reality. However, old age made itself felt, slowing down all thought processes, as if a lazy milling machine operator was sitting inside him, who could not switch the toggle in time.

"You have been fighting the Inquisition for so many years, do you want to tell us about it?"

“Tell y’all about what?”

“Tell your story.”

Matthew bent down, took some more snow, washed his face, cleared his throat. It seemed that he was gradually coming to his senses, he turned back to make sure of the reality of what was happening, looked at them with his dead and empty eyes, the color was akin to the salty dark blue-green ocean, and answered:

"Ye're here for a reason, ain’t ye?"

"We're here to talk to you."

"You don't look like ordinary people who hang around here from time to time."

"Aye, that's right."

Matthew, not noticeably for the others, used a special metovis technique that shows the aura which every person living in this world, or a metentis or a creature of another race, possesses. Egon's aura was black and white, something he had never seen before. What an unusual young man, he thought. Ofir and Guillotine had the standard white aura for a person. As for what had happened to Homer, he understood immediately.

"Ye have a difficult fate, don't ye?"

"We won't complain," replied Guillotine.

Matthew sat back down on the cold, frozen ground, put down his cane and put his hands on his knees. The wind howled with a new force, lifting the upper, soft layer of snow and twisting it into small tornadoes, which crashed into the old man, and then disappeared; a snowdrift, like river rapids, rushed without memory into the distance all over the field behind him.