It was a large place, consisting of several conjoined houses on a narrow street in this large German city. The yellow-red bricks shone now in the rays of the summer sun, a stark color contrast with the brackish waters soiling the street. It was a home to the homeless, a place of refuge, a fortitude...for the right price.

A man of youth who went by the name of Kilik had heard of this place, and, having money and a need of home, came up to its door with his travel bag in tow. A matron of a woman opened the door at his knuckles' question, and began her long and needless oration meant to make a sell. The two made their way to the inn's third and highest floor, one to sell and the other to rent.

The unoccupied room was quite large compared to most inn rooms the man had recently been in. Walking at a steady rate of speed, it took him about three seconds to travel the length of it and two seconds to travel the breadth of it. It had two marred and miry windows looking out the back of the house onto an alley below, and a small fireplace with a chimney in a corner. A mirror was above the fireplace, and on a mantle between the two were vestiges of the room's previous transients. A desk, chair, and drawers occupied another corner of the room and a bed the other, and in the remaining corner of the chastely square room was a door leading out to the hall. A bath and place of relievement was at the end of the hall of rooms, so that he need not even descend from the third floor.

Although the place was more than he expected, Kilik did not yet hand over the week's rent, for he knew that the moment he did so the woman would most probably leave him to attend to whatever it was a keeper of an inn attends to, and he wanted to ask her a few questions. He had been in search of someone for nearly half a year now, a girl most dear to him. She had left in search of some sword, but somehow they had lost contact of each other, so he had decided to personally seek for her. He kept the keeper of the inn occupied with an interrogation of all persons who had come through this place, but apparently she had never heard of a person with the name he sought.

After handing over several coins from his diminishing money bag, Kilik began looking at the clues strewn around the room of its previous occupants. Tiny fingerprints on the window spoke of inquisitive children standing at the window, beholding the life outside their world. A splattered stain on one wall told of a drunken man's fury, where he had thrown a bottle of his drinks at some real or imagined adversary. Several ominous blood stains littered the room's thin carpet, and some gaudy, forgotten shoes were bemoaning their state under the desk.

Lying on the bed, Kilik let the sounds of this building waft over his senses. A rakish monologue was chiding some jejune unfortunate in one room, and in a room directly next to his a sick person's annoying cough sporadically made its presence be known. In one of the rooms below his some person was playing skillfully on some musical instrument, and in a room from an unidentifiable direction there erupted bursts of laughter from time to time, bespeaking itself of a group of raucous men telling their rehearsed japes.

Suddenly Kilik let out a shout, a greeting, a question. That smell! It was a scent he would never forget, a perfume that haunted his memories from the time he woke to the time he slept. It was the fragrance of his paramour, her very essence in a waft of air. Kilik jumped off the bed and very nearly expected to see his love standing in his doorway, but he saw no one, the door was still closed. Going into a near frenzy he began to pilfer the room of its contents, looking for any clue, any hint that his girl had lived here for awhile, leaving behind her what he had sensed earlier.

He leaped towards his reflection and scrutinized every tiny object on the mantle. There were several hairpins, bespeaking of feminity, but they could have belonged to any woman. A few stray playing cards and a fake-gold piece were the rest that was there, none of them his lady's. Kilik fairly ran towards the desk's corner, though the distance was so short he took as much time stopping as actually moving forward. Several nondescript bills lay on the desk's wood top, and all that was below it were the crying shoes. Nothing could explain for certain the fading scent. Kilik fairly tore open the drawer's boxes, flinging out each item as soon as he ascertained it was not his love's.

After he had looked at each and every item in the room again and again, he calmed himself down and fell back on the bed. He could not regain his sense of that which had made him go berserk, but this only made him more despondent. He lay there for several minutes, his chin sunken into his chest in utter dejection. But then, again! That waft that spoke of air, clean, fresh air, something so simple and yet somehow exotic, plain yet beautiful beyond words. Guessing then that she who he had loved most had slept in this very bed, he leapt to his feet again and ran to find his landlady.

A long and thorough inquisition of his room's last tenants...their age, their size, their appearance...reaching back to a year ago only brought as much information as his previous questions. Returning to his room gloomier than ever, Kilik slammed the door shut behind him. He sat himself at the desk and wrote a long and sad letter, full of poetical twists and turns. Once finished, he lowered the blinds of his windows, darkening the room. A great symbolism, he thought, as my faith in my quest has faded into dark oblivion also. He pulled the latch on his door to lock it, and then kneeling on the floor solemnly pulled a dagger out of his boot. He laid the weapon in a ribbon of light coming through a crack in the blinds, causing the blade to send off a faint glimmer. He prepared himself to take his final breath, but then an occurrence stopped his outreached hand.

There it was again. Screaming in frustration, Kilik cursed his nose and swore that he would torture it with fire before he ended his own life. Leaping to his feet one last time he threw open the door and went out into the hall. A strange turn of fate caused him, even in his rage, to notice the contents of one of the rooms beside his, its door, unlike previously, being opened. It was a dark room, its blinds pulled down and no fire lit, but a ribbon of light fell upon a brilliant metallic object, a dagger lying in the middle of the floor. Kilik could've sworn that it was his own room he was looking at, but in his wrath towards his nose he did not consider the peculiarity.

As he approached the innkeeper's haunt he heard something that froze him in his tracks. Wondering if maybe he had already died, and was repeating history, he heard a thick and groggy voice, like of one who has a cold, ask the matron for a source of fire. Dazed by the strangeness of what he was hearing, he stood where he was in a stupor, unable to will his feet to move. Once the dialog ceased, he heard the inquirer's footsteps walk towards the corner he was hiding behind. Suddenly a horrid thought struck him, what if this person, asking for what he was going to ask for, was the person who owned that room beside his, the one with a dagger in its middle also? Such a coincidence could only mean that this person was supernatural, and was here to punish him for thinking of taking his own life. Kilik opened his mouth in a silent scream, and futilely pleaded with his feet to flee from this angel of death, but the punishing angel had placed a curse upon his body that held him there to stare in horror as it came around the corner.

It was not an angel of death or punishment…

“Talim!”