Samuel rowed his boat with the whole party out onto the lake. The trip had been full of laughter, stories, and many, many dad jokes. The conversation died, however, as the dark shape of an overgrown island loomed out of the mists. The boat's hull crunched against the rocky shore, and the team piled out.

“I will wait here for you to finish,” Samuel waved at them with Lorenzo as they walked into the dense vegetation.

A faint path wove through the overgrowth, leading them deep into the middle. Just when the group was thinking they had taken the wrong route, a small cabin appeared ahead of them.

“He's home,” Malakos whispered, looking up at the smoke curling up from the chimney.

“So how do we do this?” Deruque asked.

“Wish I'd made cookies. Visiting people is always easier with cookies,” Ruby said.

“What, we make cookies and pretend to be Kobold Scouts?” Bardy asked.

“You'd fit the profile,” Malakos shrugged.

Bardy shot him a dirty look.

“Anyway, I suppose our charismatic 'force of nature' should be the one to approach the door, cookies or no,” the tiefling continued.

Bardy looked at the cabin. It had appeared small, from far away, but closing the distance had made it evident that the proportions were simply off. It was not a small cabin with regular doors—it was a normal-sized cabin with towering doors. The person who would build such a place must be at least eight feet tall and three or four feet wide. The halfling gulped.

“I'll go with you,” Ruby said, placing a hand on his shoulder. Bardy reached up and knocked on the wood, then immediately turned and scampered off the porch.

“Ohwellnoone'shome,guessweshouldjustleave!”

“Wait, I hear something,” Ruby said, still on the porch. The rest of the party moved closer, Bardy clinging to Malakos's leg.

Heavy footsteps approached. The door creaked open, revealing a deep gloom inside. From the gloom emerged the biggest person any of them had ever seen. His face was gaunt, bedecked with a long beard. He was surprisingly young, despite the haunted look in his face, and his considerable body mass was mostly muscle on broad shoulders and formidable limbs.

“Holeee....” Bardy started.

“Holy Mace,” Ruby spoke over him. “We wanted to speak to you.”

The man's face darkened at hearing the name. “I do not answer to that title. It has been a long while since I'd even heard it spoken.”

“Yeah, I imagine you haven't—there's no one here to speak it but the squirrels,” Bardy quipped, under his breath. Holy Mace looked at him, and the bard quickly stuttered, “W-we've heard great stories about you—stories of heroics unmatched. Of goodness and greatness in word and deed. We've come to beg your aid in the name of the oppressed.”

“My aid? What good could the aid of a warrior long gone and forgotten be to the forces of good?”

“W-well, we're leading a revolution. Against a tyrant king. You've overthrown your share of those, if half the stories we've heard are true.”

By now, the party had followed him into his cabin. He hadn't invited them, but he hadn't closed the door on them, either. Ruby looked around. The house consisted of one room, with a table and a chair, some pots and pans, and a hunk of meat, drying on a hook from the kitchen ceiling. A small fire smoldered in the chimney, and above it, on the mantle, rested a large mace as long as one of her legs. The Holy Mace, from which the hero before them took his name.

It was covered in dust.

Ruby continued glancing around the room. Quite a lot of the place was covered in dust, as a matter of fact. Retired heroes didn't place much stock in domestic upkeep, it seemed. But then, the demeanor of the man before them didn't exude the air of one overly concerned with keeping up appearances... or really, concerned with anything at all. He looked hollow, in a way.

What could have broken him so?

“I cannot aid you,” Holy Mace rasped. His voice sounded like this was the first time he'd used it in a year, and already the strain was showing. “I am not the hero you idolize. I am not the man for the job. Go home.”

“But people are dying!” Bardy objected.

“People are always dying! It never ends! I did not spend my life as a hero—I did not retire to this island to have would-be adventurers like you showing up and preaching to me about duty! You have no idea what I have seen sacrificed in the name of duty.”

“So what did you come here to do?” Malakos asked, slowly and pointedly swiping a finger across the mace on the mantle and rubbing the dust between his fingers. “Quietly wait out the rest of your life here, where you can't hear the cries of those who need you? Living each day as nothing more than a stretch of time between sunrise and sunset?”

The shoulders of the giant man drooped just a fraction, and uncomfortable silence fell. Bardy cleared his throat and said softly, “We'll... we'll leave now--”

“I'll go with you,” Holy Mace said.

Malakos released the breath he had been holding since he'd insulted the massive hero, slayer of who-knows-how-many-much-bigger-and-stronger-fiends-than-Malakos-himself-was.

“Follow me. I must first fetch an item of importance, from the field of my last battle,” the hero said.

The party walked through the woods, buzzing with excitement.

Success! Malakos thought to himself. One objective down, two to go. And with the prestige of such a legendary hero on our side, soon we'll have recruits flocking to our cause!

Deruque walked beside Holy Mace, subtly sizing him up while exaggerating his own strut to assert dominance.

Ruby still wished she'd brought cookies.

“Here,” Holy Mace said, pressing past the foliage into a wide open field. For the first time since marching into the woods, the party could see the sun through the dissipating mists. Visible also through the mists, however, was the grounds of the field--

--covered entirely in bones.

“This...was the...field of your last...battle...?” Bardy asked, picking carefully past a human spine that twisted through the eyes of a larger skull—orc or ogre, maybe.

“What were you fighting?” Deruque muttered. It had been meant as more of a hypothetical question, but Holy Mace reached out a massive hand, pointing into the middle of the field. The figure was faint, but clearly dead—its skeletal figure somehow still standing even what must have been decades after its defeat. As the mists finished disappearing into the sky, the party's stomachs filled with cold dread. The skeletal figure was large, as large as Holy Mace. Its armor, though rusted, looked heavy. It had been as strong as Holy Mace, as well.

The skeleton was Holy Mace.

“I told you,” the voice of the figure they had been following gurgled, no longer straining to mimic that of a person it hadn't heard in decades. “I am not the hero you're looking for. He is long gone and forgotten.”

“Aw, bannit,” Malakos groaned as black tendrils of slime poured forth from every orifice of the pretender's stolen skin until a fifteen-foot monster of stygian ooze wearing a bronze mask loomed over them.