The color of molten gold.
On an evening at the very end of June or start of July 1977, a man from Golub-Dobrzyń in northern Poland took his guard dog, a medium-sized mutt, for a walk in the forest on the edge of town. The woods there are crossed by a network of old, collapsed trenches from the war.
About ten metres from one of the trenches, the dog stopped and stared. A man climbed out. He was young, early twenties at most, tall and lean, with a mane of dark wavy hair and a goatee. He wore a dark wide-brimmed hat with feathers, a green cloak patterned with leaves, dark jackboots and heavy gauntlets. What the grandfather remembered most were the eyes: wide, and not light brown but the colour of molten gold.
The two men stared at each other in surprise. The grandfather remembered that the town castle was about to hold its first re-enactment of a knights' tournament and asked whether the stranger was there for it and had got lost. The stranger answered in a language the grandfather didn't know. It wasn't German or English, and to him it sounded like something Romance. He only spoke Polish, Russian and a bit of German, so they couldn't understand each other.
The stranger pointed at the growling dog and asked something. Before the grandfather could answer, the dog broke its leash and charged. The stranger lifted a hand and pointed a finger at it. A burst of purple light flashed beneath him with a bang like a huge firework, and the dog turned and fled, yelping. The young man looked at the grandfather with what seemed like disappointment and guilt, flicked his wrist, and vanished in another purple flash and a sudden gust of wind. The grandfather ran home and found the dog already waiting at the gate. He didn't walk near the trenches again that summer.
Around two the next morning he woke with a strong urge to look out of the kitchen window. In the yard by the garage stood a dark outline with the same golden, glowing eyes. It seemed to gesture, held his gaze for a few seconds, and disappeared in a glowing purple circle and a gust that shook the branches. He went back to bed and fell asleep quickly. In the years that followed, he said, the plants on that exact spot always grew taller than the rest.
The grandchild who shared the story says his grandfather was a rugged, practical man who didn't read fantasy, told almost no one about it, and was deadly serious when he did. He called the stranger the Hat Man, or the Wizard.
