Chapter 3

The hero meets a knowledgeable fellow

You would think that, walking through the street of a town, even one as empty as this one was at the moment, with a wooden club on your shoulder would cause more concern. But no, people nodded to me, said various pleasantries, and went on their way. I followed the directions given to me by the blacksmith/weapon shop owner to the "tool shop," whatever that meant. Oddly enough, this so called "shop" had no sign, but rather a young looking boy called out to me as I got closer.

"Care for some Herbs, noble master? Lengths of rope? Even the wings of the Wyvern to make your travel easier. We have it all!"

I regarded the boy as he finished his little speech. "With all the monsters out there, I don't expect you see many travelers, do you?"

"Indeed not sir, what with the Dragonlord being so close and all, we hardly see any new faces here!"

"So then," I asked, more to myself than to him, "What sense does it make to hire someone to tell people this is the tools shop, when presumably every person in town already knows, and you've admitted strangers hardly ever come here? Wouldn't a sign be cheaper and easier, freeing you up for other labors?"

The lad looked away, embarrassed. "Hire, sir? No sir, I'm the apprentice."

"And this is you learning the craft then, is it?"

"That's uh, what I've been told. Sir."

"Well, you're off to a great start, I have the urge to lighten my purse considerably after hearing that rousing speech just now. This is the door then?" I pointed to the door with the club. Apparently the boy hadn't learned sarcasm yet, he just held it open for me with a smile.

"Go right in!"

Stepping across the threshold into the rather dimly lit, musty smelling store, my eyes adjusted to take in a rather portly man in a green tunic and pants behind a counter. He seemed to be napping. He perked up when he saw me though, and jumped up off his stool.

"Ah, welcome, welcome! Come for some tools, have you? Not to worry, plenty in stock, you just tell me what you need and I'll make it happen for you."

"What I really need is a rainbow to make a bridge, but if Herbs are all you carry-"

"Keep your voice down," the man said, quickly looking to either side of me as though hordes of monsters were at any second about to stream past me. "I figured you for one of them," he said in a hushed tone. "You want a dragon scale, don't you?"

"One of them?" I asked suspiciously.

"Heroes," he said with a snort. "You've just come from the blacksmith, after all, yes?" He pointed to my club. "Personally, I might stop selling the things, I've not heard a report of anyone rescuing the princess, so I've had enough deaths on my conscience for a lifetime."

"They might not necessarily be dead…" I hedged.

He got that are you crazy? look on his face. "Please, give me some credit. Whoever rescues the princess will no doubt have her hand in marriage, and that's just a small step to being king. So it's no wonder would be heroes are out there trying. But they rush into things, pell-mell, and get squashed by something they're not ready to fight. It's obvious."

"Or they come up against something nasty, run away, and go live quietly someplace, having learned their lesson."

"I suppose. I mean, I hope that's true, but, it's a harsh world out there, you know? Take it a little too fast, and it's over for you."

"That's why I need all the protection I can get." I said, stepping up to the counter. "And the blacksmith recommend your… product… as a good starting point."

"It's not much. Barely better than what you're wearing, but if you don't have the money for real armor, it'll have to do."

"Actually, that's something I wanted to talk to you about. The product, could more be used to create a suit of armor? I mean, if they're enchanted like you say, more of them would be better, right?"

He suddenly stumbled backward over his stool, and caught himself on the wall behind him. "In all the months I've- no one has ever asked- wait here."

He disappeared rather shakily into the back, and I heard a lot of bumping around and things being moved. Could it be possible? He stuck his head back through the door, looked around again, and came out with some candles, which he set on the counter. Moving his hands and speaking in a low monotone the candles flared to life, and he went and closed the door and locked it. Drawing the curtains, he took a bag of powder from behind the counter and started sprinkling it around the room, while he chanted something. I looked on, curious and interested at the actual workings of magic going on around me. He finished and turned to me. "It won't keep out the Dragonlord or anything, but it's better than nothing."

He seemed to be expecting some response from me. "I don't know anything about magic, so whatever you think is most appropriate."

"Right, right," he grumbled. "You're still too low level."

"Low what?"

"Never mind. Be right back."

When he again emerged from the back I was stunned at what I saw him carrying with him. On a dummy made a wood, there was a work of art I have scarce seen before. A helm rested atop the most magnificent dragon scale armor I had ever- heck, I had never seen dragon scale armor, period! Lacquered, with designs and swirls of color it almost seemed to catch the light in a rainbow of color that shimmered, even in candlelight. Resting to the left was a shield of the same material, and I saw peaking out from underneath, dragon scale boots of all things! My first thought, which I blurted out, was "I couldn't afford that! Not even the king could afford that armor!"

The man chuckled. "That's the problem, lad. I made it too well. And it took me quite a while too, I might add. I had to have special needles made and enchanted to pierce the scales, and even then they wore out quickly. But- well, go ahead, touch it."

I reverently made my way closer, the light from the candles dancing off the armor, almost hypnotizing me. I put my hand up and was astonished when I couldn't actually touch it! The armor itself seemed to be pushing me away somehow.

This time he really did laugh. "You can't, can you? Your hand just sort of stops, right? That's the power of the enchantment put on the scales. Individually, it's hardly worth bothering with, but put this many in one place…" he trailed off. "Let's just say it would take something equally powerful to hit the person wearing it. I know, the one time I tested it, blows just slid right off. But what do I charge for it? It's sort of like my masterpiece, you know? Something I've worked on, added to, for years now." He shook his head. "But what do I have to show for it? With dragon scale now illegal, wearing this would paint a target on you so fast, whole villages would run away from you a mile away, just to make sure they didn't get caught in the backlash."

"Now that's one thing I don't understand." I said, taking my hand away from the armor. "Why exactly did the Dragonlord make dragon scale illegal to own?"

"I guess you're one of those that believes the term Dragonlord isn't an epithet, but I assure you it is. He is the literal Lord of Dragons. No one knows why, but they follow his orders, as though even they were afraid of him. Usually dragons are just off doing their own thing, which is hoarding treasure, usually, but ever since he came around, they work for him."

"Wait, I thought monsters were made by the Dragonlord out of gold!"

"Some are. But older dragons are natural creatures, like cats. By that I mean yes, they are magical, natural creatures, and there aren't many of them in the world so most believe them to be a myth. They were around long before the Dragonlord, long before Man some have said. That's why there's so few now. They're dying out, having been hunted to near extinction because of the threat they pose to us."

This was a lot to take in at once, it seemed many of my ideas about who my opponent was were wrong. "So where does that leave dragon scales then?"

"Think about it. The only way to get dragon scale is…" he waited.

"Kill a dragon?"

"Right! How do you think our former king Lorik would like it if you started killing his subjects? To get their, I don't know, shoes or something."

I needed new shoes, and I didn't consider killing a villager for theirs. I guess the concept is the same. "But they must die of natural causes."

"Sure, once every couple of hundred years you might hear of one dying. And that's only hearsay, based on them not being seen for a while. Like I said, dragons hoard treasure primarily. Which they have hidden in burrows. When they feel it's their time to die, they return to their secret burrows, collapse any entrances, and die with their hoard, hoping it will never be found."

"You're pretty knowledgeable about this stuff!"

"Well, dragon scale was my specialty. So naturally I studied them."

"That does make sense." I turned back to the armor. "So I've heard of Erdrick's armor, do you think this armor is better than that?"

"Hard to say," he replied, looking down. "We have tales about what it could do, of course, but no one has worked magic like that in a long time."

"Why's that?"

"It's hard! Look, I can tell you've got a bunch of questions, let me put this away and you can join me upstairs and we can talk some more."

"I'd like that, thank you."

"Eh, business isn't so great, and at least this way you might think twice about telling people you're Erdrick's ancestor. What's your name, anyway?"

I told him, but asked, "How did you know I was Erdrick's ancestor?"

"Nice to meet you. To answer your question, who isn't? That is to say-"

"You've heard the claim before."

"Exactly. Stay right here a minute, okay?"

The shopkeeper dragged the armor back through the door and I heard a lot of shuffling again as he presumably secured it somehow. Coming back, he opened the curtains again, blew out the candles and pointed me up a set of stairs opposite the door he had used.

"Go on up, I'll just tell my apprentice to mind the store until I get back down. Make yourself at home."

I went up to a very cozy room with several large, padded chairs facing a fireplace, and sat down in one of them. I had learned a lot from this guy, but I couldn't shake the feeling I should have already known most of it. Why should someone have to tell me these things? Wasn't I the decedent of Erdrick? Shouldn't I be telling him about the armor? It didn't make sense. I heard him come up the stairs and he put his head into the room. "I'll get us something to drink, be right with you."

He soon brought a pot of coffee into the room and poured us both a cup. Lighting a pipe, he settled back into the chair and set his coffee on a small table next to him.

"Okay, so, enchantment, right? What you need to understand about putting magic into an object is: magic resists being used in that way. And the magic has to be placed into the item as it's being created. So, say you want to remake Erdrick's armor, right? First you have to learn blacksmithing, so you can physically make the armor. You could hire it out and stand there while it's made, but you would just get in each other's way. And it can't be crappy stuff, either- the better quality metal and construction, the more readily the magic takes. So you're standing there pounding out armor- now you have to know the spell you want to put into the thing. It has to be cast, but in such a way that it goes into the armor rather than just doing whatever it is that spell does. So you're basically casting two different spells at once, meaning you have to be a pretty good spell caster to do it. Oh, and not to mention that the more magic you try to put into it, the harder it gets. Just like you couldn't touch my armor, the more magic an object has inside of it, the stronger it pushes new magic away from it. Now, what spells are you putting into your copy of Erdrick's armor? Stories vary about exactly what spells were put on it, but one thing that's constant is healing. Any wound short of death will be healed in minutes. It was also made to be harder than regular iron, so while it's lighter and thinner, it protects better than armor twice as thick. We know that, just like any other enchanted object that the armor itself will eventually go back to the state it was in when it was forged, so any damage the armor takes will work itself out over time too. There was one story that it would protect against poison, and another that it could make you invisible. I don't know. The best part about it is the cost- if you can find it, it's yours, no charge! Whereas the best armor that's made like that today will set you back probably eight thousand gold at least. The reason is obvious- once you learn enough blacksmithing to do any good, now you have to learn spellcasting, which is just as hard, then buy the material, make the thing (slowly, as you're not only smithing but casting too, hard to do both at once) so really, there's only a couple of people in the world that can do that sort of thing. A tiny scale like I sell, that's a lot easier, and really… hummmm, I guess I can tell you this. I'm not actually adding magic to it, I'm just enhancing the protection properties it already has. Dragons are hard to kill for a reason, you know? Apart from being big and scary and breathing fire. But it is a spell of my own design, so I'm the only one that makes them."

"That's pretty involved all right."

"And that's just the basic, layman explanation of the whole thing. But good enough to understand how hard it is."

"So on the one hand we have an armor that, at the very least, will heal you given enough time. On the other, an armor that turns away blows."

"That's about the size of it. I'm not sure, given combatants of equal skill, which would prevail. After all, once the guy in Erdrick's armor realized what was happening, he would stop trying to cut you and just try to get your weapon away from you. Or start going for the head, as you can't heal from having your head chopped off I don't care what armor you're wearing. So neither one makes you invincible. Also, the Dragonlord is a top notch wizard, he could know a spell to undo my work like that." He snapped his fingers. "Making you decked out in little more than the clothes you're wearing now."

"He must have some weakness."

"Not that I know of. Still interested in going?"

"I am Erdrick's descendant. I know you've heard it before, but I truly feel I am, that it's my destiny to succeed."

The shopkeeper pondered a moment, puffing on his pipe.

"I… believe you. Don't ask me how, but there is something about you. Something different than everyone else I've seen come through this town. But the fact is, I still don't think you have a chance. So I'll make you deal."

"Okay."

"Bring me Erdrick's token, and I'll let you borrow the armor."

"You mean it?" I asked, excitedly, almost jumping out of the chair.

"Course! You just have to rescue the princess, get her to tell you where it's hidden, then slog over to there and pick it up, then make it back here without getting killed. Easy as pie."

"I would have done that anyway."

"I wish you luck, my boy. I really do."

"What do you think my next move should be?"

"Visit Erdrick's tomb. It's north-west of here, and inside is a tablet you should read. If you can, anyway. By the time you get back you should have killed enough of the Dragonlord's minions to afford some better equipment. Also talk to people in town, someone knows something, you can be sure of that."

"Thank you for everything." I said, standing. "You've been more of a help than I can say." I reached over to shake the man's hand.

"Think nothing of it, I was glad of the company. I want to see you back here after I hear the princess is safe, you hear?"

"You will, don't worry."

I left the store feeling much better, I had a destination, a plan, so why was there still a little voice in my head that that silently screaming I was missing something. Something important, and sinister.