1 The Store

The Western Kingdom; a land of magic, a land of legends.

It is a land where humans walk side by side with elves, where adventurers delve into dark dungeons to seek their fortunes, and where magic has seeped into the land itself.

It is also, I reminded myself, a land of jackasses.

The particular jackass who brought this train of thought to my mind was an unassuming old man, skinny and hunched over with thin snowy hair, who was holding a potion in one hand and a coin purse in the other and was looking at me with confused and clueless eyes.

"This potion won't make me strong?" he asked.

"No sir," I told him, summoning forth every ounce of patience in my tired body. "It's a Potion of Restore Strength."

"So it will restore the strength I had in my youth!" he insisted.

"It restores strength from like exhaustion and curses and stuff," I explained to him. "Generally, we sell those to day laborers, and sometimes adventurers."

He looked at the bottle and furrowed his brow in frustrated confusion. "But I want to be strong like I once was."

"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't sell anything that does that," I said.

"But you have this!"

"That Potion cures exhaustion," I told him once more. I really didn't know how else I could explain it to him.

He stared at me with uncomprehending eyes, as if I had just spoken in a foreign language. I kept my smile firmly on my face. I was certain that it wasn't reaching my eyes, but experience has taught me that customers never noticed that particular detail; they like pretending that the guy at the counter loves seeing their stupid, clueless faces.

"Are there any potions that can restore my youthful strength?" the old man asked.

"Yes, sir, but we don't carry any. You'd have to go a high-end alchemy shop like Gulenheim's over on Palace Street, or maybe a decent magic shop like Killias and Sons."

"Those places are too expensive!" the old man shouted.

I nodded. "Yes, sir, but we don't carry anything like that."

"You should!"

"They are, as you just pointed out, expensive," I said. "We can't afford to carry any."

"You just don't want to help me!" The old man slammed the potion on the counter furiously. "I shop here all the time, and this is how I'm treated!?"

"I'm sorry," I lied. "But there's nothing I can do."

He stormed out of the store, leaving me shaking like a bundle of stress. That's not a great simile, given that "bundle of stress" was an accurate and probably literal description of my state, but there you go.

My name is Corvus Aiaar, the only son of two shopkeepers in Istalfax, the capital of the Western Kingdom. My parents had been having me help out in their general store for years, and I utterly loathed every second of it.

My sisters seemed to do better. My younger sister, Dove, even seemed to genuinely enjoy the work. How she could have such animated conversations with nearly every customer who walks in was beyond me.

"You doing OK?" my older sister, Egretta, asked.

I jumped. I hadn't even noticed her walk up behind me. "Fine," I said. "I don't know what his problem was."

She shrugged. "He's an ass," she said. "Sorry for making you fill in for Dove like this. I know you like it better working in the back."

"Or doing deliveries. Or buying supplies." I sighed. "Anything that doesn't involve a bunch of entitled gits yelling at me."

"Entitled gits are going to yell," Egretta told me. "That's what entitled gits do." The front bell rang as someone else walked in. "We're pretty slow today, so you should go do your deliveries," she continued quickly.

"Got it," I said. In addition to the store being slow, the man who had just entered it was Hargir, a young, up-and-coming adventurer with the kind of muscles that made me feel woefully inadequate. He always came in to stock-up on supplies between dungeon-delves and monster-slaying and whatnot. And also to chat with Egretta, who, I noticed, could not seem to tear her eyes away from his well-defined arm-meat.

"Corvus," he said with a nod at me, and then he turned his attention to my sister and smiled that dashing smile of his. How his face looked so boyish when the rest of his body was so ripped was beyond me. He pushed some of his sandy-blonde hair out of his eye, presumably to get a better look at Egretta.

Like me, she had thick black hair. Dove was the sibling with the golden locks; something she inherited from our father. Hair-color-wise, Egretta and I took after our mom.

I left the two to flirt with each other and headed into the backroom, and checked the boxes and the paper notes on them. Three deliveries. One was a bit hefty, but the other two were small and light. Probably best to bring the cart though; I didn't want to lug around a crate of coal all over the city if I was just using my arms.

Literacy was a skill that had, until the past few decades or so, been solely the domain of the upper class. Most lowborn folk like myself could only read a few words here or there; enough to get on with our daily lives. That had changed when some bright, starry-eyed inventor had trotted out the printing press. Suddenly, there were books all over the place and everyone was learning how to read. There was still some grumbling among the nobility about that, but from what I hear the people in charge of law and finances have been singing praises of mass literacy. It makes it a lot easier to collect taxes and get word out about ordinances when the average person is capable of deciphering text.

Unlike my parents, my sisters and I had grown up in a literate world. That's not to say my parents were illiterate; they had learned well enough, but there were plenty of people in older generations who still struggled. I suspected that I would have less trouble with the old man earlier if he could properly read the label on that potion.

The point I'm getting at with this big tangent is that the notes on the boxes told me who each delivery was for, and that I have no idea how we would have managed to get deliveries out like this a few decades ago, before literacy was commonplace.

Loading four boxes into the hand cart, I headed out to make my deliveries, completely oblivious to the fact that today would set off a chain of events that would eventually make me world-famous.