The door of the cutlery shop was weary, groaning in the hinges as they had forgotten their dignity years ago. Erik shoved it open with a familiar, practised thud with his shoulder. The blade of common daylight sliced into the room, leaving its mark on the floor as the dust danced beneath.
The air inside was a museum, not a book, but of old steel and quiet grime. The scent of oil and whetstone lingered in the air for a decade, seeping through the walls. It was the smell of a library where all the books are cutlery—arranged, intact on the shelf as the door chime rang to tell his presence.
Edna stepped behind him, and the noisy street slowly faded as the click sound of the door rang in her ears. Her eyes wandered, the front room was a necropolis for things that could cut—knives lay in velvet coffins, hachets and cleavers hung from hooks in the low ceiling, a dangling guillotine gallery for the unwary. Every shelf, every counter, was a testament to mankind's greed for slicing.
And behind the counter, the slab of oak stained by a thousand greasy hands. An old man is standing there. His gaze was focused on one point; the whetstone in his hand and the blade.
The rhythm broke. The sound stopped. His hand, holding a stone, hovered mid-air. As though the limbs were remembered, it was attached to a man.
"You're back," the words came, not as a greeting, but a fact.
"Gramps, you do a custom weapon?" Erik's voice cut through, breaking the solemnity of the shop.
The old man's hand stopped moving. He placed the stone down with the finality of a judge passing a sentence. His whole body turned, a mountain pivoting on its foundation to regard a particularly stubborn stain.
"My life may have already become rust." His voice was the sound of gravel being ground under the hill. He held his hand—Thick, scarred, misshapen things that looked more like a tool who learned how to bleed, "but these hands were never enough to become rusty."
"A weapon, a great sword, the grip takes full two hands, above the crossguard, there's a crescent moon-like shape to the front. Leaving the space between rough as if it were the second handle."
The old man's gaze was a physical instrument, a set of clippers measuring the boy before him. A look at measuring the worth of the steel.
"Before you bought hand axes," he grunted. The words fell like a stone dropped into a pond. "Now a sword, and not a common one."
His eyes were two chips, buried beneath the leathery ruin of his ages, slowly unfolded from their wrinkle nest, "What are you exactly preparing for, lad?"
The silence that followed was a solid thing. The kind of quiet found at a grave and the forgotten battlefield.
As the boy's gaze lifted and met his. The old man felt a cold draft, not from the door, but from the gaze itself. It wasn't youth-filled; it was a pair of open graves. There are no fires within it, no passion, no fear. Just flat, chilling finality.
When his voice is out, it is low—like a stone dropped into a bottomless well.
"...For a war."
It wasn't a boast. It wasn't a dream. It was a statement of fact, simple and terrible as it dwelt on its solemnity. A voice of a man reading his own epitaph.
The old man closed his eyes, not from the dread, but a line of something he shouldn't interfere.
"...I see," the words escape with a sigh that smelled of iron and coal.
"Three hundred gold crowns."
The moment of grace was over; now the universe demands a payment.
The number hung in the air, a physical verdict to the ears.
Erik didn't flinch; his hands slowly met, covering his mouth as he leaned forward to the counter.
"....quarter."
The word not only hangs in the air; it sullied it. A blasphemy to the sacred cathedral of his craft.
The old man's hand, a rough, leathery map of a lifetime of his honest work, was deliberately covering his face. His fingers pinched his forehead as if to shove back the absurdity into his brain. When he spoke, his voice was low, a seismic rumble of continental plates of patience grinding against each other, "I'm sorry, lad. The soot in here must be clogging your ears. I said three hundred crowns."
Erik's eyes were straight, gazing into the soul of the old craftsman's with an unbattered gaze, "...quarter."
"Lad," the word was a spark on tinder, ready to leave its burning trace to the boy before him. "Is the mage at the academy hexed your brain? A quarter? For that?" He said, his voice trembled, not from fear, but something more grandiose than a mere world-shattering disaster. "The steel alone costs more than that!"
"Come on, gramps!" Erik countered it with the placid tone of someone trying to convince others why the sky is green. "Last time you let me have that hand-axe for a quarter. Consider it as...."
He paused, the new phrase coming, escaping from his mouth with an audible click, "...loyalty discount."
"Loyalty discount?!" It wasn't a scream that escaped from the old man's mouth; it was a beastly roar of a predator defending his territory. "Last time I gave it to you for a quarter because of that sunny like troubadour you bring along reminds me of my granddaughter!"
His hand dropped to the counter, sending the whetstone and the blade he was sharpening flying for a moment, "That does not establish a precedent! That does not mean you get to come in here, with your face like a slapped cliff and a new girl in tow, and demand I bankrupt myself for your 'epic quest'!"
Erik, as if immune to the emotional outburst, pressed on with a straight face. He blinked a few times, his brain processing the outburst as a mere vendor dialogue that exists somewhere deep inside his mind, "So,... sixty?"
The sound escaping from the old man wasn't a word; it was the strangled death rattle of reason. "SIXTY?!" The countertop shuddered as a rain of dust fell, pattering down. "WHY DID IT GO UP?!"
"Final over," Erik stated, with the serene finality of a prophet delivering an inconvenient truth to congregants. "...fifty-five."
The vein on the old man's temple bulged into a throbbing, purple map of pure wrath. In the winter, steam would have been whistling from his ears as his face purpled. A teakettle of fury coming to a boil, "I'LL SHOW YOU WHAT A FINAL OFFER IS, YOU LIL'—"
"Stop it."
The voice coming from Erik's behind was quiet, soft, yet cut through the old man's roar like a wire through cheese.
Edna didn't look to either of them. Her gaze dropped low, a curtain of her hair shielding her eyes as if protecting her sanity from the blinding shame. Her entire posture was in tremor—not from fear, but of profound, soul-deep mortification.
"Edna," Erik voiced, his tone suggesting he was pausing his own battle of pride. "I'm still in the middle of-"
"Just. Stay. Silent."
The word was a fallen guillotine blade. Fell with absolute, unguarded finality. Edna finally lifted her face, her eyes narrowing to a slit as she leered at Erik.
Her face was a masterpiece of empathetic humiliation as a crimson flush bloomed from her collar to the tip of her ears.
"Do not," she whispered, the words sharp as any blade in the shop. "Embarrass me any more than this."
The judge has already spoken, the verdict has already been given, and the conviction has frozen.