by Eric Vall
The hardest part of the process had been finding a suitable primer to go on the butt of the bullet, but I was surprised to find the blacksmith had a small cache of unstable, slightly explosive minerals for some of his work that needed a little extra power. I made sure to be extra careful as I handled all of these dangerous ingredients, and in the end, I was the proud owner of a box of ammunition crafted entirely by my hand.
The next day, Aurora and I left the Oculus and headed into the heart of the city. We left on foot shortly after breakfast, and the rising sun was still crawling over the foothills. When we arrived in the craftsmen’s quarter, we entered a throng of citizens and nobility headed toward the market. I slipped my hands into my pockets and simply reveled in observing this new city in a new world.
“This way,” Aurora instructed as we reached a fork in the road. If it weren’t for her hand at my elbow, I would have wandered off with the crowd toward the smell of cooking food and the sound of live music.
“Sorry,” I said apologetically with a sheepish grin. “Lead the way.”
I followed the Ignis Mage through the winding streets of the capital. We walked past restaurants and tailors, even a jeweler’s shop with a bright blue diamond showcased in the window. Nobility strolled through the streets, casually shopping, their paces unworried and unhurried.
My steps, however, quickened the closer we drew to the watchmaker’s. I even outpaced Aurora a few times.
“Elias is not going to disappear, you realize this, yes?” she asked dryly as she attempted to keep pace beside me. The half-elf might have been an elite warrior, but her legs were notably shorter than mine.
“Yes, but the sun will, eventually, and I want to try to have at least one of these weapons completed by tonight,” I argued as we reached another intersection and Aurora directed us to the right.
“Why the rush?” the blue-haired maiden asked with a frown.
“No reason, really,” I replied perhaps a little too quickly. “I’m just eager to have a working prototype already.”
Aurora didn’t look even remotely convinced, but before she could argue her feet began to slow and she looked past me up the road.
“There it is,” she said as she indicated toward a small shop set between a baker and a fancy-looking apothecary. The watchmaker’s window was inlaid with an intricate design of golden wires, crafted to form the shape of gears.
Pure excitement burned through my veins. Behind that wooden door could lay the answers to all my problems.
“Time to meet the watchmaker,” I said with a broad grin.
A bell chimed to announce our entrance as I opened the door and we crossed the threshold into the shop. The space wasn’t very large. There was barely more than an aisle of free space for Aurora and I to walk forward into. To our left, a long glass counter stretched down the wall and formed an L at the opposite end of the shop. Beneath the glass, intricate and beautiful clocks and watches were displayed. Many of them looked to be crafted from gold, and some even had precious gemstones interlaid in their designs.
While Aurora and I were admiring these pieces, a man came out from a door at the back of the shop. He was an older gentleman, probably in his fifties or sixties. He wore a leather tunic over a gray shirt, and he had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. Gray hair clung in wisps to his balding head, and I couldn’t see the color of his eyes since he squinted at us through a small magnifier set against his left eye.
“We’re closed,” Elias grumbled in lieu of a greeting.
“Come now,” I said with a charming smile as I approached his counter. “That’s no way to greet paying customers is it?”
“It is when I have a deadline for the king to meet,” the watchmaker scowled. He flapped his hand dismissively at us. “I’m too busy now. Come back next week.”
“I only need a moment of your time,” I argued as I tugged my leather bag off my shoulder and placed it on the glass countertop.
“That is what everyone says,” Elias grumbled as he squinted harder at Aurora and me. “Although I must admit, most everyone is not a mage of the Order of Elementa.”
There was a hint of curiosity in his voice, and I tried not to grin. I had piqued the watchmaker’s interest. Now I had to reel him in.
“I can guarantee you that absolutely no one has ever brought something like this before you,” I said as I patted my leather bag.
Elias stared at the satchel for a long moment, torn by his own curiosity. Finally, he lifted his gaze to me.
“Well, are we going to stand here all day?” he asked brusquely. “Or do you plan to stop wasting my time?”
“I apologize,” I said as I hastened to open my bag. As I lifted the flap, however, a thought occurred to me and I paused. I looked back to the watchmaker and extended my hand.
“Forgive my lack of manners, I forgot to introduce myself,” I said. “My name is Mason Flynt. My companion is Defender Aurora Solana.”
“A Terra Mage,” Elias mused as he inspected the back of my hand. He frowned as he came to the silver line that marked me as other. “But what’s this? I’ve never seen a mark like that before.”
“That mark is partially the reason I’ve come to see you today,” I explained as the watchmaker released my hand.
“Oh?” Elias asked with a cocked eyebrow. I didn’t know how he did that without dropping the eyepiece that seemed welded to his skin.
“It is a long and convoluted story,” I went on as I started to open my bag again, “but the crux of it is that I’ve been commissioned by Mage Abrus to craft a weapon that will help defend Illaria.”
“I am no weaponsmith,” Elias frowned.
“I know,” I replied with a nod, “but you are a man who deals with intricate and moving parts all day, so I believe your expertise will be invaluable to me.”
“How so?” the watchmaker questioned.
I reached into my bag and, one by one, pulled out the items I had brought with me today. First, there were a handful of schematics I had sketched out with charcoal on yellowed parchment. Next came the box of bullets. I pulled out the welded frames of the revolver and lever-action rifle last.
The watchmaker’s eyes were immediately drawn to the burnished, silver metal. “What are those?”
“These are my failed attempts,” I explained as I spread out all of my materials. “I know how these weapons should look, and I know how they should work. My problem is that I need a few intricate parts to put them all together, and I don’t have a single clue where to begin.”
As Elias inspected my schematics and examined my metal frames, I noticed him stare at each piece as if it was a watch he was appraising, and I guessed that whatever work the king had commissioned from the watchmaker had faded from his mind in an instant.
“How did you even come up with these ideas?” Elias muttered as he flipped through several pages of drawings. When he lifted his gaze to me again, he finally unsquinted enough for me to see the bright bewilderment in his brown eye.
“A revelation from the gods brought to me in a dream,” I replied with an easy smile. It didn’t seem like such a lie. A goddess did come to me while I slept, and my life on Earth already felt like the ghost of a dream.
The watchmaker grumbled under his breath and continued to read through my notes. It seemed he wasn’t very religious. He was, however, a very curious man.
“So what, exactly, would you need from me, Terra Mage?” Elias finally asked at length when he finished his inspection. “Crafting these pieces would take a forge larger than the one I use for my watches.”
“The metal work is of no issue,” I assured him. “I can make whatever we need. I just need you to figure out where all the springs, screws, and little pieces go.”
Elias frowned. “I think you are misunderstanding how hard and time consuming this undertaking will be. It will take days, weeks to perfect.”
“I was thinking hours,” I replied with a broad grin.
The watchmaker gaped at me like
I was insane. “There is no possible, conceivable way--”
Before he could finish his sentence, I reached out and picked up a tiny, discarded, brass gear that had been lying on the glass counter. As Elias watched, I held the gear in the center of my palm and let a little of my magic trickle out. A moment later, the yellowish metal began to bubble and then liquefy. When there was nothing more than a metallic puddle in my palm, I sent out another stream of magic, and the gear reformed into its original state as if nothing had ever happened.
“Like I said,” I responded smugly, “I was thinking hours.”
The watchmaker was silent for a long time. He simply stared at me unflinchingly and without blinking. Finally, he reached up, extracted the eyepiece, and set it on the counter so he could look at me squarely.
“In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like that,” Elias said slowly as he shook his head. “I-I didn’t even know a mage of metal could exist.”
“Mage Abrus believes I might be the first,” I replied as I puffed out my chest a little, “which is why I want so desperately to complete these weapons. The gods must have blessed me with this power for a reason. I can think of no reason nobler than the protection of Illaria. Please, Elias Sayer, will you help me?”
The watchmaker glanced across his glass countertop one last time. He reached out and pressed his finger to the still warm gear that I had set down beside the revolver frame.
“When would you like to start?” Elias asked as he lifted his eyes. Curiosity and eagerness shone brightly in his eyes as I was sure they shone in mine.
“My schedule’s clear the rest of the day,” I replied with a grin. Behind me, Aurora walked back to the shop door and locked it before she flipped the open sign in the window to closed.
“Then let’s begin,” the watchmaker intoned as he put his eyepiece back on again. He reached for the first of my sketches and began to compare them to the revolver frame I had made.
Aurora reached my side again and flashed me an excited grin. I echoed the expression. Before I could say anything though, Elias spoke up again.
“Are you two going to stand there grinning like fools all day or are you going to help me?” the watchmaker groused.
“Sorry,” I quickly replied. “What can I do?”
Elias pointed over his shoulder without turning. “My tool bag is in the back,” he said. “Bring it to me, and then you’re going to sit here and explain word by word how this infernal contraption of yours works.”
“Yes, sir,” I said with a mock salute and jumped to follow his instructions.
The rest of the day passed in a fevered fog. Once I had walked Elias through everything I knew about guns, the watchmaker had taken out his own paper and began his own sketches. His were a lot more detailed, technical, and intricate, but he used mine for references. He also inspected every inch of the frames I had made, magnified and up close.
“Well, here is your main problem,” the watchmaker pointed out as he touched the unmoving cylinder. “For these to move, there needs to be a fulcrum and a spring involved.”
“Great,” I replied eagerly. “So, where do those go and how do they attach?”
“I don’t know yet,” Elias responded without looking up. “I’m still working it out. Have a little patience.”
I tried to suppress a groan. Patience was not a virtue I had in abundance.
It took the watchmaker a few hours to come up with a sketch for a prototype. I quickly learned that Elias was a perfectionist in all things. It was probably this work ethic that made him the best of his trade in all the kingdom. Unfortunately, it also made time go by incredibly slow because until the watchmaker completed his diagram, there wasn’t much for me to do. I tried to add what I thought were insightful comments here and there, but Elias eventually bid me to be silent, so I mostly just sat there and watched him work.
After what seemed like an eternity, the watchmaker finally handed me a finished schematic.
“Let’s try this,” he said to me.
“Perfect,” I all but moaned as I snatched the paper out of his hand, eager to get to work.
“I’ve indicated here where there needs to be space left and how much,” Elias said as he pointed to the drawing and the notes he had added. “Make the frame first, without the cylinder this time, and then we’ll go piece by piece.”
“You got it,” I replied and then reached for my own metallic, failed designs.
I started with the revolver first. I held the metal in the palm of my hand and concentrated on channeling my magic. The frame melted in my hand and, once it was malleable enough, I began to reshape it.
It was a little hard at first. My magic wanted to fill in the blanks with what my mind pictured as a gun. I willed myself to ignore all previously conceived notions of the weapon and concentrated on the schematics Elias had drawn up as if I had never even seen a gun before.
When I was finished, the skeleton of a single action revolver sat in my hand, sans the cylinder and trigger. It was mostly just the barrel at this point.
“Perfect,” the watchmaker said as he took the frame from me once the metal had cooled. “Now, on to the next part.”
We continued like this for the rest of the day, only pausing when Aurora brought us a late lunch of fish and cheeses from the marketplace. Elias and I ate in record time and were back at the glass counter again before the half-elf even had a chance to touch her plate.
Piece by piece we crafted the gun as the sun descended toward the horizon, bathing the shop in a golden glow.
“Make a screw exactly this size,” Elias would say to me, and I’d channel a little magic to fulfill his request. We worked like a well-oiled machine that way. The watchmaker would tell me what he needed, and I’d make it with barely a thought. Sometimes, pieces wouldn’t fit or line up the exact way they were meant to, and Elias would have to refigure some numbers, but mostly the process went by smoothly if a little slowly.
When the streets of Illaria were bathed in the orange rays of sunset, Elias finally stood back and set down one of his many miniscule screwdrivers. Sweat had gathered on his brow and at his temples while we worked, but he grinned as he lifted his eyes to mine.
“I believe we are finished,” he said hoarsely. The watchmaker coughed into his fist and reached for his canteen of water on the counter. “Gods, I haven’t worked on something this hard in decades.”
I looked down in wonder at the completed revolver on the glass counter. It looked like it had been transported straight from Earth as I had been. The only things missing were the wooden grips.
“This is amazing, Elias,” I said truthfully. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” the watchmaker grunted. “We still need to test it to see if it works.”
“It’ll be safer if I do that outside of the city,” I explained to him. “I don’t want anyone to get injured by accident. If something doesn’t work, I’ll return here tomorrow, and we’ll figure it out.”
“Does that mean we’re done for today?” Elias asked with a cocked eyebrow. The older man’s body looked tired, but his eyes burned with an excited fire.
“Almost,” I said with a wince. “How long do you think it would take you to sketch out a diagram for the larger weapon?” I felt bad for keeping the exhausted watchmaker up, but I wanted to leave here with as many testable weapons as possible.
The watchmaker glanced down at my less-than-accurate representation of a lever action rifle and shrugged. “After what I learned today, perhaps a few more hours.”
“If I offered to lend you my services and magic whenever you wanted, within reason, could you do it now?” I asked.
Elias considered me carefully as he weighed out his options. Finally, he said, “If you promise to demonstrate these weapons for me when they’re ready, you have a deal, Terra Mage.”
I grinned and offered my hand to the watchmaker. He shook it and then sighed as he picked up his eyepiece again.
“My curiosity wil
l be the death of me one day,” he grumbled to himself as he set down to work once more.
Elias’s estimate had been almost spot on. Now that he knew the mechanisms involved, he was able to come up with a schematic for the rifle in half the time. I was also well versed in this dance by now, and I was molding pins and screws before the watchmaker even knew to ask for them. Within three hours, the rifle was completed, sans the wooden stock just like the revolver.
“That is all I can do,” Elias said wearily as he collapsed onto his stool and rubbed tiredly at his face.
“You’ve done more than enough,” I replied. “All that’s left is to test these now, and that’s up to me.”
“We’ll test them first thing in the morning,” Aurora said as she clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Tonight, we could all use with some rest.”
“Testing won’t take very long,” I argued with a frown. “Less than half an hour.”
“Well whatever you do, you can’t stay here,” Elias groaned as he came to his feet and flapped his hands at us. “I am old, and I am going to sleep. Shoo. Take your lover’s quarrel somewhere else.”
“Oh we’re not--” I began to explain, but the watchmaker was having none of it. He swept my sketches and box of ammo into my leather bag and held it out to me.
“Good night,” he said firmly as he shoved me toward the door. I barely had time to scoop up the revolver and rifle before I was booted unceremoniously out the door.
“Good n--” The front door slammed in my face before I could even finish. I winced and glanced at Aurora who was faintly smirking.
“Was it something I said?” I asked.
“From what I’ve been told, Elias Sayer is usually not so accommodating,” the half-elf told me.
“It must be my indescribable charm,” I replied with a grin.
“It is certainly something,” Aurora remarked. Her greens eyes studied me intensely for a moment before they shifted to examine the dark street around us. “Come, we should return to the Oculus. The sun set hours ago. Abrus will wonder where we are.”