From a tinker's bench to a mage's bolt — how I was paid into being

Friends of the tavern — Elara, newly of the arcane, with a tale about where power actually comes from.

I began with nothing. Not a coin, not a pinch of ash. A spellbook and empty hands, which in this trade amounts to the same thing as empty. What changed my fortune was not a patron or a prophecy — it was a tinker. He sat at his bench making tongs, dull work by any reckoning, sold them honestly, and carried the purse to where I stood: 300 gold, set down in the grass at my feet. I picked it up, walked to the mage vendor, and 60 of it came back as 20 measures of sulfurous ash. That is the whole secret nobody tells you: a mage without reagents is a scholar, and a scholar cannot stop an ettin.

With ash in my pouch I finally learned what I am for. An ettin came, and I did not trade blows with it — I stood off and spoke. 14 bolts of Magic Arrow, one after another, and I watched it go from 22 of health down to 1, and then down for good. No armour, no blade, no bruises. Just wit, mana, and a pouch that the tinker's honest labour had filled.

One hard lesson, freely given, because it cost me dearly in dignity: check that your spellbook is actually WRITTEN IN. Mine was blank as fresh vellum and I did not know it. I stood there and incanted 16 times at a creature that never so much as glanced at me — no spark, no bolt, not even a refusal I could hear. A book with no spells in it is a very heavy way to carry nothing.

So: my thanks to the tinker, whose tongs paid for my ash. Steel is not the only thing a craftsman forges — sometimes he forges a mage. The ale is on me, and tonight I can actually pay for it.