To Be a Hero

Chapter 3 : The Red Leather Book

Negrad’s old keep, now the library, was structured with cobblestones and Red barked columns in a circle. The library was the smallest structure in the village with only one table for reading inside. Leaves cracked under foot and gently swirled in circles on the floor. Shelves stacked only as high as Nickadamus circled the keep. Most of the shelves empty, besides only a few hundred books. The magistrate came over to Nick and handed him a red, leather bound book. “I found this today while cleaning the shelves. Have you read this one yet?” The magistrate had a twinkle in his eye of anticipation.

“By the Ones where did this come from?” Nickadamus slowly ran his fingers over the smooth surface and opened the book.

“I don’t know, honestly. I have cleaned these shelves over the last 35 years and have never seen the likes of this one before. This place of Negrad’s certainly holds more mystery than we could ever know. Books come and go, vanish if you will over time.” The magistrate sat down beside Nick and wiped the sweat from his palms on his robe.

“This just appeared this morning?” Nickadamus could hardly contain his excitement. “How long since the last book arrived here?”

“Almost a decade my friend!” The magistrate wiped a tear of joy from his eye and smiled widely at Nickadamus. A plump and round man the magistrate was. With clean shaven face his pudgy cheeks glowed red with every smile. His hair began turning white at the temples late last year. Moraine jested at the youthful magistrate’s spirit finally coming of age with the rest of his body. The magistrate visited Moraine often for muffins that were said to turn back the color of age. Nick hadn’t seen on this day those muffins helping his white hair as much as helping his middle grow beyond his belted tunic!

“The pages are some sort of gray parchment but thin as ice and delicate. And the words are not written with quill surely. To write with these words shaped like these must have taken a long time. They are square here, and circle here?” Nick read a passage from the first page,

“ So little and so full of magic. She buried her ballo under the grass, a job well done.” Nick rubbed his chin and repeated, “ballo.”  Nick turned to the magistrate, “May I take this home with me magistrate? I would like to read it tonight.”

Smiling with pure joy the magistrate replied, “Of course Nick! Please, do not get so caught up with this red book that you forget the Great Feast. Oh Moraine has baked her runeflower bread, I have smelled it all day long.”

Nick took the book and ran to his favorite rock on the hill overlooking the village. He sat on the large flat silver boulder nestled atop long sweet grass. This large rock looked almost as if placed in a grassy field on purpose. Nick had found this rock as a young boy, instantly climbing atop and stood looking down at his village. He could see the villagers going about their daily tasks below, but they never seemed to look up and notice him, least of all his mother whom would shout for Nick to come home for supper.

As Nick sat now, hands on a warm leather book, completely new and mysterious as his flat rock, millions of ideas came flooding to him at once. He closed his eyes and let the stories of old come to him in perfect clarity.

Over 100 years ago, on a hot summer morning, people of a village not named anything in particular were farming. Mostly farming was all these people did. Fishing, farming, children chasing bulls in the pastures, rabbits, and the occasional deer could be spotted among the foothills of the great mountains around the valley. These people did not know anything unusual about these mountains, where they came from, for them, they had always existed right there in the valleys within the mountain range. There were other villages beyond the streams, and occasionally men would herd their livestock across to those villages, but later return either with materials or with different animals in trade. These people were content living here and living as they were. They knew no different from anything they already had, and so it was, on this morning, everything changed.