[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 21] The Smith's Name Across Time
The two words MELCHIOR were unnervingly clear beneath the lamplight.
Frog did not pick up the hilt. He only stared at the name. The old metal was layered with the polish of hands and a hundred tiny scratches, yet the maker's mark on the underside was cut deep, as though it had been engraved yesterday.
Lucca traced the grooves with one fingertip.
"What are the odds it's someone else with the same name?"
"Low."
She answered her own question. "Same spacing. Same way the last stroke hooks. The tools in that old man's workshop in Medina had the same mark."
Marle looked at Frog.
"You're saying that Melchior made this sword?"
Frog slowly raised his eyes.
"Thou knowest that name?"
"He's alive in the year 1000."
The moment she said it, Marle wore the look of someone hearing her own sentence for the first time. Frog did too. What filled the room was not the number one thousand, but the four hundred years between it and the age in which they stood.
Frog finally lifted the hilt.
"When Cyrus received this blade, he never met its maker. I was told it had been passed down through an old royal storehouse. No one spoke of whose hands first forged it."
His thumb pressed against the broken end.
"I had thought this name belonged to a craftsman long dead."
Crono looked at the blade they had brought down from the Denadoro Mountains. Masa and Mune had said that the story belonged to the living. Yet no one in this room knew the sword's beginning.
Lucca wrapped the two pieces in cloth again.
"Then we ask the living man."
Frog looked up.
"The smith in thy age?"
"I'm not calling him the same person until I hear it from him."
Lucca settled the strap of her bag on her shoulder. "But if anyone can fix this, we've got exactly one candidate."
Marle slid the Hero Medal across the table toward Frog.
"This is yours."
His hand stopped.
"Tata said to give it back. He says he'll apologize to you himself later."
"The boy hath done no wrong."
"Tell him that yourself."
Marle took her hand away.
Frog stared at the medal for a long while. He did not put it around his neck. Instead he set it beside the hilt. With the two pieces of metal lying side by side, the room somehow felt smaller.
"I still cannot wield this sword."
Lucca started to speak, but Crono raised a hand first.
He did not press Frog. He only lifted the cloth-wrapped blade.
"We'll fix it."
Frog's eyes settled on him.
The brief promise said nothing about what would come after. Mending a sword did not mend the person who carried it. But that was no reason to leave the blade broken.
Frog bowed his head slowly.
"I leave it in thy hands."
By the time the three of them left the Cursed Woods, dawn had caught in the tops of the trees.
Smoke from the war still stained the southern sky, and the change-of-watch horn sounded from the direction of Guardia Castle. Perhaps because Zenan Bridge had held, more soldiers were on the road than the day before. No one stopped the three travelers emerging from the forest. In this age, the memory that they had saved Queen Leene still protected them.
The Gate in Truce Canyon hummed low between the rocks.
When Lucca brought the Gate Key close, blue light split open in a thin seam. Before stepping through, she checked the broken sword one more time.
"I don't love carrying this through a Gate."
"Why?" Marle asked.
"We don't know how Masa and Mune will react to time travel. More precisely, we don't know how whatever's left of their power in the sword will react."
Marle glanced at the bundle.
"Then leave it here?"
Lucca thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"If we avoid everything just because we don't understand it, we won't get anywhere. If anything strange happens, we come right back."
Crono stepped into the Gate first.
As the light wrapped around him, a tiny chime rang from inside the cloth bundle. It sounded like the bell they had heard at the altar in the Denadoro Mountains, only much farther away—as though two pieces of metal lost somewhere in time had briefly confirmed where the other one was.
Then stone returned beneath his boots.
They were at the End of Time.
Robo rose from his place beside the fire. His repaired right hand now moved with almost no delay.
"Return confirmed."
Marle spoke at once.
"Robo, we have good news and weird news. At the same time."
"Please provide classification criteria."
"We found the sword. It's broken. We found the name of the man who made it too, except he's alive four hundred years later."
Robo's blue eyes brightened once.
"Given the existence of time travel in our present circumstances, the second item is difficult to classify as unusual."
Lucca failed to keep from laughing.
"You're getting talkative."
Gaspar had looked asleep on the far side of the fire, but at the name Melchior, his eyes opened beneath the brim of his hat.
"A craftsman's name can outlive the things he makes."
Lucca looked at him.
"You know him?"
"Knowing a name isn't the same as knowing a man."
"When you answer like that, it sounds exactly like you do know him."
Gaspar put another piece of wood on the fire instead. Sparks rose, briefly lighting his face.
"If you're bound for Medina, use that pillar. Though you already know humans aren't especially welcome there these days."
"We know," Marle said. "We've been there."
Robo started to follow, but Lucca pointed at the dent that still remained in his chest plate.
"You stay this time."
"Combat functions are—"
"You said that last time too."
Robo paused, then looked to Crono. When Crono nodded, he returned to the fire.
"I will await your return."
The pillar leading to Medina was shorter and rougher than the other Gates.
The three of them dropped into the same locked cupboard as before. This time they were ready, and no one spilled all the way to the dining table. Crono pressed an ear to the door. The house was empty.
It was afternoon outside.
Small lamps still burned at the foot of Magus's statue, though fewer people were gathered there than during their last visit. The defeat at Zenan Bridge could not possibly have crossed four hundred years to become fresh news in this town. And yet every time Crono looked at the statue, he remembered the smell of the battlefield they had just left.
Melchior's hut still stood southwest of the village.
Smoke curled from the chimney. A hammer rang three times beyond the door, then stopped. Before Crono could knock, a voice came from inside.
"Come in. The door hasn't done anything wrong."
The old man stood at his workbench.
Before he looked at their faces, he looked at the sword at Crono's hip. The sheath of the short blade Melchior had sold him now bore several fresh cuts and scrapes.
"You came back. And no, that doesn't mean I'm collecting the rest of the money."
"We have something else to show you," Lucca said.
She placed the cloth bundle on the bench.
Melchior's expression did not change as the cloth came away.
Then the broken blade appeared.
His hands stopped.
Then came the hilt.
Every sound in the workshop seemed to vanish. Only the crackle of charcoal in the forge and the wind outside remained.
Melchior did not touch either piece.
"Where did you find this?"
"The year 600," Lucca said.
He did not look at her.
"Where."
"The blade was on the Denadoro Mountains. Frog had the hilt."
At Frog's name, one of Melchior's brows moved almost imperceptibly.
Crono noticed.
At last Melchior picked up the hilt and checked the mark on its underside. He studied his own name as though seeing it for the first time.
Marle asked, "Did you make it?"
"The work is mine."
"Four hundred years ago?"
Melchior set the hilt down.
"That's not what matters right now."
Lucca answered immediately.
"It matters quite a lot to us."
"What you're curious about and what you need are two different things."
The old man's voice had dropped. "You brought this here because you want it repaired."
Crono nodded.
Melchior fitted the broken surfaces together. There was a gap between blade and hilt nearly two finger joints wide. This was not damage that could be solved by welding the metal or adding a patch.
"This sword isn't made of ordinary steel. The metal gives it shape. The heart of it is something else."
He opened a drawer beside the forge and took out a small stone flecked with red dust. It glittered like glass beneath the light, but when he held it close to the Masamune, nothing happened.
"Dreamstone."
None of them had heard the word before.
"A red mineral. Records say it was once common enough to be set into crowns and ornaments. In the age I know, almost none remains."
Lucca leaned closer to the fragment.
"This isn't Dreamstone, is it?"
"Just an imitation. I kept it to show the texture and color."
"How far back do we have to go?" Marle asked.
Before answering, Melchior looked from one of them to the next.
"Very far."
"Give me a number," Lucca said.
The old man sighed.
"Before humans built kingdoms. Before they learned to smelt iron. When history was written in bone and stone instead of records."
Marle thought of the glowing pillars at the End of Time.
"Gaspar might know a way there."
Melchior's hand stopped again.
Only for a heartbeat.
Lucca caught it.
"You know Gaspar too?"
"You ask a great many questions."
"Travel through time and see how many you end up with."
Melchior did not answer.
He laid the two pieces of the Masamune side by side on a soft cloth and unlocked a case at one end of the bench.
"Bring me Dreamstone. Enough of it to work with. A few handfuls of dust won't do."
"We leave the sword here?"
"Unless you plan on carrying it around until you break it into more pieces."
Crono looked at the blade for a moment.
Masa and Mune were quiet. The sword did not feel like something that chose for itself whose hands it would trust. In the end, the choosing was always done by people.
He pushed the wrapped pieces toward Melchior.
The old man closed the case.
"One more thing."
The three had turned toward the door. They stopped.
"If you meet someone who possesses that stone, don't start by asking the price."
Marle tilted her head.
"Why not?"
"The older a thing is, the more likely someone kept it for a reason that has nothing to do with money."
Melchior picked up his hammer again.
"Take away the reason, and you may bring back the stone without ever bringing back the sword."
The sun had dropped low by the time they stepped outside.
A long shadow stretched behind Magus's statue. Crono looked briefly at his empty hands. The blade they had won on the Denadoro Mountains, and the hilt Frog had guarded for years, now remained on Melchior's workbench.
Marle took out the Gate Key.
"Before humans built kingdoms."
Lucca pushed her glasses higher on her nose.
"We'll see how far back Gaspar's oldest pillar goes."
Crono was already heading toward the house and the hidden Gate inside.
They were no longer searching for a sword that could defeat Magus.
They were searching for the red stone older than history that might allow that sword to become whole again.
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