[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 28] A Name Made Whole Again
There was another workshop beneath Melchior’s workshop.
It was larger than the room above, and far older. The walls were not made from Medina brick but from seamless black stone. Narrow pipes reached across the ceiling toward the chimney. The forge was cold, yet the smell of heated metal had sunk so deeply into the chamber that it seemed to rise from the floor.
Lucca stopped halfway down the stairs.
She understood the purpose of half the tools on the walls. The other half she could not even tell how to hold. A metal-cutting saw hung beside a pair of crystal tongs. Beneath a slab that resembled an anvil, dozens of fine needles had been arranged in a circle.
“You have all this down here, and upstairs you use an ordinary hammer?”
Melchior did not turn.
“Why use any of this for a job an ordinary hammer can do?”
He laid the two pieces of the Masamune on the long worktable at the center of the chamber.
A gap two fingers wide remained between the hilt and the broken blade. When the Dreamstone was placed beside them, faint light flowed from both fractured ends. The red layers inside the stone began to move at the same pace.
Marle asked, “Does the stone recognize the sword?”
“A stone recognizes nothing.”
Melchior drew a thin metal needle across the Dreamstone’s surface. The red material did not crumble. It stretched after the point like a strand of molten thread.
“But it holds the passage of power. Longer than any metal. Longer than a person’s memory.”
He finished the sentence and looked at Crono.
“Where did you find this?”
“Ioka.”
Marle filled in what Crono’s short answer left unsaid.
“65,000,000 B.C. Their chief, Ayla, gave it to us. It mattered to her whole village.”
Melchior’s hands went still for the briefest moment.
“And she parted with something this large?”
“We didn’t exactly get it for nothing.”
Lucca raised her bandaged wrist. “Though most of the trouble came after we had the stone.”
Melchior looked from the injury to each of their faces. There were questions in his expression, but he asked none of them.
“Then I will waste as little of it as I can.”
He lowered the Dreamstone onto a round cradle before the forge. First he chipped a tiny piece from one edge with the crystal tongs and placed it in the fire. The fragment, no larger than a fingernail, dissolved into red light. A low resonance passed through the room. Once Melchior had studied its color and tone, he slid the cradle and the whole stone into the forge.
Crono moved closer to the worktable.
A bell-like presence stirred inside the broken sword.
It was not quite the voices of Masa and Mune that he remembered from the Denadoro Mountains. It was something that had not yet become speech—a force striking through the metal, one half searching for the other.
Melchior said, “This will take time. Go and wait.”
Lucca did not move.
“I can help.”
“With that hand?”
“Only the right one is hurt.”
“You cannot hold a tool with stubbornness.”
“That’s why I’m going to use my left hand.”
They regarded one another in silence.
The old smith sighed first.
“Third regulator on the left. Turn it only when I say, and not one mark farther.”
Some of the exhaustion left Lucca’s eyes.
Marle leaned toward Crono.
“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
Melchior sent Crono and Marle upstairs. Once the forge was lit, the lower room would become dangerously hot, he explained, and every unnecessary body was one more distraction.
When the trapdoor closed, the workshop returned to the ordinary sounds of evening.
A bell rang somewhere in Medina. Footsteps passed through the lane on their way toward the statue of Magus. Crono sat in the empty space beside the worktable. Melchior’s short sword hung at his waist. The locked chest that had held the broken Masamune stood open.
Marle watched the village from the window.
“In 600 A.D., a war is being fought because of that name.”
Small lights appeared one by one before the statue.
“Here, it’s been remembered for four hundred years.”
Crono thought of the Hero’s Badge on the table in Frog’s home. The names of Magus, Cyrus, and Melchior had all survived by attaching themselves to different people and objects in different ages. He still could not tell how much of any remembered story was truth, and how much was the hope of the one doing the remembering.
The first hammer blow sounded below.
Clear and brief.
A second followed, lower than the first.
The two notes began to alternate.
Marle pulled an empty chair across from Crono.
“Do you think Frog will take it?”
Crono did not answer at once.
Frog had asked them to repair the sword, yet said he was not ready to wield it. A broken blade could be restored. Whatever memory he had fled from could not be hammered back into place by Melchior.
“All we can do is bring it to him.”
Crono nodded.
“What comes next is Frog’s choice.”
As the night deepened, the hammering slowed.
Once, Lucca pushed open the trapdoor and climbed halfway out. Soot streaked her face, and damp strands of hair clung to her forehead.
“Water.”
Marle handed her a cup.
Lucca drained it and turned to go back down.
“How is it?”
“According to Melchior, we haven’t even started.”
“It’s been hours.”
“Ask him that downstairs and he gives you another tool to clean.”
She complained, but her eyes were bright.
“He isn’t just joining the metal. He’s teaching both pieces to remember the same flow of power. Heat through one side, then the other, and the Dreamstone fills what’s missing—”
She stopped.
“I’m watching him do it and I still don’t understand.”
Lucca did not often admit that so easily.
“Did you ask him?” Marle said.
“Every time I ask, I get another hammer to polish.”
Crono’s mouth curved.
Lucca pointed at him.
“If you have enough strength left to laugh, you can come work the bellows.”
Melchior’s voice came from below.
“Regulator!”
“Coming!”
Lucca disappeared again.
Crono and Marle dozed in their chairs. Each time they woke, the darkness outside had thinned. At some point, the hammering stopped altogether.
Just before dawn, the trapdoor opened.
Melchior emerged first.
He looked far older than he had at the beginning of the night. His beard was singed at the ends, and red dust covered both hands. Lucca followed with a long, narrow bundle cradled in her left arm.
Crono stood.
Lucca laid the bundle on the worktable.
The cloth came away, revealing a single sword.
It had not been polished into something new. The marks left by the Denadoro Mountains and older battles remained along the blade. The wear on the hilt had not been erased. But there was no seam where the sword had broken. A line of red ran through the metal, fine as a thread, binding hilt and blade.
Marle caught her breath.
“The Masamune…”
At the sound of its name, two notes rang from the sword.
One high. One low.
This time there were clearly two presences, distinct and awake.
Crono reached out. Melchior stopped him.
“It is not yours.”
Crono withdrew his hand.
“I know.”
Only then did Melchior wrap the sword again.
Lucca looked toward the lower workshop.
“What happened to the Dreamstone?”
Melchior pointed below.
Dark red husks and glassy powder were all that remained on the cradle. The shape of the great stone from Ioka had collapsed. None of its inner light remained.
“Its size did not fill the gap in the sword,” Melchior said. “The power held inside it did. What remains cannot be used again.”
Marle gazed down at the lightless fragments.
“There won’t be a stone to show Ayla.”
Crono remembered Ayla’s request when she gave it to them: bring back the sword when it was whole. With the stone gone, that promise carried even more weight. He secured the wrapped Masamune across his back.
Melchior did not follow them to the door.
“When you deliver the sword, do not demand an answer.”
Marle turned.
“Why?”
“The sword waited while it was broken.”
When they returned to the End of Time, Gaspar saw the bundle and asked nothing. Robo offered to examine the repair, but Lucca stopped him. Frog had to see it first.
They did not rest for long.
Before the pillar leading to 600 A.D., Crono tightened the straps around the Masamune. As the light took them, a clear chime sounded from the sword on his back.
It was no longer the sound of two pieces seeking each other.
It was the sound of them crossing the same road together.
Rain fell over Truce Canyon.
The wind in this age was nothing like the heat of prehistory. It smelled of wet grass, turned soil, and smoke from distant soldiers’ fires. The three travelers followed the forest path toward Frog’s home.
Several sets of bootprints marked the ground outside. Guardia soldiers had come and gone since their last visit.
Crono knocked.
Movement inside stopped.
After a moment, Frog opened the door.
His gaze passed over their faces and settled on the bundle across Crono’s back.
No one spoke first.
Crono entered and placed the sword on the low table. He unwrapped it one layer at a time.
The blade, joined by its red line, shone beneath the lamp.
Frog did not move.
The Hero’s Badge, which had lain at the far end of the table when they left, now rested directly before the light.
Marle noticed, but said nothing.
Frog’s hand stopped above the sword. His fingers trembled. Before he even touched the hilt, two clear tones rang from the Masamune.
The lamp flame wavered.
Frog closed his eyes.
He remained there for a long time, like a man listening to a voice from years ago.
When he opened his eyes again, Crono pushed the sword toward him and stepped back.
Frog finally took the hilt.
“You truly restored it.”
“I said I would.”
Crono’s answer was quiet.
The sword appeared almost weightless. Even so, Frog lifted it like a man forcing open a heavy door.
He drew a hand’s breadth of the blade.
The red line glowed.
Another night moved through his eyes: a rain-dark cliff, a sweep of black cloth, the back of a man who had stepped in front of him.
Frog returned the blade to its sheath.
“Grant me this night.”
Remembering Melchior’s warning, Marle nodded.
“We’ll come back in the morning.”
The three had reached the door when Frog called after them.
“Crono.”
Crono turned.
Frog held the Masamune and the Hero’s Badge together.
“What did you see on the road to mend this sword?”
Crono thought of a chief who gave away her red stone, of Kino returning to confess what he had done, and of Azala refusing to leave Nizbel’s side.
“People who returned.”
Frog held the short answer for a long while.
When the door closed, he was alone.
The lamp burned low. Rain filled the silence above the roof. Frog laid the sword across his knees and covered the old wear on the hilt with his hand.
Then, for the first time in many years, he spoke the name he had spent so long avoiding.
“Cyrus.”
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