The Cursed Blood

than one would expect). It’s a wonderfully cluttered treasure trove of tools, camping gear, building supplies, and dark ages implements of death and mayhem.
Gramps had to all but drag me out, as I had taken to staring wide eyed at the battle axes lining the far wall beside the racks of sandpaper, bins of bristly wood handled paintbrushes, and a large barrel of cane rodded fishing poles.
He nodded a curt goodbye to the aproned, white shirt and black bowtie sporting clerk, who with an arched brow and amused smile returned the gesture, chuckling to himself as he straitened up a rack of very questionable magazines and badly pretended not to have been watching the whole thing.
Next, we went to a place identified as “The Mercantile” in faded gold paint from a creaky wooden sign screwed into the wall over the rickety looking porch. There was a squeaky screen door hat never seemed to stay closed.
Swaying, creaking, and banging in even the slightest wind into the old rocking chair (of which there were two, set on either side of a rusted iron ringed barrel stamped as once containing Oak matured mead, with a checkerboard painted on its top) that only the old Fey who read the wanted posters (several of which displayed one member or another of the Clampetts clan) and notifications tacked into the cork board above them ever sat on. Although how they managed to play checkers with so many missing game pieces is well beyond me.
I remember that even back then that second step up to the porch creaked terribly and was just warped enough to send you into the dirt if you weren’t careful (something I did more than once as I dashed up them over the years). Something the proprietor decided to fix by nailing a brightly painted CAUTION sign onto the porch support that likely took longer to make that it would have taken to fix the dratted step.
Here Gramps had me sized up by an older, grey haired lady with pointed ears poking from her curls named Myrtle, who was in a colorful shawl, floral blouse, and long flowing skirt that he told me was another half-blood (part human, part something else).
Though she was obviously of a much kinder disposition than the trio we had run into over breakfast. She quickly and efficiently had me measured foot to waist to neck, took Gramps’ list, and without a word was off to fill our order.
In no time at all a bag of odds and ends, two boxes of boots, and a heavy brown paper parcel wrapped in twine containing my new wardrobe was packed and waiting on the counter. Much like we had at the Wayfarers and hardware store, Gramps paid in an odd coinage I’d never seen before that he later explained is the Feyish tender of choice.
The currency is mined and minted by the Dwarves deep under the earth in a secret process that renders them impervious to attempts at counterfeiting. And further protected and backed with a promise that trying to do so would cost a counterfeiter their heads. It’s actually a fairly simple monetary system.
The thicker octagonal gold ones are called crowns and are stamped with a depiction of an empty throne on one side and a crown on the other. Evidently cut throats, assassins, and such call these daggers, due to them being the cost of a life in Feydom’s dark underbelly.
You need ten of the silver oval ones to equal one gold crown. These are called harpers, as they’re stamped with a merry looking lute toting jongleur on one side and a harp on the other.
The last of them is tiny, round, and made of copper, and it takes twenty of them to equal a silver harper. These are nicknamed hovels but are actually properly named gibbons, which has nothing to do with the species of monkey or the horn of plenty. They have goblet stamped on them. To be honest no one really knows why they are named that—they just are and that’s the way it’s been as long as anyone can remember.
Next, we were off to the town Apothecary dubbed “Doc’s Kitchen” from a faded and peeling sign over the porch. It’s set conveniently at a crossroads neighboring a vacant lot and across from the town’s tiny post office.
Another unmistakable landmark across the street sticking out like a sour thumb is “The Galloping Gnome Gas, Gears, and Gulp” (cheapest gas in the Adirondacks—great mechanics and amazing at giving directions. Just never try their Bubbly Beaver Fever juice and avoid the: “best in state tuna sub.” At least if you want to spend the day NOT on the toilet praying for death).
If you’re a mundane and impossibly lost and somehow manage to find yourself in town (which does infrequently happen despite local enchantments designed to lead non magic folk safely away), you honestly can’t miss the place. As its flashing neon sign is dangling off of a ghastly twelve-foot statue of a beaver chomping on a wrench and holding a submarine sandwich aloft like a victorious knight celebrating winning a sword battle.
Back to the Apothecary though, it too is a memorably odd-looking place. It honestly looks little more than a back woods shack shoehorned into a shopfront, with countless old license plates nailed onto it. Its slightly buckling, leaky roofed, slightly crooked porch seemed quite seasonally festive.
Dried herbs, bundles of feathers, and even a few skull and tiny bone wind chimes dangled from the beams. There were even a few unlit, sinister looking Jack O’ Lanterns on the steps, with one huge jagged toothed one with triangles for eyes set atop a faded rusted old loudly humming vintage Coca-Cola vending machine that had definitely seen better days.
But, while it appeared like the “nothing good comes from stopping there, let’s roll up the windows, lock the car doors and drive faster as we pass it type of place” it’s actually MUCH, much more than it appears,