By the time Boltac returned to the store, Relan was gone. Boltac’s shopkeeper’s eye quickly saw what the boy had taken. All the wrong things. The idiot was probably even walking. Walking to his Heroic death.

Boltac thought about opening for business. He thought about barricading the store against looters. Then he looked across the street to the still-smoldering remnants of The Bent Eelpout. He stared for a long time. He stared until a light rain began to fall. He watched the drops turn to steam as soon as they hit the smoldering coals of what used to be an inn. Each drop was infinitesimal. Wasted. A single drop could not put out a fire. But enough water could wash an entire city away. He savored his melancholy and rolled this thought around for a while. Then he turned his back on the window.

Boltac looked around his store. Not only had the kid taken all the wrong things, he had taken all the wrong things to carry them in. Boltac shook his head. Why travel if you don’t have the luggage you need to enjoy the journey? He had sold a lot of luggage with that line, but that didn’t stop it from being good advice.

He went into the back and opened the chest on the left. He took out all of the small leather bags filled with coin and set them aside. He would need money, of course. After all, it was the most multipurpose substance known to man. But, for Boltac’s purposes, there was something in here more valuable than money.

“Ah HA!” he said as he held up a burlap sack. The sack looked like its only purpose in life was to hold twenty pounds of potatoes. “There you are,” Boltac said to the sack as if to a precious child he had found in a game of hide and seek. Of course, this was a ridiculous analogy–Boltac hated children–but this burlap sack? He couldn’t have been more proud of the sack.

He walked through his well-stocked store finding items he might need for a journey to the depths of some foul, unknowable place. Into the sack’s modest opening he placed five goatskins of water, two of wine, ten stout torches, a few flagons of the finest oil, three daggers, an axe, an ornate and well-jeweled silver mace in a wooden case, a roll of rare tools used for the picking of locks and dismantling of doors and chests, several hundred feet of good rope, an extra pair of boots, two hats, several wool blankets, a lambswool sweater (the depths could be cold) a side of pork cured in salt, five pounds of hard biscuit, and a pound of chocolate.

But that wasn’t all. He flitted here and there among the shelves, adding this, that, and the other–oddments and ointments–anything Boltac thought he might need. Because if Boltac knew one thing about Adventure, it was that you never knew.

The second-to-last thing to go in was the Magic Lantern of Lamptopolis. And very last of all, his thick wool Gauntlets of Magic Negation. Didn’t want to be reaching around in a bag like that with bare hands, that’s for sure.

Through all of this, the bag never bulged or grew heavier than the 17 or 20 pounds that a sack that size, filled with potatoes, could be expected to weigh. The more Boltac stuffed into the sack, the wider he smiled. For a moment, he considered trying to fit EVERYTHING into the sack, just to see if he could. But then he thought better of it. Even a Magic sack had to have its limits. And if it didn’t? That wasn’t the kind of thing Boltac wanted to know.

Boltac hated Magic, but he loved this bag. It was Themistres’ Bag of Holding. One of only a very few known to exist. It was said that it would contain anything the owner could place into it. It never got heavier or bigger. It was, in effect, a bottomless bag.

Themistres, as the story went, made the bag for his wife. She was a large woman who liked to travel heavy. The Wizard had not made many of them, and no Wizard seemed to have been able to duplicate his feat. Wizards seldom married, and the ones who did, generally wound up turning their wives into something that wouldn’t bother them. The Bag of Holding was generally believed to be a myth, a pleasant fiction of overloaded husbands and servants everywhere. But Boltac had found one. And what a wondrous thing it was. Priceless, really.

With this thought of pricing, he remembered the coins he left out in the back. He took out his mittens and put them on. He removed the Magic Lantern from the sack. It did not light as he touched it. Then, he added some gold to the sack. As he did, Boltac wondered: what was the point of holding any in reserve? It wasn’t like he expected to be coming back. And that’s when Boltac realized–told the truth of it to himself–he probably wasn’t going to make it out of this Adventure alive.

He stopped and stood up in the back room of his store. He had worked so hard to build this store into a thriving business. Now, standing among the money he had worked so hard to accumulate, all of it seemed worthless. The heavy weight of the Gauntlets of Magic Negation dragged his hands towards the floor, and his shoulders stooped. For a moment, tears ran down his round, weathered face. He let out one sob. Then sniffed and bent back to the task at hand.

He piled all the gold into the sack. Who knew, perhaps he could buy his way out of this trouble? That was what a shrewd Merchant would do.

When he picked up the lamp this time, even though he was still wearing the mittens, a faint light shone out from its depths. Boltac didn’t notice.

Boltac left his store and headed north, for points unknown and unknowable. Yes, it was stupid. But there was nothing else to do. In the end, he had no more choice than a single raindrop falling onto the smoldering remains of a burned building. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have any choices. It had been a mistake to try to fight like a Hero. Boltac could see that now. He wasn’t a Hero. He wasn’t a King either. But he wasn’t powerless. Rather than go off half-cocked, he could use the skills and tools he had. He could do a better job of outfitting himself. And he would be damned if he would be walking to his death.