Knights of the Platinum Dragon: A D&D Story

Chapter 21: Heraldry

As the dawn continued to break outdoors, Logan felt a soothing rush of relief was through him as he came out onto one of Chateau Toussaint's balconies and saw that the sky wasn't overcast with clouds and the air wasn't full of falling raindrops. It was going to be a nice day by the looks of things, and he wasn't going to let that go to waste!

With his painting supplies tucked under one arm, some carpentry tools he'd borrowed from the cockatrice under the other, and a shield gripped in each hand, he went out onto the balcony and began to set himself up. He didn't have an easel, so the best he could do was place everything on the floor around him before laying the shield down on the edge of the balcony, then taking the hammer from the carpentry equipment and beginning a task that made him grind and grit his teeth while grunting continuously in exertion – straightening out the boards of Finnan's shield, one of the two he'd brought up here.

After dinner last night, where they'd all agreed to go on the quest, he and Romain brought up to Stalk and Finnan that, if they were going to be knights, they would need a coat-of-arms; a sigil to show who they were to other knights and make them recognisable. Such devices were usually painted on shields, and so Logan had offered to paint them what they wanted to the best of his ability.

Finnan's request was simple – a mountain with a sunset background. But at it was, the halfling's shield was literally nothing more than some wooden planks lashed together with vines, some of them overlapping each other or jutting out in all sorts of weird directions, and all of them wobbling and clunking together like a rickety old house on a windy day.

Before the sigil could be painted, Logan needed a flat and stable surface to work on. And so after rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, he disassembled the tangle of boards, replaced those which were rotten and dissolving before hammering the shield back together with nails. Once that was done, he re-fitted the cross-grip straps across the back - by which he meant two more vines that he also had to hammer into place – and adjusted them to make sure they were of suitable size for a halfling to wield effectively.

How Finnan could bear to use something like this was something Logan kept concealed behind stifled grunts of exertion, splinters breaking off the wood and stabbing into his fingers as he worked. He hoped that moving to this distant balcony would help ensure that he didn't wake anyone up this early in the day, and thankfully, any noise he was making was finally came to an end when he fixed the second strap of the shield into place.

After that, he lifted his golden eyes and scanned the Milisevran landscape, his gaze drifting over the mountain range that turned the horizon into a jagged zig-zag of shining sky and sunlit stone. When he found one that stood out from the others, a great conical peak whose summit was capped with a coating of purest white like the icing on a bun, he propped the shield against the edge of the balcony and began to work, tracing on the outline of the mountain with chalk before mixing the colours for the sunset.

For a long time after that, there was nought but the chorus of songbirds, the whispering of the wind and faint, near-imperceptible sound of brush bristles on wood. Logan layered the pale yellow, fiery orange and deep, pungent purple over each other on the shield, creating the vivid gradient he wanted and capturing a moment in time on the shield. Thankfully, no trails of paint ran down to where the mountain would be, and any splodges and blots were smoothed out with a little bit of work.

But before he could start on the mountain itself, a voice sounded behind him:

"Finnan? Are you there?"

Logan turned to see a head peer out from the doorway he'd come through moments ago, framed by a curtain of wavy gold locks and a pair of tapering ears as Arabella revealed herself, stepping out onto the balcony in a milk-white robe trimmed with lilac, tied with a knot about her waist. When she stepped out, she saw Logan and immediately said "Sorry for interrupting, Logan, but have you seen Finnan anywhere?"