Forging Fate

Divine Intervention

  Augus woke up early that morning so as to not miss the caravan, although he knew they would stay the night as they always did, and it might also have something to do with the work he always seemed to have piling up on him from living alone.  He dozed off while working, but slowly roused to an ever increasing tinkers song drifting through his half clean window.  He started awake and hit his head on the lintel, clutching his head and praising himself for being so smart he rushes out the door. 
"Hey what took you so long Auggy, they were almost here a full five minutes before you bothered to show up, huh?"teased a bystander.
Augus replied after catching his breath,"I was hard at work cleaning the house, you know.", the townspeople laughed at this and one responded "Your snoring was louder than the tinkers song, though lacking the pitch."
  The eleven year old Augus craned his head at the wagons, trying to catch a glimpse of their riders but failing to see even a shoe through the  townspeople looking to buy or sell to the caravan.  Augus heard a loud voice near the front of the caravan rant, "The devils work be in this book, but for the life of me and mine I cannot destroy it!".  Augus, being particularly interested in any sort of knowledge, stopped trying to push through the crowd near the merchant and snuck around to the fringe of the crowd listening to the apparent preacher gesture at a pristine book writ in strange characters in a crude box. "Destroy it" the boy thought, "how could you destroy something so full of knowing?", but he kept these thoughts from their notice.  The smithy offered to use his furnace to the religious man, he reluctantly agreed after the smithy by the name of Terb promised not to lay a finger near the book.  Although the priest said he trusted Terb, he brought the box himself to put in the fire.  Although I did not watch past this point, the tales of a book turning to stone in the flame spread like, well a fire among the small town.  The story was less interesting to Augus than it would normally be though, because he was busy trying to decipher a book. How did he get this book? It might've had something to do with the distraction that was caused during the deliberations about the book when a bird seemed to be summoned as if from an evil force from the inside of the priest's wagon.  With such an uproar it was a simple thing for Augus to switch the book with a nearby rock, and to add some copper power besides, for effect. 
  He didn't even bother to see the rest of the caravan, much to the shock of all involved, even those who hadn't met him had heard of the small outlier of the town who asked so many questions.  Augus was busy learning how to learn a new language, and it took him weeks to even grasp his first words in this old style script, the title of the book: Magic and alchemy.  The name of the author was inscrutable with his knowledge of the language, and Augus did not bother to learn the name, he had more important secrets to discover.