Horo's Curios

A petite blonde woman in a vibrant yellow dress had been walking casually along one of the cobbled city streets when she spotted the peculiar, but remarkable shop someone had told her about recently. Horo's Curios read the sign on the front. She decided it was as good a time as any to drop in and check the place out. Supposedly there was nowhere better in all of Dalen to find exotic and odd things.

In quick, short strides, she crossed the street and entered through the door, inhaling the scents of ancient wood, decaying parchment, and polished metal that filled the air. Visually the cluttered interior of the shop was not very well laid out, but she imagined that the large cornucopia of items that sat boldly on the shelves or locked inside all the rows of display cabinets would have been rather difficult to organize in any real proper fashion. In all her very long years, she had never before seen such an eclectic mix of artifacts, some of which that even hung down on strings from the ceiling.

She slowly moved down the first aisle nearest the door, browsing what she took to be the jewellery section. Her kind were by nature drawn to shiny trinkets, and there were copious amounts of gem-encrusted rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, large broaches, and other baubles lined up on the crowded shelves. Each handcrafted piece was anything but pedestrian, and clearly originated from the many foreign lands that lay beyond the Two kingdoms if the unusual designs of the gold and silver-work were any judge.

A curious, beautiful, varicolourful bracelet caught her eye. She picked it up, admiring the crystalline beads and the unique way the light played off them. Glancing around self-consciously, and not seeing anyone watching, she tried it on. It fit about her slim wrist perfectly and felt good against her skin. Upon contact she sensed the bracelet was very old. It was rare for her to encounter something older than her own self, and this was profoundly ancient, wrought in some unfathomably distant primeval era. Though they did not contain any perceivable magic, she found that the beads possessed a most agreeable effect on her, their immense age comforting in some indescribable way. She wondered how much it cost? She had money, but was far from what one called rich. She had been forced to leave all her hidden faery treasure behind in the Verden forests.

With respect, she carefully replaced the bracelet for now exactly where she found it and continued browsing the towering, close-packed aisles, smiling and at times gawping at the endlessly bizarre oddities whose wildly different aura impressions that each one imparted to her was making her slightly dizzy. The objects ranged from understandable items such as antique coins, rare books, lacquered boxes, statuary, and taxidermy, to incomprehensible mechanical-looking contrivances, to the grimly macabre, such as a pair of silk dance slippers, complete with severed, mummified feet standing inside.

She made a face, not wanting to know the story behind those; the residual taint of black magic suggested the tale was an unsurprisingly dark one. Beside the slippers was the preserved heart of a famous dead wizard, a white one in life, she sensed with some relief, and next to that grisly object hung a full set of armour composed of dragon scales once belonging to some notable warrior or other.

Finally she came upon the selection of growing seeds that she had been told about. She gravitated toward it, feeling the raw potential of life pulsing in each tiny plant embyro. To her awe there were more various kinds of seeds than she could have imagined, and despite being quite knowledgeable on Dalen's local flora she did not recognize many of the names scrawled on the vellum packets. She had never heard of a pineapple before, much less coffee beans, whatever those were.

Her attention suddenly stopped on some cloth-wrapped bulbs labelled blue roses. Blue roses? There had never been such a flower native to this region, and she had only ever heard them mentioned before in poems and songs. They would certainly add colour and a touch of the exotic to her garden. She picked up three of the bulbs and carried them over to the counter.

"Hi. How much do these cost?" she asked, smiling up at the shop keep.