The Sorceror's Bakery

On a sleepy street corner in the heart of Chapel Village is Oddfellows' Bakery, a simple shop with red geraniums in the window-boxes. Most locals know it for its mushroom quiches and braided loaves. Wood elves swear it's the only place in town to get a good loaf of breadgrass-bread; halfling families praise it for the dense almond tea-cakes that rival their own. But a few know it as the home of the most powerful sorcerer in Cape Hildegard.
The baker is a man named Tchelio, an old half-elf with a red beard and a gruff demeanor. Local legends claim he helped vanquish the horrors beneath the Caves of the Banished Scholars. They say his magic is fey in nature—not long-studied like the magic of the arcane colleges, but no less powerful. Some say, on damp mornings when the oven won't light, he pulls out a gnarled hawthorn wand and shoots a bolt of fire into the stack of logs inside. When he turns back to his dough, some people claim to hear ethereal music, or see a shock of white seagull feathers sprout from his beard. Sometimes his skin turns blue for weeks at a time. The boy who delivers the firewood swears he once heard a loud noise in the back of the bakery and turned around to see a sheep standing at the hearth, looking mildly frustrated.
Most of the time, he dismisses any comment on his powers with a wave of his hand. "Nah," he says. "You must be thinking of the other Tchelio. Hear he's great, though. Anyway, what can I get ya?"
But it's not just the man behind the counter, with his supernatural tricks and his knowing smile; many of the customers, too, are strange. A mountain man comes when the seasons change—a willowy wood elf, clad in the habit of a nature cleric, bearing sacks of heirloom vegetables and thick bundles of herbs. The baker's wares for the next week or so are more elaborate: golden raspberry tarts, savory pies topped with enormous slabs of violet-red tomato, elvish breads striped with thick veins of goat's cheese and wild marjoram. On Friday afternoons, the head priestess comes down from the College of the Holy Mother to trade gossip from the Council of Deans for petit-fours and strongly brewed tea. And every now and then, when the winds from the North are kind to the sailors, a handsome man with a spell-forged arm lingers ever-so-slightly too long by the bakery counter.
The baker keeps to himself most of the time, though he's perfectly polite to those who stop in so long as they behave themselves. He chats with the mountain man and the head priestess and the handsome sailor. Regular customers sometimes catch snippets of his stories, here and there, though none quite know what to believe.
"Oh, those mountains?" he'll say to a customer who mentions journeying into the mountains out of town. "Nothing to 'em. See something dangerous, you can just disintegrate it on the spot. I've done it loads of times." And he'll shrug as he boxes up their order, as if to say: what, like it's hard?
When the baker finds a young person in need of advice, however, his attitude suddenly shifts. He pulls up a chair (sometimes seemingly out of thin air), spins it around, sits down next to the acolyte having a panic attack or the young woman stood up for a date, and tells them at length what he thinks they need to hear. His advice meanders, threaded through stories of prophecies and dangerous masquerades and giant floating skulls that apparently made some good points, but it's solid and practical. Keep moving forward. Never give up on the people who love you. The truth is often simpler than you think. And nothing good comes of cavorting with fiends or collegiate necromancers.
It's been many years now since Oddfellows' Bakery first sprang up on its sleepy street corner. The baker, though still spry, has more grey hair in his beard than red. Skeptics doubt he is the same Tchelio as from the old legends, the battle-tested mage who fought devils and nightmares in the Caves of the Banished Scholars and lived to tell the tale. The gala invitations have long since stopped coming, after too many events where Tchelio's place-card graced an empty seat. The reporters no longer wait outside, clamoring for comment from a hero on this or that. He has never once returned to the gladiator ring.
Those who know him, though, never doubt who he is, no matter how improbable his stories may be. After all—who hears the old legends and thinks that Tchelio, of all people, was in it for the fame and glory? Is it so hard to believe that a baker can be a hero, with enough loyalty and cleverness and improbable luck, and then simply choose to go back to baking again when the heroic deeds are done? For as much as he likes to grouse about the endless cycle of Cape Hildegard politics and the dueling wizard students whose spells he counters outside his bakery, Tchelio seems wholly content with the simple life he's chosen. He whistles as he walks home from the market. He smiles to himself behind the counter as he adjusts his loaves into perfectly casual-looking stacks. And once in a blue moon, when three mismatched figures sweep into town with tall tales of their own to tell, he throws open the doors of the bakery and waits with open arms for the customers he treasures most.