This scene comes from a long-running tabletop story that started as Waterdeep: Dragon Heist with friends. The campaign went dark fast—the Zhentarim wiped the party and burned Trollskull Manor. Only my wife’s character, survived and fled to Baldur’s Gate. I rolled up Rishisura to meet her there, and for a while our table leaned hard into faith-driven characters and improvised adventures using the Baldur’s Gate gazetteer.
Eventually our group dissolved and it became a two-player game with my wife and me—more tabletop roleplay than “classic” D&D. We’re busy adults with kids, and this became our way to live in the Realms for a few hours at a time.
Over the years I documented the sessions extensively (scene notes, drafts, character dossiers, setting research), and now I’m reworking that material into an immersive narrative—one scene at a time—shared here for feedback.
A boy’s voice—panicked, defiant, cracking under fear.
A man’s voice—hard, angry, trained to command.
And the third sound, the one that always made his shoulders tighten even when he told them not to: the hiss of steel leaving a scabbard.
He turned the corner into Ragpicker’s Alley and let his eyes take the measure in one breath.
The buildings leaned close, shoulder to shoulder, blotting out most of the sky. Lantern light smeared across wet stone and smoke. The alley narrowed where a broken cart had been shoved half aside, making a choke point. Two Flaming Fist enforcers in rust-red cloaks stood in that narrowness like a gate.
Between them, pinned against a wall that smelled of old tallow and damp, was a pickpocket.
No older than fifteen. Ragged clothes, patched too many times to count. A strip of cloth knotted clumsily at his waist, faint ink on the fabric—Guild marking, half hidden, half brag. A dropped purse lay on the ground with its belly torn open, coins scattered in the dirt like someone had tried to buy mercy and failed.
The pickpocket’s hands were up, empty, shaking. His mouth was still moving—defiance by instinct, fear leaking through every syllable.
One of the Flaming Fist raised his sword.
Risha didn’t hesitate.
He stepped between blade and the pickpocket and caught the descending strike on the wrapped palm of his left hand.
The impact shuddered through bone and tendon, a clean brutal vibration that climbed his forearm and rang his teeth. The cloth bit into his skin. His shoulder wanted to give. He held anyway—muscles tightening with precision rather than force, like stopping a door before it slammed on someone’s fingers.
For a heartbeat, everything went still.
The Fist soldier staggered half a step back, eyes wide with surprise—more offended than afraid.
“What in the Nine Hells—”
Risha lowered his hand slowly. He kept it open. He kept his breath low so it didn’t turn into a growl.
“If a blade must fall,” he said, “let it fall on me.”
The pickpocket stared at him as if he’d spoken a foreign language. Gratitude and terror fought in his face, neither winning.
The second Fist moved in, anger already flushing his cheeks. He took in the Guild-mark at the boy’s waist, then Risha’s robes, then the way Risha didn’t step back.
“You interfering bastard,” the man snapped. “This whelp is Guild scum—alley-trash.”
He said it like a verdict. Like it made the rest easy.
Risha shook his head once.
“Not scum,” he said. “Lost kid.”
They looked at each other. It was quick. Familiar. A wordless agreement that said: here’s our lesson, served up politely.
Then the first one grinned.
It wasn’t a villain’s grin. It was worse. It was a working man’s grin when he finds a way to enjoy what he was already going to do.
“You want to take his punishment?” he said. “Fine. We’ll give it.”
Risha didn’t raise his hands into fists. He didn’t widen his stance in challenge. He didn’t threaten.
He only turned his head enough to catch the pickpocket’s eyes.
“Run,” he said.
The pickpocket’s breath hitched. Then he bolted—scrambling past the broken cart, shoes skidding on wet stone, vanishing into the maze of balconies and shuttered windows. He looked back once, just once, and Risha saw the moment something changed in him—fear still there, but folded around something heavier.
Then he was gone.
Risha faced the two soldiers again.
The alley gave him nowhere to breathe: wall at his right shoulder, cart to his left, slick stone underfoot. No room to circle out.
Their armor made them careless—leather, metal, weight. His padding was rags and needlework, good enough for rain and scrapes, not for two trained men.
His padded robes wouldn’t be enough.
He took one slow breath in. Not to become calm. Just to be present for what he had chosen.
The first hit taught the rules.
A forearm crashed into his guard and drove his own hands into his face. His jaw lit up hot, teeth clicking together hard enough that sparks seemed to jump behind his eyes. His vision blurred for a fraction of a second—not because he was weak, but because his body answered before pride could. His eyes watered. He tasted copper.
Before he could fully reset, the second man’s boot slammed into the outside of his thigh.
His leg went dead.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was simple theft: the leg that had been his a heartbeat ago turned numb and useless, and his balance went with it.
They didn’t “fight” him.
They dismantled him.
One stayed in front, keeping him busy, pushing him back into the wall. The other shifted to his side, angling into his blind spot. When he shelled up to protect his head, they went to his body—short, ugly shots into ribs and solar plexus, places that made breath a question. When he dropped his elbows to save his organs, they came upstairs again, gloves and knuckles thudding into cheekbone and temple.
Risha moved like someone trained to survive being hit.
He turned his torso to bleed off force, took what he could on meat and bone he could afford. He slipped half steps not to evade, but to make angles imperfect. Once, when a sequence came too fast, he clinched—briefly—wrapping his arms around one man’s shoulders just to kill momentum and stop the next strike from landing clean.
The man snarled, surprised by the contact.
Risha released immediately.
He would not let this become a fight.
That was the point. That was the cost.
He felt fear, sharp and animal, when a blow landed too close to his eye.
He felt anger, hot under his skin, when he heard the men laugh between breaths.
He felt the part of him that knew exactly how to end this—where to strike, how to drop them, how to walk away while they gasped on the stones.
And he stayed anyway.
Because leaving would cost the pickpocket his life.
His ribs burned. Each breath scraped against something cracked, raw. His mouth filled with blood and he swallowed it because gagging would give them an opening and he could not afford openings.
A knee buckled.
His hand hit the cobbles.
Stone bit through cloth and skin, a small sharp pain inside the larger one, almost insulting in its clarity.
He pushed up, shaking. He stood again.
Not cleanly. Not like a hero. Like a man refusing to collapse while the world still had its hands on someone smaller.
Another boot caught his hip and drove him sideways. His shoulder hit the wall hard enough that his arm went numb for a heartbeat. He blinked against white light blooming in his vision.
Just breathe. Don’t panic.
Stay up.
Just stay up long enough that the pickpocket stayed gone.
The rhythm broke only when one of the men’s fists began to slow, not from mercy, but from fatigue.
“That’s enough,” he muttered, flexing his hand like it ached.
The other spat to the side, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist, as if this had been labor.
“Throw him in Wyrm’s Rock,” he said. “Let him meditate on minding his own gods-damned business.”
Hands grabbed Risha’s arms. Hard. Metal gauntlets biting into bruised flesh. They hauled him upright as if he were a sack, not a person.
His legs tried to fold again. He forced them straight.
He didn’t plead or explain. He didn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing him beg for it to stop.
He focused on one thing that was still his.
Breath.
The alley blurred. Lanterns smeared into streaks. He caught a glimpse of the scattered coins on the ground, dull and dirty now, and thought—absurdly—how small they looked measured against what he’d just paid.
Then the alley was behind him, the fog swallowing it as they dragged him toward the looming shape of the prison tower.
From somewhere above, unseen at first, a hawk’s shadow cut across the wet stone.
---
The first thing Maeril felt was the shock through the hawk’s bones.
Not pain. She was too far for that, and the bird was only half-real besides. But there was a jolt that traveled through borrowed senses when steel stopped short of where it meant to land.
From her stall on Wyrm’s Crossing, with the cookfire already hissing and a pot already steaming, Maeril went very still. A plank counter in front of her, bowls stacked within reach, a short line of morning mouths trying not to look desperate.
Her hands had been moving by habit—ladle, bowl, coin, smile—threading a morning’s work through the bridge’s constant noise. The river wind carried smoke and salt and the sharp tang of onions. People surged past, shouting prices, laughing too loudly, coughing into sleeves. A child hovered near the edge of her canopy, pretending not to look hungry.
Then the hawk’s view snapped into clarity.
Ragpicker’s Alley. Rust-red cloaks. A pickpocket cornered. A sword lifted.
A stranger stepping in.
A wrapped hand catching steel.
And then—boots, fists, two men taking turns breaking someone’s structure because they could.
Anger rose in her so fast she tasted it, hot and bitter, as if she’d bitten a herb that was meant to be medicine and found it was poison.
No surprise. No disbelief.
Just that old, familiar pattern: uniforms treating cruelty like a lesson, like a right.
Then something quieter moved beneath the anger and steadied it.
Recognition.
A man who chose to be where the blows fell.
Not because he loved suffering. Not because he was made of iron. She could see it in the way he swallowed blood and forced his legs to hold—he didn’t want it. He was scared. He was hurt.
And he stayed anyway.
By the time they hauled him out of the alley, Maeril’s breath had gone shallow without her noticing.
Her eyes tracked the hawk’s view as the men dragged him through fog toward Wyrm’s Rock. She watched the way his shoulders remained too still—discipline under force, refusal to give them panic.
Her ladle hung above the pot, dripping broth back into steam.
Someone cleared their throat in front of her, impatient.
Maeril didn’t look away.
She sent a thought to the hawk—sharp, precise.
Follow.
The bird’s wings shifted in the air, and the view tilted to keep the prison tower in frame.
Maeril set the ladle down. She forced her hands to move again because people still needed food, because the bridge still ran on small mercies, because she could not abandon the whole world for one man.
But she could watch.
And she could decide.
She slid a bowl toward the hungry child without making a show of it. A small extra scoop. A quick touch to the rim as if it had been an accident.
Then she lifted her gaze back to the invisible thread of her familiar’s sight and felt the decision settle in her chest, simple and heavy.
“Alright then,” she murmured, more to the hawk than to herself.
“We’ll see where you land.”
And she sent the hawk higher, tightening its circle around Wyrm’s Rock.
The Chionthar river moved under the boards and stone, more felt than seen—cold breath rising through cracks, carrying river-salt and rot and the clean edge of wind. Above it, the bridge lived on its own rules: stalls stacked tight, awnings stitched together like a patchwork roof, a narrow lane down the middle where carts argued with feet and always won.
Maeril’s canopy sat in the crush like it had grown there. A plank counter. Bowls within reach. A cookfire that never quite stopped smoking. A short line of regulars with work in their shoulders.
She fed them.
Not for charity—she needed coin like anyone—but because hot food kept tempers from sharpening, and she made her living serving them hot.
Ladle. Bowl. Coin. Smile.
The weather was kind today. No hard rain to thin the crowd, no sharp cold to turn people mean. The flow only thickened.
No slack.
Maeril worked—hands steady, eyes bright—but her attention kept tugging upward, where her hawk circled high above the river and the stone throat of Wyrm’s Rock.
The hawk kept Wyrm’s Rock prison-tower in its wide, circling eye.
Stone over water. Guardwalks. Movement. From Maeril’s counter, it was only a lump of distance—close enough to haunt, far enough to be useless.
The morning went by in bowls.
Then noon.
Then the slow slide toward afternoon, when the bridge got louder and hungrier and everyone started to look like they’d forgotten what rest felt like.
Maeril didn’t crane her neck toward the Rock. She couldn’t afford to stall. She saved her face for customers and her hands for work, and sent her attention up the invisible thread instead—marking the rock, counting the gates, watching the same stretch of stone until it stopped being curiosity and became a kind of duty.
He was in there.
Alive, she told herself, because she needed that to be true.
And when the monk finally walked, she meant to see it.
The sergeant showed up like he belonged there.
Rust-red cloak dulled by use, not parade. Boots planted wide at her counter. Not in line—never in line—just that familiar lean of a man who’d survived long enough to treat the world like it would make room.
Maeril didn’t blink at it. She just kept moving.
“Same as usual?” she asked, already reaching for a bowl. “How’s your wife today?”
The man grunted, the sound halfway between thanks and complaint. “Mean. Healthy.” A pause, softer: “Kid’s got a cough.”
“Mm.” Maeril slid the bowl across the plank and let the steam do the kindness first. “Bring him by later. I’ve got something bitter that works.”
He huffed like that was inevitable, and started eating like he’d been hungry for hours.
Maeril kept her hands busy—wipe, ladle, stack—then lowered her voice behind steam and bowls, like she was asking after weather.
“The monk they brought in last night,” she said. “Grey robes. Wrapped hands. When does he walk?”
The spoon stopped once, midair.
His eyes flicked past her shoulder toward the Rock, then back to the bowl like it hadn’t.
“That one,” he said, mouth tight. “Quiet sort. Patches people up.” A small pause, as if he didn’t like admitting the next part. “Still… he can put a drunk on the floor without spilling blood.”
Maeril let that land without smiling.
He scraped the bowl once, slow. “I’ll see him out later today. Need a word with him first.”
Maeril nodded like she’d asked what time the tide turned.
“Later,” she repeated, and kept serving, as if her chest hadn’t just tightened around a plan.
—
Risha woke to stone and iron.
Cold stone under his cheek. Iron bars in front of him. And the ache—a deep, heavy ache—settling into every part of his body like a tide returning to shore.
He didn’t move at first. He lay still long enough to map the night into his bones: bruises blooming under skin, a cracked rib that scraped when he breathed too deep, his jaw throbbing where a boot had caught him.
He pushed himself upright with care and sat cross-legged on the cell floor.
A thin shaft of light cut down from a tiny window high above, turning dust into a lazy fall. The air tasted of old iron and stale breath.
He set his hands on his thighs and slipped into his practiced rhythm.
Breath first—measured, disciplined, made to fit around broken places. Then warmth, quiet and steady, the small internal glow of his blood spreading through him like a candle lit behind ribs. Then focus: fingertips pressing and tapping along collarbone, sternum, the bruised ladder of his ribs—awakening what still answered, easing swelling by degrees, coaxing dizziness down into the floor.
Hours passed. He changed posture when numbness demanded it, stretched when the rib let him, pressed along familiar points until the ache dulled into something he could carry.
Healing came slow. Earned.
By afternoon, the pain hadn’t vanished. It had simply changed shape—manageable, contained, no longer drowning him.
Footsteps echoed down the corridor.
Measured. Unhurried. Coming straight for his cell.
Risha straightened.
He let his face go blank.
The sergeant stood with his hands hooked on his belt, shoulders squared in a way that said he’d worn the uniform for years. Not one of the two from the alley. Older. Scar on the bridge of his nose. A face that had learned to stay bored so nobody could read it.
“You,” the sergeant said. Not a question. “You’re the one who stepped in. Between my lads and that Guild brat.”
Risha nodded.
The sergeant watched him a beat, measuring the bruises he couldn’t hide and the steadiness he could.
“They say you caught a blade.”
“I did. I stopped it.”
A corner of the sergeant’s mouth twitched—more irritation than amusement. “With your hand.”
Risha didn’t look down at it. “A hand was enough.”
“Hm.” The sergeant’s gaze narrowed, then shifted, taking in the wrapped wrists, the way he held himself like a trained fighter, even bruised. “And you didn’t swing back. Didn’t even try.”
“He was a child,” Risha said. “They were angry.”
For a moment the corridor felt quieter, as if the place itself had leaned in.
The sergeant exhaled through his nose. “Most folks don’t put themselves on the line for Guild trash.”
Risha didn’t flinch. His fingers found the red cord at his wrist—thumb and forefinger, a small press like a habit of prayer.
The sergeant’s eyes held on his. Then he asked what he’d come to ask, plain as a boot.
“Why?”
“Because it would’ve ended him,” Risha said. “And it wouldn’t end me.”
The sergeant studied him longer than courtesy required. Not soft. Not hostile. Just trying to fit a shape he didn’t like into a world he understood.
Finally, he straightened.
The sergeant grunted. “People die for less.” He shifted his weight. “I’ll let you out later. After I’m done with the paper.”
Risha inclined his head once. Not gratitude. Acknowledgment.
“Next time,” the sergeant said, already turning, “give a warning. Might save you teeth.”
A dry breath left Risha—almost a laugh, cut short by a sting in his side.
“I’ll try.”
He paused, like he hated the softness of it.
“Heard you mend bones,” he said. “Try not to break your own.”
Boots moved off down the corridor, the sound fading into stone.
Risha stayed where he was, still as the bars, and let the promise of *later* settle like a weight he could carry.
—
Maeril saw him before the bridge did.
Grey robes. Wrapped hands. That careful, controlled walk that pretended nothing hurt. He moved with the current instead of against it, letting carts and shoulders slide past him like he wasn’t a body that could be stopped.
If she waited, he’d be gone.
Time to move.
“Sorry—emergency,” she muttered, already stepping out from behind the counter.
A customer made a noise. Another leaned forward, offended.
Maeril didn’t look back. She left the ladle where it was, steam still rising, and threaded herself into the lane without blocking it—matching his line the way you join a river: at an angle, clean, no collision.
Above, the hawk circled once and held.
She came up alongside him, close enough that he’d hear without her raising her voice, but not so close she’d force him to stop.
“Hey,” she said, and let it sound ordinary.
He didn’t slow. His eyes flicked past her, automatic—already moving, already elsewhere. He turned his head a fraction, looking behind him as if the person she meant must be there.
There was no one.
Maeril felt her pulse jump—annoying, bright—and kept her face steady.
“I watched,” she said. “Last night. Ragpicker’s Alley. Through different eyes.”
That did it.
He stopped as if the words had put a hand on his shoulder. Not hard. Just real.
His head turned. His eyes met hers. Then, a fraction higher, to the hawk’s shadow cutting across the boards.
Maeril held his gaze and let the bridge keep moving around them—carts complaining, boots clacking, bowls clinking behind her where she’d abandoned her post.
If he kept walking, the crowd would take him and she’d never find him again.
She kept her voice level anyway.
“Easy,” she said. “I’m not the Fist. I just wanted to make sure you made it out in one piece.”
Maeril walked as she talked—half a step ahead, just enough to make “come” feel like the obvious next thing, not a command.
Her stall was only a few strides away, but the bridge fought her for every inch. A cart shouldered through. Someone barked a price. The cookfire’s smoke snapped sideways in the river wind and stung her eyes.
Two customers were still at her counter, bowls promised, patience thinning.
“Back in a blink,” she called over her shoulder, already sliding behind the plank counter again.
Risha stayed where he was for a beat, like his body was checking for the hook in the offer.
Then—hesitant, careful—he nodded and followed her to the canopy.
He stopped beside it where there was room to stand without being pinned—close enough to take the heat, far enough not to feel boxed in. He kept his shoulders too steady, the way men do when they’re making pain behave.
Maeril moved fast. One bowl out, a quick coin taken, another ladled and slid across with a murmured, “Sorry—keep moving.” A few words, a few motions, and the waiting mouths were no longer waiting.
Then she turned back to Risha.
She didn’t reach for him. Didn’t ask his name. Didn’t ask why. She only lifted the ladle again.
“This is the part where you let me be stubborn,” she said, low enough that the bridge didn’t get a vote. “You eat. You walk. No debt.”
His eyes flicked to the crowd streaming past, to the open lane where he could vanish in a breath, to the hawk’s shadow passing once across the boards, and something in him tightened: she really had seen.
For a heartbeat, he looked like he might choose disappearance on pure reflex.
Maeril didn’t push. She just held the bowl steady in the space between them—warmth and steam, nothing else offered.
He exhaled. A small surrender. “Thank you,” he said simply.
Then he stepped in that last half pace.
Maeril set a clay bowl down in front of him like she was placing something ordinary on a table. Steam rose between them, softening edges. The broth smelled of onions and pepper and whatever cheap bones she’d bullied into giving up their last kindness.
He wrapped his hands around the bowl, the smell of onions and pepper rising into his bruised face.
The first sip was careful. The second was real.
Maeril turned her face toward the work, because watching him too closely would make it a thing. She wiped the counter. She answered a question about price without hearing it. She kept the world moving.
And under all that motion, something in her chest unclenched—a small, private release she didn’t allow herself to show.
He stayed.
Great.
Now I have to keep him.
Notes: In next scene draft, Risha goes to Maeril's place, but my wife says I need to switch focus to Risha because he's the main protagonist. And my son wants a fight. Because "fights are what make the story great." He just started reading One Piece so go figure :)
From where Risha stood, Maeril’s canopy made its own small room in the crush—cloth stretched tight, steam rising from a pot that never seemed to stop breathing. The bridge traffic slid past in close inches: boots, wheels, shouted prices, wet wool. Her hawk familiar perched on the canopy’s ridgepole, talons hooked into wet cloth, head ticking in small, exact turns.
Risha stayed on his feet to eat, tucked close to the counter so the line could move. He ate cautiously—measured sips, measured pauses—letting heat and salt settle before he took more. The broth hit his bruised ribs like a held palm: warm, steady. His breathing loosened around pain instead of catching on it.
He watched Maeril over the rim.
Green skin, weather-dulled, like leaf-shadow on stone. Two horns swept back from her temples, clean curves into her hairline. Jewels studded the horn ridges, flashing when she turned—little defiant sparks that made her look less like a warning and more like a person who had decided to be seen. Long dark hair in practical braids, thick and heavy with work. He placed her roughly near his own age—early forties—and felt a quiet kinship.
Her clothes were tempered greens and working layers—nothing precious, nothing sloppy. Small carved charms hung at her neck and belt—wood and bone, worn smooth by touch. Her tail never stopped. It counterbalanced a reach, punctuated a turn, tightened when someone edged too close, loosened when a regular smiled. A mood you could read if you knew to look.
She worked in clean motions: pot to bowl, a quick crumble of dried herbs, the counter wiped with the back of her wrist, payment taken as if it were just another ingredient. And her eyes—yellow, sharp, moving constantly—tracked everything without making a show of it: the line, the pot, the hawk, and him—his swelling, his careful breath, the way his posture tried to hide pain and failed.
Risha ate with discipline—full attention—and accepted the warmth with a quiet thanks he didn’t voice.
Gifts made him cautious. Kindness as well—not because he distrusted it, but because he never knew what shape it would ask him to take.
He watched for what mattered: her edge, her tells, what she chose to ignore.
Not the horns, not the skin—her timing. Who she greeted by name. What made her tail tighten. Where her eyes went when trouble brushed close.
The line held steady. It flexed as people peeled off and stepped in, as if the counter were the pivot the whole bridge moved around. Regulars came up without looking at the menu. Faces softened here—shoulders relaxing, hands loosening around bowls held too tight.
Maeril’s smile arrived with each face, unforced.
Names first—quiet, certain. A tilt of her head. A look that said she remembered yesterday’s complaint, last tenday’s cough, the way someone’s limp had been worse in the rain. Her hands never stalled, but she still found space for a joke at the right moment, a dry comment that landed, and the man who’d arrived sharp didn’t stay that way.
Laughter didn’t spread far on Wyrm’s Crossing. Under her canopy, it did. Small, quick, like people testing whether it was safe.
Children darted in and out of the press, too fast for grown hands, too small to be seen until they were gone. Maeril saw them anyway, and said nothing.
She set a heel of bread at the corner of the counter without looking at it. A biscuit waited under a folded cloth, nudged forward with the back of her wrist when a small hand paused near the edge. Quick. Practiced. Given in motion—so it wouldn’t become a scene. Like they were hers.
Risha watched what the giving did to her.
She gave carefully, not lavishly—each extra measured, each one chosen—yet her eyes still brightened when it landed. Each extra cost her something real, and she still let it go, the smallest shine in her eyes before she hid it again.
He looked for what she wanted from it, and the absence of an answer held his attention.
His gaze kept drifting, checking for the ordinary proofs people wore without thinking: a ring worn smooth by years. A token at the throat rubbed too often. Any sign that this warmth was backed by someone waiting at home, a shared bed, a second set of hands. He saw charms—wood and bone, scratched with meanings he didn’t understand—but nothing that said belonging the way people meant it.
No ring. No braided cord worn bright with touch.
Just her.
Just the stall.
And the way the counter gathered people until the bridge felt—briefly—like a place you could stand without being lost.
The thought settled, unwanted and clear: she wasn’t feeding them because she had plenty—she was feeding them because this was how she stayed among the folk—held by names, held by need. Surrounded. Needed. Kept in place by names and small givings she never tallied.
Risha could see it wasn’t coin she was collecting. It was people—names, faces, the small ones the bridge forgot. And it landed in him, deep and quiet.
He finished the last of the broth. The bowl was nearly empty now; his grip felt steadier, less guarded by pain. His body still hurt. It would for a while. He held himself the way he always did when he was marked—quiet, contained, already mapping the simplest way back to Lantern Hall.
Maeril caught him before he could step away.
“I live out on the edge,” she said, as if she were placing a fact on the counter between them. “Doorless hut.”
“No door?” The question left him before he decided to ask it.
“No door.” She shrugged one shoulder, small and certain. “Still sleep. It’s protected. I’ve got eyes at night. The hawk, and wards besides.”
Next to them, the hawk shifted closer on the ridgepole. Feathers rasped against wet cloth. Its weight settled with a deliberate surety, answering her without a word.
Risha’s eyes flicked to the familiar, then returned to her. “You watched the alley.”
“I watched, yes.”
“The fight?”
“Not a fight.” She said it the way you fixed a wrong name. “A man risking flesh and bone to keep a kid breathing.”
They fell quiet and let the late day thin toward evening, the light changing between awnings.
“Anyway.” She wiped her hands on a cloth—practical—and let the subject drop without making it heavy. “I’m Maeril. Some call me the Green Witch of Wyrm’s Crossing.” She smirked. “Just bridge talk.”
“Green witch,” he repeated, letting the title sit there and show its edges.
“You don’t look impressed.”
“I listen to actions, not titles.” He kept it plain. “They can hide more than they tell.”
“Hm.” Her smile cut sideways. “A philosopher.”
Silence sat between them for a beat. The bridge noise swelled and dipped, as if the crowd were breathing around their stillness. He was still standing, still angled to leave, his attention already tugging toward the road—Lantern Hall, Brampton, the familiar pull of routine and quiet.
“I should go,” he said.
“Tea, sometime?” Maeril didn’t push. She didn’t reach. She just offered it into the air like a thing that could be accepted later. “Not now. Just—sometime.”
He hesitated. Not refusal. Not agreement. A careful middle.
“Maybe,” he said—careful.
Maeril’s eyes held his. “I didn’t get your name.”
He nodded. He’d taken the bowl and her attention and still hadn’t offered the simplest thing back.
“Rishiśūra,” he said, careful with the sounds. “But most call me Risha.”
Her mouth twitched—a small wince, like the sound caught on her tongue. “Rishiśūra,” she tried, slower. Then, candid: “I haven’t heard that pronunciation before. Is it foreign?”
“Yes.” He let the truth stand plain. “From another Plane of existence. Mount Celestia. It’s my monastic name.” He hesitated, then added, “Rishi means Sage. And śūra—” he paused, as if the word needed a different mouth, “—Warrior.”
Maeril inclined her head, brows lifting—disbelief edged with tease. “A name from the Seven Heavens.” Her mouth threatened a smile. “And for someone who doesn’t care about titles…”
“It’s a vow,” he said—flat, certain. “The difference matters.”
He turned to leave. At the edge of it, he angled his head back and bowed—hands folded behind his lower back, quiet and formal, a monk’s shape in the middle of the bridge’s churn.
“You may send your familiar with me,” he said, voice low enough that it was only for her. “If you want to know the way.” He didn’t wait for an answer.
As he stepped away, the hawk lifted from the ridgepole and slipped into the air behind him.
He left Wyrm’s Crossing and felt the noise fall away in layers—first the shouting, then the bargaining, then even the small laughs under Maeril’s canopy. Past the last crush of stalls, the crowd thinned. The boards underfoot gave way to uneven cobble, and the air off the Chionthar slid cold along his cheeks.
He took the riverside track toward the Lower City, where fewer eyes bothered to look up. Wind worried at his robes. The Chionthar kept pace beside him—dark, steady—carrying the day away.
He paused once at a riverside lookout, only long enough to taste the sea-bite on the wind, then kept going as the light thinned and the city’s edges sharpened.
Brampton took him in on the other side—tar and rope and salt replacing river-damp. Shipyard air, work air. The sound of it eased toward rest as he walked: hammers fading, voices lowering, the whole quarter folding itself toward evening.
The streets narrowed as he went. Lanterns flared under eaves, throwing warm pools across wet stone and leaving the gaps between them too dark to trust.
He kept moving.
His left thumb found the red cord at his wrist on its own. One small press. Then he let it go.
The rest he handled in motion: a tug at a wrap, leather settled back into place, a knot checked with the edge of a fingernail—low, close to his body, hidden in the sway of his stride.
He slipped into a recessed doorway where the wall stole him from view and stopped for half a minute.
Cloth off. Cloth back on—tight where it needed to be tight, loose where circulation mattered. Arm guards seated into their familiar grooves. Then the studded leather over his knuckles, the kind of thing Brampton made you carry after dark.
When he stepped out again, he was already moving as if he’d never stopped. Only the cord sat warmer against his skin, and the routine stayed what it was: readiness.
A tavern door burst open behind him and threw lantern light onto the wet cobbles in a hard splash.
A man stumbled out with it—broad in the shoulders, built like a man who hauled rope for a living, reeking of drink and sour rage. He caught himself on the jamb, then lurched forward as if the street should steady itself for him. Voices followed in a ragged line—cursing behind him, laughter too loud, a third voice straining for command.
“Out,” a patron snapped from the doorway. “I said out.”
The sailor swung around, eyes bright and unfocused, and took up the lane like it belonged to him. He shouted something slurred and ugly, then shoved the air with his hands as if he could push the street back into order. He looked for something to hit, and his attention found the patron in the doorway.
Bodies around them tightened—feet bracing, hands pulling back. A few bystanders yelled the sailor on like it was sport. Others backed away, quick, not wanting to be the nearest body when the blow landed.
Risha angled in without hurry, taking the scene in one breath: the tavern frontage, the slick stone, the doorway that could trap the patron, the light that made the drunk’s shadow larger than he was. He kept himself off the centerline, where a straight charge would be easy. He placed his body where it would matter before his voice did.
The patron came out a step farther, panic in his face despite the bluster. A dog strained at his hand—lean and wired, teeth bared—kept just barely leashed.
“Don’t,” Risha said, low—palm up. Not a shout. A line drawn.
The sailor didn’t hear it. Or did, and chose not to. He surged toward the patron, arm swinging wide, too big to be precise and too drunk to care.
The patron’s bluff broke. His grip loosened—and then released.
The dog launched.
It hit the sailor’s forearm like a thrown weight and clamped down—hard. No warning bite. No snap and release. Teeth locked and stayed.
The street sound snapped—cheers collapsing into a sharp intake. Someone screamed. Boots skittered on wet stone as bodies scattered away from the violence they’d cheered a moment earlier.
The sailor roared and jerked, trying to shake the dog loose.
This scene comes from a long-running tabletop story that started as Waterdeep: Dragon Heist with friends. The campaign went dark fast—the Zhentarim wiped the party and burned Trollskull Manor. Only my wife’s character, survived and fled to Baldur’s Gate. I rolled up Rishisura to meet her there, and for a while our table leaned hard into faith-driven characters and improvised adventures using the Baldur’s Gate gazetteer.
Eventually our group dissolved and it became a two-player game with my wife and me—more tabletop roleplay than “classic” D&D. We’re busy adults with kids, and this became our way to live in the Realms for a few hours at a time.
Over the years I documented the sessions extensively (scene notes, drafts, character dossiers, setting research), and now I’m reworking that material into an immersive narrative—one scene at a time—shared here for feedback.
Act 1 - The Monk and the Witch
01 - Mercy Lands Hard
02 - Where You Land
03 - Soup, and Teeth
The Monk and the Witch - Mercy Lands Hard
Risha heard it before he saw it.
A boy’s voice—panicked, defiant, cracking under fear.
A man’s voice—hard, angry, trained to command.
And the third sound, the one that always made his shoulders tighten even when he told them not to: the hiss of steel leaving a scabbard.
He turned the corner into Ragpicker’s Alley and let his eyes take the measure in one breath.
The buildings leaned close, shoulder to shoulder, blotting out most of the sky. Lantern light smeared across wet stone and smoke. The alley narrowed where a broken cart had been shoved half aside, making a choke point. Two Flaming Fist enforcers in rust-red cloaks stood in that narrowness like a gate.
Between them, pinned against a wall that smelled of old tallow and damp, was a pickpocket.
No older than fifteen. Ragged clothes, patched too many times to count. A strip of cloth knotted clumsily at his waist, faint ink on the fabric—Guild marking, half hidden, half brag. A dropped purse lay on the ground with its belly torn open, coins scattered in the dirt like someone had tried to buy mercy and failed.
The pickpocket’s hands were up, empty, shaking. His mouth was still moving—defiance by instinct, fear leaking through every syllable.
One of the Flaming Fist raised his sword.
Risha didn’t hesitate.
He stepped between blade and the pickpocket and caught the descending strike on the wrapped palm of his left hand.
The impact shuddered through bone and tendon, a clean brutal vibration that climbed his forearm and rang his teeth. The cloth bit into his skin. His shoulder wanted to give. He held anyway—muscles tightening with precision rather than force, like stopping a door before it slammed on someone’s fingers.
For a heartbeat, everything went still.
The Fist soldier staggered half a step back, eyes wide with surprise—more offended than afraid.
“What in the Nine Hells—”
Risha lowered his hand slowly. He kept it open. He kept his breath low so it didn’t turn into a growl.
“If a blade must fall,” he said, “let it fall on me.”
The pickpocket stared at him as if he’d spoken a foreign language. Gratitude and terror fought in his face, neither winning.
The second Fist moved in, anger already flushing his cheeks. He took in the Guild-mark at the boy’s waist, then Risha’s robes, then the way Risha didn’t step back.
“You interfering bastard,” the man snapped. “This whelp is Guild scum—alley-trash.”
He said it like a verdict. Like it made the rest easy.
Risha shook his head once.
“Not scum,” he said. “Lost kid.”
They looked at each other. It was quick. Familiar. A wordless agreement that said: here’s our lesson, served up politely.
Then the first one grinned.
It wasn’t a villain’s grin. It was worse. It was a working man’s grin when he finds a way to enjoy what he was already going to do.
“You want to take his punishment?” he said. “Fine. We’ll give it.”
Risha didn’t raise his hands into fists. He didn’t widen his stance in challenge. He didn’t threaten.
He only turned his head enough to catch the pickpocket’s eyes.
“Run,” he said.
The pickpocket’s breath hitched. Then he bolted—scrambling past the broken cart, shoes skidding on wet stone, vanishing into the maze of balconies and shuttered windows. He looked back once, just once, and Risha saw the moment something changed in him—fear still there, but folded around something heavier.
Then he was gone.
Risha faced the two soldiers again.
The alley gave him nowhere to breathe: wall at his right shoulder, cart to his left, slick stone underfoot. No room to circle out.
Their armor made them careless—leather, metal, weight. His padding was rags and needlework, good enough for rain and scrapes, not for two trained men.
His padded robes wouldn’t be enough.
He took one slow breath in. Not to become calm. Just to be present for what he had chosen.
The first hit taught the rules.
A forearm crashed into his guard and drove his own hands into his face. His jaw lit up hot, teeth clicking together hard enough that sparks seemed to jump behind his eyes. His vision blurred for a fraction of a second—not because he was weak, but because his body answered before pride could. His eyes watered. He tasted copper.
Before he could fully reset, the second man’s boot slammed into the outside of his thigh.
His leg went dead.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was simple theft: the leg that had been his a heartbeat ago turned numb and useless, and his balance went with it.
They didn’t “fight” him.
They dismantled him.
One stayed in front, keeping him busy, pushing him back into the wall. The other shifted to his side, angling into his blind spot. When he shelled up to protect his head, they went to his body—short, ugly shots into ribs and solar plexus, places that made breath a question. When he dropped his elbows to save his organs, they came upstairs again, gloves and knuckles thudding into cheekbone and temple.
Risha moved like someone trained to survive being hit.
Chin tucked. Shoulders high. Elbows tight. Hands open.
He turned his torso to bleed off force, took what he could on meat and bone he could afford. He slipped half steps not to evade, but to make angles imperfect. Once, when a sequence came too fast, he clinched—briefly—wrapping his arms around one man’s shoulders just to kill momentum and stop the next strike from landing clean.
The man snarled, surprised by the contact.
Risha released immediately.
He would not let this become a fight.
That was the point. That was the cost.
He felt fear, sharp and animal, when a blow landed too close to his eye.
He felt anger, hot under his skin, when he heard the men laugh between breaths.
He felt the part of him that knew exactly how to end this—where to strike, how to drop them, how to walk away while they gasped on the stones.
And he stayed anyway.
Because leaving would cost the pickpocket his life.
His ribs burned. Each breath scraped against something cracked, raw. His mouth filled with blood and he swallowed it because gagging would give them an opening and he could not afford openings.
A knee buckled.
His hand hit the cobbles.
Stone bit through cloth and skin, a small sharp pain inside the larger one, almost insulting in its clarity.
He pushed up, shaking. He stood again.
Not cleanly. Not like a hero. Like a man refusing to collapse while the world still had its hands on someone smaller.
Another boot caught his hip and drove him sideways. His shoulder hit the wall hard enough that his arm went numb for a heartbeat. He blinked against white light blooming in his vision.
Just breathe. Don’t panic.
Stay up.
Just stay up long enough that the pickpocket stayed gone.
The rhythm broke only when one of the men’s fists began to slow, not from mercy, but from fatigue.
“That’s enough,” he muttered, flexing his hand like it ached.
The other spat to the side, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist, as if this had been labor.
“Throw him in Wyrm’s Rock,” he said. “Let him meditate on minding his own gods-damned business.”
Hands grabbed Risha’s arms. Hard. Metal gauntlets biting into bruised flesh. They hauled him upright as if he were a sack, not a person.
His legs tried to fold again. He forced them straight.
He didn’t plead or explain. He didn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing him beg for it to stop.
He focused on one thing that was still his.
Breath.
The alley blurred. Lanterns smeared into streaks. He caught a glimpse of the scattered coins on the ground, dull and dirty now, and thought—absurdly—how small they looked measured against what he’d just paid.
Then the alley was behind him, the fog swallowing it as they dragged him toward the looming shape of the prison tower.
From somewhere above, unseen at first, a hawk’s shadow cut across the wet stone.
---
The first thing Maeril felt was the shock through the hawk’s bones.
Not pain. She was too far for that, and the bird was only half-real besides. But there was a jolt that traveled through borrowed senses when steel stopped short of where it meant to land.
From her stall on Wyrm’s Crossing, with the cookfire already hissing and a pot already steaming, Maeril went very still. A plank counter in front of her, bowls stacked within reach, a short line of morning mouths trying not to look desperate.
Her hands had been moving by habit—ladle, bowl, coin, smile—threading a morning’s work through the bridge’s constant noise. The river wind carried smoke and salt and the sharp tang of onions. People surged past, shouting prices, laughing too loudly, coughing into sleeves. A child hovered near the edge of her canopy, pretending not to look hungry.
Then the hawk’s view snapped into clarity.
Ragpicker’s Alley. Rust-red cloaks. A pickpocket cornered. A sword lifted.
A stranger stepping in.
A wrapped hand catching steel.
And then—boots, fists, two men taking turns breaking someone’s structure because they could.
Anger rose in her so fast she tasted it, hot and bitter, as if she’d bitten a herb that was meant to be medicine and found it was poison.
No surprise. No disbelief.
Just that old, familiar pattern: uniforms treating cruelty like a lesson, like a right.
Then something quieter moved beneath the anger and steadied it.
Recognition.
A man who chose to be where the blows fell.
Not because he loved suffering. Not because he was made of iron. She could see it in the way he swallowed blood and forced his legs to hold—he didn’t want it. He was scared. He was hurt.
And he stayed anyway.
By the time they hauled him out of the alley, Maeril’s breath had gone shallow without her noticing.
Her eyes tracked the hawk’s view as the men dragged him through fog toward Wyrm’s Rock. She watched the way his shoulders remained too still—discipline under force, refusal to give them panic.
Her ladle hung above the pot, dripping broth back into steam.
Someone cleared their throat in front of her, impatient.
Maeril didn’t look away.
She sent a thought to the hawk—sharp, precise.
Follow.
The bird’s wings shifted in the air, and the view tilted to keep the prison tower in frame.
Maeril set the ladle down. She forced her hands to move again because people still needed food, because the bridge still ran on small mercies, because she could not abandon the whole world for one man.
But she could watch.
And she could decide.
She slid a bowl toward the hungry child without making a show of it. A small extra scoop. A quick touch to the rim as if it had been an accident.
Then she lifted her gaze back to the invisible thread of her familiar’s sight and felt the decision settle in her chest, simple and heavy.
“Alright then,” she murmured, more to the hawk than to herself.
“We’ll see where you land.”
And she sent the hawk higher, tightening its circle around Wyrm’s Rock.
Index | Next: Where You Land
The Monk and the Witch - Where You Land
Morning found Wyrm’s Crossing already awake.
The Chionthar river moved under the boards and stone, more felt than seen—cold breath rising through cracks, carrying river-salt and rot and the clean edge of wind. Above it, the bridge lived on its own rules: stalls stacked tight, awnings stitched together like a patchwork roof, a narrow lane down the middle where carts argued with feet and always won.
Maeril’s canopy sat in the crush like it had grown there. A plank counter. Bowls within reach. A cookfire that never quite stopped smoking. A short line of regulars with work in their shoulders.
She fed them.
Not for charity—she needed coin like anyone—but because hot food kept tempers from sharpening, and she made her living serving them hot.
Ladle. Bowl. Coin. Smile.
The weather was kind today. No hard rain to thin the crowd, no sharp cold to turn people mean. The flow only thickened.
No slack.
Maeril worked—hands steady, eyes bright—but her attention kept tugging upward, where her hawk circled high above the river and the stone throat of Wyrm’s Rock.
The hawk kept Wyrm’s Rock prison-tower in its wide, circling eye.
Stone over water. Guardwalks. Movement. From Maeril’s counter, it was only a lump of distance—close enough to haunt, far enough to be useless.
The morning went by in bowls.
Then noon.
Then the slow slide toward afternoon, when the bridge got louder and hungrier and everyone started to look like they’d forgotten what rest felt like.
Maeril didn’t crane her neck toward the Rock. She couldn’t afford to stall. She saved her face for customers and her hands for work, and sent her attention up the invisible thread instead—marking the rock, counting the gates, watching the same stretch of stone until it stopped being curiosity and became a kind of duty.
He was in there.
Alive, she told herself, because she needed that to be true.
And when the monk finally walked, she meant to see it.
The sergeant showed up like he belonged there.
Rust-red cloak dulled by use, not parade. Boots planted wide at her counter. Not in line—never in line—just that familiar lean of a man who’d survived long enough to treat the world like it would make room.
Maeril didn’t blink at it. She just kept moving.
“Same as usual?” she asked, already reaching for a bowl. “How’s your wife today?”
The man grunted, the sound halfway between thanks and complaint. “Mean. Healthy.” A pause, softer: “Kid’s got a cough.”
“Mm.” Maeril slid the bowl across the plank and let the steam do the kindness first. “Bring him by later. I’ve got something bitter that works.”
He huffed like that was inevitable, and started eating like he’d been hungry for hours.
Maeril kept her hands busy—wipe, ladle, stack—then lowered her voice behind steam and bowls, like she was asking after weather.
“The monk they brought in last night,” she said. “Grey robes. Wrapped hands. When does he walk?”
The spoon stopped once, midair.
His eyes flicked past her shoulder toward the Rock, then back to the bowl like it hadn’t.
“That one,” he said, mouth tight. “Quiet sort. Patches people up.” A small pause, as if he didn’t like admitting the next part. “Still… he can put a drunk on the floor without spilling blood.”
Maeril let that land without smiling.
He scraped the bowl once, slow. “I’ll see him out later today. Need a word with him first.”
Maeril nodded like she’d asked what time the tide turned.
“Later,” she repeated, and kept serving, as if her chest hadn’t just tightened around a plan.
—
Risha woke to stone and iron.
Cold stone under his cheek. Iron bars in front of him. And the ache—a deep, heavy ache—settling into every part of his body like a tide returning to shore.
He didn’t move at first. He lay still long enough to map the night into his bones: bruises blooming under skin, a cracked rib that scraped when he breathed too deep, his jaw throbbing where a boot had caught him.
He pushed himself upright with care and sat cross-legged on the cell floor.
A thin shaft of light cut down from a tiny window high above, turning dust into a lazy fall. The air tasted of old iron and stale breath.
He set his hands on his thighs and slipped into his practiced rhythm.
Breath first—measured, disciplined, made to fit around broken places. Then warmth, quiet and steady, the small internal glow of his blood spreading through him like a candle lit behind ribs. Then focus: fingertips pressing and tapping along collarbone, sternum, the bruised ladder of his ribs—awakening what still answered, easing swelling by degrees, coaxing dizziness down into the floor.
Hours passed. He changed posture when numbness demanded it, stretched when the rib let him, pressed along familiar points until the ache dulled into something he could carry.
Healing came slow. Earned.
By afternoon, the pain hadn’t vanished. It had simply changed shape—manageable, contained, no longer drowning him.
Footsteps echoed down the corridor.
Measured. Unhurried. Coming straight for his cell.
Risha straightened.
He let his face go blank.
The sergeant stood with his hands hooked on his belt, shoulders squared in a way that said he’d worn the uniform for years. Not one of the two from the alley. Older. Scar on the bridge of his nose. A face that had learned to stay bored so nobody could read it.
“You,” the sergeant said. Not a question. “You’re the one who stepped in. Between my lads and that Guild brat.”
Risha nodded.
The sergeant watched him a beat, measuring the bruises he couldn’t hide and the steadiness he could.
“They say you caught a blade.”
“I did. I stopped it.”
A corner of the sergeant’s mouth twitched—more irritation than amusement. “With your hand.”
Risha didn’t look down at it. “A hand was enough.”
“Hm.” The sergeant’s gaze narrowed, then shifted, taking in the wrapped wrists, the way he held himself like a trained fighter, even bruised. “And you didn’t swing back. Didn’t even try.”
“He was a child,” Risha said. “They were angry.”
For a moment the corridor felt quieter, as if the place itself had leaned in.
The sergeant exhaled through his nose. “Most folks don’t put themselves on the line for Guild trash.”
Risha didn’t flinch. His fingers found the red cord at his wrist—thumb and forefinger, a small press like a habit of prayer.
The sergeant’s eyes held on his. Then he asked what he’d come to ask, plain as a boot.
“Why?”
“Because it would’ve ended him,” Risha said. “And it wouldn’t end me.”
The sergeant studied him longer than courtesy required. Not soft. Not hostile. Just trying to fit a shape he didn’t like into a world he understood.
Finally, he straightened.
The sergeant grunted. “People die for less.” He shifted his weight. “I’ll let you out later. After I’m done with the paper.”
Risha inclined his head once. Not gratitude. Acknowledgment.
“Next time,” the sergeant said, already turning, “give a warning. Might save you teeth.”
A dry breath left Risha—almost a laugh, cut short by a sting in his side.
“I’ll try.”
He paused, like he hated the softness of it.
“Heard you mend bones,” he said. “Try not to break your own.”
Boots moved off down the corridor, the sound fading into stone.
Risha stayed where he was, still as the bars, and let the promise of *later* settle like a weight he could carry.
—
Maeril saw him before the bridge did.
Grey robes. Wrapped hands. That careful, controlled walk that pretended nothing hurt. He moved with the current instead of against it, letting carts and shoulders slide past him like he wasn’t a body that could be stopped.
If she waited, he’d be gone.
Time to move.
“Sorry—emergency,” she muttered, already stepping out from behind the counter.
A customer made a noise. Another leaned forward, offended.
Maeril didn’t look back. She left the ladle where it was, steam still rising, and threaded herself into the lane without blocking it—matching his line the way you join a river: at an angle, clean, no collision.
Above, the hawk circled once and held.
She came up alongside him, close enough that he’d hear without her raising her voice, but not so close she’d force him to stop.
“Hey,” she said, and let it sound ordinary.
He didn’t slow. His eyes flicked past her, automatic—already moving, already elsewhere. He turned his head a fraction, looking behind him as if the person she meant must be there.
There was no one.
Maeril felt her pulse jump—annoying, bright—and kept her face steady.
“I watched,” she said. “Last night. Ragpicker’s Alley. Through different eyes.”
That did it.
He stopped as if the words had put a hand on his shoulder. Not hard. Just real.
His head turned. His eyes met hers. Then, a fraction higher, to the hawk’s shadow cutting across the boards.
Maeril held his gaze and let the bridge keep moving around them—carts complaining, boots clacking, bowls clinking behind her where she’d abandoned her post.
If he kept walking, the crowd would take him and she’d never find him again.
She kept her voice level anyway.
“Easy,” she said. “I’m not the Fist. I just wanted to make sure you made it out in one piece.”
Maeril walked as she talked—half a step ahead, just enough to make “come” feel like the obvious next thing, not a command.
Her stall was only a few strides away, but the bridge fought her for every inch. A cart shouldered through. Someone barked a price. The cookfire’s smoke snapped sideways in the river wind and stung her eyes.
Two customers were still at her counter, bowls promised, patience thinning.
“Back in a blink,” she called over her shoulder, already sliding behind the plank counter again.
Risha stayed where he was for a beat, like his body was checking for the hook in the offer.
Then—hesitant, careful—he nodded and followed her to the canopy.
He stopped beside it where there was room to stand without being pinned—close enough to take the heat, far enough not to feel boxed in. He kept his shoulders too steady, the way men do when they’re making pain behave.
Maeril moved fast. One bowl out, a quick coin taken, another ladled and slid across with a murmured, “Sorry—keep moving.” A few words, a few motions, and the waiting mouths were no longer waiting.
Then she turned back to Risha.
She didn’t reach for him. Didn’t ask his name. Didn’t ask why. She only lifted the ladle again.
“This is the part where you let me be stubborn,” she said, low enough that the bridge didn’t get a vote. “You eat. You walk. No debt.”
His eyes flicked to the crowd streaming past, to the open lane where he could vanish in a breath, to the hawk’s shadow passing once across the boards, and something in him tightened: she really had seen.
For a heartbeat, he looked like he might choose disappearance on pure reflex.
Maeril didn’t push. She just held the bowl steady in the space between them—warmth and steam, nothing else offered.
He exhaled. A small surrender. “Thank you,” he said simply.
Then he stepped in that last half pace.
Maeril set a clay bowl down in front of him like she was placing something ordinary on a table. Steam rose between them, softening edges. The broth smelled of onions and pepper and whatever cheap bones she’d bullied into giving up their last kindness.
He wrapped his hands around the bowl, the smell of onions and pepper rising into his bruised face.
The first sip was careful. The second was real.
Maeril turned her face toward the work, because watching him too closely would make it a thing. She wiped the counter. She answered a question about price without hearing it. She kept the world moving.
And under all that motion, something in her chest unclenched—a small, private release she didn’t allow herself to show.
He stayed.
Great.
Now I have to keep him.
Notes: In next scene draft, Risha goes to Maeril's place, but my wife says I need to switch focus to Risha because he's the main protagonist. And my son wants a fight. Because "fights are what make the story great." He just started reading One Piece so go figure :)
Index | Next: Soup, and Teeth
The Monk and the Witch - Soup, and Teeth
From where Risha stood, Maeril’s canopy made its own small room in the crush—cloth stretched tight, steam rising from a pot that never seemed to stop breathing. The bridge traffic slid past in close inches: boots, wheels, shouted prices, wet wool. Her hawk familiar perched on the canopy’s ridgepole, talons hooked into wet cloth, head ticking in small, exact turns.
Risha stayed on his feet to eat, tucked close to the counter so the line could move. He ate cautiously—measured sips, measured pauses—letting heat and salt settle before he took more. The broth hit his bruised ribs like a held palm: warm, steady. His breathing loosened around pain instead of catching on it.
He watched Maeril over the rim.
Green skin, weather-dulled, like leaf-shadow on stone. Two horns swept back from her temples, clean curves into her hairline. Jewels studded the horn ridges, flashing when she turned—little defiant sparks that made her look less like a warning and more like a person who had decided to be seen. Long dark hair in practical braids, thick and heavy with work. He placed her roughly near his own age—early forties—and felt a quiet kinship.
Her clothes were tempered greens and working layers—nothing precious, nothing sloppy. Small carved charms hung at her neck and belt—wood and bone, worn smooth by touch. Her tail never stopped. It counterbalanced a reach, punctuated a turn, tightened when someone edged too close, loosened when a regular smiled. A mood you could read if you knew to look.
She worked in clean motions: pot to bowl, a quick crumble of dried herbs, the counter wiped with the back of her wrist, payment taken as if it were just another ingredient. And her eyes—yellow, sharp, moving constantly—tracked everything without making a show of it: the line, the pot, the hawk, and him—his swelling, his careful breath, the way his posture tried to hide pain and failed.
Risha ate with discipline—full attention—and accepted the warmth with a quiet thanks he didn’t voice.
Gifts made him cautious. Kindness as well—not because he distrusted it, but because he never knew what shape it would ask him to take.
He watched for what mattered: her edge, her tells, what she chose to ignore.
Not the horns, not the skin—her timing. Who she greeted by name. What made her tail tighten. Where her eyes went when trouble brushed close.
The line held steady. It flexed as people peeled off and stepped in, as if the counter were the pivot the whole bridge moved around. Regulars came up without looking at the menu. Faces softened here—shoulders relaxing, hands loosening around bowls held too tight.
Maeril’s smile arrived with each face, unforced.
Names first—quiet, certain. A tilt of her head. A look that said she remembered yesterday’s complaint, last tenday’s cough, the way someone’s limp had been worse in the rain. Her hands never stalled, but she still found space for a joke at the right moment, a dry comment that landed, and the man who’d arrived sharp didn’t stay that way.
Laughter didn’t spread far on Wyrm’s Crossing. Under her canopy, it did. Small, quick, like people testing whether it was safe.
Children darted in and out of the press, too fast for grown hands, too small to be seen until they were gone. Maeril saw them anyway, and said nothing.
She set a heel of bread at the corner of the counter without looking at it. A biscuit waited under a folded cloth, nudged forward with the back of her wrist when a small hand paused near the edge. Quick. Practiced. Given in motion—so it wouldn’t become a scene. Like they were hers.
Risha watched what the giving did to her.
She gave carefully, not lavishly—each extra measured, each one chosen—yet her eyes still brightened when it landed. Each extra cost her something real, and she still let it go, the smallest shine in her eyes before she hid it again.
He looked for what she wanted from it, and the absence of an answer held his attention.
His gaze kept drifting, checking for the ordinary proofs people wore without thinking: a ring worn smooth by years. A token at the throat rubbed too often. Any sign that this warmth was backed by someone waiting at home, a shared bed, a second set of hands. He saw charms—wood and bone, scratched with meanings he didn’t understand—but nothing that said belonging the way people meant it.
No ring. No braided cord worn bright with touch.
Just her.
Just the stall.
And the way the counter gathered people until the bridge felt—briefly—like a place you could stand without being lost.
The thought settled, unwanted and clear: she wasn’t feeding them because she had plenty—she was feeding them because this was how she stayed among the folk—held by names, held by need. Surrounded. Needed. Kept in place by names and small givings she never tallied.
Risha could see it wasn’t coin she was collecting. It was people—names, faces, the small ones the bridge forgot. And it landed in him, deep and quiet.
He finished the last of the broth. The bowl was nearly empty now; his grip felt steadier, less guarded by pain. His body still hurt. It would for a while. He held himself the way he always did when he was marked—quiet, contained, already mapping the simplest way back to Lantern Hall.
Maeril caught him before he could step away.
“I live out on the edge,” she said, as if she were placing a fact on the counter between them. “Doorless hut.”
“No door?” The question left him before he decided to ask it.
“No door.” She shrugged one shoulder, small and certain. “Still sleep. It’s protected. I’ve got eyes at night. The hawk, and wards besides.”
Next to them, the hawk shifted closer on the ridgepole. Feathers rasped against wet cloth. Its weight settled with a deliberate surety, answering her without a word.
Risha’s eyes flicked to the familiar, then returned to her. “You watched the alley.”
“I watched, yes.”
“The fight?”
“Not a fight.” She said it the way you fixed a wrong name. “A man risking flesh and bone to keep a kid breathing.”
They fell quiet and let the late day thin toward evening, the light changing between awnings.
“Anyway.” She wiped her hands on a cloth—practical—and let the subject drop without making it heavy. “I’m Maeril. Some call me the Green Witch of Wyrm’s Crossing.” She smirked. “Just bridge talk.”
“Green witch,” he repeated, letting the title sit there and show its edges.
“You don’t look impressed.”
“I listen to actions, not titles.” He kept it plain. “They can hide more than they tell.”
“Hm.” Her smile cut sideways. “A philosopher.”
Silence sat between them for a beat. The bridge noise swelled and dipped, as if the crowd were breathing around their stillness. He was still standing, still angled to leave, his attention already tugging toward the road—Lantern Hall, Brampton, the familiar pull of routine and quiet.
“I should go,” he said.
“Tea, sometime?” Maeril didn’t push. She didn’t reach. She just offered it into the air like a thing that could be accepted later. “Not now. Just—sometime.”
He hesitated. Not refusal. Not agreement. A careful middle.
“Maybe,” he said—careful.
Maeril’s eyes held his. “I didn’t get your name.”
He nodded. He’d taken the bowl and her attention and still hadn’t offered the simplest thing back.
“Rishiśūra,” he said, careful with the sounds. “But most call me Risha.”
Her mouth twitched—a small wince, like the sound caught on her tongue. “Rishiśūra,” she tried, slower. Then, candid: “I haven’t heard that pronunciation before. Is it foreign?”
“Yes.” He let the truth stand plain. “From another Plane of existence. Mount Celestia. It’s my monastic name.” He hesitated, then added, “Rishi means Sage. And śūra—” he paused, as if the word needed a different mouth, “—Warrior.”
Maeril inclined her head, brows lifting—disbelief edged with tease. “A name from the Seven Heavens.” Her mouth threatened a smile. “And for someone who doesn’t care about titles…”
“It’s a vow,” he said—flat, certain. “The difference matters.”
He turned to leave. At the edge of it, he angled his head back and bowed—hands folded behind his lower back, quiet and formal, a monk’s shape in the middle of the bridge’s churn.
“You may send your familiar with me,” he said, voice low enough that it was only for her. “If you want to know the way.” He didn’t wait for an answer.
As he stepped away, the hawk lifted from the ridgepole and slipped into the air behind him.
He left Wyrm’s Crossing and felt the noise fall away in layers—first the shouting, then the bargaining, then even the small laughs under Maeril’s canopy. Past the last crush of stalls, the crowd thinned. The boards underfoot gave way to uneven cobble, and the air off the Chionthar slid cold along his cheeks.
He took the riverside track toward the Lower City, where fewer eyes bothered to look up. Wind worried at his robes. The Chionthar kept pace beside him—dark, steady—carrying the day away.
He paused once at a riverside lookout, only long enough to taste the sea-bite on the wind, then kept going as the light thinned and the city’s edges sharpened.
Brampton took him in on the other side—tar and rope and salt replacing river-damp. Shipyard air, work air. The sound of it eased toward rest as he walked: hammers fading, voices lowering, the whole quarter folding itself toward evening.
The streets narrowed as he went. Lanterns flared under eaves, throwing warm pools across wet stone and leaving the gaps between them too dark to trust.
He kept moving.
His left thumb found the red cord at his wrist on its own. One small press. Then he let it go.
The rest he handled in motion: a tug at a wrap, leather settled back into place, a knot checked with the edge of a fingernail—low, close to his body, hidden in the sway of his stride.
He slipped into a recessed doorway where the wall stole him from view and stopped for half a minute.
Cloth off. Cloth back on—tight where it needed to be tight, loose where circulation mattered. Arm guards seated into their familiar grooves. Then the studded leather over his knuckles, the kind of thing Brampton made you carry after dark.
When he stepped out again, he was already moving as if he’d never stopped. Only the cord sat warmer against his skin, and the routine stayed what it was: readiness.
A tavern door burst open behind him and threw lantern light onto the wet cobbles in a hard splash.
A man stumbled out with it—broad in the shoulders, built like a man who hauled rope for a living, reeking of drink and sour rage. He caught himself on the jamb, then lurched forward as if the street should steady itself for him. Voices followed in a ragged line—cursing behind him, laughter too loud, a third voice straining for command.
“Out,” a patron snapped from the doorway. “I said out.”
The sailor swung around, eyes bright and unfocused, and took up the lane like it belonged to him. He shouted something slurred and ugly, then shoved the air with his hands as if he could push the street back into order. He looked for something to hit, and his attention found the patron in the doorway.
Bodies around them tightened—feet bracing, hands pulling back. A few bystanders yelled the sailor on like it was sport. Others backed away, quick, not wanting to be the nearest body when the blow landed.
Risha angled in without hurry, taking the scene in one breath: the tavern frontage, the slick stone, the doorway that could trap the patron, the light that made the drunk’s shadow larger than he was. He kept himself off the centerline, where a straight charge would be easy. He placed his body where it would matter before his voice did.
The patron came out a step farther, panic in his face despite the bluster. A dog strained at his hand—lean and wired, teeth bared—kept just barely leashed.
“Don’t,” Risha said, low—palm up. Not a shout. A line drawn.
The sailor didn’t hear it. Or did, and chose not to. He surged toward the patron, arm swinging wide, too big to be precise and too drunk to care.
The patron’s bluff broke. His grip loosened—and then released.
The dog launched.
It hit the sailor’s forearm like a thrown weight and clamped down—hard. No warning bite. No snap and release. Teeth locked and stayed.
The street sound snapped—cheers collapsing into a sharp intake. Someone screamed. Boots skittered on wet stone as bodies scattered away from the violence they’d cheered a moment earlier.
The sailor roared and jerked, trying to shake the dog loose.
Risha moved in.
Index