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.
Rishi 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—”
Rishi 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 Rishi’s robes, then the way Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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 Rishi saw the moment something changed in him—fear still there, but folded around something heavier.
Then he was gone.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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 Rishi’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.
—
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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,” Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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,” Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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 Rishi—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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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 Rishi.
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.
Author's notes
In next scene draft, Rishi goes to Maeril’s place, but my wife says I need to switch focus to Rishi 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 Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi’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 Rishi.”
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.
Rishi 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,” Rishi 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.
The dog stayed latched to the sailor’s forearm like it meant to stay—teeth buried, body braced low, the leash trailing on the cobbles. Lantern light slicked its wet coat to a shine. The sailor swayed, half-turned toward the tavern door, face twisted with pain and drunken outrage.
He lifted his free fist and slammed it down into the dog’s head.
Again—heavier, faster, uglier blows.
The dog’s skull snapped sideways. Its legs skidded on wet stone. The jaws did not open. Its eyes went glassy for a beat, then blinked hard, searching for focus, as if shaking could drive the fog out of its head.
The ring of onlookers tightened—hungry and afraid at once.
Rishi moved.
Not a run—economy. Long, silent steps that ate distance. He took in the pieces as he closed: the sailor’s wobble, the dog’s locked jaw, the doorway behind them, bodies pressed too near to be safe.
He did not reach toward the dog’s teeth. He stepped in on the leash side—outside the dog’s jawline—and caught the collar from behind, fingers finding leather under wet fur, where the neck was strong and the mouth could not swing.
Then he yanked—up and sideways.
Hard and fast—stealing the dog’s leverage before it could brace. The body rose a handspan; the sailor’s arm came with it, twisted at an angle the jaw couldn’t keep. The bite broke—wet, reluctant.
The dog hit the cobbles yelping, gagging once. Its paws scrabbled on the slick stone. It shook hard, confused and violent, then backed off in a tight arc, hackles up, head low, barking like it could rebuild courage out of noise.
The nearest onlookers recoiled, boots skidding back, the ring widening in the rain.
The sailor lurched forward from the sudden release, arm swinging uselessly, weight pitching forward, suddenly unanchored.
Rishi was already there.
He drove in low—shoulder into the sailor’s lower chest, using the stumble like a lever. Breath blasted out of the sailor. His knees dipped. Stubborn mass kept him upright for a heartbeat longer—then not.
Rishi’s hand caught the sailor’s wrist and rotated it into a lock. Not a yank. A steer.
He hauled the sailor backward into the street—away from the door, away from the dog’s range, away from the smallest bodies. His feet stayed wide on the rain-slick stone, hips turned, weight low. The sailor fought with strength and liquor, but it came out clumsy—pulling against angles he couldn’t read.
The crowd shifted with them, shuffling back to avoid being swallowed into the tangle.
The patron flashed at the edge of his vision, retreating into the tavern. Rishi did not follow. He kept the sailor moving. Kept space open. Kept the doorway from becoming a trap.
The patron reappeared with a crossbow coming up, rain beading on the arms. He hunted a shot and found none—only Rishi and the sailor tangled too close, too fast, too human for a clean line.
The bowstring drew back—and a sharp screech sliced down from above. A clear warning.
Maeril’s familiar—the hawk—dropped low over the raised crossbow, wings beating once across the lanternlight, cutting straight through the weapon’s line.
Rishi heard it and knew what came next. No time to argue. No space to gamble.
He pulled the sailor aside and dropped his own weight low, using the lock, his hip, and a planted leg to drive him down onto the cobbles—fast enough that the sailor hit before he could brace.
The crossbow string snapped dry.
The bolt hissed through the space they’d occupied a heartbeat ago and slammed into a nearby wall with a heavy thunk. Wet splinters jumped. The crossbow’s string still quivering.
The crowd flinched as one—noise pinching into silence for half a beat, then breaking into a scramble as people stumbled away from the bolt’s path.
The patron’s crossbow dipped. Anger cracked into something sharper—realization. He’d nearly put steel into a man’s skull.
Behind Rishi, the sailor scrabbled, trying to get up. Wet hands found nothing but slick stone and rage.
Rishi kept hold of the back of his coat—just enough to deny balance without turning it into punishment. The sailor flailed: wild fists, backward kicks, heels thrown back without aim. Nothing landed clean. Rishi stayed just out of range, body angled, breath even, letting the storm of limbs spend itself.
Then—no warning, no wind-up—he stepped in.
A hard, straight punch into ribs, driven through studded leather and bone.
Air burst out of the sailor in a harsh bark. His posture folded. His feet tangled. He stumbled into the wall and slid down it, one hand smearing rain across stone before he sank toward the ground.
Rishi released him carefully—careful even now.
Across the lane, the patron snatched the crossbow back up, hands shaking with anger and fear, trying to find a shot through the crowd again.
Rishi turned and went—direct and fast—on an angle.
Before the patron could ready the crossbow, Rishi drove all his weight into the patron and slammed him back into the inn’s doorframe. Wood cracked. The patron’s breath popped out. His boots skidded on wet stone; his head clipped the frame—enough to rattle him and take his balance.
The crossbow slipped from his hands and clattered to the cobbles, skidding end over end into the doorway, out of reach.
A couple of bystanders jerked back from the rattle, hands up, as if the weapon might bite them too.
Rishi kept the patron there, forearm across his chest, weight set. Not crushing. Not kind. Decisive.
“Stop,” he ordered.
The patron pushed back once—more reflex than will—then the fight ran out of him. His eyes blinked too fast. His throat worked.
Rishi held his gaze until the shaking eased, until the man’s posture sagged into something that couldn’t lift a weapon.
Then he released pressure and stepped back.
“Please,” he said—flat, purposeful. “Let me help this wounded man,” pointing at the sailor, ” I’ll take him off the street.”
A beat. Rain ticked on wood and iron.
The patron stayed braced in the doorway, blinking, swallowing hard.
Rishi turned only when the weapon stayed down and the man’s shoulders sank, and moved toward the sailor on the stones.
Rain kept ticking—steady, small—flattening the street’s sounds into a damp hush. Lanternlight smeared in puddles as Rishi took the sailor by shoulder and belt and pulled him upright, just enough to move.
No speech. No explanation. He took the weight and went.
The sailor sagged into him with dead heaviness—sour breath, wet wool, damp leather. The bitten forearm hung wrong at his side, wrapped only in rain and shock for now, the air around it sharp with blood-salt. Each step tugged a quiet answer from Rishi’s own bruises, a reminder written under his ribs and along his forearms. He did not change pace for it. He chose streets he knew, straight lines through Brampton where lanterns were already coming on and the docks’ smell began to rise—tar, rope, salt, work.
Lantern Hall’s light showed ahead like relief and obligation wearing the same face. He felt it in his chest before he reached the threshold.
Inside, the common room held its usual warmth: worn wood, soot in the grain, low light that never fully chased the corners away. A few tables. A few chairs. The steady quiet of a place that kept taking in what the city threw out.
Elisa was at the altar—Lantern Hall’s spiritual anchor, the one who mended what words could reach when wounds were deeper than flesh. Still. Hands set. A small flame’s glow held to her face and left everything else in gentle shadow.
She lifted her gaze only enough to register him and the limp body at his side. Her eyes held him a beat longer than the wounded man, and something in her face softened—small, controlled—like she’d been braced for him not to come back at all. Rishi felt her tension release.
Rishi guided the sailor through as if he’d done it a hundred nights in a row. He checked the small room kept for the poor and wounded. Four bunks. All taken. Breath and sleep already rationed there, bodies wrapped in the Hall’s thin mercy.
He did not argue with it. He did not waste time wishing for more.
He brought the sailor back out and lowered him to the common room floor where he could be seen and managed. A bedroll went down quick. Blankets over it, then over the sailor—arranged to keep him from rolling, to keep the injured arm from being trapped beneath his bulk. The man muttered once, thick with drink, then sank into heavy breathing.
Adequate. Contained. Safe enough to get through the night.
Rishi cleared space the way his hands always did—without treating it as important, because it was necessary. Chairs scraped back. A table corner opened. A lantern drawn closer and angled down, its light made functional. He went to the supplies nook that was his by habit more than ownership and opened it with the familiar economy of someone who replenished what he used.
Clean cloth first. Wraps. A small blade and scissors. A stopper-bottle of cleansing spirits. A jar of salve. More bandage rolls than he liked to see disappear in a week. He set them in a strict order—not ritual, just fatigue-proofing, so his tired hands could not reach wrong.
Then he knelt and inspected the sailor’s forearm.
The coat’s thick leather had blunted the worst, leaving tooth marks that were deep but not down to bone. Still, the wound was angry—ragged edges, darkened by rain-filth, swelling already gathering under skin. It would hurt worse by morning. It would tempt infection the way street wounds always did.
He made his hands clean. He laid a folded cloth under the arm and positioned it so the sailor’s weight wouldn’t drag at it. The sailor breathed hard, mouth open, lost in drink.
Rishi cut away clothing cleanly, avoiding any pull across the bite. The blade moved with competence. He exposed the wound fully, then poured the cleansing spirits and flushed it, slow and thorough, lifting grit and rain-dirt out in a thin, stinging wash.
The sailor twitched, a half-wake reflex. A low sound scraped up his throat.
Rishi did not rush. He steadied the arm with one hand and worked with the other, keeping pressure where it mattered, letting the reflex pass without turning it into a struggle. He flushed again until the runoff ran clean enough to trust. Then he dabbed—not rubbed—and laid salve over the torn skin in a thin protective layer: enough to seal, enough to discourage rot, not so much it went slick.
Bandage came next. Firm tension. Even tension. He wrapped to hold without stealing blood, watching skin color and swelling as he went. Layer one supported the forearm and elbow properly, locking the joint into something the sailor’s unconscious thrashing couldn’t easily undo. Layer two bound the arm across the sailor’s chest—functional sling-wrap, snug and unglamorous, built to stop the drunken flail that would tear the work open before morning.
The sailor twitched again, then settled. His breathing thickened, then smoothed into a dull rhythm. Rishi finished the last turn of cloth, tucked the end, pressed once to confirm it would hold.
Only then did he let his shoulders drop a fraction.
He put the room back in order: wraps re-stowed, jars re-corked, tools wiped and returned to their places. The lantern’s flame turned down. He checked the sailor once more—bandage secure, sling binding seated, blanket placed to keep the wrapped arm from slipping free. The man was alive. Contained. No longer one more body the street could steal.
Rishi stood, and the day finally reached him. Fatigue wasn’t drama. It was weight in the joints. Ache in the ribs. A faint tremor that wanted to start and didn’t—held back by habit.
He did the last small caretaker sweep—doors, corners, the common room’s quiet—then went to his small room as if it were another duty and not relief.
He lay on the plank bed, pulled blanket and fur up, and let his hands go still at his sides. For a moment he took one measured breath—in, out—and kept it plain.
Finally. It’s been a long two days.
Tomorrow: a cold plunge into the Chionthar, to clear my mind and reset my body. Then breathing. Stretching. Training. I’ll be myself again.
He closed his eyes and let the Hall settle around him.
Lantern Hall mornings came in the same order whether his body wanted them or not: boards cool underfoot, water drawn and put over the fire, the sweep that chased last night’s grit into the edges. The altar glow held steady in the dim, and Elisa held steady with it—present, contained, making the Hall feel anchored without speaking.
Rishisura took his breathwork where he always did, in the small space his body knew. Stretching. Light maintenance—enough to wake joints without pushing them. Then the Hall again: heat checked, kettle watched, a quick glance to Elisa—anything break overnight?—and a fast audit of the supplies corner.
His hands were sorting when his mind slid sideways.
A child’s thin wrist—gone as soon as he noticed it. Bread sliding to the edge of a counter as if it had been an accident. The brief brightening in Maeril’s eyes when she gave something away.
His thumb found the red cord and rested there. He let the exhale lengthen until his shoulders eased. The thought thinned. His fingers kept folding cloth.
Late morning and midday took him out into the city with a bowl and a practiced face that asked without words. Doorways. Corners. Small exchanges made without ceremony. People gave him crusts or a copper and, in return, he listened with his eyes as much as his ears: the gray of fatigue, the hitch in a breath, the way a hand guarded a rib even while the mouth said “nothing.”
A dockworker sat on a step with a cut that wouldn’t stop weeping. Rishisura rinsed it clean, wrapped with firm, even tension, and asked two questions that mattered.
As he tied off the final turn, the phrase surfaced uninvited—green witch. Bridge talk—Maeril’s smirk behind it.
He didn’t chase it. He kept his eyes on the dockworker’s face. He felt his feet on the stone. He counted one slow breath out.
“You dizzy?” he asked. “Any fever?”
Afternoon pulled him back to Lantern Hall for what never stopped arriving. Intake. Triage. Nursing work that was mostly patience: water, food, clean cloth, checking a fever by touch because there wasn’t time for fuss. He restocked what he’d used, wiped what needed wiping, put every tool back where a tired hand could find it without thinking.
Elisa spoke once—something small, functional, meant for him.
He answered a half-beat late, because for a heartbeat he thought he heard the hawk’s screech again—sharp above lanternlight, a warning note that tightened his chest.
He swallowed. Let the sound pass. “I’ll handle it,” he said, and did.
Dusk cooled the river air and brought bodies into circles under rules that kept it from becoming a brawl. He took rounds for conditioning and control—sometimes with sailors, sometimes with mercenaries, sometimes with a Flaming Fist man who needed to hit something and came here because consequences still existed under the Hall’s eyes.
Between rounds, sweat cooling on his skin, his attention flicked—unasked—to Maeril’s gaze tracking a crowd without ever looking busy.
He reset his stance. Hands up. Work continued.
Late night meant alleys: routes, sightlines, exits. Walking the Lower City and Brampton, listening more than looking, learning how violence started before it started. Footing. Angles. The quiet change in a voice that meant someone was about to make a choice they couldn’t take back.
For three days he did it all the same way: exact, clean, present.
And for three days the drift kept returning—not in floods, not in longing, just in small, persistent intrusions that should have slid off his discipline and didn’t.
He had believed his mind was sealed. He was learning it wasn’t.
Late afternoon emptied Lantern Hall in slow layers. The last bowls had gone out. The soup smell faded down to damp wood and soot. Voices dropped. Chairs settled into their places again. The supplies corner was being put back together from the day—wraps restacked, jars re-corked, clean cloth folded tight.
Rishisura stood at the supplies table, wiping a jar’s rim clean before he set the lid and pressed the seal down with his thumb.
Across the room, Elisa knelt at the small sun-altar, hands still, lips moving too softly to carry. Even in prayer she kept the room in the corner of her eye—counting who remained, catching what wasn’t said, ready to turn a person with one gentle question and make them tell the truth in their own words.
The seal was still warm when movement caught at the threshold.
Maeril’s hawk perched on the doorframe as if it belonged there. Its feathers were ash-pale, the edges ghosting to translucence when the light caught them. It held the wood without sound. Eyes fixed into the Hall and did not blink.
Rishisura’s hands went still. His attention narrowed—precise. He moved to the doorway and stopped at a respectful distance. The hawk’s head ticked once, small and exact, and a pale strip of paper was bound to its leg.
He reached slowly, not grabbing, and the bird allowed it. The note came free without struggle.
Three lines. Plain hand. No flourishes.
Tea? You know where to find me. —The Green Witch
For a breath, the words sat in his chest heavier than paper should.
His thumb found the red cord and rested there. He let one long exhale empty his chest. The reflex landed him back in his body, back in the Hall, back in the fact of choice.
He folded the note once. Then again. Not hidden. Not crumpled. Made small and kept.
I can’t leave the sick.
He crossed the common room and re-checked a patient’s fever by touch—forehead, then wrist, then the rise and fall of breath. Adjusted a blanket edge so it covered what it needed to cover. Restacked the nearest bandages into a neat column where a hurried hand could grab them.
Then he went to Elisa.
He didn’t offer the note. He didn’t explain. He only met her eyes for a beat, the question clean: “Do you need my hands for anything?”
Elisa’s gaze flicked from him to the hawk on the frame, then back. She read the pull in his posture the way she read a confession—quick, clean, without making it a spectacle. She gave a single, small nod.
She didn’t need him.
He nodded. That was enough.
Cloak on. Staff in hand. The note settled inside his belt wrap where it wouldn’t be lost or damaged. When he stepped out into the evening, the air met him cold and wet, and the Hall’s warmth fell away behind his back.
He walked, and found himself looking forward to it. That was new.
The bridge took him back in the way it always did: press of bodies, steam lifting off pots, river damp rising through the boards. Maeril’s canopy held a small pocket of order—line, bowls, the pot’s steady breath. Her hawk familiar perched on the ridgepole, talons set into wet cloth, head ticking in small, exact turns.
She didn’t rush to him. She finished cleaning—one last wipe, a lid settled, the ladle set down like punctuation—then met his eyes as if he’d arrived on time. She nodded toward the edge, an invitation without ceremony, and stepped away from the counter only after the last bowl in her hands found its place.
They walked off Wyrm’s Crossing. The crowd noise thinned in layers. Boards creaked underfoot. River below. Above the awnings, the hawk’s shadow slid once, then kept pace.
“How long have you been in Baldur’s Gate?” Maeril asked as they walked.
He took a moment. Cut his life down to what was usable. “I was born here. I traveled for about a decade to train, and then came back. You?”
“A few years,” she said. “People see the Abyss in my face and decide where I belong. Usually somewhere else. But here, nobody minds. So I settled. Found a rhythm that worked.”
His eyes flicked to her horns, her green-tinted skin, her yellow eyes—then away. Not to reassure her. Just to keep himself from staring. He’d seen people treated like warnings.
The hawk passed overhead. Her gaze snapped up without thinking, then returned to the path like it had never moved.
“You watch from above?” he asked.
“I keep eyes on the bridge. And on the ones it eats first.” She spoke like it was work. “It also keeps me from being surprised by the wrong things.”
She went quiet for a heartbeat, measuring.
“And then I saw you step in,” she added. “Between a kid and a bad decision. Between a drunk sailor and a crossbow.”
Her head tilted, studying him.
“Looks like it tends to be a habit of yours. Those scars don’t come from one good deed.”
A small huff escaped him—almost a laugh. “Indeed.” His hand went to the back of his head, fingers finding the old knife-cut scar by muscle memory, then dropping. “Some things don’t stop unless you step in. I can take a hit. Not everyone can.”
Maeril smiled, looking ahead. “Most people can’t even stand being inconvenienced for someone else.”
“I’ve learned how to live with it. That’s all,” he said, as if it were simple. “It’s like your cooking. It’s how I keep people from falling apart.”
“I’d rather cry over onions than cough blood,” she said.
He surprised himself with the grin that followed. “Try my stew. You’ll understand why I choose bruises.”
Her laugh came out warm and quick, brief as steam. “No, thank you. I’d rather stay alive.”
They left the densest part of the bridge behind. Boards gave way to packed earth. The city edge loosened: shacks spaced wider, scrub showing between them, wind gaining room. The hawk kept parallel overhead, patient as a tool.
Ahead, her hut waited: bead and leather strips where a door should have been. Herb bundles hung at the opening like a warning and an invitation at once.
He frowned at the lack of a door.
She said, “Hinges don’t stop anything that matters. Wards do. And flying claws.” Her eyes flicked up toward the beam line, as if the hawk could hear praise. “Some dare. They usually try once. Then regret it.”
She stopped at the threshold without stepping aside. Not blocking him—just refusing to make the choice for him.
“You can turn around. I won’t chase you.”
“You would,” he said, not believing her.
“I would. But I won’t drag you in either.” She gestured toward the hut’s interior and left the space open.
For a moment he tasted the ease of leaving. The clean relief of making it simple by disappearing. His thumb brushed the red cord once—more check than ritual—and dropped away.
“…All right.”
He stepped through. No flare. No spectacle. The space simply held itself: ordered shelves, jars and bundles, a hearth giving steady heat. Two mismatched stools set where tired bodies could be useful again. The air smelled of dried herbs and clean earth, river damp kept politely outside.
Maeril invited him to sit. He did. Above them, the hawk settled on a beam, quiet as a nail in wood.
Tea came without ceremony. Simple cups. Steam that smelled of mint and honey.
“Where did you learn to cook so well?” he asked.
Maeril smiled—at the question, at the fact he’d asked it. “Everyone needs food. It’s an easy way to earn a place when you don’t have one.”
The words sat for a beat. Rishi watched the way her gaze went past him, not far—just enough to touch an old memory and return.
“I let it become one of my joys,” she continued. “And that’s what made me good at it.”
She glanced at her small working desk—notes, paper, scrolls, ink, the quiet clutter of practiced craft.
“It taught me the value of practice and creativity,” she said. “Useful skills for an arcane weaver.”
The fire sank lower. Cups cooled and were warmed again. Maeril spoke about learning magic when she was young—the hunger of it—and then turned the question on him, asking about Lantern Hall like it mattered, like it was more than a place where people went to break.
As they talked, something in him loosened. Ease arrived, then the fear of it. He felt himself start to settle into the warmth of being received, and that familiarity made his stomach tighten.
“I should let you sleep,” he said, bluntly.
“You can leave if you want. But don’t pretend it’s because you’re polite.” Her grin wasn’t cruel. It was accurate. “It’s you trying not to get used to being taken care of.”
His throat tightened. Not shame—recognition. He let it sit there without wrestling it into a story.
“Drink your tea,” she said. “Then decide what you’re actually doing.”
Her mouth twitched, amused at his discomfort without taking advantage of it.
He drank the last of his cold tea, then felt his shoulders drop a fraction. “Should we make more? It’s gone cold.”
She smiled at the indirect agreement and set about warming what she’d prepared earlier.
They held silence while the water heated. Not empty. Just unforced. He listened to the small sounds—kettle, fire, the bead strips shifting when the wind touched them—and let his body register that nothing was asking him to be anything but present.
Maeril sat back with the warm tea, poured fresh cups, and looked directly at him, soft smile held steady.
“I’m going to say something,” she said, “and you’re not allowed to turn it into philosophy.”
She held his eyes when she spoke next, and he didn’t look away.
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life only reacting.”
“To what?” His brow furrowed.
“To hunger. To power. To systems that pretend they’re weather.”
The words hit close. Too close to dismiss.
“I want one thing that I choose.” She paused and let the quiet take the weight. “I want to visit Candlekeep’s great library.”
The name landed in the room like a placed stone. She didn’t soften it. She didn’t laugh it off.
“It’s a place built to keep knowledge from rotting,” she said. “It’s quiet on purpose. And I want to stand inside a wall that isn’t fear. But…”
She held the word, looking away, hesitating for a heartbeat. Then she faced him again.
“I don’t want to go alone.”
His gaze dropped to his cup. Thumb on the rim. The reflex to step back, to make it clean by refusing, rose sharp and practiced.
He didn’t move.
“You don’t know me,” he said, and heard how thin it sounded even to him.
“I know.” Her throat worked once. She didn’t reach for him. “But for once, I met someone who doesn’t need things to be easy.”
“Easy isn’t really what I do,” he said, a dry attempt to ease the tension.
Her shoulders dropped a little.
“Men I’ve met before,” she said, “they want the idea. The novelty. The green witch. Then the work shows up. The mud. The crowds. The waiting. And they get tired.”
She gestured at herself—no theatrics, just fact.
“But they do not want this.”
His caution rose in him like a trained muscle. “Want makes people careless.”
“Want makes people alive. Careless is a separate skill.” Her voice sharpened without becoming cruel. “I’m too old for games. I want something real. For once.”
The lantern guttered once. Silence deepened. Rishi heard night birds outside and felt, in his bones, how late it was—how many times he’d used lateness as an excuse to leave.
He set his cup down. The sound was small and final.
The next line came out clean, unperformed. It surprised him—how little armor it carried.
“I’ve been celibate my entire life, you know. I’m a monk.”
She looked back at him. “That’s why I am asking you. Not the monk.”
He bit his lip, trying to contain his laugh. He couldn’t believe how open she was—how daring, and how direct, without making it a performance.
He leaned slightly on the table, toward her, and felt his own want sit in his chest without immediately turning into a problem.
“You know,” he said, “to enter Candlekeep we will need to offer a writing of value. Something they don’t already have.”
Maeril’s face lit with a wide smile, then she turned it into a grin like she refused to let herself linger too long on relief. “I don’t have a rare tome lying around.”
He heard himself before he could retreat. “We make one.”
Her eyes narrowed in disbelief. “Did you just volunteer to write?”
“It’s not the worst decision I took tonight,” he said, and the laugh that followed was quiet but real.
For a beat they held each other’s gaze. Then both looked away, as if holding it too long would make it fragile.
“Come back tomorrow,” Maeril said. “And bring your neat monk handwriting,” as if to seal their decision into fate.
“Writing’s not neat. My hands do other work.” He turned one hand, showing bruised knuckles like proof.
“That’s fine,” she said. “Candlekeep can suffer a little.”
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
04 - Drunken Intercession
The Monk and the Witch - Mercy Lands Hard
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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—”
Rishi 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 Rishi’s robes, then the way Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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 Rishi saw the moment something changed in him—fear still there, but folded around something heavier.
Then he was gone.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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 Rishi’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.
—
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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,” Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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,” Rishi 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.”
Rishi 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 Rishi—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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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 Rishi.
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.
Author's notes
In next scene draft, Rishi goes to Maeril’s place, but my wife says I need to switch focus to Rishi 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 Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi 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.
Rishi’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 Rishi.”
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.
Rishi 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,” Rishi 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.
Rishi moved in.
Index | Next: Drunken Intercession
The Monk and the Witch - Drunken Intercession
The dog stayed latched to the sailor’s forearm like it meant to stay—teeth buried, body braced low, the leash trailing on the cobbles. Lantern light slicked its wet coat to a shine. The sailor swayed, half-turned toward the tavern door, face twisted with pain and drunken outrage.
He lifted his free fist and slammed it down into the dog’s head.
Again—heavier, faster, uglier blows.
The dog’s skull snapped sideways. Its legs skidded on wet stone. The jaws did not open. Its eyes went glassy for a beat, then blinked hard, searching for focus, as if shaking could drive the fog out of its head.
The ring of onlookers tightened—hungry and afraid at once.
Rishi moved.
Not a run—economy. Long, silent steps that ate distance. He took in the pieces as he closed: the sailor’s wobble, the dog’s locked jaw, the doorway behind them, bodies pressed too near to be safe.
He did not reach toward the dog’s teeth. He stepped in on the leash side—outside the dog’s jawline—and caught the collar from behind, fingers finding leather under wet fur, where the neck was strong and the mouth could not swing.
Then he yanked—up and sideways.
Hard and fast—stealing the dog’s leverage before it could brace. The body rose a handspan; the sailor’s arm came with it, twisted at an angle the jaw couldn’t keep. The bite broke—wet, reluctant.
The dog hit the cobbles yelping, gagging once. Its paws scrabbled on the slick stone. It shook hard, confused and violent, then backed off in a tight arc, hackles up, head low, barking like it could rebuild courage out of noise.
The nearest onlookers recoiled, boots skidding back, the ring widening in the rain.
The sailor lurched forward from the sudden release, arm swinging uselessly, weight pitching forward, suddenly unanchored.
Rishi was already there.
He drove in low—shoulder into the sailor’s lower chest, using the stumble like a lever. Breath blasted out of the sailor. His knees dipped. Stubborn mass kept him upright for a heartbeat longer—then not.
Rishi’s hand caught the sailor’s wrist and rotated it into a lock. Not a yank. A steer.
He hauled the sailor backward into the street—away from the door, away from the dog’s range, away from the smallest bodies. His feet stayed wide on the rain-slick stone, hips turned, weight low. The sailor fought with strength and liquor, but it came out clumsy—pulling against angles he couldn’t read.
The crowd shifted with them, shuffling back to avoid being swallowed into the tangle.
The patron flashed at the edge of his vision, retreating into the tavern. Rishi did not follow. He kept the sailor moving. Kept space open. Kept the doorway from becoming a trap.
The patron reappeared with a crossbow coming up, rain beading on the arms. He hunted a shot and found none—only Rishi and the sailor tangled too close, too fast, too human for a clean line.
The bowstring drew back—and a sharp screech sliced down from above. A clear warning.
Maeril’s familiar—the hawk—dropped low over the raised crossbow, wings beating once across the lanternlight, cutting straight through the weapon’s line.
Rishi heard it and knew what came next. No time to argue. No space to gamble.
He pulled the sailor aside and dropped his own weight low, using the lock, his hip, and a planted leg to drive him down onto the cobbles—fast enough that the sailor hit before he could brace.
The crossbow string snapped dry.
The bolt hissed through the space they’d occupied a heartbeat ago and slammed into a nearby wall with a heavy thunk. Wet splinters jumped. The crossbow’s string still quivering.
The crowd flinched as one—noise pinching into silence for half a beat, then breaking into a scramble as people stumbled away from the bolt’s path.
The patron’s crossbow dipped. Anger cracked into something sharper—realization. He’d nearly put steel into a man’s skull.
Behind Rishi, the sailor scrabbled, trying to get up. Wet hands found nothing but slick stone and rage.
Rishi kept hold of the back of his coat—just enough to deny balance without turning it into punishment. The sailor flailed: wild fists, backward kicks, heels thrown back without aim. Nothing landed clean. Rishi stayed just out of range, body angled, breath even, letting the storm of limbs spend itself.
Then—no warning, no wind-up—he stepped in.
A hard, straight punch into ribs, driven through studded leather and bone.
Air burst out of the sailor in a harsh bark. His posture folded. His feet tangled. He stumbled into the wall and slid down it, one hand smearing rain across stone before he sank toward the ground.
Rishi released him carefully—careful even now.
Across the lane, the patron snatched the crossbow back up, hands shaking with anger and fear, trying to find a shot through the crowd again.
Rishi turned and went—direct and fast—on an angle.
Before the patron could ready the crossbow, Rishi drove all his weight into the patron and slammed him back into the inn’s doorframe. Wood cracked. The patron’s breath popped out. His boots skidded on wet stone; his head clipped the frame—enough to rattle him and take his balance.
The crossbow slipped from his hands and clattered to the cobbles, skidding end over end into the doorway, out of reach.
A couple of bystanders jerked back from the rattle, hands up, as if the weapon might bite them too.
Rishi kept the patron there, forearm across his chest, weight set. Not crushing. Not kind. Decisive.
“Stop,” he ordered.
The patron pushed back once—more reflex than will—then the fight ran out of him. His eyes blinked too fast. His throat worked.
Rishi held his gaze until the shaking eased, until the man’s posture sagged into something that couldn’t lift a weapon.
Then he released pressure and stepped back.
“Please,” he said—flat, purposeful. “Let me help this wounded man,” pointing at the sailor, ” I’ll take him off the street.”
A beat. Rain ticked on wood and iron.
The patron stayed braced in the doorway, blinking, swallowing hard.
Rishi turned only when the weapon stayed down and the man’s shoulders sank, and moved toward the sailor on the stones.
Rain kept ticking—steady, small—flattening the street’s sounds into a damp hush. Lanternlight smeared in puddles as Rishi took the sailor by shoulder and belt and pulled him upright, just enough to move.
No speech. No explanation. He took the weight and went.
The sailor sagged into him with dead heaviness—sour breath, wet wool, damp leather. The bitten forearm hung wrong at his side, wrapped only in rain and shock for now, the air around it sharp with blood-salt. Each step tugged a quiet answer from Rishi’s own bruises, a reminder written under his ribs and along his forearms. He did not change pace for it. He chose streets he knew, straight lines through Brampton where lanterns were already coming on and the docks’ smell began to rise—tar, rope, salt, work.
Lantern Hall’s light showed ahead like relief and obligation wearing the same face. He felt it in his chest before he reached the threshold.
Inside, the common room held its usual warmth: worn wood, soot in the grain, low light that never fully chased the corners away. A few tables. A few chairs. The steady quiet of a place that kept taking in what the city threw out.
Elisa was at the altar—Lantern Hall’s spiritual anchor, the one who mended what words could reach when wounds were deeper than flesh. Still. Hands set. A small flame’s glow held to her face and left everything else in gentle shadow.
She lifted her gaze only enough to register him and the limp body at his side. Her eyes held him a beat longer than the wounded man, and something in her face softened—small, controlled—like she’d been braced for him not to come back at all. Rishi felt her tension release.
Rishi guided the sailor through as if he’d done it a hundred nights in a row. He checked the small room kept for the poor and wounded. Four bunks. All taken. Breath and sleep already rationed there, bodies wrapped in the Hall’s thin mercy.
He did not argue with it. He did not waste time wishing for more.
He brought the sailor back out and lowered him to the common room floor where he could be seen and managed. A bedroll went down quick. Blankets over it, then over the sailor—arranged to keep him from rolling, to keep the injured arm from being trapped beneath his bulk. The man muttered once, thick with drink, then sank into heavy breathing.
Adequate. Contained. Safe enough to get through the night.
Rishi cleared space the way his hands always did—without treating it as important, because it was necessary. Chairs scraped back. A table corner opened. A lantern drawn closer and angled down, its light made functional. He went to the supplies nook that was his by habit more than ownership and opened it with the familiar economy of someone who replenished what he used.
Clean cloth first. Wraps. A small blade and scissors. A stopper-bottle of cleansing spirits. A jar of salve. More bandage rolls than he liked to see disappear in a week. He set them in a strict order—not ritual, just fatigue-proofing, so his tired hands could not reach wrong.
Then he knelt and inspected the sailor’s forearm.
The coat’s thick leather had blunted the worst, leaving tooth marks that were deep but not down to bone. Still, the wound was angry—ragged edges, darkened by rain-filth, swelling already gathering under skin. It would hurt worse by morning. It would tempt infection the way street wounds always did.
He made his hands clean. He laid a folded cloth under the arm and positioned it so the sailor’s weight wouldn’t drag at it. The sailor breathed hard, mouth open, lost in drink.
Rishi cut away clothing cleanly, avoiding any pull across the bite. The blade moved with competence. He exposed the wound fully, then poured the cleansing spirits and flushed it, slow and thorough, lifting grit and rain-dirt out in a thin, stinging wash.
The sailor twitched, a half-wake reflex. A low sound scraped up his throat.
Rishi did not rush. He steadied the arm with one hand and worked with the other, keeping pressure where it mattered, letting the reflex pass without turning it into a struggle. He flushed again until the runoff ran clean enough to trust. Then he dabbed—not rubbed—and laid salve over the torn skin in a thin protective layer: enough to seal, enough to discourage rot, not so much it went slick.
Bandage came next. Firm tension. Even tension. He wrapped to hold without stealing blood, watching skin color and swelling as he went. Layer one supported the forearm and elbow properly, locking the joint into something the sailor’s unconscious thrashing couldn’t easily undo. Layer two bound the arm across the sailor’s chest—functional sling-wrap, snug and unglamorous, built to stop the drunken flail that would tear the work open before morning.
The sailor twitched again, then settled. His breathing thickened, then smoothed into a dull rhythm. Rishi finished the last turn of cloth, tucked the end, pressed once to confirm it would hold.
Only then did he let his shoulders drop a fraction.
He put the room back in order: wraps re-stowed, jars re-corked, tools wiped and returned to their places. The lantern’s flame turned down. He checked the sailor once more—bandage secure, sling binding seated, blanket placed to keep the wrapped arm from slipping free. The man was alive. Contained. No longer one more body the street could steal.
Rishi stood, and the day finally reached him. Fatigue wasn’t drama. It was weight in the joints. Ache in the ribs. A faint tremor that wanted to start and didn’t—held back by habit.
He did the last small caretaker sweep—doors, corners, the common room’s quiet—then went to his small room as if it were another duty and not relief.
He lay on the plank bed, pulled blanket and fur up, and let his hands go still at his sides. For a moment he took one measured breath—in, out—and kept it plain.
Finally. It’s been a long two days.
Tomorrow: a cold plunge into the Chionthar, to clear my mind and reset my body. Then breathing. Stretching. Training. I’ll be myself again.
He closed his eyes and let the Hall settle around him.
Index | Next: Tea, Sometime?
The Monk and the Witch - Tea, Sometime?
Lantern Hall mornings came in the same order whether his body wanted them or not: boards cool underfoot, water drawn and put over the fire, the sweep that chased last night’s grit into the edges. The altar glow held steady in the dim, and Elisa held steady with it—present, contained, making the Hall feel anchored without speaking.
Rishisura took his breathwork where he always did, in the small space his body knew. Stretching. Light maintenance—enough to wake joints without pushing them. Then the Hall again: heat checked, kettle watched, a quick glance to Elisa—anything break overnight?—and a fast audit of the supplies corner.
Cloth. Wraps. Clean rags folded tight. Jars sealed.
His hands were sorting when his mind slid sideways.
A child’s thin wrist—gone as soon as he noticed it. Bread sliding to the edge of a counter as if it had been an accident. The brief brightening in Maeril’s eyes when she gave something away.
His thumb found the red cord and rested there. He let the exhale lengthen until his shoulders eased. The thought thinned. His fingers kept folding cloth.
Late morning and midday took him out into the city with a bowl and a practiced face that asked without words. Doorways. Corners. Small exchanges made without ceremony. People gave him crusts or a copper and, in return, he listened with his eyes as much as his ears: the gray of fatigue, the hitch in a breath, the way a hand guarded a rib even while the mouth said “nothing.”
A dockworker sat on a step with a cut that wouldn’t stop weeping. Rishisura rinsed it clean, wrapped with firm, even tension, and asked two questions that mattered.
As he tied off the final turn, the phrase surfaced uninvited—green witch. Bridge talk—Maeril’s smirk behind it.
He didn’t chase it. He kept his eyes on the dockworker’s face. He felt his feet on the stone. He counted one slow breath out.
“You dizzy?” he asked. “Any fever?”
Afternoon pulled him back to Lantern Hall for what never stopped arriving. Intake. Triage. Nursing work that was mostly patience: water, food, clean cloth, checking a fever by touch because there wasn’t time for fuss. He restocked what he’d used, wiped what needed wiping, put every tool back where a tired hand could find it without thinking.
Elisa spoke once—something small, functional, meant for him.
He answered a half-beat late, because for a heartbeat he thought he heard the hawk’s screech again—sharp above lanternlight, a warning note that tightened his chest.
He swallowed. Let the sound pass. “I’ll handle it,” he said, and did.
Dusk cooled the river air and brought bodies into circles under rules that kept it from becoming a brawl. He took rounds for conditioning and control—sometimes with sailors, sometimes with mercenaries, sometimes with a Flaming Fist man who needed to hit something and came here because consequences still existed under the Hall’s eyes.
Between rounds, sweat cooling on his skin, his attention flicked—unasked—to Maeril’s gaze tracking a crowd without ever looking busy.
He reset his stance. Hands up. Work continued.
Late night meant alleys: routes, sightlines, exits. Walking the Lower City and Brampton, listening more than looking, learning how violence started before it started. Footing. Angles. The quiet change in a voice that meant someone was about to make a choice they couldn’t take back.
For three days he did it all the same way: exact, clean, present.
And for three days the drift kept returning—not in floods, not in longing, just in small, persistent intrusions that should have slid off his discipline and didn’t.
He had believed his mind was sealed. He was learning it wasn’t.
Late afternoon emptied Lantern Hall in slow layers. The last bowls had gone out. The soup smell faded down to damp wood and soot. Voices dropped. Chairs settled into their places again. The supplies corner was being put back together from the day—wraps restacked, jars re-corked, clean cloth folded tight.
Rishisura stood at the supplies table, wiping a jar’s rim clean before he set the lid and pressed the seal down with his thumb.
Across the room, Elisa knelt at the small sun-altar, hands still, lips moving too softly to carry. Even in prayer she kept the room in the corner of her eye—counting who remained, catching what wasn’t said, ready to turn a person with one gentle question and make them tell the truth in their own words.
The seal was still warm when movement caught at the threshold.
Maeril’s hawk perched on the doorframe as if it belonged there. Its feathers were ash-pale, the edges ghosting to translucence when the light caught them. It held the wood without sound. Eyes fixed into the Hall and did not blink.
Rishisura’s hands went still. His attention narrowed—precise. He moved to the doorway and stopped at a respectful distance. The hawk’s head ticked once, small and exact, and a pale strip of paper was bound to its leg.
He reached slowly, not grabbing, and the bird allowed it. The note came free without struggle.
Three lines. Plain hand. No flourishes.
Tea? You know where to find me. —The Green Witch
For a breath, the words sat in his chest heavier than paper should.
His thumb found the red cord and rested there. He let one long exhale empty his chest. The reflex landed him back in his body, back in the Hall, back in the fact of choice.
He folded the note once. Then again. Not hidden. Not crumpled. Made small and kept.
I can’t leave the sick.
He crossed the common room and re-checked a patient’s fever by touch—forehead, then wrist, then the rise and fall of breath. Adjusted a blanket edge so it covered what it needed to cover. Restacked the nearest bandages into a neat column where a hurried hand could grab them.
Then he went to Elisa.
He didn’t offer the note. He didn’t explain. He only met her eyes for a beat, the question clean: “Do you need my hands for anything?”
Elisa’s gaze flicked from him to the hawk on the frame, then back. She read the pull in his posture the way she read a confession—quick, clean, without making it a spectacle. She gave a single, small nod.
She didn’t need him.
He nodded. That was enough.
Cloak on. Staff in hand. The note settled inside his belt wrap where it wouldn’t be lost or damaged. When he stepped out into the evening, the air met him cold and wet, and the Hall’s warmth fell away behind his back.
He walked, and found himself looking forward to it. That was new.
The bridge took him back in the way it always did: press of bodies, steam lifting off pots, river damp rising through the boards. Maeril’s canopy held a small pocket of order—line, bowls, the pot’s steady breath. Her hawk familiar perched on the ridgepole, talons set into wet cloth, head ticking in small, exact turns.
She didn’t rush to him. She finished cleaning—one last wipe, a lid settled, the ladle set down like punctuation—then met his eyes as if he’d arrived on time. She nodded toward the edge, an invitation without ceremony, and stepped away from the counter only after the last bowl in her hands found its place.
They walked off Wyrm’s Crossing. The crowd noise thinned in layers. Boards creaked underfoot. River below. Above the awnings, the hawk’s shadow slid once, then kept pace.
“How long have you been in Baldur’s Gate?” Maeril asked as they walked.
He took a moment. Cut his life down to what was usable. “I was born here. I traveled for about a decade to train, and then came back. You?”
“A few years,” she said. “People see the Abyss in my face and decide where I belong. Usually somewhere else. But here, nobody minds. So I settled. Found a rhythm that worked.”
His eyes flicked to her horns, her green-tinted skin, her yellow eyes—then away. Not to reassure her. Just to keep himself from staring. He’d seen people treated like warnings.
The hawk passed overhead. Her gaze snapped up without thinking, then returned to the path like it had never moved.
“You watch from above?” he asked.
“I keep eyes on the bridge. And on the ones it eats first.” She spoke like it was work. “It also keeps me from being surprised by the wrong things.”
She went quiet for a heartbeat, measuring.
“And then I saw you step in,” she added. “Between a kid and a bad decision. Between a drunk sailor and a crossbow.”
Her head tilted, studying him.
“Looks like it tends to be a habit of yours. Those scars don’t come from one good deed.”
A small huff escaped him—almost a laugh. “Indeed.” His hand went to the back of his head, fingers finding the old knife-cut scar by muscle memory, then dropping. “Some things don’t stop unless you step in. I can take a hit. Not everyone can.”
Maeril smiled, looking ahead. “Most people can’t even stand being inconvenienced for someone else.”
“I’ve learned how to live with it. That’s all,” he said, as if it were simple. “It’s like your cooking. It’s how I keep people from falling apart.”
“I’d rather cry over onions than cough blood,” she said.
He surprised himself with the grin that followed. “Try my stew. You’ll understand why I choose bruises.”
Her laugh came out warm and quick, brief as steam. “No, thank you. I’d rather stay alive.”
They left the densest part of the bridge behind. Boards gave way to packed earth. The city edge loosened: shacks spaced wider, scrub showing between them, wind gaining room. The hawk kept parallel overhead, patient as a tool.
Ahead, her hut waited: bead and leather strips where a door should have been. Herb bundles hung at the opening like a warning and an invitation at once.
He frowned at the lack of a door.
She said, “Hinges don’t stop anything that matters. Wards do. And flying claws.” Her eyes flicked up toward the beam line, as if the hawk could hear praise. “Some dare. They usually try once. Then regret it.”
She stopped at the threshold without stepping aside. Not blocking him—just refusing to make the choice for him.
“You can turn around. I won’t chase you.”
“You would,” he said, not believing her.
“I would. But I won’t drag you in either.” She gestured toward the hut’s interior and left the space open.
For a moment he tasted the ease of leaving. The clean relief of making it simple by disappearing. His thumb brushed the red cord once—more check than ritual—and dropped away.
“…All right.”
He stepped through. No flare. No spectacle. The space simply held itself: ordered shelves, jars and bundles, a hearth giving steady heat. Two mismatched stools set where tired bodies could be useful again. The air smelled of dried herbs and clean earth, river damp kept politely outside.
Maeril invited him to sit. He did. Above them, the hawk settled on a beam, quiet as a nail in wood.
Tea came without ceremony. Simple cups. Steam that smelled of mint and honey.
“Where did you learn to cook so well?” he asked.
Maeril smiled—at the question, at the fact he’d asked it. “Everyone needs food. It’s an easy way to earn a place when you don’t have one.”
The words sat for a beat. Rishi watched the way her gaze went past him, not far—just enough to touch an old memory and return.
“I let it become one of my joys,” she continued. “And that’s what made me good at it.”
She glanced at her small working desk—notes, paper, scrolls, ink, the quiet clutter of practiced craft.
“It taught me the value of practice and creativity,” she said. “Useful skills for an arcane weaver.”
The fire sank lower. Cups cooled and were warmed again. Maeril spoke about learning magic when she was young—the hunger of it—and then turned the question on him, asking about Lantern Hall like it mattered, like it was more than a place where people went to break.
As they talked, something in him loosened. Ease arrived, then the fear of it. He felt himself start to settle into the warmth of being received, and that familiarity made his stomach tighten.
“I should let you sleep,” he said, bluntly.
“You can leave if you want. But don’t pretend it’s because you’re polite.” Her grin wasn’t cruel. It was accurate. “It’s you trying not to get used to being taken care of.”
His throat tightened. Not shame—recognition. He let it sit there without wrestling it into a story.
“Drink your tea,” she said. “Then decide what you’re actually doing.”
Her mouth twitched, amused at his discomfort without taking advantage of it.
He drank the last of his cold tea, then felt his shoulders drop a fraction. “Should we make more? It’s gone cold.”
She smiled at the indirect agreement and set about warming what she’d prepared earlier.
They held silence while the water heated. Not empty. Just unforced. He listened to the small sounds—kettle, fire, the bead strips shifting when the wind touched them—and let his body register that nothing was asking him to be anything but present.
Maeril sat back with the warm tea, poured fresh cups, and looked directly at him, soft smile held steady.
“I’m going to say something,” she said, “and you’re not allowed to turn it into philosophy.”
She held his eyes when she spoke next, and he didn’t look away.
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life only reacting.”
“To what?” His brow furrowed.
“To hunger. To power. To systems that pretend they’re weather.”
The words hit close. Too close to dismiss.
“I want one thing that I choose.” She paused and let the quiet take the weight. “I want to visit Candlekeep’s great library.”
The name landed in the room like a placed stone. She didn’t soften it. She didn’t laugh it off.
“It’s a place built to keep knowledge from rotting,” she said. “It’s quiet on purpose. And I want to stand inside a wall that isn’t fear. But…”
She held the word, looking away, hesitating for a heartbeat. Then she faced him again.
“I don’t want to go alone.”
His gaze dropped to his cup. Thumb on the rim. The reflex to step back, to make it clean by refusing, rose sharp and practiced.
He didn’t move.
“You don’t know me,” he said, and heard how thin it sounded even to him.
“I know.” Her throat worked once. She didn’t reach for him. “But for once, I met someone who doesn’t need things to be easy.”
“Easy isn’t really what I do,” he said, a dry attempt to ease the tension.
Her shoulders dropped a little.
“Men I’ve met before,” she said, “they want the idea. The novelty. The green witch. Then the work shows up. The mud. The crowds. The waiting. And they get tired.”
She gestured at herself—no theatrics, just fact.
“But they do not want this.”
His caution rose in him like a trained muscle. “Want makes people careless.”
“Want makes people alive. Careless is a separate skill.” Her voice sharpened without becoming cruel. “I’m too old for games. I want something real. For once.”
The lantern guttered once. Silence deepened. Rishi heard night birds outside and felt, in his bones, how late it was—how many times he’d used lateness as an excuse to leave.
He set his cup down. The sound was small and final.
The next line came out clean, unperformed. It surprised him—how little armor it carried.
“I’ve been celibate my entire life, you know. I’m a monk.”
She looked back at him. “That’s why I am asking you. Not the monk.”
He bit his lip, trying to contain his laugh. He couldn’t believe how open she was—how daring, and how direct, without making it a performance.
He leaned slightly on the table, toward her, and felt his own want sit in his chest without immediately turning into a problem.
“You know,” he said, “to enter Candlekeep we will need to offer a writing of value. Something they don’t already have.”
Maeril’s face lit with a wide smile, then she turned it into a grin like she refused to let herself linger too long on relief. “I don’t have a rare tome lying around.”
He heard himself before he could retreat. “We make one.”
Her eyes narrowed in disbelief. “Did you just volunteer to write?”
“It’s not the worst decision I took tonight,” he said, and the laugh that followed was quiet but real.
For a beat they held each other’s gaze. Then both looked away, as if holding it too long would make it fragile.
“Come back tomorrow,” Maeril said. “And bring your neat monk handwriting,” as if to seal their decision into fate.
“Writing’s not neat. My hands do other work.” He turned one hand, showing bruised knuckles like proof.
“That’s fine,” she said. “Candlekeep can suffer a little.”
Index