Bree-Town

Asmalinde came fully awake. She had been drifting half in half out between the elven world and the earthly one. Nothing was clear to her. Flashes of a deep stairway, fire and stars blotted out by shadows. She shook her head and broke from her all but non-existent camp. She had left her horse behind in one of the small farms dotting the landscape on the edge of the Old Forest and the east road to Bree-town.

“Did you not have friends in the Mark with whom you could confide in such gossip?” Piper asks me over the rim of her mug of cider. We had been talking long at the table in the center of the tavern. (She had caught me outside in the rain, relishing in it, and invited me inside for a drink ere I caught cold).

I fume even as I storm into the home of my brother; “I shall never again stay out so late!” I declare as if an impetuous teenager with little thought of consequence, and make myself scarce and hidden in my niece’s room. My niece, Jennefer, is already outside playing while her mother washes the laundry. It is early morning, and again was I out all night, and for such a dreadful reason to boot!

Sera stepped into the hovel of a room, with its broken windows and holes in the wall so deep that you could see through them to the street, that she and her mother called a home in Beggar's Alley.

"Mother? I'm back."

A middle aged woman with similar features, though they were somewhat worn and drawn, stood from her seat by the tub of murky water that served as a washbasin and her eyes lit up with excitement and love.

"Sera! Come here- Ah, wait let me dry my hands first-"

Ford stirred in his bed as the morning light crept in through his small room through an equally small window under which his writing desk was situated. It was a quaint, cozy room, the kind you'd want for a single person living by his lonesome, but at the same time, it was monstrously cramped -- a shelf overflowing with various books stood next to the dusty stonework of a dimly-lit herth-fire, a small table situated in the middle of the room, flanked by two chairs, and one of the dresser's drawers was still half-open, a sock protruding from it's edge.

A series of written thoughts stashed away in a box of parchment, written meticulously and precisely, as if the writer had taken great pains to make their handwriting as legible and clear as possible. This time, the author's manner of speech is far more eloquent and collected, like he had taken the time to sort out his thoughts.

A series of written thoughts stashed away in a box of parchment, written meticulously and precisely, as if the writer had taken great pains to make their handwriting as legible and clear as possible.