[center][img]https://fontmeme.com/permalink/190811/ebaf9cbdde92c7897e853938cfe68fe5.png[/img]

[color=6E8E67]Location:[/color] Eldra, Shalador[/center][hr][hr]

There was something about waiting that always made her stomach feel watery.  Like she might throw up.  Like she might be able to run a marathon without losing breath.  Her hands shook as she held them clasped against her stomach.  She watched the window as the day turn slowly darker to night.  It was awful, waiting.

She couldn't eat.  She had given the girl a kind smile and had even tried to take afew bites but the stew turned to grit and sand in her mouth.  Fatima spent her time in silence, thinking, and watching the window.  Her thoughts were on her mistakes.  And on the man who caused a quiver of terror and excitement to wrack her spine.  She would occasionally sigh and shake her head as if in an attempt to cut him loose from her mind.  But he stuck.  Like a tumor.  Or like a missing piece of a puzzle.  A dangerous piece of the puzzle.  Covered in razor blades and arsenic.

When the two guardsmen made their racket and abused the door, Fatima stopped breathing.  She waited in complete stillness and silence.  She wanted to knock them upside the head for their idiocracy.  How she could have given them a stern talking to.  Their shadows danced across the walls and books.  Their light moved hither and thither.  It dragged on.  Far too long.  She bid them so many times to leave.  She shouted it at them in her mind.  Finally they moved on and she let out the breath she had been holding.  After a while the shopkeep came to tell them it was the safest it was ever going to get.  Jandar offered him money.  This was something they would have little chance of restoring on their travels.

Fatima materialized an old book on herbalism and anatomy.  It was a little hard worn for the amount of times she had read over it.  It had been old too when it came into her possession.  But it was valuable in what knowledge it could give and to the right person who needed it.  The book was worth something.  She pushed the book into the shopkeeper's hands with a whispered, [color=6E8E67]"Thank you,"[/color] before she made her way out of the door and into the heartless night.