easternwindrises:

               ❝ Oh, I know that face ——————
               but if you’re searching for someone
               I don’t think can help ya. ❞

       The woman frowned at the shadow of mild confusion at the other’s face. For a moment her heart skipped a beat, thinking she’d done something  w r o n g,  something that would yell ‘a stranger, beware the stranger’ but the single flutter of her dark eyelashes cleared her evenly dark eyes of any visible doubt that was hiding in them.

“–Pardon?” Bard did not think he had seen the strange woman before, which was a curiosity in this town. Not many came through Esgaroth; those days were long gone. Mist and shadow, that was all that remained of a place once alive with merriment and trade, the town on the lake ideally situated between two flourishing kingdoms. No more. Now the mountain was beset by a monstrous beast, and the woodland a shadow of its former glory, whispers of a growing darkness beneath its ceiling of once green leaves.

“I am not searching for– Forgive me, but your accent is very… I do not think I have ever heard it before. How did you come to be in Laketown?”