It’s been days since Talora had something to eat, what was once a refreshing cool has turned into a biting chill. The cobbled stone walk path is frosted over as Talora creeps down an alley, her hunger has gone past the point of pain and now just lingers as a reminder of something gone. A hole in her abdomen that begs for something, anything to please save it from this weakness. A loud growl echoes in her bones from her stomach, but she ignores it. She ran out of money three days ago, and she’s been sleeping on the cold ground in shadowy streets. When you’re homeless in the capital you have to hide away from patrols of catchpoles and street thugs alike, if you are caught by either it could mean mortal danger. It could also mean things far worse than death, a young woman Talora knew from the workhouse had been picked up not two days ago. Poor girl got robbed the first day, she’d been sleeping too far away from main street and got picked up by Eigo’s gang. If Talora had to guess she’s somewhere in the city being prostituted now, it was easier to not think about it. Ignoring hypothetical issues is easy for Talora now, everything within her is on the search for food now. She tried catching cats and mice, but she's far too big and slow for that. The same issues arise when she considers stealing food. She could snatch up a loaf of bread from the bakers, but probably not without getting caught. If she was caught it’d be her hands or her life, especially without a group backing her. The idea of beating some commoner down and taking their coin was repulsive, Talora had seen. Even if they were never slaves and hadn’t been through what she had, she could see that nobody here was truly safe or free. You can see it in the way the fat landlords jingle down the street tailed by armed guards, fresh from evicting a widowed mother and her two children. The emaciated man selling pottery, he’s had to skip seven meals in ten so that his pregnant wife has enough to eat. She couldn't live with herself if she took from them, and to take from a wealthy man was to court death for at least one Hagh Nahn in the city. People seemed to have a difficult time recognizing the faces of anyone not of their race, so if I was to get away another child could be punished for her actions.

Talora felt trapped as she stared at the man in the market square, bread lining his little stand. She had seen him before, he took bread out to market while his wife stayed at home and sold it to anyone coming in. Is she destined to starve? Alone in the streets of a city so far from home, unable to find work or provide for herself. Nobody will hire a Hagh Nahn, not with the war so fresh in history, not to mention the active slave trade making paid employees just not worth the coin. She had resolved yesterday to find a mark, and then follow him until he was completely alone. One that didn’t look like losing a couple coins would break his family, chubby perhaps. And today, she found her mark. A young man probably a year or two younger than Talora walked down the road away from market street, he had a sack of charcoal in his hands and he walked as though he’d never been in a fight. A jaunty saunter whisked young Raith down the road, he was quite chuffed with today’s dealings. His da’ had sent him down with eight coins to buy a couple weeks worth of charcoal, but he’s schmoozed Old miss Galica into half the price. He knew she thought he was adorable, something about baby fat around the cheeks. Raith liked to think of it as sturdiness, makes him hit harder and take it better in a fight. His dad would surely be pleased with him today, maybe even enough that he might let him skip cleaning out the forge! He is excited now and begins whistling, a fun light sort of tune his father often hummed when he was working.

Talora couldn't believe her eyes or her ears, is he whistling? No chance, someones pulling her leg right? You couldn’t make this easy of a target if you tried, Totalerenni had truly blessed her today. “Thank you elden mistress for the feast you have laid in front of me today”, she muttered a soft prayer in thanks to her goddess as she moved out of the alley behind him. She glanced in all directions, one final check before she enacted her plan. The plan was simple: tackle the boy, grab his purse, and skedaddle. A simple three part plan with room for improvisation, that sounds about good enough. She stepped softly up behind him, trying to muffle her footsteps before she got close enough. “THUMNP” the whistling comes to an abrupt end as Raith lands face first on the ground, The air exits his body and he finds that quite odd.

‘Odd, why did I fall over just now’? He thinks to himself as he begins to push up. A crushing weight settles on his back, forcing him back to the ground.

Talora drives her knee into his back as she grabs at the coin purse, she gets it in her hand and pulls, and pulls, and pulls, and yanks, and jimmy’s, and struggles but it doesn’t come loose. “Ah” she says aloud as a glaring flaw appears in her master plan. She’s forgotten the ‘cut’ portion of the cut-purse title. Right so this is certainly tied to his belt, and she has no knife to get it off.

Raith finally understands what's happening and reaches back, placing his hand in the crook of her knee. Pulling with the gripping hand and pushing off the ground with the other, he flips over and shakes Talora off his back.

“Off!” he shouts as he stands up, he gets low and takes a good look at his attacker. ‘Oh, oh wow’. He’s- well, he’s quite taken with her frankly. She’s got a nearly bald head, just some fuzz on top. This sort of rough and tumble way of holding herself, she’s tall and clearly strong. ‘Gods damned she’s pretty’, this thought enters his brain at about the same time Talora’s fist connects with his stomach. Raith doubles over, the shock and pain of the strike assailing him. Raith nearly throws up as he clutches his stomach. Talora spots his waist knife, she grabs it and quickly cuts off the coin purse. She makes a split second decision, drops the knife, and sprints down a nearby alley. Once she’s out of sight she starts taking random exits to muddy the search, but Raith isn’t following. He’s just staring at the mouth of the alleyway, thinking of the face he just glimpsed. ‘Wow’ he thinks to himself, ‘that really fucking hurt’.

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After a few moments Raith collects himself, well it’s not all bad. She left the knife behind, if he had lost that his da’ would have killed him, but she took the charcoal. Raith wasn’t an idiot, oblivious and overactive surely but not an idiot. His coin purse is inside of his shirt in a pocket he sowed there himself, she just took the little bag of charcoal he tied to throw thieves off the trail. He thinks about how disappointed the beautiful lady who just absolutely rocked his shit must be, she was probably hungry. He picked himself up and put his knife back in it’s sheath, then continued walking home. He still had the big sack of charcoal so really not much of a loss today.

Talora is distraught, she sits with her face buried in her hands. ‘This is truly how I die then isn’t it, not exactly the way mother had always dreamed it for me’. Her mother had always told Talora that one day she would feast at the kings table, wandering the lands impressing nobility with her music. Now she sits, crumpled by the weight of circumstance she was forced into. And what's worse, that fool boy managed to pull one over on her, so now she was embarrassed as well. Talora stands and picks up the small sack of charcoal, not much she can do with this. She can’t sell it, how strange would that look? A large teenager selling nothing but a miniscule amount of charcoal, and to who? Sell it back to the vendor that boy bought it from? No, it’s clearly an odd set of circumstances and Talora was just done. With a sigh of acceptance she crept back toward the street that boy was walking down. She doesn’t spot him but walks in the same direction as he was first going, it leads into a poorer part of the city. Talora takes a quick pace down the alley in hopes to catch up to the boy, further and further the cobblestone streets begin to show more signs of wear. ‘Did I get my mark wrong’ she thinks to herself as signs of wealth disappear on the buildings. ‘If he lives down here then he probably didn’t have much coin to begin with, maybe he even already spent it all on charcoal’. As the buildings finally resolve into ones without glass windows she spots him, he’s walking toward a dead end in the street next to a forge. The boy stops at the open concept forge and speaks to the man at the anvil, the older man looks peeved as he sets the steel he was working back in the fire and ushers the boy into the house attached. Talora walks close to the house and hides in an alley near by, she picks up a large loose stone off the ground and pulls out a piece of charcoal. She quickly writes something on the large piece of stone, and drops the charcoal back into the sack. She checks the forge and the front door of the house quickly before sprinting toward the building, she moves up to the anvil and sets the stone down with the small sack. Talora hears someone approaching the door so she quickly turns and sprints back to the safety of the alley. As she watches the man and his son step out to the forge, the boy isn’t wearing a shirt now and the large red mark is beginning to resolve in a bruise on his stomach. ‘No I got it the best I could, he really is quite chubby’ but she did realize now, it was the build of a boy who would be quite strong later in life. She imagined he’d look quite like the man who stood next to him in figure. The blacksmith moves next to the anvil and reads her note, a deep frown covers his face as he reads the word written on the stone ‘Unfortunate’. Talora can’t hear them speaking but she see’s there’s something of an argument, the young boy waves his hands animatedly as the man shakes his head. The blacksmith looks up to the sky as the boys goes on and on with his argument, finally the big man waivers. Shoulders slumping down to his sides he gestures back inside the house, the boy runs back in through the door and the man takes the sack of charcoal. He opens up the top and spills it out over the piece of metal in the forge. He moves the bellows up and down, getting the burning coals to rage around the metal. After a few minutes the boy comes outside with a bowl in his hands, he hands it to the blacksmith who has a look in. After a moment he walks out into the street glancing around at the alleys, Talora shifts back to hide in the shadows as he does. He sets the bowl down in the middle of the street and then walks back to his anvil. The boy begins working the bellows and the man takes out a piece of metal from the fire. Then they just, work. Nothing else to it, as if the bowl had been forgotten. Talora knew what this was, it’s clearly a trap. They’ve laid out an enticing offer for the hungry Hagh Nahn bandit and now they wait, they’ll surely spring on her if she goes out there to get it. But elder mistress is she hungry, the pain is back now at the sight of a bowl of food. She wars with herself for a time, going back and forth on whether or not its worth the risk. She finally decides she’d rather die fighting for food than starve in the street, so she quickly runs out and picks up the bowl. The big man looks up at her with a pensive look on his face, they make eye contact as she lifts the bowl, and then notices a note underneath it. It’s written on something that looks like failed parchment, closer to leather than anything. ‘Leave the bowl when you’re done’ is written on it in charcoal. She looks back up and sees the boy smiling at her, the blacksmith is looking down at his work. She retreats back to the alley and sits down with the bowl in her hand. She’s getting a good look at it now and it’s beautiful, meat and various hearty vegetables float in a thick soup. It smells incredible and the pain in her stomach reaches an apex. Tears trail silently down her cheeks as she consumes the first real meal she’s had in days.