Quick Work
The night was not cold. That was a blessing, since the plate kept out the cold about as well as it kept out the heat. Still, Cereta was glad of the quilted gambeson beneath the heavy riveted armor, more cushion that insulation. While the night was warm, it was long, and by choice she stood on a partially exposed balcony.
Guard duty was not new or intriguing to her; long hours of her life had been spent in that attitude, the heavy axe-head of her halberd resting against one spiked shoulder. She doubted its use would be necessary, but one never knew. Better to be ready than dead.
The events of the day meandered the space of her thoughts, not quite reaching the level of distraction necessary for her to pull her attention away from them. The fur-trimmed woman, primal in attire but so... vital. Kind. Flattering. She tore her thoughts from that infectious grin and the memory of watching her frustration, the joy of altering the stranger’s casual demands. Confusion warred with a blossoming joy inside her, the entire experience relived with a kind of nascent fear.
What would she have done differently, had Felix not waited at some familiar haunt in the city?
Thoughts like this never used to bother her. Something had changed on this latest return to the white-hewn stone of Stormwind, some... hangup that existed in her soul when she thought of him. It irked her as much as it terrified her, this urge to preserve and to please. She had not felt it for nearly twenty years, and even now, alone outside of a warehouse guarding a door no one was interested in for less gold than the effort was worth, she avoided naming that feeling.
Left unnamed, it had no power over her, she told herself firmly. A second thought was shoved back, unacknowledged, to the inner recesses of her mind.
Avoiding the truth does not make it untrue.
Cereta resigned herself to a long night of waiting for nothing to happen, content by force and by habit to pass the hours in silent contemplation of meaningless moments and ideas, nothing tied to her growing fear.