Making Up Adventurers writing prompt — This disgraced once-paladin would do it again. They’d do it without hesitation
Glishka spends the lunch rush watching a woman in a hot shop. She pushes her own bowl of leeks and beans around, taking in the wide shoulders and callused hands of a trained warrior, the close-cropped hair of a career soldier, the deceptive relaxation of her pose while nothing, nothing escapes her notice. And finally, when it quiets down and it’s mostly just Glishka and the woman, Glishka tucks her wax-faced copper tablet with its matching stylus under her arm and sidles up the counter.
“Hello,” she says. “Unless I’m quite mistaken, I think you might be the fabulously pure-hearted and mighty-handed, yet cast-out, Lion of Tremaine, Kelia of Darnos.”
The warrior cocks her head, mopping up the last of her meal with a hunk of bread. “You got all that,” she says, amused, “from staring across the shop at me?”
Glishka taps the edge of her note tablet. “Scribe-acolyte of the Pale Mountain,” she says.
“In that case,” the warrior says, “well met, Scribe-acolyte. What might I do for you this fine day?”
Glishka beams at her and slides onto the stool next to hers, clanking her tablet down on the counter. “I have questions!” she says.
“Naturally,” the fallen Lion of Tremaine says, gives her a wry smile, and sips from a clay beaker of cheap local wine.
“Namely,” Glishka says, “how it is you’re cast out from your Holy Order.”
“That’s very straightforward of you, Scribe-acolyte,” the Lion says. “And if I don’t wish to answer that?”
Glishka shrugs. “I write down, for posterity, that I asked and you declined to answer.”
“Hmmmm,” the Lion of Tremaine says, a long, thoughtful noise, and rubs the point of a knuckle under her sharp-lined chin. “Well, how about this—” and spends nearly an hour telling a long, elaborate story full of twists, turns, and asides, about a manticore kitten, a bucket of paint, and an entire conventful of Multiplicitite nuns breaking their vows of silence.
“Oh,” Glishka chortles at the end of it. “Nobody ever wrote down that you’re so funny!” She drums her heels on the stool. “Not a word of that’s true, is it?” she adds cheerily.
“Hmmm,” the Lion of Tremaine says, tone equivocal and grin wicked, making a scales-wavering-around-balance gesture with a rocking hand. “I find,” she adds, after a few seconds, “more joy of life, of late.”
Which is, Glishka thinks, probably the closest to a direct answer she’ll get.
“Is it true, though,” she says, “that your god-granted aegis remains, and your dismissal from Holy Order is no more than — just that, a wholly worldly matter?”
The warrior points to Glishka’s hand. “Turn that up on the counter a second,” she says, and puts a fingertip onto Glishka’s immediately upturned palm. Tingling warmth radiates out from it, beneath Glishka’s skin.
“Oh!” Glishka says, then “oh,” as the paladin slowly runs the fingertip from Glishka’s palm to the pulse in her wrist, and cocks an inviting eyebrow. “Well. Um.” She half-turns, a little flustered, to indicate the second Scribe-acolyte who’d arrived during the anecdote, loitering near to them. “This is Jumi…my wife.”
“Oh, well,” the Lion says easily. “That was rude of me, then; my apologies for embarrassing you in front of your wife, and my apologies to you, Jumi, for presumption.” She clasps Jumi’s shoulder for a moment, then as if she’s thought of a last-minute addition to the thought, leans in and says something that Glishka doesn’t quite catch, which makes Jumi sputter with startled laughter.
Glishka buys her wife some little hot rolls stuffed with cheese and smoked meat, and sits with her, knees touching, while Glishka diligently sets down notes on the paladin’s wild fabulation. It might not be true, but it’s what she said; posterity deserves that. Eventually, the end of her stylus poked into the corner of her mouth while she scowls over how best to summarise the Lion’s mien, Glishka casually ventures: “So what made you laugh like that?”
Jumi sniggers, unfooled by Glishka’s nonchalance. “She said unless we’re both into it,” she says, and nudges Glishka’s leg as she chokes on her own spit and scrabbles for her cup for a soothing drink. “Ha, your face! Be good and I’ll let you call me the Lion in bed.”
“I’m always good!” Glishka protests, red-cheeked. “Wait, no, that’s not — Jumi, don’t tease.”
Her wife cackles harder at her pout.
