A Common Life
"Tell me a story."
Nadya glanced around the cheerily lit room, eyes landing on a large bookcase - filled with romance novels.
She sighed, "I don't have any stories that you'd like to hear, Leah."
Leah rolled her eyes and then took a drink from an over-sized tankard of dwarven stout.
"Don't matter, they're starting to depress me anyway. Ain't no pretty paladin goin' to whisk me off into the sunset with his armored pony, and I ain't getting on no ram with no smelly-bearded hunter either!" She chuckled, "Light help me for having a thing for humans, never going to do me a bit of good."
Nadya looked at the small dwarf woman seated across from her. She supposed that, by dwarven standards, Leah was very beautiful - her long black hair intricately braided and held together by gold and jeweled clips, her skin fair, her complexion clear and her vibrant violet eyes...
"Well?" Leah asked impatiently.
It was odd, Nadya mused, that the impatient look her friend was giving her suited her better than the serene expression she wore at the cathedral. Shouldn't a priestess of the Light always wear a serene expression? It was odd, wasn't it?
"Leah?"
"Yes?"
"Why aren't you living in the cathedral? Houses in Stormwind cost an arm and a leg, don't they?"
"And a couple fingers too!" Leah laughed merrily. "Actually, I have a cell there, but I moved out as soon as I saw this place for sale - not too many opportunities to buy a house here, you know! 'Sides, it was too stuffy there, those eunuchs can't take a joke."
Nadya licked her lips, hesitating to ask her next question. Aside from the modest black robes Leah prefered to wear, they were the only inexpensive items in the dwarven priestess' house. Leah had an unreadable expression on her face as she took another drink from her tankard - her frost enchanted tankard. Only a dwarf would ever consider having a cup enchanted for their ale!
"How were you able to make the money to afford it - your house, I mean."
"I did quite a bit of adventuring when I was younger," Leah answered dismissively.
"Oh," Nadya replied. Adventuring, her parents had explained to her, was a mercenary's work - not always to the highest bidder, but always for payment. She felt her heart drop, she couldn't fight - she'd never been trained. Wait...
"When you were younger," she echoed. "How old are you?"
Leah seemed thoughtful, as if she had to remember how old she was.
"Seventy-six," she answered confidently.
"Seventy-six?!" Nadya cried incredulously. Perhaps that enchantment on Leah's tankard was doing her more harm than good. The woman that sat across from her didn't look a day over twenty-five. Maybe she had one-to-many pints of stout, what number was she on again? Surely any minute now, Leah's face would break into a wide smile and she'd say, "Kidding", or something like that and they'd laugh at how gulible she was.
"Time moves slowly for the Earthen," Leah replied, shrugging her shoulders. "If you're looking for work, we can go over what you're able to do or what you're willing to do and I'll see if I can find anything for you tomorrow. But first," she said, grinning, "I'd like to hear a story. Who knows, I might even give you a couple coin if it's a good one."
Nadya almost groaned, "It's not worth hearing."
"That depends on who's listening, girlie. Now quit yer stallin' and get to talking!" Leah crowed triumphantly.
Nadya sighed, Dwarves. "I don't know where to start."
"Where to start?" Leah asked with her eyebrows raised, "Well, most people like to start at the beginning. You're hardly an old woman yet, so you can't start at the end, can you?"
"I guess not," Nadya replied, sounding distracted. "From the beginning then..."
AN: Why hello there! I guess this is where I say that I don't own anything pertaining to Blizzard's Warcraft franchise and that I'm not making any money from writing this and that it's worthless to sue me for everything I own because how then would I pay my WoW account fee every month? I wouldn't - and that would just make everyone unhappy.
Nadya and Leah are loosely based off of my characters on some unnamed RP server, not that I really RP with them - I'm more of an RP voyeur. What can I say? My happy people-watching habit extends itself into video games too. I know, I know - it's kind of creepy - but I giggle anytime I see someone say 'thy' or 'thou' seriously.
Well, I hope you enjoy this story. Comments would be lovely, even it's just to say "You spelled the word 'the' wrong in paragraph 4, sentence 3. Fix it." I kind of agonized over how to rate this, as I don't really see it as being a 'M' rated fic but, unfortunately, I can be pretty foul-mouthed... my apologies. =D