It had been a little over two and a half weeks since Fastred went with her father to Riften. Even still the experience continued to fill her daydreams, washing over her mind and making bearable the long, monotonous hours of her days in the field.
Yet something was different than it was before. Unlike before, the hopes for her future now clung to something that felt tangible and real. No longer were her dreams hazy and uncertain, now she knew what she wanted. She wanted shops, and people, and endless distractions.
She wanted the city.
Though in a painful way this made her youth, and her dependence, and her confinement, and her small village life feel all the more horrendous. She was trapped in darkness with a light at the end of the tunnel, but with no way to reach it.
She needed adventure, and she needed romance. She had always needed romance; adventure and romance in equal parts.
She needed a man, a wonderful man, a heroic man, a charming and a dashing man to carry her away from her life and away from this place, and to never let her look back.
She leaned wistfully against the fence post at the edge of the farm. She counted the clouds in the sky. She contrasted the colours in the autumn leaves. She did anything to avoid the crops, and the labour, and the dirt between her fingers.
Then she saw him coming up the road.
For a moment she thought him a mirage of her hopes, but he was real; as real as any man of flesh and blood.
He was handsome, and tall, and broad, and carried himself with a pride like no farmer or labourer she had ever seen. His armour was beaded and spiked and covered in bearskins, and were it not for the confidence with which he walked, she would have thought him a barbarian. But he was no barbarian. What he truly was didn't click in her mind until she saw the village guards saluting him as he approached.
He was a stormcloak; and an officer at that. He was a stormcloak of great respect; a leader of heroes.
He smiled to Fastred as he walked past, but he did not speak to her. This was for the best, as her legs had turned to jelly, and her emotions and her thoughts had become a confusing nonsense. If she had tried to speak, her words would have muddled and bumped against themselves.
Fastred only managed to keep her composure for the time it took for this handsome man to climb the distant steps, and enter Vilemyr Inn.
Then once he was gone, and she could no longer bare her excitement, she ran to her secret place behind the barrow to giggle and hide.
On the way she fell on her face.