The light of dawn played across Dari's cheek. She opened her eyes and remembered where she was. Eitar was snoring contentedly, so she swung her legs out of bed and gathered up her clothes. When she was fully dressed she took the small purple vial from the nightstand- payment for this encounter. She turned it over in her hands for a moment, then un-stoppered it and took a small sip. Just a little taste to get her going. The familiar bitter taste of Skooma filled her mouth and she swallowed, taking care to avoid choking so as not to wake her customer. Then she departed the house.

Water dripped from the roofs of Leyawiin, and birds sang happily. There had been a tremendous storm last night, thunder and lightning dueling in the skies until the wee hours when both sides called a truce and the clouds lifted. She liked the smell of the air after it rained. The whole world seemed brighter- clean and polished. No one was in the street yet except the beggars and urchins who had no choice in the matter. Her face was a familiar sight to the guard on duty at the wall, who nodded hello to her and opened the gate. He had been a customer too, once upon a time, until his wife had caught him sneaking home covered in short golden hairs.

A cool spring breeze rustled through the willow trees and shifted the hem of her dress. She thought about the circumstances of her life, as she often did after the day's first hit of Skooma. She thought about all those people she had let down, ripped off and betrayed in her homeland, all for the sake of that drug. And then she thought about something else, because in her experience, thinking about the past could drive you crazy. Leyawiin had expanded since the end of the Oblivion crisis, although not in the way that the empire had anticipated. The humans seemed to be eternally on the rise, regardless of their military situation. The gold and the good land belonged to them, and Khajiit and Argonian alike still flocked across the border to find their fortunes in Cyrodil.

The walls, though, were set. There were only so many souls who could live inside the city. The rest had settled on the banks of the river to the south of towns like Bravil and Leyawiin, the Argonians on the west bank and the Khajiit, mostly on the east, although there was a great deal of overlap. Shanty towns had sprang up, extending onto the water like wooden cobwebs. There were plenty of fish to catch, and a dozen other hustles for new arrivals to pursue, but no real jobs. The lucky ones got themselves apprenticed to a mage or blacksmith and the rest lived a tedious, day-to-day existence like Dari. Every morning she woke up wondering if she had made enough coin the previous day to put food in her mouth today. Sometimes the answer was yes, and sometimes it was no. The first year she had been there she had manged to work out an "arrangement" where she could have a warm place to sleep in exchange for her body. By the second year this arrangement had grown tiresome and she had managed to buy a fishing shack downstream. The previous owner was a Nord hunter who was packing up and moving to Imperial City. It had been perfect for her because it was even farther south from Leyawiin, around a bend in the river and surrounded by willow trees and tall grass. She could do pretty much as she pleased there, and it was relatively isolated from the dangers of the shanty town.

The shanties were an amicable enough place by day. Dari recalled many warm summer afternoons spent drunk on the pier, fishing with total strangers and exchanging banter, gossip and playful insults. By night, however, rougher types started to wake up and begin their prowl. Gambling dens unlocked their doors. Skooma peddlers and addicts converged at their favorite corners. Thieves' Guild enforcers extracted protection money and hustled new arrivals. She was glad she was no longer living there. She had recently found a trail through the woods that lead from the city gates to her house, so that she did not even need to walk along the main road past the shanties at all. This was advantageous, because just like everywhere else she went, it seemed she had managed to make more enemies than friends.

At last her house wound into view. It was fairly small- a kitchen with a wooden stove and a table with a few chairs abutting a small bedroom. She had made many improvements- not least of which was putting wood floors over the dirt and sealing up all the leaky cracks with pitch. A gaggle of chickens roamed the yard in their usual little cliques, pecking at the space that had been cleared of vegetation. A long, dilapidated fence ran around this clearing. It was difficult to see from the road, so she did not get many visitors, a fact for which she was grateful. A long wooden dock extended from the back porch of the cabin and out into the reeds, far enough that one could throw nets or a fishing line clear of the end.

Something caught her eye as she moved to unlock the back door with the key around her neck. A dark shape was lying in the reeds underneath the dock. Her hand hovered above the door frame for a moment, and then let the key fall back against her collarbone. She approached the figure cautiously, and discovered that it was an Argonian. He was badly hurt. An arrow protruded from back at an angle. Each time the lizard breathed in, it shifted.

A silent debate raged in Dari's mind. She could either ignore him, and hope he would die or wake up and remember where he was supposed to be, or she could help him. Even as the loud voice of experience told her to roll him back into the water and let someone else deal with him, she realized that she couldn't. She could tell from being around Argonians for a while that this one was fairly young. His had was bare save for a small crest fringe, and the red spots on his face had not yet blossomed into his final adult coloring.

Pity overwhelmed caution, and the instincts of a healer kicked in. First things first. That arrow would have to go. Thankfully it did not appear to be barbed. When she had been a younger, more innocent girl training as a healer in her homeland she had seen many soldiers stricken with such wounds. She reached out to grasp the arrow.

As soon as her finger brushed it, the Argonian's eyes snapped open. He hissed at her like a frightened cub and tried to move away, but she pinned him.

"Stop struggling, you're only going to make it go deeper."

Surprisingly, he obeyed her. She could tell he was exhausted. His waking breaths were hardly less ragged than his sleeping ones, and he had not even bothered to try to reach for the knife which was stuck through his belt, even though it was on his uninjured side.

"This has to come out if you want to live, do you understand?"

He nodded and replied, surprising her again with his mastery of the human tongue.

"Just do it..."

Gingerly she reached for the shaft again, clasped her hand around it, and pulled it free in one clean motion. A groan turned into a shout of pain. She clenched her teeth as she saw the young Argonian's eyes roll into the back of his head. He quivered, and then fell unconscious again, a fresh flow of blood oozing out of his back.

Dari moved quickly, putting her hands under his arms and hauling him back towards her shack, where she kept her medical supplies. The chickens scattered to let them by. She would have to act fast. He had lost a lot of blood already and he could not afford to loose much more.