[ WP ] Write a story from the perspective of a guard in a stealth game .

The day's patrol began like lukewarm porridge. Cold chainmail and the orange glare of the twin suns to the right. Always to the right. Always in the morning, to the right, north along the sand-desert wall that hung over the harbor's clear waters. 
 
 Ten ships per day, 50 barrels per ship. Same captains, same crew, same ships. They must not have far to go. Same Francis Lenson, leaning against the lowest spec of the chapel wall, begging for coins before the heavy priest sends him away. 
 
 Down along the Merchant' Lane, where rows of black eyed sellers stare at building walls. An odd thing I had n't noticed before, that, after all the years, their only customer was a red-haired woman in oddly fashioned leather. She was there yesterday, the first time I had seen her, stuffing a glazed ham into her pouch -- should this be odd as well? As she passed she smiled and asked the way to the Ill Rose -- west until the Devil's Tongue, then south and to the left. Then she brushed past, and for the rest of my march that smile made my shoulders light. 
 
 When the morning had begun I had forgotten her -- why had I forgotten her -- until the Merchant's Lane, where the memory of our encounter lifted me again and I walked with the air of a man many years younger. But then the maze of alleys and cold puddles, of lefts and rights, numbed me like poisoned wine, and I drifted. 
 
 At the end of my march I stood, as I did, on the wall that hung over the harbor's clear waters, looking across the sea to a giant moon that sat, gold, at the base of the night sky. And again, something new, soft leather against my lips and a hiss of metal and pain through my back. As I was flung off the wall, a hooded figure with red hair that fluttered. 
 
 I would have let her pass, if she'd asked. 

