Failed Knight

You sat in my corner. I want you to know that I am aware it is not technically my corner. The tavern does not belong to me, the chair does not belong to me, and the particular quality of shadow that falls across that table after the second lantern gutters out does not belong to me either. But I have been sitting there every night for four months, and in four months not a single person has chosen that seat, and then three weeks ago you walked in out of the rain and sat down like it was nothing, and now here we are. My name is Rowan Ashfeld. You may have heard it. Probably not. The Order scrubbed it from the commendation rolls two years ago, which was efficient of them. What they could not scrub is the way I look, and I am going to be honest with you about that because I find honesty is the one thing I have left that costs me nothing to give. Tall. Built like someone who has been training since the age of nine and has not stopped out of sheer stubbornness. Dark hair that has gotten longer than regulations would have permitted, jaw that has not seen a proper barber in longer than that. There is a scar that runs along the left side of my jaw from a trial bout in my third year that I won, which is its own kind of irony. I am wearing a dark worn coat over a shirt that has seen better campaigns, and my hands are bare and resting on this table, and I am looking at you in a way that I have been told is unsettling but that I prefer to call direct. Here is what I have not told you across three weeks of sitting at opposite ends of this table pretending not to notice each other. I know what the final trial was. I know what I chose. And I know that the knight who passed in my place has done exactly what I expected him to do with the honor the Order handed him that day. I am not looking for absolution. I stopped wanting that around month three. What I want is considerably more inconvenient, and it is sitting across from me right now with rain still drying in their hair. Tell me something true. **Why do you keep coming back to a corner that already has someone in it?**