It was a pleasant dream -- a family outing in the Allarrian forest. The kids were running amuck -- as usual -- with his lovely wife on their heels. Her jewels winked in the sunlight -- but it was not the jewelry Audric found so alluring...
A strange scrape caught his ear from out among the trees. His family played on, oblivious, but Audric himself rose to cautiously peer in that direction...and as he heard it again, he realized it didn't fit: the sound of metal against metal, then metal on stone, but muffled somehow...
...Like it might sound, if someone were crawling onto his balcony... His eyes flew open, then scanned the darkness of their bedroom. His wife was breathing steadily, as oblivious to the danger as she had been in the dream. He could only find the regular shadows in his room, highlighted by the moonbeams drifting in lazily through the windows...and the sound, itself, had stopped now...
But he wasn't a man to take chances.
Picking his dagger up from its place beside the bed (a long-standing habit Nera didn't necessarily approve of), he moved stealthily towards the double doors leading out onto the windswept balcony. There was a man-shaped lump laying there, he noticed -- but its features were lost to shadow. Carefully, he pulled open the door and stepped forward...only to realize, suddenly, that he knew this man...and that the dark splotches on his clothes were, no doubt, blood.
"Arrant? Angsar's sword, what the hell happened to you?" His eyes swept over the balcony and railing, but there was no sign of Leif's attackers anywhere... Cautiously, he knelt down beside him, worry in his face. "Are you alright?"