The prompt: A drunk man sits next to you in a bar, thinks you're his buddy and starts confessing "the truth." Write about what "the truth" is.
- Prompt #58, Creative Writing Prompts


Loved drinking, hated bars. Those were Averill's general feelings on the matter - and she hated Silvermoon, too; if she had to be in a bar, well, better make it the World's End. But here she was, halfway through a bottle of wine in the Wayfarer's Rest.
Alone. Like it was wise for her to go to Silvermoon alone, the place it had become these days. Like she could just walk out to the Bazaar and find a bodyguard. A gorgeous, scarred, blonde, paladin bodyguard. Her heart ached, and she drained the wine, red so deep it was almost black. Averill nudged a few thick golden coins toward the bartender, picked up her bottle of wine, and headed for the fountain at the center of Silvermoon's marketplace. To the place where she had been standing when she'd met him.
Shoulder jostles a stranger on the way out the door and she mumbles an apology, determined to reach the spot, and the rogue slouches onto the bench, opposite the Rest's entrance to the Bazaar. Watches their patrons come and go as the cover of night deepens, the city's streets lit by floating motes of silvery arcane energy.
And drinks the rest of her bottle of wine, and tries not to think about the man she had come to this place to remember.
Dezeras Trollbane was dead.
They had told her as much only a few days after he left for Northrend; his ship was beset by naga the first night.
She hadn't believed it, but when she had gone down to Desolace (as the steward had instructed her weeks prior to do) she had slaughtered the whole brood of naga there, all the same.

There's the vague jingling sound of mail armor and suddenly there's a man beside her. She tries to ignore him, pretend he doesn't exist.
"You wanna know the truth?" he slurs, in Thalassian. "The truth is you'll probably never find your soulmate. Lost mine, six years ago. She looked a little like you," tipping his hip flask in the rogue's direction. He's maybe half her age, a young adult as she looks him over in the briefest of glances. An attractive young blonde Blood Knight, she gets in that first pass, wearing their black and red insignia on his cloak clasps.
"I ain't her," she replies, quickly, in no-nonsense Orcish, and he laughs.
"Just sayin' you look like her. Wouldn't be caught dead in leathers, my girl. Guess she was a mage."

Averill has to set the bottle of wine aside now, and though the general look of him makes her heart ache, she scrutinizes him closer. No scars - a fresh-faced youth. His eyebrows are dark, and she thinks, briefly, of another missed opportunity, a man she'd never met.
There's no hollow sense of longing in thinking of the man she was once betrothed to; if she met him now she wouldn't know what to do with him.
"Songblade," an unfamiliar voice, female and commanding, rings out through the Bazaar and the novitiate Blood Knight straightens.
The woman in plate approaches with a swagger, sword and shield at her back. "You will return to Farstriders' Square in two hours' time, Adept Songblade." There could be no mistaking the surname now, and it hits the rogue like a slap in the face.
Valendar Songblade. Spellbreaker. Her would-be husband.
"Yes, Champion Sunforge." He salutes her receding back, turns back to the rogue. Averill is pretending, as adeptly as she's ever lied, that she doesn't recognize her fiancé. Ex-fiancé. His luminous green eyes dart toward the Rest.
You wanna know the truth? she thinks, crossing her arms over her chest. The truth is I got over missing you around the same time I came to realize I'd never cast a spell again. Though it had taken the ex-mage a lot longer to actually come to terms with that fact, and Dezeras had helped in that. The truth is that I am who I am now. Not because of him, no, but with his help all the same.
"So, you wanna continue this discussion over drinks?" he asks.
Or under you, something in her growls, and for some reason she's repulsed by the thought of her once-betrothed bedding her.
You wanna know the truth? I'm not drunk enough to not remember this in the morning. I'm drunk enough to close my eyes and let you fuck me and think, "young, blonde paladin" and pretend you're him. I'm drunk enough to call you by the wrong name in bed, maybe you're drunk enough not to care, maybe I'll tell you my name is Jessica, the first name springing to mind - her dead friend. Maybe we'll never see each other again. I hope we won't.

The truth is I love him enough to accept the time we had, and not betray his memory by faking that with you.
"No," she says simply.