The mage blinked. His ambush script had been interrupted by a monologue he had failed to anticipate.
"I have been to an orphanage, sir. An ORPHANAGE. I held children I did not know. I was touched without permission by at least four of them simultaneously. I funded a roof. I watched two dragons I stole from the military get more affection in two hours than my husband has given me in thirty years. I listened to a thirteen-year-old girl tell me I am insane, and I agreed with her, because she was correct, and the correctness was more useful than anything my husband has said to me in a decade."
She took another step forward.
"And now you. In your cloak. With your smoke. On my road. On the one afternoon I leave the castle to do a single generous thing for another human being, a thing I am doing for strategic purposes but a generous thing nonetheless, and I am stopped by a man who thinks dark fog is a personality."
