<br/><br/>The place was very much alive, as squalid as it was; a hive of the human organism hard at work and getting on with the day despite winter having arrived early. A few snowflakes tumbled out of the pallid sky and settled on the hem of Twilight's hood as she listened...children at play somewhere in the street below. A clatter of hooves and the wheels of a horsedrawn cart over cobblestones.<br/><br/>A rumble of the furnace that belched smoke from some smithy or smelting factory to the west, audible underneath everything else as a steady drone.<br/><br/>After a while, raised voices came to her ears. Muffled, but clearly a man and a woman in the midst of a raging argument.