by A. J. Markam
For the first time I could understand why all those villagers back in Fernburg had nearly shat themselves when they saw Stig and Alaria. If you thought my imp and succubus were the confreres of the Underneathian butt-uglies, you’d probably shit yourself, too.
No matter how nasty they were to others, though, the demons tended to leave me alone. Maybe because I was a Warlock?
I would have liked to think that was the reason, and that they regarded me as some kind of badass… but it was probably because I was always hanging out with Stig and Dorp.
One thing demons didn’t do was fuck with other demons. I guess they hated everybody else so much that they didn’t have any bile to waste on their own kind. Since Stig and Dorp didn’t wear collars, the gangs probably figured that they were running some kind of scam on the dumbass dopey human.
Anyway, I got to drink in peace.
And I did a lot of drinking.
I also woke up in the gutter quite a bit.
Literally.
I would wake up squinting in the bright light of morning as I lay by the curb of a topside street. My head would be throbbing like somebody was pounding nails into my skull. My mouth tasted like an army had marched through it in their dirty socks. Specks of dried vomit were flecked across my clothes. I reeked worse than the sewers: the yeasty stench of a New Orleans dive bar during Mardi Gras mixed with a fecund potpourri of body odor and puke.
Stig was usually there in the gutter right alongside me. Dorp was always sitting on the curb, meditating with the ball gag in his mouth.
Crowds of proper, respectable, stick-up-their-asses Exardian citizens would be passing by, looking down at me in utter disgust. The occasional flock of young schoolchildren would poke me with a stick until I woke up and roared at them, at which point they would scatter screaming across the town square.
We always woke up in the white streets of Exardus, at least, and not the sewers of the Underneath.
What can I say? I was a classy bum.
I would sit up groggily and hold my aching head in my hands. I would think about how fucking stupid I was being, about how raunchy and sleazy this was, and how I would never do it again.
And then, like a junkie needing his fix, I would look at Alaria’s picture.
She was right there on my Action Bar – an icon of her face, beautiful and smiling. I would stare at it until the emptiness and pain gnawing inside overwhelmed my self-respect. Which didn’t take very long, trust me.
Every morning I woke up swearing I would never touch a drop of alcohol again.
But 20 seconds after I looked at her picture, all my promises went out the window. To stop the pain in my head – and the even worse agony in my heart – I would get up, stagger into the Underneath, and do it all over again.
There was one funny story that happened over the course of my bender, at least.
I was sitting on the corner one morning trying to keep my head from splitting open when a human in fancy robes came walking up. He was a middle-aged man, a pompous burgher, a prosperous merchant with an undoubtedly stellar work ethic. And he was offended by my very existence.
“You are a disgrace,” he sniffed. “Stick to the Underneath where your kind belongs.”
I squinted up at him with one bloodshot eye barely open, the other shut tight against the sunshine and pain.
He just kept sneering at me like I was a particularly nasty dog turd he’d stepped in.
I knew if I said what I wanted to, as loud as I wanted to, in the hungover state I was in, it was going to hurt like a motherfucker.
Oh well. Small price to pay.
“FUCK OFF!” I roared at him, and immediately winced at the invisible chain gang of kobolds pickaxing my brain.
It was worth it, though. Mr. Pompous Burgher flew across the street so fast you’d have thought he’d spontaneously grown wings.
I watched him go, then hawked a loogie and spat it into the street.
“Hey Boss,” a voice said next to me.
I looked over blearily. Stig was sitting there like Kermit the Frog might if Kermie had done an all-night bender of whiskey and blow.
“Yeah?” I mumbled.
“I thought you liked the – ”
He made the OK sign and rapidly thrust his finger through it.
fwap fwap fwap fwap fwap
I frowned in pain and confusion. “…what?”
Stig pointed at the pretentious prick running down the street. “You don’t like him, but you told him to fuckoff.”
He pronounced it as one word. Like bakeoff or standoff if you said them superfast.
“It’s fuck… off,” I grumbled. “Two words. With a pause in the middle.”
“But you like the – ”
fwap fwap fwap fwap fwap
“Stop that,” I muttered, putting my hand on his and interrupting the simulated coitus. “Just… stop.”
“You don’t like the fuckoff?”
He still wasn’t getting the part about ‘two words with a pause in the middle,’ but I was too hungover to care.
In fact, the way my skull was pounding, I couldn’t be bothered to observe any social niceties, so ‘crude’ became the theme of the day.
“I like fucking,” I said, and groaned as I cradled my head in my hands. “Fucking is different from ‘fuck off.’ You say ‘fuck off’ to somebody you don’t like.”
Stig sat there for a second, digesting the information.
“Did Alaria say fuckoff to you?” he finally asked.
Ouch.
I winced, and not from my hangover.
“…I guess she did.”
Okay, I guess that story turned out sad rather than funny.
Never mind.
“Fuck it, let’s go get a drink,” I groaned as I stumbled to my feet.
As the days passed and the more bedraggled I became, the worse the drinking establishments I had to go to. The normal residents of Exardus looked down on me like I was a literal piece of shit. I was banned from bars and shops at street level, but the cutthroats and thieves and degenerates all welcomed me with open arms, puke-stained clothes and all. All I needed was the money to pay them.
Finally, though, as the money began to dwindle, I couldn’t even afford the higher-priced dives in the upper levels of the Underneath. And so began my slow crawl down the ramps into Hell, seeking dodgier and skankier drinking establishments where the swill was 50 coppers a cup… then 25… then 10… then 5.
You know that really cheap vodka you can buy at drug stores? (Well, drug stores in California. The rest of the country, I have no idea.) The very bottom-shelf stuff? The bottles marked ‘vodka’ on a plain white label? $3.49 a bottle? The stuff bums reach for when Mad Dog and Night Train are just a tad too expensive?
Yeah, that vodka. The staple of poor college kids everywhere (like me at 21). Mix it with some cheap-ass dollar store orange juice concentrate and you have a really awful screwdriver, automatically chilled.
Or if your liver’s already busted, maybe some Everclear. Mix it with Kool-Aid for dorm-room hunch punch. If you’re flush with cash, buy a watermelon, cut a hole, and pour in the hooch. Take a tiny bit in your mouth and spew it out over a cigarette lighter for those special occasions where you need to spit fire to impress the ladies. Just be forewarned that straight Everclear will dissolve the skin in your mouth, and maybe even some tooth enamel. (And if you catch yourself on fire it’s your own goddamn fault, not mine.)
Yeah. All that shit was nectar of the gods compared with what I was imbibing.
In fact, Mirk’s pig swill at the Netherworld Tavern would have been a step up from what I drank at the end of my stay in the Underneath.
I didn’t care, as long as it kept me fucked up.
And I needed to stay shitfaced, because when I wasn’t, all I could think of was WHY?! Why did I do it?! Why did I take the best thing I ever had and fuck it up?!
Then I would argue with myself.
You couldn’t have known, you didn’t
know it would hurt her!
Sometimes I would argue in my head. Other times I would argue out loud, depending on how drunk I was.
You should have seen the orcs scoot over a seat or two at the bar to get away from the crazy Warlock.
Maybe you’re thinking, Dude, ease up. It wasn’t that bad. She’s just being a bitch.
Which is what I would often tell myself when I was trashed.
But just for a moment, consider what I’d done in real-world terms. Think about me doing something comparable to a woman in the real world.
Say I walked into her workplace and convinced her boss to fire her behind her back, just so she would have to move in with me to save money.
That’s kind of what I did, right?
No? Not really?
Okay – say I fucked up her credit rating so bad that her credit cards got canceled, just so she’d have to depend on me for everything.
Or I sabotaged her social media accounts and posted some gnarly shit under her name just so everybody would hate her and she would turn to me in the depths of her despair.
Or slipped Prozac in her food because I couldn’t stand how moody she was.
Isn’t that what I’d done? Made a momentous change behind her back, without her knowledge or consent?
All I know is if I’d done any of those things back in the real world, and the girl had found out, she would have been insane not to break up with me.
Desmond had told me Alaria was real, but I’d treated her like a thing.
Krug’s words echoed repeatedly in my head:
You used her like you thought you still owned her.
Even worse were Alaria’s words:
Everyone else who abused me, at least they only hurt my body. YOU invaded my MIND! YOU made me think I was going INSANE!
I thought you LOVED me!
I thought you were DIFFERENT from the rest!
I thought of Saykir and Jastoth and Odeon and imagined them all sneering at me: Hypocrite. You’re even worse than we were. At least WE never claimed to love her.
But because I couldn’t handle that shit – couldn’t look in the mirror for more than a minute at a time, you might say – I kept coming back to the absolute best potion to blot out shame and guilt.
And I don’t mean alcohol.
I’m talking about rage.
Righteous indignation.
A sense of my own martyrdom.
I didn’t MEAN anything by it!
I wasn’t trying to HURT her – but she’s trying to hurt ME, that’s for goddamn sure!
I FREED her, and this is how she repays me?!
Ungrateful BITCH!
Psychopathic WHORE!
Of course, the drunker I was, the more of that I said out loud. The other customers would get edgy, bartenders would cut me off, bouncers would throw me out, and I would crawl on hands and knees to another, lower level of the Underneath where a new breed of lowlife would help me onto a stool.
Got ten coppers, guv’nor? No? How ‘bout five? Excellent! Try our best brand of fermented pig shit!
And so I spiraled even further down.
I don’t remember much from that week-long stretch of hell, but there is one thing I remember… and it still horrifies me.
I am deeply, deeply ashamed of it. Maybe even more ashamed than what I did to Alaria.
But I did it, and there’s no use trying to pretend like I didn’t.
At least Alaria was strong. She’d given me plenty of shit when we first met, and she loved to tease me afterwards. With her, I was dealing with a fighter. Somebody tough. Somebody with defenses.
Not Dorp.
It was early in the morning and I hadn’t had my first drink of the day yet. I think I was still drunk, though. At least, I’d like to believe I was, because that would at least provide a tiny iota of an excuse for my behavior.
What I do know is I was lying in the gleaming gutters of Exardus, and my hangover felt like somebody had buried an ax in my head.
Dorp had taken his ball gag out of his mouth and was prattling on, trying to console me. I think I’d been moaning in my sleep about Alaria, and he felt sorry for me.
Imagine that.
Dorp, the most annoying and unloved creature on the Revenge, felt sorry for me.
“Don’t worry, Master, I’ve been using the Sacred Mouthpiece of Kwiaytus to tell all the elves in the world how great you are. I think enough of them will sing your praises that Alaria will finally hear and change her mind and – ”
“Dorp,” I seethed, “SHUT THE FUCK UP.”
He sat there, stunned. “But… Master…”
“You’re the one who made her leave!” I snarled.
Of course he wasn’t.
Yeah, he’d accidentally contributed to the situation by casting that illusion of her naked and pregnant, but he’d done it while trying to protect me.
But I had to have somebody to blame, because at that point I sure as hell wasn’t going to own up to it myself.
“I’m… I’m sorry…” Dorp said mournfully. “I didn’t mean to…”
“Doesn’t really matter what you meant, does it? She’s gone, thanks to you.”
I might as well have been talking to a mirror. Actually, I should have been talking to a mirror. I would have caused a lot less damage that way, and I would have actually been talking to the right person.
Dorp tried to console me again. “Don’t worry, Master, I’ll tell all the elves that – ”
I flew into a rage. “You moron! You actually think that thing works? That it’s some magical elf artifact? Eluun just made that shit up so you would SHUT THE FUCK UP! Every time you used it, everybody was laughing at you behind your back!”
I felt a tug at my shirt and looked to my left.
Stig was shaking his head, a look of horror on his little grey face. “Boss… don’t…”
“STOP THAT,” I snapped as I swiped his hand away.
Then I heard Dorp start to cry.
It was a low, mournful, whimpering sound, like a wounded animal.
Hearing it felt like somebody was shoving an ice pick through my heart.
But, again, I couldn’t handle my shame at what I’d done, so I just lashed out. “Oh, FUCK you. Shut the fuck up, you goddamn crybaby.”
And then I finished with the coup de grace – the same thing my new brand-new stepfather had said to me when I was nine years old.
“Quit your crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Stig hunched over on the curb next to me and covered his face with his hands.
Dorp stopped crying… but when he spoke, his voice was thick with tears.
“I thought you were special,” he whispered. “I thought you were good. But… you’re just mean. I knew everybody else didn’t like me… but I thought you were different.”
It was like he was taking a straight razor to my heart, carving off whole chunks at a time.
“WELL I’M NOT, SO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” I screamed at him. “GO! LEAVE!”
Dorp turned around slowly… looked back at me once over his shoulder… then shambled off alone down the streets of Exardus.
I sat on the curb, my head buried in my hands, and cursed the day I was born.
When I finally looked up, Stig was still sitting there next to me.
“Why are you still here?” I asked bitterly.
He didn’t answer for a couple of seconds. When he did, there wasn’t a hint of rancor or anger in his voice. “You need a friend.”
“Everybody else fucking hates me… why don’t you?”
“You didn’t hurt me.” He paused. “Yet.”
“I probably will. I hurt everybody else.”
“I’ll stick around until you do.”
“And then?”
“…we’ll see.”
I laughed mirthlessly, the gallows laugh of a fool in hell. Then I stood up. “I need a drink.”
“Okay,” he agreed, and followed me off into the Unde
rneath.
12
Dorp didn’t come back that night. Or the next day.
That was okay by me. This wasn’t A Christmas Carol and I wasn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. I didn’t need the Demon of Shittiness Past showing up to remind me just how fucked up I’d acted. The longer Dorp stayed away, the easier it was to ignore just how abominably I’d behaved.
Except I began checking his icon on my Action Bar almost as often as I looked at Alaria’s. I would just casually glance at them to make sure they were both alive… although sometimes I would stare at their pictures and remember all the terrible things I’d said and done, until the guilt started eating away at my insides.
There was a cure for that, though: another drink. Always another drink.
And so the nights slipped away in an alcoholic haze, only to end each morning in brightly lit hell.
Other than the time I was an absolute asshole towards Dorp, all my mornings were exactly the same. They began to blur together, too, just like the nights. Same excruciating hangover… same blinding sunlight… same waking up in the gutter. Everything always the same.
Until the morning I got a visit.
I was dreaming of Alaria and Dorp kicking me down into a dark hole where Saykir and Jastoth and Odeon’s rotting corpses clawed at me like zombies –
When I was awakened by someone prodding my ribs.
I opened my eyes and squinted blearily at a crowd of silhouettes outlined by the midmorning sun.
A voice full of gravel and razor blades spoke. “Well, well. It seems someone has forgotten his financial obligation to me.”
Shit.
It was Varkus, surrounded by a bunch of Rogues and scary-looking Warriors – a mixture of humans, orcs, and elves.
Sell-swords. Mercenaries. Assassins. And probably a few professional torturers.
“Good morning, sir,” Varkus said cheerfully. Way too cheerfully. “If I remember correctly, you owe me 4000 gold. And since your compatriots took off without you, you and you alone owe me the 4000.”
I just lay there squinting up at him. “I’m good for it.”
