Godforgt's Story

CH:1 GODFORGT

The sky was leaking a surreal blood-red from clouds modeled like over-filled tits, dripping its enticing, sorrowful light over the bulldog-built dwarf. He slung his pack over his shoulder. Whores withered against crumbling pleasure-houses, wallowed soullessly as the opiate needles penetrated rotting sin...

It was espoused a number of incurably financially-keen dwarves migrated their businesses to this sore, sore reminder of a haven of vices. Economics had driven it from its once-romanticized brothel legend to a crime-ridden place reduced to the title: Dome of Thieves.

Godforgt's gaze crawled over the excessive drudgery, travelling miscreants nibbling on sticks scarcely baring meat. It sent his tongue salivating, glancing down at his rumbling belly, and at an airship flying over the ailing sky.
Upon stepping into the bar, the air was crispy, flickering on a flimsy frame of vision, the faces around him indistinctly taking insidious and innocent shape, flushed with the downpour of alcohol moseyed into their embattled bellies. Godforgt knew it wasn't wise to get drunk before waltzing to a bar, but he'd done it anyway. One man poured salt and water down his throat, desperately gargling it around to taper the metallic hardness burning at his trachea.

He heard a stool crack behind him, another bar brawl erupting out, just as his shot of whisky was thrust in front of him. The barkeep spoke in a gruff, weathered voice.
"That'll be one buck..."
Godforgt nodded, trying not to look miserable outright, or broody. "Most bartenders try to advertise the most expensive drink in the joint. It's a tradition."
"Most bartenders throw out the customers for loosing a fight in the establishment."
"True enough." Godforgt swirled a finger in his shot, his eyes turning to the whore dancing on a pole, she didn't seem to be enjoying it, rather cramped, uncomfortable as a legendary hero far past his hay-day. Someone who had... peaked.
To forget. Why was it so hard to forget.

It was strange how he wished his own story had been less memorable, less epic, for the years since had yawned past slowly, slowly...

The burning blazed throughout his belly, he bore the self-imposed consequence quietly. Then launched into a gripe towards the bartender. "Whatever happened to family, law, tradition.. social sciences. We can't even make our own technology anymore without gnomes injecting their logos and cultures into it... foisting their piggish appetites into the public domain to add insult to fucking injury."

The dwarf, apparently, could not see the irony around him; dwarves shoveling down their meat-and-potato bowls with all due desperateness, some eating theirs raw, growling at a renegade string of meat hanging stubbornly onto a monolithic hunk. The bartender agreed without hesitation, chiming in a guttural growl himself. It was a symbolic bell of universal dwarven solidarity, presumably. "It is getting bad, brother. Cheng should genocide all of them, cuckolds."

Godforgt rotated his head queasily from the bartender, clamoring to capture the attention of the dwarf growling at his meat, his jaws wrapped around it with saliva intermittently dripping from his teeth, his eating utensils long-forgotten. "This fucking guy... Cheng, made a deal giving gnomes an edge on ship-building factories in the docks of Calidor."
The red-haired, red-bearded dwarf who was in deep battle with his fourth slab of meat, looked up at Godforgt bitterly. He'd disturbed him from the most prized of his activities, and growled a response. "Reckon Cheng will go home with his tail between his legs when the gnomes get caught blowng up ships. Fucking pigs they are... but I ain't too learnt on what boils down in Calidor. I reckon you're not a far cry off though, dwarves and men and elves have become sissified by a hubbub of culture-mixing nonsense. It just don't sit well with me." He upended his shot-glass, vitriol seizing him, and boy did he look mean and malicious...

Godforgt wrinkled his nose, "Someone will be busting this Cheng's balls before long... and it's where I'm moving to. Godforgt paused, to admire the red-bearded dwarf's gilded accoutrements on his armor. "This armor is beautiful."
Red-bearded dwarf grunted in agreement, measuring whether the comment was born of genuine admiration or a latent homosexual innuendo. He decided not to go with the assumptive latter. after all, it weren't like he were some damn bigot, cuck-gnome. "This armor's from the old wars after the elves' Fall... of course, I prettied it up with the up-to-date-modifications. It'll get someone's goat when they realize you can't just hew through it with one mean hack."

The bartender parked two whiskey shots before the two dwarves in their alcohol-triggered, mid-rant and intoned roughly again, "On the house, brothers..." He'd been timing out their shots, and at approximately four minutes after the last was slopped-up, they practically howled for more.
A thick cauldron of silence settled over the bar, just the sparkling poles that whores slid their supple bodies on interlocked everyone's attention.
"How much for that one?"Godforgt finally asked, setting his eyes on the hottest dancer in the bar, her hips ground demurely against the pole. He'd pierced the quietude, and it took the bartender eternal seconds to register his request.
"Oh, that's Diamond, she's on the house. The bartender wiped strenuously at a shot glass, trying to cut all of the rot out of it like a world-weary inquisitor. You look like you need it."
"What can you tell me about the beautiful lass?" Godforgt ventured she seemed too sophisticated and out-of-place to be in this hole-in-the-wall with its horrid musky smell, rust-tinged windows, and dust-covered although evil-promising gadgetry.
Godforgt hunched his shoulders, and emptied his shot-glass. He watched the blue-haired woman gracefully dance for a long time, imagining what he'd do to her.

****

Hours later, Godforgt drunkenly lumbered behind Diamond towards a derelict barn-house. Like a crushing compression uncorked, black birds jettisoned across the sleepy sky. A light-pole twitching its last sparks of illumination, farm-life were dredging up divine racket, and Godforgt spanked Diamond's ass; disciplining her for some unspeakable infringement. He rattled the barn-door ajar, looked left, then right, and tipped her over a haystack.
He tried hard, but he failed to get the weasel up. He wasn't sure if it was her lack of personality, or how fake-sounding her crescendos of pleasure were... it just wasn't tickling a rise in him. Paying for sex was for the dogs, he should of stayed home.
Pulling up his trousers dourly, and splashing his shirt on in haste, he gave vent...
"What do you think it's a fucking game? I payed you to do this right." Gorforgt was in Diamond's face, waving around the scant dollars he had left.
"I-I was just following orders, Donnie..."
"Don't mention Donnie. You own your issues, not him. Why is it the whole time, you were looking at my pack over there."
"It's nice..."
"Trying to steal my shit, the balls on this broad." In one lurching blur of movement, he backhanded her hard into the messy barn-floor.