Rough Riders: Heartflame

Blood In The Wine

"So!" began the fair-faced male with pale hair across the long, shabby table, as he clapped his too-clean seeming hands. "Tell us all about how you came to join our merry bunch, new friend!"

Well that was a fun story, wasn't it?

---------------

His vision blurry, all Kordak could see clearly was the glass of wine in front of him as he was slammed onto the thick oaken table. As he watched, it was turning red with what was very likely his own blood.

He could feel everything though, from the cracked rib last week, to the slash from a broken bottle a month ago still healing on his left shoulder. the newest lovely addition was the loose tooth in his bruised jaw that had added the lovely rose' colouring to the cheap wine. Garn liked to tell folks that it was the finest vintage in the Crossways, but the Leaky Sow didn't have the best anything. Its best wine was barely shelve-able in the nicer taverns up along the city's north fork.

Unfortunately, it just so happened that one of the rich young fops who's parents kept manors in that district had come in to the tavern tonight. He and his friends were causing a disturbance for all the other patrons, but Garn had been triple charging the idiots on the sly and making more than the rest of the tavern on just that one table so he'd told Kordak leave them be and the serving girls to bring some extra rounds to the other patrons on the house.

So Kordak did, at least until the chief of the limp-sticks tried to take a grab at Lanie. Usually the clientele that came to the Leaky Sow were a half decent group, a good few of them less than noble for sure, but everyone knew to keep behaved under Garn's roof. These foreign merchant folks though, never seemed to think the common folk were much better than the yaks that pulled their wagons, or worse than the prissy horses they rode in on. Especially if you weren't human. Apparently they had very little else over there in Lanathel. They probably thought a halfling barmaid would put up half the fuss or some other racist bull.

That's what Kord was here for though, handling this sort of crap. He was already on his feet and halfway towards the table before the regulars at the bar even noticed. "Now, I don' think that's your best idea, you know? The lady there was just on her way to bring me a drink!"

As the table all looked up in response to Kordak's own interruption, Lanie was able to wriggle her way free from their leader. As she ran past Kord with her tray, he grabbed a drink off it that was definitely not his, and took a swig, thanking her as she carried on to hide in the kitchen. She'd be good. Her face was red with anger, not with fear. Just because the little folk are small, doesn't mean they couldn't hold their own. The drink was awful though, it was that blighted mead that Garn's wife had warned him was trash, but he insisted he was getting a great deal when he bought it.

The first of the pack came up on Kordak, a large, broad, oafish looking fellow clearly hoping to leverage his greater size to intimidate him. He was over two meters tall, or six feet eight inches or so, if he recalled his Boralan measurements. They were terribly stupid though, he wasn't surprised they had never caught on. Why did they even keep using them?

Unfortunately for the walking bookcase, there were advantages to being as short as Kord was. In this case, it put him at the perfect level for a sucker punch straight to the family jewels. Before the man could even get out an 'Oi, you', he was on his knees cradling his package with the startings of tears in his eyes. Kordak finished him with an uppercut from the now-empty stein, delivering him to flop backwards with a heavy thump onto the stained and dirty floor.

That got his friends moving. The second, a thinner man with pale skin and oily black hair matching his drink-soaked jacket went down with a kick to the back of the knee, followed up by a punch to the jaw. Number three , a lad with short brown hair, a green vest, and far-too-well oiled riding boots, tried to come at him with a chair in hopes of cracking it over his head, but a heel driven into the top of his foot ended the wildly overestimated swing with a crash as the man let go of the chair with a yelp pain as it whiffed harmlessly over Kordak's head. As he lay on the floor grasping at his foot, Kordak drove his heel down again, but this time into the man's gut, driving the wind out of him. Then kicking at the man's side like he would a tipped barrel, mister green vest rolled into the legs of friend number four, sending him tumbling forward straight at Kordak. This lad, with prematurely thinning hair revealed by his garish purple beret now laying in a pile of bookshelf's sick on the floor, went down with a well placed flying knee to the tip of his nose.

In the next moment as he stood over their groaning bodies, he couldn't tag the fifth, their ring leader. All he heard was a pansy grunt right before the blonde fop of a man in his blue dress coat swung his rapier down towards him. Catching the blade of the rapier on his arm, Kordak grunted in pain as it cut deep, the well polished and razor sharp rapier leaving a clean and wide rent down to the bone.

Good thing he wasn't human either though. His father's dwarven blood, also the reason to thank for his barely five foot four stature, had given him a dwarf's sturdy body, with bones, skin, and muscle far stronger than most other humanoid races. It hurt like the nine hells and the veil were having some twisted playdate on his forearm for sure, but it would take more than that to slow him down. It was on now.

Kordak torsioned his forearm and shoulder downwards, ripping the blade out of blondie's hand. At the same time, his other hand lashed forwards and wrapped over-top the now-empty fingers that once held the rapier. He followed through with the momentum and broke each of the fingers backwards to sit in a crumpled heap. Next, he rotated his palm around and swept his hand back the other way to grab the collar of blondie's fancy blue velvet coat. Sticking his opposite foot between their legs, he swept it outwards, resulting in them falling to the floor.

Just as the blonde one started to try and scream in pain, Kordak mounted the man's chest and struck out with his other hand, aiming a solid punch right at his face in hopes of knocking him out. The searing pain that shot from his fingertips and up his arm though, as they collided limply with the golden fuzz on the man's cheek, told him his arm may in fact be pretty rough off after all. Unable to close the hand into a fist, Kordak drove the side of his forearm into his face for an elbow strike, one, two, three times.

Kordak got back to his feet, stepping over the groaning silver spoon and had just started to call for Lanie to see if she was ok when he heard a pained grunt behind him and the gurgled voice of the blonde man from behind him.

"You damn half-breeds, you're nothing but gutter trash! Mark my words, your days are numbered, you and that filthy half-"

That was all that Kordak let him get out before leaping up (the man was a good foot taller than him) and spinning a roundhouse kick to his temple that sent him careening back into one of the wooden pillars before slumping unconscious to the floor.

***

But how did that result in him getting slammed to the table you might ask? Well apparently blondie's daddy had friends in rich places because the very next day a squad from the DefCon city guards strolled into the Sow asking for him. He barely got a word out before a truncheon cracked across his face, sending searing stars into his eyes, and then one of them slammed his face first onto the bar top and twisted his hands behind his back. In a hop, skip, and a jump, he was in front of one of their Captains and getting sentenced to prison or work duty. Apparently, pretty boy didn't like getting tuned up, and his father and mother made a ruckus claiming that their son had been dealt terrible trauma from his head wounds and could barely even walk. Hard to imagine as Kordak had seen all five of the friends carry each other drunkenly down the street after he and a couple of the regulars threw them out the front door.

He picked work duty of course, thanking his stars the captain threw him a bone and didn't offer to send him to the wall or one of the outer rim-forts, and two weeks later he found himself in a ramshackle manor house-turned-outpost out in the Grey Peaks, having to introduce himself to this man-pretty, eyeshadowed elven man whom he now had to call his captain.