Audemus Dawnspark

Pendulum

Brawl’gar is running a special on well drinks, a silver for swill, and as enticing as redirecting his rage into a bout of exhibitionist violence sounds, the place is packed and he’s not especially interested in waiting for the opportunity. It’s less effort to kill his liver and wallet instead.

There's enough waiting at the bar, anyway, swarming with brutality fetishists thirsty for scrapping and spirits both. When a space opens up next to him — the announcer whipping up the crowd about last call bets for a quite literal bout of tauromachy, Grimtotem on Grimtotem — a hulking Orc missing a tusk and sense of personal space leaps like a horny salmon into the spot, shouldering him brutishly.

“You got a problem?”

With the same dead eyes of a serial killer or successful Goblin evangelist, One-Tusk rakes him over with a mean look, the derisive whuff of air he blows out rattling the tarnished brass ring in his cauliflowered nose like a door knocker. A gust of fetid breath must pass for a response in this fellow’s particular Orcish dialect, but he plays the tourist card and repeats himself, more or less, with increased volume.

“Do you want a fucking problem?”

He gets his drinks, then, seltzer and vodka and some lachrymose limes, and the She-Pandaren he’d been buying for makes her appearance as well. If Unitusk had words, they’re not put to voice: she’s got a meaty paw twice the size of his head and each of her claws are just as long as the lonely, gold-capped canine jutting from that sour looking mouth, and there’s a grizzled guard at the end of the bar whose cataract cloudy eyes  focus on them with the preternatural sense of an old wardog who hasn’t been let out of the pen in a while and is itching for a run.

“No problem,” Cowed-Greenskin says.

So, problem solved, he drinks, he bets, and he wonders if he’s going to end up later re-enacting some sort of deviant nature documentary with his current company.

The last question is answered when she admits she “Just doesn’t like elves,” and he thinks, fair, because there are a whole lot of fucking elves he doesn’t like too. They have a good time indulging in cheap vodka and even cheaper displays of cruelty, and, it’s still a sort of documentary worthy spectacle to watch a bear regurgitate its weight worth in bile and liquor when she ends up overestimating herself. He feels blessed to have witnessed a Pandaren reach their limit.

He has a limit, too, and it comes in the form of claustrophobia when the vodka makes him feel hot and the crowd makes him feel restless. Even Orgrimmar’s canyons are too narrow, so he makes a pit stop at the Tusk for some cactus apple cider for the road before he’s stumbling through the Dranosh’ar Blockade to places unknown.

He happens upon a saguaro that rather looks like an extended middle finger, flouting the heavens in a spiny fish hooked fuck you, and it feels like destiny to piss on it. When he falls, a sudden whipping pain cutting his legs from beneath him, the new angle just makes it look more like a prickly phallus surrounded by stars, but he’s not sure if that’s from the night sky or the impact of his head upon the dirt.

A few thoughts feature prominently in his dazed mind.

One: bolas make for ugly ankle bracelets.

Two: at least he’d done back up his trousers.

Three: finally and for once, with this provocation, happening this way, he has been freed from the trammels of witness or attachment.

Ornery One-Tusk, who probably just doesn’t like elves either, has brought along some extra tooth and claw to make up for a personal dearth of it. Upon the back of a dust-colored worg, the duo cuts quite the imposing figure of practiced hunter and pet, but the slow, taunting pace they take as they circle back around — so sure of felled prey, just a mouthy drunk who’s getting his deserved comeuppance — is amateur at best.

His fingers furrow in the terracotta earth. The worg’s piteous, harrowing howl as summoned shadowfrost, spearing up from the ground and splitting through tender underbelly, is sweetly delayed gratification for his earlier restraint. Settling their issue in blood and beer sticky sawdust would have been satisfying, but this? This is overdue.

Rider and mount, rather anticlimactically, collapse over into a thatch of thorny shrubs. A crash would have been nice, or perhaps a peal of thunder, but he can always embellish the story later to make it suitably dramatic. A pithy one-liner might do instead.

He gathers both himself and his fallen scrumpy, drinking as meanders to the spined brush. Bleeding out, the enormous worg has pinned its handler beneath its weight, and the both of them are skewered upon the botanical barbs.

“Killed your dog.”

He’ll leave that part from the retelling. It’s hardly epigrammatic. He kills his drink, too, then lobs it at the Orc’s head. Bottle versus skull produces more of a satisfying sound than disappointing doggie death.

Up close, the goldenrod canid is evocative of a trapped beast in Tol Barad, who probably isn’t trapped any more but should be. His face aches with the memory, and so does his mind, and he wishes that he was seeing red but he’s really just seeing double. “I want you to watch this,” He tells the dying Orc, who gurgles an affirmative, or is maybe just choking on blood.

The dagger in his boot is very sharp but his mastery of skinning is rudimentary at best. By the time he’s worked off an ear and mangled a section of mane, he’s covered in blood and his audience has expired. Stupid.

It’s much easier to change course, moving from beast to man, severing ligament and spine from skull, and he knows enough about doing this to be mindful of the arterial gush.

He pays his respects by kicking the decapitated head a ways down the watershed. The Orc’s face, gathering red Durotar clay until it’s the color of gingerbread, makes a suitable for now substitute for the one he would’ve rather taken a few weeks previous. Intangible goalposts in his mind are worked further and further back until he loses his makeshift football in the riparian grasses lining the Southfury.

The little twinkle of dental gold acts as a beacon for its location, and he touches a bloodied finger to his own canine in morbid reverie.

Have any more jewelry for me?

It wouldn’t fit, but he thinks it could pass as an ostentatious, particularly battered sewing thimble. Does a thimble count as jewelry? He wonders what she would say about this particular item’s method of acquisition: likely, she would be disgusted. The idea of it curiously thrills him.

He scours the bank, on his hands and knees in the silt, for a flat rock the size of his palm. When he finds it, he provides his own garrulous congratulatory commentary because the head certainly isn't going to. For its impertinence, he sets it upon a nearby schist outcropping, flat and smooth from erosion, and caves it in.

The first crack of rock against skull is dull and hollow sounding. He strikes it, again and again, like a caveman carving tools from flint, until hollow gives way to wet whiplash. Full of misdirected rage and all of its concomitant confusions, he laughs until he cries, and then he redoubles his efforts because of his tears.

The skull is shattered until it’s unrecognizable, a bloody pile of jagged bone chips dressed with gray matter. It looks like it could be an Undercity gustatory delight, nachos a la encephalon. He makes sure to find his prized, golden fève, and then he treats the river beasts, hissing crocolisks who have been drawn by his disturbance, to a cerebral snack. They snap at the gooey shards he tosses out over the water and don’t even say thank you.

He finds a large tor to climb up on, overlooking his mess but out of reach. The reptiles will have to be content with his gory amuse-bouche. If he could make sense of direction, he’d try to place himself on the western side of the rock for the morning, but he’s not even sure which way is up or down. He settles for spreadeagle, and when his stomach lurches at his sudden horizontality, he has the foresight to at least loll his head to the side so he doesn’t asphyxiate on his own vomit.

When a scorpion skitters by, a gore matted lock of golden wolf fur clinging to its chela, he briefly considers he might be dreaming.

Of course, he’s not and he knows it —  because at least in his dreams, he never feels quite so acutely alone.