Three Assholes Walk Into a Bar
Jag
A bar. A dive. A neon sign glitching on and off above a burst of yellow light seen through a smeared windowpane. A bouncer hulking in a doorway—the type with more knuckles than IQ points. Probably half-dryad by the look of him, although his mother certainly wasn’t one of the willow-tree sprites that get all the press. The smell of wet asphalt and cigarette smoke. Brownies, kobolds, and sidhe bundling past, wishing they had enough money to go in. But no one in this part of the Iron City is particularly liquid right now. They haven’t been for the past fifty years. Prospects don’t look great.
Inside, a mad cram of bodies. Ruddy-faced kobolds. Sidhe in imperious shades of blue. Pixies scattered across the dance floor all the colors of a shattered rainbow. A shouting, clawing mass with one thing in mind: erasing the grind of the week with bad decisions, and the possibility to one day tell a story that starts with the phrase, “Don’t judge me, because I was obliterated at the time.”
The fae of the Iron City are at their shift’s end. They are at their wits’ end. They don’t appreciate the rhyme, even though the band on the stage are milking it for all they’re worth. A pixie on vocals, her hair half-shaved, the other half bright as summer lilacs. She’s screeching and screaming, throwing all of her adolescent energy into every word. And it’s immature, and it’s mostly wrong, but there’s still a beauty to her passion that half the preening fae with their pints of fermented nectar can’t wait to tell her about.
Behind her, a kobold has scavenged an old oak door from somewhere and is beating on it like it said something horrifying about his sister. He’s broad, and wearing a shirt to prove it, muscles emerging from the shaggy mane of red hair that obscures half his features.
The slender sidhe violinist who accompanies them is perhaps hampered by her own ennui. Still, attitude counts for a lot on stage and her dead-eyed stare from above knife-blade sharp cheekbones makes up a lot of ground.
The three of them have Jag transfixed.
Jag does not belong here. Jag’s neatly coiffed and perfectly trimmed hair don’t belong. Her clothes with their perfect lines and elegant stitching don’t belong. And Jag’s race definitely does not belong.
Jag is a goblin. She is obviously and painfully a goblin. She is green-skinned and sharp-featured. She has yellow eyes with slit pupils. She is long-fingered. And while she is taller and graced with more sidhe-like elegance than most of her kind, she is still, most undeniably, a goblin.
Jag is an oppressor in a bar of the oppressed.
Jag thinks she knows all this, of course. Jag believes she is wise to the possibilities and the dangers, but Jag is the heir of House Red Cap. Her father is Osmondo Red. Consequences have been, in her experience, things that happen to other goblins.
The other reason no one in the bar is willing to cure Jag of her assumptions is Sil. Sil stands behind Jag’s chair. Sil with a sword strapped to her back, and scars on her face that the sweep of her white-blonde hair cannot quite obscure. Half-goblin, half-sidhe, every angle on her body seems to have been sharpened to a point. And while her skin is too green for the tastes of the fae around her, too pale for the goblins back home, she is more than prepared to take on anyone who wants to take it up with her.
Sil
Sil hears the music. She sees the encounter with the numinous it inspires in Jag. She finds it does nothing for her. To her, the notes are simply obfuscation, hiding mutters, muting angry words.
What Sil does care about is intent. The way one gnome shifts his weight, the way another kobold stares. She cares about the purposeful movements that the fae try to dissemble. She cares about escape routes and high-priority targets.
She has the whole bar charted by now, the route of every wooden tray of spiked milk and moss-stuffed taco catalogued. She sees everything except the thing that makes Jag grin and look round at her, and say, “It’s so beautiful!”
She wonders if she ever did that. Ever turned and smiled and exclaimed in wonder. She can’t remember. When she looks back, her past is a mist she cannot penetrate. Only the lessons she was taught stand out. Islands of memory. Each beating distinct.
She nods, though. She has been taught to agree with her half-sister. Another lesson drummed into her ribs. Her kidneys. The back of her skull.
Jag turns back to the band, grinning. Sil checks to make sure that no one else has made a move. To make sure that Jag is safe.
In the end, that is all she does, and can, care about.
Knull
Deeper into the bar, away from the stage, and through the press of onlookers, Knull is shifting his weight from foot to foot. He is made restless by his father’s pixie blood, made anxious by his mother’s brownie heritage.
Every drug deal, Knull knows, is a fuck-up waiting to happen. It’s not that he’s a pessimist. It just that he knows the best-case scenario is that everyone goes home afterwards and makes themselves incrementally dumber.
Knull also knows that every drug deal is a chance to make serious cash. Especially when the shit he’s selling has been cut three ways to Mourn’s Day, and is likely to only get the purchaser about as high as a three-day-old balloon. And that’s exactly what he’s going to sell to the pair of dull-eyed gnomes in front of him now. They aren’t regulars. They aren’t locals. That means they get the tourist special.
“This?” Knull shakes his baggy of Dust at the pair. “You don’t want this.” He slips it back into his pocket. He points to the other baggies he’s spread out on the table.
“Titania’s Revenge.” He picks up a bag of completely identical Dust. “It’s like being kissed on your frontal lobes.” He picks up another—its contents in absolutely no way different from the previous two bags. “Iron Blood. It’s got a bite, but it’ll be one hell of a night.”
“Why,” says one of the two gnomes, “don’t we want the other bag?”
Knull pats his pocket. “This? Serious customers only, mate.”
The gnomes exchange a look. They are big, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal tattoos and biceps. Knull recognizes their guild brands: coal miners. No Dust, he thinks, will ever get them as high as their own sense of self-importance.
“You think,” one gnome says, “that we ain’t serious?”
Knull pats his pocket one more time. “Midsommar Dreams? That’s dryads only, my friends. It’s not personal, just biology. This would screw you up so bad you wouldn’t know your own names for three days.”
The gnomes exchange a look.
“I want the Midsommar Dreams,” one says.
This, Knull thinks, is like taking sap from a dryad. Except it’s taking money from idiots, which is potentially a whole lot easier.
“I’m telling you, guys. It ain’t for sale.”
One produces a fistful of coins. “You sure?”
Then comes the pantomime of indecision. “Fine,” Knull says eventually, “but let me make sure you’re up for it first. My conscience and all.” He slips a finger into his pocket, into a baggie entirely dissimilar to the one that contains the so-called Midsommar Dreams, the one he’s been holding back in case one of his regulars shows up. He dips it directly into the pure shit.
He pulls out a white-tipped finger. “Here,” he says, tapping the residue off onto a tiny sheet of rolling paper. “Rub that on your gums and don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”
Their eyes are as big as saucers. There is some shoving to get to the Dust first. The bigger one wins. His finger goes into the Dust, and then he works it around his mouth like he’s trying to unclog a drain.
His eyes balloon.
Knull has never seen the production of Dust, but he’s heard about it plenty. It is a tree resin, he has been told. The resin is ground down, and can be ingested in a variety of ways. Some like to snort it, others to eat it, while others like to heat it up and inject into the vein of their choosing. You can even smoke the stuff if you like.
Users of Dust like to tell Knull that the specific method of ingestion varies the high they get, but from Knull’s perspective the end result is always the same. For just a moment, for just that fae, the Iron Wall goes away. For just a moment, they touch the world that was, the world that went away. For just a moment, magic is alive within their hearts.
And then the magic goes away, and they come back, and they pay Knull so that they can do it all again.
So now, the gnome’s pupils dilate, and wind sweeps his hair. Knull watches a snake weave a crown upon the gnome’s forehead, and grass pushes up through the linoleum at his feet. Sunlight seems to reflect in his eyes.
And then it’s over, the moment gone. The snake slithers back into nothingness. The grass wilts and all that’s left beneath the gnome’s feet are cracked tiles and stale puddles. He gasps, staggers, and grins.
“Shit, yes,” he says.
The gnomes count out tin cogs. Knull tries to not salivate. He fishes the bag labelled “Midsommar Dreams” over. The gnomes high five each other, and then, when their backs are turned, Knull heads for the door as fast as he possibly can.
Jag
The band takes a break. Jag doesn’t. She gesticulates with her cigarette. She expounds upon a theme.
“This,” she says, “is real. Right here. Right now. That’s what fae music is about. It’s about the intersection of out there and in here.” She taps her sternum. “That’s the problem with goblin music, Bazzack. It’s all externally focused. It’s all indicative of a conqueror’s mindset.”
Bazzack—the target of this rant—is underwhelmed. He is the son of a minor colonel within House Red Cap’s ranks. A rich, young, bored goblin, whose rough edges money cannot fully erase. They have known each other forever, and she is far enough out of his league within their house’s hierarchy that she felt confident to bring him here without having to suffer through any painful flirtation. Still, platonic familiarity comes with its downsides.
“You do have a rough sense,” Bazzack says, “of how absurdly pretentious you sound right now, don’t you?”
And the thing is, Jag does. She knows what she is and where she is. She knows how both Bazzack and the fae see her sitting here. But she also knows that doesn’t stop her words from being true. It doesn’t stop her fellow goblins from needing to hear them. To hear them and realize that it’s not just posing, or an angle, or a new look for this season’s balls.
Bazzack, though, Jag is coming to see, is not the goblin who is going to make that realization.
“This,” Bazzack says, just to ensure his particular brand of boorish ennui gets its moment in the spotlight, “is poor fae music, in a poor fae bar, in a poor excuse for a neighborhood. And the brooding-artiste look may get your suitors to feign a little more sensitivity, but don’t pretend to be so naïve that you imagine that solicitude will last past the moment when they finally talk their way between your bedsheets.”
“That—” Jag leans forward. “—is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re seeing all this as a pose, as something put on for others to observe. You can’t for a moment picture this as something genuine, and that’s the whole—” She stabs with the cigarette. “—damn problem. Because this music isn’t anything about that. It’s about revealing the internal.”
She glances back at Sil. At her half-fae half-sister. Her father’s bastard daughter. She looks to see if any of this is getting through. To see if any of her sidhe mother’s heritage is being unlocked. “What do you think, Sil?” she asks.
Sil looks at her for half a second. “The music could be a useful cover in the opening moments of a fight, for whoever wishes to initiate it.”
Bazzack laughs. Jag gives Sil a pleading look.
“It may also serve to mask anyone approaching me from behind,” Sil says.
Bazzack laughs harder. Sil is entirely unfazed by his amusement. The only movement in her face comes from her eyes, which go back to dispassionately scanning the bar and its occupants.
“I don’t know why you bother with her,” Bazzack says. “Her blood is tainted with—” He raises his voice. “—fae bullshit.” The crowd studiously avoids reacting. Bazzack sneers. “You know your father doesn’t want you doing this. She is a servant. Nothing more.”
Jag shakes her head, reaches out, puts a hand on Sil’s arm. “She is my sister.” Sil doesn’t react in the slightest.
“She is the accidental result of your father indulging his urges.”
“How she came into this world is of no concern to me,” Jag says, keen to move on from the idea of her father in the moment of conception. “She is here nonetheless, and what is happening here is part of her culture and her heritage.”
It would be an easier argument to make if Sil was willing to give the impression she had any sort of emotional range beyond that of the pint glass on the table before Jag.
“You can dress this shit show and your indulgence of it,” Bazzack says, stifling a belch, “in any pretty words you want. But they are literally on stage, putting on a show. It’s all bullshit. Just—” another grin “—like you.”
Sil
She knows how she will do it if Jag asks her. Pirouette around the chair, stab her sword directly into Bazzack’s ballsack. Such a small target, she thinks, will at least make it something of a challenge.
Edwyll
The evening twists on. Deeper and darker. Glasses rise and fall. Spirits move along with them. It’s easy to be despondent in the Fae Districts. It’s easy to focus on the cloying air and the dirt-smeared walls, and think about what was here before the Iron Wall. It’s easy to think about what could be if the fae weren’t cut off from their magic.
Some, though, would rather call bullshit on such defeatist attitudes. Some think that there is still the potential for beauty left in the world, and that the sun still shines if only the fae would stop and lift their heads, and see it beyond the chimney smoke.
Edwyll is such a fae. Edwyll thinks he has a medium and a message. Edwyll is trying to channel his mentor, Lila, and create the beauty he wants to see in the world. He is trying to create something that will remind his fellow fae that life did not end fifty years ago.
He hunches over a table in the corner of the bar. He stabs and dabs with his paintbrush, trying to capture the feeling that rose within him as the band played, building counterpoints of orange and blue, shifting tones of yellow sliding into red. He tries to make the kobold-hair bristles move the way his body wanted to move as the beat bounced through him.
And yet still, despite his conviction, despite his brave face, despondency lurks.
The problem, as ever, is money. Because even if he is successful in his transformation of elation into a visual medium, who will pay for it? Who will put enough food on his table that he’ll still be alive next week to create the next painting?
Edwyll isn’t even meant to be in this bar. He’s meant to be running home to grab some materials for his next big project. He’s meant to be checking that his drug-addled parents haven’t puked themselves to death. But he saw a flyer in the window about bartenders being wanted and then the proprietor needed to deal with some crisis or other, and he’s been waiting for half an hour, and the band started to play, and the spirit moved within him.
But now he’s hungry again, and the art isn’t quite what he wanted, and the spirit is starting to get sluggish.
He sits back, looks up, surveys the bar, these fae he wants to lift up out of poverty, these fae he is too poor to uplift, and then he sees them. Brownies knocking back spiced nectar. Two green leaves sitting about the blue, brown, and red bodies of the fae… surely not.
He blinks. He tries to make sure.
Two goblins. Two goblins sitting in the crowd. Two goblins slumming it for the night.
Two potential patrons.
He looks down at what he has accomplished on the scrap of canvas he’s holding. And screw it. It’s good enough.
He’s up and on his feet, pushing through the crowd before he has a chance to second-guess himself. He’s standing in front of them before he’s had a chance to figure out what he’s actually going to say.
“Great music, right?”
No. Not that. That was not the thing to say.
Two pairs of startled yellow eyes turn to him. He swallows.
“It’s amazing what great art can do, right?” He taps his chest. “Uplift the heart. Uplift the spirit. Change the whole world one heart and mind at a time.” He flashes a smile.
Against all odds, the female goblin’s face actually lights up. In defiance of logic, she smiles.
Then the male grabs the painting out of Edwyll’s hand, and sneers at the paint he’s just smeared.
“Peasant art,” he slurs. “I thought you lot were meant to be good at this shit. I thought you were meant to be good for at least one thing.”
“Hey, asshole—” are perhaps not the best words to deal with this situation, but they are the first two out of Edwyll’s mouth.
The goblin stands, sending his chair flying backward.
“What did you call me?”
Edwyll knows very well what he called him. He just doesn’t know if he’s willing to repeat it.
Instead of repetition, though, escalation. Before Edwyll can open his mouth, a large brownie puts his hand on the goblin’s shoulder. There are no butterfly wings on this fae. He is heavy-set, slabs of muscle scarred with burns and painted with tattoos. An ore miner on his way to the night shift that most of his kind prefer. He has rolled up his sleeves. His wrists are the breadth of the goblin’s thighs.
“This is the wrong part of town, son,” the brownie says, “to say shit like that.”
The goblin pushes the hand away. “I,” he says, “am the only good thing to ever happen to this shitty little bar, and this shitty part of town. If I am here, then it is exactly where I am supposed to be. You, peasant, are the one out of place in my city.”
Edwyll closes his eyes. Because he has always wanted his art to move people. He has always wanted it to create change in the world. But this is not what he had in mind at all.
Jag
Jag stands. Jag sees the faces around her. Jag blanches.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the fae with his hand on Bazzack’s chest—a brownie, or a pixie, or some mix of the two, she can’t be sure. “You are entirely correct. My friend is an asshole. We’re leaving.”
The brownie looks at her and Bazzack with distaste. Jag puts her faith in Sil standing behind her, in the fact that there is something in Sil’s eyes that normally speaks straight to every fae’s brain and gives them a single warning.
Bazzack, though, has silenced enough higher cognitive functions that belligerence has become his default setting.
“We are not leaving,” he spits. “We came here to have fun, Jag. And I am bored.” He grins at the brownie. “Five cogs,” he says. “I’ll pay you five cogs if you’ll fight her!” He points at Sil.
No. No. That is not why Jag brought Sil here. That is the opposite of why.
“No fae with fighting spirit left in the Iron City?” Bazzack shouts. “What if I make the pot richer? What if I pay one lead gear to anyone here who can best this half-fae in combat?”
“Shut up,” Jag says.
But it’s far too late for that.
“Show me the coin,” the brownie gripping Bazzack’s shoulder says.
“Show me something worth paying for.”
The brownie leans in closer. “How about I just take all your coins.”
Uncertainty rattles the bars of Bazzack’s intoxication. “Jag?” he says.
Jag wants them to leave. But she also wants to see the smirk wiped off Bazzack’s face. She wants to punish him a little for ruining this night. “She’s not your bodyguard, Bazzack,” she says.
Bazzack swallows. His confidence is starting to slip like an ill-fitting jacket. Nervous fingers fish out his coin.
“Good lad,” the brownie says. He lets go of Bazzack’s shoulder, claps him on the back. “Now, I’ll kick this half-gobbo’s ass.” He nods at Sil. “Then I’ll kick yours.”
He looks up, levels a finger at Jag. “And then I’ll kick your friend’s.”
Sil
The brownie’s mistake is that he has made one threat too many. Two, Sil can accept. The last, though, is taboo.
So, she reaches for her sword, and then, with a flick of her wrist, she removes his hand.