"....what the hell am I going to do with those?" Jarel, the bartender of the Slaughtered Lamb barked. Two rather old, grungy looking dining chairs sat, their legs rickety and unsteady. The chairs were simply not safe for holding guests anymore. At least, thats what he gathered when both chairs randomly collapsed underneath his heavily armored guest earlier in the evening. She had not been very happy, as Jarel's black eye could attest to. He really had to watch his mouth a bit. The comment about the amazon's weight was probably uncalled for. Not that she hadn't been good looking. Rubbing the tender, discolored area around his eye, he winced and grimaced between the pain and the incoming sunlight crawling through his front door.
Jarel could count on the curvacious warrior not making another appearance at his tavern.
"Eyepatches are fashionable, aren't they?" the bartender winked at the hooded woman sitting at the corner table of the dining room. "Augh...ouch!" he hissed. Winking was bad.
"I think you deserved it," Anisse replied flatly, her hood slid back a bit to eye her glass of iced tea. Rather than drinking it, she seemed satisfied with toying with the ice cubes inside of the glass with her spoon. "I do not think your guests come to hear you talk. Or insult them, even playfully."
"What?!" Jarel blew off the woman with a dismissive wave. "You're mistaken, missy. People come here for my good looks."
Anisse looked away tiredly as he strutted, flexing his rather pathetic "muscles". The bartender was not terribly horrible looking, but he wasn't winning the Azerothian Beauty Pageant either. Either way, the apprentice warlock decided she would retire, growing weary of watching the man act like a fool. There seemed to be no inkling of serious manner in the proprietor.
"Good night, Jarel," she murmured as she swept down to the basement, not giving him the time to think of something for her to do. As a permanent patron of the Lamb, Anisse had closed herself into a free deal of food and sleeping arrangements in exchange for harvesting meat for cooking and helping to keep the crypts below clean. Training was expensive, and she could not afford a regular room in the other Stormwind Inns. As thankful as she was for it, the warlock was in a sour mood, having spent most of her night trying to decimate the murloc population of Elwynn Forest. A simple task turned into a need for something to fill her jars with, a trinket besides a squishy eyeball. Unfortunately, most of the spells in her arsenal slowly tainted the body organs from the inside out, often liquifying the innards of the fragile fish-like creatures by the time they would fall. It made collecting their hearts all but impossible, and Anisse had returned by morning with no meaningful trinket.
At least the request of new meat for Jarel's meatpies had been filled. Apparently Defias rebels were tasty.
Home. Her soft leather boots clicked upon the catacomb floors. Peeling the robe off her shoulders, she sighed comfortably, feeling the soft velvet of the fabric. At least she had enough coins to buy the fresh new robe. Surely, she was indulging herself with the new cloth. Unfortunately, it was also going down on the crypt floors. Anisse unlocked her special chest of treasures, and placed a single, small jar into its confines. The kobold heart, the only undamaged organ she was able to collect, bounced like a bobbing apple in its mixture of preserving fluids, forever trapped behind the glass for her to study. Gently, she let the smaller jar clink against the Kal'dorei and succubus hearts. One last look of admiration, and the lid was pressed down until it clicked into place. The chest shimmered as she ran her fingers over the surface, and this made Anisse smile throughly. The scroll of protection she'd used to enchant it was horribly expensive, but it would be protected against all but her own fingers.
The jars could sit in safety. The dregs of the night slowly fell away from her mind with that affirmation.
Lying down upon her robes in her thin petticoat, Anisse drifted off into a comfortable sleep, ignoring the slight cold that whisked over her from the underground catacombs.
An hour later...
A scratching, dragging noise echoed through the bowels of the catacombs.
Waking with a start, Anisse's fingertips came to life with fire, the flames racing up the entirety of her hands. The Twilights had come for her at last, those she had betrayed. Somewhere in her heart, she knew this day had come, for the Twilight's Hammer never would let such an insult to their Way, as she was, be forgotten. She shivered, crawling up to her feet in that cold, dank crypt, staring on at the coming figure with her doom in its hands. Yet, for all her fears, she was ready to go down with a fight. The light of the flames lining her white slip of a nightgown, she looked much like an angry phantom in the darkness of the crypt, ready to rain down her vengeance.
"Acck...Great...Titan's Knickers..." echoed a man's voice, the tanned face of the bartender revealed. "Put your damn hands out before I take a bucket of water to you, woman!!"
"...Jarel?" Her voice wavered in the dark, a smidgeon of fear touching it's softness, the flames remaining. She'd not felt her heart beating so quickly since her first Offering.
"Well, of course! You know, you could see much better if you'd actually keep those torches lit." The dragging, screeching noise came to a stop, and her head thumped with its resonations, from her backpedalling paranoia. Her stomach was twisted in knots, sick. Somehow, she collected herself enough to light the torch next to her, and then let the spell die.
"Why did you wake me? I could have killed you." The idea hadn't completely left her head, glaring hard at the man.
"My luck, girlie. Put your clothes on, I've got something for you."
Throwing the lain robe back on so it hung loosely over her cotton nightgown, Anisse stared down upon an old wooden dining room chair. A broken, old wooden dining room chair.
"You are bringing me trash?"
"Im bringing you a seat. A 'thank you' would suffice."
"It's broken. I cannot use it."
"Use your head, woman," Jarel sighed out. "I have some wood rails down here you can use to make a bed with, so you don't have to sleep on the crypt floor. If you're going to live down here and work for my establishment, I'm not having you smelling like a corpse. Don't you smell yourself? You stink."
It was probably the smell of dried blood that wilted his nose, caked underneath her fingernails. Anisse wasn't about to tell him that, though. She let him go on his tangent, surprised with his concern.
"We'll fix this. Summon your imp."
"I don't have one."
Jarel fixed her with a hard stare. "Summon your imp."
"I do not have an imp," she answered again in monotone. His eyes were boring through her now.
"Why the hell don't you have an imp?!"
"They seem a distraction, and useless and I do--"
"Every neonate warlock needs a damned imp. It doesn't matter how annoying they are. They are a step up the ladder to demonic control. It ought to have been one of the first spells for you to learn. If you don't have an imp, you might as well be a damned mage. Good luck with that route, Lady Sleeps-with-the-dead," the bartender quipped gruffly. He seemed in a sour mood, not his usual cheery self above in the tavern. It was a side of Jarel Moor she'd never seen before, and it fascinated her.
"How do you know so much of warlocks? You are a bartender." He laughed hard at her question now, shaking his head.
"You don't live in the wild without learning the habits of it's wildlife, milady. I do not practice, but I know more than you do, apparently. We're getting you an imp, and we'll teach you to train it to obey your commands."
He dropped a bag of money at her feet, a sizable satchel that was heavy in her hands as she picked it up. He caught her amber eyes as she rose again, his own intense.
"Those warlock trainers up there? They would laugh at you now, and send you out to die. Do you understand me? Feel thankful that I'm doing this for you."
Anisse had no doubt the Warlock trainers cared nothing for her well-being, but the thought was mutual, in truth. Since she'd escaped her Brethren, she only meant to hide behind the warlocks, to mingle, to pretend she was one of theirs. Their way of magic was interesting, but it was hardly a path she obsessed with, and she treated it as a useful key to shelved knowledge. She would turn the key and take what she needed, when she needed it.
Now it seemed, there was a different plan.
"Warlocks are a ruthless bunch, remember that," Jarel explained, and Anisse agreed silently. "But with the respect of those in your Circle, you can find life much easier. You are already on the list of shame with your botched attempt on the spy. She was delivered to you to be taken care of! It's not a good spot to be in, m'dear. "
"Why are you helping me?"
Jarel laughed. "Because I don't want you to die!" the cheeky bartender of the Lamb returned to her with his candid smile. "I don't know what kind of meat you've been bringing me, but it sure isn't lamb, and everyone loves it! I'm not letting you go to your death. You'll just have to learn to live with that."
Anisse smiled thinly beneath her hood as they worked up the ramp twisting to the warlock's den. People enjoyed her treasures.
"Then you will teach me to control a demon outside?" the woman said a bit too hopefully.
"Hell no. You can practice commanding it to weld your chairs and bed together. You can have yourself a little parlor down there! Come on then, hurry it up."
Anisse followed silently behind the bartender now, playing the little dunce, feigning her ignorance. There was so much more to this picture she could not allow Jarel to see. The bartender had his uses after all. His heart perhaps, was in the right place in aiding her.
For once, that place was not in a jar.
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