In Which I Send A Flurry Of Ill-Advised Letters

Observe your narrator now, his heart freshly pulped, his ego pureed, as he sits alone in a tavern off the Great Valley Road, bedraggled and hammered. I had left infernal Bloodroot on a stolen horse and begun the journey home to my kingdom. Not that there seemed much point in being a king anymore. All I wanted to do was lie in the gutter and shout insults at the moon.

I had left my companions behind at Bloodroot. We never said goodbye; I left in a hurry once a modicum of strength had returned to my legs. They were concerned, of course, and launched a city-wide search for me. I had to dive down several alleyways on my way out of the city to avoid Boomlay’s cabbage rolling past, with Selladore and Glob leaning out of the windows hollering my name. But I cared not. I wanted to be alone .

And so it came to be that, after a lonesome two weeks’ travel, you find me slumped inside The Blacksmith’s Nips tavern, off the Great Valley Road. The innkeeper had just asked if I wanted another drink and I did not reply, for I was too busy dry heaving and weeping over the bar top.

“Oi,” spake the barkeep, “stop getting tears and phlegm and bile all over my bar.”

It was not an unreasonable request. However, in the depths of my leeching heartmud, I took the same course of action I have been taking throughout the past fortnight since my love left me to rot: I blew a raspberry.

“You waggling that tongue at me, pal?” spake the barkeep.

“Aye,” said I. “And what of it you – hic – breathboiled wartler of moistened chunk?”

I closed my eyes and hoped it would be a swift end, bracing myself to be slapped out of my barstool and pummelled, but no succession of blows did rain over me. I eased open a lone peeper and found the innkeeper polishing a glass and looking at me with forehead all a-furrow.

“What was their name?”

“What?”

“Listen laddie,” said the barkeeper.

[ASIDE: Scotland isn’t a physical realm in this story, but the barkeeper had an accent that, were Scotland to exist, could be described as very similar to Glaswegian. I am telling you this information in this somewhat clunky style because it saves me the indignity of trying to indicate an accent via quirky spelling, which is easy to misinterpret and just generally embarrassing for all involved]

“I get fifteen sad-eyed mongrels in here a week, just like you. They pour and they pine and they scrap and they bicker, thinking they’re better off dead because the world hurt them. So I’ll ask again. What was their name?”

“Astra,” I sighed. “She left me, and I don’t know what to do. My heart feels like it is being stabbed constantly. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I want to crawl back into the womb and sleep forever.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but bartenders are actually a lower class of mage – somewhere a few rungs below ‘woodland hermit’ but a few notches up from ‘drunkard in the street yowling surprisingly profound sentiments’. Their magic lies in their ability to draw the most intimate details out of their patrons without ever really having to try. Their primary tool is the one glass they endlessly polish, which works as a mild hypnotic charm and lulls bar flies into a trance-like reflective state. The same is also true of barbers and their shears.

“I’ve given a lot of advice to a lot of heartbroken people over the years,” said the barkeeper, “and the one thing I’ve learned is that, as far as matters of the heart are concerned, you can be the poorest, dirtiest scrote who looks like he just dragged himself out of a swamp – like yourself, no offence – or you can be the mightiest and noblest monarch, and it makes not a blind bit of difference. People get broken, yes, but they get better, and the only healer is time.”

“Time? That’s it?” I squawked, feeling chubby tears shoulder barge their way to my worn out ducts. “There’s nothing I can do but wait?”

I didn’t like that one bit. It’s all very well saying ‘things will be better this time next year!’, it makes you sound very cheery and helpful, but nobody whose life is melting in the upturned palms of their hands has ever been comforted by the notion that things would be better eventually. Because of course they would be better eventually, but that hardly stops the fact that right now your heart feels like someone’s holding it to a grill.

“Don’t you have anything better to tell me? What if I’m alone forever?”

“You’ll find someone again, most likely. But that’s not worth thinking about yet. Look at you. You looked like a tree stump someone’s been at with a hatchet, and you smell like a bin.”

Resisting the urge to give my underarm a sniff, I frowned at the barkeeper.

“But what can I do now to make it better?”

“Look,” said the barkeeper, pouring me a new jug of mead which I hoped would be on the house because I hadn’t any money. “Have you ever broken your arm?”

Instinctively I glanced at my own arm. It was very dirty and appeared to have some sort of moss growing on it.

“My arm? No. Why?”

“Well, have you ever broken any other bone?”

“I’ve had my nose broken about eighteen times in the last six weeks,” I admitted.

“Not a bone, but fine. And when you broke your nose, what did you do?”

“What did I do? Well, what can one do when one’s nose is absolutely mashed in. You’ve just got to wait until it gets better.”

“Exactly,” said the bartender. “You don’t begrudge your nose for healing in its own time. You accept that it’s broken and that you’re in for a painful ride, but safe in the assurance that it will heal, you try to get on with your life.”

“Look, why are you going on about my poor nose? I already know it looks hilarious, I don’t need you having a pop at it.”

The bartender smiled knowingly at this, which irritated me obviously.

“Why should your heart be any different?”

“Ugh.”

I curled my lip at the bartender in a rough approximation of what a sneer would have looked like, had I not been drinking for eighteen hours.

“I know it sounds like a load of old tosh now, when your eyes are crossed and your ears are steaming, but mull it over a while.”

“I’ll mull you over, fatty.”

At this point I am ashamed to say that I had forgotten what we were talking about and blew a very long raspberry, before the barkeep, in what I now interpret as an act of mercy, clobbered me off my stool.

*****

I had a very strange dream while unconscious involving a grapefruit, a world-weary aardvark, and a harem of topless jesters. At the time I found this dream very mysterious and profound, and believed it perhaps to be an omen of sorts regarding Astra. I spent a long time trying to work out what it could mean, sitting on my bar stool with a fillet steak strapped to my swollen eye, but could reach no satisfactory conclusion. It actually turned out in the end to have no forbearance whatsoever on the events that were to unfold. Some dreams, it turns out, are total hooey.

Several days passed as I drifted down the Great Valley Road, sobbing from tavern to tavern. I’d not been sober since I left Bloodroot, and I could feel my body slowly packing in. My headbrain was slowed to an intellect that, while still far superior to the brightest peasant, was vastly dimmed from the gleaming sheen of my prime. My belly strained against my breast plate, and I had trouble fastening the last button on my tunic. My jaw was hugged by a taxidermic beard, and beneath my eyes lay not mere bags but great, heaving potato sacks. Isn’t it strange how when one’s heart is broken, the rest soon follows. The mind attacks the body, the body attacks the mind: once the heart is broken, it’s civil war.

I had never spiralled before in my life, but I supposed this must be what everybody meant when they talked about spiralling. Kings don’t have the freedom to spiral, you see. Nobody ever lets you get too rowdy when you’re a monarch. I was always very frustrated by this at the time, but presently I rather missed having fifteen advisors around who would gently suggest I don’t pour another red wine before elevenses.

At one point on the Valley Road I came across a rookery while absolutely smashed off my gunt, and raided it for letter birds. I scrawled a message on a piece of paper thusly:

Dear Astra, MY WYFFE.

I am Ruined, for Thine Magic, I am without. Please send a Letter back to me, declaring your Mistayk and your Undying Love (for Me), and we may yet Rule in Harmoniousity. Vena is, quite obviously, a Bastarde. Return to me, Wiyf! Return return! I love you! RETURN

Love from Athelstan

As I watched the bird labour into the sky and clap away on the curling winds, I was slapped with the moist haddock of regret. I had been too nice! Swaying on my feet, I penned another letter:

Here you,

Forget it! The last Letter was Hokum, Bogus wrongdoing! Thou art a villaine and a demon and thy tits are Lacklustre, HAHAHHA!

I felt rather worse watching this next rook fly away, so hastily grabbed another and began to scrawl out:

Oh Gods! Astra I’m so sorry I did Not mean it about thine Brests – they are not Poore of Quality; Nay, they are a splendid Marvelle, the Bosom of the Realm! I am Apologetic for Slagging off thine Appearance; t’was unbecoming of me, and not Kingly. I HATE YOU! Please love me again! Love meeeeee. Goodness, I am so drunk it’s hard to stand up, ha ha. You’d Giggle muchly to see your Hubby now, tottering alle over the Rookery! Anyway as I was saying, hope you are having a Moste Lovely Day.

Bye 🙂

I think I drifted off a little towards the end of that one and I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d written, so began a new note to be safe:

Astra, It is I again,

Please ignore all prior Correspondence, because I am Very Sorry.

Yours,

The Heartbroken

Then I got really angry thinking about Vena and sent one that just said:

BASTARDS THE LOT OF YOU (DROWN DROWN DROWN!)

And then I ran out of ink.