Hey guys! This is an edited excerpt from a text-based role-playing-game I started a while ago. It’s basically where I’ve been venting all my writing energy. Sorry. Vicca Shellcocker is my character, who runs the Tavern that all the other characters frequent. He secretly is a rebel against “The Empire.” Hope you enjoy!

Mr Shellcocker walks as he always walks in town: with swift purpose and the lumbering oddness unique to absent-minded tall men. On most days, Mr Shellcocker cannot help falling into friendly chatter with strangers he meets on the street, but not today. He forces himself to merely smile awkwardly and wave at the potential conversations walking past him. Today calls for his attention.

Shellcocker swerves into a side road, dim and quiet. The town shuffles on behind him, but between the grey, stacked shops and the occasional incongruous survivors of the days this road held respectable town houses, the worrisome tavern-keeper walks alone.

He slows as he approaches the very dead end of the cobble road. A few shops, long drained of business and life, surround and loom over him. He stops, and turns in a slow, searching circle, head swiveling and craned in scrutiny.

“Hmph.”

He scratches his head, and pulls out a letter from his trouser pocket, searching its contents for some clue or missed instruction

“Ahh.”

Pocketing the letter, he walks towards an especially dead-looking cluster of shops, and behold, in between the peeling “Jemma’s” and the dilapidated “Gnarl & Sons,” lays a doormat. It barely fits in the space between the shops, but it is there all the same. “Welcome,” it reads. Mr Shellcocker does not feel particularly Welcomed as he walks between the shops to the oiled oak door with the brass lion knocker, but he knocks anyway.

The silence answering Shellcocker’s knock was the sort of silence one might expect to get from the inside of a door in an alley off a side road. But Mr Shellcocker knew how he was raised. He waited for a few minutes, and knocked again. This time, a muffled shuffling (almost flapping?) and a sharp, “JUSSta moh-mint, serr,” replies.

The door opens to reveal a balding, harried-looking man dressed almost entirely in faded blue.

“HM? Hah? Who here? How? What, what?”

Our tavern keeper coughs politely “I’m Vicca Shellcocker. I came at the behest of The Hound. Do I come to the right address?

The blue man sniffs vehemently. “I’d say you do. Been ex-PECT-in you, has he been he has.” The man steps only a shuffle aside, and holds the door a fraction more open. “In,” he ushers.

Mr Shellcocker nods the most disdainful of nods, and slides past the obtrusive girth of the blue man.

The inside of the house is almost unbelievable. It is just like any other old house past its prime, with dusty ornaments on small, useless tables, and portraits of unimpressed elderly people gazing past. It has a faded red carpet, and clouded braziers casting tired light down, but everything is as if the house had been gradually squished on both sides, like an old house between abandoned shop tectonic plates.

The door was so far from the laughably thin staircase at the end of the house that Mr Shellcocker had to squint to see it.

“GIT. Move it.” The blue man begins shuffling sideways with notable velocity behind Vicca. Mr Shellcocker starts to shuffle too, in slight fear of being trampled. The two shuffle around cane-holders and squeeze under the occasional lamp, and in some places have to crawl to maneuver under the frames of large paintings. But eventually, they make it to the stairs.

The stairs are odd, a visual definition of vertigo. They go up and ahead eerily far, but the perspective is warped. It looks as if the stairs get wider as they go up, instead of looking smaller.

A minute’s travel upwards, and that proves to be the case. It appears that the two men gradually escape the confines of the two buildings on either side, and the house has room to breath again. The blue man still shuffles, however. It seems that shuffling is his only mode

Finally, they reach a door. This door closely resembles the front door, but this one looks far more comfortable, languidly standing with its frame comfortably inhabiting as much space as it wants.

The blue man coughs with bristling intention, and looks at Shellcocker like a sheepdog having a bad day.

Mr Shellcocker sniffs, and opens the door.

The whelming feeling inside the room is of cavernousness. Mr Shellcocker knows in his head that he has climbed near half a thousand steps, and that he therefor has to be higher than when he started, but his gut tells him that he is far, far under the town he left earlier that day.

The room is gaping, and undecorated. It is barely a room at all, more like an ancient, grottoish amphitheater. The ceiling is a sky of menacing stalactites, and thick pillars of time-born rock stretch up to the cave’s heavens.

And there are movements. Dark disturbances, the kind you feel behind the treeline in the dark. Present, but barely real.

Mr Shellcocker swallows.

“I am Vicca Shellcocker, guest in the Hound’s hall. May I… speak? With him?” But Vicca’s voice becomes drowned. Drowned in the sound of wolves. The barking and howling and ecstasy of wolfishness swirls around the cavern like a whirlpool. The maelstrom of wolf grows and grows and closes in and begins to come into toothish view when-

“ShhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.”

The waters are still.

Out of the shadows, and out between the forest of stone spikes, a huge figure emerges. It walks rhythmically, dirge-like. Its feet make no sound.

Mr Shellcocker stands his ground, but in that moment he doesn’t think he has the bravery to run if he wanted to.

“Vicca. Glad you found the place.” The voice is the border between a drawl and a growl. The figure gestures with an arm covered in fur. “Please. Sit.” As he speeks, a huge, wild wolf materializes from the shadows, and drags out a very chewed wooden chair. It sits beside it, and its stillness resembles the stalagmites around it.

Vicca sits. “I heard that this place had been found, but… I thought you would move locations entirely.”

A deep, panting laugh “Now why would I do that, when I could just as easily move the location?” The figure waves his hand. “Now enough with the formalities. You want something.”

Shellcocker raises a correcting finger. “You came to me wanting something.”

The figure, still walking towards, Vicca, shrugs “It doesn’t matter. What I say is true. Tell me your boon.”

Shellcocker crosses his arms. “You know of my… dealings. We both have teeth in the Hundwassers’ game. And I think we’d both much rather be more at liberty to do our own playing about.”

Shellcocker leans forward. “I want pać-drokker.”

A disdainful laugh, and the energy of wolves begins stirring again. “Speak elven tongues in my halls, and you are a chew toy, my friend. Say what you will in common bark. But in any tongue, a pact-of-the-killer has not been cut since these halls learned to walk. What is your purpose?”

Shellcocker measures his next words carefully. That wolf next to him hasn’t stopped staring at him.

“These times are getting dark, Hound. Soon, allies will be few, far between, and much needed. I need a power I can trust. And I will help you in turn, of course.”

The Hound comes into the greenish light. He is the mix of a monstrous wolf and a god, and he is gigantic. He wears a suit of ancient mail and a long cloak, and at his side is an inhumanly long longsword.

“Help? Me?” He looks down on Shellcocker, weighing and calculating and prophesying in his all-black eyes.

“You know I can help you. I am no sorcerer, Hound.” Shellcocker’s face resembles that of a chess piece in a particularly dangerous position.

The Hound kneels, scrutinizing Shellcocker. On his knee, he is still taller than the high-backed chair.

“Or. I could eat you.”

Shellcocker blinks. “Ye-es. I guess you could. Options, options.”

The Hound sneezes in the way that a bored wolf sneezes after making a deal

“Fine. Draw.”

Both Shellcocker and The Hound stand. The Hound unsheathes his terrible blade, and Mr Shellcocker unsheathes an elegant sword with meaningful words on its hilt. The Hound holds out his arm that does not hold a sword, as does Mr Shellcocker.

The Hound speaks. “Aemdromeida, dréght incarte sghat moote, Veeka Shelcoc?” (On the power-that-made-you, do you bind your flesh to my blade, Vicca Shellcocker?)

To which Vicca replies, “Sghat mooter, Djasse-hund, kor meght door dréght dallhallen.” (I bind, Old-wolf, with my blade against your keeping.)

And with these words, both rebels bring their blades along the length of each others’ arm. One bleeds. The other does not.

They then speak in unison. “Aemtok.” (As it should be)

Both sheathe their swords. Shellcocker tries hard to ignore the sharp pain in his arm. The Hound looks like he has just blown the fluff off of a dandelion.

“Well, that’s that.”

The beast nods “That it is.”

The two stand in silence for a time.

“You may leave now. Brother.“

Vicca laughs uncomfortably. “That title will take some getting used to.”

The Hound does not laugh. But the wolves that are suddenly behind him look very interested.

“Good-bye”

Vicca nods, and leaves. When he opens the door, he opens the door to his Tavern.