The idea of home is a strange, slippery thing, at least for me. Is it the place where you feel most comfortable? The place where no one can tell you to go away? The place where the tax collector can expect to find you, and force you from if you can’t pay up? Or is it just the place where you can keep all your stuff and sleep off a drunk in relative safety?

I’ve heard people snivel and complain about missing their homes (often just after I’ve had their dwellings burned to the ground) but to be frank, I’ve never really understood it. Not on a personal level.

I’d begun my life on the family farm, then lived in the village kirk for less than a year, then I had become an inmate of the Scriptorium for close enough to a decade. And then I’d stalked the wilds for months, sleeping anywhere that was sheltered and defensible and leech-free.

None of those places had been the kind of ‘home’ that you’d get attached to while you were there, or miss once you left them.

Honestly, the only true home anyone ever has, in my opinion, is within the confines of their own skull. Be content with yourself is my advice, and don’t get attached to physical places that can be invaded, burned down, washed away by floods etc., etc. If you externalize your happy place, sooner or later someone’s going to come along and shit in your bed, so to speak.

For a would-be Evil Overlord, attachment to anything (places or people) other than your own existence and your Vision is just asking for disappointment, and probably a pointless, avoidable death.

Now you may say to me, ‘But Gar, that attitude makes for a sad and lonely existence,’ to which I say, were you expecting to make friends on the road to Utter Domination? Were you thinking you’d retire to some quaint country estate in your twilight years, when Dominating had become more of a chore than a thrill? Will you then concentrate on growing prize begonias? Because that’s not how it works.

While you’ll almost certainly need a base of operations (your lair, dark tower, fortress of doom or what have you) your home will be the ground you stand on, buddy, until the day you lie down for good. All the territory you take? It’s just a buffer between you and those who want to end you – so my advice is, don’t bother decorating.

~ ~ ~

I had been to gambling dens, drinking establishments and flesh houses of every imaginable tone, from grimy, windowless rooms to spaces that would not have looked out of place in a palace.

The Dripping Bucket was not the palace variety.

When I stepped inside, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It was a good, foody smell, baking bread and roasting meat, with notes of something it took me a moment to recognize and put a name to. Then it came to me. Spices. It had been a long time since I’d eaten anything that had been flavored with any spice other than dirt. Well, also grit, and the occasional insect. And if you charred the meat, that was technically a different taste, too.

Anyway, it smelled good inside. Wonderful in fact, though admittedly I was easy to please at that point in my life. But while my nose gave the place an immediate, enthusiastic thumbs-up, the rest of my senses were more like “Oh. Oh, dear.”

From what I could see, most of the ground floor was taken up by a common room, with a fireplace at one end, a long bar opposite the entrance, as well as another door that led outside judging by the light that streamed in from the massive cracks in it. A set of stairs leading up was at the other end.

There were perhaps ten tables scattered around the common room, some with chairs and some with benches. The place was lit with a few ancient brass lanterns.

All of it, from the furniture to the fixtures to the building itself looked as if it had been made from lumber not even fit for firewood, and only the sheer weight of indifference kept anything from collapsing – as if the place couldn’t be bothered to fall apart even though it very much should have.

There were only a few patrons inside. None of them looked my way when I entered. One of them, an old human fellow, was playing a fiddle by the fire. Well, he was forcing sounds out of it, at least. I couldn’t piece together anything resembling a melody.

“Put wood in the hole,” came a voice from the bar. I looked toward it and saw a half orc standing behind it. He was staring at me, so I assumed he’d been addressing me.

“Eh?” I replied.

“Close the door. Choose which side you want to be on when you do it.”

I shut the door and went over to the bar. The innkeeper was tall and fit, like most half orcs I’d seen. He had a thick, shiny steel nose ring, lots of delicate gold eyebrow piercings, his tusks had been scrimshawed with geometric patterns, and his eyes said he was dead inside.

“This place comes moderately recommended for not getting murdered in your sleep,” I said. “Do you have a bed available?”

“Yep,” he said, with a voice that made him sound as if he might perish from terminal boredom at any moment. “You want common or private?”

“Private, if you please.” I wasn’t sleeping on the floor with a bunch of strangers.

“How nice you want it?”

“Bed, floor, walls, lock on the door. Window if you have it.”

“Six copper a night, then, or five silver a tenday. Payable in advance.”

“Of course.” I dug out six copper coins, all of them kingdom issue, and lay them on the bar top. “I might stay longer. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

“I will await your decision with bated breath,” the innkeeper said, sweeping the coins into a pocket on his apron. Then he got an iron key from under the bar and handed it to me. “Upstairs, second door on the left.”

“Are meals included?” I asked, pocketing the key.

“Sure. Also we’ll send Old Torg up to your room each night to give you a hand job and tuck you in after.”

“You fucking will not!” the fiddle-torturer exclaimed.

“Then how much for whatever it is I’m smelling?”

“Two coppers for a plate and a jug of harsh.”

I put the money down and found a seat as far away from everyone else as I could. The innkeep disappeared into a back room with a heavy sigh, as if the burdens placed upon him by life and all us fools who shared it weighed upon him very heavily indeed.

He was my kinda guy, is what I’m saying.

He came back soonish and plonked down a clay jug, a wooden cup, and a deepish tin plate of rabbit stew with a spoon already stuck in. He didn’t bother to tell me to enjoy my food, and I didn’t bother him with thanks. At no point in my life had I ever really been subjected to courtesy or table manners, and I wasn’t about to start then. I practically inhaled my meal.

It was quite literally the best thing I had tasted in months. I was prepared to forgive the innkeeper pretty much anything if the meals continued to be that good. I brought my empty plate and two more coppers to the bar.

“More.”

“Grum’s balls, did you have time to taste anything?”

“I tasted everything. More. Please.”

He raised a pierced eyebrow and shrugged, and went to get me more.

I ended up going through three plates before I felt satisfied. I could have finished a fourth, but I wanted to save space for whatever the hell was in the jug. I was very familiar with a variety of things that could get you cabbaged, form the cheapest of cheap ale to rare and expensive vintages, but I had never heard of anything called ‘harsh’.

It had been a long time since I’d had anything besides water – rain water, melt water, water from streams, water from muddy pools with a pond scum chaser. Well, there had also been a time or two when I’d been forced to drink blood, which I wouldn’t recommend, but you get my point. Whatever the hell they drank in those parts, I was up for it.

I poured out a cupful from the jug, noticing that there were bits and chunks of… something in it, which really wasn’t a good sign. I raised the cup and took a sniff. The odor was quite literally indescribable, other than the fact that it was definitely alcoholic. I shrugged and took a gulp.

It burned. Light, but it burned. It felt like my esophagus was being eaten away by acid, and my heart immediately began to slam against my ribcage like a triphammer.

I put the cup down with a shaking hand.

“What the hell is this?” I gasped, to myself really, but the innkeeper heard.

“Traditional orcish drink. My dad’s recipe, actually.

“Fuck me,” I said, suddenly breaking out in a sweat.

“You want something gentler?” he asked, his face saying he’d take pity on me, but he would also definitely judge me.

“Fuck you,” I replied, pulling the jug protectively close to me and taking another swallow from the cup, and he actually laughed.

Anyway I don’t remember much after that.

* * *

When I woke up, it was in a bed, in a room I didn’t recognize. I sat up and looked around blearily. My pack was there on the floor next to the door, with my ax beside it. My hand automatically went to my pocket – and met the reassuring, chunky bulk of coins. I checked my other pocket for the key to the room, but it wasn’t there.

It proved to be in the lock. Somehow, I’d managed to get inside the room and lock the door before I’d passed out, so yay me, but the dedicated survivalist I’d been for months looked on the whole situation with pure disgust.

My head throbbed, and the rest of my body felt like dried jerky. My teeth felt… chalky? somehow? and my tongue was a hunk of dry, cracked leather.

I swore off any further dealings with orc booze.

I wanted to just lie down until I either died or recovered, but I had things to do. Like piss. Also, Catapult wasn’t going to find herself. So I got up, left the room and crept downstairs like the fragile thing I had become. The common room was empty, except for the person behind the bar.

It was a woman this time, human and middle-aged. She looked nice. Friendly-ish. Motherly.

“Where’s the pisser?” I croaked.

She glanced at me. “Out back,” she replied, tilting her head towards the door next to the bar. “But there’s also a chamber pot under your bed.”

“Ugh,” I replied, and went to relieve myself before I embarrassed myself. When I got back, I asked for water and slumped into the nearest chair.

“Modie got you to drink the harsh, didn’t he?” the woman asked, setting a jug and cup down in front of me. I nodded, ignoring the cup in favor of drinking straight from the jug.

“I’ll have a word with him. Pure humans can’t drink that crap. Not safely anyway. It’ll eat out your insides. Did you piss blood?”

“Uh. Not that I noticed.”

“Well consider yourself lucky, then. Honestly, that boy. If he wasn’t my son I’d have fired his ass long ago.”

“In his defense, he did offer to switch my drink for something less, uh, caustic.”

“And you refused.”

I nodded, and she tsked.

“Doesn’t matter what species, you men will always try to prove what giant balls you have, won’t you?”

(Side note: While I disapprove of the words ‘always’ and ‘never’ on the grounds that they are used far too often in lazy and inaccurate fashion, she did have a point. It’s also a point that any would-be overlord should take to heart: never get sucked into trying to prove anything to anyone. Your job is not to ‘prove’ you are the smartest, strongest, deadliest or most vile. Your job is to be those things, if that is what your path to Utter Domination requires.

Don’t confuse being something with doing something. The first can win you an empire, while the second might win you a bar bet and a clap on the back.)

“Anyway,” the woman continued, “will you be staying on? If not, you’ll need to clear out of your room in an hour, mister…?”

“Gar,” I said. “And I’ll be staying.” I dug out five silver and handed them to her.

“Right then. I’m the one who’ll be cleaning your room, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do anything too vile in there. My name’s Hella. Now what about breakfast? On the house this time, on account of my dipshit son.”

My abused stomach said ‘gods, no’ but the savage in me refused to turn down free food.

“That sounds good, Hella.”

Breakfast was a tasteless mush, which was actually a good thing considering my state. I worked my way though it in silence. Customers began to arrive in ones and twos, and Hella saw to them. The mix seemed to favor half orcs, but humans came a strong second. There was one... insect guy? He (or she maybe) looked kind of like a praying mantis, and one troll shambled in, built up the fire, then took the fiddle that Old Torg had been torturing the night before and treated it with a lot more respect. It wasn’t Terces.

They were all obviously regulars. Hella knew what they wanted without having to ask.

The thing that eventually percolated into my consciousness was the fact that nobody gave me a second glance. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it in a big city like the capital, but in a much smaller place like Mudhelm, I would have expected a stranger to garner more attention. But the only person staring, even surreptitiously, was me.

Maybe I was a little sensitive about my general treatment the previous day. Maybe there was just nothing remarkable about me, now that the stench and filth of the wild had been scraped off, and my necklace of Fuck You had been packed away. But I began to suspect it was something more than that: with so many extremely different types of beings all living cheek by jowl, it might have become a sort of cultural thing – Live and let live. Mind your own business. Don’t stare at strangers lest you also be stared at. Or lest they take offense and bite off your face. Something like that, anyway.

Looking back, I’m actually a little proud of my younger self for at least trying to understand the people and the place I now found myself in. It was a sign of growth and maturity, and that I did it with the handicap of an absolutely brutal hangover gave it that much more weight.

Then I finished my mush and got on with what really mattered, which was finding Catapult. Thinking deep thoughts is all well and good, but philosophers don’t conquer kingdoms, or secure sweet, sweet revenge.

People with axes and grudges do that.