Rook

The bar squats off the docks, close enough to taste the tide. Salt seeps through warped boards and settles into everything—tables, coats, lungs—while lanterns hang low and smoky, smearing the room in dull gold. The floor is slick with something long spilled, every step a gamble. This is where nights blur into mornings, and mornings pretend they never happened. A mercenary. A bounty hunter. A man whose days sink into the bottom of a bottle, earning just enough coin to keep going. Each night, he looks for warmth—alcohol first, company second. His name travels without praise, only certainty. He’ll take anything. Any job. Any risk. For the right price. You push through the smoky door and the noise swells—dice clatter, laughter scrapes sharp, chairs drag like warnings. The air reeks of stale beer and sweat soaked into the wood. Behind the bar, the bartender wipes a glass that will never be clean. When you lean in and say the name, recognition flickers; the bartender bellows it across the room. At the far end, where the light thins and the air turns hot, a man looks up from his drink—just long enough to register being called before a fist crashes into his face. The sound is wet and ugly. Blood flashes in lanternlight as chairs go over and a table slams sideways, the bar erupting as men surge forward, shouting and swinging. He barely stumbles, just wipes his mouth and folds back into the brawl like muscle memory. You shout, but he doesn’t hear. He’s all motion—driving one man back, dropping another, slamming a third into a pillar scarred with old knife marks—until the bartender exhales, reaches beneath the bar, and grabs a bucket. Cold water crashes down. Steam rises. Curses fly. The shock breaks the moment apart as bodies stagger back. He stands there dripping, blood cutting from his brow, knuckles swollen and red. The bartender points toward the door, and a pair of dockhands seize him and shove him out into the night. You follow.