Dawg
My given name is Dagueros Malvolo Grabworth. I was born the only son of Ambrose Grabworth in the Hobbit ghetto of Chendl, the great capitol city of the kingdom of Furyondy. The king was (and still is, in my hope) an honorable and decent human who bore in his heart a fondness for the smallfolk but to be perfectly honest, his love did not include any measure of respect. He believed that our little legs should be out farming the rocky places that would trouble the tall folk, that our clever hands needed to be pushing plows lest we immediately transform into cutpurses and cat burglars.
The ghetto became somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. Hobbits were denied title, so we could not own land. We were denied position within the church, so we could not serve as moneylenders or bankers. We were even barred from possessing "small, easily concealed instruments which may deal harm" and by some constable interpretations meant that we could not carry anything smaller than a rake. Even carpenters and chefs could not own or even carry the tools of their respective trades. The avenues for a hobbit became servant, merchant, or criminal. All of the respected folk were driven out of the city which a cynical person could say was the point of the whole system from the beginning. Sadly my father chose to pursue the least respectable of the three paths. He became a merchant.
In theory there could have been an honest and honorable merchant in the ghettos, but I never met one. The ghettos were cramped, so rents were high. Any tradesman that worked with you for stock would gouge you as hard as they could, and the church bank required "additional tithes" if you actually started to show some significant revenue. The only way to win against a stacked deck is to cheat and my father meant to win. Grabworth became a curse word throughout the city.
The son of "Avarice Grab-Everything-of-Worth" was well feared and friendless. It is a wonder that I survived my childhood but my father bent all of his resources to protecting his only boy. I was honestly terrible in just about every way. I was every cliche of entitlement and abuse of station. I had lackeys and hangers-on who called themselves my friends but only existed to hide in my shadow and leech my goodwill and my father's bloody coin. We caroused and threatened to get waiters fired for failing to predict and appropriately bend to our every whim. We harassed the lamplighters for fun, snuffing their lights and pelting the poor sods with rocks when they came to relight them. We replaced manhole covers with painted driftwood and looted carriages when they lost a wheel or a horse in the collapse. We dumped pig blood on constables and well dressed couples. We were wicked in the way that only the extremely sheltered and naive could be. All of that darkened when I met Rick.
His name was Heinrich Davonish but he told me to call him Rick after my friends and I took to greeting him as HEEEIINNrich! at every turn. At first he was just a stern face to wheedle in the Pub. He had a crew of his own, not jovial mean-spirited tools like us, but rather serious and gloomy folks always going on about the evils of the ghetto system and the cruelty of the King's Rule. We mocked them mercilessly but they at their core had a kindred spirit in that the law was always on them same as us. In time the pranks abated and I scarcely noticed that my goons just weren't interested in poking at them like they used to. I was so self absorbed that i didn't notice the fear in the eyes of my companions, or that some of them were not coming around anymore, or that a couple of them had disappeared altogether. In my mind I was a shark among mackerels, and the faces barely registered with me at all. Rick on the other hand, he stood out. He stood out in a way that would have terrified a wiser man. To me Rick was a light in the dark, a course to chart that promised meaning and purpose that was missing from my endless days of base debauchery.
Rick oozed confidence in a way that I desperately wished to. He was tall for a hobbit, his blonde hair near white and cropped close to his head. He was lean in a way that hobbits never were, and was what my friends and I would call a Tenderfoot in that he wore military jackboots instead of going barefoot. Everything about his dress was precise and I never once saw him with so much as a wrinkle or a smudge of dirt. He smoked delicate cigarillos from a filter rather than a pipe and spoke only when necessary in a very precise, clipped speech.
He took me under his wing, in that he voraciously consumed my resources as I begged for scraps of encouragement. I did anything he asked, or mentioned, or looked like he was thinking about wanting. I was his dog and he knew exactly how much he needed to pet me to keep me in line. I did his bidding blindly, not even realizing that each new task was costing me one more tiny piece of my soul. I did some things I am not proud of, some things I can't admit to, and a few things that I cannot bring myself to even remember. He didn't need a contract for me to sell my soul. I signed it one little drop of blood at a time, not even noticing that I was spelling out my own name.
