Cunning’s Bar is made out of a clay-beige stone and topped with a literal green roof.
The collection of plants, moss, and small trees is a bit unkept—but it still forms the rough shape of a clover. On the windowsills below it, rectangular planters just as unkept as the roof’s greenery sit happily in the sun, their earthy inhabitants easily sprouting the very crops outlined by the vegetation on the roof above them.
There are 7 windows in total (on the front of the building, at least).
5 line the second floor of the building and appear to be the portholes to the barkeep’s family housing. Meanwhile, the last 2 sit to the right of the front door.
A secondary entrance sits in the first floor’s middle.
Jarl assumes it’s the kitchen’s door.
~
The inside of the bar is loud and dim and full of drunks and laughter.
The first floor is split into two with the kitchen area spanning both. It’s fronted by a round, tended counter with multiple rows of beers, wines, spouts, and a standing fridge along the wall behind the grinning barkeep. There’s a swinging door to the robust woman’s right, far away from the front entrance, that likely leads to the kitchen Jarl predicts is connected to that ancient, dark brown, semicircular arched middle door.
There doesn’t seem to be much food here.
What food there is appear to be various types of appetizers. From what his parishioners have told/confessed, these types of dishes are quite regular in bars and pubs as such locations really focus only on their drinks.
And, clearly, the drinks are the real reason anyone is here.
Several mugs and glasses of various shapes and sizes stand or sit scattered around the various tabletops. Some of them are empty, others half-full, but they’ve all been obviously drunk from.
For a moment, Jarl wonders if he remembered to stock up on communion wine before leaving.
Then he shrugs it off: Sophie will more than take care of that.
(And, anyway, there won’t be communions until he’s back.)
~
The rafters in the ceiling are exposed.
The beams appear to be made of dark oak—much darker than what his cabin home uses back in Shantown—and couple perfectly with the dark oak flooring spread all across both sections of the bar and the bar itself. The countertop is a sparkly black slab of quartz which appears to be made of the night sky and green stars.
Paired with the wall’s neutral olive color and the curtains’ warm velvet red, the place feels rich and cozy.
Until, of course, Jarl hears Áesta laughing like a loon and the word blood.
~
They find Áesta amongst the din: a black hole of daemonic charm and piercing green eyed singularity.
He’s sitting in the corner of the second room with a circular table between him and the rest of the world—and the several men and women surrounding him. They’re all drunk (or seem like it) and laughing with him.
They aren’t as immune to his charms as Jarl (or even Manus).
His tabletop is easily the messiest out of everyone’s, but Manus assured Jarl earlier that Áesta doesn’t drink (Or eat, for that matter: he’s a daemon, after all, so solids and liquids aren’t really his thing.). Which is good: the last thing Jarl needs is for his little pet daemon to get out of control in another priest’s backyard.
And he means this literally: he could still see the Church of Redemption from outside the bar.
It was literally just two buildings away.
~
Áesta looks very different in this moment.
Jarl’s not sure if it’s because of the bar’s dim lighting (Jarl’s church [St. Shan] is very well lit, even at night—much like Jarl’s wooden cabin—and the only other places he’s actually seen the daemon were well lit, too [inside Sunder Inn, for example, and the whole afternoon trek to it from the loch], so it’s hard to say) or because of the bar’s atmosphere, but Áesta look much happier, more lively, and much more at home.
He’s relaxed, smiling more, even laughing as he talks.
He seems to be where he belongs.
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