Something Old/Something New
Rules: share something old - a snippet of a favorite fic you wrote, that you are proud of; AND/OR share something new - give us a sneak peek of something new you are working on. tagged by @riding-with-the-wild-hunt thank you kindly for the tag. nominating @melestasflight, @antlered-vixen, @polutrope, @queerofthedagger and taking this opportunity to post a piece of 4th age reembodiment german expressionism upper class suicide drama. The Black Obelisk or Steppenwolf, but make it elves with 8 PhDs and a three-digit kill count each.
Iscalas smiles over the rim of the goblet, a little relieved and a little wan.
“I don’t think acceptance is a choice in this matter,” he confesses, a thin red line on his upper lip, “If it is, it is merely a choice between accepting change and resisting against something that has not only already happened, but which is currently happening at an inexorable march. And refusing ontological facts because they don’t suit your personal aesthetics of order is the purview of fools.”Â
“Change happens not on behalf of what men want, but in spite of it.”Â
They don't toast. AicarossĂ« watches as the knife carves away slivers of liver in a motion that seems almost hypnotic, a slow rocking back-and-forth that dives through the caramelised surface and returns nearly clean as easily as breathing. He follows the skewer and the way it collides with the mouth, with the barest hint of tongue; with the teeth, against which it rings out on the periphery of audible sound, and with the plate where it once again comes to rest. Where Iscalas will allow it to change hands -- from the right, with the signet ring, to the left on the fingers of which moissanites still break through the white trench-lines of old scars and their forbidden delineations -- and retrieve the knife, where he will make one pierce and the other dance again.Â
“Alongside it,” Iscalas says during one of those times when the utensil hangs in the air amidst the fire of perfectly cut gemstones, and the knife is barely touching it, “I do not think the fundamental laws of reality care much as to whether we are compliant or contrary.”Â
The light catches on the hairnet he still insists on wearing, very briefly, very knightly, scarlet spilt-blood dappled across ashen hair.Â
AicarossĂ« pushes his own unbound hair out of the way, and drinks. The wine is rich and heavy.Â
“Change and challenge are part of those fundamentals; we were not made to be immutable, rather the opposite.”Â
“That’s a courageous opinion to have in Eldamar, these days,” the other knight retorts, though his eyes are laughing in the conspiratory manner of old men. “Careful, lest you get yourself branded a subversive anti-social Fëanárian element.”
“And here I was thinking I pay the dyer a shepherd’s yearly wage for blacks dyed separately in the warp, weft and pile to camouflage myself and steal from orchards by the night,” he wipes one corner of his mouth with a white knuckle and the other with the pad of the thumb; the wine-stain paints two thin lines on his skin in the colour of dawn skies bloodied in the night, “Not that many men who walk these streets still know how to throw a glove in the ring, but I digress.” The breath that escapes from Iscalas’ lungs sounds heavy for that one instant, a too-long pause in which something is smothered. He is not looking across the table; his eyes belong to the horizon, shaded in innocent dove blues like the blooming myosotis at the close of spring, and to whatever lies beyond it in the hazy furrows of memory pared off the flesh by the inexorable march of time.
“You miss it, don’t you?” he asks, and it is not an accusation but a comfort--
And yet, it cleaves like the executioner’s blade.
AicarossĂ« puts his knife down, not caring to lick it clean. The foie gras curdles to blood-clotted viscera on his teeth.Â
“Of course I miss it.” The air slithers out of his lungs as though polluted -- even though there is nothing to turn it foul, for the foothills of the PelĂłri have never known the winter of starvation that would see the Eldar burning manure and carrion on the bonfires for the briefest warmth, their rivers have never run muddled with filth from the run-off of killing fields and oil-slick of machinery. Even though there is nothing here but the grapevine, untouched by any blight, viridian green.Â
“I would be another man if I did not,” he runs his thumb along the spine of the knife till it sings to him. “And I do not think I could like that man. I think I would have best liked to cut off his head.”Â
And the sun keeps on bleeding slit-gut-cerise on the parapets, these parapets fashioned from older marble for a newer world, letting in the sunset that the old world never knew.Â
