#iscalas

Valariandë was once a dark land, bleak and mirthless at the time of their landing. When they had found it, and the pyre of their vanities had finally died down, for many years it knew only the grey of starlight and the scorching of flames that eat the dead -- the land neither knew nor cared for brightness. But time is in itself a malleable thing; it would come to bask in warmth and long summers, too

The night is late and dark by the time the regiment comes to a halt; clouds eat away at the starlight, but the midday heat lingers in the tall timothy-grass and on the half-open blooms of wildflowers, on blue chicory and scarlet field poppies that have yet to be reaped for throwing at soldiers. It shimmers under the transparent wings of crickets; it finds refuge between the soft feathers of nightjars. It keeps the hard dust of the road dry. And what a heat it is, which like the wild youth persists in the hidden lacunae of feeling, clinging to the world with the unquestioning love of beasts and little children who think nothing of the transactional world in which their lords and masters live — the dark, fellow-traveller of all quietly spoken confessions, has the arms of an old mother. 

The cook is setting up a campfire; the squires take their mounts and the draft-horses both, lead them to water. The march dissolves into a hundred minutiae of individual instances. 

They have a little time yet. 

Time to let their tongues rest from the weight of marching songs and lie in the tall grass, to listen to the blackbirds in the willows overhead; time to watch, without betraying that he's watching, how Aicarossë divests himself of his gorget and cuirass (slivers of silver and iridescent oil-slick black shine in the gloaming like the pathways of falling stars), how the footmen raise painted tents and with sure hands hammer stakes in the ground to keep them upright (the machinery of the front is a well-wrought and confident thing), how the treetops drift, in a slow sway like the moonlit sea, against the furrows of the western wind. 

He has lived other summers before. Bloody summers and summers drenched in rain; summers of mourning and summers of lack that eats away at the soul itself, summers of looking for things that cannot be found on this shore any longer. This one, though, has only been warm so far. A warmth that burrows, entrenches itself in memory, digging holes like a sapper that it'll plant one of those scarlet poppies in for years to come — Iscalas has never been one for hoarding, but if something ought to leave archaeological evidence of the fact that even a marred world can birth beauty, he could let it be this. 

The moon is emerging through a gap in the clouds.

He hasn’t noticed when a pair of boots appeared by his side, but when he looks away — only a short while has passed — a shadow is standing beside him, fiddling with the silver thorn of a knife. 

He stirs, rubs a hand against his eyes. 

"Were you sleeping?" Aicarossë asks. The breeze is chasing stray hairs across his white face.

"Not quite," Elbow, shoulder; no hurry, he rises. He’s not even too tired. "Just watching. The grass smells like it's alive."

"It does." A pause. "The fireflies are out."

"Really?" 

He's up before he knows it, brushing dry stalks off his sides. 

"Mmm. Between the willows. They live in the old leaves, so there's going to be even more towards the creek."

"Let's go look. That stew's going to take a while yet — did you ever use to catch them in a jar and bring them to the garden to start a colony in your parents' oleanders when you were a child? And then end up disappointed, because you were seven years old and didn't know that animals need to fuck in their preferred habitat to reproduce, and stick to silk-moths and dogs? Though perhaps it was simply that they didn’t have much to feed on in a Tirion garden." 

"Fat chance, my mother would've popped a vein if I brought bugs to the house." 

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.” 

“Change happens not on behalf of what men want, but in spite of it.” 

They don't toast. Aicarossë 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. 

“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.” 

The light catches on the hairnet he still insists on wearing, very briefly, very knightly, scarlet spilt-blood dappled across ashen hair. 

Aicarossë pushes his own unbound hair out of the way, and drinks. The wine is rich and heavy. 

“Change and challenge are part of those fundamentals; we were not made to be immutable, rather the opposite.” 

“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.

Aicarossë puts his knife down, not caring to lick it clean. The foie gras curdles to blood-clotted viscera on his teeth. 

“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 Pelóri 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. 

“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.”