#laureo

because @melestasflight tagged me to share some (thank you kindly), I am posting a piece of Knives, aka the story about the murder of the princes of Doriath. also tagging @balrogballs @polutrope @tobermoriansass @starshadeemilyart

The man that takes them to the woods has a knife, and it is long and dark and wicked sharp. 

His gauntlets sting where he pinches them by the nape, the black steel is ever hungry for more blood to slick its joints; his hands are cold, his eyes are hard, his steps give no pause to the stumbling feet of children or the winter’s chill seeping through their gold-silk hose. He walks without looking down, and his fingers never once loosen.

The blackbirds are singing.

The man pushes them over the frozen bed of a creek. His hobnailed boots leave no footprints. It is almost night, and his knife gleams balefully in a colour that has no name in the languages of Beleriand, no equal in the frozen setpieces of midwinter -- neither where the steel glides noiselessly through the air, nor where elven blood seems to still live on its hilt cherry-red without drying, without dying, without becoming mere memory -- and no pause for the fact they have not yet lived through seven winters apiece and their ada said they were yet too young to hold swords of their own, and thus carried none save the kitchen knife which Eluréd had hidden in his shirt while they waited with bated breath in the pitch-black pantry and which did not save them. 

The snow seems almost too bright in the dark; the white falcon on the man’s chest glitters, shadow-eyed and silver and silent, brightly but not like a star because stars gleam with grace and no matter its skill, the hand of the raptor’s maker knew nothing of such tender virtue.

They walk. The trees loom overhead, black and white and grey and strangely quiet. The man’s hand chills like death. They walk until there is no more blood on the ground, and then some. 

“Where--” Elurín’s voice cracks like a whip before it breaks, tearing through the silence. He clears his throat. “Where are we going?”

He does not expect the man to answer, or even to notice -- he has been quiet until now -- yet, before the echo of his voice has been swallowed up by the snow, he feels a glance burrow into the back of his head so cruelly that he cannot help but flinch. It is itself a knife (Eluréd’s hand around his tightens, but he, too, is shivering), long and dark and wicked; the man’s eyes are green, but not like spring, they’re green like venom.

The blackbirds are singing.

Tyelkormo’s gauntleted fingers scrape out long lines in the frost on the way down. Down, down, down.  “Always the same rivers,” A plume of white mist lingers in the air, sharp with the stench of high-strung nerves when it brushes the tip of another man’s tongue. “Never the same water.” 

Thanks a lot for the tag and the hilarious excerpt @balrogballs and enjoy a part from the upcoming chapter of Last Salute. Tagging @polutrope and @starshadeemilyart also

One, two, three strokes. The thumb describes a half-circle around the thorns engraved in the pommel, lingering for a split second too long. 

“Are you impatient?” Laureo asks. His breath mists. Someone has opened the door.

“Am I?” Noiseless, Tyelkormo turns, looking at him with bloodshot eyes sunken into a face as if cast in wax, where no warmth reaches the surface to sand the salient-lines carved out by sleeplessness and wrath and therefore they jut out like broken stone into the exterior, ready to cut any hand that presumes upon itself the duty of misplaced kindness. The captain himself has never feared spilling blood, neither familiar nor foreign, but he knows the laws of beasts; there's no argument to be had with the cliff of the suicides.

“I'd cut a finger off my hand where I stand if I could cut the wait down to a day, and no longer.”

What he doesn’t say: a finger is a small sacrifice. Necks are cut just as easily. The sword Atarincë had forged for him is a thing that hungers without pause, a black thorn in the wound of the world, made insatiable just as they were made unappeasable themselves, because the world has never known such a chalice of glory that would fill a river made to run forever, and it never will. The sword Atarincë had forged for him, the sword he keeps on the other side of his bed, the sword his fingers circle even now, is just an extension of his hand.

The knight exhales, hard and long.

“Don’t,” he says, kind in that he spares no mercy. “There’s no use. The time will pass anyway.” 

The prince spears him through with his eye. For he is still a prince; he doesn’t lower his head.

“It’s not the passing that makes me impatient,” he confesses -- he speaks very slowly, and for an instant appears exhausted before his teeth snap shut to grind, sharp, too sharp with nothing to blunt themselves against, the minuscule gaps between them too wide to keep anything worthwhile in, and shear away all tenderness at the base of the neck. “It’s the waste of it.”

“It’s Nelyafinwë,” Laureo observes. He does not call the man his brother. 

Tyelkormo looks away.

He turns the sword’s hilt around in his hands, every motion still damnably casual if it killed him with that half-undone sneer on his lips. The thorn-vine of the guard gleams like black oil on the surface of a motionless lake.

“Sometimes, I want to put a knife in his stomach and wind all of his guts around it like a spindle,” Leisurely and low, as though he was merely admitting a distaste for the selection of wines at the coronation feast. He never moves his eyes. “Sometimes, I really think there’s no other way to prove he’s still naïve. I’m so fucking tired, Laureo.”

Congrats!!

zebriane replied to your photoset:

Congrats!!!!