Wsnippet Wednesday
tagged by @balrogballs and @riding-with-the-wild-hunt - thank you kindly, my good fellows - so I'm going to share a part of the argument between Maglor and Celegorm in 33 years, before I either finish it or it kills me. tagging @melestasflight @antlered-vixen @polutrope @tobermoriansass, if you have done it already, take no offence, the watchtowers on the Ard-Galen have a very poor internet reception.
“The naked truth threatens you, o king?” He leans back in his chair, unwinding his fingers slickly from the splintering bone as though it had become only carrion; he tilts his head and licks his sharp teeth like a beast. “I live and fight amongst them, I eat with them, I march with them. I am not here as your brother, Macalaurë, I am here as their general, and you will have to treat with me if you wish to have an army.”
“Is it commonplace for generals to demand their liege’s witness to their preposterous proposals, baseless insults and disgusting rumination over dinner like a wild swine?”
“Why, would you perhaps rather be having it over wine and figs?”
“You know all too fucking well that the semantics of what, precisely, you chew into my ear are not the primary concern!”
“Does it make a difference?” Now it is Tyelkormo’s turn to rhetorically demand answers that never were, and which he knows will not be made. One hand wipes the other on a linen square embroidered with black falcons, not looking for purity but only preparing oneself the way a man does in the tourney field — his brother will know this, but he wants, he needs him to know, he needs him to see the glove being cast before it hits the ground. “One superficial matter of appearances or another? Public indulgence or public restraint, public magnanimity, public grief — anything for the standing ovation. You’re still making theatre speeches in the agora, but you forget that the living world has no curtain behind which your duty to your words made on the stage is rendered through and done.”
“What do you know of the living world?” his brother wheels on him in turn; the glove hits the mark, and he throws his arms out in challenge, black samite cast out into the four corners of the world like the falling curtain between the changing of the scenes. “You absconded from it before you were old enough to speak at court! It was not you who walked among the people, never you — every time Atar left by the back door, you left by the window in turn! And now you wish to lecture me about the self-same living world you derided all your life as a stage of idiots unworthy of your time and attention, the one you mocked me for giving myself to?”
Tyelkormo, silk nightshades straining on gleaming samite as he crosses his arms, only regards him with a cold grey eye.
“When have you last left the fort, Macalaurë?” His voice is almost quiet.
Kanafinwë’s breath hisses through his teeth, rank with fury.
“Do you think,” Hands slam against the table (severe, heavy, an executioner’s hands, cuffs curtaining centuries of bloodshed eating into the soft skin of the palms), no quarter given as he claws his way forwards through every inch of heavy air between them, out of the chiaroscuro between mortified trophies and dusty tapestry silk and emerging into the light like the bone comes to face the world under a butcher’s paring knife; the abattoir stench of fat and wrath and diluted sour wine, lingering; all the things between these four walls that remain tangible in a world that is quickly constricting itself into smaller and smaller horizons. The light outside the window, the baleful pyre’s warmth. The light on the inside that does not reach the edge of every shadow in full. The light on the edge of the knife, in the peerless, heartless eye; the light on the horizon that no longer glows.
“Do you think the living world is just the court, and ends where peerage does not walk?”
He would shake him by the throat — his fists curl until every nail becomes a disparate blade — like the dogs, if only his brother stood an inch closer.