thank you for the tags to @riding-with-the-wild-hunt and @balrogballs, posting a piece of a modern historical AU of the Lay of Leithian or more specifically of the Nargothrond debacle part of it. ft. Celegorm's strange aesthetic proclivities as always. tagging @starshadeemilyart, @antlered-vixen, @melestasflight @queerofthedagger, @tobermoriansass
“Make a wish,” he says when a champagne glass shatters on the ballroom floor and scatters into a rain of light, and they waltz past on ghost-light feet, fearless. He’s smiling. “They’re rare to come by these days.”
“A wish? Why a wish?” she asks, turning her head after the white sparks of shattered glass like a moonflower turns to follow distant stars, but the scattered glass is already far behind them. Her hand is light in his, glove embracing glove. “Is it a custom, here, to make wishes while dancing? Or while breaking things?”
He laughs, and when he does so, the schmiss on his jaw turns to a ribbon of silver soutache.
The room stretches outwards. He puts a hand to the small of her back when they spin, to the bare skin, warm beneath the leather, though his eyes are not warm. Around, left and right as the bodies spin, black glass panes open to the night and the pale drapes hanging side to side over gilded stucco blur and bleed into one another, night and day, brilliant and dark; a spark in a private darkness caught on his black lapels, a private shadow in a sea of light cast upon her silver dress, there is white light refracting in her black hair and there is blackness pooling in the recesses of his white waistcoat, and neither contradicts the existence of the other in its brief life. Neither has the time, as long as the orchestra plays: everything moves terribly fast, crystal and gabardine and grenadine and cocaine dusted above an officer’s iron cross, and everyone’s fast steps in the torrent, and the wild laughter, and leads sewn into the hem of a woman’s spinning skirt and young drunken ensigns’ kisses exchanged behind a satin drape and judicial matters shoved into a breast-pocket to be executed in the morning with a signature and a rifle squad, and white-blooming peaches outside the chateau windows, and eyes, and hands, and every celebratory word, glib and honest and piss-drunk alike -- everything is at its most brilliant before midnight, because everything knows that it must end.
So does a crystal glass; so do men.
In that, perhaps the dark in the centre of his grey eye and the dark outside under July skies are kin begotten in the same womb, and that is why they inevitably find their way to each other again -- he is not looking at her, nor at the empty space between him and her (the dancers that pass them hold the women in their grasp close, but the medals on his tailcoat never press against her breast where an embrace yawns absent with missing human heat), he is looking to the distance which they brush beneath their feet. Though he has not drunk, his stare is quicksilver.
“Because the champagne flutes, look--” he points outwards, embracing the attending tables and the miles of hardwood they have crossed to return in one sweeping gesture, one outstretched hand upon which everything glitters briefly, “Have a star engraved in their stem. And one does not often see falling stars, nowadays, outside of a nighttime artillery barrage.”
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
annaxmalina
stormborns
jbbartram-illu
titsay
janainaart
