#cennan

[mercysought]

grief does not exist in linear time. / iollan, to anora

meme archive // selectively accepting // @evirsor @cennan

They butchered my father in front of me. I had to scrub his blood from my face.

Is what the Queen wants to say. She wants to have those words rip out the small hint of a smile from his lips or the easy way that he seems to walk through this world - with seemingly little to no care in the world to push him down beyond the weight of the passing clouds. She doesn't know if his words are meant to soothe her or prickle her - and whatever the intention may be, the result was simple and pure annoyance.

She didn't need his platitudes. The Queen needed him to give her an advantage at taking back what was hers. She cared not about grief. Her father was dead and hadn't been burnt. Her father was dead, like a petty criminal, without trail and she had been ousted from the crown that rightfully belonged to her. It was about her getting back what she was owed. It was about repaying the unkindness with another flicker of a blade.

Anora dreamed of the day that she would march back to Denerim, cross the bridge onto her throne room and would put the bastard through the same justice that he had shown her father. She would do him the favour too, of allowing his traitor guardian (uncle, he would have called him) with him.

They had killed her father and locked her away in a tower while they fought the darkspawn. Until they decided how best to put her through the sword with minimal revolt. But they had forgotten that she was not without allies, even if they were fewer than that of Eamon's slippery lies. They had killed him, his blood on her face; she had stayed with the blood for days - on her skin until it could be peeled off. On her hair until it turned into a paste that she would never be able to forget.

Weeks later, even as she washed herself, she saw the darkened lines beneath her fingernails that had little to do with the cold dirt that she slept over.

Instead, however, the Queen remains silent, poised. Light eyes remain cold when they meet Iollan with a clipped, annoyed smile "Speaking from experience?"

[breniatham]

   NORTHWESTERN FORESTS SHOULDER A SILENCE SO DENSE ,   THE GREEN         of it all almost appears to breathe. The air, too, is thick and sultry   ---   Theron’s lashes tremble in the pale early light, but he fights the distraction, and thumbs the left shell of his ear. 

   On their way, his fingers brush slim wire, and he remembers the silence is not a sentence. Once the earbuds are in, he pauses long enough that his body comes to a stand - still from the inside out. Only when Maria Callas’ velvet vibrato fills his head do his lungs fill with oxygen, and his eyes open. He toggles the volume until he can hear nothing but her voice, and gladly does he see the world through Habanera’s descending chromatic scale. 

   But he does have work to do. Iollan’s worktable is rock - steady ;   oaken and sealed from legs to surface. Good for keeping things in, just as well as keeping them out. All the better, for the doe that rests atop it has already been bled, but she’ll leave her mark the same as all life   ( and death )   does. His cuts are gentle. His respect is plain. 

   Bare from fingertips to elbows, with the sleeves of Iollan’s shirt rolled taut to keep them in place, Theron slips until he’s lost, quiet like the trees, but thriving slow and sweet and baptized by his escape.         /         @cennan​ .

[breniatham]

   SOMETHING STATIONARY AND TOO LONG ALIVE LIVES IN THE         air of the west coast, heavy with looming rainfall and layering thickly above the eventual winter floods. In the mountains, particularly, Theron finds the wilds the most hospitable, and the deer hunting rewarding. A massive nine - point columbian black - tail would be difficult to parse entirely and leave with, but arrangements could be made. All that was left was the game warden’s once - over, and a few short words with the ranger on staff. 

   And wasn’t that an unexpected surprise. 

   How time passes, and how the memory always stays the same. When last they had seen one another, Theron had been twenty - seven weeks pregnant  ------  a percussive five years in the past. It seems ridiculous to say much at all in situations like these, but Theron couldn’t imagine conducting business with him and leaving without a word. He had taken too many lives with the man’s guns for that.

   “ ------  Retirement and flannel pair well together. ”         /         @cennan !

[breniarchive-blog]

   “ Stranger, you are much too far from home. ”  Lindalambë was not a language made expressly for peace, but the Teleri were not known for their wars. They were recognized for their song. As such, the words for what Thranduil smells on this one’s skin churn about in his mouth with a cadence much too summer - sent for the circumstances. Wilderness brings out his mothertongue, but he has a feeling he shall be understood.  “ The sea is west of here. ” 

@cennan.