my way
Chapter 01: captivating aura
Chapter 02: ...sweet prince
Chapter 03: as an older man
Chapter 04: hypermasculinity
Chapter 05: cowboy stories
Chapter 06: rage and tenderness
Chapter 07: the likes of which...
Chapter 08: just lay there and bleed
Chapter 09: desire for the ideal
Chapter 10: hysteria redux
Chapter 11: some minochi shit
Chapter 12: the author's disguise
Chapter 13: photoshop dream
[*] His expressive eyebrows and bitchy aura have captivated me
Aegaeon found that he took no especial pride in being the one that knew Brighid best of all - her moods and her motivations, her curls and what it took to coiffe them. What transparency she had to others, it paled in comparison to that which had shown itself true to him, over a period of procedural years in which she couldn't help but become known to him, as a part of him.
That is, Aegaeon tried to find this to be true. Aegaeon tried to discard it, and hold himself to a humbler standard. Aegaeon tried to treat it as an operative fact of life, and not chafe if it so became overturned by future facts of life that self-suffaced.
But here was Aegaeon's pride. Brighid was Aegaeon's pride.
And, thus, knowing that her fascination had been captured by none other than Quaestor Amalthus's rogue Blade, a rascal who himself seemed just so transparent, Aegaeon became confounded and ashamed.
"His expressive eyebrows and incorrigible aura have...captivated me, Aegaeon."
Perhaps so. Perhaps Aegaeon admitted to his own shortcoming, in that he had neither of these appallingly compelling qualities or features (his eyebrows were the most expressive part of him, but only by default; his aquine agreeableness was a landmark trait).
Perhaps Master Minoth left nothing to be desired but desire itself. But was Brighid not forgetting...herself?
[*] good game sweet prince
Would it, in fact, be a political spectacle, apoplexy of the worst kind in the very worst way, if Tornan citizens had heard the nonchalant yet vigorous comment uttered off the lips of the people's prince: "You know, war is really great." ?
Well, why not? It should be. Zettar needn't even weigh in.
That's not how he meant it, though. Addam was instead referring to the card game comprised of several small battles, rank agin rank, interrupted only by the mounting of larger battles in the case of ties, that could peaceably occupy a pair of friends or rivals, enemies or lovers, for some minutes or some hours.
No skill was involved. No choice. Only luck and momentum, but since Minoth wasn't a cheater and was a shark, Addam crowed loudly for negligible benefit when the tide turned to him. Sometimes Minoth engaged him, gamely, and others not.
Always, though, since they didn't cheat and since they were fish of the same school, their games would conclude with a kiss passed from the winner to the loser - pat consolation prize - and a victory beat: "Good game, sweet prince."
[*] *flirting with an older man* when i was born you had already attempted suicide once - "worth living just to meet you kiddo" finally someone says something kind of titillating
The thing about being born fully-formed, as all Blades are, is that Mythra sometimes (all the time) has difficulty conceptualizing the idea that others, whether human or not, could be only "on the way" to their eventual resting place in personality and predilections, and not perpetually performing their end state in the present, learning and training and testing complete.
They accuse her of being set in her uncouth ways, coarse and obstinate. They don't allow her the room to grow, though they do sometimes allude to the idea that she will.
The former residents of Torigoth? Clearly toast. She didn't know anything about them beforehand, and she probably won't think about them again afterward.
Addam? Impossibly blithe and green. No such schlock about "growing together" and gaining a mature mastery of her power.
Milton dies as he lives. Lora too. What could Mythra ever know of aging?
Two years since Minoth last saw Amalthus, which is longer than Mythra's been alive.
What did he look like two years ago? Probably the same. She still doesn't know about the scar. Nobody knows about the scar. Maybe it's a birthmark, a hyperpigmentation. Has he ever had short sleeves, short hair?
What did he talk like two years ago? Did he always put on all these worldly airs, back then?
Back then. Not so long ago. But, by the time Mythra was awakened, Minoth had been awake most of a decade. Considering the speed at which she currently experienced her own flurry of unwelcome emotions, that was time enough for him to become a whole different person.
Or, the same person.
"Never thought you'd live to meet the Aegis, huh?"
Minoth turned toward her with a tilt of his chin. "Nobody did, until Malos arrived. And, then, I suppose we all got a little tighter with our ideas of mortality."
"Mortality?"
Minoth shrugged. Mythra felt his presence unbearably close and palpable, as if he'd reached toward and grasped her kneecap, even though his hands remained respectfully confined to his own lap.
"Was judgement coming for us? Did we care to wait around to find out?"
For all Malos's bloviating about human folly and desecration, that couldn't possibly be a thought that most humans had foremost in their minds when they saw a divine scourge descending upon them. Most people felt that they had something more to live for, whether out of obligation or greed or legitimate love for...something. Anything.
If that was how Minoth had begun, could the turning point be coming, now?
What had changed?
"And...now you found out," Mythra gestured to herself with a halfhearted flourish.
Was that a wink? "Sure did."
[*] men love being tied to chairs and gagged it makes them feel masculine it's the same as working in an office - this is very funny bc i went to a class on gay cowboy bondage that discussed hypermasculinity in the practice and basically made this exact point but like, unironically - a class on what
For Minoth to be insecure would imply that there is something about his own self that he fears - that he trembles in fear of. That he is constantly worried, anxious, overwrought.
And he is, to be sure, all of those things, about his past catching up to him and his decisions ceasing to be decisive enough to bear themselves out; about his worth and his utility as a famously infamously failed experiment; about the merit of his craft that he so pretentiously practices.
But he can't quite say that he feels, or appears, insecure. He denies the accusation, one supposes. He neatly sidesteps it. He dances around it. He pretends, in his rare first person omniscience, that it doesn't exist.
His own share of toxic masculinity, perhaps. His hypermasculinity, that he must keep up the façade (is it only one?) of mystique even when it compromises his ideals. Even when it compromises his most inner sense of safety.
If he were gagged and bound, if he were plainly painted as removed from his own faculties, perhaps then he would feel most completely at peace. Most in control of himself.
At all other times, Minoth resents his own jagged movements, and ponders with a ridiculous, impossible confidence upon whether or not others resent them too.
[*] cowboys never die. they just ride off into the sunset - is that what your parents told you when you came back from school one day and your cowboy was missing
Cole has, in those more recent of the past five hundred years, stopped worrying as much about what will happen to him when he dies. How it will be. What he'll leave behind. The work he has yet to do and that which he has determined to abandon. The legacy of history's secondary legendary Flesh Eater.
Instead, his thoughts turn to Iona, this latest and last child of Mymoma. Will she be alright? Of course she will. Will Vandham take care of her? Of course he will.
(Of course he won't.)
There isn't much of a question about who will be there to witness it, this great going. No soldiers. No townsfolk. Either Iona will be there, or no one will.
She'll come home from school, and call out for him, and he won't answer.
Architect, it's morbid. What a horrible way to be.
But what else is there to do? Surely not take him from her in the last moments they have to spend together.
Iona has, as people periodically do, once again sparked Cole's wry wish to live forever, or else ride off into the sunset with the rest of his undying companions in tow.
[*] rage and tenderness existing simultaneously in the same body
"I can hate Amalthus and love you in the same breath, Nia, but it also doesn't have to be the same breath. You are more than just the injustices you carry."
Tenderness for herself. Oh, he wished she would take it. Think of the wonderful promises. Think of that feline rage, jumping in fierceness to instinctually reimage the terror of apathy and beaten-down pain. Try protection. Try intrinsic value.
In that same body. That impossible body. That capability across so many myriads.
That smile that can lead an unsundered life. Those hands that swat, but knead, and hold. That determination, impure, so real, so human - in the good way, the best way, the only way any of them really know how.
Cole knows he doesn't know how to do both at once, anymore. Maybe he can alternate. Maybe he can make a best effort.
But the rest...that's on to Nia, now.
[*] I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.
"You're quiet, Your Majesty." Minoth allows himself this observation after considering it a week, a month.
"An emperor should consider his words well. This, of all advices, I hold keen."
Hugo doesn't ask if Minoth agrees. They're not making party to a polite conversation with more mores than anyone trained or untrained has the patience for. There's no point in ploying traps for rhetorical speakers.
And even Minoth, who overthinks, isn't as careful as Hugo. Even Aegaeon isn't.
The little emperor. The pint-sized mastermind.
"Considering anything dangerous?"
Everything, for and from the ruler of the most powerful nation in Alrest, is dangerous. The smallest of wrinkles so as to aspect microexpressions cross Hugo's guise as he prepares an exacting of words appropriate and incisive to the task. A companion, perhaps, to the unasked quest for concord.
"There are principles I hold with a deadly weight, Minoth. Not sins, I wager, but gravity, that ballasts my unsteady road. But I cannot act with that anger. I cannot be so short of temper. So, instead, I indulge my lighter hand. I throw all my conviction into compassion."
The tiny face stills to stone once again.
Minoth feels his shoulders drop, and yet set back. How could he ever be equal to a scion such as this?
[*] ARE YOU GOING TO COWBOY UP OR JUST LAY THERE AND BLEED ?
"Up you go, Minoth."
"Master Minoth, snap out of it!"
Jin and Haze's hands, three in total as she drops her crosier and he passes his nodachi to the opposite side, are uncharacteristically rough upon Minoth's shoulders, at his back, on and in the crease of his contorted flank. Haze is always a touch more harried than her icy compatriot, but there's an element of frenzy in her empty encouragement. And Jin, to startle?
Oh, he wants to give up. It would be so easy to die here, to die this way, to say that this is how the world ends, with a whimpering bang as his legs buckle and his mouth bites buckshot. To tell Haze, don't bother, move on, move on - though, as if she would listen...
That last infinite ounce. Could be drained. Who's to say? If he's tired, then he's tired. If he's out, then he's out.
But he's got to sit (stay, lie, lay) all through the dying, first, and that wouldn't exactly be characteristic, now, would it?
[*] my desire to see more characters try to self-destruct by vomiting up a deluge of the most damning lies about themselves in a fit of despair and loathing and desire to be punished in some way vs. my knowledge that at least some audiences would take their words at face value and metatextually respond exactly the way they're hoping for
Minoth's is a short and low-smoldering fuse. By the measure of his fatigue, he hasn't exploded yet. Maybe he never will. But there have been many a grawlix-blank powdering fired off, at intervals. Out of a dreadful dissatisfaction with what is, what was, and what continues to be, Minoth attempts to undissemble and disassemble the framework upon he has built his year-on-year and day-to-day; to uncover the root of the problem, he tries to smoke out the building entirely. Because, of course, not knowing the problem is worse, a double-damning curse, than the portent of the problem itself.
They may be lies. Maybe. But how else will anyone ever know the truth?
Stress testing. Shake the foundations. Find the change where it has to be found. Make something, anything happen.
Make someone punish him for being so damned, forsaken and wrong.
That's the easy part. That's the part that keeps trying.
The trouble is what audiences will do with it. What those malingering eyes will make see.
"Why, then, Minoth? Why fight this way? Why do you not give it up? Why do you not admit what you so lowly profess?"
Heretic. Hypocrite. You're a hypocrite, you hypocrite!
He will keep fighting. He will keep blowing until the whole damn world goes out.
"Because you want me to."
[*] I have female hysteria + male loneliness + toxic masculinity + dark empath abilities
It would be an unbold Aegis that used a proposition of pretending not to understand humanity as its gateway into exacting duty. On the contrary: Malos claimed to know humanity's fate in absolution, as an agent of it.
What was more, he took what he could parse, blackly understand, of humans' emotions and used it against them. He manipulated Amalthus as well as anyone faced with that very same master manipulator ever could or can.
How could the Aegis, Dark Aegis, be anything but brutal? How could it ever suffer a sub-peer partner?
Minoth knew these things. Minoth suffered mightily (adverse, advex, ad nauseum) at the wheel of wondering whether he too perpetuated these brooding atrocities in the scope of simply having learned to coexist (in some sepulchral fashion) alongside Amalthus.
And they were, underneath pretension, woefully finicky, irritable people. Malos was a champion complainer. Minoth could get on your nerves in an instant if he was in the right (wrong) mood. Likewise, they were sweet talkers, a sour-savory way. They sweet-talked each other; the aftermath tasted acrid-grim.
Oh, made for each other. Horribly and terribly made.
[*] describing my relationship to someone by introducing them to people as "an old wound" - at that description they roll their eyes and point out to me that "you're the one who won't cauterise me" and i shoot back automatically that i did try and we're both struck silent for a beat before they respond "... i know" in such a fond yet melancholy voice, and we share a look of such profound unspoken understanding that everyone around us begins to feel like they're intruding on some intimate affair
"Well, if it isn't my oldest wound."
The words crack in the air.
Cole says it as much to mess with the man as anything. Better than grunting to say hello, isn't it? Bit of sarcasm will make anybody feel welcome. Introduced, at least. Never heralded.
And Vandham loves to bat back. "Not the oldest, surely - that scar, to start with?" The scar. The scar. Always with the scar. "You're the one who won't cauterize me, fella."
"I did try, Aquila?"
Well, if it isn't. If it isn't a half-century of taunts, of triages, of taxidermies. If it isn't that, it's probably a few decades of dancing around it, falling into it, pulling yourself by the uglies full out of it only for it to drag you right back in.
Cole hates to forget. Cole refuses to forget. But in his own way, he did try. He did try to accept that Vandham would leave him before outlast him. Would lurch laboriously away by omission. Would out-pragmatize the master, in a thrilling twist.
The mountain slumps, softens, shifts. "I know. Believe you me, mate, I know."
[*] the author's barely disguised lack of socialisation and profound sense of alienation from all other human life
"Oh, are you sure-?"
She could hear the not-so-distant echo of Haze's knowing, proud voice: "Master Minoth never lets anyone read his manuscripts. He loves narrating for us!"
That much, Lora doesn't doubt. He loves it, indeed. The pleasure is clear in his timbre as he lets it tumble over each full stop and rushing pause. He grins, nearly smug, when lines are tossed to this party member or that. He plays with the plot twists like puppet strings. He plys his vocal cords as a perfect, timeless instrument.
Minoth is in his element when he reads, moreso even than when he writes.
So now, as Lora holds the binding of Memento Bark still sticky with sap aloft in her ungloved palms, she has to search and search for that same generous gleam.
Minoth seems...unsure, yet serious.
"Go on. I want to hear what you really think."
Oh, she hates to tremble at the task. To say what she really thinks about what Minoth really thinks?
Lora opens the manuscript. It's her play, The Knight of Torna. Though as audience members they'd all hang onto every word of a drily deviced introduction, here with her own golden eyes she glosses quickly past it. There once was, and in Torna fair, the state of the war, so on, so forth.
She glances up. Minoth isn't watching her hands, but instead her eyes; he's very pointedly not looking at her hands, and the work within them. His own work distractedly above the uncoordination of juddering, bouncing legs.
She turns to the middle, looking for the thrust of the rising action.
Ah. There are stage directions. Those silent invocations the narrator so deftly and improvisatorily weaves.
"The lady knight is determined, yet appears carefree. Her eyes are for her Blade, but her smile is for all who cross her path, in some and yet no particularity those convened at this ceremony. We are invited into a truly special moment; a celebration of the pure and real goodness of humanity."
On reflex, Lora reads it aloud. Though her tone is attemptedly even, she can feel herself cracking at the melancholy that practically bleeds from the precious document. What nobility is this she has been chasing? To be described as...
But she doesn't wish to chastise him. Were she to get up and walk away without revealing her thoughts, he would know in an instant the rejection he already assumes. Even if she were to embrace him, for the offered chance to know him better.
"Your work..." she worries fingertips at the leaf edges. "I think you have a tremendous gift for uplifting people - making all of us feel truly special. I can't say I would expect it!"
It's that last tag, autonomous, that saves the interaction. Some small smile does come. The legs do not stop, but the hands do.
Lora doesn't know how she'll go on from here, sensing what she does about how isolated Minoth has been and continues to make himself. But, she refuses to give into the same deification. She will make him know his place among them - in particular!
[*] 21 NOVEMBER: My first Photoshop dream. I dreamed I was erasing my past in Photoshop, but it turned out that I was using the 'clone tool' - so instead of erasing I was just copying chunks of the past into the future. -- Brian Eno (1995)
"When was the last time you truly felt yourself moving forward, Minoth?"
Minoth. Hah. But Minoth is the past, isn't he? Is in the past, but refuses to stay there. Keeps leaping out and asserting himself. Keeps wandering to the forefront of the stage.
Cole thinks he can control his narrative. He's living in a fantasy land where he can inspire a brighter future, where anything he does now means anything about anything, to anyone. But in truth, by remaining, all he does is let the wind blow stale over the same sodden faces. New faces meet the same old wind, from an offstage machine that cannot beat Titans' wings.
How about their great and ancient creator, then? His blueprints? His shorthanded notes?
He doesn't matter anymore. Beat the horseskin drum, and maybe break it: he never did.
The more he repeats and is repeated, the less and less salient he becomes. Cole, the great. Cole, the rich and evocative. But Cole never did write truly timeless poetry.
"Azurda, I don't think I ever have." Those eyes peer with the same damn perceptiveness, that all-seeing sky of stone. "I don't think I can."