laevisilaufeyson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laevisilaufeyson) wrote2013-04-25 11:00 pm
laevisilaufeyson) wrote2013-04-25 11:00 pm
Entry tags:
now who holds the shell will be cæsar
Tales were once told, in song and in whispers, in mead-halls and ‘round hunting fires, amongst the bedrolls of soldiers, in the bellies of mighty boats, of the nornir and their threads. A maiden fair, a mother warm, a crone old – what was, what is, what will be, spinning out the lives of all things that have lived, now live, and will live. Together the threads are woven into a great tapestry, a shifting and mercurial thing. Time. Time and space.
Tales are told now, scratched out on blackboards, printed in books, sent halfway ‘round the world and back in flashes of electromagnetic radiation, of bits and pixels, of information bound at the edges of all things and projected into the centre, of the vibrations of tiny strings, the tiniest possible things in the universe – and from that, from that impossible and primordial thrumming, all things.
Mere holograms. Merely a tapestry, shifting and mercurial, encompassing space. Space and time.
The ultimate truth of the matter is inconsequential – at least here and now, at the meeting of two threads. Occasionally, a fine tendril reaches out and brushes against something one might never have guessed it would, brushes against it like a warm, pale hand brushes the lapel of a jacket. Fifty years ago the room would’ve been hazy with smoke, the men and women drifting through it like spectres, suits and ties and tumblers, the clinking of ice against glass, the smooth rustle of fabric brushing against fabric.
Fifty years ago it might also have been a suit and not a dress, but the change is bothersome only in its impracticality, not in the implications. Those have long since ceased to matter, buried thousands of years ago beneath jeering accusations of argr and the exhileration of that first transformation. Now slipping skin comes easier, but there is still a spark in it, something in the adoption of a new face that makes the heart beat faster, for a time.
If the story of the threads is true, then he was meant for this, this passingly handsome stranger, made for this brush with greatness. He swallows her smiles like liquor, recoils in unease at the brush of her cold, cold hand – fifty years ago it was the same, a bright blonde thing with her lips painted red, a permanent flush, an artificial grasp at perfection. With this one it’s subtler but the signs are still there, in the faint constellation of razorburn at the edge of his jaw.
It doesn’t matter. Who they are doesn’t matter, what they are matters less – their fortune breeds benevolence.
Loki Laufeyson – Laufeysdóttir – does not, after all, believe in fate. Not today. That makes him so much luckier.
She spins for him a clever tale, one rooted in the threads of this place, of his long history, long and proud. Spins it in his own tongue, of his own tongue, flatters, brilliant, look: the gaudy affair mounted above the bar, separated from its other sundry parts and stuffed. The beast slain: die Deutsche Sprache. How?
Loki grasps a thread and tucks it under. Today, today is inconsequential, but once, Romans, Emperors, conquest, and under it all that singular name, that lone animal: Cæsar’s now. And from Cæsar, the world. Greek. Old English. The tongue of the vikingr. From sunny Italy to frozen Norway, dieses einfache wort: Elch. An elk. Another turn of the spindle, charming, neat, well. Like she knows. Like she was there.
The truth of the matter he will never work out, this finely-dressed, blind little man. Perhaps one of the ones who ran the last time, not so long ago. Was he there to see it, the trick with the eye, and all the others that followed? If he travels in these circles, perhaps he was. Only a friend of a friend today, but yesterday important, and tomorrow, who knows? Either way he can’t discern the similarities, though they are manifold. That is not his purpose.
His purpose, in truth, is to stand and to speak and to draw attention, to smooth out the lines of her ego the way she smooths out the lines of her dress while she flirts – hardly an engaging task – and twists, spins her clever tales. Misleads, as the liesmith does. Him, yes, and all the rest, too. He is bright enough, animated enough, that they will not notice if his eyes stray.
Since the slipping of the chains they do stray, sometimes in wariness, sometimes in fear, tonight with purpose. Tonight she plays a daring game, walks an uncertain line. Watching has its value and in watching she has learned so many things. Rises and falls, and not merely of emperors. Of falls there were many. Inevitable. Of rises…
Tonight there is one in the making, heard of in whispers, tugs on the spider’s web Loki has spun. An extraordinary ambition, and no ambition is complete unless it can make room for itself to grow.
The target is logical. A visitor, not from so very far away as Loki – merely an ocean. He is Cæsar. He is the one to which her eyes stray. Green. Not unfamiliar, perhaps, like the lines of her face, softer than they once were, more feminine, but echoing what came before in unsubtle ways.
To build an empire, one must first grind the last into dust. One must tear from it its secrets, and then burn the remains. To that end comes Brutus. To that end Loki follows. Here, in Berlin, at this ridiculous gala, three threads may cross one another in a most unlikely configuration. What unfolds may be making or undoing, or may be nothing at all – only time, only the weaving of the norns’ tapestry will tell. Until then, dramatism, pomp and circumstance, is pointless. There is the pleasant drone of this conversation to occupy her. Tony Stark's movements are not difficult ones to track. As always, the emperor is a larger presence than a mere body can contain.
Tales are told now, scratched out on blackboards, printed in books, sent halfway ‘round the world and back in flashes of electromagnetic radiation, of bits and pixels, of information bound at the edges of all things and projected into the centre, of the vibrations of tiny strings, the tiniest possible things in the universe – and from that, from that impossible and primordial thrumming, all things.
Mere holograms. Merely a tapestry, shifting and mercurial, encompassing space. Space and time.
The ultimate truth of the matter is inconsequential – at least here and now, at the meeting of two threads. Occasionally, a fine tendril reaches out and brushes against something one might never have guessed it would, brushes against it like a warm, pale hand brushes the lapel of a jacket. Fifty years ago the room would’ve been hazy with smoke, the men and women drifting through it like spectres, suits and ties and tumblers, the clinking of ice against glass, the smooth rustle of fabric brushing against fabric.
Fifty years ago it might also have been a suit and not a dress, but the change is bothersome only in its impracticality, not in the implications. Those have long since ceased to matter, buried thousands of years ago beneath jeering accusations of argr and the exhileration of that first transformation. Now slipping skin comes easier, but there is still a spark in it, something in the adoption of a new face that makes the heart beat faster, for a time.
If the story of the threads is true, then he was meant for this, this passingly handsome stranger, made for this brush with greatness. He swallows her smiles like liquor, recoils in unease at the brush of her cold, cold hand – fifty years ago it was the same, a bright blonde thing with her lips painted red, a permanent flush, an artificial grasp at perfection. With this one it’s subtler but the signs are still there, in the faint constellation of razorburn at the edge of his jaw.
It doesn’t matter. Who they are doesn’t matter, what they are matters less – their fortune breeds benevolence.
Loki Laufeyson – Laufeysdóttir – does not, after all, believe in fate. Not today. That makes him so much luckier.
She spins for him a clever tale, one rooted in the threads of this place, of his long history, long and proud. Spins it in his own tongue, of his own tongue, flatters, brilliant, look: the gaudy affair mounted above the bar, separated from its other sundry parts and stuffed. The beast slain: die Deutsche Sprache. How?
Loki grasps a thread and tucks it under. Today, today is inconsequential, but once, Romans, Emperors, conquest, and under it all that singular name, that lone animal: Cæsar’s now. And from Cæsar, the world. Greek. Old English. The tongue of the vikingr. From sunny Italy to frozen Norway, dieses einfache wort: Elch. An elk. Another turn of the spindle, charming, neat, well. Like she knows. Like she was there.
The truth of the matter he will never work out, this finely-dressed, blind little man. Perhaps one of the ones who ran the last time, not so long ago. Was he there to see it, the trick with the eye, and all the others that followed? If he travels in these circles, perhaps he was. Only a friend of a friend today, but yesterday important, and tomorrow, who knows? Either way he can’t discern the similarities, though they are manifold. That is not his purpose.
His purpose, in truth, is to stand and to speak and to draw attention, to smooth out the lines of her ego the way she smooths out the lines of her dress while she flirts – hardly an engaging task – and twists, spins her clever tales. Misleads, as the liesmith does. Him, yes, and all the rest, too. He is bright enough, animated enough, that they will not notice if his eyes stray.
Since the slipping of the chains they do stray, sometimes in wariness, sometimes in fear, tonight with purpose. Tonight she plays a daring game, walks an uncertain line. Watching has its value and in watching she has learned so many things. Rises and falls, and not merely of emperors. Of falls there were many. Inevitable. Of rises…
Tonight there is one in the making, heard of in whispers, tugs on the spider’s web Loki has spun. An extraordinary ambition, and no ambition is complete unless it can make room for itself to grow.
The target is logical. A visitor, not from so very far away as Loki – merely an ocean. He is Cæsar. He is the one to which her eyes stray. Green. Not unfamiliar, perhaps, like the lines of her face, softer than they once were, more feminine, but echoing what came before in unsubtle ways.
To build an empire, one must first grind the last into dust. One must tear from it its secrets, and then burn the remains. To that end comes Brutus. To that end Loki follows. Here, in Berlin, at this ridiculous gala, three threads may cross one another in a most unlikely configuration. What unfolds may be making or undoing, or may be nothing at all – only time, only the weaving of the norns’ tapestry will tell. Until then, dramatism, pomp and circumstance, is pointless. There is the pleasant drone of this conversation to occupy her. Tony Stark's movements are not difficult ones to track. As always, the emperor is a larger presence than a mere body can contain.