|
  |
While the Enchantress' attempts to get so much as an affectionate touch from Thor had failed. Repeatedly. She had not seemed to have given up while they shared the castle with Loki, and Scarlett. Whenever there was so much of a chance, Amora was practically glued to his side. Her attempts to gain his attention ranged from comical to the rather clever. Yet still, the golden haired god treated her with all the affection of a good friend, and nothing more.
Still, being in his company seemed to have soften the harder edges around the goddess' demeanor and acts. There were no attempts to lure mortals to her wiles. Nothing even so biting as an insult escaped her lips. She seemed kinder, almost even gentle, in the Thunderer's presence. She was polite to Rogue, in as much as she noticed the other woman.
Amora remained, mostly, in the castle or its grounds. Either at Thor's side or, if he left or managed to duck away from her attentions then in the library. Even her manner of dress had diminished from the snazzy, more Hollywood styled fashions. Her long hair hung free, pushed back from her face by a green headband. A loose fitting cotton blouse hung from her and a flowing white skirt hung around her knees. She often went barefoot, treading lightly as a wind when she idly paced the walk ways of the castle.
*
A castle in Scotland, far away from the centres of population and snug abreast the coastline, serves as quite the romantic aerie to recover from a kidnapping with one's amour at arm's length. Alas for Amora, that partner may well be deaf and dumb to her libidinous entreaties to warm her bed and cosset her against the miseries of her imprisonment. Alas for Scarlett, that partner may well be incapable of committing his thoughts solely to a mortal or returning the unenviable intensity of emotions known only to the Norns. And, perchance, a long-seeing guardian on a bridge turning his head from time to time upon the children of Asgard in their exile.
No doubt he's a bit prone to staring.
The redhead goes about the cyclical routines of so vast a place with a temporal sense all her own. Tea sees its way up to Amora, accompanied by warm scones or crumbly biscuits flavoured by strawberries. Preserves are common enough. She can prepare rather extraordinary omelettes seasoned by fresh herbs obtained from someone or another's garden, if any thought to ask. Hunts no doubt will happen at the Thunderer's leisure, but the bohemian has long been responsible for feeding herself, as the kitchens won't stir with non-existent servants throughout her life.
Though it's unwise to consider her a servant. Those trays are gifts.
"A moody place, this. I think Scotland cannot help but harbour a streak of romance and passion, wedded to melancholy," she murmurs. Such is her greeting to Amora.
*
Amora sat at the edge of an old rust colored velvet chair. The gilded edges of the winged back seat faded and aged over centuries, yet it still held sturdy. She glanced up from a book she'd been reading, one which fit in to the surroundings without pause but most likely did not belong to any library here on Midgard. The shifting colors of the title, done in a script alien to the realm it was presently in, gave no hints as to the contents of it. The Enchantress shut the book with care at the sound of Rogue's approach, setting it on her lap and turning a pale eyed gaze upon the mortal woman before her.
"It has been in oddly good cheer. I had not expected such sunlight to be so constant as it has been the past few days. I was expecting far more rain, but I am sure it will come to pass in its own good time." She sighed, propping her chin up with a hand.
"Won't you sit and join me for a while today? I find myself in a most abysmal mood, and can only slake its temperament with curiosity."
*
What is a kindness, if not to offer companionship while a pair of men wander around in the woods and refamiliarize themselves with the shore? For all anyone knows, they're both playing cribbage in an old glade out back that probably has held one too many fox or stag hunts in the past century.
A wary gaze is unwarranted for the redhead, given she presents absolutely no threat. Then again, so might several species of spider, venomous snake, or mysterious Australian marsupial. On the surface, though, her presence is a subtle thing. "The summer last long this far north and the hours wane into darkness less than were we deeply to the south. I know the western face of the peninsula earns more rain, but they speak to the balmy days fairly. There's an isle some distance from here, but an easy ride, where the waters are near as warm as Georgia's, actually." Georgia of the stately variety, and not the subsumed Soviet nation.
She floats into the library, her longer tunic spilled over a rather pretty pair of leather leggings stitched up the sides, and sufficient to give poor Scots lads nose-bleeds. "How may your day be brightened? Let's banish away the woes. Far too pretty a place to rest uneasy, isn't it?"
*
An arch of golden brow follows the mortal's entrance and speech, Amora's figure settling back into the chair further and offering up a faint smile in return. A poor shadow compared to the beams she lavished upon her favored Prince, but perhaps more honest in its temperament. She crossed her legs, gesturing to the seat opposite of her own.
"I must confess I know little of this area. I favored the continent or further North in my younger years, and did not often venture to this country previously. I shall have to take your estimate about the climes as accurate. In regards to its beauty though, it is pretty enough, tis true. However," She pressed a hand beneath her cheek, propping it up as she canted her head to the side and studied the mortal before her.
"You and I should both know that beauty never promised comfort or ease." She sighed, letting her hands settle onto her lap as she glanced out the high and narrow window to her side.
"Tell me how it came to be that Loki treats with you in such a state? How it came that he called upon your aid in such adventures as did fall in Muspell?"
*
Expectation of a reception diminished by contrast to Thor's greetings is evident. Scarlett settles into a chair opposite Amora, her feet crossed at the ankles and evidencing a serpentine caress upon the upholstery. Draw a sharp line back to her hip and the straight posture reinforced by all those years practicing her asanas pays well now.
"No, but beauty is testimony to grandeur and effort. The climb up the mountainside to witness the dawn's breaking may require toil, and is it not all the more lovely for it?" The lilting bell tones of her voice radiate from the library, still dusty in its corners, a testimony to long disuse and disturbance yet. "There are lovely vistas here, although nothing so high or lofty as the mountains of Norway or the Rockies. Should you wish to take the air, I can guide you upon the path."
Those offers are made freely, no evident expectation of a return. Or should there be strings attached, they are surprisingly intangible. Her question brings up the redhead's gaze, flickering away from the volumes surrounding them. Old leather and newer cloth, bindings tattered or enduring, they should well tempt her. "I admit to know very little, the more I learn." That old idiom plays out thus. "One truth I do stand by, any who claim to know Loki Liesmith's mind are fools or preposterously arrogant, and thus the worse. Forgive me, lady, but I cannot speak for his manners or choices. Mayhap to cause mayhem, perchance for some deeper design. I could speculate but only dishonour myself and disrespect him, as if he'd dare to speak to me of such."
*
A hint of laughter played along the edges of her smile as Amora considered the mortal woman's words, though no actual sound escaped past her reddened lips. As the conversation shifted from adventures of beauty and quests for the elusive views that drove people to seek out such things, toward Loki, Amora paused. Her expression dwindled in the hints of mirth and she seemed to fall silent in contemplation for a series of heart beats that deepened in the library's open chamber. Finally, she shifted, and with sharp eyes scanning over the woman opposite of her she seemed to come to a decision.
"You honor him in so many words as you speak. A careful response. A clever response. One that does him a credit to teaching you, or at the very least taking an interest in you." She folded her hands on her lap, and then thought better of it and propped up her chin with them instead.
"You are not the first, and I doubt you shall be the last mortal to fall into his interest so. What puzzles me the most is that he took you to Muspell, and begs me to think upon you as far more than a mortal should. You have powers, that much is a given, and potential far beyond most.. However," Her gaze narrowed faintly, and she leaned back.
"The tragedy of life here on Midgard being that you are gifted in scant years means that there is little chance for you to grow beyond that.."
*
"I do not account myself particularly clever." It's a very harsh yardstick to measure oneself by, when adjacent to the greatest trickster in Asgard and one probably wearing the masks in a few other pantheons as well. "You are too kind, lady. In truth I wish to avoid offense and remain in the present company as you will have me." It is simple enough as that, laid out as a series of pretty shells to be regarded in the sun. So simple. So utterly true, and not even scratching the first atoms on the iceberg descending to the depths of the sea.
She does not shift in the wingback chair, comfortable enough though the shape and size are intended for someone taller, a touch broader. Thor in the same spot would look utterly ridiculous, naturally, though she is still tall for a woman in this age.
"My lady, they stole you from your rightful place. Whatever other sins were performed, that alone would be enough for me to lend what little assistance I could to your recovery." Her words, if grave, are still saturated in that barren honesty revealed in every gilded turn of phrase. Truly her voice is a beautiful thing to hear. "You suffered for no rightful purpose. Your captors hold you no longer, and you are back among friends. That is a good thing, an end to a tale that will no doubt warm you many years from now when you recount your stories to a rapt audience. Truly you've the sign of a gifted storyteller, and in the right setting, those reels would burn."
Her hands rise lightly and her shoulders roll. "What more can we do, we children of the middle realm? I am not secretly one of the Ljosalfar." That's rather new. Her pronunciation of Icelandic — Old Norse, by any other name — is much improved.
*
Another silence, cousin to the first, fell between the two women in that great and ancient chamber. A thoughtful one, as honesty and fairy truths are told between the two. A slender brow rose and Amora pursed her lips together briefly, a blotting out of red by whitened flesh. "I have no offense to take given your words have always bordered the line of polite and respect. A closer cousin to flatter nearly I have never heard. A strange creature you are, most unnatural to the realms of mortal men in this day in age. Out of time and place, you would do better centuries before your time." Her words were soft, more of musings to herself than to the redhead before her.
"It is not the first that I have been taken and used ill. Nor has it been the first that the two who came did find me in such straits. Merely the first that a mortal had joined their ranks willingly, which gives me pause." She dragged a hand through her hair, curling a lock of gold between her fingers idly.
"As you are a learner of old things, of the ancient rites long forgot… you shall find me humored in such a thing. And I shall share for you what futures and pasts I have seen through the skills the Norn Queen gave me when I was young. If you have an interest."
*
"Showing proper respect ought to be timeless. We live in an age where people may speak freely of their thoughts, and yet they're so careless about what they say and how they say it." Scarlett's head shakes softly, a frisson of her flaming tresses parted over her shoulder and skimming down towards her lower back. The frosted white lines are hidden by her usual braiding techniques, not visible unless one truly looks. "I wonder if they realize the privilege can easily be revoked? Or that their blunt words may cause them woe when being more circumspect might spare pain and negative outcomes."
That's the nice way of saying just because can you can say it, maybe you shouldn't.
She rests her elbow to the arm of the chair, a casual realignment that places her more within Amora's quadrant of the room. Though they face one another, that casual movement instills a certain nonverbal rapport absent by sitting ramrod straight. "Ah, but they came for you. The how and the why, lady, matter but you remained their unfaltering purpose no matter what Muspelheim threw at them. Take comfort from it, surely?"
No doubt those two princes might not be happy about them speaking so, but these are matters of a woman's household, shared betwixt the guardians of the distaff and not the hammer or sword. "Whatever you should allow me, you must know me keenly willing to listen. I cannot promise I understand all, but I will try."
*
Interest alit upon Amora's gaze as Scarlett accepted her offer of peering into the mists and shrouds of the past and future worlds that she had dabbled in once so long ago. A quirk of her lips had Amora rising to her feet in a languid motion, her head tilted upwards toward the room that was so heavily warded in which she had rested her head upon. Another turn and she looked about the room once, and then nodded as of satisfied that the library was bare of such magics that might hinder her. Then she was moving lightly upon her toes, pulling her chair closer to the mortal woman and leaning forward until their knees might yet touch if they were so inclined.
As she sat, the Enchantress waved a hand and a poof of green smoke encased her hand momentarily. As it cleared a drop spindle sat in her hand. A braid of woven gold had already been started was wound around a crystal of multiple colors, which made up the main shaft and spindle. The whorl at the base was carved with designs so intricate it was impossible to make them all out at once, much less what material the white substance was made from; for it sparkled prettily in the afternoon sun that streamed inside.
In her other hand had appeared a distaff, holding more of the golden fleece that connected to the spindle opposite. This, Amora held out in offer to Scarlett with a silent grace in which one might accept the most dear and dread of gifts.
"Karnilla who trained me in such arts said I never had the discipline to learn. Never held the temperament in which one might divine the truths of the many from that which I sought. But I found her methods tedious.. and sought to learn such skills from others. Hold and know, that while the Trickster Prince is the strongest sorcerer in the Nine Realms quite possibly.. I remain the most skilled of the Aesir and women's touch."
*
From Verdandi to Skuld, from Lakhesis to Klotho. Change their names and their faces but behind the masks, the threefold women are the same, repeated again and again. Her Asgardian journey thus far has taught her one thing she will never forget: nothing can be ignored, no matter how unrelated or insignificant it might seem. She does not allow herself to be careless with minute detail. Her dark lashes lift a fraction when the shape emerges from the smoke, and beyond the smoke, tangible measures await.
Scarlett reaches out, her fingers taking the distaff with great care as one might approach a sacred relic carried out from an imperial treasury for proper restoration. Had she the opportunity, it's possible the girl might have gone into that line of work. The slender neck she takes within the crook of her fingers, wrapping the digits around the wood until the grain warms to her temperature.
"Each have their talents. I have no doubt of the Prince's skill or your depth of knowledge. May only that I do not cave in the ceiling." Her mouth arcs in a faint smile, those rudimentary lessons hinged on a foundation of stability at least.
Her gaze lifts to Amora, and there waits, absorbing all that she can.
*
As Scarlett takes up the distaff, Amora twines a pinch of the golden, sparkling fleece free to anchor above her wrist as she pinches and twists the strand of woven gold and sets it spinning. The whorls' patterns changes and morph as it spins, giving the appearance of moving shapes and forms. The movement of plucking free a clump of fleece and setting it to spin and then wrapping it around the whorl becomes a natural pace. One in which Amora is obviously well versed in and requires little concentration from her. Instead her gaze lifts back to Scarlett and a slow smile lifts at the corner of her features.
"There are many paths yet untrod, and many that have been taken 'ere long. Twice have I seen a possible future betwixt myself and the Thunderer, and only twice. The rest, forever scorned and forgotten, a broken heart given to me instead. He chooses Sif, or some mortal girl. Whom so ever he decides, he shall never willingly pick me first. This I have seen time and again. Yet those twice times, there I was once happy. Though the paths that might tread for such a design are difficult and I know them not. Caution, I ask you, for while you and I might see mists and images of the future or past—We never shall we know how to weave such things into being." She murmured, her voice soft and lulling as she worked.
"Ask your question, that you might know, or at least, put forth the idea that you desire. We might yet see if it chance to happen.."
*
What will her thoughts dwell upon when the Enchantress sits back, in days and nights to come? How shall they speak on conclave where mortals ears are not? Surely they might laugh heartily and sip their ale, if they care at all.
A golden cloud of fleece beckons to be reached for, to be pinched and pulled and teased to a shape. The same spindle they form echoes the pendant at her slim ivory neck: one blooded and oathed, sworn in its existence by the Norns in their high heaven in Nornheim. What might they all say, knowing she possesses that small object in her care, imprinted by mystic sympathies? Doubtful anyone would ever seek to look.
Scarlett reaches holds the distaff somewhat back, contoured to her shoulder, not perfectly upright. The orientation of the wool aligns the longest fibers to the central base she holds, and thus the spinning takes on a graceful rotation controlled by her fingers touching the sacred wool. 'Tis Amora who plies what she will, but the redheaded girl allows her thoughts to drift in time to that function of weaving in ancient fashion, the lilt of words at a distance carrying her away.
Thus might be the first idea she contends with is already chased into the aureate strands, impregnated to the core of the weaving. No word needs to be uttered for the heart to sing to the Norns three, their daughter crying out along a celestial spectrum with soul-deep clarity. Surely they are bombarded thus by all the cares of the Nine Realms. But it's not the word she speaks aloud.
A dozen other possibilities flicker, shunted aside. How to obtain wisdom. How might she master the arts so sweet they could be tasted. The path to happiness (oh, you know which, fate, you do). A query of ageing and not ageing at all.
Her voice is soft, when it comes. "What role may I play to avert their dark end at Ragnarok?"
*
Jennifer has disconnected.
*
A practiced hand guides the whorl to spin and twirl. Graceful and nimble fingers catch it when it slows and rewinds the fibers round. She speaks not when Scarlett ponders her questions, her thoughts. Even as her own cloud with inner thoughts, ones long such questioned and turned over time and again. The same answers as always presented back toward her. The images, faint and blurred by years of askance. A child. One that she might never know. Just beyond her reach as always and forever denied to her at length. There were no happy days in promise for her in answer to her thoughts.
Thus, the mortal, as she spoke, gained Amora's attention raptly. A shimmer of the gold spun reflected in their woman's face as she shifted her position. "Such answers might come to you or not, as we spin. Guard them or not, the choice is your own. But I shall tell you mine own tales of what I have seen in regards to Ragnarok. It is a cycle. One as your seasons change. It cannot be prevented. It cannot be stopped. The means, paths that lead to it change. Each time anew life springs. What we remember from such times is difficult to conjure. But thus far, never have I nor those before me. Such as Karnilla herself, have seen a means to avert the coming tide."
*
Jennifer has connected.
*
"Even volva in the Voluspa told Odin, king of the gods, that dawn should come after the long twilight and bloody war," murmurs the redhead in that fabled library of a forgotten, lofty castle bathed in the sunlight of a Scottish late summer. Even so the skies will not darken truly until ten or eleven o'clock at night, and the stars emerge late in their season. "Yes, lady. The paths must be trod and the cycles revolve as they have and ever will, as you say. But for those in their keeping, is aught I might do that will see them a little further through the night?" The question is but a reflection of the same, spoken thus. It might be a fool's undertaking; she knows this, deep in her bones. If Wagner can labour over the Gotterdammerung for a year in his extensive labours upon Der Ring des Nibelungen, Asgardians surely peer far and wide for signs of salvation. Her engagement may be no different, her aspect in the great play of ruin and revivification no different from all the rest.
Except possibly she does not ask for herself, or anything directly to herself, other than for reasons gestating somewhere in the depths of the soul-thief's darkest or brightest self. She asks as she holds the distaff fair, clearing away all cares but one, and its bright guiding star she will not speak. Not to Amora, not to Karnilla, not to the Three. The latter know it, surely. The Creator beyond knows if he ever cared.
*
At the rephrasing of the question, Amora pursed her lips. A mortal's stubborn determination? Perhaps. A folly to look where so many an eye had been turned before? Mayhap. Who could say? Certainly not the woman that spun the spindle round and round. She could not peer into that heady weave of the future and pluck such a fiber that would tell what might yet be born of such an askance.
So she continued to spin, shaft never ceasing to have further space for the next twined bunch to wrap round it. She fell silent in the motions, allowing what might come to the other woman to come. And after what seemed a goodly time, not over long. She chose to speak again.
"I know not, for it does not come to me. As I am not the asker of such truths. Mayhap it shall come to you, as it is your question, your thoughts that begat such." She paused, her gaze lifting from the spindle toward her opposite woman in spinning.
"But I would tell you, such as it were, that if you live when Ragnarok approaches, perhaps you might lend aid. And in some small way hope to soften the course it plans for all. Yet, it might not ever come in your brief time. Pray, that it does not. Such things would not do." She sighed, and it was a melodic breath that left her.
"The question falls, if in this cycle it comes between the two brothers, as it had in tales told in the past.. Which side would you stand on?"
*
"Would you have me ask of my own successes and failures, how I might stand to gain, lady? Those seem an unreasonable use of a gift, a way to squander what you offer on something so fleeting, so small." She is not jaded, nor is Scarlett quite justifying herself so much as going form to the thoughts turbulent within.
A shake of her head brings the shadows into fresh alignment around her pale, moon-pure skin; Scarlett's face is cut by those delicate borders of sunlit gold and cream, barred in darkness tinted red. She smiles, and such is a thing of wordless sorrow beneath the simple turn of her lips.
"My nature is a diplomat. Be it possible to resolve their differences, I would. Having seen them together striving for a common purpose, would it not behoove me to make that possible again?" Her gaze is clear, mindful even as she answers after a momentary pause to collect her thoughts. Loyalties are driven through the core, and it very much defines her, right down to the utterances on her lips, the breaths taken between the stars, and the soft promises spoken to an empty night. Pleasure holds no grip on her answer, only revelation as one mortal can find it.
*
Amora inclined her head, once, and simply. As if answering all the questions that Scarlett had put forth to her in such a motion. Even as her quick fingers worked their spell upon the plying of golden fleece to twist and round again. A twitch of her lips followed, a faint if not hollow smile that etched upon perfectly sculpted lips.
"A thing of grace and beauty unmatched is the two of them entwined. So I believe, their parentage desires. Yet," The smile fell from her lips and she sighed with a slow rise and fall of her shoulders.
"Who can say how long such love will last? What turn of fate might twist such yet? For how can aught last long when the Norns know and offer blood on blood's shoulders? A girdle of might 'round such love tis not enough to protect such a fragile thing. Perhaps, if at least, whilst you yet live. You might be a broker of such things.." She canted her head to the side as she spoke, her gaze narrowing in thought at some distant point.
"But who can say, when the God of Thunder and the God of Lies might yet break bread and then break skulls upon the earth?"
*
Laughter might spring forth from the memory of a dream, a prince made astonishingly fair, one brought low with a bite and a kiss. Scarlett does not laugh. Her glittering emerald eyes hold the world and not but a drop of history behind their curled frames. The softness implicit in the sound passing from her parted lips holds an airy hue, a quality of not being wholly extant.
"All parents wish peace for their children, I must assume," Scarlett says. The merest shred of hesitation is painfully telling for those aware of her fractured history, those knowledgeable about the broken sheaves of her history snapped over someone's warded knee. "Such love of brothers?"
She holds her thoughts together, then speaks slowly. "Such must be tested time and time again when they are like to fire and ice, storm and sea. Have they not always quarreled and contended? Yet I must believe in some deeper union between them. Is there no shadow without light, no melody without its harmony? They are writ in it. As surely as they sit together, dark reflection of the bright, and bright reflection of the dark, there's some deep and abiding bond that outstrips us all. I don't think they can but co-exist. Maybe therein lies the immortality and the hope for their happiness. That they know it and see it."
She shakes her head softly. "I am no seer. I only know what I am allotted, and strive ever further."
This is how the soul sings.
*
With a soft sigh, Amora's spinning comes to a halt. The whorl coming to a stop and the cloudy magic of the weaving futures and pasts comes to a slow. A heady mixture of the power still lingers in the air, after thoughts slipping by on the breeze. She holds out a hand for the distaff after a moment's pause before she deigns to speak again.
"So it has. So do we all strive. Perhaps it shall remain this time a while yet. Light cannot exist without shadow. Nor can shadow without light." She pursed her lips and turned her pale gaze down to the drop spindle in her hand, her fingers turning it over in the light.
"But the wyrd is what it is, a shaped and woven tapestry that will not be torn from its set design." She closed her eyes briefly, as if sorrow mingled too strongly from her attempts in looking into similar questions before.
"Ragnarok will come despite all best intent. Or perhaps, it shall come because of it." A wane smile pulled at her lips and with a whispered word, the staff and spindle faded into a green swirl of smoke and were gone.
"But enough of such things. My power lies not in the fates. I turned from such long ago. I am much more for words of love and lusts therein. /That/ I can aid in more."
*
"The resonance of fate and love seems to be a common story among all of us." Eventually the young woman will hand back the distaff if that is sought of her, though she will keep it until such time. "None who have ever heard the ancient songs or the latest poetry will deny that our hearts chime in accord to them. I hold some belief, lady, that however small the actions we take can change the shape of a portrait sung. Not all comes to its design as imagined in any such sense. Possibilities arise at every turn."
Oh, what terrible incandescence is hope!
Her fingers close, and her arm drops, once more supporting nothing but the weight of dreams. Ghostly smoke flowing around her wrists, nothing else. She pets it rather like a cat. "There I acknowledge you the undisputed master! What power of desire and its many children have, Lady Incantare, I've no doubt. That holds the means to change the world in its way at levels oft underestimated." A smile becomes the sunrise again, her manner drifting playful into the bewitching upper airs of mirth again.
*
A laugh, mirthful and all at once resounding throughout the room followed the playful smile that lit upon Scarlett's features. Amora sat back in her chair, crossing her legs as she waved the smoke of her magic away with a dismissive hand. Mischief alit in her gaze an equal to that which might be seen in the Trickster God's own eye.
"Tell me of your love, or would be love. Those you desire or do not. I have the means to aid you. Be mindful, love is a wretched mistress, and harder to snare than many a more mightier foe. I can tell you the ways in which you mind find your own, an apple peel tossed over a shoulder to write your true love's name upon the soil. Or perhaps a toss of pomegranate seeds while the moon is full. Many of such things I know and can imbue with such magic that would give them strength." She grinned, a flash of teeth as she lounged—not unlike a Queen upon a throne, though a meager chair it was she sat on in comparison.
"Or of desire.. love's own true cousin. That I know as well, if not more so."
*
Scarlett shakes her head, spreading her fingers in a wide fan across her knees. "Whatever I should tell you, lady, would sound like the stale poetry from a greeting card. I fear you might find it a tepid glass of water, not a champagne full of fizz or the hottest bourbon rolling your way down your throat like amber fire." A light flick of her wrist captures the spindrift of a dust mote caught in the beam slanting through the window. "I could tell you of the love for life I hold, all the growing things and all those people so cherished within earth's embrace. It would be true, too. I've learned the romance and the soft, gentle sweetness to be found in treading those myriad joys."
She's talking as the bohemian she is, inheritress to a vast body of art, music, and social graces. That spellbinding adoration wrought on the page is no different for her than dreaming away a night over a glass of wine in the very best of company, be that fireflies or the London Philharmonic or her own garden full of delicate, growing herbs and showy plants, all with their own purpose.
Her voice holds laughter for herself, a kind of ephemeral quality rarely given shape. "I could tell you what you already know in full, using borrowed words from men and women far more adept than I. My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown. My heart is expanding a thousandfold. Every cell, taking wing, flies around the world. All seek separately the many faces of my love. Or lovers find secret places within this violent world where they make transactions with beauty. None of them seem fit. Be nourished by the promise of affection, the outpouring of love, for they are the sweetest of fruits. And on it goes."
*
A tutting escaped the goddess' lips and she wagged a finger with each tut she offered. "Come now, come now, speak you plain." She chided, arching a golden brow upwards. "I know well the shape of mortal love in many such veins. Yet you know that is not which I asked after. /Who/ does tender your eyes with sweet sorrows? Who does it that you girdle yourself for in so rosy a hue?" She laughed, her lips twitching as she spoke and could no longer hold in her amusement.
"Come sweet child, and tell me with your own words, who it is? I know it, tis true, however such things are best spoken of openly. Not locked in a darkened room." Her eyes glittered with continued laughter, perhaps at the situation she espied once more for the thousandth time. Or perhaps, it was the fact that either of them had unreachable goals and found it tragically mirthful?
She rose with a sigh and shook her head. "If you have need to speak with me again on such things I am here. Though I know full well who it is that makes your heart earn. A darkling night perhaps you'll find embraced by arms of the one you seek. But heed my warning, child of Midgard. We do not love as mortals do. He which ensnares your heart would own a many more. Yet they find little succor." She murmured, and made to leave.
*
Jennifer has reconnected.
*
Jennifer has partially disconnected.
*
"What could I tell you? The electron moves to the atom. The wide river of the stars moves to its gravity woven in a spiral. I am both its subject and its regnant, its supplicant and its creator. It will hold me until the hour of my end. What do you wish me do, debase myself before the impossible and plead my impassioned case? Would it make any difference to shake the roots of the World Tree for clemency from myself, for relief, to change the essence of what is always and forever worthy of deepest respect? I can't ask. I cannot give voice to my own frailty. If it is not enough, then all Asgard knows it's not enough and I will ensure that casts no dark shame or amusement, even as I endure as I am. Love gives no mercy to me and I expect none. It's as elemental as the waves, death, the game of electromagnetic forces. They who weave foresaw this lot." Her voice is quiet, full of unnamed things. Scarlett gestures. "Ask them what is one of Midgard worthy of, why they appointed me a gilded thread. Who has the greatest jest but one who may strive to achieve the unimaginable because for her there is no other choice?"
*
Amora shook her head once, a flicker of pity or some other here to unknown emotion kindled in her eyes as she looked upon the mortal woman before her. "Do not despair such things. There are more ways in which one of your realm might anoint themselves in the beauty of Asgard yet. But none of this is and shall be accomplished by a mewling heart." Her voice was soft and the cadence giving credence to the possibility of pity there.
"But I cannot give you further aid until such a time as you tell unto me such as you desire. A true telling for payment of askance. It is the old ways, and I cannot reach a hand to you until then." She murmured and turned to leave.
*
The painful, glorious smile descended upon her is a balm and acid in a wound.
The pity she meets with the flare of her luminous eyes, submerged peridots in an arctic sea.
"I very well would not be here, were I fearful, Lady Amora Incantare of Asgard. For no other reason than that, I endure this path for those boon companions I am given, and account myself grateful for every moment. It may hurt, it may sting worse than any wound, and I am glad for it." The curve of Scarlett's smile rises to that benediction slant, the inquiry answered, the faulted leap. "Sensation is how we know we are alive. Walk you well. I brought you more lavender scones, too."