I'm prone to low moods. It's nothing unusual. But today...it's bad. Really bad. I wish I could write, but I can't do even that. Still, I can always read. I was going through the blogs I follow, and ran across an interesting post at All The World's Our Page about learning about your characters through love scenes. I thought it ironic enough, as I've been dallying with Arosek and Ryenn the last couple of weeks because their fraught relationship? Is the best path towards understanding them, and it's helped considerably with my understanding of the events of Greywater. Kristen did ask for people to post up little snippets at her blog, but I'm too shy and so out of sorts that I decided against it. Still, the story I thought of...it's the one I started writing in Australia, and I finished it some time last week. I haven't shown it to anyone, and I keep thinking this is one of my problems. I pour my heart into my writing, but then I am so unsure of the worth of my own self that I am becoming more and more reluctant about sharing it. Sometimes I can, but in times like this...I just want to delete everything I've ever written and accept my fate as just another space monkey.
But I did learn something about these two characters, I did, and I suppose it might do my broken mind some good to show anyone who happens to be out there just a little of their broken hearts. It's something, I guess.
And maybe, then, I can go back to Greywater, and to the story of the demi-goddess and her Major. Because that'll cheer me up. Ha ha ha. At least those two get something like a happy ending...if we ignore the fact that he is mortal while she is not. It brings to mind, actually, the note that Wills Penrose passed with something like terrible pity of purpose to Eliot Tennyson via his daughter, Tessera:
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.
*****
“I must go back to Ilke,” Ryennkar said, but Arosek had known him for forty years and could hear tiny telltale cracks spreading like spiderthreads beneath the smooth façade.
“Will you stay with me?” He raised his face, bit his lip. “Just until I fall asleep?”
Those cool eyes, as silver and distant as the web of stars long since concealed by the cloak of day beyond the window, softened. A moment later they closed, as if he was afraid of what he saw reflected in Arosek’s own eyes, and pressed his forehead against his. “Is this what you want?” he asked, a mere whisper.
“I want it.” Again Arosek raised his hands to his collar, working on the torc. Ryennkar made no objection as it was removed, set gently aside. He only watched, wordless and weary. He had nothing to say even as Arosek pushed the heavy cassock from his shoulders, leaving him in the shirt and trousers beneath. With an ease born of long practise, Arosek made quick work of the laces of both and then pushed the silk from his broad shoulders. Only then did Ryennkar look to the window again, the cool light of morning bright over his pale skin.
“There’s time enough,” Arosek said, soft, drawing his attention back. He then moved his hands to his own waist, loosed the belt he found there. A shrug of his shoulders split the collar and he shed the robe like a second skin. Nude before Ryennkar, who was dressed now only in the opened trousers, he shivered, and the other man shook his head again.
“Arosek—”
“Isn’t this what you wanted, too?”
The question could be nothing but rhetorical. All he had to do was look down to see it was very clear that Ryennkar wanted him. And so, with a smile both tremulous and sensual, Arosek took his hand and turned towards the open door of his bedchamber. He did not let go until they reached the bed on its platform, the thick curtains already pulled back. With his heat beating hard he leaned back against the pillows. Relief flooded him to see that Ryennkar had not left him, and he opened his arms with a smile as involuntary as it was perfect.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
The quiet words seemed to hurt the other man, somehow; he closed his eyes, inclined his face to the heavens. If Arosek hadn’t known better, might have thought he was offering up a prayer to the earth-father. But for all his birth and early childhood in the cradle of Janerin’s home, there was little care for the immortals in one as vitally mortal as Ryennkar Vassidenel.
*****
For I myself saw the Sibyl indeed at Cumae with my own eyes
hanging in a jar, and when the boys used to say to her:
“Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied: “I want to die.”
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