#and ty mer for enabling me!!

[shivunin]

Filed Under 398.2

In which Lucanis and Rook don't quite manage to have a post-game interlude in the Necropolis library. (Inspired by this post) *The beginning of this is a bit risqué, but not explicit

(Rook Ingellvar/Lucanis Dellamorte | 2,470 Words | AO3 Link)

“We only have—mph—half an hour, maybe forty-five—why do you have so many belts?”

“Poisons,” Lucanis murmured against Rook’s mouth, hands already working deftly at the buckles. “Throwing knives. Other things that I—ah!” 

Lenore caught his lower lip between her teeth, thumbs already hooked into her underthings to push them down and out of the way. The library shelves, carved sturdily from stone, absorbed his weight admirably when she pushed Lucanis back into it. Sometimes, she wished she was just a little taller, or that she owned any shoes with a heel. It was hard to reach his mouth for kissing without a little assistance.

“Where is everyone?” he asked, shedding three belts in quick succession and starting on the last. 

“Symposium,” she told him. “Compulsory. I waited until they swept for apprentices or we would’ve had company. That’s why we only have half an hour.”

And she was infinitely grateful she’d worn a dress for once. Lucanis was coming straight from a contract, and thus his clothing would take significantly more work to get off. She couldn’t complain, though; it’d been nearly a month since she’d seen him and he’d have to go straight back to Antiva from here. She was fortunate they had even this long. 

Climbing to her own quarters would have taken too long, and she’d been content with catching up in a crypt while they’d waited for the library to clear out. He’d given her the wide bracelet she wore on her left wrist now, malachite beetles inlaid with gold. She’d given him wyvern venom enchanted with a potent paralysis spell, just in case his target had built up a resistance. It was tucked into the bandolier on his belt now, discarded amongst the others on the library floor. It was gratifying that he’d seemed to appreciate it—his thanks had been enthusiastic enough that they’d wound up, well, here. 

It was unfortunate that she held the Necropolis too sacred to do this in the crypt because they probably would’ve had a little more privacy. Ah, well; she’d have to thank Emmrich later for holding a symposium at such a convenient hour. Sex in the library was so much better than no sex at all. 

As she thought so, Lucanis’s sword belt fell to the floor. In an instant, he’d gathered her up into his arms and reversed their positions. His mouth was—she’d missed kissing him so much. She’d gone much of her life not doing it or thinking about it at all; it seemed ridiculous that she would feel the absence of it so keenly now. It was not something she could understand through logic, so she’d stopped trying. 

There was something disarming about the way he sometimes curled his hand around the back of her neck, as if she was something precious, something that must be held carefully. Nothing else in the world—no accomplishment, no heady wine or hard-won victory—ever made her feel the way she did when he touched her. It wasn’t even the sex she needed, it was just—being near him, feeling his hands on her skin. The need was as urgent as breathing. 

His hands slid up her thighs now, pushing the dark fabric out of his way with agonizing care. Lenore had wrapped her legs around his back for stability, but she shifted them enough for him to move the skirt out of the way. All that remained between them was a thin, unfastened layer of leather. So very little was left to separate them.

“Are you ready?” he asked, and tipped his head so his kisses fell over her exposed collarbones. Lenore squirmed against him, half-laughing. 

“Ready? I’m melting,” she told him, and made a soft, wanting sound when his hand slid between them to trace the length of her. She loved the quiet Antivan curse he mouthed against her skin, the devastating care present in every touch, the heat of his skin, the—

She loved him. She loved all of him. 

Lucanis removed his hand from her waist and looked up—presumably to find a spot to brace against. Slowly, his eyes focused on something to the left of her head. Oh, dear. There were spiders and wisps and things in here sometimes. Had one of them crept closer? She turned her head to look where he did and smiled. 

Ah. No, not a wisp or a spider at all. 

“The Ways of Wyverns: Provincial Folklore and Mythology,” Lenore read aloud. 

Lucanis cleared his throat, glancing at her and then up again. 

“I don’t suppose I could…borrow that? Return it to you later?” he asked. 

“Enchanted, I’m afraid,” she told him sympathetically. “Whole section is. We’ve the best research collection on monster hunting here, all donated by a foremost Nevarran scholar on the subject. There’s a standing bounty for any copies of a lot of them and they’re only lent out on special occasions. After the third or fourth theft, they took measures. Nothing from the collection leaves the Necropolis.”

Absently, she reached over her head and slid the volume free, propping it on her exposed thigh. 

“Oh, I’ve read this one,” she told him. “It’s actually rather interesting. The folk in rural Orlais have all these elaborate traditions around wyvern hunts. There are altars and rituals associated with them, even given how dangerous wyverns can get when fully grown. One of the families even…”

She trailed off, abruptly aware of the position they were in. Half-naked in the arms of the man she loved and hadn’t seen for a month and she was telling him about wyvern hunting traditions in Orlais. How were things like this always happening to her? It was nearly as bad as the time she’d had to stop touching him so she could coax a freshly animated skeleton to leave her quarters. 

“Go on,” Lucanis said, angling his head to look at the book. “What do they do? I have heard about the hunts, but I have never seen this—” 

Lenore snorted, then laughed, moving the book out of the way so she could press her face into his half-exposed shoulder. For a moment, laughter overtook her and she was helpless to explain herself. 

When she gathered herself at last, she lifted her head to look at him. Already, she could see the shift in his expression. It was the same one she felt herself. It hardly mattered that they’d been waiting to see each other for a month or that they had very little time before he would leave again. The idea of sitting propped in his arms while they read together was every bit as attractive as making love against the cold bookshelves of the Grand Necropolis. 

Actually, it sounded more attractive than what they were doing. Her hip was starting to hurt and the shelves really were frigid. This had seemed a lot more spontaneous and romantic than it actually felt. Ah, well. One fantasy punctured by reality, one likely realized—if he felt as she did. 

“You are perfect,” she said, and unwound her legs from his back. “Why don’t we read this together instead?” 

“You’re certain?” he asked, setting both hands on her hips. He was frowning, as if trying to work something out. “You don’t want to…?”

“I’m certain if you are,” she said, still half-laughing. “But only if you stay close to me. I’ve missed having you close enough to touch.”

“I was going to say the same to you,” he told her, dipping his head to kiss her again. 

He really did feel perfect, she decided happily, sliding down his body. She could see her underthings just behind him. If she hurried to get them back on, they might make it through two or three chapters before their time was up. Last week, she’d even found an inordinately large chair near this section, one big enough for two if the two were comfortable with each other. 

They passed nearly an hour together in the quiet library, Lenore snuggled back against his chest while he paged through the volume on wyverns. At intervals, Lucanis would set the book down to exclaim over some piece of trivia and Lenore would respond with other things she’d gleaned from the library. 

“Why do you know so much about wyverns?” he asked her after one such moment. 

Lenore, now fully clothed and comfortably ensconced between his chest and the arm of the chair, grinned at him. 

“Why do you think?” she asked him. 

Lucanis set the book face-down on her lap, which covered his. 

“You read this for me?” he asked, reaching for her face. Rook pressed her cheek against his palm, closing her eyes. 

“When I miss you, sometimes I come down here and read about them. I think about which things you’d like, what I ought to tell you later. I have a list somewhere. Under a book in my rooms, probably.”

“You—” 

Lucanis cut himself off, surging forward to kiss Rook. Carefully, he lifted both hands and cradled the base of her skull, holding her exquisitely still. His lips moved against hers, delicate at first, as if conveying some unspeakable emotion. Slowly, he leaned into her, pressing his cheek to hers. Lenore’s hands slid down his shoulders, touching the leather below, the criss-crossing belts, the vee of bare skin below his throat and above his heart. She’d grown accustomed to the soft brush of his beard, the way he angled his lips against hers, and she cherished it all. 

How horribly she’d missed this while he’d been away. She’d never truly understood how lucky she was to always have him near the Lighthouse. Being with him, especially like this, felt right in a way she had no means to articulate. 

For long, sweet moments, he simply rested against her, their lips pressed softly together. When he pulled away at last, it was only far enough to rest his forehead against hers. 

“You think of me,” he said at last. 

“Of course I think of you. Both of you. I’ve boxes of things for Spite to smell and touch too, if we have time. When we have time.” 

He touched her face, tracing the angle of her jaw and the curve of her cheek. He didn’t move away from her. 

“I want to stay,” he said. “For tonight, at least.” 

“Don’t you have to go back to Treviso?” she asked him. The lines beside his eyes deepened. 

“I can send word that I’ve been delayed. It will give us until dawn at the earliest.”

Lenore leaned back, studying his face. They both knew who’d demanded he return as soon as this contract was completed. It was the same person who’d chosen contracts increasingly far afield. Any contract would do, so long as the fee was paid and the target was far away from Nevarra. 

“I can’t ask you to do that,” she said at last. 

The book still rested on her lap. She flipped it closed to protect the pages, leaving a finger tucked into the edge to save their place. 

“You don’t have to ask,” he said. 

“Lucanis, I don’t…” 

Didn’t what? She wanted him to rest in her bed, to read with her, to be there when she tracked down that list of things she’d wanted to tell him. How could she say no to any of that, especially when she’d rather his grandmother trip into a canal than get to have him back? 

And it was precisely that—the animosity between her and Caterina Dellamorte—that meant she was reluctant to be the one who asked him to stay. His family was everything to him; it was not a bond she would test for her own gratification. 

“Do you want me here, Rook?” he asked, resting his hand over hers on the book. 

“Of course I do.”

“Then I will stay,” he said. “We can take this book to your rooms. Finish what we started.”

Yes. Oh, she wanted that so badly that it almost hurt to imagine. She’d resigned herself to sleeping alone already, had braced herself for the pain of curling up alone in her bed after having him for so brief a time. 

Solitude still came more easily to her than company. That was what she told herself when he was gone, anyway. It was easier to tell herself so than it was to admit that it cost her something vital every time she left him at the eluvian to Treviso. 

Endearments did not trip easily from his tongue, and she would have accepted them with just as little grace if they had. Long experience had taught her that there were other words that amounted to the same thing. 

“Lenore,” he said quietly, and brushed his thumb over her cheek. “Lenore. I would always wake with you if I could.”

“I know,” she told him, and slid from his lap so he couldn’t watch her gather herself. “Come on. If we stay up late, we can finish this in my rooms.” 

Already, there were voices at the doors to the library. The symposium must be done, later than expected. No doubt, she would hear the broad strokes of it tomorrow. If not, she’d get the tale from the one who’d led it. Catching up would keep her busy, and that would be good. 

But—none of that had to matter right now. Corpses and spirits and necromancy could wait for tomorrow. Right now, she had a book to read and an assassin to hold. 

The voices drew closer. As if he did not care whether or not they saw, Lucanis took her hand and kissed it slowly, one knuckle at a time. It had been the first place he had kissed her and the gesture, no matter how briefly it was performed, always did something funny to her knees. When he was done, he did not let her go. His thumb ran over her knuckles instead, back and forth, as if reminding himself where they were. 

Lenore swallowed around the tightness in her throat and hurried toward the exit. Every moment of happiness they’d ever had together had been carved from a universe that didn’t want to share. This would be no different than any of those other moments. They had a whole night ahead of them—eons and eons of time stretching out before her, so much more than she’d thought she would have. She didn’t want to waste a second thinking about his inevitable departure, how he would turn to look at her one last time before he stepped through the mirror to the Diamond. 

No. Instead, she would think about…about wyverns. 

As long as he was with her, as long as she could feel him near, she was satisfied.

[sanwaldeen]

Neruda: A Passion for Life

New Post has been published on https://sanwaldeen.com/journal/2020/03/11/neruda-a-passion-for-life/

Neruda: A Passion for Life

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Read­ing a biog­ra­phy is always an unusu­al expe­ri­ence; to think that a per­son­’s entire life can be churned into a dense col­lec­tion of words and fold­ed between two pieces of cheap paper, even a life as event­ful and dra­mat­ic as Pablo Neru­da’s. It is an expe­ri­ence that is both hum­bling and unnerv­ing, for it makes one reflect on one’s own life.

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Pablo Neru­da was born Ricar­do Eliecer Nef­talí Reyes Basalto in Par­ral Chile, where “the vines curled their green head of hair.” His moth­er died two months after his birth; her grew up with his grand­par­ents; then lived whit his step­moth­er; went to San­ti­a­go for col­lege; joined the gov­ern­ment so he could trav­el; trav­eled to Ran­goon in Bur­ma; then India, before remov­ing to Spain where he helped refugees escape to Chile from Fran­co’s fas­cist regime dur­ing the Span­ish civ­il war; went back to Chile; was exiled for his com­mu­nist ideals poems and writ­ing; lived as a fugi­tive and returned to Chile a hero; died in Chile because of can­cer, dur­ing a U.S. spon­sored mil­i­tary coup that end­ed up tak­ing thou­sands of inno­cent lives and placed a dic­ta­tor in office that was two rule Chile for over a decade.

Through his life, Neru­da taught me what being an artist means:

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The qual­i­ty and tex­ture of his work was per­pet­u­al­ly chang­ing. He kept play­ing and exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent styles, tech­niques, and ideas, mak­ing the entire body of his work rather uneven. Crit­ics hat­ed this, but Neru­da did­n’t care. Sepul­ve­da, the best-sell­ing Chilean nov­el­ist even wrote:

” I share Borges view of Neru­da that he was uneven. All poets are uneven, of course, but Neru­da’s poet­ry under­went some pecu­liar leaps. How could the same man write both “El hon­dero entu­si­as­ta” and the “Odas ele­men­tales?”

To me, this will­ing­ness to exper­i­ment and con­tra­dict him­self is pre­cise­ly the rea­son Neru­da’s work is so refresh­ing. He was­n’t afraid to dis­prove or ques­tion him­self ide­o­log­i­cal­ly or styl­is­ti­cal­ly, despite his fame. His con­stant play and exper­i­ment are pre­cise­ly what enabled him to go from writ­ing poems of love to start­ing a rev­o­lu­tion.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row unlock_row_content=“yes” row_height_percent=“0” back_color=“color-914157” overlay_alpha=“50” gutter_size=“3” column_width_percent=“100” shift_y=“0” z_index=“0”][vc_column column_width_percent=“50” gutter_size=“3” overlay_alpha=“50” shift_x=“0” shift_y=“0” shift_y_down=“0” z_index=“0” medium_width=“0” mobile_width=“0” width=“1/1”][vc_single_image media=“90743” media_width_percent=“100”][vc_custom_heading heading_semantic=“h6” text_font=“font-767115” text_size=“bigtext” text_weight=“100” text_color=“color-200557” separator=“over”]“This is the poet­ry we should be after, worn away, as if by acid, by the labour of hands, impreg­nat­ed with sweat and smoke, smelling of lilies and of urine, splashed by the vari­ety of what we do, legal­ly or ille­gal­ly. A poet­ry as impure as old clothes, as a body, with its food stains and its shame, with wrin­kles, obser­va­tions, dreams, wake­ful­ness, prophe­cies, dec­la­ra­tions of love and hate, stu­pidi­ties, shocks, idylls, polit­i­cal beliefs…“1[/vc_custom_heading][vc_column_text]

Per­haps that is as true for life as it for poems.

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He was poor for the major­i­ty of his life, even when he became a famous and suc­cess­ful poet. The neces­si­ty of liv­ing-pay­ing bills. Rent­ing an apartment—that was paid for by his “day job” as a sen­a­tor. A posi­tion he hat­ed for the major­i­ty of his life. But he did­n’t let the mun­dane reg­u­lar­i­ty of dai­ly life get to his cre­ative spir­it. He con­tin­ued to write, exper­i­ment and read every day just to keep his soul nour­ished. Even when he was a fugi­tive, he con­tin­ued to write in dark clos­ets and unlit spaces, let­ting his words con­vey the light.

He stood up for what he believed in, even when it means that he would lose his job and free­dom. He died a dis­il­lu­sioned man; as a com­mu­nist, he was shocked when he learned about Stal­in’s crimes and hav­ing seen the effects of the US inva­sion of Latin coun­tries and Viet­nam (direct­ly or through proxy) made him wary of cap­i­tal­ism. Despite the dis­il­lu­sion­ment from pol­i­tics, he kept fight­ing for the rights of every­day work­ers till his dying breath. Even when it meant going to jail or fac­ing tor­ture. Neru­da nev­er sac­ri­ficed his ideals.

Even at the low­est points of his life, he nev­er lost the pas­sion for liv­ing. He kept throw­ing par­ties and meet­ing with friends, even when he was in dan­ger of being thrown in prison He did­n’t let fear con­quest his life or art.

He had an exten­sive library col­lec­tion and loved to read. But he was­n’t read­ing books on about books; he was read­ing to be inspired. At the cer­e­mo­ny at the Uni­ver­si­dad de Chile on 20 June Neru­da exclaimed: ‘I’m not a thinker, and these col­lect­ed books are more rev­er­en­tial than inves­tiga­tive.”

He learned ear­ly on in his life to look at the world through sym­bols. Grow­ing up in a pio­neer town where no one spoke the same lan­guage, the shops around him were strewn with sym­bols instead of words. So instead of see­ing J.B Hard­ware com­pa­ny, you would see a giant ham­mer; a cob­bler’s shop would be rep­re­sent­ed with a shoe; and so on. The world around him was all rep­re­sent­ed in sym­bols rather than words, much like his poet­ry.

He nev­er lost his sense of play­ful­ness and humor. As he was flee­ing Chile on a horse, cross­ing the moun­tains while every cop in the coun­try look­ing for him, he saw a tree and was inspired to write a note to his hunter:

“How good the air smells In the Lilphela Pass Because the shit has not yet arrived From trai­tor con­soles Videle’s ass.”

He loved writ­ing and cre­at­ing art for art’s sake. Of course, he enjoyed fame and lav­ished in it; but at the begin­ning of his writer’s life, he had to fight his father and alien­ate him­self from his fam­i­ly to pur­sue art. Lat­er on, peo­ple tried to box him as a “love” poet or a “rev­o­lu­tion­ary” poet but he still kept evolv­ing and chang­ing; even when the crit­ics wrote about how ter­ri­ble his work was. He kept his eyes on his writ­ing.

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Neru­da’s favorite col­or was green. He thought it was the col­or of hope and life. And so, he always wrote in green ink. His life, like there col­or green, has giv­en me hope. Hope that despite all the chal­lenges that life throws at us, we need to keep the child in our­selves alive and keep mov­ing for­ward, with courage and love.

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