The dinner
fairly speaking it didn’t require a perspicuous observer to tell the lady commanded the lord well —— whom here was referred to as the dread, black, muted one, stood in his lesser frame approximately 6’3, a head and more taller than his lady wife who by contrast would gaze and admire his figure with a cold satisfaction: He made a good establishment of hers. She would reach her arms to his, interlocking their arms in a delicate manner where the honorable ownership was presented as lukewarm intimacy, like a bannerless parade displaying a contract relationship. ——Evening, my lady—— a nod, a slip of eye—— my lord. The lady would smile but the lord usually simply nodded or even, according to his current disposition, sidestepped from the intercourse completely, which instance showed its epitome that night when he was held, bound, and dragged by his slender lady wife into the hall with an impassive and pallid face. They were that sort of eye-catcher couple whom almost no participants would brush off unconcernedly, in the dimension of both physique and power dynamism. The lady was delicate and mindful, and her lord was forceful and prepossessing. The usual compliment early in their marriage was “You make a rather dashing match!”, for their harmony was unusual for a combination so apart in their making: that time the lord had made a second term of a Dominion, while the lady was a slave; she being merely a size of an elephant in her larger frame, while her husband the largest dragon the world had known so far. With the lapse of the years and the birth of their child, however, the flattering had then inclined to the lady who formerly had attracted vilification for her birth, of her perfect managing and rule over her husband. Her perception and wisdom overshone his ashen graveness weighed so hard down in recent years that people had to whisper, as a reminder of the objective truth that he too, many years ago was from a meager start, no better, or perhaps even worse than her. Nonetheless hardly were there any guests spoke in his presence. They never quite spoke to him and related the conversation with the lord to be dreary and dreadful. With the conversation being savorless to a degree of taciturn tediousness, they preferred to look at him. That he was a scene to behold, with that figure and visage adored by years instead, more often than not like men in his age to writhe, bloat, and wasted away into bones with fat. He was indeed in good shape and it was proper for his lady wife to feel proud of his outlooking. He was a beautiful piece of the collection, and, above all, he himself seemed to take some pride in so, for didn’t he in that night in TOWER alone look at least six times into the mirroring window for his own reflection, ever so into it? When his wife came and told him the dinner had begun, or, some other ladies and lords would like to talk to him, he gestured a mild rejection by raising his arm, eyes in the window, flickering in vernal bloom, saying, “not now”, or, “You may take the hold if you would like”. She then performed the duty with much gladness as if saying yes, they indeed made a great, fruitful couple.
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The man was avoiding the mirror when the mirror found him. At his age it was impossible to not forget about oneself but to be dissolved into one title after another, one duty linked with another and one atrocity inducing another. When he was avoiding the mirror all things began to reflect: the flame on the candle, the plate on the table, and the lady, who bore the title of his wife. Her eyes and skin too became the mirror, in which he saw a man regretting. Is it possible, the man asked himself by the window, for him to divorce her now? Later when he turned he saw her handle and merge with the nobles and play with duty and power and he knew it was too late. She would never want to leave, having been this high onto TOWER. It was on the highest floor by records on the TOWER, the latest recognized three years ago that the man was standing, pondering and looking out into the darkness but eventually looking upon his own complexion. He almost forgot his own face now, asking himself several times if he had changed that much to the degree of being unrecognizable. But she did recognize me and I recognized her. The voice sounded in his mind when the man reached for a cup but tasted milk from blood——it should be good but he sensed the malice.
“What is this?” The man frowned. He didn’t notice what he drank and there was blood dripping from his lips, fresh and red. The lord from the south, the red and crimson lord who had burning red hair and blue eyes smiled at him from the opposite, knocking his finger knuckle on the table, and sitting by his side was the white lord, with the hair of northern, the sleekness and refinement also derived within, who then laughed merrily. “Young blood, pure and strong.” He introduced. Resting before them was a line of dishes, forming into a lying figure with traces of scales, polished skin, and swelling belly: fillings within.
“The young lord, of a newly defeated clan, my lord. This whole table was made from him. Blood for wine, flesh for meal. Great combination.”
“He had a bigger brother.” The red lord added, “We are just discussing the better disposition. You have only one child, my reverend friend. Do ask if you feel like more. He was stronger. Certainly would make a fine bed.”
The man didn’t maintain well his impassiveness. He clearly abhorred the idea and the manner, his arm stretching out and the chair screeching, such that his lady wife approached him and said:” You are tired.” He looked at her and shook his head slightly, yet she was tenacious. You are tired, said her, gazing into his eyes coldly. She insisted he was tired from the meeting and couldn’t relax himself if more politics was to be discussed at the table that he should dance with her. He tried to reject but it was to no avail. She led him, her tall and silent husband, into the dance floor, remarking on her way that the activity, the dance, was the best one that can be enjoyed in their lesser frame. They laughed and she posed him to accommodate her, perfect as always.
The man was never too good at dancing, with a lack of willingness shading the performance and stiffness in mood besetting the cooperation. Arm round the lady’s waist, he looked as if a reluctant guardian securing the post, each turn and move lagging behind only slightly saving only for the most curious gazer. And as the audience was mixed with the common beholder, the careful watchers and cravers for jesters, there was a wave of admiring, laughing, mocking as well as a certain dose of sympathy. “What a scene. They made a good couple, and she was indeed wise.” ——Such was the comment from the Red Lord who was smiling cruelly. “What a scene!” His companion, the Dominion with white and pale hair sighed heartbreakingly. “Everywhere in the world presents us with a dire shortage of precaution, consideration, and harmony. It would have been much better should they only coordinate with their eyes.”
“You are totally not yourself, my lord.” While spiraling in the ball with her strong and resplendent doll, the lady began, seeking the lord’s eyes but found them fleeing and dodging, “What have you seen today? Was that a lady to your taste who but yet to reject you? I can certainly make an arrangement to guarantee your mutual pleasure.” He had wandered, she pointed out, from noon to dusk, among the herds of women; all the white slaves. He loved white, being delighted even in the sight of her in white, though not lingering long; her white gowns were just not right. “No.” He denied, pursing his lips. “Then what was that for? You were inattentive, dreamy, and half-heartedly distraught. You were not talking, listening, or building any productive relationship, my lord. Aren’t that what we are supposed to do here, today? ”
On the sound of “today”, she turned in his arm, as elegant as a swan. The lord was as muted as ever. She pushed herself, close to him, catching his eye in a way that falcon grabbed a prey. She was to speak, with a flush of blood brought by these salubrious movements of the body on her white skin, and he knew it. He was weak to her words, her thoughts, and her wants so he could only try to intercept them before they lashed out.
“I understand.” The man said. “I am sorry that I have disappointed you.”
She gazed at him, long and hard, eyes quivering under the illumination amid the night. She was close to kiss him but she wouldn’t do it, not now.
“What for?” Whispered lady. “You never disappointed me, my lord. You elevated me from hell and all I ever want to do is to help you. Allow me to do so if you will.”
He wanted to turn. She collapsed herself into his arms so that he had to hold her, swaying with her along to the music and her will; her power over him. “I would not seek another term, nor any position in TOWER.” Eventually, he had to speak, painfully, in a low voice, to which she smiled graciously, clinging to him, flesh warming and soothing. “You are tired. Unaccustomed to a cup of blood when you were expecting the milk. That was your character, my dear husband. You are simply tired.” She concluded in a silky voice. “I will not.” He insisted dimly, to which she chuckled.
“Are you speaking of letting your child ——our child, my lord,” she gazed up at him, “Growing up in a humble environment as we do?”
The lord in red approached when the man was about to say, no, in no sense will the child do in their way; they were so different then, cutting his words into a severance of hands and arms. “May I borrow your lady for a while, my reverend friend?”
The red lord smiled at the lady:” I would be honest to you in admitting I am weak to a lady of power and wisdom——a while.”
The lady and her husband met their gaze for a moment. He nodded and she smiled. She told him to have some rest, even a sleep, here on the highest floor of the TOWER! “You are tired, my lord husband.” She said, assuring him that all his preoccupation with loss was temporal; He didn't know, the lord with black scales didn’t know why she could so easily command his action. He almost always did as she told. Maybe he was simple to manipulate, or maybe she was simply reading an inevitability. It was plausible, for he cannot see, from the air, the gloom and shade on his face that drove the crowd away from him to send him a quiet corner in order to have him bury all the agony in dreams.
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The child——who, much as he would like to and accustomed to address himself, was almost a man on that night of that year when light from the torches was trembling under a curtain of rain falling from the downcast sky, and the executioner squad was slaughtering a house of men and women by the main road they were walking on. They passed them by, those wailing trails of people, covered in mud and blood, elders followed by the younger; the man and his lurywen, in another word, mother , shuffled by the yelling girls dragging on the fingers of the dead. Lurywen, the man said, in his old habit, to look up in search of her then caught none: He was already taller than her. Much taller. To spot her he needed to do otherwise. Looking down, he saw her dreamy and fatigue face, wet with rain, gazing directionlessly into the river of blood and discipline clamoring with the sound of swords and begging of crying.
“Lurywen,” said the boy almost a man, yet with eyes so childish and ignorant, “What is this for?”
There existed no manual in the world that could embrace the principle of the dream design of a being in full. so it was not clear for thorough description to reason out his seeing the dream: Was that because the man had danced with his wife whose dressed flowered in white foam earlier in the night that he dreamed of the woman in white who did not turn to him or maintained any tangible touch with him at this point of his consciousness? Was it because he accidentally tasted a drop of blood that he saw in vision their shoes paddling across the blood in the water? Was the sound of music falling on the floor reminded him of the rain that he envisioned the rainy night of the southern city when he set foot to a grand city for the first time in his life, or was it because he was himself after all, that he would dream the dream, for a thousand of times while he can and he may——he cannot tell. For all the possible reasons the lord dreamt in his slumber, the night he went to the south with his mother, passing by a line of chained people, waiting for death, remebering himself asking the question: Why are they dying, and why are they killing? Did they commit horrible things?
One had what one deserved was the common ground of justification to create a worthy act. It made the dream an ulcer in the mind when the lord ruminated the thought to himself, who sank into the dream painfully; his fingers around his jaw, eyes hiding under a curtain of hair outside the dream when his wife was dancing with the south lord. To believe the blood flowing on the crack of the stone road was to believe on a seal of justice and jury, which on the night when he passed them by, not able to help but to turn back for the view in a shuddering amaze he could not believe, and which on the night of dance and meeting and banquet he still failed to grab.He was never good on abstract, and by the exact same reason perhaps, he had never believed things of the names printed upon the cover and words: nor justice, no revenge, no right and no glory.
He thought no, when in dream he wetted his boot in rain with his mother across the puddle of blood and water once again, and once again also failed to believe there the flowing blood was a token of vendetta or justice; and he thought no in his frowning visage in the shade of night when the banquet continued and his wife was dancing. This was what the dizzy lord on the TOWER pondered to himself in a trance, that young man, on the other hand, felt only stupendously uncomfortable and heavily weary. Leaving the slashing of blood and flesh behind the view retained on and he maintained that it was not an incident; he simply tried to perceive, that what he witnessed that day was no rarity with a texture of familiarity tained from the surrounding, which was instead judged by him as things common, the things of the way here in the city as the rules in nature governed the wilderness.
“Lurywen.” The young man was confused, “Would you please tell me what was that blood and carnage for? Is there anything we can do?”
The mother shook her head, her lips moving. —— She couldn’t answer the reason and the normality of the world. She said nothing, and they moved, under the coat of rain, away from the light. As the road stretched beyond the silence they could keep between themselves, she finally spoke to him.“Your hand, please.” Sinking into the darkness, she asked. When he reached his, She clutched his fingers hard, but her fingertips he could feel were reassuringly soft. Recalling the details, despite muffled by the vagueness of a dream, the lord smiled to himself sorrowfully; thinking, or dreaming, which did not matter then, but back from then, he thought she was at the moment not trying to protect him but the opposite, to seek a protection out of the reason that she couldn’t offer one herself, however she wanted to do. They held hands, treading in the darkness, where he asked where they were heading to.——Where are we going to, mother. He asked, with the sound growing, from a vague phathom covered under dreams, into the sleeping lord’s reality. The music in the dance floor was too rising in a quivering and dangerous beat, in which his lady wife stepping the floor with her clicking heels. He cannot see and he cannot hear. Nonetheless he mixed the signals, as if they were sinking through his ever waking blood, through his non-sleeping heart; Should anyone then be present in front of him, they would notice him smiling, that pair of lips twitching, in a wild, bending pain, yielding to the question, where. His fingertips, by contrast, were harder than stone, cutting into his own skins.
The blood dropped.
“Mother.” He had tried to contrain his disturbance when he failed, exerting force, not very consciously, to halt her from proceeding. “Mother.” He called out again. “Where are we heading?”
The blood dropped. The lord sank his finger blade into his own skin, without control, nor with any choices. The music was drowning in the mirth. “The academy.” Replied the woman, holding his hand, her fingertips tender than the melted swords. The young man raised his gaze in awe and a sense of resistance; the answer of the question manifested itself along side the announcing voice, which, should he suppose now that was almost every man’s reaction to the Academy? Over half of them lost their lives in the place in the first few years; each one survived to the last had killded hundreds.
The scar on the lord’s face was itching to cure; their insatiable appetites for life after life. He never cut deeper than they could heal; She led him through the arch of the academy, and after a long night of walk, the soft and natural light of moon finally shone on her. He smiled, the lord, in his pitch black vision, submerged in dream, to see the white slowly burn. She wore white. He loved white; loved still. His heart pounded seeing that flash of whiteness, bright than fire and nothing ever burned so harsh in his world than the color white. “Academy?” “Academy.” He was amused and incredible, she determined with a soft sigh.
“Congratulations. ” She put the word up; In reality, he sensed, the music was too climbing, with a breath of wind, battering rain on his face. She spoke to him in a rather rigid tone and he wanted say, no, no. Do not do this to me; The rain and wind and winter could be cold. All could be cold. The sword, scale and people’s words. The lord knew the reason of that coldness but he could never understand her rigidness to him, not when her hand was so warm and soft.
“Congratulations.” She said again. This time the voice melted; The music in the hall was on the crest. Soon it would fade. The lord’s wife was spiraling in her mind’s intricacy. She was striving for a treaty or two while he was trapped in a nightmare. “I just——I am so sorry. I am just trying to say I am happy for you, my——”
She inhaled heavily. The woman in white. “I am happy for you. This is the place where you belong.”
The blood dropped, sticky and with the color of deep ink. He had asked where they would be heading, to which she had answered. But he had never been able to ask the lost question: Mother, if this place is where I am heading, and where are you going?
He heard her tongue falter and he saw her tremble; He saw her tremble and he saw her fall. It twitched his complexion, the scene, in the hall when he turned; Are you cold, or are you afraid? Out of a surge of affection, and perhaps for too the failure for his never very able tongue, to ask for sure, only to stammer and hesitated, the young man stepped forward and hugged her, so tight and so close into his arms, where she put her head on the edge of her shoulder and cried; She was not crying very loudly, the lord remembered with sudden and chilling woe, that she was never open for emotion. But he cannot be very sure for it was so long ago and nothing he could be sure of but a dream’s fallibility. Half in grieve, the other in a strange merry; it was true, he nearly laughed to himself, the lord in black, blood in fingers, his wife dancing. It was true, he thought that time, that yes, she was really cold and rigid! But then it would be fine. He will hold her as long as he can and she won’t be cold. So he asked: May I hug you for a little longer？ She nodded a sobbing yes. She can never be warmed but he hold her still.
May I hug you? The lord walked across the carpet and see her tremble and fall. The only difference was on that noon it became a muted question, unable to be declared into reality however his will.
“I will come to see you.” She told him. Not long. He didn’t ask her to promise because he trusted her, otherwise, he would have done so to beg for her coming more. Those days and years, piled to be hundreds after hundreds, he live without her when he was living with a perpetuating blur. He was bewildered by the bizarre in the world, its shapes and its buzzing. He remembered how she faded away that day and the guardian called him in. He waited all night, dull and in an unknown shroud of sorrow, never having left him in the rest of his life; that mist of severance, such that he asked the guardian who spent the night with him about the executioners.
“Why do they do so?”
The man he stayed with mocked his accent and sentences but muted in his build. There were scales on his fingers coiling up like a new shield.
“Child for food, women for slaves, men for breeding. All for life.”
The guardian answered. That was a strikingly correct answer. He was unable to hold himself in his dream; the lord was about to wake. She never returned. That year when he was released from the academy killing dozens of men himself, wondering how to address her of the matter, only to discover there was no necessity: she never did appear again.
“Men for breeding?” The young man was surprised. “Excuse me, sir, I thought only women breed… and how come the dead can breed?”
The Guardian, too, was very surprised. Genuinely. Of course, are men, he looked at him suspiciously to gauge if the boy was trying to make a fun of him. But he was more making a fool of himself struggling so hard in building the reality.
“Women’s corpses are mostly not good for a bed. It produced no fine offspring.” The guardian said. “I mean not to offend, but you speak like an idiot.”
He was. He probably would always be. When he woke, he saw the white blooming in the dance floor; his wife dancing, her face hidden from him. He had hurt himself in the dreams, but none left a scar, only blood congealing on the table. The man told to himself that he could be wrong. But he had to go, if only for once. He could be striding off the gate, or he could be sneaking along the corridor with his conspicuous build. He simply quit the room, leaving his lady wife returning from the ball with only a trace of blood, dark as night.
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