Wednesday September 25th, 2019

The exercise:

Write about something that is: bittersweet.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Aha, you avoided all my suggestions from yesterday and went with the dvandva one instead... I approve!

Bittersweet
Hermes, said Death wordlessly, specifically in his role as Hermes Cthonicus. At the moment though he is persistently invoked as Hermes Trismegistus and the Accords are clear that the power to command me belongs to a specific form alone. He does not count as alive for now. Xipe Totec, the Flayed One, is second, and he currently sleeps in the Southern Hemisphere. Thirdly is Osiris, who is once again separated into several pieces and scattered about the world. If I were him, I would seriously consider a divorce. And fourthly is Cerberus, who is alive and living at my residence.
Cerberus is a dog, said Cernunnus, his mental voice shaded with both fear and anger.
To probably the same extent that you are a stag, said Death calmly. I did not write the Accords. You were there, you are capable of remembering if you choose. I was bound by the Accords and you all agreed that it was right and proper that I should have no choice in how I was bound.
And now you’re asking us to consider if we made the right choices. Cernunnos’s mental voice went flat and quiet.
I would say that I’m asking you to look over the Accords and check what loopholes have been found since they were written, said Death.
You mean like Cerberus having the power to command you, and essentially being owned by you? Cernunnos still couldn’t quite keep his fear of dogs out of his mental voice. That definitely sounds like a loophole to me.
If it were important, I wouldn’t have told you about it, said Death. His bony jaw gaped in what might have been a smile. Cerberus can command me in the matter of deaths of animals. There is still a remarkable amount of latitude there, but you all here, who wrote the Accords, would struggle to use that against each other. The Infanta, on the other hand, seems more like a grenade painted white and dropped into a bin of golf balls.
The noise of argument swelled then, and the two incarnates dropped their conversation, Cernunnos to think about what he’d just been told and Death to gaze across the long hall with empty eye sockets and use all his senses to consider who might be acting out of character, or looking unduly nervous. The growing and bittersweet realisation that someone might be planning to use the Infanta to murder one of them was causing a lot of nervousness however, along with mild excitement that this option existed at all and might be available to each of them eventually as well.

Marc said...

Greg - :)

I quite enjoyed the silent conversation in this one. And that final paragraph is... I think 'unsettling' is the word I'll go with.