Re: second class smoking room
Going? The coal of his head turned heavily, slowly, painfully; the cracked silt of rock a burst along his neck. Old gods died without words, dreamed in prophecy and Hephaestus was old god and witless joke, cuckold’s horns worn high by the man who spun crowns like sugar, drew metal into twisted shapes it could not dream of for itself? The carpet beneath his feet began to smoulder, smoke like the end of so many cigarettes and glow like dull embers. Cigarettes; Hephaestus leans into the back of the chair and he noticed not when that began to smoke too, beneath the powerful breadth of his forger’s shoulders, bearing up bravely beneath his weight. There was enough smoke, thin and artificial, nothing of fire, of magna’s gorge, gathered together in a place that heat simmered over skin like hammered copper, a thin mimicry of the forge and of home. Even a cuckold hangs up his horns at the end of the day and Hephaestus is man as any of them.
He studied the stranger, the one who did not balk and he looked for ridicule and rapture in equal measure, the torturous laughter memory could not take, milky Lethe promised to soothe but the water that batted the sides of the boat was no Lethe, no Tarturus and lacked oblivion. His eyes were black as coals and his pupils the amber of flame and he looked at the glasses without recognition. They are wrapped thickly, tied together without forgery and a god that stirs substance as if it were liquid knew only that if the two pieces were metal they could be bound together without aid.
He was no prince. He was given a courtesan, a whore and a princess in a woman for a wife but that put no crown upon his head and made him but the long-suffering end to a joke. He was no prince and he saw no crown upon the head of his companion but he stared whilst the carpet smoked.
“Going?” His voice is hoarse, smoked vocal chords and graveled words. “I am staying.”