View Single Post
Old 04-13-2011, 02:55 PM   #192
Anguirel
Byronic Brand
 
Anguirel's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The 1590s
Posts: 2,825
Anguirel is a guest of Tom Bombadil.
"I was a great actor once, working with the greatest company in the history of Gondor! I had it all, and by the Valar I will rise again!"

It was a noteworthy outburst, Sador thought, from the sitting position in the corner back to which he had retreated after his abortive appeal to the players' sense of dramatic integrity. Surprisingly one of them, the ox-headed sot, no less, had apparently taken his advice to heart, but only as an exercise in self-aggrandizement, followed by a none-too-valiant retreat. Ah well, it was something of a relief to have one fewer overexcited, uncouth brawlers in proximity to him...but now it was Aldarion's turn to perform, it would seem, and he was declaiming with a passion which had been quite absent from his tone while they merely bandied the girl's name...

Had Amlach not said it was in the role of Ar-Pharazon, Sador reflected, that Aldarion had been 'discovered' by the world at large? There was something a little like the golden king in his tone now, or even, perhaps, more sinisterly hubristic, in his dark vow to "rise again". Even more intriguing to Sador was the unmodulated respect, almost yearning, with which Aldarion referred to the Swan Players as "the greatest company in the history of Gondor"; it contrasted easily enough with the touchy playwright's reference to his current troupe as a "work in progress".

He speaks of the Swans as an Elf does of the Hither Shore...it is even as I hoped. He longs to return to his true peers, and we shall test yet what he shall and shall not do to fulfil that wish...

The Variag gentleman, or whatever he was, was now honouring Master Aldarion with some even more intemperate language about the bodily functions of yrch. Wonder how he got to know so much about them, eh? But much as before, Sador found himself impressed despite himself with the pithiness of that foreigner's rhetoric. The fella sure knew how to frame a dichotomy, and seemed to have left Aldarion so speechless that he was trying to catch words out of the air by opening and closing his mouth. It struck Sador, quite pleasingly, that at this unfortunate moment the handsome player resembled no one so much as his slow-witted elder half-brother, Lord Ecsichil, trying to make conversation on a bad day and ending up catching flies in his tonsils...

But the smart young nobleman's cogitations were interrupted by the unexpected apparition of cold steel, which caused him to seek strictly temporary sanctuary beneath the table.
Anguirel is offline