Here come the Comedians - Magnus/Lucrezia/Sinew/any

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

Pathetic;
She had called him pathetic once, years ago, on a cruel, barren spike of that larcenous Mountain. Pathetic, she had called him, because he coveted his valuables so—those heavy, spartan weapons curving back from his forehead, the split, flexible toes and the voltaic promise of his muscles; the cold, riveting feeling of invisibility and the single, deboned wing dragging by his side. All the things he had earned; all the things he had to remind him. “Ah,” he smiles, a reptilian gesture, altogether insincere, “Lucrezia.”

The gift-giver has a nasty habit of letting things leave him without first getting their names—rude on their part, in any case, not to offer.

His lips twitch back as he draws his tongue across his dry, dusty lips. Last they met, she had called him pathetic and he had played a game with her. A game which had not been satisfied at its conclusion with a winner, for the Mountain forces ever downwards, and they broke apart from each other’s orbits to find their naked selves below.
But he had goaded her into playing; into bending but not breaking—he is very good at that.
He had not fed her fear (a remarkable mercy), but she had fed him anger and it had been a enough pleasant snack. “Small world we live in.”

He wonders if she found the things she had lost.
(He had, with no small thanks to his son.)
He wonder if she still blames ‘them’; still holds anger in her heart for ‘them’—the nebulous ‘them’ that she had not identified as her family to him—and that’s well enough, it’s best not to arm him with more information than is necessary when playing his game.

He had expected to come here with Sinew anonymously, in truth, but he sets his grim smile and does not waver. He hadn’t hurt her, right? He hadn’t fed her fear? So this kingdom (so far as he knows) is yet unharmed by him. This, of course, is a consequence he never saw his lifestyle dealing him—he had never really planned to play with others, only startle them a little every once and awhile.

He moves to answer her question, but Magnus’ scent distracts him, curls his lip as he turns those flat, black eyes in its direction. The gift-giver knows weakness—he has worn it, like dirt, over his shoulders; he has spilled it merrily and liberally, on the ground. This man is not that. He is not that in the way his body holds hairless, pink-grey etchings—he is suddenly keenly aware of his own, three knots along the underside of his jaw. He is not that in the way he carries himself. “Magnus,” he echoes, gravelly and low, nodding his heavy head.

One final interruption;
(—he watches her touch Magnus, gently. He watches it with cruel, precise intrigue, but does not waver. He wonders if Sinew has seen it, if she notes it too—if she has the kind of brutal brain that twists love as his does; suspects he knows the answer. It is best, indeed, not to give him more information than necessary.) She offers her name, short and sweet. Ellyse.

“What a nice welcome,” his pleasantries are inauthentic, even as a king he does not try. It is a waste of effort, there has never been a time or place in his life where others could not smell the stench on him, whether it be dirt or rot or stagnation. “My name is Pollock, I'm the king of Pangea,” he waits for Sinew to introduce herself, capable as she is, “we are simply here to introduce ourselves, see what our neighbors are all about. Diplomacy and all of that.” Rubbish.

the gift-giver