#where are our women talamasca

[devourcr]

i'm just endlessly hoping we get either jesse or merrick in the talamasca.

[kaelio]

snippet from Dead Gods' Thunder that I liked because hmm where the fuck were you, you little squirt:

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Lestat was in a bind, not long ago—trapped in a mortal frame, held within viscera. I did not intercede. I excused myself; I informed him that my absence was in the interests of his soul, but the truth is, I was distracted and the notion of a soul and its redemption—or the prospect—was but a cold balm that came after. Daniel, my Daniel, had begun to fray the fabric of my love; he plucked at ugly threads. I did what few believe possible; I put another ahead of my infatuation with he who brought the light.

The possibilities are nagging nonetheless. With fetters of Maharet’s make, cords of the daring red we know, Lestat can be held—and this would have been true, too, of the Raglan who inhabited that roguish, reckless form. Raglan as an instrument, Raglan as a tool: so much would have been possible! We could have removed and stored his arms, his legs, his eyes and such, and kept at our disposal—much like the mute Mekare—something powerful of use within the brain. I imagine stables of supple men, of handsome women, of apple-cheeked children, who we by some careful sequence made our modern wardrobe, their skins our many-colored parasols. We breathless dead could paw and play disguised as mortals beneath a blazing, ignorant sun, deep down still far from being human.

The whorehouses of Venice had but one flaw: the women, the men—I held them dear, but they were none I loved. In this fantasy I find the Lestat who would dress me as a doll, carding my hair with warm fingers.

Or I, I alone, could have trapped Raglan and beguiled him. My elaborate visions fail with Lestat due only to their pounding familiarity. Raglan, for his part, knew nothing. I could have ensorcelled him, bade him to any end. I imagine a scheme where Lestat is human, where I am human—where we are human together, husband and wife, husband and husband, wife and wife.

I imagine the souls on the banks of the Glass City, their joy streaming off of them like pennons. I see my mother holding an egg undecorated and intact, its wet iridescence the proof it was that morning newly-hatched.

I see the grief of my Maker, guilty of my life and death no longer. He would cheer for me through tears knowing that, at last, he let me go.

These things are no longer possible. Lestat pulverized the skull and Raglan James is dead now. I monitor the Talamasca, should they ever find another body-thief, but this, I think, will be a while, or it may not come at all. I suspect opportunity is one I may have lost for-ever.

This time I had a child. It changes everything.