 but if you have what it takes to return to where all the world knows your name,
then que sera, let's go sailing on
Mallos rolled his eyes expressively and sank back into his chair when Arthur started speaking. The images of Lorraine looking bedraggled had to have worked - the king was just putting on a face, he was sure of it. So, he put on a face of his own: while inwardly listening attentively, outwardly he lounged back in the chair, pulled his phone back out of his pocket and started flicking through the apps with a bored expression, giving the impression of not listening at all. The outward, overtly childish display was intended to annoy more than anything else. If Arthur was annoyed, he was more likely to slip up. Anger and ire were much more difficult emotions to contain than joy or mirth, which was why Mallos usually chose to provoke the former instead of the latter. Additionally, my consciously adopting a childish position, it encouraged the other person to adopt the position of the parent. In his role as a parent, it was much easier for Arthur to lose his temper than in his role as a king, and he had the freedom to express himself more around a harmless child than around a professional ambassador. This same trick worked a treat on Tsi, but it didn’t seem to have much of an obvious effect on the king.
He adapted his expression slightly when Arthur said that his job wasn’t to sign papers, altering his facial features to show a mild surprise. There was a subtle insult there if Arthur cared to pursue it. Unfortunately, he didn’t.
Mallos kept his eyes on his phone, and it took every ounce of willpower he possessed to maintain his expression and not fidget. Tsi could have said the same thing to no effect - and had said similar things - but coming from Arthur it hit at a personal level. The emotions that came with it were mixed and complicated.
Firstly, there was a rather self-righteous sense of annoyance. Just like everyone else in the world, Arthur assumed that divinity was easy. In reality, weeks and months of hard work building a ship were nothing compared to the centuries of sweat and toil it had taken to get to the point where he could build something in the blink of an eye. If he could do it so well, so effortlessly, it was because he had already put the effort in over the thousands of years he had been alive, and millenia of work had paid off. Belittling that was the same as belittling the ship-builder after he had built a fleet and retired. Magic wasn’t static, either - Mallos was still learning new forms of magic, still faced problems with control whenever his emotions overpowered his will, and still had to develop and practice the skills that he had. It was the same as any trade or skill.
Almost immediately following the irritation was a very rare, uncharacteristic sliver of self-doubt. Yes, he had worked to get where he was now - but Mallos had never had to work that hard at anything, and he’d always succeeded at anything he put his mind to. He didn’t know what failure was. He certainly didn’t know what it felt like to have someone take away his achievements and stamp on them, because nobody who dared to try ever succeeded or lived long enough to enjoy their success.
Or did he? Subconsciously, Mallos selected the gallery app on his phone and flicked through the images there until he found the ones of el Alhambra, the Moroccan palace in Granada under which he had been imprisoned for a thousand years. Gwythr had taken his magic, his pendant, his memories and a part of his soul and left him there indefinitely in the darkness. He’d re-written his identity, and Mallos had emerged to find that his position as a god of mischief had risen to a god of evil. And, in spite of what he’d always believed about himself, he cared about that. He cared that people thought he was a dictator, murderer and rapist.
‘That was different,’ he flicked past the images of the Alhambra as quickly as possible. ‘Taking someone’s identity isn’t the same as taking an achievement. And you can’t rebuild a reputation as quickly as you can a ship.’
That might have been enough to override the self-doubt, if Arthur hadn’t then pulled the d-word.
Right after calling him friend, too.
Later, when he was out from under the stone grey stare and had the time to analyse the conversation logically, Mallos would appreciate that that sentence had been geniusly constructed. Outwardly there was no change, but inwardly it had exactly the desired effect. He’d heard the repercussions of your actions line more times than he could count, but the last time he’d earned vocal disappointment from a friend had been from Aura over a millenium ago - and Aura hadn’t been nearly as good a wordsmith or conversation strategist as Arthur was. With a relationship as brief as theirs, Mallos might have been tempted to consider it irreparable - but Arthur had reinforced the friendship with his choice of that word, while simultaneously forcing him to face the problem. Mallos navigated his misdemeanours by not caring about what the vast majority of people thought of him, and avoiding the negative reactions from the small minority he did care about. If this matter had stayed with Tsi, Mallos would have avoided Arthur and the rest of his family anyway until the fuss had died down; coerced into this present situation, he now couldn’t take extreme avoidance measures by convincing himself that the relationship had broken down. For the first time in a long time, he had to think about what he’d done and the effect it had had on people he cared about.
And that was hard.
He would have found an excuse to leave, except Tsi had warned him that if he tried anything, he’d have to face his original punishment instead.
Empathy wasn’t something Mallos was used to feeling, but in this case it wasn’t hard to reverse the roles. He and Arthur both held positions of protective authority over their own people; it didn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to suppose would it would feel like if Arthur made him look incapable in front of his followers. Ever since Aura died, Mallos had found that the nagging question of whether he actually was capable of protecting people he cared about was returning with all too much frequency for his liking.
Somewhere deep inside, mingled with the feelings of annoyance, defensiveness, self-doubt, empathy and the desire for avoidance, the little candle of shame was tempered by an increasing sense of frustration. Frustration at himself, Arthur or the world in general, Mallos didn’t know. All he knew was that he wanted out of here.
Kraar provided the perfect distraction, and the minute Arthur clicked the door shut behind him Mallos threw his phone across the room. It hit the bookshelf and smashed, but almost immediately re-assembled itself and flew back into his hand. He set it down on the arm of his chair, then transferred it to the other arm, then onto his knee. After a second, he picked the phone up again and threw it repeatedly up into the air, catching it with one hand while he pushed his other hand through his hair.
‘I knew there was a reason I didn’t have mortal friends.’ Immortal, divine friends never cared when their stuff was ruined, or said things like I doubt I can make you understand what it was like to be like them, because he already knew.
By the time Arthur returned, Mallos had reverted to his original position. The only indication that he had moved at all was his hair, which was slightly rumpled from running his fingers through it.
Arthur avoided looking at him, which was fine by him - Mallos was only following events out of a growing suspicion that whatever was going on with Morgana was going to have something to do with him, otherwise he’d be avoiding looking at Arthur too. His expressionless, black eyes flicked between the raven and the king, finally settling on the latter when Arthur pulled out the goblet. There was a moment of silence when Arthur made his final statement, in which Mallos glanced at Kraar again and then out of the window, where snow was just beginning to fall again. It didn’t take a genius to make the deduction.
“Nooo way,” he said incredulously, dropping all pretense of boredom. “I’m allergic to ice.”
There was no way on Shaman that anyone was going to get Mallos out there to dig out snow by hand. That’s why magic existed. The Spaniard folded his arms slowly and gave the goblet a pointedly defiant look, indicating that he had no intention of giving up his divinity any time soon. And there was no chance in hell of Arthur forcing him to.
The atmosphere in the room changed as completely as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over its occupants. Mallos didn’t need facial expressions or body language to resonate feelings - when his guard went up, it was indicated plainly enough by the shift in his aura. Sperantia, who had thus far been wholly absent from proceedings, connected to his mind straight away to demand to know what had happened. While she sifted through his recent memories, he regarded Arthur with an expression more akin to the one he had used when they’d first met than any occasion since.
The second-to-last time Mallos had lost his magic, it had been forcibly repressed and he’d been thrown into a millenium-long prison of darkness and solitude while his enemy masqueraded around with is identity. The last time he had lost his magic, it had been his punishment for escaping and trying to prevent that same man from destroying this very world. Arthur, who called him friend, had just asked of him what Gwythr had taken.
‘Alright,’ Sperantia spoke decisively into his mind, as she always did. Her self-assuredness, usually annoying, was oddly comforting while his own emotions couldn’t sit still. ‘I don’t agree with this either, and I don’t think Arthur has really considered what he’s asking. But, I also don’t think he or anyone else had a chance of knowing how you would feel about it when you don’t open up to them. You’ve never talked to Arthur about what Gwythr did to you personally, have you?’
‘That’s my right,’ Mallos thought back furiously.
‘Right,’ Sperantia’s voice was grim. ‘And when you break the rules, it’s their right to punish you any way they see fit. If Tsi is using Arthur to get to you, you’re going to have to change something. If not your behaviour, then you’re going to have to break off the friendship with Arthur or let him get close enough to understand you better.’ She paused. ‘It’s a bit late for any of that right now, though. Right now you’ve got to make a choice: is giving up your magic for one afternoon worse than spending twenty years on your own? Tsi said if you don’t accept Arthur’s punishment, you’ll be sent back to him.’
‘Arthur wouldn’t send me away for twenty years,’ he responded defiantly, but Sperantia latched on to the unsurety in his voice.
‘You need to gauge, right now, if Arthur’s sense of family or friendship towards you outweighs his sense of duty. And you need to be prepared to run the risk of it not if you go down that road.’
Mallos hesitated. His job relied on him being able to gauge other people’s emotions and reactions, and yesterday he would have been certain that his friend would never have sent him into a two-decade exile - for Tristan’s sake if not his own - but today was different. Either Arthur was very good at playing the game, or he had meant everything he just said, in which case Mallos wouldn’t put much past him. There was a chance that he could refuse this punishment and not have to accept the exile, but that was an enormous risk.
And… after everything he’d already done, did he really want to force Arthur into having to make that difficult decision?
An afternoon without magic or twenty years in solitude was a no-brainer, really. But, now realising that he was being forced to accept this punishment, a new and rather more alarming problem was presenting itself.
The last time Mallos had given up his magic, he’d been the only deity (or the only one who had retained his memories of being a deity, at any rate) on Shaman. Now, every single one of his most powerful enemies and rivals was right here on this planet, and the prospect of spending any length of time without divinity with them around was about as appealing as the exile. The originals could sense divinity but not tell who it belonged to, which was why they used the pendants to identify one another. The other originals would know immediately if his divinity was separated from his pendant, and Mallos had no doubt that some of them might come and investigate. Allianah wouldn’t even have to come if he was being sent straight into her territory, unarmed and powerless.
Unless…
No.
‘That’s actually pretty genius,’ Sperantia admitted, peeking at the idea.
No, no, no.
Ignoring the goblet, Mallos slowly reached inside his shirt and pulled out the yellow sun-pendant which he always wore around his neck. The other originals would only know what had happened, and be able to track him, if his divinity and the pendant were separated. If they stayed together…
Something unnervingly close to fear fluttered in the Spaniard’s stomach. In the hands of another, the pendant was more powerful than any amount of magic. The pendant was his identity - his ability to identify himself to others, his ability to communicate as himself, his connection with the council. The deities guarded their pendants closely for a reason - in anyone else’s hands, they could become an exceptionally powerful weapon. Gwythr was proof of that. He might have been able to pull off his insane scheme with only the pendant - he’d just taken the memories and the soul as insurance.
‘You gave Arthur access to your mind,’ Sperantia said quietly, ‘if you can trust him with that, you can trust him with this.’
‘That was two-way,’ Mallos pointed out. ‘I know he won’t touch my mind for as long as I can touch his.’
But what choice did he have? He could either trust his friend, or he could be banned from seeing him for the next twenty years. What was the point of friends if you couldn’t trust them?
Mallos turned the pendant around in his hand for a moment - then, before he could bottle out, he pulled the looped black string over his head and focused on his magic. Sperantia joined forces with him - probably for comfort more than anything else, since he didn’t need her help - and together they forced the divinity out of his body and into the pendant. A warm, yellow thread of light spiralled down Mallos’ arm and into the necklace, which glowed brightly in turn. It only took a few seconds - just a few seconds to sign away his magic. As the last bead of light left his hand and the pendant’s glow ebbed away, Mallos felt the crushing weight of mortality on his shoulders. This was not a feeling he had missed.
He didn’t hand it over to Arthur right away. His connection with Sperantia had faded somewhat, although he could still feel her at the edge of his mind - faint, but there. The originals’ fairy-familiar connection was much weaker than ordinary fairies’, and Mallos usually relied on his magic to bolster his link with Sperantia. Unable quite to meet Arthur’s eye, he frowned lightly instead at the bookshelf behind the desk. The titles on the spines were jumbled nonsense, and he couldn’t pick out the fine details of the texture as clearly as he could a second ago. All of his senses had dulled, and his ability to read in English had vaporised completely. He weighed the pendant in his hand for a moment, before letting it slip through his fingers and taking a light hold of the string instead. Without a word, he reached over and held the newly magic-infused pendant out for Arthur to take.
mallos
there's a wise man in every fool
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