Bottles of wine, covered with dew, and otters

[cleolinda]

I've been sitting on this for a couple of days, but I can sit no more: If there is purpler prose than this, I don't want to know about it. Includes fanart and a dramatic reading.

ETA: In defense of Silk and Steel. In other words, an intentional burst of badfic?

Comments

Thanks for the link!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Here. I'm going to post the first two paragraphs of the first book in the trilogy, so you can get an idea.

If it had not been for the strong arm of Thud Mollockle, the Princess Bronwyn would today be languishing in some unknown and mossy dungeon, had she been allowed to remain alive at all.

Thud was a sarcophagus-maker for a stonecutting firm in the Transmoltus district of Blavek. He worked without assistance in a large, low-ceilinged ground-floor room. Directly above him were the studios of the more skilled stonecarvers, who worked on Church and private commissions. They provided more than a third of the city's architectural decorations: caryatids, capitals, friezes, pediments, cherubim, urns, bas-reliefs and portrait busts, among many other standard and commissioned items. Dust--fine, white, and talclike--filtered through the wide spaces between the boards that formed the stonecarver's floor and Thud's ceiling. When the afternoon or morning sun beamed in through either the southeast or southwest windows this ever-present lithic miasma was illuminated with a milky glow that made it almost impossible to see one end of the shop from the other. Thud was probably doomed to a lingering death from silicosis since he had begun working at the age of six and was now thirty-two. Still, he just as certainly would have thought it unnatural to breathe an atmosphere composed of anything other than ten percent oxygen, fifty percent nitrogen and forty percent marble. All day long Thud could hear above his head the ceaseless, fussy tink, tink, tink of sharp steel chisels.

I can hear the tongue-in-cheek all through that paragraph, and admire the style very much. The scene that's been causing so much sensation is supposed to be mind-altered seduction as seen through the ultra-melodramatic eyes of the King of the Fairies, and I agree that out of context it's easy to misconstrue. (Now, if you don't like the rest of the author's style either, I guess there's not much else I can say. ^_^ )