Boudika doesn’t know what she had expected of him, when she spoke, when the story bled from her lips like a sacrificial lamb. Her truth. Her story. A confession she had shared with no one else, in all the years since it had happened. Boudika doesn’t even know what she had hoped for, but, whatever it had been had been foolish, and naive, and--

There is another girl. 

It is the last thing she had expected him to say. 

It is the one thing she had not guarded against. 

Why would she? In what world does a sinning monk find not one woman to love, but two? Tenebrae wears scars upon his back where he had been whipped for wanting her; and now, that confession from him seems dual-edged, opaque. Had it been atonement for one sin, or two? 

The softness of her expression, the tears dancing at her lashes, vanish. Boudika steels herself and a hardness comes upon her like a curtain closing. She turns away, unable to meet his gaze. Her thoughts spiral--how could she not have known, or assumed? The answer comes: because you are a fool. 

Whatever else he says, it does not matter. Her mind is filled with the impossible images of something, someone else. What secret intimacies has he shared with her? What delicate secrets, or quiet fables? When he had not been calling at the sea, had he instead been whispering outside of cabins, or forest walls? How many other kisses had he shared, when he had stolen her first? 

I never said I would leave the Night Order for her. 

Boudika’s eyes snap to him. 

There are many types of fire. It was Vercingtorix who told her, once, that love and hate are not so different. The line between them is thin, he had said, and one day she might grow to understand. One day, she might even forgive him. Her eyes are alight with it, with a fury that she has never felt, with a hot branding of betrayal. How dare he. The transgression rips her apart; it flays her with a sudden, unexpected chasteness. No, Tenebrae. I was the fool. 

It is his turn to talk, and talk, and talk. It is his turn to bury himself in sentiment that no longer matters. Boudika listens, but she does not care. Boudika hears, but cannot sympathise. The silence that lasts after his confessions is deafening; it is as if the entire forest has laid down and died right beside her, in the giant aching his truth has produced. His rough laugh strikes her like flint upon stone. 

“How dare you.” Her voice is quiet, at first. It rises a pitch when she repeats, seething: “How dare you.” Boudika’s expression should be as gnarled as she feels inside; but it isn’t. As much as her magic clamours in her soul to become anything but woman, she remains firm in her form. There is a dangerous, deadly calm settling over her expression. “How dare you come to me, confess your love of me, your intent to sacrifice, sitting on a lie like that. How dare you offer to sacrifice something so deep when in the same breadth you’ve confessed such betrayal.” 

His eyes lay claim to her, and in doing it, fans the flames. 

“What does she look like, Tenebrae?” Boudika goads, in a moment of uncharacteristic cruelty. Her features abruptly transform. Ironically, the night gives her power, and her fury fuels it. She goes from herself to a plain chestnut mare, then a gray, a black--she waits until something sparks in his face, and then retains the form of a palomino. Her magic had been begging to be used, stretched; and it stays steady now.  “Like this, is she?” Boudika asks, in a tone like a blade’s whetted edge. 

It is with the palomino’s mouth she speaks, when she says: “You do not know love, Tenebrae. You know want, and hunger. You do not even understand duty, or even discipline.” Then, the palomino’s face is gone: Boudika is herself again. She does not move closer, nor away; her tail does not lash, and her eyes do not spark. “You compare us, as if the comparison is meant to bring me solace. But the truth is for yourself. It is because you want me to say, ‘What an admirable sacrifice you offer, Tenebrae, it rights your wrongs,’ or ‘you must love me so much, Tenebrae, to leave both the Order and another woman.’” Boudika’s mouth twists as a thousand memories contend within her: his admission makes her feel like a girl, a little girl, who had been too trusting. It makes her wish for no heart, and brings upon her shame she has not known in years. At least it had always been just her. At least when Vercingtorix had not kissed her, it had been because he had loved her too much. Orestes had given her herself, a gift she could never repay. And whenAmaroq had left? He had left her with a future. 

But what does Tenebrae leave her with? What has Tenebrae given her? Nothing. Nothing but handfuls of hope turned to shame. Nothing but a feeble hope for more, more, more that now has turned to ash. “You don’t know what love is,” Boudika repeats; at last, the rage is evident in her tone. “First, it is built on truth, and you don't even respect me enough to give me that. No, Tenebrae--you were too much of a coward for that, to face me with your truth, or at least the Order. Instead, you wait for us both to cede to your wants. I won't do that.” It is her turn to laugh, but it is cold and mirthless. Boudika turns away. “I wondered which one of us would lose first, which one of us would hurt the other. You decided that from the beginning though, didn’t you, whenever you began to keep not just one lie, but two? I could accept the Order. I will never accept this. You don’t deserve to look at me.” This last line, Boudika spits. 

That is when she becomes an osprey, a last bubbling of magic that drains nearly all her power from her. It is Boudika’s final insult. You will never fly, it says, and it is why she chose a form he could not follow.

It is also one that does not shed tears. In a last act of pride, Boudika refuses to cry for him. She ascends into the night sky and banks toward the sea, with Caligo's light upon her shoulders. 

"Speech." || @Tenebrae

tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us

these, our bodies, possessed by light

Boudika is water between Tenebrae’s grasping fingers. She is gone before he can even comprehend - not that he had even had her within his grasp. They way she watches him reminds him that she is more than he could ever hope to deserve. Boudika grows dark and hard. The way she watches him is like a wave rearing up out at sea, threatening to break him into pieces upon the shore.  She will turn him into finer sand than the beach across which they just ran. And yet, beneath her rage is a slate-grey sea as unforgiving of his apologies as a slab of concrete to a falling knee. 


Her words cut into him. Boudika flays him open between the trees who stand about them as silent and watchful as a jury. But it is Boudika who will sentence him and he has only eyes for her. No matter how he sees the pain, the fury bloom within her body bright and hot as running lava. She scolds him with her quiet, chilling cold. Her every word cuts him to the quick and he is fast to learn that every bite of the whip, with which he chastigated himself, was a kiss compared to the pain he has caused her and the unremitting punishment of her words.


How dare you… How dare you… Each one is a whip crack upon his soul, his heart. 


How dares he? The young monk blinks and breathes and they are such effort. Always they have fought, always they are touching fighting with words and teeth upon skin. But now, oh now he does not reply. Not even when he longs for her to know that it was never a lie. He love for her was nothing but honest. Every word that fell from his lips - he would leave the Order for Boudika…


Thoughts and words and emotions tangle within him. Tenebrae, young monk of the Night Order, no longer knows who he is. All he knows that his life began with Boudika and it will end with her too. He wonders how it could have happened, how he came to love two women, how it ever came to this. He does not know, he is too foolish, too drunk upon all that he should never have. 


This is why monks should keep their vows. Tenebrae clings to such a thought. He holds it tight within him as treasure. Yet as he watches Boudika, he can never rue the day he first beheld her, looming out of his shadows.


Her ire is sweet upon his tongue. The monk knows its flavour. He craves it, yearns for her violence. But not like this. Not when her agony her fury is caused by a cut so deep to her heart. She transforms, shifting her skin from colour to colour. He watches her with steady, regretful eyes, until, oh until she gilds the moonlight in a gold so brilliant it is more than the sun could ever hope to be. He flinches at the beauty of it. Tenebrae swallows down the shameful stir of want and warm bloom of love that swells within his gut. It is not love in the way he loves Boudika. He knows now, he knows too late. But he feels it, will always recognise it and apologise to Elena for an eternity because of it. 


The Disciple’s flinch is answer enough. His girl- Boudika- knows, though she asks. She need not. Now the kelpie knows the other woman is sunlight-skinned. Tenebrae swallows on an apology for Elena, for what might come her way.


You do not know what love is.


He says nothing, he does nothing. There is no answer he can give her. Not when she solders truths like that deep into his bones. He does not know what love is, except for now and now the time is too late. The monk has been an ignorant fool. 


When had he begun to cry? He does not know but a frantic and dangerous wave of dread rises like a monster from within him. Desperation spills out from his nerves, until grief shakes him like rocks. Boudika transforms, an osprey rising into the sky. 


I will never accept this. You don’t deserve to look at me. She steals his breath from his lungs. He has nothing left with which to inhale. His lungs tremble in their sorrow, they refuse to draw breath and the monk falls to his knees in her absence. Tenebrae tries to breathe, but his fall is worse than that upon the battlefield. What was life without her? What was an eternity unable to look at her again? The last he will ever see of her is the way she rose, a bird, wild and free, leaving him behind.



|| "Speech." || @Boudika

when is a monster not a monster?

oh, when you love it