He should not have come. This is no place for a monk.


Tenebrae skirts the dancers whose silhouettes (framed by fire and moonlight) tangle in songs and delight. Horses pass him in masks made with wild flowers, roots and vines and leaves that still echo the forests from which they were plucked. Eyes gleam bright with the mischief of Night and revelry laughs in the spaces between bodies. 


Conflicted, wounded, the warrior monk makes his way toward the small shrine made to Caligo. It is upon the edge of the meadow with the trees for her cathedral beams and the setting sun for her lamplight. The day dies in hues of bronze, lilacs and burnished gold, crimson bleeds across the sky. If all the woodland is her cathedral tonight, the sky is her stained glass window. Tenebrae stands, bathed within its tumultuous, violent, light. It hurts to look upon it and he wonders if, when the sun at last touches the horizon, the sky will shatter as it turns to smothering black. 


The monk kneels, hard earth beneath his bones. He prays for all the souls who gather beneath Caligo’s emerging moon. He prays for redemption - that she might turn him again from his sins. Yet each word grows a little more shallow and his heart becomes a little more hardened. Darkness hisses in his ears, words that echo sinner! in his soul. The darkness is a lover as it curls about him, shrouding the monk with the gift of Caligo’s magic and yet it parts along his spine, exposing to the night sky (and all who see him) the whip marks that mark him a blasphemer.


He aches with kneeling and with praying, finishing his prayers with an unsettling mix of piety and disinterest. Already his mind is drifting, already it is snagged like a lamb in the thorn bush of temptation. He rises (though he is continually falling from his hallowed place, like an angel from its position beside his god). Like Icarus, Boudika once whispered in his ear. He hears the kelpie as if she is there, as if the darkness veils the crimson of her body from him.


Gluttonous of her, sickened, he turns from the altar and the dark swarms upon him. They hide his silver skin and the half moon sigils of his Order. Only his eyes gleam with light and they grow brighter as his ire builds, as he drinks in the light of the sun. He is a Stallion made to Swallow the Sun, a Disciple! Yet he is as tempted as Adam. His ire builds in the heart of the darkness that shrouds him like armour. It swallows the light around him, feeds into his glowing veins, into the white of his eyes. Light succumbs to his ire as he swallows it down. Darkness blooms about him. Horses part before the monk, before one of Caligo’s Disciples. He moves and still a litany is upon his furious lips. Words pour out as he fills up the empty parts of himself with prayer.


He does not see the girl at first. The girl with her golden skin and wide, keen eyes that drink in the magic of the festival. Tenebrae knows it is a heady wine and her skin seems to glow with the energy of it. It is that which captures the attention of the Disciple. He pauses from where he walks in darkness and wicked, white light. He turns the glow of his starbright eyes upon her. She is as bright as the torches that herald the coming bonfires. Solis’ setting sun halos her, sends sparks along the curve of her perfect plaits and turns them wilder. The night turns her as unkempt as a faerie and then ever wilder, wilder.


“Welcome to Denocte,” The monk says, breathing darkness along the parts of her that glow. He knows she is not of the Night Court, for no girl of night knows the light of day like Elena does. Framed in twilight, liminal and smelling of wild cliff-side flowers Terrastella sings from her sunflower skin.  “What is your name, Terrastellan?” He dares not look at all the ways her body is soft as petals, for all the ways it curves, feminine and alluring. She is bright, bright and by the gods the Stallion is ravenous. Tenebrae keeps his white-bright gaze upon the blue of hers as moonlight and twilight meet in the setting of the sun.


@Elena ~ Please excuse the novel!

 

Would it comfort Elena to know how well she hides her secrets?


As she stands, elvin, in the gloaming her face is nothing but serene. It is porcelain upon which the twilight carves her from moonlight. It paints the careful angles of her face and then sends embers of the setting sun down to illuminate along the angles of her cheeks, her nose. 


The girl turns her face to him and there is no trace of the sorrow and heartache she keeps locked between her teeth and heart. Her round eyes move to watch him, no longer drinking in the scene beyond him. His fills her foreground, the dark of his magic billowing like wings, gathering like ominous clouds in a volatile sky. Yet her eyes find his, yet she smiles and no, still there is no trace of sorrow there.


His eyes illuminate her face in all the places the setting sun does not. The burnished gold of her skin captures it all and burns ever bright. She turns bronze in the sunlight, bronze like Boudika, like the sun that tumbles out of the sky. Tenebrae is ready for it. He waits for the falling of the sun and the endless rise of darkness. 


His prayers dry up upon his lips when she smiles and when she speaks. What use are prayers here? He should chastise himself for such a thought. But there are so many things Tenebrae should be doing that he is not. The tight pull of skin across his whip-scarred spine reminds him. The twinge of skin at his throat where Boudika bit him reminds him of all the things he has done that he should not.


He is a sinner, this man before her and yet she smiles and hides her secrets better than he. There are better things to learn from girls than the soft of their skin and the taste of their lips. They hide secrets better than he and they are enough to tempt a god out of his throne. 


And they want to dance.


Tenebrae has seen the way Denocte dances. He has stepped into the tangle of music and limbs and felt how alien the sensation of dance is across his body. Long has he heard his brothers laugh when their captain likened fighting to a dance. Yet here, when she smiles at him, Tenebrae knows the battle is not amidst the dancers, it is within himself. It is a violent war.


He smiles though he bleeds within, though his skin feels tight across his bones at the idea of dance. He does not know how to move without a sword in his grasp and a foe before him. He smiles and darkness laughs across his lips. “You are not the first to expect a dance from me.” Tenebrae says as he illuminates her with his gaze, sending the darkness of his magic fleeing from where it draws sigils across her face. “I am afraid I must disappoint you. I do not dance.” He pauses and his gaze drifts from her to the altar hidden in the shadow of the forest wall. “I am made for other things, Terrastellan.” And yet -


Please, She says with her eyes still wide, still deeper than any ocean he had dared to stand in. He does not look close into her pool-like eyes for fear of drowning. She is moving, the music there in the bend of her knees and the sway of her shoulders, her hips. She appeals to the night, to a sky too beautiful to allow them to stand idly beneath.


What is the harm?


He follows her with his gaze as she steps beyond him and stands upon the cusp of the dancers, like a girl upon the edge of a cliff, her arms outspread, ready to fall, laughing, into the great open. She hides her wings, Tenebrae knows. Faerie breathes along her spine and chases the words of litanies out of his mind. 


He breathes out and it is as smoke from a dragon’s maw. Darkness curls and drifts out, becoming lost in the shift of bodies. Slowly he lets his gaze return to the girl beside him, “A dance for a name then, but you will have to teach me.”


And the Disciple wonders about all the ways he will discover dancing is nothing at all like fighting.



@Elena ~ 

 


She turns to him, as a flower turning toward its sun (but that is, of course, not what Tenebrae is to her). If he had known what she thinks, that men only lead to trouble, he would have laughed dark as pitch. He only recently told Boudika that women were never, ever, worth it. But every day, every minute that passes and carries him further from his goddess he thinks his words might have been a lie. Ah, such words the three of them were fed: that men were trouble and unsatisfying, that girls were, quite simply, never worth it.


Yet here they are: girl and boy in a sea of the, dancing together, laughing together, caught in revelry together. Maybe they were worth it and maybe all of them were trouble. 


Tenebrae knows nothing of where this fae-girl came from, or how she captured the sun within her skin as she has. He knows nothing of Underworld lands, but if he did, he might wonder if there were gods there who trapped girls with pomegranates too. The only things the Disciple knows of are hours spent in prayer, his forehead bent, pressed upon the cold stone, his knees bruised with his piety, his soul as dark as Caligo paints it.


At last his shadows reach for the girl and Tenebrae wonders why it took them so long. They explore, one moment like fingers and the next like the gossamer of a dream, along the slant of her cheeks, the groove of her throat. He does not dare to think what it might feel like, to touch a girl like that. He has only ever known violence and it is easier that way. That is what he was made for, trained for.


The sun-girl is moving, out from the shadows of his magic, out into the gloaming, out into the galaxy of dancers. With his bright eyes he watches her go. She leads him out to dance amidst the planets, into this place that is like fighting and yet there is no violence here, except for that of the wildness of love and lust; comets colliding, stardust blinding. And these are things he knows so little of, so grounded is he.


The dancer-girl (for she seems to be so many things) asks him what other things he is made for, breathless as she does. What steals the air from her lungs? The night? The stars? The anticipation of dance? The mysteries of girls are as fleeting to him as the breath from her lungs. He does not smile at her but gazes at her, darkness steeling along his cheeks, sharp as a sword. There is nothing soft about him as he stands here in robes of darkness his sigil moons glowing as he swallows the light from her skin. “I am made for gods and suns and war,” the Disciple says upon this battlefield of want and grace and beautiful, melodic chaos. 


He does not smile and this is not the time for it because she is making him move. Her daylight body moves close to his but always there is the gloaming between daylight and moonlight and he steps back. The space between them is liminal, filled with stars and the setting sky. Tenebrae keeps them chaste, for it is all he knows. He stole a kiss once and that was crime enough. The sea beckons him again and it is a weight in his soul, his god-filled soul. Divine deliverance is all that can save him now.


He mirrors her, her hips, her feet, her limbs. It is like fighting and yet the only music is the song of instruments upon the wind. There is no violent clash of metal here. He moves, he dances and he is only a warrior moving with all the learning of battle to sharpen his steps. He is the grace and violence of a swan. Tenebrae moves with her, because of her, until, like the sun loosing her planets into orbit she says with a look framed with dark, burnished lashes, Lead, tell me where to go.


So he does and they move like satellites until the battle ends and then he stops and does not ask how he moved (not when their knees collided, their shoulders, their hips - he would have laughed, if he were not making sure they did not touch again). Tenebrae only says as the music fades, “See? I am made for things more violent than this.” He watches the fire spark along her spine, “You owe me your name now, Terrastellan.”


@Elena

 


His body still hums with the memory of dance. His knees, his hooves, his shoulders and hips still bear the echoes of how they bumped with hers. There is an ungracefulness to his dancing and he recalls it again and again through his body. It is like fighting and yet the soft of her skin is nothing like the cut of a blade or the punch of a hoof.


Tenebrae does not know that as the memory of dance ghosts upon him, the memories of lovers’ touches ghost upon Elena. He has felt nothing like that and dangerous it is to think, even for a moment that he might just wish to. He does and so very quickly, he does not. He wants as men do. He wants as monks should not.


He inhales and she smells nothing like Boudika (with her salt, her sea and wild girl smiles). No, clinging to Elena is the scent of a wild wood, of flowers he has no name for and the incense burning at the festival. Across her skin is the gold of the setting sun, dark and liquid bright. She moves like the lick of a flame and already the monk is burned.


The Disciple breathes in the smoke of the festival, the smell of alcohol clinging to the lips of the dancers who swirl about them. Together they are still as a rock amidst the sea of dancers. Though about them his darkness billows, it swirls as if he and Elena are still dancing, tendrils twining, twisting, tangling. It is not fighting and maybe his shadows learn faster than their master.


She says they are not steel and stone and, “I believe that of you.” The monk murmurs, his voice low and smooth as it cuts through the music. Another song has taken to the night and dancers changed, they move like planets again yet Tenebrae knows Elena is not of the stars but the earth. She is fae- fire and flowers, smoke and laughter. She is the point where Dusk and Night meet. The gloaming embraces her and she gleams as the sun beneath it. Tenebrae hungers.


But Elena is no sun for him to consume in violence and greed. Her wildness not of the sky nor the sea. Her smile is meadow soft, her hair sways like grasses caught in a breeze, her eyes like a river wending through an untamed wood.


I will follow you, Elena says and Tenebrae exhales, he cannot help but think that those are words he should have said to another. But here they are, clinging to Elena’s fae-lips.


She laughs as the music stops, the sound bright as stars against the dark absence of song. But her words are soft confessions that burrow their way into his chest, into his soul that aches. Tenebrae smiles then too and it is a small, solemn thing. The shadows play along it as if to memorise this new curl of his lips.  “No, it is not weak,” the Disciple says, as if he knows - maybe he does, maybe he does not. Their breaths mingle where shadows still dance and tangle. “We all want easy, Elena.” He says her name at last, freshly given, freshly felt upon his tongue, his lips. 


“We are all brave and courageous in different ways.” His skull tilts, the blue and white of their eyes tangling. It is something electric, sharp as lightning and yet maybe cooling, soothing as ice, like water for a parched throat - he cannot decide. Tenebrae settles for both. 


“I pray for easy every day,” He says low, low, the words spoken for her ears alone. “But things are not meant to always be easy.” Darkness drowns him as his eyes close, against his confession, against the admission he makes to himself. He knows he is falling, he begs that life were easy again, away from temptation.


When he opens his eyes again, she is looking up, up, up at the stars. The moonlight limns the contours of her face, her throat and Tenebrae’s eyes trail her cheeks, the curve of her throat until they fall away, guilty. He will not deny her. His name is upon his lips but she stops him with a quick voice soft and full of dreams. 


There is only silence between them after her request. Her smile speaks into the darkness between them, the bonfires light and cast gold across the butterfly smile upon her lips. In answer a smile suddenly breaks across the monk’s lips and it is nothing like the dark, pained smiles of before. Despite its beauty there is something dangerous upon his mouth now, something wicked in its delight. Within him, black magic sings in his white-bright blood. He laughs, low and rough and ancient as Caligo’s Stallions who preceeded him, it fills the space between them, pushes music out and presses against the wings of her butterfly smile. “I will come to Terrastella, Elena,” he breathes, her name once more upon his tongue. “But you might struggle still to see me for all the darkness.” 


The Disciple chuckles, low, low and shadows peel from his mouth as smoke from a dragon’s maw. They reach for the fae-girl and playfully curl about her mane, tangling with fire-bright of her hair.


The monk leaves her an ember smoldering beneath the moon.


But all he can think as he goes is that daylight is when he is at his hungriest.