I have seen your darkness, and your stars and your moon, I think it right I ought to see you in the sun too.


That is what she said when last they parted and like a fool he said he would find her. But Tenebrae has always been impulsive. No matter how the masters berated him as a child, no matter how they tried make their charge more mellow, still Tenebrae was untameable. Recklessness is the child’s bones was what the abbot had eventually surmised. It was this impulsivity that saw him pinned beneath Boudika’s teeth upon the beach. That had him pressing a kiss to the corner of her lips because, what could it hurt?


It always hurt, he knew that now.


Now he resists and fights and yet his recklessness makes him weak. Inside him a magic pours black and white and paints his skin in myriad grays. Tenebrae lives his life in the greys, drifting between shades of black, his brothers watch him from the darkness, wary. It was such recklessness that had Tenebrae laughing low, low, his mirth pouring out like gasoline and Elena was the match to spark alight the ravenous magic within him.


Daylight.


Oh, daylight!


His magic stirred with his thoughts of the sun. Creation and meaning forged within him, reminding their vessel just what he was made for.


And it is why he is here now, why he walks out beneath the open sun with his goddess’ gift billowing from him.  


Elena stands, a shard of the sun parted. He thinks of the day he met Orestes, the Sun King, in Verenor. Ah his hunger is so similar. Their magics warred, everything Orestes gave Tenebrae swallowed down and down and down. But Elena has no light to forge and the monk is ravenous as he comes to meet her. His magic sets his eyes feasting along the contours of her body, along her spine where the light pools like ichor.


Does she see how the meadow falls to darkness behind her, gathering like the dark of the ghosts that press upon her heart, her soul. Foolish, foolish he draws to a stop beside her, drunk upon magic, drunk upon light. Darkness shrouds him, its edges fade to a mist, but all it reveals of the monk is his bright eyes, his triad of sigils. 


She is perched, flighty as a bird upon the edge of the cliff. He wonders where she hides her wings and his eyes are at her shoulders, her spine, looking, looking. “It is a long way to fall,” The Disciple says at last, looking down to where the sea embraces the cliff. He does not know how her ghosts twine about her ankles and hold, hold her down like roots and vines. She is more wild than a flower or a tree. He wonders when she might realise that she is fae and all fae hide their wings.


She saw him in moonlight in starlight, but she never saw him at all. Not like his brothers and Boudika when he banished his shadows exposing his wintry body with its hues as bleak as a winter’s sea. Tenebrae is the bite of cold upon her cheeks but she is warm, hot like sun. She scolds him, yet he hungers, oh Tenebrae always hungers for things of the sun. 


Night does not hide her this day though his shadows yearn to with tendrils that dance like butterfly wings. They flutter where sunlight pours upon her cheeks, her nose, her hips, her spine. He draws them back and she is gilded in sunlight once more. 


I will still find you She had dared to say, but...


“I found you,” Tenebrae confesses, his voice is solemn, weighted. He should not have found her. Just as she should not find him. “But I should remain nameless to you,” And this might have been the greatest truth he has ever told. He has learned much from Boudika. The monk now knows how easy it is to want what is forbidden.


But gods how he wants.


The shadows hide the fresh whip-wounds upon his back. The pain reminds him, it makes him less reckless. But it is not enough, he is still here, despite the angry lashes across his back. He is still here with wild, black magic in his veins.


He is here because, gods, he is hungry.

 

Tenebrae does not know that she has thought of him since that festival night. It is just as well or else he might flee. Better for him to escape the presence of this sunshine girl who sinks her dreams and desires deep into his veins, than stay and risk the consequences. 


But Tenebrae does not know. In fact, he knows nothing at all and he is still a fool. Elena trembles beside him, with something like want. It flutters the pulse in the groove of her throat, quick from her trembling heart, fleet like a rabbit. It is a shiver down her back as if it is ice that pools in the dip of her spine - not ichor, not the golden sunlight poured out in this midday hour. 


They stand together, the girl clinging like a leaf to the grasses atop the cliff. So fragile her whimsical thoughts make her but when she turns her blue eyes to the boy who stands adorned in his shadow and religiosity there is nothing fragile there. Her eyes are the gleam of the deep blue ocean, caught by the sunlight that glitters across its rolling breakers. The sparks of her soul glitter there and she will turn his shadows into the residual smoke from the fire she lights in his soul. Such is the sun in her, such is the hunger her golden body inspires.


Tenebrae would gladly burn for just a taste and that is his curse.


Her toes seem to grip to the edge of the grasses and she has turned away from the sea that reaches its salt-water hands up to welcome her (and him). The fae-girl watches the monk, but Tenebrae feels the drop, he feels the cut of her challenge, sharp like golden shards. Do they cut her mouth when she speaks them? Can she taste blood as the cost of her daring?


Tenebrae is learning that she is so very daring. 


Once she called him strong and courageous but his is nothing like hers. The Terrastellan holds hers in her gilt smile, the way she steps closer when she should be stepping away. The way she dares to ask questions she should not to men she should not. 


“I would catch you.” He says low, low into the cliff-side breeze. It carries his words to her, through the tangle of her hair that it pulls from her slender neck and out, out over the edge of the cliff. “Though we would both perish for my effort,” The monk adds, gazing down, down into the beckoning sea and speaking of more than just the sea and a long, terrible drop.


Elena looks up through the winds that tangle her hair about her, she looks up to him with eyes wide blue and bruised by a heart woven together with ribbons of time. He can almost see it where she holds it too open, too exposed. He breathes out and his lungs twinge with the effort, his breath rattles past his lips. You should not be glad. He wants to say, but does not. There is a sin in pulling girls in, but a sin too in constantly pushing others away. He feels the tightrope line he walks, it cuts into the soles of his feet. 


He pushes her away and yet she steps closer, closer. Elena steps into darkness like the sun chasing the night. Shadows mute the bright gold of her skin, they steal along her spine and swallow down the light pooling there. Is it cold here, Elena? Where light cannot shine?


Even in the darkness his moonlight eyes illuminate along the sun-bright glow of her skin. She is still that shard of sunlight, set to pierce the night. Tenebrae’s magic delights in her.


And what, Denocte, do I need to do to get you to tell me?
“If I tell you my name, would you leave and not look back?” The Stallion asks. Her eyes turn deeply, darkly purple here in his darkness. He wonders what hurts they herald, what bruises he might cause her. 


“I am a monk, Elena.” He breathes to her through the darkness, his voice little more than a whisper to smooth along the shell of her ear. “Made to swallow the sun and you are so very much like it.” He reaches out, as if to touch her, as if to drink in the heat of her sun-drenched skin and wonder if she tastes anything like light and life. The air grows thin and tremulous in all the places he reaches out to touch and yet does not. He draws back, they remain untouched.Only his breath dares to curl like smoke across her body.

 

Elena’s eyes follow his down the cliffside and together they are tumbling, tumbling, down, down. Better than to perish alone. They are drowning, together in tangled limbs and relentless waves. He does not think he could live without the sea anymore. It is in his lungs. It is his breath. He does not yet know how close he will come to death tangled in the dark sheets of the ocean’s deep bed.
But you’d probably haunt me forever anyway….You’re here now though and I don't think you are going anywhere.


And that is the truth of them is it not? If he is the blade that presses to her breast, that she welcomes as it presses deeper, deeper leaving something terrible, something wonderful, behind in the soft of her heart... a poison that drifts in her veins and turns all to wickedness and want… then she is no better. 


It is her smile that undoes him. The way it picks at all the ties that hold him together and she lets him fall apart. Tenebrae is desperate as he clutches the parts of him she has exposed together. 


But he is a wonderful liar (just one of his ever growing list of sins) and he watches her with his dark, dark eyes and seems so utterly unbroken. She watches him through blue as the sun watches the moon fall as she rises and rise as she falls. She holds him with that unwavering gaze. It is her gold that glues the parts of him (that she so deftly unraveled) back together. 


They are doomed to die (aren’t we all?) yet if she is Juliet then Romeo is her ill-fated lover; their love so pure, so utterly forbidden. Oh Elena why do you stand with the dagger in your heart and Romeo a ghost at your shoulder?


There is one thing that Tenebrae knows of Elena that many may not: she is cruel. She sighs, and aches when he does not touch her. He draws back, his confession spoken like a warding spell between them. But it has no power against Elena. It was a plea for her to stay away and yet she steps close, close, close.


He knows how they crave, he can almost see the question forming upon her lips, ready to be asked, why?. Up she gazes at him from beneath the bow of her dark, dark lashes. From where they stand so close, too close, where breaths mingle and distance is felt as wondering just how they are not yet touching, he can see the way his darkness frames her. He knows how she smells, of wild flower meadows, of bluebells in spring. Daylight breathes across her skin and never has he thought it tasted more wonderful, than it does now.


 But she is gone.


He breathes and remembers who he is, what he is. 


Elena asks of him a secret. “I want,” Tenebrae answers without pause. It is a secret that comes with the agonising weight of a confession. It is rough and deep as it cuts like liquor through his veins, his nerves. “And monks should never want.” 


But he does, he does, he does.


He craves, he desires, he yearns, he wants.
“Tell me a secret of yours, please.” And it is something like a prayer, a plea. His voice is low and rough, the words just for her, for this place where they stand upon the edge of the world, surrounded by ghosts, by dreams and tales of ill-fated lovers.


And he looks to her as if she could absolve him, as if she might be the balm for the whip-wounds that smart across his spine. They remind him, they remind him that he is failing.

 

Yes, Elena is cruel.


He knew it before, he is reminded again as she steps toward him. She moves through his darkness like the sun at the dawn. Before her he had not known to crave the dawn.


She moves like a comet passing close, dangerously close and then she is gone. But always Elena returns. It is like gravity, a yearning that holds them tight, tight and always returns. She moves toward him, cruel and warm, warm, warm. He had not known the cold of his magic until she is there and the air is trembling with the heat of her skin. If she told him now she was the sun here to end him, he might believe her, he might fall to his knees and offer himself.


With her fae lips she speaks his secret back to him. She does not keep it cradled like a fragile bird. She returns his words to him. They fall from her mouth, pensive, and part of him wishes to take his confession back, to have never spoken it at all. Tenebrae feels foolish here, a boy full of want. He wants to open his lips and if he cannot bring the words back onto his tongue then he wants to tell her that he is expected to want for nothing. That only Caligo should be enough for him. But so great and terrible is the looming realisation that she may not be. Not for him, not anymore. 


Elena bears his confession so simply, it holds none of the weight that his tongue gave it. From her mouth it is simple and obvious. 


And she steps closer again. “Elena.” Tenebrae implores her, rough and low and warm as her skin that he dares not touch. She does not cool and snuff out beneath his magic, not like sun does. Does that make her greater? The monk thinks it might. 


He looks up, he dares to take his eyes from her, from the girl who edges, closer, closer. The Disciple looks to the sun and half waits for her to touch to whisper across his skin.


It does not come and the sunlight is all that bathes him. It laughs at the Disciple, it mocks the man who thought he could ever endlessly hunt the sun and not tire. 


Tenebrae’s eyes close against the deriding sun, against the disappointment that begins to form with a twinge in his nerves. He wants to be touched.


Oh, he wants.


Tenebrae has turned away from temptation and its deep yearning. It was easier when all he knew was war, when every touch was violent and filled with malice. It was even easier with Boudika, where her every touch was some sort of exquisite agony. 


He breathes.


Elena is like none of those things. He swallows his yearnings down and lowers his gaze to look at the fae-girl. She is smiling and there is something of Solis in her. It makes him hungry and yet, he knows she is nothing like the sun. Even as she stands close, like an ember. He is the touch paper, she will burn him so completely.


There is sweet sorrow in the spaces between them, in the way her breath catches and he counts all the beats she does not breathe, until she does again. He thinks he can hear the way her heart races, he wonders if his is faster or slower. He dares to believe the first. 


I am an orphan. 


How still he falls, how wide her open heart breaks to him. Her eyes snag upon his, water across the moon. Electric blue into the white lightning of his. He wonders what planets might be blue like hers. He wonders how the sun turns its sky so blue and how she stole a piece of it. Mysterious, wild Elena. Maybe her father is the sun and her mother a winding river. How ironic that would be when his was a Stallion Made to Swallow the Sun.


The first of her confessions has him exhaling low, low for her and then the next comes. The words are small, her voice little more than petals on the breeze. The words are soft, vulnerable, the wind catches them and they are gone in moments.


Yet while her confessions fade, whilst she lays before him the things she is and the things she does not want. Tenebrae is a young child again. There is dust on the road, he can feel the way it chafes his limbs, his knees itch with the memory. In desperation and hunger, in loneliness and sorrow the child Tenebrae follows the trail of caravans praying that they might stop. Praying that this might be the day they take pity on him and welcome him back.


Yet Tenebrae killed his mother and his father ceased to exist (a god creation, made and then so utterly, unmade). 


He takes a breath and it is deep with sorrow, deep with want, deep with their shared loss. He wants to be touched, he wants, he wants…


Tenebrae covers the distance she does not, all the space she leaves that offers him salvation. He presses his brow to hers until they touch brow to bridge to nose. His eyes close and he breathes, the smell of her, the sea salt breeze that already claims her skin, the wild flowers that press ther pollen into the caramel of her mane. 


“I am an orphan too,” Tenebrae gives her another confession to draw them level. He gives her another confession because this one matches hers. Sun and midnight, so different and yet the same beginnings.


How long do they stand this way? Time ceases, it slows as it reaches them, seconds are hours and minutes a lifetime. When he moves, it should be to part from her, but it is not. Sinful, terrible Tenebrae. Instead he reaches up, smoothing under her mane, his breath hot against her neck. He reaches across her and stops as he holds her. Their hearts beat together as they stand breast to breast. “Did you know your parents?” the question breathes across her skin, it chases his shadows that swirl patterns across her body, sigils of crescent moons. Such sigils seem blasphemous against her sun-hewn skin. Yet already Tenebrae is already damned and so he does not move from where he holds her, where begins to learn of something other than violence.



@Elena 

 


The wild flowers sway atop the cliff and they do not care how he is remade.


It is only now, with their touching, simple as breathing, that he realises how numb and incomplete he has always been. It is easy for a monk to never be touched. It is easy for an orphan to never be embraced. It is easy for them to never realise how much they have craved it.


They are fire and smoke upon the cliff top, a sign of something consuming, a sign of something becoming destroyed. Tenebrae and Elena are a warning lamp seafarers would know. One that warns do not land here, but here they are, turning to ash upon the wind. Waiting for new life. As if in knowing his shadows begin to drift out upon the wind, trailing over the sea in tendrils of smoke from Elena’s fire. 


If she feels the cold of his darkness, the acute absence of light, he does not realise it. How can he when she burns him with the fire of her fae-soul? How can he when he has always been numb within his solitary darkness?


He thought salvation was in the spaces they left between them. Oh he thought to keep himself apart as his goddess had (from her siblings) was right. But even Caligo had family, even she once knew what touch was.


The monk is enlightened as they touch. He is remade and remodelled by Elena’s embrace. It was not like their hold when dancing. It was not like Boudika’s kiss that ripped his soul and made sure it never forgot her.  This was the light of revelation resoldering back the parts of him that fell away, untended to with love. This was realisation dawning, shedding its light at last upon his impenetrable shadows of unknowing. 


At last the monk realised what it was to touch, be touched and realise how he needed it as much as living. 


Time does not rush them. It gilds them in the glow of Elena’s skin and lets a monk’s dark magic fade away a wild meadow and a beckoning sea. Still they burn together as bound together as flames upon wood. Already Tenebrae is new life from the ashes, yet still he gives oxygen to Elena’s fire as she turns him wholly to charcoal in her hold.


Now he thinks he might be able to name that look Elena had cradled within her dark eyes. It was a look that had betrayed the lovely, storybook smile upon her lips. It was a look that had been dark with the eternity of space between them. It was a look that had wanted touch. Was this the curse of orphans? Were they destined to always wander and crave touch and comfort and love?


In the dark of the dorms the boys had never spoken of their parents. Their histories were identical in this regard. Mothers unable to survive the births of their boy children and fathers who disappeared, unmade by magic, unmaking their sons as they dissipated. None of the Disciples knew their mothers. None of the Disciples were ever told they should need love. 


Now Elena embrace opens him like a book and he longs to read his story upon its pages. To learn about himself and the ink that fills in the pieces he never knew he was missing, until now, until this golden fae-girl and her confessions.


She whispers more admissions across his shoulder. The words seep into his skin, reaching into his soul with grasping fingers. Her voice is breaking into a thousand pieces and he cannot collect them all; he laments. 


His shadows grow restless with the need to morph and transform his sorrow into shapes and creatures. The monk wonders what animals represent death, what objects, flowers or piece of nature. All he knows is those he has used to bring death upon others, shadow spears and knives. But there is violence gleaming in the shards of her broken voice. He can see where it has painted her red and so his shadows burst into fleeing butterflies, taking flight across the cliff top where Elena and Tenebrae cling together. 


“You knew them,” He observes that small and joyous gift of hers. “How were they taken?” He asks and wonders how many children he has left orphaned too. Ah.


Oh.


He drinks in the smell of her skin, the soft of her body against his, anything to avoid the sinking of his soul. It was easy to be bloodthirsty when you do not consider the collateral damage of war. She is slim and fragile as a dove. Still Tenebrae finds himself wondering where she hides her wings, but still he sees no evidence along the curve of her back, the slope of her fine shoulders. He exhales as they part and already he misses it, already he grieves for what it was like to be held.


Yet Elena grieves too and her lips trail his jaw, his cheek, his chin. There is darkness when his eyes close, better to listen to the nerves she sets alight with her touch. He does not dare to forget this moment of awakening and his eyes open again to watch her. They meet in bluelight and starlight eyes. The monk exhales and moves forward, pressing his brow to hers because already he is greedy, already he feels bereft of touch. The fae-girl has given him too little and yet too much.


Her forelock tangles with his closed eyelashes. All of him is filled with meadow flowers and summer heat. “Me too,” He says of all the years he has lived without them. “But do you ever wonder,” He dares to breathe, ever sinful, ever blasphemous, “What it would have been like if things were different? What would you change about your life until now, Elena?”

Then, in a whisper, "I did not know mine. I unmade them both." And that is all he says, because Disciples do not talk of their creation.

@Elena