I can take care of you now.


When he left her, her words still tumbling over and over the dunes of his laugh, it was easy to think he could avoid her. Elena’s suggestion was dangerous. The more he ruminated upon it, the deeper he realised its connotations ran.


Yet Tenebrae has already learned that Fate has her own strange way of making her will come to pass. It is what brought him to the edge of the sea as a new spring storm reached her arms out, throwing waves upon the shore. It is what brought him down to the bottom of the sea within Boudika’s jaws. It is what saw him spending the night in a cave talking. It was Fate that saw him far, far from the Order’s keep. 


It is Fate, he convinces himself. Though each time he knows that he is weak, he knows that he yearns, he longs and he cannot resist. It has all begun to feel as vital as breathing, as necessary as living. He cannot resist, he longs to survive and oh, he is not sure he can ever live his life as it was before: absent of touch. 


Touch. In all of its wonderful and terrible capacities, Tenebrae has come to desire it. Need it. 


Yet it is touch that brings him into Terrastella. It is what has caused the open wound about his throat. It is deep and crimson and throbs with infection. His skin still recalls the bite of crocodile teeth. His body still sings with Boudika’s violence and the dark of her lonely eyes. 


He had left it, for the night he spent with Boudika in the cave, the wounds they inflicted upon each other growing dry and stiff in the sea-salt air. The monk had hopped he might have healed. That is wound would mend without a need to visit a brother for healing. But Fate is not so kind. His wound festers, another lasting memory of Boudika to match the scar she left upon his throat from her first bite. 


It had been days. Tenebrae had left it too long. Unable to explain his injury to his brother yet unwilling to go to Elena he had let time drift slowly by. His tissues did not knit themselves back together.  They lay open and weeping. The infection spread, into his blood. Lethargy came slow and lazy and begged him to stop, stop, stop.


So he walked and he walked and he stumbled and he tripped his way to Terrastella. There is nothing grand about the monk as he arrives this day. He comes with sweat slick across his skin, with a wound raging like a dragon’s maw. It bleeds bloody tears and weeps with white tears filled with infection. His magic reaches out as he wades through the swamp towards the hospital. It’s fingers drift through the tree-top hospital. It winds down corridors and calls, calls, calls for the sun. It arrives beside her like a blackbird with feathers made of wispy darkness. The shadow bird watches Elena work. It does not speak to her for it has no voice, but it waits until she sees it and opens its beak in a silent cry. It summons her as it rises back into the air, an urgency in its wings. It leads her back through the corridors and out into the open where trees stand cathedral tall. 


Tenebrae stands a short way away beneath the shadow of thicket.  His shadows bloom still, though they are turning like flowers growing limp. His stormy skin is slick with sweat. His white-bright eyes are a hazy moon’s glow, their eyelids low. He is a half of a man, too filled with infection. He sighs and it is like groaning. “I tried not to come...” The Disciple says as the sun-girl steps close. The blackbird flies into the dark that shrouds him and disappears, its work is done.


He moves to briefly press his damp brow to hers as they had done before. But oh he is weak. There is a slow, delirious smile that curls his lips and darkness blooms like black flowers in the corners of them. Laboured are his breaths as he draws away and lets his eyes roam across the gold of her skin, as if the light of her might vanquish the festering germs in his wound. “...But the gods conspire against me, Elena. Say-” Rough, like sandpaper, his voice is friction in the air, across the shell of her ears and the soft of his tongue. “-are you true to your word? I think I need your help.”  With that, the last of his energy, he falls to his knees before her.

 

Shhh She breathes. Her voice is the soothing sound of a faraway sea to an ailing man’s ears. How had he ever come to be bound so inextricably to the sea? In Boudika’s soul, in Elena’s eyes. It was the sea that wounded him and it is the sea that heals him.


When he looks up, his star-bright eyes no longer blazing with light, but muted with fever. His gaze has dimmed to the hazy, soft glow of a young moon’s light. And maybe that is all Tenebrae is: young, weak, fleeting.


Mortality throbs meekly in his veins. His foolish deeds have brought him to such terrible illness. Death feels only a turn away, looming beyond the veil of existence that has grown so thin. He is not truly near death, no. But it comes close anyway, to remind him of all the ways he is not truly living. 


The monk moved to press his forehead to Elena’s but she moves back, their brows untouched. He sighs and the sound is something like loss. Yet he smiles, for feverish delirium curls like a drug through his veins. That ailing smile is slow and lazy, as if all that fills his blood is alcohol, not poison from a festering wound. 


Her eyes, chilled to ice with the cool of her concentration is like a balm across his too-hot skin. Can his salvation from his sickness be found in the frost of her gaze? He hopes. He does not take his hazy gaze from his healer’s.


But, as Elena was the one to refuse his touch before, so she is the one to break their gaze as she tells him to stay awake and that she will be back. The monk chuckles. It is a low and listless sound. Like gravel, like water rolling in the deep of the ocean. He knows what that sounds like now - ah, how his wound twinges at the memory. How his lungs remember what it was to strive and suffer.


He stops his laughter and takes a rasping breath. Darkness blooms in the space where her sun-light body once was. Tenebrae is still upon his knees and idly his feverish mind wonders if she has ascended - a divine creature sent down only to test the weak will of man.


The man sleeps. It is yet another example of how he fails to honour requests and expectations:


Pray daily.


Focus upon training.


Worship only Caligo.


Fill your life with serving Caligo and Denocte.


Do not concern yourself with material things.


Do not allow yourself to be distracted by relationships.


Caligo is your only relationship.


Stay awake.



He rouses from slumber as his blood, at last, runs clean. About his throat Elena winds a soft, white bandage. He cannot be trusted with such pure things - why white? He knows why, to see blood, of course. Yet he is unworthy all the same.


They are silent, for a moment. She sits back like the sun at the end of the day. He is warm like the earth, no longer chilled, no longer feverish. How long had she treated him? Did she know? Did he? 


Weariness paints itself in dark lines along the contours of her face. Her soft lips are drawn down like a bow. The arrow of her accusation bruises him, the soft her voice little more than a blunt arrowhead. Yet it sobers him, it draws a heavy breath into his tired lungs. “I had hoped it would heal on its own,” The words are rough, coming from his too-dry mouth. It is a partial truth as all things seem to be that pass his lips now. His secrets are gathering, piling up behind his teeth, his tongue, his lips. He can only guard them so long. 


“I should not be here.” Tenebrae’s long limbs feel as spindly as a foal’s when he stands, yet his muscles remember what it is to hold him and to fight. They lock, weaker and yet steadfast.  “I should go.” He breathes in a low voice still coarse, still rough like sandpaper. 


He does not leave then, but steps toward Elena who watches him with large, dark blue eyes. Her forelock covers one eye, the hair golden, sheer as a gossamer veil. His magic is already pressing his gratitude across her face. Without a smile he moves to brush the veil of hair from across her sky-blue gaze. The curve of his nose touches hers as he murmurs earnestly, “Thank you, Elena.”  The monk presses a kiss of thanks to the soft of her cheek and is already retreating, turned away from her, when her next words come to him upon the breeze.


A life for a name, Denocte. 


The words stop him. They press along his back and swoop to catch his plunging heart. Guilt blooms in bright, jagged flowers, poisonous and unwelcome, through his core. “You put too much of a price upon a name, Terrastella.” He thinks it might be easier if they forever call themselves thus: Terrastella and Denocte.


But he owes Elena. Already her name has a familiar place upon his tongue. Already he knows the shape of it, the sound of it. 


Tenebrae is turning, walking back to her.  Again his head lowers to meet hers. He stands, no longer feverish, no longer weak. Thanks to her care he stands dark and formidable over her, a warrior, not a young man, an orphan, discovering what it was to be held for the first time. “I have told you it is better that you do not know my name. It is for the same reason I came to you and why I never should have come to you.” Low, low is his voice, soft and quiet enough that only her ears could catch his words. Not even the trees and leaves can discern the words he breathes close, close to Elena’s ear.


“If I tell you my name, will you leave me alone, Elena? I promise I will leave you alone.” He dares to barter and realises how he is taking, taking, taking. Like she always takes, takes the distance between them. They both want too much.


Already the consequences of his proposed agreement sits cold along his skin. Imagining it feels sharp with a sense of loss. He is remembering what it was to be held and touched. He remembers then why it must be done. He wants too much.

 

He did not know, when he speaks like a foolish man, that his words will be gasoline upon the embers of Elena’s ire.


But he should have. (All foolish men should). 


This is a valuable lesson for Tenebrae to learn. All of him is filled with his own regret. He is selfish and his soul is not at rest. So inward looking is he, he does not see when her blue eyes spark like lightning. So concerned with his sins is he that he does not witness how they press pain deep into Elena’s breast.


It all began slowly, slowly, something like a storm that brewing out at sea. The moves to leave, no, to flee. Yet in answer Elena turns to follow him; a flower leaning toward the sun.  


Tenebrae is no sun. 


He has nothing with which he can nourish her, no light he can cast upon her slim body. She was already sun-kissed - was that not why he followed her first? He was a Stallion starved. He is always a Disciple yearning to swallow the sun and, oh, is Elena not so much like the sun? Is it not there in the way her soul is fire, the way her skin is limned in Solis’ purest light?


He pushes her away and yet the monk stays; unholy, sinful. He barters because he thinks he has anything at all to barter with. But Tenebrae has nothing. A monk always vows to possess nothing.


He remembers.


He remembers too late.


Elena. 


Her name sits like a possession on his tongue. Names have more power than you may believe, Denocte, The sun-girl breathes into the space between them. He watches the way her eyes narrow, clouds drifting together until the blue of her eyes is a thin flash of wicked lightning. It is enough to electrify his veins.


“Elena,” Tenebrae speaks her name back to her. He lets her name form across every part of his mouth and up from healing throat. Already his lips know the shape of her name. Already his mind knows the sound of it in the air. It has become a familiar song upon his tongue - too familiar. So now he speaks it, as if it contains a mystery, as if within it is a formidable magic. He says Elena as if it is taboo. From his lips, it might as well be.


The monk stands closer to her than he ever should and lets his eyes roam across the contours of her sunbright face as he watches her reaction to her name spoken aloud. “And who does your name give power to? You, or me?” When her eyes lower into a blink, he watches the dapples of light across her lashes. The Disciple waits until they lift again, until he can feel her electric gaze spark across his vision. “I am a monk. I am supposed to possess nothing and exert no power over anything at all. So I shall give you this: My name is Tenebrae.” He reveals himself to her now. Giving away his name feels like peeling his shadows from his skin, leaving him exposed, able to be summoned. Able to be asked after.


Don’t ever ask after him, Elena. Don’t.


He has played a dangerous game and now he is caught within its tide.


Knowingly, his dark magic seeps its shadows across her face. They paint Elena darker, darker until all that glows is the bright blue of her eyes. In them he settles his gaze, drowning, drowning. He can feel his lungs constricting, remembering the deathly embrace of the deep. Boudika’s bite claiming, killing, cradling.


Then she burns. Elena ignites like kindling caught by a spark and by his gasolene. She burns, she glows. Her words bite at his cheeks. He turns his head from them, from her. In that movement he surfaces from the ocean of her gaze and breathes in deeply, deeply. But the sun-girl is not done. She scolds the monk with words that burn like a dragon’s breath. Anger paints her in a resplendent glow. Elena scolds him as she becomes transcendent in her ire. Ascending. She becomes more goddess than a girl.


So he lets himself bleed from her words. He lets them feast upon his flesh. His body has learned the ire of women now and a part of him is struck in wonder. When Elena is done, when her words have drawn his blood and wrapped themselves around his sins, exposing them, only then does he turn back to look at her.


Tenebrae smiles as he clasps her in his star-bright gaze. His sigils burn and paint their reflections across her body. Sun and moon and stars bow down- before him or before her? The Disciple does not know but the celestial skies are kneeling, stooping low.


Do not lie to me, Denocte.


And Tenebrae does not.


“I want you to stop wanting to see me because, clearly, I cannot stop seeing you.” The truth hangs heavy as iron between them. “Of course I have missed you, Elena.” Again he says her name, slowly, slowly, asking her again with it, Who does your name have authority over, Elena, you, or I? 


Her name makes him a slave. His want of it, a sinner.


The man smiles. It is a dangerous thing, as sharp as the knives his shadows forge, able to cut the sun and slay his enemies. He turns it upon her where it softens to smoke, blowing across the fire of her ire. “You already know I am a monk and that I want what I should not.” Tenebrae’s voice is rough, rough with the trauma to his throat, rough with the confessions that claw their way up from his soul. “I came to you now because I could not take my wound to my brothers to be healed.” He laughs and there is nothing joyous in the sound. It is the sound of a man drowning, struggling. “I am already a sinful man, Elena.” He breathes, across her poll, where her hair smells of salted honey. “Please do not add to my sins.”

 
You would be happier if you learned not to push people away.


She looks lovely as her ears fall to her skull and anger blooms like sharp thorned roses across her face. The monk does not shift his gaze from her, but lets it drink in the sight of her, resplendent with her fury, her hurt. He wonders at the irony of how he tried to hold a girl together atop a mountain as she shattered into pieces from her hurt and yet in just one turn he is the source of another’s hurt.


Slolwy he breathes, through the pain of Boudika’s bite, all the places she marks herself upon his throat. It no longer feels like his own, it is not smooth as it once was. Her mark is everywhere along his neck, her presence a deep, healing pain within his body. Boudika is a constant reminder now, their meetings forever displayed upon his body. He cannot escape her.


You would be happier if you learned not to push people away. 


Oh he studies Elena. Her slim body, the way she has taught him to learn the beauty of sunlight anew - even if being beside her still makes him wild, still angry, still so ravenously hungry… He wants nothing to do with her or Boudika or any other girl he has met. He wants everything to do with them. He cannot imagine is life without them now - to know what touch felt like, an embrace for the sake of sharing something. Being held.


But he has made vows. Vows that burned out his half moon sigils and his eyes. Vows that makes him glow and pierce his body with their sharp reminders. How long had he been looking at Elena now? How long had he been allowing himself to fall into her anger, her sorrow, bathing himself within it as if she might offer him some kind of answer.


You would be happier if you learned not to push people away.


“I have to.” He says and does not like its pitiful, weak taste upon his tongue. His lips curl with distaste and he sighs, something like groaning, like frustration rising.  How much more can he tell her without exposing himself so openly? Any more and he would be ripping open himself, spilling the tar of his sins upon the ground between them, staining him, staining her. They may never be able to remove the marks of this encounter from their bodies, their souls.


Elena asks him more. Of course she does.


This is what makes his eyes close, what tears his gaze at last from the vibrant fae-girl beside him. He looks out along the path he came. He barely remembers it. He feels weak with his wound again. Weak like a man carrying too many burdens. Weak like a monk losing grip upon his religion. His wound smarts. It throbs.


He takes a breath and it feels despair and anger tangle their way up from his core. When they reach his tongue he turns his white gaze back upon Elena. He frames her in star fire, in the wicked heat of the light his magic swallows. He turns her gold back upon her. She has stepped close, as she always does, as she likely always will. He does not chastise her for it. He does not beg her to step back. He thinks he might like it. Crave it. Need it.


“When we become monks, we make a vow to pledge ourselves to Caligo. To put her above all else - above each other, above the love of another, above sex, above earthly things.” Tenebrae does not put distance between them. He lets the words fill the space bwteeen he and the girl who glows as morning light upon a meadow. He looks into her face as lovely as a wild-flower. His shadows trap the words to come, anything to stop the shame of others hearing.


You keep far too many secrets, Tenebrae.


“If I tell you them, will you keep them, Elena?” The monk asks as he watches her, longing to press his brow to hers. The words breathe along her cheek, her forelock brushing against his lashes.


She asks him. She longs to understand. 


He swallows deep and it is something like drowning. 


“I went to the sea. To hook up with a girl there.” Then he laughs, low and coarse. There is no joy in it, the salt of irony stings his throat, “She bit me and tried to drown me.” He sighs, closing his eyes. “My brothers will have asked too many questions. If they knew...“ 


The monk trails off, letting his eyes wash across her face. “I would be punished.”


And all Tenebrae can think is how he should have gone there. How his back needs to know the bite of more lashes - anything to turn him from his ways.


@Elena

 


Maybe the difference between Tenebrae and King Solomon is that, when Bathsheba became pregnant he had her husband, Uriah, killed. Unlike King Solomon, Tenebrae knows nothing of the man who waits for her upon the star-strewn mountain top. He knows nothing of another man to whom her heart might belong. But of course there would be another man; a better man. Elena is beautiful, loyal, caring, as gilded as the sun and as free-spirited as the sea, the woods and the fae that inhabit both. Tenebrae is but a Disciple with loose morals. He clings to the few he has left and will not stop her falling into the man atop the mountain. She deserves more. He deserves less.


But, if he did know of the man atop the mountain - the man a better suited lover - what would he do then? The answer for Tenebrae is simple, he would not lie with Elena this night, he would not keep her from the arms of the man she should be with. In many ways Tenebrae is not King Solomon, though he watches Elena as if she bathes and dares to fantasize about all the ways things could be different. 


But Tenebrae knows nothing of a lustful king and the great son awarded him through his adultery. He knows nothing at all.


Elena does not believe him when he says he has to push people away. The sun laments for her. It turns its gaze from his dark shadows. It lets them bloom, black like sin. 


Her anger is divine. It sharpens the line of her face, it makes her fierce and brave. She becomes a gilded eagle in his sights. Tenebrae feels little more than a fawn beneath her gaze. Elena picks apart each piece of him that he exposes. He is flayed open before her…


Yet she sits, regal as a sunflower, soft as the fae. This girl is fierce, yes, and yet soft. There is something that trembles within the monk. It whispers to the part of him that is not weak, newborn, inexperienced with love and girls. Elena is lovely in her righteous anger, in her sadness that hollows him out with the blue of her wild-water gaze.


The Disciple smiles and still there is no joy in it. Sadness draws itself into the dark corners of her downturned lips. He sees it. The fine lines of her face make her slender, delicate, sun-born. He sees that too. Her ire is salt in his veins, it stings and his body feels sick with its presence. Yet even in her ire she vows to keep his promises. Wretched, Tenebrae does not question her. The monk does not think for a moment that she would not. Maybe it is because of the loyal honesty in the way her chin tilts up and she watches him. Or maybe it is the fact that something lingers deep in the darkness of her blue eyes, something like devotion, like… 


He dares not name it. He fears it. He recognises it for it is within him too. It has a voice that yearns and answers hers.


Tenebrae breaks her with his revelation. She has a man waiting atop a mountain for her. He has a girl within the sea waiting for him. (Though he cannot have her either!)


His words pick at the threads that hold her heart together. He watches her unravel. The monk is not ready for the pieces. He will cut himself upon the sharper parts of her, bleeding as he tries to reassemble what he has broken.


Elena denies him the broken fragments of herself. Instead he watches as she hastily pulls herself together. There is nothing neat in the way she holds the pieces of herself - all twine and uneven edges and sad, broken eyes - yet there is grace in the way she stands, a pride that sets his body ablaze. His fae-girl glows like coals, embers reigniting beneath the night. He moves to her, wanting to hold her, to together keep the pieces of her whole. But Tenebrae is still too-blind to know how he has managed to unravel himself too. So wrapped up in her is he that he does not see how he is unspooling, unspooling, unravelling.


She rises, more a queen than a girl with his blood smudged across her body. 


“Elena…” Her name is strangled when it comes from his lips. It falls fragile as glass and shatters across her, across him. It hurts more than the wound at his throat. She closes her eyes. In doing so she denies him the sea, denies him a look at that raw emotion that gathers in the deepest parts of her. Tenebrae’s eyes trail across her lashes, he lets light pool upon her cheeks.. 


She glows like Bathsheba. 


The monk watches her.


He is close enough to drink in her every word. But they hurt. They carry the poison, the ire in her core. The Disciple takes every piece of her righteous punishment as if she were the whip that cuts his back. He dares not breathe as his fae-girl whispers her decree. They are so close he can taste the words of it across his lips.


The Disciple reaches for her, his darkness clutching at the gold of her body, to offer his own vow in turn and seal it with a kiss, a touch, a press of his forehead to hers. But she is leaving and he is banished. Her body pulls from him and something within him is breaking - even while he feels like he can breathe, at last.


Tenebrae turns from the hospital, his wound still aching, his body more painful, more vacant than when he had come. Yet the truth is that neither he nor Elena leave complete. They each have lost a piece of themselves and gained a piece of each other.