The sound of singing, of laughing and dancing is what draws him to the river first. He sees the way light gleams, moving like thin torches through the trees and out along the river banks. Children sing lullabies and girls and boys and fireflies dance and dance and dance. 


He is not at home here. The warrior stands strange and ill-at ease. I am not made for dancing He had said, not once but twice when he has been asked. His eyes follow along the river current, half expecting, half hoping to see the crimson gaze of Boudika rising leonine from the river. He looks and half expects to see Elena dancing gold amidst the dancing fireflies. His heart is beating a little faster. He is sorry neither of them are here, even if it might mean they would lure him into dance - one gentle, the other feral.


Tenebrae turns from his hopes, his wishes and wends his way along the river bank. His shadows are not gentle, not here, not now. He is a banished man. He is a monk made for war, for battle. He has been made soft. He feels the desires of his heart, they way it beats with longing. The Disciple moves through the soft light, the gentle wings of fireflies, the undulating dance - something like revelry- of the gathered horses. The songs cut themselves across the blades his shadows make, the starlight splinters as it falls upon the spears of his darkness. 


The monk is dark and sharp and wicked and sorrowful. His shadows cut a path through the crowds and songs quieten as he passes by. He walks on and on along the banks until he reaches a girl whose fireflies are different. Her gaze is different. She hums and yet all the life upon Delumine’s banks seem to gravitate to her.


A wish gathers itself upon her lips. She sighs whimsically, her chin tipped up, ready for the wish to tumble from her tongue, finding life amidst the fireflies. It might be like a prayer, it is similar, a hope, a desire put into words, given to another being. Tenebrae blinks and the flies dance within the starwhite glow of his moon sigils. “I did not hear what your wish was.” The monk murmurs watching the path of a lighted string of fireflies. His voice is warm whiskey warmed over a candle, ready to set the world ablaze with just one kiss of the candle’s flame, “I have heard many wishes on my way along the banks. Do you think the fireflies can really grant our wishes? Or is that reserved for our gods alone?” Slowly he moves his gaze from the fireflies, to let it tangle in the dark of the mysterious girl’s. His skull tilts, his shadows prowl as panthers. His magic possesses the night. A tendril of darkness softens, it weaves around the fireflies’ light and he wonders if he could make a wish upon the magic of these fireflies and just how faithless that would make him.

 

The firefly wish lifts from her cheek, its wings beating the air as it hovers just before him. The mare’s words are upon the air, they buoy the firefly’s wings. Tenebrae watches the small creature, its tiny firelight and the way its glow beats back the darkness. “I am not sure… I have never made a wish before.” The monk confesses lightly, considering the firefly before him. “I have always laid my hopes before Caligo, in prayer.” Slowly he moves his gaze from the insect to where the woman steps a little closer. He smiles, “But i hope your dream comes true for you.”


His darkness ripples as she bumps it with her nose. It disperses and reforms, like smoke from a bonfire. She calls his magic curious and he chuckles lightly, “Is it?” Tenebrae thinks that all magic might be curious. He has never seen any that is similar, each one is different, unique, dangerous and beautiful in its own way. 


Her next words intrigue him and slowly Tenebrae turns his attention to her, “Maybe.” He says pensively, “but to lay all of our expectations on god and to not work for anything ourselves is to become lazy. A relationship is a two way road. Those who take and take and expect only to ever receive, only ever destroy their relationships… Maybe wishes are the same as prayer and having a relationship with a god… You can ask, of course, but you have to work to achieve your desire too. You have to give something back.”


She gives him her name. “It is nice to meet you Mephisto. My name is Tenebrae and my darkness -”  He watches the way it dances across her skin, “- was bestowed upon me by Caligo. I am a Disciple in her Night Order. We all control shadows in this manner.”


Slowly his gaze trails over her midnight skin and the soft blue of her feathers. “I do not think you are originally from here. The smell of your skin.. You have foreign scents upon you. Where are you from originally?’



@Mephisto <3 

 

Her description of her homeland intrigues him. It seems like Novus and yet… not. She comes from a place called the Winter Court. Tenebrae feels the chill of such a place. It blows cold and wicked along his spine. Tendrils of frigid magic skip across the lacerations that lie across his spine. Winter is coming in Novus. The trees are growing scarce of leaf, their twisted, undulating limbs stripped of colour like clothes. Their bodies are naked, the knots of their trunks exposed. Winter will come, adorning them in frost, but for now they grow red and gold and then fall into barren nakedness as the ground gathers their leaves.


The Disciple considers Mephisto, the blues of her, that quiet, dark knowing within her gaze. He has seen a land built of magic and how magic ruled over it, changing its face with every season. Tenebrae no longer knows if the island is at the whim of the gods or if a new, stranger magic lays its hands upon it, twisting and morphing it at leisure. “Was your homeland anything like the island off Terminus Sea?” He asks of her, lightly curiously. Mephisto mentions no gods in her homeland - just a place ruled by magic and time. Could time be its own master? The shadow stallion has only ever known Tempus to rule over time - the idea that time alone can rule… What would Tenebrae do, be there, in a land without gods? He thinks of Boudika’s question. If you were not a monk, Tenebrae, what would you be? He has no eloquent answer. He flounders over such questions. He is too young, too narrow minded. His world has been filled up upon Caligo and duty and religion. There is little of himself left to dream of anything else.


What other curiosities has your goddess granted to her disciples? Mephisto asks of him. Tenebrae turns his starlight gaze to her. Fireflies illuminate along her cheeks, begging for more wishes, even as she asks to know more about him and his brothers. What else does she give him? He knows how he should answer, but all of those replies, given so easily by his brothers, feel as bland and cloying as dust upon his tongue. 


“Do you miss your old home and its lack of gods?” He dares to ask. He dares to wonder what a world might be without gods. Would he ever leave the monkhood?  What would his life be without it - what if he was never born to a goddess - what then? Who would he be?


What other curiosities has your goddess granted to her disciples? Tenebrae blinks, slowly, the starlight of his eyes glowing wicked bright. He smiles, shadows breathe over his lips, they make stark the lack of humour there. Tenebrae’s look is pained with its darkness. He does not have the answers he should. Boudika stripped him of them first and then Elena. They have left him with nothing of himself lefts to give to Caligo. Or so it feels. 


He breathes an honesty comes from him, it gathers like darkness and spills from his lips like an ominous, consuming monster, “I do not know.”


@Mephisto <3 

 


Tenebrae smiles slightly. It is a small and sad thing, the shadows blooming along his lips. They reach out for Mephisto too, cool in the autumnal night, yet warm with their gesture. “I think it takes a while to truly belong anywhere.” The monk knows how it took him months as a child to adapt to the strange way of life within Denocte. 


“Really?” The Disciple asks, surprise hanging from every syllable. By her account Novus seems a milder place - or at least it had in his mind when she described the wilder magic of her homeland. However, the more he thinks, the more he feels that strange creeping magic of the island. Just because it had not reached across the water to the mainland, did not mean that feral magic did not exist within Novus. 


When she talks of Vespera, of Terrastella, Tenebrae only listens. His lips do not twitch with humour. He waits until he has finished, watches the fireflies as they seem to drink up every wish from her cheeks as if they were tears. “The gods exist,” Tenebrae says, assured. “I have seen Caligo.” But that was a long, long time ago. He has not seen her for so long. SHe seems almost quiet. The monk knows his faith should be stronger. Yet her silence rattles him, sometimes. “No one should expect anything of a god but love anyway.” Tenebrae is quiet for a moment, thoughts filling his mind on the infallibility and impassibility of the gods. They were deep questions, ones his brothers agonised over nearly all their lives. They were questions he could not begin to grapple with tonight. They were too large for the fragility of this firefly night. Suddenly weary he sighs, “It was good to meet you, Mephisto.  I hope we can meet again soon and i hope that your wish, whatever it was, finds some place in reality for you.”


With that the monk turns, his shadows gathering against his silver sigils as he presses on, through the firefly glow and out into the dark wilds of the trees beyond.


@Mephisto ~ Fin, thank you so much :) <3