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@Sirius

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This is a place not just for watching, but listening too. And that is just what Tenebrae does as he stands and hears the Island tell her tale from the stone lips of a nearby statue.


The sound of her voice, this statue girl, if of lands being born and reborn. It is a rumbling that reaches into his bones and rattles out from them the truth of all he is. His own curious legend and all the ways he has made it normal and present and mundane. 


He listens and as he does, he wonders how the island has made her look. She sounds so much like a woman, like any girl with skin soft and warm. But nothing but the grass is soft here. All around the windswept hills that roll up into the sky and down into the sea are statues that laugh like children and watch like eagles. Still his lips are warm with the graze of stone across his lips as he touched the cheek of a statue and noted that it was not soft and supple as skin should be. 


Stones ring like stars and twinkle as diamonds when his toes catch upon them. They are cymbals in the symphony of this island’s unravelling story. Their sound, ricocheting between the sleepy, idyllic valleys and rising up to be lost into the sky, begs him to listen. They tell him not to heed the stories he hears, but Tenebrae already knows that. Tell me something new, he might say to them in turn, but already they are silent, their song lost and he does not touch them again, but lets them rest, buried in the earth.


He tilts his head as another comes, they are not heavy like the statues that move around them. The stranger’s footfalls are light, weightless, like a bird. The monk listens and his shadows see. They push toward the newcomer and press their inky black questions against his skin, who are you? they ask, what are you? For they do not trust anything in this strange place where nothing is as they eye would have you believe. But maybe, maybe, that is where the monk, at last, will not miss his taken sight.