The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad!
Usually it starts with a nightmare. Some sordid dream that creeps in on a saccharine song, souring as it hits its peak. This time it came in silence.
Moving to the night order was the best decision I’d made in a while. Though I felt bad leaving dusk, and all its people, that guilt was drowned by the feeling of release. Things here are busy enough that I’m never left just to think. But there are enough healers that I can step away if needed. It’s not like the hospital in the swamp, where herb collection is constant, and there's no one else around. It’s not so… lonely.
I’d been making some salves with the other healers. Some of the stronger ones take some time, and we’d been running low after the winter, but with spring's arrival it’s far easier to source the ingredients necessary. One minutes I was fine - life here is good for me, - the next I felt a wave of dizziness, small, but enough for me to trail off from the conversation I’d been having with the others.
“Are you alright?”
I looked over to Aleris, one of the younger healers, with a soft smile. “Just tired” I could feel Picoro sigh softly onto my neck. He always knew, I'm sure he felt the shift in my balance, though this time he stayed silent. A second wave made itself known though, strong enough that I nearly dropped the pestle I’d been using. “You should go rest” the sloth murmured.
“Actually” I started softly. “Are you alright to finish these without me?” I could see concern flicker in some of my companions eyes, though no one questioned me as I set down the pestle beside its mortar. I turned to leave the chamber, my uneven hoofbeats masked by the grinding of herbs. I was careful walking back to my room, as waves of dizziness slowly came over me. I was taken aback, usually I had a warning of some sort. I did recall a fit of coughing the night before, but I’d not thought much of it. Pollen could do worse.
As I made my way into my room, I pulled down the drape of finely woven silk over the window. I had no candles to blow out. I’d move them all to one of the meeting chambers, with the excuse that they needed the light more than I did. Really I just couldn’t settle with the flames flickering over the walls. They told me they’d find more so I wouldn’t have to sit in the dark. I hope they don’t. I’ve tried to hide how much it unsettles me to stand so near them.
I settled on the bed of moss in the corner. As I laid my head on the stone floor, I was shocked by how cold it felt on my face. I wondered how long I had been feverish that day. If everyone had looked at the glaze in my eyes and ignored it for fear of being impolite. Picoro nestled in beside me, braiding my mane with nimble claws so that it didn’t cling to my skin when the fever undoubtedly grew worse. The headaches would come soon, and the best I could do was try to sleep through it.
Before I could close my eyes though I could hear hooves clacking on the stone in the corridor. The cadence of the steps was familiar, and I could already feel the wash of cold that always clung to his cloak of shadows. I hadn’t seen much of Tenebrae since I had come back to the night order. Whenever I did, It was just around a corner, a fleeting glance. We were both busy I suppose. Something seemed off, though I couldn’t quite place it. I lifted my head, already wincing at the stiffness - It was almost funny how quickly it came on - wondering if he was coming to say hello, or simply passing by.
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
The chill of winter was ebbing from the stone walls of the Night Order’s monastery. The warm hum of spring was drinking the damp out of the stones, pushing the nights back and ushering the dawn in sooner. It breathed life back into the monks. It whispered over Tenebrae’s skin, asking if he was ready to bloom too. He was not sure how to answer Spring’s call. He was not sure if he was still needing to hibernate. Was his soul ready to draw itself out again? Was his heart still too wayward?
The monk does not know that, as he wonders these things amidst a community in bloom, a girl wilts like a flower caught in winter’s grasp. Luvena ails, wearying when all her patients in the hospital wing flourish beneath her healing gift. Maybe that is why the monk comes to find her now, to take from her too, to find life again at her touch.
“Lu.” He murmurs as his shadows press against her door. The black of his magic reaches out, like fingers, to feel the texture of the frame, the panels of the wooden door, its hinges open. Tenebrae steps forward, cautious, careful, almost tentative as a lamb. His blindfolded eyes are growing accustomed to their new blindness. But the man behind them, trapped within the darkness of his entombing body, has not grown used to his new cell. Though he accepts it, sitting in silence, listening to the quiet and the way his other senses tell him of the world.
“They said outside that you are not well.” He had come for himself, but as with all things, he is not the only one in need. The world lives upon the balance of giving and taking. He will wait to be made whole again - though it may take eternity. The monk will sit in the darkness until there is light, until the flickering glow of Boudika’s light grows into anything more than a fragile, trembling glow.
“Can I get you anything, Lu?” He asks, unsure if she is even there, though his shadows drift into the room reaching for her, to remember how she feels against them, to tell him that his friend is there.
The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad!
I thought about getting up to go greet him but feared that if I did I would lose my balance and tumble, a move I did not want to risk making. As he moved through the door I could see the hesitation in his steps. The way his shadows curl around every crevice in the walls, far more sure than his footing. The blindfold that covered his face stood out again the cream coat. It seemed that though winter had left the order, it lingered around him. he seemed... not cold, but distant, sorrowful.
"Ten..." I was still stuck on the way his shadows seem to feel around every space. I was not ignorant. I had heard the rumors around the temple. It was surprising how much was let slip in healers chambers. I knew something had been done to his sight, I didn't realize it had been completely taken from him.
"I'm fine" it was an instinctive reply, one I'd said so many times it came out without a second thought. Though already my head was beginning to ache, and soon I was sure would pound. "are you? alright? I..." concern was blooming inside me the longer I looked at him. "I heard, from the boys"
The first time I had felt those shadows touch my pelt it had taken all my willpower not to jump away. Even when I had come to live here they had still made me shudder with that cold touch. This time though as they crept over me I settled under them. Their cool touch soothing on my fevered body. I shook my head no in response, before realizing such gestures were now rendered useless. "no" I murmured. "You can come keep me company though... I haven't seen you nearly since I got here. its been months"
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
Her voice… it is tired, The sound of it, the lyrical tone is more like a lullaby. It whispers of weariness and reminds his bones how tired he is, how exhausted with everything. The monk does not shy from the feeling, but lets the weight of them slow his blinking eyes. He lets his eyelashes grow as heavy as if they are made of lead. They press upon his cheek and brush against the soft threads of his bandage. It hurts to blink and so he stops, though a part of him still does not accept his blindness. It wants him to pull the bandage from his eyes and rub his weary, obstructed lids until light comes pouring in anew…
He doesn’t. His conscious knows how futile it is, how his every moment of forgetting and then remembering is like being dropped to the bottom of the sea. He would become little more than driftwood then, material caught upon the tide. Tenebrae feels worked apart by a tide already. His exhaustion is self-made, he only has himself to blame. So he bathes in his sorrow and his weariness and wears them like a chain about his throat, a noose he waits for that will pull tight. Or, maybe, it will pull him in a new direction, one that will bring him life and not this strange half-life he finds himself within.
Luvena’s words, though wearily spoken, manage to reach into the darkness of his body. He holds them there and presses against the walls of himself, wondering if he can be anything more than the shell he is. Can he be reshaped? A building razed and built anew?
“I am fine,” Tenebrae says with a smile as cool and still as a winter’s dawn. His answer is a mirror of hers. It is a lie as blatant as hers too. Ruefully he laughs a half laugh, soft as a sigh. “They cannot help but gossip. Worse than women at a well.”
He moves further in, still cautious, listening to the strange whispering feelings his shadows evoke within him. They push him and pull him until they build within his body a sensation firm and unyielding. Tenebrae stops, wary and cautious. His head dips until his halfmoon sigil lights the flagstone floor of her room. “It has been too long.” Guided by a sense he has not yet begun to understand, he reaches out careful, careful, until the hair of her forelock brushes against his muzzle.
Oh. Tenebrae smiles into the curls of her hair. His nose fills with the scents of herbs and tinctures that lie upon the soft tendrils - like spider-silk, he thinks. The monk has never stopped to think of the texture of hair before, he would linger a moment longer, expect that he has already taken too long - like an old man clasping an old fond photograph.
He steps away, “I have missed you. But we have time.” Slowly he lowers himself beside her, upon the cold floor. An ear twists toward her, his focus upon her, though he looks across the room, better to hear her than to try see what he will never see again.
The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad!
I wondered how much his shadows would explore around the room, if they would reach the curtain drawn over the window, with holes fastened over hooks to keep out even the slivers of light that would normally creep around the edges. Or the sunken firepit nearby, that held no wood, or ashes, unused since I had been here, leaving a cold chill in the room, one I made up for with hides I had found in some decrepit storage chamber. How far was their reach? Were they bound to his body? Or could they move far on their own? They never seemed to stray far, always curling and coiling around him, like a snake coils around it's prey.
Sometimes on these days, where my body decided to slip into such a state, fear coiled its way around me, just as Tenebraes shadows coiled around him. Though I often told myself not to let it, it made its way through. It hadn't always, there was a time when I had been ready, to slip away. Had said my goodbyes and readied myself, and it had happened. But I wasn't anymore, and every time, that fear that this was it would twist its away around me. I knew everytime, it wasn't it, because that first time there had been such a lead up, it hadn't been out of nowhere, but fear and logic are not friends.
I let a soft sigh escape me "We both know we're both lying Ten, you are just as 'fine' as I was when you found me in the foothills"
His touch is soft, friendly, and I welcome it. It's been so long since I've known the touch of a friend so dear. Io Kairavi was long gone, and no one had since taken her place. Though I winced at the light from his moon, I did not pull away. He could linger as long as he liked, it seemed he needed it nearly more than I.
It was strange to not be able to hold his gaze. Usually, it was a comfort to not be stared at - I'm so used to others looking at me as some foreign creature against the landscape before them - but knowing that he would never see any landscape again only made me feel sad for him. "we do" I replied. "Tell me, what other gossip flits around the temple? I only hear what the boys find noteworthy, but their taste is... questionable, at best"
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
He does not know how dark it is within her room. Nor how his shadows make it darker still. They run like ink into the darkness that already looms up the walls in every corner.
But he feels the cold and the way it sinks its fingers, like frost, down below his skin and under, pressing along his nerves and into bone.
Tenebrae longs to ask her why she sits here, in the dark liek sorrow and the cold like detachment. She sighs at his remark. He hears it, louder than he ever has heard a sigh before. Maybe it is because her room is so cold, so quiet he hears how it echoes off the walls. Though maybe it is simply that his remaining senses are growing, working themselves harder.
He smiles against her hair as he stands above her. “No, really,” the Disciple attests, “I am fine. This is what I deserved, I have accepted it. It is just learning to live differently and that… is a challenge. But I am not at death’s door.” The last he says with gentle accusation. He still recalls how she arrived, broken and cold and so nearly gone.
Now seated beside her he laughs lightly, “Men.” Tenebrae murmurs by way of an answer. Then sighs lightly, “Antiope has stepped down and Denocte has a new queen. That is the biggest topic of conversation now. Well, now that the gossip of a brother being blinded has died down…” He finishes ruefully but quietly and sighs. “Why did you come back? It is wonderful to have you, of course, but i never thought you would leave Terrastella for a new home here - amidst monks, of all places.”
The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad!
"Deserved?" I let a sort of soft 'hmph' leave my mouth before I can stop it. "No one deserves that" I turn my head away, thinking back to Cavalier, how the wolf had thought she had 'deserved' to have her tongue ripped out. "Besides, that was not my closest brush with death. Me and death have done more than brush past each other." I can nearly laugh about it now, and I do here, just a little. "What happened to you... that is not a brush" I know I shouldn't, but I wonder if his eyes are still there. If there are two empty holes where they were, or merely two eyes that can no longer see.
"Oh? who?" I ask. "I was rather under the impression that Antiope would stay until she died, though I suppose I don't know much in the way of court proceedings" Even Picoro seems surprised by the news.
I'm reminded once again of why I left. "I went to Terrastella when I got here because it was like Elysium, and Herstial..." I pause, realizing he wouldn't know of them "Both homes I knew before Novus. but the familiarity did more bad than good. One can't linger in the past forever. I kept catching scents on the wind that could never be here... My boys... I felt like I was going crazy. Not to mention I was sat in that swamp by myself half the time. There's far more company and things to be done up here, though I must admit, the mountains are not exactly friendly outside the temple"I laughed.
"Why are you here? I know you've devoted yourself to Caligo, but why? I'm not sure I could devote my life to a deity again... I already made that mistake twice"
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
The monk sighs softly. Luvena was not the first to believe his punishment was too much. “We each put different weights of responsibility upon vows.” He looks toward the middle of the room, the tilt of his head unfocussed, his eyes unseeing. “The vow to Caligo… to chastity in the pursuit of ones pledge to Caligo are vital, important ones. If we are not complete or true in our devotion to Caligo then we are not monks at all. We have no right to be in the Night Order if Caligo is not at the center of our everything.” Tenebrae pauses, his darkness letting loose the sigh he does not make. They reach around the room, touching the objects and furnishings she has scattered throughout. His magic has grown a curiosity he cannot yet feel, though he has begun to sense the way his shadows move - in ways they never have before.
“I wanted to stay a monk, after everything. The cost of that is a monk’s sight. It wraps us in Caligo’s darkness helping those who have strayed to know Caligo’s totality.” For so long he was ashamed. For so long he feared that the secret kisses upon his skin would be discovered. He hid love of women that grew in his heart. It bloomed like roses, its thorns of secrets pricking, choking him. It is a relief to sit here now and open up his misdeeds like a book, its open pages exposing all his misdeeds before the eyes of others.
He may be blind, but it is a relief to no longer live a lie.
Tenebrae laughs lightly, softly. It is a low rumble, akin to a purr in the cool dark of her room. “I can well imagine that. Just do not get too close to death, because one day it will catch you and hold you fast. None of us will be prepared for that day.”
He might have drifted off then, lost in her words, her thoughts of her past, but for how she stumbles suddenly, how emotion suddenly breaks through her words as sharp to his ears as whip across his back.
Her boys.
Slowly the monk lifts his head from where he looks, vacantly into the room. An ear twists toward her, his head turning as if his eyes remember how to find her. “You had children.” It is a statement and yet a question also. In his voice is the longing of a man who dared, for a moment, to entertain the thought that he had a daughter. That thought… that short moment of belief opened up for him a longing he did not know he possessed. He was wrong, he has no family still - but, but to believe for a moment that he did… That was joy - and terror.
Despite he knows a monk should not have children, Tenebrae cannot help but feel that freshly awoken desire for his own blood, his own love. “What is it like?” The Disciple asks, softly, to ask is no sin at all. So he dares to and settles a keep ear in her direction.
Down, down drops his head, his breath pushes from his lungs with the depth of her question. It fills him up, reaching in to the uncomfortable parts of him that writhe against such a prying query. She does not mean it. He knows.
“If you made that mistake twice, maybe you were following the wrong gods?” A pause, and then, “They say that if you are earnest in your belief that the grace of your god is enough to sustain you and keep you strong in faith.” He smiles, a dark, sardonic grin. The shadows flood in upon him, as if they know that his thoughts turn to blasphemous things. “Maybe I am following the wrong god.” He whispers into the darkness he shares with Luvena and her alone.
The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad!
I listen to him in silence, nearly forgetting about the ache in my head as his words wash over me. I admire his confidence in his goddess, his devotion, though it's not one I think I could ever share again. I had not much to say in response, and watched as his shadows crept further around the room. Wrapping its tendrils around a basket I had woven -one skill I'd retained from my childhood in Herstial - and then over Caligos stone offering plate that was in every room I'd found so far. Every once and a while I tried to offer something up, though I had no clue what tokens the goddess appreciated.
I wonder if it's a hint of bitterness I catch on his words, at Caligo for dooming him to stay in solitude, or at himself for not appreciating it. I reach out to brush his shoulder with my muzzle. "As long as you're okay... then I can live with that"
My heart hurts every time I think of them, it's been so long I can hardly picture their faces anymore. I tell myself they have both grown into strong men, with their mother's powerful shoulders, and my delicate features, but the truth is that I will likely never know if fate has let them live out their lives. I have more hope for Eremurus than Liatris.
"I did..." the words come out so quietly I hardly hear them myself, and Picoro nestles himself deeper into my side. "many years ago now..." How long had it been now, three years? four? "beautiful, and awful. You give everything to them, your heart, your soul, and they flourish with it. But if you lose them... you lose those parts of yourself forever. You can gain new parts, but those ones, they don't grow back."
I lean into him as he sighs, letting my neck rest over his legs, and then flinch at his words moments later. My head lifts sharply, winning against the stiffness of my neck, nearly hitting his head in the process. I am not angry by nature, I work hard to keep it out of my life, but I can not help but let its discordance strike through the notes in my words. "I was not" I snap sharply. "had Acrux not given me his blessing I would have no children, had I not devoted myself to his land and it's people I would not have later found the friends I held dear. Death did catch me and hold me fast and Vega pulled her off of me with strength I never could have used myself." I finish with a heavy sigh, and exhausted from the short burst lower my head back down over Tenebraes legs. "They fell apart and left us, but I will never regret the time I gave up to them. I just can't do it again, I won't risk giving everything and having it taken once more."
He sounds so defeated in that moment that I feel bad for snapping so harshly, and anger at allowing myself to do so, it goes against everything I hold dear to speak in such tones. "maybe you are" I reply "But that's not something I can discover for you. That is a devotion you must decide for yourself... no one else can help you in that regard"
@Tenebrae
angrryyyy lu (she prob will eventually devote herself to something again... shes just in deniaaallll)
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
As they lie together, the darkness tangling them in shadow, Tenebrae feels her pain. It is there in the way she trembles against him, little more than a leaf upon the breeze of sickness. It is there in the words that fall from her lips, metallic as blood, raw as worried tissue.
Her muzzle is warm. It feels larger than a brush when it passes across his shoulder. It is an embrace, a holding of friendship. It is a bond that sinks through the skin she touches and binds itself into the fabric of his being. Luvena sews herself into him as he into her.
The cold of her room is a contrast to the heat of her memories. They flood between the monk and the healer as warm as the blood that links Luvena with her sons. In silence, Tenebrae only listens. He is no wise guru here. Children are a thing so far out of his remit. There is no experience he has of children except the boys who come as fresh orphans to the Night Order. They grow to love each other like brothers. But never has Tenebrae known the love of a mother. He dares to wonder how different the love of a father is.
Luvena’s words let him have that moment of blasphemous wonder and hope. He entertains a moment as he pretends a child is his, a little girl called Elliana. Would he love her as much as Luvena loves her sons? Many would say no. Maybe they are right? What would a man without a child know? More pertinently, what would a monk know? He had no right thinking such thoughts.
Her anger is a welcome bath, scouring his selfish thoughts from him as if her irritation were acid. She lifts her head from him - from that place where they had curled together tighter than even the darkness could allow. Tenebrae does not miss her flinch, he feels it through his bones. Her hurt is a taste upon the air, a shiver in her body where it presses against him.
The monk reaches for her. He runs his lips along the curve of her neck. Her skin is warm here, warmer than he thinks it should be. Tenebrae longs his touch into a balm, something to ease the fatigue from her body and the pain he pressed into her heart. “I meant no harm, Lu.” He whispers against her skin, where the cold air cannot reach. “I am sorry.”
When the silence descends after her final thoughts, Tenebrae is silent also. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest is any indication that he is man at all and not shadow. His thoughts are a fathomless depth that he sinks into, sifting, considering, fearing drowning. When at last he tires, when the edges of his pool of thought suddenly feel like land and he in the middle of the Terminus Sea, then, then he suddenly pulls himself out of silence. “I had better go.” The monk says with a small smile and no effort to respond to her final words. That pool is too deep. His thoughts too dripping with heresy and faithlessness. “I am due on duty soon.”
The monk rises and his shadows gather. Reaching carefully, moving his muzzle until it at last finds her brow and upon it presses a kiss. “Go well, Luvena. Do not become a stranger now you are here. My door is always open to you.”
And with that he leaves, his manner slow, his shadows reaching before him, something like feeling.
