On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
This was a special day for Tenebrae.
As the sun sets over white snow, turning it to glittering gold, the Disciple stepped into the shadow of the old cave’s mouth. Its lips were carved into an intricate arch, similar to a bow pulled and ready to cast and arrow into flight. It is a half-moon smile with lips drawn down at its corners like a lament, like a prayer.
There are prayers upon Tenebrae’s lips. The thanksgivings echo from his mouth into the black of the cave’s maw. But beyond its maw the cave immediately opens into a chamber large and grandly carved. Sigils of the Night Goddess and carvings of her Stallions are drawn across the walls. Tenebrae moves toward them, a moth to the flame of their story. He needs no light to see where they hide in darkness. The light of his half-moon sigil lights them and they glow as if freshly etched.
At once his soul is at peace, at once his magic surges with belonging. All the walls dance with the swell of his magic. They become a waltz of shadows as if a great gathering of darkness was here where shadows undulate and weave and glorify the walls with frenzied adulation.
How long does Tenebrae take to move through the atrium? How long until he meanders through each and every tunnel that reaches like veins deep into the heart of Denocte’s mountains. With a mountain as its ceiling and a goddess’ darkness filling every inch of this sacred temple, there is no part of this place that does not echo with sacrament and memory.
Tenebrae brings moonlight into the dark of the caves. He no longer knows if the sun still lingers above the horizon or if it has be swallowed by the sea. Tenebrae does not care. He does not even stop to think. And why would he when all of his dreams and desires have been so filled with this dream: to find the abandoned mountain halls of the Disciples. To reclaim what was theirs and call it home.
This is perfection. This has made all the whip-wounds across his back worth their every sting and bloody tear. Tenebrae is welcomed into the heart of the mountain temple, to where the mountain opens up like a crater to the endless sky above. Trees cling to the lips of the stone circle. The reach out across the open air and gasp in the fresh air and light that tumbles down, down, down.
There is a roaring in this chasm with its open roof. There is a river that cascades down and down and down. A mist rises in a silver moonlit sigh where it endlessly empties into the pool below. Rainbows burst in halos as moonlight shatters the mist. The voice of the waterfall is a symphony of litanies that rise in a choral chant to fill the vacant cave. There is no inch of the space here that is not holy. The water channels from the pool, turning from silver to inky black as it drifts into the shadow of the chasm walls. Its water is shadow-filled and Tenebrae moves toward it, he dares to lower his lips, to smell, to taste.
And he would have. He would have blasphemed then if a worse sin did not rise from the water incarnate and resplendent. Lunar halos frame her as the water clings, crystalline to her skin. The sight of her is salvation and condemnation. She is pomegranates and a cage. Boudika rises as his gaoler with her smile lit by moonlight as it cuts along her cheeks.
At his throat, her bite calls from all the places her teeth once were. They beg to remember, healing tissues itch and burn. The Disciple breathes a hiss like a serpent for his sin. Already Tenebrae’s stomach is dirty with dust for how she makes him crawl. He goes to her, to the water’s edge where she stands in the circle of moonlight, dappled by the shadows of trees and vines, winter flowers and ivy. Snow begins to fall as petals and never has Tenebrae seen anything more holy, or blasphemous.
His every whip-wound remembers and cries out in its anguish. It bids him remembers the bite of a whip and the agony of his sins. But the monk is there, holding her in his gaze as though she were in chains. “Boudika.” He says her name, low with a lion’s growl - already his tongue knows the taste of it. So suddenly his lips remember more than the weight of her name between them, but the hot of her skin and the salt of her sea. A soft hiss, from the man with the dusty belly, “How dare you.” It is nearly a whisper, furious and coarse as whispering gravel. It burns as hot as the red of her skin - though she is nearly black as coal in the moonlight. He knows how she burns like embers, even submerged beneath the waves. Boudika is lava and the Arma mountains cradle her deep, deep within their core.
“Get out,” the cave sings with his demand and the gravity of her crime.His toes reach over the water’s edge, but he does not get down into its cool and sacred deep. Nor does he step back when rocks tumble loose and shatter the perfect mirror of the pool’s surface. He leans, less a monk and more a god, out across the water as his neck reaches and he stares at her beneath the wild black of his fringe. Tenebrae’s eyes blaze as stars, his sigils glowing sharp as scythes.
“Now.”
They say she was born from the sea. And that she is just as lonely and just as willing to swallow the world.
@Boudika
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12-26-2019, 09:17 PM - This post was last modified: 12-26-2019, 09:19 PM by Tenebrae
girls who run with wolves aren't here for boys to love. the moon sings every night, pulls the ocean's tides to shore; your heart belongs to every star, screams dance upon your lips. a princess should be built of stars and suns and forevers, your mother told you fairytales but she didn't tell you this:
Standing face-to-face with him it would be easy to assume her intentions had been malevolent; that she had followed him there. There, eye-to-eye, with her name a sin heavy on his mouth, it is easy to believe her wicked and wily, a woman come to condemn him.
But Boudika is as taken aback by the appearance of the Disciple as he is of her sudden breach of the water’s surface. She stands statuesque; the water drips crystalline and nearly luminescent from her skin. She had been drawn from the deep of the cavern’s water not by any understanding of who disturbed her; on contrary, it was merely due to the passing shadows, the predatory sense that there was someone else there. Boudika was only there to discover; to learn something of herself in the pure water of the mountain's deep.
The water-horse had only been doing something innate, something inherent. She had followed the water; and it had led her here. Boudika had paid little mind to the cavern’s embellishments; to the sigils of Caligo that, for her, did not glow. The water tried to speak to her, even now; but the words it would say were ineligible in his presence. Instead, the was the dull roar of the distant waterfall—it pounded against the edge of the pristine pool and sent ripples and ridges through the water.
How dare you. Get out. Now.
He treats her with rage.
Boudika’s ears pin; her nostrils flare. The bright light of his sigils reflect upon her pupils and they stare back at him, predatory and metallic, not red but silver in the way a wolf’s are in dark and light.
A nearly childish voice cries out within her. I was here first.
He had disturbed her.
Boudika’s mouth stretches long and dangerous; an ugly smile. She takes a step back, away from him; and drops into the deepening water until only her eyes, nostrils, and ears are exposed. She watches him, crocodilian and strange, and still the water does not speak.
Perhaps if she understood the extent of the organisation to which he belonged, she would realise her trespass. Perhaps if the meaning of the Disciples was clear to her, the carvings on the wall would be more relevant.
But now, neck-deep in the water, she seethes at this man’s ability to enrage her. She seethes at the fact that not once, but twice, he had made an enormous ass out of himself.
Boudika nearly leaves then, to slip back through the twisting expanse of underground rivers, hunting and seeking and learning and living, when the outrageousness of it strikes her. What an unreasonable request. She circles him, eyes gleaming against his sigils’ light, and emerges on the far bank across the pool. She climbs out as sinuously as a jungle cat.
“Tenebrae.” His name is spat from her mouth like a curse. She eyes him sidelong, lips twitching in an almost-snarl. “Again you find a way to ruin my evening. I am not sure what trespass I made this time, aside from following a river—which, I might add, belongs as much to me as your shadows do to you.”
Boudika is all but bristling; perhaps it is because there is a part of her, girlish and bewildered, that does not understand his hostility. The last time she had seen him, he had apologised. The last time she had seen him, he had been the first man to give her a kiss. The sentimentality of it is something the water-horse refuses to dwell on, however; and the fact that she feels something only angers her more. "I was here first." I had no idea it would cause such great offense to you, shadow-caster. The words taste like vinegar.
when the sun sets and the wolves run you will find that sometimes the princess and the witch are one and red riding hood will eat the wolf; there is fire in your blood, a forest building in your veins, don't try to lose the moonlight. you were meant for this. between dawn and dusk you were made of miracles and you can run all you want, but in the light of the moon the wolves will always call you back.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
She stands like a god in the water.
She stands as if carved by adoration.
The holy water ripples where it lips at her limbs. Its mirrored surface shatters with the droplets that drip as tears from her hips. Tenebrae thinks he hears them above the hiss of the waterfall. They each hit the water and chime like a bell calling him to worship. They fall as regularly as a heartbeat.. He dare not know whether it is his or hers. Or maybe, he hopes, it is Caligo’s and she is coming to reprimand her wayward son.
But Caligo does not come and the final droplet falls from Boudika’s stomach. The echoing silence of its wake leaves the Disciple bereft. Her eyes glow like moons, cradled in the delicate contours of her wicked face. Her hair glows in tongues of flames unquenched by the cascading waterfall.
The smoke to her fire; Tenebrae stands, tall and dark, amidst the swelling plumes of his black magic. He leans across the water to reach her, touch her, to drag her out -
She sinks, with a smile that is not ugly but feral, immoral. The water swallows her and she stops when the water laps at the tops of her cheeks, her upper lip. Boudika lingers no more a goddess than a leviathan, watching, waiting. Impatient, riled, the kelpie swims to the opposite bank and Tenebrae mirrors her. She did not come to him as he demanded but slips, silken, from the water. His whitebright eyes watch her rise, divine, again.
The sacred pool cuts between them. It settles, mirror still in her absence. Tenebrae did not know how tightly she held his breath until it escapes his lungs with a gust. “Thank you,” the Disciple groans. Relief untangles the knots of his being with gentle hands. It unwinds him… until he looks at her again.
Holy water gleams sacred and crystalline along her skin - the monk looks away. He keeps his gaze on the lupine glow of hers. Together their eyes are starlight and moonlight, a moon painted sea and a shadow filled land. Boudika spits his name as a curse and Tenebrae can only wonder how it might sound as a prayer.
His wounds twinge as he moves, as he prowls along the bank of the water’s edge. Never does he stop watching her, never does he cease moving, stalking, fuming.
Her ire flies across the water on wings blistering and bright. It is a wonder the river does not ignite like gasoline. She berates him and he wonders if is this a new kind of war where shadow weapons are useless. Boudika educates him, this girl with her ravenous smile, but oh, her pupil is unwilling.
“It is holy.” He breathes, as if strangled, as if she holds his breath again. And maybe she does, for as he looks at her he questions what is really to be revered this night. The creature across the water is untameable and savage. Already he knows the violence of her teeth, already he knows the dangers of her smile. And none are as perilous to monks as the taste of her skin upon their lips.
“It is holy.” Tenebrae repeats, less a warrior than a monk desperate to preserve the sanctity of his beliefs. “Boudika,” He ignores how his murmur sounds like a prayer and more alive than Caligo upon his lips. He swallows down his ire and it is not like the ichor of the sun but bitter and wanton. She bristles like a cat, he sees the way it makes her spine stiffen. He regrets that he has watched her long enough to tell the difference.
“This is Caligo’s sacred pool. We guard the water as it passes into the shadow of her temple and is made sacred.” The monk indicates to where the silver water slips beneath the shadow of the cavern.
“Come here.” He says and prays Boudika won’t. That she will stay away, that Caligo will refuse to have her sacred pool tainted again. He is fast realising he may not be so lucky. But at least he can watch her cross the black water and see that she does not linger in the pool.
And what would he do if she refuses? Would he beg upon his knees that she cross? Would he dare to cross the water and drag her back? Or, would he rejoice if she refuses and be thankful that she does not come close to him, where he can taste the salt of her skin?
“Please.” Tenebrae says, for it is better than a sword and it is better than begging.
They say she was born from the sea. And that she is just as lonely and just as willing to swallow the world.
