What if I'm tryin', but then I close my eyes And then I'm right back, lost in that last goodbye? And what if time doesn't do what it's supposed to do? What if I never get over you?
How does a star fall apart?
It is a question Moira wonders time and time again, over the course of her life, without ever, truly, finding an answer. Slowly, she thinks, and then they collapse in a beautiful display before they become something much worse than what they are. She wonders if she's doomed to the same gravities and forces pulling her apart and pushing her too far together until she's only left as a black hole ready to tear the world asunder.
There is a beast that rages in her breast and a fire in her blood and an ice in her soul that is impregnable and impenetrable and more terrifying than she can comprehend.
The sadness in her veins is a disease, a curse, that eats her alive. Caine. Asterion. Michael. Bexley. Isra. Isra. Isra. Isra.
Her heart knows only these names. And she has forgotten the sound of her voice. Neerja cannot find her in the darkness that swells like birdsong, some dark melody pulling Moira into a fitful repose. She's half hungry, half mad, half girl, half god when she wonders into the mountains. Thorns brush her legs from bushes she didn't care if she walked through, blood pools on the surface and drips a red trail onto the patterns of the leaves.
Bruises stain her knees, but she can't feel them anymore. Too many cold nights were already spent begging her ancestors to bring them back on stone floors where only forgotten gods would listen.
It didn't work.
So Moira left, a single note for Antiope, telling her she will return and be ready to resume her duties. Then, like a flame flickering out, she was gone.
The Phoenix of Denocte, a flaming, blazing light when Isra was stolen, snuffed out in the blink of an eye.
For what?
For the heart that beats in her chest, offered to another and another and another.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
He felt her magic before he saw her. He felt the way Arma mountains sang with her desperate sorrow.
As a mountain crumbling Moira falls apart as she climbs up the mountain path. All of Denocte trembles at her crumbling. All of Denocte feels the shadow of her grief.
So it is no surprise that Tenebrae stands at the end of the path and watches as she ascends. The clouds grow crimson and gold, heralding her climb. Her magic is her torch. It is shards of light that pierce his shadows like arrows. His magic remembers hers. It still feels the wounds of their last meeting, as if she is still there, dark eyed with anguished, hot like rage. The memory is so clear, the imaginary wounds so unhealed that the mountain feels suddenly holy, so like the temple that ill-fated night.
Moira made a rebel out of him that night. He left his station and let her weep before the listening walls of Caligo’s empty temple. He was punished, as any warrior who abandoned his station should be. But it was worth it.
Not that it has helped. She returns again, does she not?
Tenebrae is waiting for her as she rounds a bend. He is the black to her light. Instantly his magic vies to consume hers, to pull from her every ray of light she conjures. But he refrains. He has learnt patience since last they met. He has learned she is broken and even more so now.
“Moira.” He says in darkness and night. That voice is low, low, knowing, knowing what her ire is like, knowing that she cannot break forever.
“You cannot keep let yourself break any more.” He says and it should be a mockery, coming from a monk. But his business is in the souls of Denocte. He knows when they are shattering, when they need stitching back together. “It must end.” He says and there is no leniency in his voice. Sombre is the Disciple as he watches her. Ready is his magic, for he knows how this girl rages, he knows how in her sorrow her magic is a wild thing.
His shadows gather, silently, silently. Her rage will be a beautiful thing and he is ready, again.
What if I'm tryin', but then I close my eyes And then I'm right back, lost in that last goodbye? And what if time doesn't do what it's supposed to do? What if I never get over you?
A voice rolls as thunder does when she turns round the corner up ahead, his darkness a net cast about him just as the angry orbs that flicker in and out of existence in her wake are strewn behind her. He stands strong and tall and bold. Ever so bold in the face of fire, in the face of doom and destruction and death.
She wears a snarl as well as any monster, turning her face into a grim, shaded portrait of what it once was. Perhaps, in this light, she looks a demon with her shredded skin and hollowed curves. Even her crown is down, her hackles raised, her eyes alight at the sight of him. But what burns in golden depths is not a natural fire, nothing of this earth.
Moira makes no sound as her head tilts, as she sizes him up again and a ray of light slithers along the ground, twining around his ankle to chase away the shadows, to chase him from her path.
Solitude.
Silence.
Isolation.
Not for the first time in her life, Moira wants to be alone. So she feeds her rage kindling, faces of those who go, faces of shadows in a temple, strips of memories that are as beautiful as they are painful.
All she knows is pain and a hunger in her soul.
“Move, Monk," is all she growls, the only warning she will offer him this night.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
He remembers the temple where they first met. Where their magics warred together. She burned bright like the sun that night and he hungered, oh how he hungered!
Moira’s gaze had been dark as a bruise. So dark he could feel the throbbing pulse of her soul. But now it is not just a throb but a harrowing cry. Its voice rips from every part of her that grief has turned ragged and bitter.
The girl who stands before him is a shadow of the phoenix she once had been. He has never known Moira happy, he has never known her without tears beading like pearls upon her lashes. Though he has never known her any other way he cannot help but think this is not you. It was a cruel existence.
She rages. A gaunt, angular shadow of the creature she once was. A serpent of light slithers toward him. Her magic stings the air, it hisses with fire and heat.
Move monk, Moira snarls leonine, feral. He is not swayed. From the darkness his white-bright eyes glow, unlinking they hold her as the moon watches the night, serene, unmovable.
“No.” He says. Tenebrae’s voice is low and stones judder as the mountain quakes for the two who meet upon its side. That serpent of her magic twists itself around his ankle. She threatens as she did before. Moira is more untethered that she had ever been that night in the Temple.
He lifts his hoof and lowers it upon the slithering snake of light. Darkness billows from him, smothering, choking that small piece of magic.
“Moira, you look awful... There is no rest in you.” He says, seeing the chaos of her body, the battle that rages within her: how can one survive a broken heart? Yet her body clings to life, gaunt and savage.
“Will you come home with me?” That question is a gentle thing. It waits for her, yet in the monk’s eyes is something harder, sharp as a jet black blade. There is no question for her really. This is her intervention and she can come to it willingly, or Tenebrae will take her.
What if I'm tryin', but then I close my eyes And then I'm right back, lost in that last goodbye? And what if time doesn't do what it's supposed to do? What if I never get over you?
Ice can only rage so long; storms can only ravage a sea, an island, a body until it is frozen through and through. She cannot feel herself frozen, but one never notices the numbness until they cannot move, cannot feel, cannot function as they once did. Soon, it could be too late.
She does not care.
All she feels is the howling hollows of her heart, the canyons of darkness of her soul. All she knows is the rage biting her blood when the man who looks at her like the moon - such sorrow and judgement and pity - says no. Everything else does not matter. Nothing else matters in those moments only that he is a mountain standing in her pathway and she will conquer it.
She will move past him no matter what.
There is a snarl, there are no words for the girl who was once so shy, so eloquent, so lovely. Only a savage scream builds and builds like the pressure in a dam. Surely she will crack too soon, too quickly, and a unstoppable flood will be unleashed on everything she knows and everything she is. Soon, so soon, even the phoenix will burn without stopping.
Darkness swallows her snake, she feels it crushed as though it is her own throat that is closed off. Nostrils flare and it does not matter that Tenebre is of Denocte. It does not matter that he means no harm and wishes her well. It does not matter.
Nothing matters.
More light streams from the moon that smiles so sadly down upon her, and she pulls it like a girl starving, she strings it down as her toy and weapon as a fallen angel wields their last hopes - boldly, bravely, beautifully. It pools and pools between them, building as a rope in her hands, a wall between them growing higher and shining such soft, sweet silver rays. Moira watches the latticework falling into place.
There is only anger and desperation burning in those golden eyes. She is bathed in the glow of her power, it radiates from the stars upon her skin that pulse, hungry for more, more, more. They beg and beg for her to feed them, for her body to grow hot with the light, for her skin to boil with the power. Moira does not hold back, does not stop as it spools from her body. The starlight on her skin, faint and yellow and orange and white, joins like a million sparkling eyes into the wall.
It moves as a tsunami - a singular motion, impregnable, impenetrable, a solid force between them. Slowly she builds it up as moves it forward, pushing Tenebre back and to the side.
This is her path.
He will not stop her.
Not now, not now, not now.
This is all she knows. That she is strong and she is powerful and she will not be stopped.
She is so tired of men and their hungry eyes, their sad eyes, their pitying eyes that eat her flesh and eat her heart and eat her soul. Tenebre is another man, come to tell her what to do and where to go, and what to feel.
Not tonight.
Never again.
With bared teeth and a savage scream, the phoenix is half wild, have mad, as she charges behind her wall, aiming to wrap her woven rope of light about his feet to tear him from the very ground he stands upon if she must.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
There is no rest in her.
She rages like a sun as it dies and turns crimson and ravenous. She draws all to her. All the light floods down from the moon and the stars. All the light is hers.
She is a star exploding and he wonders when Novus will feel the ramification of her breakdown. Moira is the wild sea, her hair crimson and yet salt licked, coarse enough to strip the fabric of his soul into pieces.
He stands and watches her, even as she pulls the light out of the sky. His own magic snarls at such a display of magic. His own magic is as ravenous as hers. In her palm the evening light gleams, it halos her. Frraming Moira in divine light, painting her a celestial being, broken and intent on reaping her despair upon mortals.
The night is quiet and then she screams. Oh it pierces every part of him. Her voice is claws ripping at his heart, his soul. How broken is she now? She is a warning for him: the cost of falling in love is falling apart. Tenebrae will have none of it.
“Are you done?” He asks, his skull tilting, his voice low, steady, a rumbling snarl.
But Moira is not done.
When will she ever be simply done?
She builds a wave of light and Tenebrae watches it form. It rises like a tsunami. It gleams with celestial fire and vows to illuminate every piece of him. His nape arches, his chin pressing hinto his chest, his ears falling atop his skull. About him his shadows rally, they rise like her wave. They command the night. Ravenous they consume her light and bloom in eternal darkness. Darkness forms a wall upon which her wave can crash. It reaches tall between the mare and the monk. It is a pledge that nothing more will break this night.
Moira charges, screaming, savage and broken. The wall does not waver. It becomes passable only enough for Tenebrae to emerge from behind it: at first only a glow of two white eyes and a wicked half moon sigil. Then he is there, appearing from amidst his magic.
They are close, her scream splitting the air. Her magic, ropes of light tangle about his limbs. He trips and a sword appears within his grasp. It slices her ropes into pieces, over and over. Still his darkness blocks her path where light crashes upon it, as endless and terrible as a raging sea.
“Is this helping?’ He says, low, almost a snarl. His gaze searches out hers, where dragons live and wildfires feast behind her wicked bright eyes. “Do you feel better?” The monk asks and he does not think she can be, not when her screams tear them all apart. Moira Tonnerre is in pieces upon Veneror.
Tenebrae reaches for her. To grasp her, to hold her in ways no magic can. A vice about her sorrow; a friend to hold together the pieces of her that she no longer can. He thinks that it is nothing like the ways he has held anyone before. It is living, existing, holding a shattering world, even if it means being flayed alive.
What if I'm tryin', but then I close my eyes And then I'm right back, lost in that last goodbye? And what if time doesn't do what it's supposed to do? What if I never get over you?
In her rage and her fury she has forgotten his power, forgotten his awesome displays of darkness, of Caligo's might that touches his soul, is as much a part of him as the light is a part of herself. He is a vessel of darkness, of some pagan religion her family would never believe in, the childish part of her screaming against it, yelling incomprehensible things at him, demanding he move with the howls and growls that explode out of her like the night air about them.
When her rope is broken, when her wall is consumed, she turns the shattered pieces into drills. Small snake heads pierce the ground in a million little spots, rays of light shooting into the stone beneath them, tunneling faster than she can breathe, faster than she can move, in a circle that grows wider and deeper. Between them blossoms a sinkhole, a crater that crashes down, further and further, a widening gap between them as she pants.
Her eyes are wild, if they were pale and white surely they would be much larger than the beady dark, blackholes they now seem to be. They seek to devour every inch of him that defies her, that halts her from her own self destruction.
Who is a monk of Caligo to stop her?
This is what she wants so why does he keep talking.
Moira does not feel the tears that scrape her cheeks like knives until they are raw, does not even know they are falling. Yet they cloud her vision, mute the world as dust rises around them, blocking Tenebre from her, blocking her toppling to the ground from him.
All the energy, all the pent up rage, everything holding her upright begins to fall as she does. She feels light, she feels unhinged, she feels too much and cannot stand it, cannot handle the sheer muchness of it. He reaches her as she faints, the ground stops its rumbling as the light reaches to encompass them both, holding them together, lifting them just barely off the ground.
Everything is dark for her, for a moment, and her heart races when she does not scream. The phoenix wants so badly to stay here, stay where nothing matters, but she feels herself returning, floating towards a surface that is full of razors and shattered diamonds.
It's been only moments, but she feels as though she's been floating in the dark for eons. Her lights are nearly out when her eyes begin to flutter, her mouth a soft 'o' that quickly morphs into a frown. For a moment, she struggles. Ears tucked into riotous curls, eyes squeezed shut to block out everything, and yet, some part of her, some tense, tightly coiled bit, comes undone. Unleashed, untethered, she cries, and cries, and cries.
Great sobs are storms overturning a boat, her body shakes and quakes in his grasp, her breathing as erratic as the noises coming from her mouth. It won't stop. Moira can no more control her body than she can the weather, and so it goes in, exhausting her until she is just a dry heaving mess, gasping for air, for something solid to hold on to.
At last, at last when Tenebrae's hands rake through her hair and she feels the tenderness of her caress, her body begins to calm its quaking, her knees give out and she rests upon the ground. Like the night blooming jasmine, she looks up, opening to Tenebrae as the shrub does to the moon. He is a giant above her, but he looks down on her with something that is not pity, something she does not know, and she says "What do you do when Caligo leaves you?" Her voice is so hoarse, crackling from her screams and rabid growls, her eyes swollen and nose wet. "You, who are her disciple, her midnight lover, under stuck her spell, her thumb?" It is like smoke in the night, drifting so easily away, lingering only with its acrid scent.
Another small sob, another tear falls, and then, "They were my moon and my sun..." her voice hitches, she looks like a child begging for answers, trying to figure out what she did wrong. "They left...they left and left me bereft. I feel so...hollow"
It takes another moment for her to remember how to breathe, how to pull in oxygen as she pulls down light. There is no light here, not when his shadows are a safety net around the both of them, blocking her rage from the world, keeping her and Denocte safe. She is shaky when she speaks again. "When the world is only full of different shades of shadows, where do you find the light? Even storm clouds have silver linings... without them the winds have died and the storms fled. Without them..." her head shakes, falls down as she whispers, “there is nothing."
As she stares into the ground, looks to the pit she's carved, she says at last “"You have always known shadow's kiss upon your skin, have always moved in their soft embrace... I've only ever lived my life by candlelight. Never have I been so blind."
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Nails of light fall like hail from the sky. They strike stone and yet are not stopped. They sink deep into the mountain with the same ease as lava through wood. Moira Tonnerre’s grief carves a cavern, a deep rift. Though her magic fell like rain, the hole left is akin to a crater left in the wake of an asteroid.
Her magic raises them. It cradles them, holding them up above the rift, the consuming darkness that sinks down into the mountain’s cavity. Tenebrae does not look to where the shadows broil below him. Instead he holds Moira as she shatters. Her screams turned to cries, strangled by grief and tears.
The monk pushes back the tangles of wild curls from her wet cheeks. She slumps, she weakens in his embrace and he holds her as their feet find the ground once more. Tenebrae does not let her fall, even as exhaustion and sorrow cut her muscles with their numbing touch. But then she lowers, down, down to the floor, an angel descending. The monk lets her go at last, yet his touch remains, a balm across the heat of her raw and broken heart.
Shadows and light, starlight and blazing fire, watch each other as the stallion and mare say nothing but look and look and look into each other’s eyes. His touch brushes across her feverish brow, it lingers at her cheek as she asks her questions. None of them are easy. Each one of them is broken and bleeding.
Each one will hurt him to answer.
For so long he stays quiet, yet holds her. The darkness presses in. No longer does it battle her light, nor seek to smother it. Instead they tangle and blend until light concedes to darkness and darkness to light.
“I do not know, Moira.” Tenebrae breathes and in his honesty he feels juvenile. “But I do not think you can compare my love of Caligo with your love for those who have left you. It is too different, it does your love a disservice…”
The young monk takes a breath. “I have not known the love of a woman. The love of a god is more… familial. Besides, I fear I will be the one most inclined to leave in my relationship with Caligo.” Such honesty flays him. Such honesty shatters something within him. Oh he feels its shards cutting him into ribbons. It hurts to breathe but, this moment is not his. This moment belongs to Moira, this comfort, this sorrow is hers.
He turns all of him back to her and her next question is easier. So much so that a smile creeps across his lips. It is a Disciple’s smile, hungry and wicked and full of savage magic. “I take the light, Moira. I consume it, swallowing it within me that my shadows might reign. To make darkness I control both light and dark.” All around them is pitch darkness, her light dissipated, her magic exhausted. He feels its weak press. Slowly he lets his own magic fall away until moonlight spills in, until the lights of Denocte glow upon the distant horizon.
“You may feel in darkness now, but you control light. You can life by darkness or draw more light down. It is up to you whether you live in darkness, by candlelight or in the glow of the sun. All of it is yours to control. We are not so different, you and I. Our magics are twins.
“They may have left you in darkness Moira, but you do not have to stay here. You do not have to let the tide of black wash over you. You are a phoenix, made as we all are to be broken and hurt by living. Yet you are made, better than any of us, to rise from the ashes. So rise and make your light and shatter the darkness of your grief.”
Tenebrae presses a kiss to her temple, it is searing with the light that lingers upon his lips. “Come and spend a night with the Order. We will see you fed and rested and you can return to Denocte tomorrow. You need a night at least.”
With that the monk turns, continuing along the path he had been taking home before Moira stepped, broken, upon the mountain. He waits for her and when she joins, he leads her to peace and to respite - if only for one night.
@Moira - Fin <3 I loved this and I demand a BFF thread immediately <3
What if I'm tryin', but then I close my eyes And then I'm right back, lost in that last goodbye? And what if time doesn't do what it's supposed to do? What if I never get over you?
Perhaps she is a fallen star, a piece of the sun having found itself into the soul of a girl who feels all too much and all too little, letting the world splinter her, shatter her light. It does not matter when the crater blooms, all that matters is the cool, night-touched caress of Tenebrae as he holds her, as he catches her and does not let her fall. Golden, glowing eyes flutter open, finding him in the chaos of her world, the mess that she's created, and clinging like a newborn fawn next to its mother. Her phantom hands grasp at his shoulders, tangle in his wild hair, and pulls herself closer with every sob that rakes through her.
Weary by the time she quiets, fatigue heavier than the heavens themselves, she lets herself stare at him, lets him stare at her. Silence is their only language. It is a tongue more ancient than time itself, or perhaps the two were born together. She is a newborn god, she is an angel cast down, but more than that, she is completely and utterly at the monk's mercy. The monk who she, moments ago, tried to blast off the mountainside, tried to drown with her light. He matched her step for step, his shadows cooling the rage of her light, and she is grateful that a crater is the only thing left to show her fury. Much worse could have come if it were anyone but he who found her. She is grateful when, at last, he breaks the silence and talks.
Coming down from her power-high, from her shattered light that does not sputter into existence again, worn out from her display, recouping somewhere in her bones, in the fragments of her heart, she struggles to piece together the words at first. Syllables that are not spoken as magic against her skin are foreign, strange. The curl of his lips, the curve of his tongue, it is difficult to know its meaning. Frowning, the phoenix takes a breath. Another. Again.
There.
For a minute she catches his words and holds them in her chest. They are scrawled in the starscape above, written in the dust beneath them, in the pained lines of the crater she created. Together, they balance on its lip, just a breath away from falling, just a breath away from flying.
Moira should have known Caligo's son would not have let her fall.
Despite that, she did doubt. Her trust broken time and again, ice daggers plunged into her heart every time she realized that she was wrong, that maybe she should not have grown so close to another, maybe she should have stayed as she was Before. Oh, but how could she when the ocean's song is sweeter than any cinnamon roll she's tasted? That softness she was drawn to is not like the savagery that Ten displays, a scythe taking his smile, the moon kissing his browned cheeks. The Tonnerre girl does not shy away from it, would no more run from this side of him than she would her own shards of light or his shadows. Of everything she has run from in her life, this man is not one of them. Perhaps it is because her magic feels that his is kin, his is the same and it is different; they wear different faces, but at their core they are one.
Twins, twins, twins. The word hums, ricochets, a riotous curl of water against her mind, her thoughts. Twins. Like the twin to her soul - Estelle - his magic is the twin to her own. Light cannot be without Darkness, and what is Darkness but the absence of Light?
Humming at his words like a swarm of bees, at last the woman's head tilts to the side, at last some semblance of a response from someone who is alive is offered to the man. Not just any man, this man who saved her. From...what?
Myself, she thinks. He saved me from myself.
It is a realization like the first man may have felt when he saw his first sunrise. Full of awe and fear, but not so much to be driven away. She knows she would come back for his honesty time and again, for the comfort he gives her as his phantom hands brush over her brow, bury in her curled hair just as she had clung to him mere moments before. Or maybe it was hours. Time has lost its meaning, it is just another river on which she rows.
"You harness yours so easily. I have swallowed the sun and let it consume me. I have been ash and bared my skin to its acrid touch. I have watched my newborn flesh rise from that filth of what was. I know its pains and I hate them." Hers is a confession just as his words were, words that she could not answer. Moira knows so well what it is to leave another, but to leave your history, to leave your past? While it is true that she left the Estate, she knows that the Ancestors still watch her move, still judge, still guide her. No matter how far she falls away from them, they will always take care of their own. It is the way of the Tonnerre in life and death.
What messes she makes, another will find to clean up and correct. They leave no stains on the world they are not ready to pay for. Moira is not a mistake they would let loose. She knows, as she knows many things, in time others would come, their courage wet by her own boldness. Not the first Tonnerre to leave the family, but she would not be the last, either.
His lips are a fire upon her sweaty brow, and with them she whispers up to him "It would be so much easier to live in your shadows." To be overlooked, to never have to worry about pain. Ancestors help her, what a life would it be to live unassuming, unseen? Moira was a ghost before, she remembers. She Knows what it is to be a living dead girl, and yet that, somehow, was almost easier than this...rending of herself.
He offers her a home, a refuge, and she is too tired, too hungry to deny it. Grabbing on with both hands, the woman rises to her feet, shaking off dust that covers her, dampens her glow, and implores "Can't I just disappear there for a short while? I would very much like to be...away. I need to be away." Away from the noise, the crowds, the memories. Away from Denocte so that she could heal, so that time would take the sting from her wounds, her heart, her life. Maybe, she thinks, it will never leave her. Like Caine's crane that rests on a shelf in her room, waiting for the day a man with four wings should return to her again, fulfill his promise to teach her to fly. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
So she would wait for her heart to stop aching even if it would not stop beating.
"I won't impose on the Order too long, I won't get in the way of your training or rituals or guarding of the Temple. Just let me stay," let me stay she asks with her eyes as much as her cracking voice. They are the final words offered as her footsteps fall into line with his, her shoulder and wing brushing against the monk, cloaked by the shadows he's brought back to cover the two of them. Obediently, the Tonnerre follows the Disciple into another world of secrets and darkness.
“Speaking.”
credits @Tenebrae finished <3 what a beautiful start, middle and end. thank you ! BFF thread is coming to a novus near you soon!
07-13-2020, 04:38 PM - This post was last modified: 07-13-2020, 04:39 PM by Moira
