Moira Tonnerre, the bleeding heart, the phoenix girl
There is a winter storm brewing, but it is not on the surface, not in the skyline that rumbles with thunder and the taste of Autumn. Apples and cinnamon are heavy in the air of Denocte alongside other more exotic spices, other richer flavors that only the Night Court knows. Their harbors are full and bountiful, trading ships coming from unknown places, selling wares the likes of Novus' citizens have never seen before.
Moira misses the cold, ringing halls of her home from time to time. It reminds her of the ice storm within right now.
There is a frown upon her ebony lips. It sits as a dagger waiting to slice out the poison in her court, the poison that festers in her heart. All of it started with a boy.
A stupid boy with black wings and a promise. A dreamer boy with star-skin and a pretty smile. A silly girl of gold and stories.
Had they not met her, she would not have turned into a cold creature, a phoenix that is so cold her touch burns. There is starlight sprinkling upon her skin. Starlight from the small orbs of light that bob like faerie trails after her. It runs hot in the cool air, a bread-crumb trail into the mountains.
And she moves like the night; strong, silent, beautiful in her crumbling light and broken glory. The Emissary seeks solace, seeks silence, seeks a temple found the last winter. It is pale in the glow of the moon, a beacon that cries for her, that calls for her. Not even the tigress guards her hurting cub now. Left to the silence of the woods, the coldness of the climb, and the howling of her soul, she comes to the temple entrance as some red beast, some bloody sacrifice.
Like a lamb lead to slaughter, Moira moves past pale pillars that reach as skeletal fingers into the sky. They cannot contain a phoenix, no bone cage can hold her flaming heart, her molten skin, within Death's reaching grasp. She is indomitable, she is eternal, and she is aching; bleeding starlight like sins upon her tongue, ichor flowing from small scratches from overgrown rose bushes and thorny plants standing guard to the monolith hidden from Time itself.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Winter comes early to the mountains. It howls in its corners and prowls round its crags. The cold creeps upon the white temple that gleams like bones - a cage of ribs in which Caligo’s heart is housed.
Tenebrae does not feel the cold, not as he leeches his brothers’ magic and pulls darkness down to smother the temple and guard it from the press of winter’s groping grasp.
He stands guard, a statue in the deepest reach of this great, ornate ruined basilica. Its hellenic beauty steals the breath of his lungs each time he climbs up and up until the air grows so thin that he is left breathless and gasping. Yet it always abates for trained he is to endure the heights of mountains - where else are they to commune with Caligo? The Night Order, placed here to defend their goddess and her Court. The Night Order, placed here to remind the world what darkness is and swallow the light out of the sky.
So it is his duty this night, to stand and listen to the thrum of life below, where toffee apples are passed between sticky fingers, where revellers dance in the pale moonlight and couples kiss in golden firelight. Up here he is to hear it all. Up here he is to be removed, to stand guard and remember that he is apart. Disciples are not to be tempted by the delights of the flesh, their love is Caligo alone.
How long has he stood here, shrouded in black with his star-bright eyes closed as he listens and does not move. Hours, his body cries, hours. It might even be days.
So it is, when she comes, this girl that walks like a ghost. This girl that burns as brightly as another he already knows. But there is no smile upon this girls lips as there had been upon Boudika’s. There is only a line and it is sharp and agonised.
The girl drifts as if a wraith, as if joy and love and delight have slipped from her body as easily as life. She floats beautiful and lost and he watches her, his eyes now open, twin stars that glow brilliant in his swallowing dark.
He moves and the shadows press upon him, fingers upon his cheeks his jaw, the muscles of his breast. But he moves through them as easy as air, they beg for a command, to be made solid. Tenebrae gives no such command and so they go and press upon her. They shy from her glow but dare to press upon her throat and settle in the grooves of her face, the curve of her flanks. They are bold and brave and his eyes blaze brighter as he chastens them back, back and summon more down, down until the darkness sighs and billows as thick as smoke, as deep as a chasm.
He moves as the girl does, keeping at right angles, watching as she drifts like a lick of flame between pillar and pillar. The air tastes of her agony which has filled up all the places love has left her empty, empty. He is glad he has vowed chastity, he is glad such love is forbidden to him - if this is what it makes of you.
The Stallion moves as she does, each step mirroring hers, his path an orbit about hers, until she moves to the centre of the temple where Caligo’s altar lies. Suddenly his magic is released. Suddenly shadows snap solid as a spear that reaches clean across her path. Black sparks fly as his shadow spear strikes stone. It is there for a moment and then gone, weary is he with his vigil. But there is no worry for Tenebrae is there before her. He stands adorned in the glory of darkness, his eyes aglow, his sigils blazing their ire.
“You cannot pass this night,” darkness murmurs to the phoenix who dares bring light to the temple. She glows crimson and gold before him. Her fire, her light, her sorrowful vivid, angry light, pushes against his darkness. Oh how darkness and light tangle like fingers pushing, pulling. Where once he wore a smile upon his lips for a girl with a trident and skin so brightly copper, he does not now for a phoenix girl. Not when the darkness feels the bruises of her agony and the cut of her starlight blood that pours from open wounds and banishes darkness with a stroke.
Moira Tonnerre, the horror you have committed is not who you are
An echo of her steps rings faintly in the dark, cushioned by shadows so deep and soft, but they are not the footfalls of her beloved guardian. The jungle song that rings through both of them has been hidden behind sheets of ice, cascading waterfalls that are frozen, blocking caves that reach down, down, down into the darkest parts of her, the most tender parts of her. The possessor of the footsteps does not come nearer, only circles, and so she ignores them.
Her phantom lights ring her in spikes and orbs, she is the sun that her planets of light orbit. For a moment, she mattered to something even if it was of her own making.
The phoenix moves through a crumbling archway, a doorway covered in ivy and hanging vines. No one yet removed the barrier that shields the guts of the temple from time. The phoenix brushes through it, letting vines grapple with her sides, pulling at goose-bumped skin, until they are shaken free. Within the temple, their joined footsteps ring as one into the choir rows high above.
Moira Tonnerre can imagine the way disciples of the Night would once have come here to sing praise to their goddess, to dance beside her when the moon hid her face in the sky.
That is not why the phoenix comes now.
As she moves through spearing moonlight, an amalgamation of silver and red and gold, she does not expect the templar knight to charge from his shadowy confines. Like a cage, he kept behind his dappled bars. Now, @Tenebrae stands tall before her, starlight eyes flaring and glaring at her intrusion into his sacred domain.
Wings flare like her nostrils, ears tip back, and the Emissary's head tilts with narrowed golden eyes. She bleeds darkness in that look, the darkness of their Goddess - perhaps one of the only deities she dares believe in enough to break from the Estate's beliefs.
Coolly she traces his outline, fingers of light grappling with the shadows, her own small scythes reaching out to illuminate the browns of him, the whites of him. Their pale, bright fingers tangle like lovers quarreling over his skin, over his shadows, until she washes herself with its glow and seems an angel coming home.
“Who are you to stop me?" She speaks in tones of ash and ruin, and although she is broken, she is filled with steel and the strength of every Tonnerre that rose tall and frigid before her. There is no sign of fear, there is hardly a sign of anything to decipher in the shadows of her lashes and angle of her nose. Only a girl facing a boy, both too stubborn to back away now.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Tenebrae had circled her like a planet about its sun. His orbit had closed and closed until they collided in a clash of light and dark. They were two comets meeting: their magics dancing and fighting and dancing and fighting. The Stallion and this mare are fingers of darkness and fingers of light that grapple and grip and twine their fingers together repelling and then drawing in, in, in.
He stands tall above her, illuminating her in the silver of his eyes. It is a light she does not need. Not when she glows like a divine pyre. She is the boldness of flames licking out into the dark. Her wings flare with seraphim fire as she tips up her chin and looks at him beneath the sweeping black of her lashes.
Their eyes meet, silver to gold and moonlight to sunlight. Upon her skin is everything of Denocte - the jasmine, the smoke of bonfires, the laughter of revelry. Yet never has Tenebrae seen a girl who looks so unDenoctean. Especially with her magic that opposes and matches his, that brings light to life and gives it solidity.
There are orbs of light, bright as fireflies between them and Tenebrae’s darkness leaps to swallow them whole. Inkblots spilled across the paper, darkness bleeding across the sun.
Ah, was that not what she is? The sun? The sun come here to light Denocte. He smiles and it is a wolfish thing upon his lips. It is hungry and savage. His eyes glow, glow, glow. Brighter and brighter they blaze as he swallows down each piece of sunlight she draws. Moira makes him ravenous she reminds him of what he was made for: he is a Stallion made to Swallow the Sun.
Yet she meets his grin. She meets his smile with words that are ash and embers. They breathe firelight across his skin and his nape arches shadows pulling out into arching wings to match hers. Across their shadow wings her light sparks like lightning. He feels their sharp illumination upon his body as she moves to light him as his shadows move to swallow her.
Those wings are there for but a moment, expanding like a breath, and then gone as if he exhales and all the shadows tumble back to press in close upon him.
“I am a Disciple of the Night Order.” Tenebrae says with a voice rich as whiskey that waits for the spark of her embers to ignite his words, his voice. “We protect the temples of our goddess and this night is not for worship here.” Low, low is his voice, deep like the dark the presses in and around.
Still their magics battle, still she illuminates him as he shadows her. Still their magics tangle and untwine. The shadows relish the fight of her, and yet, as they darken the lines of her, drawing her in stark relief, they can feel the emptiness of this girl. They whisper to him of how she burns bright and wild outside, within she is a wilderness ravaged by love, broken and unwound by love’s great, bruising grasp.
Yes, yes it is easier for the Disciple to stand and call himself apart - untouched and kept free of the chains of love that bind and wound. It is easy, easy. “Do you dare to challenge a Disciple of Caligo?” Tenebrae asks her and upon that feral curve of divine black lips is a beautiful wild that hopes she might say yes.
His shadows prowl forward like a panther, weaving midnight between her slim limbs. They whisper along the skin of her knees and ankles, Yes, yes, yes.
Moira Tonnerre, you feel it in a way that makes you tired to your very bones
He meets her challenge of light and hollow fury with the beckoning of his own, darkness spreading into wings, into the crevices of her skin. She cannot stop it, for darkness is merely the absence of light. Without Light, the world would simply exist in some sort of gloom where shadows eat shadows. She illuminates the truth, she holds hope in her hands, and with the leaving of one, the altar of remembrance of a single man, the Tonnerre girl crushed it in her hands, too.
She does not mind looking up into those moonlit eyes, finding them brighter than the stars that dapple and freckle her skin. She does not mind the disdainful, thoughtful frown upon her dark lips that fall darker than even him. They are the shadows he sews stained with blood, the same shadows that kiss the hollows of her cheeks, casting them in black like the world around them. Together, they make a dashing pair of broken and unbroken; of light and dark; of night and day; a duo so alike and so unlike. From the outside world, they must have been breathtaking.
Moira finds nothing breathtaking about the situation. As his shadows rise to swallow her light, she watches, intrigued, when the forces spear at one another. At last, her phantom lights all gather around. She lines them up one by one between the two of them.
A glint in her eyes is the only warning, and then the moonlight and candlelight orbs begin to crack.
How they crumble and shatter. Pieces break off like icebergs shattering. To the ground they topple in silence, only to clang upon the stone. Only when they are ensconced in the shadows @Tenebrae makes does she speak, "Is that what you think, I am here to worship in this temple?"
When their breathing is the only thing left between them, when her feathers are neatly tucked against her side, when her blood stops shaking and shivering from the rush of cold fire, when she is just a hair's breadth from him, only then does her midnight smoke voice ring in his ear again. "You're wrong."
And then the woman brushes past the Disciple, moving toward the center of the structure, looking up into the high, vaulted ceiling. Eyes go to the windows with swirling artwork, stories carved into the very fabric of glass and stone. It is a masterpiece that must have taken years to complete - it leaves her breathless in a way nothing of flesh ever can.
She drinks her fill of it by the light that filters in, and then, she lets the Stallion who Swallowed the Sun drink down her words, too. "If I say yes?" It is a bit of a breathless whisper. She wonders what secrets her magic can unlock, what her blood never told her. Is this magic from her mother? Or is there hoarfrost in her veins and water sluicing thicker than blood from the Tonnerres who came from the sea, the forgotten history of her people that was not written and has been kept by word of mouth in only the most elite and secretive of members?
Oh, she watches and waits and wonders; she's left to wonder if they both are the thing that hunts in the night, or if one will be the lion and the other the lamb.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Away, away, below, below he hears the sigh of bonfires breathing smoke up into the sky. They laugh with glowing sparks that are nothing compared to the light that dances and crackles across his flesh victim to the Tonnerre girl’s magic. Oh that revelry, that mid-winter delight so warm with joy that it is mid-summer sticky across the flesh of all who gather at the Queen’s command.
But they are so far, so far away that their laughter is but a whisper dream in his ears. It is temptation that wraps itself about the mountain base and croons to him like a cat. Yet tenebrae is here, held by his shadows that swell and billow across the temple. They crawl across his goddess’ walls and rise like wings. The crescent moons atop his brow and emblazoned across his shoulder grow with greed as they swallow, swallow every piece of flame-lit magic Moira gives it.
Ah their magics - their magics! They tangle and loop and circle and no longer does Tenebrae know which came first - his darkness or her light. For all his magic swallows her light, her magic grows brighter, brighter. Tenebrae is a reveller here. Light dances across his flesh, it caresses like a lover, it delves beneath his skin as if between the pages of a book. What does it read of him there in the words of his DNA… there in the novel of him, his past, his existence? Ah! He smiles for this is how he was made, of light verses dark, of sunlight and darkness, Night versus Day.
She is not here to worship and oh, who is the heathen now? It should steal the smile from his lips, that smile as lovely and dark as Night’s deepest hour. Yet his grin grows, it is the space between stars and the moonlight glitters across his lips as if they are glass, black as a raven’s wing. His smile is sharp as shards and soft as feathers. “Blasphemous.” Tenebrae murmurs, low, dark, amused. He is not appalled for none could be like he and his brothers, devout and holy and deacons to his goddess.
Slowly he blinks as her words slide like serpents of sunlight, such is her ire. Her phantom lights align into a row of flames that lick the darkness with tongues of endless light. His spear of darkness does not reform though the temple’s bones still echo with the song of their meeting. It is a song to which their blood has words that clash and harmonise and clash and harmonise.
His starlight eyes glow bright beneath the shroud of his darkness (the parts of him her magic allows him still to keep secret). Tenebrae closes them slowly, to better listen to the ancient whispers of all the sacred magic Caligo has left here. “Then what brings you here?” His skull tilts listening no longer to the song of Caligo but the echoes of the sun that play across the temple, held in the essence of this girl’s magic.
A part of him begs, a part of him rises like a storm at sea and gathers with hope that she might dare, that this girl might challenge as the sun once foolishly challenged Calligo. Tenebrae hungers as all the Stallion’s hunger. He has a taste for stars and gods of sunlight. Yes, her voice whispers small in the temple and yet he hears her every syllable as her tongue forms them. His eyes open, bright and brilliant, keen and wild with scattering moonlight. He turns to her ravenous and delighted with her challenge.
His laughter is mercury pools warm and rich and beautiful - dangerous as a blade. The shadows gather keen and sharp, they level themselves into a sword whose tip is lined for her heart. “I hoped you might be so foolish.” He breathes as soft as her challenge, and yet he does not move. For all his magic, for all her ire that rises in challenge of his, beneath this girl is a torrent of sorrow. Tenebrae is the dark between stars, yet she is the emptiness. She is unspooled and in pieces and so he waits with his smile upon his lips and his eyes bright, bright, bright.
Moira Tonnerre, you feel it in a way that makes you tired to your very bones
Down, down there she should have been. A whisper among the crowds. A flame for them to see with her burning smile and sunset skin. Moira is so much a part of Denocte and so unDenoctian just as the monk first thought - jasmine clings to her like a second skin; art pulses in her blood, demanding to be shown to the world, demanding to be seen; yet she goes away. Away. Into the hills where darkness claims her. Caligo's fingers, his magic, it is a sap upon her spine, sticky and sweet; as irritating as a salve and not wholly unwelcome.
She is fearless as she watches his moons grow and grow, their appetite unending, their reach impossibly far.
Everything she makes is swallowed, and when it is all gone - shattered like her hopes, her heart - she does not mind the darkness that follows. His smile is distant, elsewhere, somewhere in a dream that she cannot see. Unknown, just as Tenebre is unknown to the healer-girl, the artist-girl, the red crowned girl with scythes for smiles and diamonds for eyes. Multifaceted, impossible to know what next she should do (what she would do).
"Solitude." Simplistic, soft, the answer seems so obvious that a child could have discerned it. Perhaps, were she not such a roiling mess inside, or were she another, an incredulous look would have flashed across her face. When it does not pass, when there is only stillness on her surface, but she is an ice storm waiting to freeze and burn the world. You are so cold you burn, Moira Tonnerre. Always remember that as a Tonnerre. You are dangerous, a weapon, a diplomat, a perfect being crafted by your ancestors. So often Anselme Tonnerre would tell her this as he tucked her in, ignoring the tear-stains and scent of fear on her skin after days out of the house.
He would remind her that she is Tonnerre by blood.
Not that she was special.
Or powerful.
Or enough.
But Tonnerre. And tonight, that is good enough. It is enough when his sickle smile does not disappear, and instead his spear is almost readied. Before his breath is drawn and words are spilled, she tilts her head back, letting half-light cascade down upon her in streams of silver and dreams, and she sighs. "Sorrow. What difference does it make with a dagger to the throat or heart?"
Golden eyes are closed, lips seal once more as she gathers herself, ready for him to strike, ready to thread that moonlight upon her skin into armor and scales. Always, always must she be ready for the humming of another's to stop, for their backs to turn, for their teeth upon her throat. So she is, in silence, mentally preparing for a battle that she is unsure will even come. Then, "How does it feel to conquer?" like the smoke below, her voice, too, fades with his night angling at her.
She does not pull moonlight into threads, nor the colors from above into a muted display upon her skin.
In the moonlight, she is ethereal and holy.
In the moonlight, she is Caligo's creature just the same as he.
In the moonlight, she is Tonnerre and she is lying that she is numb.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
And she shatters.
The lights of her magic are nothing compared to the thousand shards she becomes in her sorrow.
Tenebrae’s darkness is nothing but a swallowing void through which the shards of her anguish cut. The light seeps in an Tenebrae stands, exposed.
Moira Tonnerre breaks and yet the Disciple stands as if unmoved. The white of his eyes are not the bright of stars now, but those of moon-caught-cobwebs capturing memories as dust upon the glow of its gossamer thread.
She breaks and her light sputters out. No more does light battle with darkness. No more do the tongues of light dance across his skin, fine and elaborate as tattoos. In the darkness, the shadows knit themselves over where her light left it wounded. Within its grasp this girl stands as at peace in the soul of his darkness as she is in the light of her own. The black coos to her now, it adorns her in the silk of silence. Gone is the war and oh, this is the silence of its wake. It is an inhalation and the Stallion feels the temple groan with the effort of breath.
Beneath the wrath of his magic this girl had stood as a phoenix ready for the coming of death and life. She had stood already in pieces, fractures littering through her skin, her soul, her heart. He had missed it all. Hungry, hungry warrior he is! Born only for war, for a destiny he is hell bent upon meeting. Yet this silence, the girl who watches him with eyes like the sun - oh eyes that make him hunger- reminds him of more than war.
Solitude, Moira speaks into the silence. Every syllable off her tongue is as sharp as ice, and beautiful as hoar frost. Cold, cold she is now an ice queen with sorrow dusted across her cheeks and lips as snow and grief frozen in tears upon her lashes.
Oh phoenix will you burn in ash or snow?
The girl smiles slow and small and beautiful as she tilts her head back, back. Moonlight shines through the parts of his darkness he has not yet healed and tumbles in rays down the groove of her slender throat. Tenebrae stands, black as midnight, his weapon lost with the groan of the temple. It aches for its warrior, these walls of stone and marble. It aches for its phoenix girl who burns in ice and silver.
How does it feel to conquer? Though he is stood tall and great before the altar, a formidable barrier to stop her path, already Moira has made herself a sacrifice. She is a lamb before the lion, the phoenix ready for its change. Tenebrae wonders what she will be when she rises from her ashes.
“How does it feel to be defeated?” He murmurs low, low to the girl upon her altar; it is a table gilded with gold and ice, woven with feathers of her fly-away soul and ashes of the phoenix. There is no victory for him or her - Moira has left no space for it, not now. Not when her fight puttered out like the thousand flames that pressed and burned across his torso. He wants no victory in this. He deserves no victory. Her ash is in his mouth and it is bitter to his tongue.
No longer does his darkness press as if it reach into her bones and banish the fire, the light from the essence of her being. Now it reaches for her, soothing along the contours of her cheeks and settles in the dark of her lashes. “There is no victory to be found in solitude or sorrow.”
Still he stands, the black of his magic breathing ominous and whole, reaching out to the corners of the temple. It holds him and from its depths his white eyes glow, glow. Yet it is his half-moon sigils that illuminate her skin. Within the darkness the Disciple watches her, the contours of his elegant face drawn in whispering lines of burgeoning understanding.
“Forgive me.” He says like a vow, like a pledge. The temple trembles with the weight of it, with a girl’s agony and a man’s contrition. Tenebrae knows what it is to be consumed in sorrow, to turn to the dark and hallowed pieces of himself and the foot of his goddess’ altar for peace, for comfort.
There is a part of him that knows the sacrament of silence, the healing of it. He takes a breath, it is wrong to leave his post and yet he knows it is best for her. So he turns and leaves her to the silence of her thoughts, her sorrow, her grief.
