On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
There is a storm gathering out at sea. It illuminates the edge of the world with flashes of splitting lightning. Charged waves, made rapid and strong by the blowing winds and rising static, push against his chest. The salt water laughs in his ears, back, back, it seems to say, you do not belong here its foam words fizzing across his chest. Fickle, the tide pulls out and twines itself about his limbs, tugging, tugging.
His skin grows dark, painted darker yet by the shadows that bloom beneath the belly of the thunderclouds. The storm looms like a wall and its voice is the howling wind. It is sirensong in his ears, breathing its saltwater breath along his cheeks. Come the sea’s new voice groans with storm-ragged fervour. Tenebrae takes another step into the wild water’s gathering deep.
The beach, the sea, the sky, the cliffs are gashes and brushes of greys and blacks. Terminus sea is a ragged scar painted onto the edge of Novus’ portrait, such is the virulent storm. Her song is ripping skies and wild water, of galloping winds and rising surf. He is not far out, not yet, not yet. His feet still know the bottom of the sea, though the sands shift and the waves break across his chest.
If you want to find me, come to the sea, she had whispered into his skin as if it were a prayer. Such blasphemy, such want. So of course it is now that he stands amidst the sea with her name cradled upon his lips as if it were a sacrament. His curious shadows rise into the sky, lured by the dark wall of the storm. Their tendrils unfurl like wings, like his soul ascending from his expired body. But Tenebrae lives! He feels his vibrant heart ricocheting in his chest, resounding like the crashing of the waves, the roaring of the storm.
Every sharp point of a wave he thinks is the pinnacle of a horn and he turns to look at her, to embrace her with want, to feel the skip of his heart. But it is just the waves that meet his white-bright stare. And maybe that is the truth of them, for that is why he is here, is it not? To want her, to desire her, to crave her and yet… to give her nothing. Because, what has a monk to give a girl except... nothing at all?
“Boudika.” He calls out into the storm, into the sea that writhes below. “Boudika,” he calls again for no chant can be whole with just one name. ”Boudika” he says again as the lightning splits the sky and shines electric bright in his eyes. Oh his shadows rise up, up into the ragged sky and out across the ocean. Does she feel the way his shadows seek her?
“Boudika” he says the last like a heartbeat stopping. He has nothing to give her, nothing at all. But oh, she is here.
He watches her rise from the chaotic ocean, crimson eyes, crimson skin. She is blood in the water and it is his. His shed with the pieces of him she has bitten away and the pieces of him she keeps behind that lovely, violent smile.
The water pushes them together until they are breast to breast, until his muzzle brushes beneath her salt-slick mane and he inhales the wild sea girl. Then his lips are at her ear, “Dance with me.”
Tenebrae calls a name into a sea that has swallowed everything a name could possibly be. What is the girl he seeks if not the ocean itself, the wild hunger, the dark lash of salt waves against his chest? Does he not know she is already all around him, that she has pushed him back toward the shore all along, saying, not tonight, do not come looking tonight, this is no place for you.
He is a fool for forsaking the message. He is a fool for wading into a sea full of hunger, a sea that would sooner drown than save him. Boudika already knows what he does not; the ground swell is coming, the water from the distant squall that will raise the inland tide. She knows what he does not; that hungry things are fighting in the depths, full of the ocean’s rage. There are gods and goddesses older than Novus’s and they live here, in the heartbeat of the water, in the rhythmic pull of waves and sand.
She swims beneath the surface, listening to his nearly wanton call again and again, her name, her name, and she nearly laughs. It is as if he is the siren, singing. As if she would ever want him more than this, this, this—
so at last Boudika emerges in a rush of water and fury. The air is charged with the pressure of the storm; she is sensitive to the beating of it far off the coast, the way rain water has already hit the surface. There may have been hope if the water did not press them so close together; there may have been hope if he did not press his lips nearly to her ear and whisper, Dance with me.
Boudika is more than half-wild; and her appetite is the appetite of a storm that would devour the world. She closes her eyes and groans against her better nature, the threadbare part of her soul that whispers as if to reign in her hunger, no, no, no. But Boudika’s eyes snap open. As the storm makes landfall she says, “No. Dance with me—“
The sentence is cut off by the abrupt violence of her transformation. The entire time they stood chest-to-chest her body trembled with the desire to break form, amorphous, and become something else, something better—
In the same breadth it takes for lightening to strike, Boudika is a saltwater crocodile lunging for his face.
It does not matter where she grabs him; only that she does, and with a powerful flick of her tail she drags him struggling to the bottom of the sea. The water is brackish with the storm, a sort of opaque darkness that his shadows must be familiar with. The sea is quiet, strangely, despite the storm; a push and pull of water, and the bursting flavour of blood. There is a tremendous strength to her jaws but once there, Boudika lets him go and settles in the deep, watching.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Tenebrae is not sorry either. In spite of everything, and despite he should be, he is not.
He is not sorry as the sea relinquishes Boudika as if she were its goddess. The Disciple does not stop to wonder how he might worship two.
His last chant has barely been swept away by the wind before she is pressed against him. She trembles where they press, breast to breast. It is as if she is the sea quaking beneath the wrath of the storm, but Tenebrae knows that Boudika is the storm. She is the sea that swallows her name. Wild waters push the duo together and he remembers how the surf had breathed she is coming over and over across his throat, his face, his chest.
Now she is here and they are pressed together like two tectonic plates, always pushing, pushing against each other. Destined to consume the other, to send all around them into chaos. Tenebrae and Boudika slip and slide against each other and her groan is the shift of the earth, it is the swell of the sea rising with the storm.
The cliffs stand dark and ready, they loom, sanguine and black, at Tenebrae’s back. They know how he stood upon them once and thought of drowning and thought of how he should not want. Yet he does. The monk wants so many things, the worst of which is before him.
Tenebrae inhales her like a man dying - maybe he knows what is to come after all? He feels the beat of her heart in the cradle of his. His bones are singing the sound of her heartsong.
Still she trembles, still she groans. She speaks, ‘No -’ and the rest is a dream. Yet he has lived his dreams with her before and he is ready when she lunges with hungry, savage, wild beauty. He knows the feel of her teeth cutting into his flesh. He knows her.
Except he knows nothing of her at all.
When first they met she was just a girl with blood upon her smile and thorns in her mouth.
When second they met she was a kelpie with a seal’s blood upon her feral smile and teeth as sharp as thorns in her mouth. She bore a heart so easily bruised then.
When now they meet she is a kelpie girl with an animalistic magic.
Once he knew her body, the length of her face, the soft of her lips, the bite of her teeth. But that was then and this is now.
He does not know a crocodile's maw, nor how much longer it is than Boudika’s. He does not know a crocodile's teeth and how much bigger they are than hers.
She teaches him.
There is the pull and rending of flesh. He can almost hear the cry of his flesh as his throat splits open. Boudika holds him and swims, down, down, down. Down to where light is weak and shadows reign. She cradles him in inky blue and his shadows rise in ire, they turn to solid snake heads that strike along her throat as she holds him. Their magics grapple they land upon the still bed of the ocean floor. She releases him in the blood and darkness. Her hair is a halo of wicked black, her eyes darkest red, her body bathed in nothing but shadow.
If only he knew how to exist here he would have the time to see how beautiful she is, in this place where she belongs. But, here, his body does not know how to keep him alive. The ocean holds no favour for Caligo’s monk. He is dying in its depths as he watches Boudika.
Salt water presses into the ragged edges of his gaping wounds. It feels like ice against the heat of his distressed skin. The storm calls him, up to where it breathes oxygen across the roiling surface of the sea. Already his heart is thundering to get the remaining oxygen around his body, already his brain is starving, his lungs contracting, his head pounding.
He watches Boudika for a moment, his ears pinned, blood drifting in a cloud between them. Finally his ears shutter back, his lips peeling back from his teeth in a grimace of agony. Tenebrae propels up, away from her, away from the girl who has dragged him too deep, too deep. Ire drives him, up to where the light cascades in rays through the murky depths. As the water grows brighter, he consumes it as all around him grows darker. He breaches the water surface, gasping, rising and falling as waves roll the water in towards the beach. Overhead the storm rages, feeding, fuelling the warrior below.
“Boudika!” This time her name upon his lips is nothing like it has been before. It is filled with the danger of the storm and sharp as the lightning that splits the sky. Her name is a cry across the waves that carry it in and shatter it upon the shore. The Disciple takes another breath, filling himself before he dives down to watch her loom out of the darkness, elegant, beautiful, dancing.
Tenebrae swims down to meet her, his ears still pressed to his skull. Anger seethes through his blood. It pounds in his chest and rings in his ears. The sea is filled with the wrath of a monk. He sees where his magic has bitten her and this time it is he who lunges. His magic sharpens into a blade that he presses tight to her throat. They rise the rest of the way together and once above water he hisses to her softly, “What the fuck was that?” Tenebrae wears no reckless smile for her now, but there is fury that roiles deep within his white-bright eyes. They tread water together close, close, limbs knocking, tangling as the storm laughs and laughs above.
Tenebrae no longer thinks what monsters might loom out of the darkness, drawn by their blood. He knows he watches the most dangerous creature the sea can offer. Yet he dances with her, something dangerous, something the land has never known.
There is a quiet part of her that blooms with his blood in the dark, that asks, is any of this his fault? And Boudika knows it isn’t. This god-fearing monk with scars like wings on his back does not truly deserve this, this unpredictable monstrosity, this visceral violence, this lusting rage.
But in the rush of the water and with the tremendous strength of her body, with the sea in a storm and the land crying with the wind from the distant ocean, it is all she has left to give. The cliffs are black tonight and in that quiet place of his struggle, of his drowning, as she drags him fighting to the depths—well, in that quiet moment of struggle, of desperation, she thinks, I must remember to tell him never to visit when the cliffs are black.
They remind her of blood on sand.
Of never being enough.
Of what it feels like, to Bind a soul forever, for an eternity and longer, to strip from someone all they have been and all they will ever be. And perhaps that is Boudika's amorphous power, to destroy what she touches; to take it between her teeth and skin it with the deft touch of an expert killer, peeling back the layers of skin from the loin and breast and then the limbs. Perhaps the taste of blood in her mouth has nothing to do with her rage at all, but only her nature.
Only her nature.
When his shadows fight her, she is relieved; they pierce the leather-thick hide of her crocodilian form, and she releases him to the writhing nest of shadow-snakes. The shape of a crocodile rejects her, then, as if the nature of the beast screams out, kill him kill him kill him kill him and by refusing, there is nothing left. She floats above the sea-floor with a tangled mane and eyes that belong to something—someone—infinitely older and infinitely more sad. The sea is screaming through her as if wronged; the waves pummel her even here, and Orestes’s words come back to her like a fierce lash.
The ocean will never love you like you love it.
Boudika never realises the truth of the statement until now. She watches Tenebrae with his lack of oxygen, with his rent wounds, and feels a hunger like she’s never known before. Boudika knows the struggle. The way his lungs must scream for oxygen and how the edges of his vision must go black. There is a moment when he regards her before pushing back toward the surface and Boudika’s soul strikes like flint with loneliness; the fire doesn’t catch. She ascends after him with dangerous ease, wishing she could have said, just take my blood, fight back, I can turn you that way—blood unto blood—I can make you mine—
Perhaps that had been her frantic reasoning for striking out all along.
When they break the surface, it is with Boudika's name on his lips and Tenebrae's blood on hers. Boudika rests with her equine face barely above the water. Although she is no longer a crocodile, she swims like one; and the storm pushes them together again, legs against legs. What the fuck was that? He is mad. The fury reaches her with a kind of distance, as she appraises him.
It is in my nature.
Boudika is bleeding, too; it slicks down her neck and shoulders and she knows there will be creatures hungry, soon, creatures that want to discover them. Creatures already scenting blood and on the way. There is no room for weakness here.
His blade is against her throat.
Boudika does not flinch. Simply continues to appraise him, his anger, his white-bright eyes and the beauty of it. It is the most beautiful he has ever been, in her eyes, streaked with blood and wearing the storm. His expression is pinched in a way that only anger creates, and still, Boudika isn’t sorry. Still, Boudika wishes he had bitten her back rather than fall back on his god-given magic of darkness.
It would be too much to explain.
Boudika doesn’t know the words anymore, only the primordial communication, only the longing for more, more, more. Amaroq had understood, and Orestes too. It is the feeling of a soul set to ringing, like a gong. A soul set to aching. With strange gentleness, Boudika drops her nose to gesture his weapon aside—closer, closer, closer
and she kisses his wound.
Perhaps one day she will tell him her intention.
But not tonight.
Not beneath a storm-born sky that begs her to become anything but this, this, this weak-willed, weak-fleshed creature, too prone to letting its heart beat from it’s chest.
“We must go.”
Boudika knows it isn’t an explanation. “There is a place I know that will shelter us from the storm. But this—“ and she presses her nose to the disaster she’s caused, his bleeding, puckered wound. "—will attract beasts much worse than me.”
She draws away; and the mare is almost sheepish in it, almost apologetic, almost regretful. But Boudika cannot regret claiming him again; she cannot regret giving him the opportunity to Become. There is something animalistic, something… something… that has opened within her like a cavern when he first called her name tonight, and left Boudika emptier then she has been in longer than she can remember.
“I—I… am…” the apology is almost there.
But Boudika has sworn away apologising for what she is.
And so she doesn’t. She only regards him steadily as the rain falls harder, harder, and she can barely see him through the shroud it creates.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Oh Boudika. If he sees the hurt in her eyes, the twinge of sadness that rises from her struggling soul, he is not aware of it. Survival has a way of clouding out everything but the essential requirements for living. And Tenebrae cannot breathe. So he leaves her where she floats - a goddess in turmoil, the sea set alight by the fiery crown her hair makes.
He breathes upon the surface. He gulps air in the pauses between thrashing waves. When he is filled he hunts her out, swimming down, down until he meets her rising up. They bleed together. They turn the sea red with their fascination and their desire.
They bleed because of each other.
How many times will tenebrae know the bite of her teeth? First as a kelpie and then as a crocodile. He should have known, the moment she stepped into his shadows. It seemed for her as if stepping out into the light. It was simple, easy. She had blood upon her lips then and she has blood upon her lips now. Tenebrae thinks that she has had blood upon her lips every day since they first met.
She makes him bleed for her. His throat knows her more intimately than Tenebrae has known anything in his life. She has brought him closer to death than any warrior he has faced upon the fields of war. Was this Caligo’s work? Was this her revelation to him:
Oh Tenebrae, you are not made for women or love.
Caligo made him and Boudika is unmaking him.
He was made to glory, laud and honour his goddess and yet his eyes have turned away. They dare to concern themselves with things unholy, with a woman who is not his goddess. To chose a mortal woman is to reject what he was made for and what is left for him then but to be unmade?
His heart skips each time their limbs collide, each time they tangle as the reeds she dragged him down to. They sway morosely beneath them as if there is a lament within the sea for the girl who is changing and the boy who is being unmade. What tales does the sea have for the ill-fated pair? What words of warning does she hiss in their ears as her stormy waves surge over their heads?
Boudika is low, low in the water. Still she watches him like a crocodile as they together turn the water red, red, red. Sing them a crimson song, of hearts that bleed and oceans that bloom red as roses. She swims to him and he flinches, like a mortal, like a man only a shred away from death. Still his darkness is a knife at her throat. It does not gleam malevolently as steel does. It needs not to. It is a shard of obsidian, the bite of crimson earth pressed against the red of her ocean-red throat.
But he yields. He lets her get closer than a crocodile ever should. She presses equine lips to his throat and all he feels is pain, pain, pain. He groans, nearly felled by her kiss, by the exquisite pain of their tumultuous desire. Her bite is too much and her kiss ever more painful. His groan was lost to the earth-splitting thunder, but even the storm silences at his, “No.”
He pushes her back with the black blade that vows it will bite deeper than its snakebites had. It is unyielding as it commands a retreat from her. In his eyes is a new kind of pain, something that hurts worse than dying, worse than knowing oxygen was gone and the sea was so terribly, awfully deep. It was a long swim, and he only feels worse now for breathing.
It is well she does not tell him how she wanted him to change. Already she is demanding he change and Tenebrae is not made for changes like this.
Not discouraged and oh, ever brave, the wild warrior girl swims back to him. She presses her muzzle to his wound again and whispers of beasts in the deep. Hungry, wanting beasts tasting blood upon the water. Tenebrae laughs. It is heard above even the thunder. It is rough (with his ravaged throat) and it is cold as the sea they swim in and hard as the blade still at her throat. Now they are closer than they have ever been. With their legs tangled like anemones, their jaws pressed together and her muzzle pressed to his ragged wound. It feels even more intimate than the times she has been buried tooth-deep within him.
“I cannot believe there are beasts much worse than you.” Those words are as sharp as they are rough. He aims them to cut. No, he cannot imagine any creatures worse than her in this great sea. It is only Boudika he is not supposed to survive. He knows that now. But still, but still there is a part of him that thrills at the wild of her, that would have him falling to his knees for her.
“Go back.” He breathes, coarse as sandpaper in her ear (such has she ruined his throat). “Go back.” He repeats and does not mean for her to return to the ocean’s deep, though it would be easier, it would help, even for a small, fickle little moment.
“Show me.” Is all he demands, cutting off the apology her tongue cannot find. And all the while his first question presses itself upon her body, every piece of it he knows and yet does not.
What the fuck was that?
Who the fuck are you? New questions begin to bleed in, striking across her back like the thongs of the whips he uses across his own.
What the fuck are you?
And he will have his answers, Boudika.
@Boudika
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
04-30-2020, 02:17 PM - This post was last modified: 04-30-2020, 02:25 PM by Tenebrae
No, he groans against her touch, and pushes her away. Yet the sea will not keep them apart. They are buoys treading water, tethered together by invisible string. Boudika, fearless, presses against his blade, even as it pricks blood.
I cannot believe there are beasts worse than you. The raw-edge of his voice, like flesh too wounded to recover, tells Boudika he is trying to hurt her with more than his magic. And then, go back. Boudika does not have to be told twice. With deft gracefulness she swims away, putting the sea between them. The salt stings her wounds in a way that seems like a welcoming, a come back to me. In face of his rejection, she wants to. Her pride stings more fiercely than her wounds, and then—
Show me.
Boudika trembles; in his asking she experiences a revelation. I don’t know how. To his unasked questions, there is only the sentiment of she is still learning. The change is something she has suppressed; something she has tried not to question. And now Boudika does. Now the loneliness gnaws upon her heart as if it is mere carrion; perhaps it is. How is she supposed to say, I don’t know?
Amaroq had disappeared after her creation and since then, she had been alone. There had been no water horse to teach her how to become more than instinct, to be. It was only Boudika, and in this she was forced to face the inhumanity of her past. Had she not subjected Orestes to the same fate? The last of his kind? Had she not wished to spare Amaroq of the torture by becoming his companion?
She turns to Tenebrae, now, with a flash of anger. Her eyes, already red, gleam gem-bright above the waves. He demands her to perform her transformation as if it is a circus trick? As if it exists as some kind of proof? The magic seems as if it has lived within her for a lifetime, even with its newness, even with its uncertainty. Boudika's magic feels like fate, even as she struggles to understand it. Show me. Show me. It is a demand, and the only reason Boudika answers is because of her half-finished apology. With the high, angry tide and the moon beyond the clouds, her power feels strong. Her blood sings with the storm. Boudika pins the monk with her eyes again with the sea between them. Then, her body like a play of light, she becomes the mirror of Tenebrae, down to his glowing sigils.
“What else would you like to see, Tenebrae?” her voice is seething, the sound of water draining from jagged rocks. Yet Boudika's voice is his voice, even as she speaks, even as she says, “The magic is new to me and yet it has already grown strong, and stronger still. Would you like to know how my shape has become transient? How there are moments when, amorphous, my soul longs to become a crocodile, or a shark, a jaguar, or a tigress? An albatross, a dolphin? Or how I know, in my heart of hearts, one day I will become the sea? A whale, a dragon, a great and terrible serpent?”
The anger is what fuels her next transformation; she already feels heavily fatigued, and it is the first time she has transformed so rapidly. But abruptly, like a sleight of hand gone unseen, Boudika's form ripples from her imitation of Tenebrae to one of her more favoured shapes; a tiger shark’s dorsal fin slips silently beneath the water. When Boudika submerges, she is met with the topungent odour of fresh blood.
Everything within her cries, more, more, more. She swims a distant circle from Tenebrae; her body cuts through the water with the deftness of a blade. The world below is a kaleidoscope of light and dark, rushing water and opaque forms, billowing kelp beds and the dart-like, scattering of schools of fish. Boudika streaks blood from her wounds from the water and she returns to him, an ominous fin that cuts blade-like the uppermost, raging waves. The storm is welling, the depth of the water increasing by the minute. She trails around Tenebrae in narrower and narrower circles, with enough distance between them to be unthreatening but no less ominous. At times, Boudika submerges entirely and reappears nearer than before; or submerges and brushes just beneath his body, so he may feel the rush of her movement but not the touch of her scales. Tenebrae is bleeding in the water and a shark, archaic and primordial and terrible, circles him as if for the kill. But even as Boudika swims, she retains her rage and spits it at him in formless words,
What other tricks ought I perform for you, Tenebrae?
Then:
Disappearance?
With the word, her fin slips beneath the water.
For an indefinite amount of time—so long he might not even know if she intends to return—she resurfaces nearby as an equine, wild, water-swept hair that tangles and gnarls in the water. Her eyes are hard and fierce and she says, “What else, Tenebrae?” And in her voice the storm resonates. Within her voice, there is a rage like the sea’s and a sort of raw helplessness, the same helplessness of an ocean that batters the shore day after day after day but never joins it. In her display of magic, of power, Boudika feels utter separated, as if cleaved from everything she has ever known. This, Boudika knows, is why Caligo chose her. So a mortal could suffer the same sentiment of being abandoned by all other gods. So a mortal knew a gods loneliness, her terrible difference, the power of something dark.
Even as she thinks it, she fights a civil war within herself and her very nature; his blood entices her more thoroughly than anything ever has. It entices her because she wants more, and the word emerges in her own mind, an echo of Orestes.
She wants his Soul.
She wants to share it, know it, touch it. She wants to be a Keeper of someone aside herself. The sea buffets her and Boudika recognises that now they have drifted so far from the land it is a distant sight on the horizon, dipping and falling and disappearing with the violent, growing swell of waves. Boudika says nothing else. Her muscles tremble with fatigue, even as her expression reminds proud, defiant, etched in stone and copper.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Boudika’s blood blooms along the black of his shadow-knife. It trickles down her throat, joining with the littered puncture wounds of his snakebites.
Tenebrae presses the blade into her neck, demanding her retreat. Somewhere inside himself something is howling for distance from her. A part of him is still in the bottom of the ocean, as broken as a shipwreck and only Boudika will find it there; a shard amidst the wreckage.
He should rejoice at the distance she affords him. He can breathe now, yes. When she is not close the fog of desire lifts and the twisting question of who is she? does not shout so loudly in his mind.
But, when she is apart from him their attraction pulls tight as a rope. Tenebrae is a colt bridled for the first time, he thrashes, thrashes against this want. Yet the reins do not break. He cannot be free of her.
The sea is complicit too. It pushes them back together and the rope falls slack. The monk’s body does not ache when she is close. He crashes into her again and again as the sea rises and falls with her swells. He is a plaything here but Boudika is a goddess.
Show me. He had commanded of her. Wearied, weakened by blood loss, he does not specify his command, he does not think he needs to. Show me the safe place you know. The intention is there, but his words are already lost by the sea. He is tired. Boudika is the worst thing in the sea, but he is tired and he is willing to rest with her now.
If only.
All the sky is an omen of death. It is gathering chaos. This has become the battle between life and death. His warrior-girl is the worst thing in the sea and she has not yet shown him just how terrible she has become.
Already something other is shifting in her eyes. Already the storm has slipped its electric fingers into her veins. Boudika comes alight beneath the flashing white. Fury limns her with the lightning’s ferocity. Tenebrae watches as her fury grows. It emerges in trembles that shudder in her bones.. The sea rocks her, it coos to its wild girl. This is her show.
Who is more fierce now? the wild wind seems to crow, the storm or the girl?
Tenebrae watches on, deeply, darkly sombre. His shadows gather. They breath across the waves like smoke. They rise up from the deep, summoned by the Disciple. He readies himself, he knows this dance with her. This is not their first turn about the floor, their feet know how to move together, their limbs, their hands, their arms and the beating of their hearts.
They may know how to dance, but they are so full of deep misunderstanding. Her apology is still upon her tongue, her mind still full of sorrow and loneliness. And he is tired, a mortal in need of rest, so far out to sea that the cry of the shore is lost in the wind. He wants shelter. She wants forgiveness.
Fate laughs.
Something lethal comes upon the kelpie. It is some grim revelation, some new, raw hurt. All Tenebrae can think is how and why they seem to hurt each other more with words. How has he inspired from within her a new kind of fury?
She thinks he demands her magic from her as if it were cheap tricks. He does not realise she thinks this way. But oh, the damage is now done and his revelation is yet to come.
His kelpie holds him in her ruby red gaze and morphs as if it were as easy as sighing. She becomes him. White light glows from his sigils in their places across her brow and shoulders. Tenebrae’s breath sucks in between his teeth and now he swims back, recoiling from this strange magic. It is her turn to mock him (though he never mocked her at all).
“Bou-” He begins to say - still husky, still rough as the rocks beneath the waves - but she cuts him off with his own voice. It is haggard and rough, low, low like the roaring ocean. What else would you like to see, Tenebrae? She makes his doppelganger ask.
His shadows descend through rain and cloud to smother her, to trap her words back within his mouth. They pause when she gives him answers to all his unanswered questions.
Who is she? A kelpie possessed by her new magic
What is she? A shifting soul, savage and hungry and hurt.
Tenebrae’s heart is in his throat, pulled up like a fish upon a hook. Boudika’s changing soul demands of her its desire and she swims away a shark, cutting through the water. Her dorsal fin cuts an ominous circle about him and he twists to follow it. Shadows track it through the water, they turn her great body black as midnight.
“Boudika!” He shouts coarse above the storm. Still she goads him in her fury, still she threatens him with her sweeping circles and then…
Then she speaks into his mind, loud and clear and wrong. She mocks him with those words.
She disappears.
It is only Tenebrae and his billowing shadows out amidst the waves. The sea fights his treading limbs as he twists and turns to see where she has gone. Boudika has sunk beneath the waves, still a savage beast, still wild. Her absence does not ease his heart. The waves hide their girl within their writhing black depths. The water laughs and it roars as it tosses the Disciple, pulling him further, further out to sea. Still Boudika does not return though he knows she will, she always does. She is wild and savage, unpredictable and hungry. She is angry and petulant. Above all, she cannot resist their pull.
Despite this her ire stokes his. Fear fans the flames of his own fury. When she returns she is just as likely to bite him and fight him as she is to kiss the wounds she has inflicted upon him. So often he relishes her unpredictability. So often he craves her wild nature, the bite of her teeth but-
“BOUDIKA!” He screams a third time as lightning splits the sky. This is the second time he has chanted her name into the waves this night. Summoned, as a genie, she emerges. In her horse form she is almost fragile amidst the waves.
Distance is nothing as he swims to her. His fatigue is forgotten. Tenebrae is as electric as the skies above. Her face glows with the light of the half moon sigil atop his brow. “Do not threaten me,” the Disciple warns with a voice low and ominous. Still the waves push them together, they converge like planets, like continents - their being together is an earthquake, a catastrophe, after all.
“Do you wish to kill me, Boudika? If so then let it be upon land where I can meet you in fair combat.” His lips pull back across his teeth, his ears are flat atop his skull. His body burns with ire and it is only further stirred when he lets his gaze roam across her proud face.
“We have much to discuss.” The sea churns, turning them in whirlpool circles as they rotate, held tightly together. Now he is quiet, now it is his turn to simmer with danger, to let his shadows gather and turn themselves into to beasts that run across and through the waves: lions and tigers. “I can match your wild, savage soul,” the monk hisses with desire and simmering warning, “but for now, I repeat, show me this safe place you said you knew. That is all I asked of you.” He is close, close in the water, where their mouths bump in the uneven waves, where lips meet teeth and hooves scrape the other’s knees. “And no more of your tricks.”
Then, softer, softer so soft even the storm quiets its fury to hear the monk speak, “You are not the only one hurting. You are not the only one out of control here. Give me your words tonight, that is all I want from you.”
when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you are the reason it became so mangled
How, he wonders, why? he asks, and the puzzlement is simple: they hurt one another. Their pain comes from a great and terrible well, the type of well that only exists when one—or both—of the offenders understand pain has no depth but, is instead, depthless. Boudika would answer him, that, those words. She would curl her lips back into a terrible smile that is, in no way, a smile, and cry out; I hurt because it is all I have ever known.
If there are many lives we live, Boudika is still falling from a black, black cliff after two men she would give her heart to. She is still giving her heart, it is still gone. Bou— he thinks to calm her? He thinks to explain? Boudika is inconsolable. Boudika is the sea that rages, and remembers, and never forgets. Perhaps she is no longer seeing him in her rage and in her apology; perhaps she sees only blue eyes and green eyes, and all the men that had come before. Perhaps she only sees her father’s devout stare and the smell of whiskey on the wind.
Boudika realises, beneath the lightening and within the furious sea, that Tenebrae wears her crown of thorns. When he took his lashes, it was not only for his desire—of which she knows little—but, instead, her old sentiments.
Boudika!
She shouldn’t come back.
She should let the sea become a salve, she should let it swallow her into the storm. She was never meant to be a woman, no, and that is what her entire life has told her, what every man has ever said—
yet the magnanimity of him draws her back.
In her mind remains the girlish hope that not all of them are the same, that some men are good, and worthy, and—
BOUDIKA!
At last, his true self.
Her vision is not obscured by the darkness; the lightening cracks, and whips, and illuminates the both of them. Do not threaten me.
If only that is what she’d intended.
They are brought together again, in a fierce collision of knees, chests, jaws.
She is tired, now. She wants the sea to take them, and she wants Tenebrae to go. But he cannot. And she cannot leave him in the battering waves. Boudika recognises just how far they’ve drifted from the land and, strong as the Disciple may be, to fight the swell of the storm would be nearly impossible. He looks statuesque with the dim storm light; his face has become all hard angles and the glowing sigil at his brow.
I knew a man, she wants to say.
With a sigil like yours, burned into his skin with gold and copper. It shone with blood—
But she doesn’t.
We have much to discuss, and as he says it, Boudika realises, they don’t even know one another. They are strangers, pulled by some affinity she cannot explain. Where he is darkness, pride, anger, Boudika is now soft in the way a tigress can, sometimes, be soft. Tired, languid, a beast with eyes that deepen, deepen, deepen, and burn.
I can match your wild, savage soul. It is a challenge she would like to meet.
Then, Tenebrae undoes her.
Then, Tenebrae shatters the feral self-confidence she has erected. In one fell swoop, with a blow silent but unrecoverable, he says: But for now, I repeat, show me this safe place you said you knew. That is all I asked of you.
Her throat burns with what she hopes is salt water, but knows to be tears of embarrassment. Even a month ago, Boudika would have stammered out, I didn’t understand, I thought you meant—I thought you meant—
Of course he already knows, what she thought he meant.
She turns her face from him to stare at the sea and steels her breathing. Hot tears burn in her eyes but refuse to fall, and, besides, they seem to be nothing besides sea water. She closes her eyes. “No more tricks.” Boudika promises. Her voice emerges strangely tense, with the sort of brittle fragility of one with a storm of thoughts on their mind.
“I… this is not meant to be a trick. One last time. To get us to… safety.” The thought of transforming again nearly undoes Boudika a second time. She is weary in a way she has not been weary in years; her body aches with the stress of changing shape; but once more, Boudika becomes a crocodile.
This comes slower, more painfully. It feels as if she is forcing herself to fit into a shape, now, not meant for her. The only reason the transformation is within her limits is because of Caligo’s light breaking, briefly, through the clouds—it gives her one last burst of power, and then, then Boudika explains carefully.
It is too far for you to swim. It is better you conserve your energy. I will help you; I know it is a lot to ask, but I will not use my teeth on you again. I know you are hurting, but… I would like to talk. I have words. She swears it in her own mind, inaudible to him. Boudika turns her body so it begins to break the waves, and offers her neck for him to drape a limb over. Her tail, long and powerful and wicked, will propel them more quickly than even her kelpie form.
She does not yet say, I am sorry, but she finds her penance in the rough treatment of the waves and in the way that, as the storm deepens, even the sea seems to punish her. The journey is not an easy one.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
The sea washes away her tears with fingers of waves and salt and seafoam. It leaves no room for a girl’s embarrassment. It rages beneath the storm and cries its own violent tears that mix with the leaping waves. Seaspray stings his eyes and yet they are not extinguished. They glow as brightwhite stars in the inky black of the roiling expanse.
Tenebrae, though his eyes sting, keeps his gaze upon her, where she is so close. They rise and fall in the dance of the waves. This carousel-waltz is nothing like the dancing he had hoped for when he stepped out into the sea storm and chanted her name as if she were a goddess. Maybe she is a siren of the ocean? A witch whom the sea exults? A goddess feral and beautiful who comes to lure foolish men of religion out to their deaths. Will she make him abandon Caligo?
He does not dare to wonder.
He thinks he might already know the answer.
Her body feels different when it collides against his in the force of the waves. Their shared anger has abated. Their weariness sits bone deep and their muscles ache. His body and hers, they float loosely in the salt-water. They are softer then they press together. The Disciple sees the downward turn of her lips, the way she keeps her sorrow in and her wilderness out.
Proud girl.
Her horns are wicked as daggers and the rain spirals down to tangle in her hair. Droplets trickle down her cheeks, gathering as pearls in her eyelashes.
No more tricks, She says with a voice strangled by her sorrow. Boudika looks away and the curve of her mouth draws his gaze. He looks to the corner of her mouth where he kissed her - its ghost still lives there, he thinks. Or maybe he hopes. But as he thinks of their kiss, he feels the bite of her teeth, he swallows too, his jaw clenching.
No sooner had she said no tricks and she suggests a change again. He is sure he knows what form she will choose. The Disciple pushes back, fighting the sea that delights in only pushing them together. The sea lets him go, as if it knows that he teeters upon the edge of his limits. It whispers in his ears that it will cradle his bones in the deep. He is too tired to swim to shore. Tenebrae does not doubt the sea’s prophecy.
Her crimson eyes are lovely, even in their hurt, in the moment before Boudika’s gaze turns grey and crocodilian. Tenebrae watches her until she becomes strange and lethal again. The bloodstained water (for still his throat and its distressed flesh bleed slowly out) laps at his throat. His heart cannot help the way it leaps. His magic blooms and billows across the surface of the water. It is dark and ominous. It seethes with warning.
Yet, no longer does the crocodile watch him as it had. This time, when Boudika swims toward him it is slow, weary. She turns at the last and offers her body to him: a float upon which he is to be carried. Pride is little more than a droplet in his blood for wariness surges, wild and feverish through his veins. It cautions him yet he goes to her (of course he does).
But when Boudika begins to pull him through the waves, they get pushed hither and thither. The monk feels how she tires, he hears the effort of her lungs. He never thought he would, but he begins to sorrow for a crocodile.
@Boudika - Fin! Imma off to reply to the next now xD <3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
