Smoke and stars and senselessness reflected across sable, restless water’s surface. She watches it from the deck of a merchant vessel bound for anywhere by here (again, and again, and again), seaspray and tears upon her slick cheeks. For a moment, the tattered edges of another dying home, the silence, the aching sureness of Edana’s swift demise, it all becomes as one, a formed and hulking mass of flesh, bones, blood, larch, pine, granite, wildflower, cobble and gold. A blood-idol, a totem of bare impermanence, a miscreation of love, lust and life – a thing with breath and heartbeat, final as they may be, tilting grotesque head to the vanquished deities – all is lost. We let you down.
Again.
—and then, she lets it go.
Bows her head to its deep web of roots – Memory – and beseeches it to find cloister in that cage of rib and breastbone where it lives in leaden, forlorn foreverness. It takes her prayer, her offering, and recedes, for now, leaving her empty, but clear-eyed. Heavy, but loosened from that realm of shifting, hungry creature-fear. Free, now, to walk the strange and lovely land, whose borders she had breached, unbeknownst to her, whilst following the compass of new stars by night.
(Quid erit, erit.)
Her deep, blue eyes blink open, revealing the late-summer sun, low on the horizon, bathing the bright, halcyon meadow in a bask of soft, lemony yellow; fingering the red, ruffled edges of poppy and orange butterfly-weed. It folds over her, balmy and beautiful; earthy and bright; unadorned, it is naked and perfect and entirely unencumbered by its own mortality. And yet, easily – too, too easily – she can see it growing yellowed. Listless. Gone to seed. Dark. Nothing. Nothing and then dreamlike, in her mind’s eye, as if it had never really been at all.
She lets that go too, taking a deep breath and shifting her weight, carving trails of parted grass and leaning wildflowers in her slow, pensive wake.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
She wanders, as phantoms do, through the deepest parts of the flower-strewn meadow. Grasses brush at her knees and hocks and bow down within her wake, reverent. She carves her path with the silence of a ship through waves.
The sunset limns her in gold. Lavender flowers open for her exposing the pollen dusted across their stomachs. Her body is the pale light of the moon. Has she come as its herald? It rises behind her, its face silver. They share the same glow, the moon and she; Both have a light as soft as wraiths.
Across her body curves patches of purple (that the lavender flowers so adore). He wonders if they are sore to touch, tender as bruises. She walks as more than a wraith, he realises now. The girl is a soul untethered, a heart slipped free of its ties.
Twilight owns this hour. All the meadow is readying for sleep when the monk arrives like the coming of night. Upon the wave of his shadows roll the impenetrable black of midnight. There is nothing of him that is similar to her. The girl is a star amidst her meadow, an ethereal thing that has loosed herself from the sky like a star, shedding her darkness and holding tight to her light.
He comes to her in black, black, black. A black as dark as pitch and all the flowers bend their faces toward the earth. Night commands sleep and they turn their bodies from the sun and fall still, ready.
They are a strange pair when they meet within the resting heart of the sunset meadow. Beneath the sun’s sleepy, summer light they are turned soft and dreamlike. Closer to her now, Tenebrae sees the way tears are dried upon her cheeks as stories once inked upon paper. He wonders of the tragedy of her words. Where is the sorrow whose fingers untied the knots that grounded her? It set her loose, like a kite to be carried until the winds cast her down.
Darkness presses upon her skin, darkening her lilac as though they truly are bruises whose distress he deepens. Tenebrae’s shadows seek to map her body and better learn the shape of this stranger, who the moonlight so carefully cradles. “You are new,” the Disciple breathes at last. The words feel cumbersome upon his tongue. He realises he has not spoken all the day long, so silent were he and his brothers in their worship.
His whiteglow eyes gaze at her from the midst of his shadows. His dark magic gathers commanding sleep to bloom, soft and sweet, in the dark lines of her delicate face. All the meadow holds its breath, lying still and dream soft. Darkness smiles, small and lazy. Religion lies woven within his bones, within the magic that generated him and all his brothers. “Welcome to Novus,” Tenebrae breathes, his tongue and voice growing warm as whisky as they remember what it is to speak.
Knew him to her bones, holds him there for safekeeping.
She shifts, stilling in mid-step, an argent hoof lingering in the buttery air a fraction of a second longer than normal. Long enough for her skin to ache in rippling shivers from the primordial core of her, the same thing that had told her to run from the oily, lamplit foreboding of those cobbled streets, so many moons ago. Urged her to forgo the traitorous trappings of flesh and searching, fervid spirit; to resist the sable rapture that had divulged from her demure soul, stitch by fragile stitch, the rayless territories of her continent.
But she hadn’t run.
Foolish girl.
Her fluted ears tilt to catch the sound of displaced grass – the purl of soft, soundless nothing as it splits the incipient dusk. Hush. Quietness, so full and complete; so softened by the scent of foxglove and bee balm and… Him. All of him, so when he forms from the strange darkness that snarls and unsnarls around him – from him, beyond and beside him – she swears it too has its own perfume, there against the male redolence of horsehair and old sweat. Adusk and piquant, all-consuming in the way she knows only darkness can be.
She blinks, nostrils widening, pink and aquiver, muscles tight as springs held between apprehensive fingertips; as lightning behind a thin veil of pressure and cloud. Waiting. Expectant. Leaning, as they seem to do in the fading swell of flowers and ebbing sun, to better see the breathy make of each other in his eclipse. You are new, he says, and she nods, watching, with keen interest, the coils of his swart coming to meet the gloaming lavender of her shoulderblade. “Yes,” she concedes – and not for the first time, her newness makes her feel small. “Is it so obvious?”
She swallows hard.
Her breath comes in slow, rhythmic heaves.
That floodlight-gaze. They could be brethren, this moon-branded man and he-of-honeyed-savagery. They could be two of the same matrix; cast in the forge of far beyond this plain, where moonlight goes to die and starlight fails to be. Except her. For, somehow, of moon and stars, she grows vivid and wild root-systems in their darknesses. “Novus,” it has a name. A frail, newborn thing, something she cannot – will not – bring to her breast as eagerly as she had Edana. Not again.
“Who are you? What are you?” reverential and guarded, she bends inwards, towards, away – unable to quite resist the glance of shade across her throat.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Incense still clings to his skin as the ghosts of prayers across his body. The scent of holiness presses itself upon the lavender of her skin as if she is a galaxy, as if upon her body is the string that holds existence together.
The monk looks closer, studies her with the somber gaze of a man who suspects she might be something other. She is.
There is nothing of Novus upon her skin. There is no smell that he can place. All of her is different, her body spun together by a different world. A separate existence. Yet she stands as normal as a star plucked out from the sky, her body the twisted colours of galaxies. His shadows press where lavender brushes across the flare of her ribs, the point of her hips. He looks at her and knows he never needs to look upon the cold tops of snow capped mountains, or the swirling dust of a blooming galaxy. In her eyes are river pearls, across her lips and nostrils the blush of roses.
She is earth and sky, winter and spring. He stands before the freshness of her, he breathes her in as if the very essence of her is life. The touch of her gaze upon him is cool fingertips, star dusted. Her knees are pollen stained and the flowers still bend in reverence at her ankles.
She nods her head and asks if her newness is obvious.
He laughs, low and rough like sleep caught between rousing lips and opening eyelashes. Of course it is obvious. She is strange here, in the way that all new things are. The meadow frames her as if it does not yet know how to hold her, this girl, this loosened star of another galaxy’s making.
Tenebrae watches as his shadows stain her darker, darker. The way she wears the shadows, the way they ink her making sharper the contours of her body. Beneath his magic she becomes art, sketched and blushed across the face of the twilight meadow. Of course she does not belong. She is too lovely for here.
Still the sun casts her honey glow. Still the meadow is speckled with the flies of summer’s final dusk. They go by, dancing lazy as motes in the hazy air. He wonders if she would melt such is the fragile ice of her, like a slender sculpted flower. Yet ivory and stardust binds her and the press of magic upon her skin tells him her skin is warm, her body firm.
“It is.” He answers her question at last, with a voice as deep and golden and lazy as the evening’s coming. His shadows bloom against her light, the half-moon sigils atop his brow, upon each shoulder, cast their triad of moons upon her body. “You are not quite like anything here. The meadow does not know what to make of you, yet.” Still the flowers are bowing, still their pollen dusts her slender knees. “What brings you to Novus?”
And the monk wonders if it is loss or love, tragedy or restless wandering. There are many reasons and the truth of hers lie in secrets across the grooves of her face, the curve of her lips, the woven stars of her heart.
Yet one thing he does know for sure, “You have known darkness before.”
It is there in the way his darkness lies across her body, like a veil, like a lover. The way it twines about her limbs, feline, affectionate. Tenebrae can nearly hear the way her bones sing with their remembering.
@Stellanor - Well this ended up long, sorry! <3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
There is something homey about the dark verge that consumes him – that consumes them. Something familiar, felt before, and so she takes a step forward. Crosses the sill of an in-between, here and there, and settles comfortably. She can breathe. She can be and not be; tie and untie the frail moorings of her around him in careful, ritual ministrations. Around him and the memory of another like him. Around something she can feel without touching; grab, though it slips through her fingers as sure as shadow and sand.
The smell of incense mixes with the newness and the void, sharp and hallelujah. She knows godliness, had met it at an altar once, offered herself as a sacrifice to it. Blood. But blood is a cheap commodity. She is full of, had found in the end that she had more than enough to spare. Would have spared more, if she could. Would. (What would her father think? He had raised her differently.) Known godliness in the cathedral of her own heart. Genuflected to a god now dead, rived by a sin more mighty than holiness because it had really been the god’s own weakness, after all.
Serenely, as she watches the shivering edges of herself and the world and all that coils around him slough off like bright skin from the soft eventide, she wonders if his darkness could slay divinity.
Were it not set to a supplicant purpose.
“Hmmm,” she tries to remember what had come before him, just moments ago. The bright, golden gloam. The mauves and the oranges, the way they bled like tides into inchoate night. Before. How it had held her like a novelty; a curio of another time and place. Feeling her heft, testing the make and measure, the delicate details and gaging her worth in the weight of the purpose she had brought with her. “Nor I, it,” she admits, remembering, faintly, trying to find some brushstrokes of her past in the yellowing sway of grass and the vibrant dance of wildflowers on their stalks.
They circle like prizefighters, and at the toll of the bell, they will all find the way they come together.
But him. This place knows the cloudy fingers of his ministerial formlessness as kin or kith, or as monastic pilgrim. So unlike her, it seems to bow to him, to know him as something proffered by a divine hand, given unto the world as a gift from shepherd to flock. She knows not the names of Novus’ gods but can see the strange way they work in the quietest of labours.
She smiles, distant and dreamy, “need,” she says simply, sadly. “It took me as a refugee from judgement. I am grateful for that, at least.” She regards him, with gentled, astral eyes, coils of white hair slipping across her endarkened cheek. You have known darkness before, he says, she shakes her head, a small giggle slipping from bruise-black lips. “How do you do that?” her brows knit together in curiousness, catching his lamplight eyes, “oraculum, I have known your kind. Of a kind of your kind.” Had touched the tattered, unloving edges of his vicious predation, and had delighted in it. Had felt teeth like lover’s caresses, soft as silken bedsheets.
She wonders if he can scry all of that as well. Can untangle the lovely weakness of her, the pliant way she had bent like a sapling in gales, around his stygian fingers.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
The way she watches the meadow and the way it responds to her. Still her knees are pollen dusted as the meadow paints the vestiges of summer across her pale body. The fine dust is as bright as a splash of paint across the white canvas of her skin. The monk has not realised, until Stellanor, how much he has come to be stagnant here within Novus. Being beside her and seeing the pale of her skin, the way Novus learns from her and of her is as welcome as the cool winds following a humid afternoon’s storm. Though already Novus seeks to change her, to mold her, to make her fit within its lands. Don’t - , Tenebrae wishes to breathe into the ebbing light between them. - Don’t let it change you.
The monk thinks that he could stand here for an eternity, watching her, feeling the newness of her…
But nothing remains new.
He asks of how she came here and her answer is sad, whimsical, filled with need and judgement. He watches her, the smile on her lips, the sadness that tips their corners down and weighs the thick curl of her eyelashes low, low. What sins had she committed in her life before this? What deed was so terrible she needed to be pulled into another world.
He looks over her, her lovely smile, the ivory of her skin, the soft of her eyes… “I cannot imagine you would commit a crime so terrible as to need to flee judgement, Stellanor.” There is a seriousness in the way he speaks, yet it is softened by his own smile that blooms like black roses. It is soft as petals yet sharp with a playful mirth like thorns, “But I stand to be corrected.”
The monk’s head bobs and he laughs with her, her next words giving him a greater stature than he ever could deserve or even fit. “Oh no,” Tenebrae breathes with a smile, “I am no oracle. I just feel how the shadows respond to you and you to them. There is a darkness to you, a residual echo… It takes someone of darkness to know.”
He watches the way she speaks, the way her smile now grows warmer, filled with the sweet taste of memory. There is a want there… “Do you miss the darkness?” He asks and such a question is so thinly veiled he does nothing to clarify for her. She already knows, the other’s darkness is already here. His own shadows shift, twist and turn about and over her body, chasing memories and future hopes.
“Caligo.” The monk says and it is as easy as vital as living. “This darkness is hers. It is just a gift that we have it. All of our magic, all of us is hers.”
