On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
He would only ever come when night was at her deepest. He would only ever come to graze his knees across the stone at the foot of her altar. He would only ever come with adulation upon his tongue and sins held back behind his teeth.
Tenebrae bites upon his prayers as they spill like ichor from his lips. Such confessions spill like sacrificial blood at the foot of her altar. Oh how he dares to leave his confessions here, dirtied and splashed across the stone of her shrine.
Her shadows sigh in the corners and he watches them with moon-white envy. The shadows reach for him - as they reach for all who dare to step into the temple of the Night goddess. She embraces all in this midnight embrace of hers. It is cool, it is thick as pitch and soon, not even Tenebrae, Disciple of Caligo, can see into her dark.
Only the flames upon her stone table are enough to beat back her darkness. Yet Tenebrae wonders if they are not strong at all, but that the goddess lets those flames burn, in kindness. He looks at their light, so golden, so bright and where sins pressed upon his tongue as sweet as poison, now only hunger pools. The Stallion hungers for the taste of light. He years for a drop of the sun upon his lips, between his teeth. Ah her darkness makes him ravenous and he falls upon his knees.
They are knees that know this cold, hard stone. They are knees that have bent and bled and bruised for this goddess of his. His brow presses upon the mountain’s cheek, where her temple forms the cut of its cheekbone. Darkness groans about him and spills forward like a cape, prostrating itself beside him.
Upon his lips is a litany of prayer. He closes his eyes against temptation that crawls sweet and glorious through his mind. Ah, he has done nothing and yet already he has dared to look and wonder and think. Go, his brothers had told him. Go and confess and all will be well. The temptations of the flesh will ease.
But they were not Tenebrae and maybe they had dared to look too - but had they begun to wonder like he? He closes his eyes against sin and warrior girls with blood red smiles.
It wasn’t his intent, to keep climbing the mountain until the path became stone-strewn and tripping-steep. Wasn’t his intent, to look back over his shoulder and see the glimmering of city lights like faint embers in the sunset, and the last distant strokes of light over the sea.
August is no pilgrim.
But here he is anyway, the palest thing in the new darkness, shivering in the cold before Caligo’s temple on the peak. He can’t remember the last time he came here; he must have been a boy, before he became an orphan. Senna had tutored him in many things, among them religion, but belief itself had never been the point, nor much concern of the unicorn’s.
August believes - he has seen and heard, after all, as much as any of them over the past tumultuous years, signs and wonders and horrors and plagues - but worship?
He already belongs to the White Scarab. There is no room for more loyalty than that.
And he is not here for praise or for prayer. The nightmares have been beaten back by Macha’s remedies, but the questions that birth them still remain, flickering sometimes like fire and sometimes like moths (or butterflies) inside his brain, spilling shadows everywhere, making messy the carefully organized compartments of his thoughts. There is nothing, no matter how familiar, he can do now without them needling at him sharper than teeth, why? why? why?
Why aren’t you dead, when others are?
Why weren’t you chosen for the Relic, why weren’t you good enough?
Why is everything falling apart?
The entrance to the temple is a dark mouth with a tongue of flame inside, remarkably steady. August tells himself he’s here; he might as well step in out of the wind, out of the cold, out of the dark. He does, and the sound of his hooves echo softly on the floor. The silence feels thick; it only heightens the mad-scrabble buzzing of his brain. He breathes out between his teeth.
It takes him a moment to notice the man prostrate on the floor, so cloaked is the stallion in shadows. Once he does he is startled for a moment, eyes full-moon wide, still as a carved figure until he sees the stranger breathe. Then he notices the paleness of his rump, begins to make out the crescent-shape on his shoulder, knows him to be a living creature. How strangely well the shadows had cloaked him - August knows better than to believe it was natural.
For a moment he considers the man, wonders if his knees ache pressed against the floor. He knows it’s cold; he can feel it rolling up from the stone. A wild impulse whispers join him, but August did not come here to make a confession. If anything he came to hear one.
“I think she’s out, for the moment,” he says, and makes no attempt to hush his voice, or question the note of cruelty that turns it cold. “You can probably get up.”
we drink the poison our minds pour for us and wonder why we feel so sick
@Tenebrae | oh I didn't even know he could be a dick
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
I think she’s out, for the moment...You can probably get up.
The words are loud, the voice is cold. They echo in the temple, reaching every secret place until every stretch of stone knows of this blasphemer.
Tenebrae hears - how could he not? But he does not stir. He keeps his knees bent, his body supplicant before the stone table of his goddess. His brow is cold where it presses upon the ground, he can feel the burn of his sigil as it scorches a black crescent moon upon the floor.
Still sins pour in a litany from his lips. Still his errors bleed out like a letting for Caligo’s judgement. His lips and tongue move with the heavy weights of his confessions - how many they are! How myriad are the ways he falls short of the divine grace of this goddess?
Only when his mouth is empty, only when his prayers are through does he speak, “She is out, but not that you would know.” Slowly he lifts his head, the burn mark of the half moon shivers in the cold dark of this divine place. He makes no move to rise, but turns his skull slowly so his eyes find the golden man at the edge of the temple space.
The stranger is radiant, gilded in gold and warmed by candlelight against all that Tenebrae has turned as black as pitch. Beneath the tendrils of his ebony painted fringe, the Disciple’s bright white eyes study the man. Tenebrae’s gaze is as two bright stars swallowing light. All around them seems darker, all around them seems so utterly midnight drenched. “I shall get up when my prayers are done,” How low Tenebrae’s voice is. How deep it sinks, oozing like ink into stone and into flesh. It is the warmth of amber and gold, kin to the stranger’s flesh. How ironic it is that the cold of the stranger’s words are as pale as Tenebrae’s own skin.
When he rises, when his knees unbend, bearing the bruises and cuts of penitence, it us upon his own choice. He falls to stillness as the shadows curl about him and then pull, pull as their attention turns upon August. Tenebrae turns with them and all becomes darker yet. All becomes the ominous black of the Night Order. He moves toward the man, the man who smells of Denocte’s starlight magic, who smells of the fetic rancor of the Island magic - ah it is still upon Tenebrae’s skin too. There are few who smell of anything but that savage island magic.
“Caligo can form from nothing at all. She listens in the shadows more often than any might dare to believe.” Tenebrae moves as if he is the weapon his shadows forge. He smiles with a grin as sharp as a dagger and as warm as ochre. Still the cold of the man’s words are upon Tenebrae’s skin. Still they send shivers through his spine. Tenebrae continues to close their distance until they are nose to nose, dawn meeting night with a banishing kiss. “But it is not me you are angry with, is it?”
Ask the man and he will tell you: he believes in Caligo and the rest of her pantheon, he has kept his tenets to their goddess of starlight and shadow. He shares his earnings with the poor and the needful and his pride in his court goes beyond the city and the mountains and all the souls they claim; it’s in the ground itself and the goddess who walked it.
But maybe he has had enough. Maybe he is sick of the tests they are being set, and the price of death not only for failing them but for those innocents who refused to play. There are still scars Denocte bears from the tsunami that swept through two summers ago. There are still children who cry and quake when an eagle swoops low overhead or a hawk cries shrill in the mountains just before a storm, thinking it is the thunderbirds returning. There is the island -
And there are no answers.
The stranger doesn’t respond, cloaked in shadow so only the barest shape of him is visible. August is not perturbed; instead a grin crosses his mouth, thin as the slash of a rapier, and he begins to walk further into the temple, examining what little he can see in the dim. He is patient, as any good warrior must be, or any good gambler. When the man does answer, the palomino is intentionally slow to turn his gaze back.
And so the first thing he sees is the moon-sigil glowing on the stallion’s forehead, like it was carved out by a piece of star. Surprise catches him by the throat and he steps back, chin tilting, a soft noise escaping him that sounds like ah.
He isn’t sure he’d truly believed in the Order. But that doesn’t mean he hadn’t listened to the tales.
Not that you would know. August might have responded to that, before; he can feel his tongue heavy with answer, like gold in his mouth. Yet he says nothing, nothing in reply to the deep toll of the monk’s voice, for now he is curious, considering.
At last the man rises. August does not look away (what is there to see? Nothing, except the stars faint out the doorway; all other light has been swallowed) at the crescent moons on his skin and the full moons of his eyes, and as the man talks in his low voice he smiles a grin that mirrors the other.
“She is not the only one who knows how to listen in shadows. I rather think her children are quite skilled with that gift. Nor does she seem to do much with what she hears.” Nearer and nearer the man drifts, the shadows moving with him, but August doesn’t step back again. Even when their breath mingles in their nearness he does not turn aside. He wonders if any of the scents he can smell on the man is what a shadow smells like.
There is little else he can make out about the stallion, but he knows the Night Order is said to be made up of mighty warriors.
“No,” he agrees. But when he licks his lips, a grin emerges that offers more dare than joy. “Though I’m sure we could find a way to repair that, if you’d rather I was.”
we drink the poison our minds pour for us and wonder why we feel so sick
