Boudika presses her forehead against the cell bars until the rust on them streaks her bald face in grime. There is a repetitive dink, dink, dink as her horn taps against the bars of her prison. She thinks she is alone, and in her first night of misery—imprisoned by her own people, by the people she had served, fought for, nearly died for!—her mind turns angry circles on itself.
How had he betrayed her?
What had she done, to earn that betrayal? Tears well in her eyes as she thinks of the nights they had shared, late, discussing strategy or their fathers or their dreams. She knew everything about him! They were everything but lovers; they were deeper than that, they were companions, and she knew he felt the same. She had been so certain, when she told him that she was not Bondike, had never been Bondike, but always Boudika—yes, she had been so certain he would not be bothered by the change, by the minute difference between a masculine “e” and feminine “a”.
Boudika simply didn’t understand why it had to make a difference.
The tears flow in earnest, now, as she glances out at the moonlit sea. The prison stands above the ocean on the cliffside, made of black cliff-rock. It is the second oldest building on Oresziah, after the church, covered in lichen and runic symbols. The windows beyond her cell are barred rather than glassed, and the cool wind howls angrily into the cellar where she is kept. Boudika shivers and ruts her head against the bars. She knows she should think of escape but she knows, more intimately, more personally, she doesn’t have anything to escape to.
A sob wracks her body.
“My people say tears are simply the ocean in our bodies trying to get back to the mother sea.”
The voice shocks her from her reprieve—Boudika starts, her eyes flicking anxiously around the cellar.
She is a fool for not seeing the silhouette in the cell next to her.
She is a fool for forgetting that he, The Prince of a Thousand Shapes, was also imprisoned.
He looks at her through the bars and she sees the blood streak down his forehead from his Binding. An ornate sun has been burned into his flesh with gold and copper wiring, and the wiring itself still rests upon his brow like a crown. He is the king of the desolate; the King of Losing Everything.
“I—I don’t understand.” It is all she can manage.
His sea-eyes glitter, almost mischievously. They are gem-bright even in the dark, in the same way the sea shines even in a black night. “You will, one day.”
— — — —
By the time they make it to the cave, Boudika has no energy left. Unlike Tenebrae, Boudika did not have to wait for monks to punish her sins; the sea did it gleefully in the form of waves that rose, mountainous, above them. With each terrible crash Boudika, with a powerful coiling of muscles, rocketed them to the surface once more. This process was repeated again, and again, and again, until what must have only been an hour or two became a lifetime of atonement. She has now crawled, half-drowned, into the cave nestled deep within the cliffside. It offers far more shelter than the land would, in such a storm, and she knows it intimately. It is the cave she has sought refuge in time and time again, upon discovering her new powers, upon neglecting her role as the Night Court Champion of Community—
As Boudika thinks it, she is filled with even more remorse. What does that even mean, anymore she wonders. Her actions would suggest that it means nothing.
She lays at the entrance of the cave silently. Her eyes are closed, and her mind is a repetitive rush and whir of the waves, the crashing, the thunderous boom of the storm. Boudika feels as if the weight of it rests evenly across her shoulders, until she remembers that is where she bore Tenebrae’s weight. Somehow she breathes out and sea water sprays from her still-soaked nostrils. She transforms from a crocodile into a mare and stumbles, somehow, to her feet.
The transformation feels like how she imagines it would feel to push something opaque through the heart, something leaden. It feels heavy and as she begins to walk toward the back of the cave—it winds, deep, deep into the cliffside—Boudika experiences a weariness she has not felt since the last time she went to war.
It makes her wonder if, perhaps, that is what is waged between herself and Tenebrae. Perhaps they are at a war of sorts, one she has never known. Is it a war of wills? A war of… Boudika doesn’t know. Even looking at him in the darkness fills her with embarrassment and shame. The resonant echo of the crashing ocean reminds her of it, too. There is a part of her that believes if she is what she acted as—a monster—she should have killed him, to be true to herself and her nature. She should have drowned him for his refusal to… to—
To what?
And she remembers Amaroq beneath the magic water of the island, the way they had been suspended there in the ribbons of Boudika’s blood as she became him. A water horse. Even as she thinks it she feels as hollow as the cave they inhabit. Even as she thinks it her chest aches ferociously, and her eyes well again not with sea water but tears. Luckily, it is dark, and she is still leading him further into the shelter.
At last, Boudika reaches the end of the winding cave. The hard purchase of stone has given way to softer, black sand. She cannot see in the absolute darkness, but has frequented the cave often enough to know the exact location of the flint. The last time she left the cave she had arranged the fire starting materials neatly, for easier access, and it was useful now in her absolute exhaustion. With trembling telekinesis, Boudika reaches for tinder and flint and starts a small, small fire in the dark. Within a few minutes, she feeds the fire with wood stashed upon a deep, drier nook in the wall. Eventually, it is light enough she can see Tenebrae across from her, and the cave reveals itself as a simple dwelling safe from the storm outside. Still, his face seems marblesque, carved beautifully from rough stone into something smooth, and furious.
With the fire the space between them begins to warm. Boudika had not realised how thoroughly she shook, how deeply the cold reaches into her bones. She stands before the flames and continues to feed them, piece by piece of wood. She is ravenous and disgusted at her own hunger; her stomach churns and self-deprecatingly she thinks, perhaps if I were still civilised, I’d have kept meat stores in this place. But she has not. There is no food, no fresh water, only the howling sea to keep them contained.
It is more and more difficult for Boudika to look at him squarely. She thinks of her reaction to him, when he had asked, show me. She cringes at how deeply she had misinterpreted her meaning, how vulnerable she had made herself with her confessions. Boudika opens her mouth to speak several times, but refrains, and the tension between them stretches taunt as a bow. She understands he must also be exhausted, but each glance at his face reveals the puckered and still bleeding wound her teeth had wrought. Boudika swallows heavily.
“Can you do anything besides unmake things?” Vercingtorix demands. “Can you do anything besides hurt those around you? Your father was the only one… the only one—“ he cuts off. The rising sun shines too brightly through the windows. It catches on the metallic accents of his face and turns his eyes to a raging, too-deep green. Boudika cannot look at him, but it doesn’t matter. He cannot look at her, either.
“Why didn’t you just—“ his voice cuts off tiredly. He leaves.
It is the only time he visits.
Boudika torments herself over what he had meant to ask.
The silence becomes unbearable.
Her voice is small, and girlish, and terribly uncertain when she says, “Tenebrae.”
A long pause. The storm cracks outside. The water swells at the distant entrance, and she hears it lap, lap, lapping against the stone.
“Tenebrae. I am sorry.”
It is understated, simple. Boudika has never had usage for apologies because, even when genuine, they never repair the damage. Her father is the one who taught her that, by never apologising for anything. He had made her what she was, with his prayers to arcane gods to disguise her as a boy. Boudika almost wonders, with the storm, if those pagan deities had followed her even here. If they still own her.
"Speech" || @Tenebrae || Eeeee sorry this is all over the place and a literal mONSTER POST
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
He feels the way her body labours beneath him. The way the switches of her powerful tail slows. His sea-girl grows weary and yet, he feels wariness mixing with ire in a terrible concoction in his blood.
All of him is as exhausted as she. How long had they been swimming together, clinging to each other as if to let go would be to fall apart forever. The sea had tried to part their grasp. It had tossed them amidst the waves and whipped their faces with seaspray. The winds roared their tempest cry into their ears.
Yet she gets them to her cave. They fall upon rock and lie together, horse and crocodile upon the stone of the cliff’s open maw. He does not flinch as she changes, not this time. Even when she expells water from her lungs, he just watches her with silverbright eyes.
Boudika does not rest. She rises, trembling to her feet. The exhaustion in his bones, his muscles, cries out to hers. Yet he rises to stand beside her. In the darkness before the fire is lit, his darkness swallows them both. It is whole, complete, not even the lightning pierces through the totality of his magic.
The monk follows her, the only sounds are the tap of their feet, the drip, drip, drip of saltwater from their bodies. She lights a fire as if she knows the darkness here intimately. Tenebrae watches the sea-girl work. Flames cast back the darkness and light begins to dance across the walls. From across the fire they watch each other, until she looks away, until the only sound is that of her swallowing.
He has forgotten the roar of the ocean. He has forgotten the lightning that splits the sky.
Here they are untouchable.
Here nothing can reach them.
Slowly he inhales, deep, deep. The air is salt-sea slick.
Tenebrae.
His name upon the air. It is small. Spoken with a voice he has never heard. His name feels frangible, she feels frangible, so far from the wild girl who rose like a siren out of the sea. So different from the mythic creature who lunged for him and grasped him tight in her unyielding maw. His throat throbs sullenly, its blood runs slower now, down the base of his throat and over his chest. It drips and leaves dark metallic stains upon the floor.
The cave inhales their salt-water skin. Never has the sea so wholly consumed him, it is in his belly where he drank it, in his nose where he inhaled it, in his blood where it saturated his wound. He feels so deeply of the ocean and yet, when he beholds the girl across the fire, with her too-wide lips and her crimson eyes, he knows he is less a possession of the sea than he is a god amidst the stars.
I am sorry. Oh her still small voice.
From the roiling obsidian of his black magic Tenebrae watches her. He illuminates her in starlight and slowly moves, walking about the fire until he reaches her. And there he stops. Now there is no sea to push his body into hers, no waves to tangle their limbs. He feels bereft of her, no matter the anger she inspires within him.
They are depleted where they stand before each other. They are drained by the other. He does not think there is a part of him left that she has not consumed with her wicked tricks, her savage bites, her sorrowful eyes, wide and lonely.
He does not know what she has been taught. He does not know what ghosts fill her mind with conversations spoken so long ago. His lips run up the bridge of her nose until, at her brow, they brush her forelock from her eyes. Crimson, red, like rubies, like pomegranates.
“When I first met you,” he whispers at her brow and even the hiss of the fire is louder than he. “You were just a girl with thorns on your tongue and a smile on your lips. I had never met a girl like you. Your smile...” He breathes his memory across her brow.
Silence. It breathes when he lowers his lips from her brow, his memory still emblazoned where he had touched her.
“I have not seen you smile in so long. What has happened between then and now?" He knows nothing of why her smile left, why her pain rose sharp and awful. He wants to know what happened to her. He needs to know. Still his voice is a whisper, his eyes searching out hers. He will not let them go. Silver into crimson, wine within a chalice.
“I came here to dance with you. To swim with you. To -” To kiss you. He sighs and does not say it but his gaze is upon her lips, again at that corner of her lips. “I would not have thought you wished me dead…” He trails off and it is more effort than it should be to tear his gaze away from her lips, the memory. “Do you wish me dead, Boudika?”
There is a calmness he did not possess in the midst of the sea. There is a weariness in his bones. Yet he steps closer as she shivers. And then closer still, until they touch from shoulder to hip. Until the air warms with their bodies and their fire.
“I know you are sorry, Boudika.” Oh her name upon his tongue. Now he knows why the sea adores her, why is rises and crashes itself upon the mouth of the cave. It summons her back. “Just tell me why.”
@Boudika - So much love <3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
06-03-2020, 05:40 PM - This post was last modified: 12-03-2020, 11:11 AM by Tenebrae
It does not occur to her until the quiet drip of distant water steels her from her thoughts that she is now in Tenebrae’s domain. It strikes sudden, unexpected fear in her heart. Is this what he had felt, when they floated in the tumultuous sea? Her domain. She had been so confident, then. But in the absolute darkness of the cave where she seeks out her familiar fire-starting tools she realises this is utterly, utterly Tenebrae’s. His shadows come to mind, the way they transform into whatever he imagines. She hears his quiet breathing in the dark, the dripping of the water from their bodies. It is only like that for a moment before the fire flickers to life and she can again see his face.
Boudika examines it, searching for rage or angst. But he is only watching her. She wonders, but does not ask, if he could kill this small fire in the deep darkness of their sea cave. She does not know when it stopped being hers and became theirs and perhaps that in and of itself has to do something with the ominous presence of the shadows all about them, flitting with the rise and fall of the fire’s flames.
He is a different creature here. Not so boyish, she thinks, as she examines the hard lines of his face. She remembers that he is a warrior as his shadows dance and flit to his demand. The light pours from his sigils and turns what it touches whiteish, silvery.
Boudika nearly flinches when he nears her; and nearly flinches again when he reaches out to press his lips along the bridge of her nose and then up, up, until his clears her eyes of her forelock with his mouth. He whispers against her skin and she trembles beneath against him; no longer with restraint, or fury, or anything animalistic. This is fatigue, pure and simple. She is tired of fighting.
When I first met you, you were just a girl with thorns on your tongue and a smile on your lips. I had never met a girl like you. Your smile… Boudika remembers and she nearly laughs with a cruel, hard kind of irony. Just a girl, she thinks, and marvels at it. Oh, how she wishes she had ever been just a girl.
What happened between then and now?
So much, and nothing.
She sighs in a tired kind of way. Boudika cannot stand it, cannot stand the pressure of his touch. She turns her face away. He confesses his motivations. I came to dance with you. To swim with you. And even those ignite within her a desperate, impalpable anger. It is not at Tenebrae, she realises. No, she is not mad at him. Do you wish me dead, Boudika?
How can he not see it? It is a good thing she has become so exhausted, because her frustration at being unable to explain surfaces just enough to make her leonine tail flick, to fill her with—with… well, with what? Boudika deflates before she is even fully ignited.
He does not let her escape. Even after she has turned from him he presses closer still, until the warmth of his body presses firmly against her own. She rests her cheek tiredly against his flank and breathes in his scent. But she only smells the sea.
Boudika is quiet for a long moment and she reels in her thoughts. She had not forced herself to reckon with her own motivations in… in Boudika does not know how long. Something within her had broken, she supposes, when Vercingtorix first appeared in Novus and Amaroq had disappeared. How she had wandered the beaches a newly made water horse and sought… not her mate, but her creator, her partner, her—
And anyways, he was gone. Gone. Gone, gone.
When they had first met, she had only been the General’s daughter, drunk on the islands magic, a place unregulated and without rules. She had been dangerous, and brilliant, and full of all the newness Novus had shown her. Isra’s kindness. Denocte’s acceptance. Amaroq’s attention. Tell me why, he asks. Does he not know how impossible of a query it is? But in the darkness, and pressed so tightly against him, Boudika can now smell something besides the sea: his blood. She owes him an explanation.
“Everyone leaves, Tenebrae.” She admits it quietly, with a voice naked with emotion.“Everyone always leaves.”
It is difficult for her to continue, but she manages slowly, deliberately, to explain. “I was turned—willingly—by a water horse, a kelpie, although I have never called them that. I saw it as my fate, my due—“ she breaks off. Boudika does not know how to explain her motivations, unless she explains everything, unless she revisits the dark corners of her own history.
“I am from an island far away called Oresziah. It is a magic island, where those who land on the shores cannot leave them. My people were trapped there hundreds of years ago, and to escape they turned on the magic that kept them there, the magic of the water horses native to the island. We eradicated them, systematically, and I am… I am the generation that finished it. But I was disguised there as a stallion, with magic, by my father—he had only I as a child. He was a General and his ambitions rested on having a son, with our culture being strictly patriarchal—and anyways, I kept that secret for over half my life. When it was revealed, I was imprisoned.” Boudika paraphrases it. She rushes through the details, the origin, as it remains something she does not want to face. ”I was imprisoned with the prince of the water horses, the very same prince I had captured and sentenced to death. We were kept together for over a year, and—I learned all about them. About their culture, and their history, and their magic, and—how we were the monsters, not them.”
Boudika sighs again. She does not… well, she doesn’t want to share it, the past that explains her actions now. She struggles to articulate it, to voice it without feeling selfish or self-conscious. “They sentenced us to death on an unseaworthy ship in a storm. But when I awoke, it was on Novus. I came to terms with the sins of my past by deciding, eventually, to become the very thing I had attempted to eradicate—his name was Amaroq and, well, I had assumed—girlishly, and foolishly—he and I would be partners. That he would teach me to be what I am.”
But he disappeared. He left her. And she was alone, utterly, save the sea—the sea, which laps at the far end of their cave. The sea, which rages outside and calls her back, always. “He disappeared, though.” Boudika does not share Vercingtorix’s brief appearance in Novus, or how she think Torix killed Amaroq. She does not share the hurt of that wound. Boudika draws away to deliver the last part—the true explanation. She looks Tenebrae in the eye to say:
“I didn’t want to be alone. I will not lie about my feelings for you. You are polarising. You do not fear me. And you sharpen me, my wits, my actions. I wanted to dance with you…and when you came to me in the sea, so far from shore, I thought you were asking for—“ and this embarrasses her. This is a bold assumption she should not make, and so she changes it, she elaborates. “I wanted you to ask to be Changed. That’s how it’s done, you see. You’re pulled below the surface and I strike you but the instinct is, if you are meant to be Changed, that you draw blood as well—you bite back. But you didn’t.”
Boudika is embarrassed—terribly, terribly ashamed—to admit her actions, and come to terms with her mistake. She had never thought herself capable of such an unsolicited act; she had never thought herself capable of behaving as monsters were rumoured to behave. But it hadn’t been like that, in her mind. She had been trying to show him something beautiful, something special and secret, held close to her heart, something that to be understood must be experienced… And perhaps, in doing so, in trying to show him, she had ruined his perception of it forever. Her voice is small and sad again when she says, “I am sorry. I should not have been so bold. I was not processing it then like I am now. I am just—“
Lonely. She thinks of meeting Anandi in the storm, how if she had chosen to be changed by a different water horse perhaps, perhaps she would not feel this way. But it was always meant to be Amaroq and she thinks of the moment he had changed her off the coast of the island, with the ice of his magic curling in the water and her ribbons of blood dancing about it. How the moon had shown and her heart felt full and how she had thought, and decided, she would never feel so alone again.
The silence after bothers her; it drags from her tongue the last, vulnerable admission. In a voice raw with it, with her loneliness and despair, Boudika admits:
“I just wish I wasn’t so alone.” The firelight flickers against them; it transforms them into softer beings, beings of starlight and flame. She longs to press against him again; to close the distance that she has opened. But her admissions leave her vulnerable, and not only does Boudika fear rejection, she expects it. "I never meant to hurt you. I wanted to share with you something extraordinary, but I didn't know how to ask. The storm... the sea... the ability to swim, and understand, and know. It is beautiful, but difficult to convey, difficult to ask. I just wanted to share it with you."
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
`His lips learn the grooves of her nose, the whorls of the white hair across her brow. They are details he has never seen - there is so much of her he has not seen. There is so much about Boudika Tenebrae knows nothing about.
He feels that unfamiliarity as she turns away from him. His mouth still remembers her, in the way it always does: an echo of taste, sweet like sugar, metallic with blood and the ghost of a touch, the soft silk of her lips - even crimson with blood.
Their every meeting has been red with something spilled. The squash of pomegranate seeds if they are mild, yet most often they leave adorned in each other’s blood. Blood that conceals kissed skin and bitten flesh. This night is no different. For once Boudika is clean, her body drying beside the warm glow of the rippling fire.Yet he stands, bloodstained. Tenebrae’s ragged throat (already marked and claimed by her) is throbbing grimly in the flickering yellow light.
The monk watches as she studies her fire. He does not know how she wonders of his magic. Nor does Tenebrae know how she trembled, not just from exertion and exhaustion, but fear too, when the darkness of the cave was total. Boudika wonders if he could extinguish the light of her fire. Would his darkness bleed into thick, inky black? He could, though he does not, turn the cave into a lightless void so deep the darkness is like satin across her skin.
Boudika wonders too if her unease in such deep darkness was anything like his at the bottom of her deep ocean… She would be right.
Tenebrae has asked his questions and she is quiet for so long. The monk misses her touch, even as they stand with their salt-sea bodies pressed together. Her cheek lowers to his flank and his muzzle brushes across the smooth skin at the base of her throat in answer. He almost smiles, realising that he will never know the smooth of his own throat again. Not since her teeth have changed him so irrevocably. All of her has changed him. Boudika has made a sinner out of a monk. He looks over the red of her and knows he can never forgive her. Yet he does not move, he does not repent, he stays a sinner beside her and learns what it is to live unrighteously.
Their silence is so deep that even the storm is just a gurgle at the distant mouth of the cave. Yet Boudika’s thoughts are a shout within the dark, even with her cheek pressed against his side he can see the way thoughts replay before her, graphic and traumatic. Her past is visceral, he tastes her sorrow in the air.
At last his sea-girl speaks and it is not the voice of the warrior queen he first met, it is not the sound of a crocodile dragging a monk down to the bottom of the ocean. No, it is the small, quiet voice of hurt and loneliness.
A droplet of seawater rolls like a tear slowly down one of her spiralling horns. Even the ocean weeps for her tale. That was why it scoffed at him, why it so wholly claimed her as its own. Now she is talking she cannot seem to stop. He welcomes every word. He bathes within her, within every single piece of her she lays out across their cave. She tells him so much as they stand in darkness and light, shadows dancing as they each thought they might when they first met, this night, in the shallows of the sea.
The kelpie sighs and speaks of his Change. He falls still as he listens. Oh, not once did he imagine her intentions. Not once has he ever entertained even the smallest notion of becoming a seahorse like her. “Do you need me to be like you?” The monk asks. He watches her through his starbright eyes, glowing with the light of the fire he swallows. He is not wholly of the earth. His body is bone and tissue and blood all connected and held together by shadows. “I am a Stallion but could become a kelpie.” He breathes as he watches her, his voice low. “But would it make you happy? Would it make a difference?” Amaroq still left her, the Prince of sea-horses too.
“I do not think turning me into a kelpie will help your loneliness, Boudika.” Oh he whispers the words to her, for they do not need to be spoken loudly, not when even their cave stops breathing just to hear this intimate conversation. Tenebrae breathes slowly as he still watches her face and the way his darkness brushes across her cheeks, as if to catch any hot tears that might dare to fall. Within her eyes is a rawness that feels rough as sandpaper over his skin. The monk inhales, she is sea-salt and jasmine. “You loved him.” You still love him The tense does not matter. Tenebrae observes her grief and maybe he means this of one of the men she has mentioned or maybe both. He does not specify, but lets the observation sit. It fills the space between them, named, exposed.
“You have shared something extraordinary with me.” Low is his voice, silken and rich as whiskey. It burns his throat, it pours through the darkness. He feels drunk with his remembering, the way they sank, the way they turned in the water - something like dancing. Suddenly his lips return to where they had been upon her throat. Pressing against the same place her bite sits upon his neck. “You don’t need to change me to get me to stay with you, Boudika.” The Disciple breathes, he vows with scraping teeth across the soft of her throat. “You are in my blood already.” My skin, my bones, my soul he does not add, but it hangs there in the way his breath washed across the column of her throat.
Slowly the warrior withdraws and all the darkness that had grown sharp, like teeth, like tridents runs their points along the walls of the cave before softening to smoke. It breathes with them as the fire warms the air between them. “Your father though, he was a dick.” The monk laughs low, low, rough and whiskey-warm, more a warrior of the barracks than a monk of a monastic order, “I prefer you as a girl.”
@Boudika - So much love <3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
06-04-2020, 05:40 PM - This post was last modified: 12-03-2020, 11:12 AM by Tenebrae
I do not know more than the Sea tells me,
told me long ago, or I overheard Her
telling distant roar upon the sands,
waves of meaning in the cradle of whose
sounding and resounding power I
slept.
It is something telling that Boudika does not fixate on the blood spilled in the same way he does. Perhaps, in her world, it has become an ingrained rite of passage. Perhaps everything that means something requires blood in the water. Sacrifice. Everyone she has ever cared for, at some point, bled for her or she for them. There is a question there, in the aching silence. There is a question. Maybe I am a monster?
If that were the case, why does he continue to touch her? Why is it she cannot drive him from her, time after time after time? There is something comforting in his strong, silent presence. In his touch. If she were only willing to accept it, to trust it, to see it as genuine rather than another complicated test.
He listens. At first Boudika is self-conscious, with her voice echoing in the cavern, haunted and girlish. But he listens. He listens with his whole body, leaned just slightly into her. She feels it in the silence, in the way he nearly holds his breath to hear her words. When he speaks it is to ask a question she had never expected.
Do you need me to be like you?
There is the light of the fire and then the ethereal other light, that makes the planes of his face seem hard. It is a light from within him, she knows, just like there are a thousand shapes wrestling in her stomach for purchase, just like a wolf howls long and lonely in her soul and an osprey screams, and screams, and screams. Boudika looks at him and does not know how to answer, especially when he questions her. Especially when he tells her a truth she already knows: he belongs to something else, something other than the sea. But would it make you happy? Would it make a difference?
She shakes her head, a silent no, because she cannot otherwise answer. Her throat is hot with unshed tears. Boudika sees the truth now, the truth of what he says. Of course it would not make a difference. Or so it should not. But what man would take a crocodile’s teeth and then respond with such compassion? She can think of none.
Even still, a part of her wants to say yes, yes, yes. There is a part another part of her that remembers not Tenebrae, but Amaroq; that hears his words return to her on the shore of Novus where she had looked, and looked, and looked for Orestes.
He had said, I could Make you. I could Make you like me. And then you could search for him below every shore, in the trenches of the deep, in the corals and kelp forests. Everywhere. And I would help you look.
Tenebrae says, you loved him and for a ringing moment Boudika is uncertain. She thinks of Amaroq’s knowing eyes the first time she met him, eyes that had said, you love this Orestes and will got to any length to find him. He had told her, it is not good to be alone. And what was it, then, had she loved him? The truth emerges, raw and vulnerable, fledgling like a bird not ready to fly. “He Made me.” Her lip trembles with the admission. And we never looked. We never ventured into the deep together, to find—to find the pieces of me he promised to help seek.
Because that was a truth, in and of itself. She had felt infatuation with Orestes. She had been Bound to him, in a way of Fates and Souls, but not of lovers. She had been Bound to him, as an ouroboros is bound irrevocably to itself. With Amaroq, it had been different. With Amaroq, she had belonged to him and he to her in a way of things created, in a way of the endangered—
In contrast, Tenebrae is free. As free as wind, as free and untouchable as shadows. He belongs not to her, but to… and Boudika cannot even answer. He belongs to something she cannot understand. You have shared something extraordinary with me.
The sound of his voice undoes her. It is a bedroom purr, belonging somewhere more intimate than a storm-drenched cavern. His lips are against her throat and there is a sound low inside her rumbling, rumbling. They are too warm. They are searing her skin, and in that moment Boudika would burn for them. She feels as if the very touch will undo her, will unravel her. The last time Boudika had confessed so much the man she had confessed it to betrayed her.
You don’t need to change me to get me to stay with you, Boudika. You are in my blood already. The words might mean more precisely because he is free. There is no line of Maker and Made, of Bound and Binder. He is free, without obligation, to confess such a sentiment.
She might have protested, she might have fought more intensely; but the sensation of his teeth against her skin is titillating. Had he not proven he would stay? He would talk? Even in the most dire circumstances, he was willing to try and understand. She closes her eyes briefly and wishes, do not stop, do not stop, do not stop
But still, she remembers—
“But what does that staying mean?” her voice is not so girlish now. There is an almost choked quality above it, as she wrenches herself from the physical sensation of his touch. No, Boudika emerges slightly guarded. “You… there is much we don’t know about one another.” Her confessions hang heavy in the air and yet he has given none. There is no explanation for his shadows, nor the temple-like alcove she had once found him in. ”A disciple,” Boudika adds, quietly, in a voice that is just beginning to lilt up into a question as he says—
Your father though…
The comment is delivered with rough humour and Boudika cannot help it. She is taken aback enough that she laughs; the sound seems sharp in the cave, sharp and echoing, but it is a healthy alternative to their somber voices. She thinks of the simplicity of it. I prefer you as a girl. If someone else had said the same thing, many years ago, she would never have come to Novus—
and she would have never, then, realised many things she had come to realise. She laughs for a long moment before she trails off. “I do, too. I don’t think I would have caught your eye, otherwise.” Boudika tries to rally; and although not outright flirtatious, it emerges tentative, nearly impish, into the dark. She clears her throat after another moment, feeling awkward with her sudden shift in disposition. “I… I think I have some medical supplies, here. Just the basics.” It is hard not to see his throat, torn by her own teeth.
It is Boudika’s turn. She turns her face to examine the wounds, but does not touch them. She looks at a body pocked with scars. Boudika recognises a soldier's body when she sees it, carved of muscle like marble. His sigils illuminate those telltale scars, almost harshly, even as the flickering shadows attempt to obscure them. Boudika stops at his shoulders. Her chin drifts just above the nape of his neck, across a shoulder blade. Then her lips touch the lash marks delicately, as one would brush their mouth across a flower’s soft petal. She exhales so, so softly. Her voice is still in her mind; husky, and deep, and attractive. She is warm where she had been cold, and soft where for so long she had been hard.
“And these?” Boudika’s vulnerabilities come with a price. There is a sinking feeling in her stomach, however, she will not like the answer even if he gives one. Boudika remembers him the first time they had met, and even the second; she remembers how his back had not borne such obvious lash marks and wonders what had inflicted them. It, too, incites a bit of rage in her.
The confession comes almost awkwardly late when she says, “Tenebrae?” she whispers it against his scars like a promise. Yet the thought had been boiling, waiting, to be admitted. “You are in my blood, too.”
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
As his whispered questions fade into the darkness the only sounds that remain are the merry crackle of the fire and their mixed breath. Tenebrae watches as his words not just tumble into her ears, but are absorbed across every inch of her skin. He can nearly hear the way her soul howls. He can nearly feel the splitting scream of the osprey as it swoops alone along the lonely contours of her veins. Boudika’s whole being sings with her feral loneliness. Tenebrae watches her, every piece of this loneliness she unveils for him. It becomes a portrait in his mind, the dark wash of watercolour streaks, wet with the blood and tears of her striving.
She shakes her head, no. The monk expected it. Changing him would never make him more inclined to stay. Yet he feels the desperation in her admission. It tastes something like sorrow and defeat. And then…
He made me.
Those words hang in the air. The meaning behind them, the way she breathes that small sentence with trembling lips. Tenebrae does not know how to hold them or negotiate their meaning. His father was… made. Without his becoming Tenebrae would be not exist. Father and son were and are committed to Caligo for their creation. The Disciple loves his goddess, he does not doubt it, he does not question it for a moment but… Was it love in the same way? Was being made by Caligo any different than being made a kelpie? Boudika existed before her becoming. Tenebrae’s father was… nothing until he was. Were they the same?
“I am not sure what that means, Boudika.” Tenebrae confesses gently. “Does that mean it was something deeper than love or…” And he does not know how to name it and maybe that is it. Is it belonging, or duty, or love, or devotion to Amaroq that laid those words across her tongue. He settles for another question, “If he returned, would you go to him? Would you leave everything?” Me?Us?
At once he regrets the words. His asking is foolishness. Tenebrae hopes she would say yes, because he knows he should not keep returning to her. He should not have come to the sea this night intent on losing himself within her. She is magnetic, he knows it from the way his eyes have not strayed from her, they way they want and want and want.
Say yes, Boudika. Save both your souls.
Or were they only ever fated for one of them to always be damned?
There is a rumbling beneath where his lips press upon the smooth column of her throat. His brothers had warned him of his recklessness. They had tried to beat it out of him as a child and yet it still weaves its way within him, it still fights against the binds that chain him to the order. Maybe he is always set to fight, to battle who he is, what he is.
His teeth are blunt where hers are sharp. His teeth are nothing like Amaroq’s and yet she shivers, yet she pulls away when their bodies become too hot, when the air between them is electric with friction and desire.
There is a low strangled cry that passes her lips and it sounds like despair. He breathes and his breath is smoke in the fire of their touching.
But what does that staying mean? The words are bolder, louder, blunter compared to the timid sound of her voice before. This is a Boudika he knows better.
He blinks and time seems to stretch itself with the gesture. He breathes draconic again and his magic billows, ripping along the groove of her throat. Tenebrae watches the way his shadows caress her and there, a scar below her jaw, small and neat. A lover’s bite. A turning, claiming scar.
What does that staying mean? What was he? A monk. He reaches forward to touch that small scar just as she reaches for the scars along his back. Many of them belong to her, his flesh broken because of his want of her. Her lips press to the uneven skin of his back and a shiver shudders along his back. The Disciple’s back arches remembering the pain, feeling the hypersensitive skin warming at her touch.
Her touch sets him ablaze - how many times had he returned to her whilst his back still wept red with his punishment? The bite of a whip seems to echo, joining with the cry of the osprey in her blood. “I am a monk.” He says and how many times has he offered it up like protection? It offered him no level of defense. He hid in plain sight, it was little more than chocolate before Boudika’s fire. It melted even upon his tongue.
“When the gods had fallen apart, Caligo made the Stallions to keep her darkness total, to be her company, to fight the sun for, with her. When she made peace with her siblings she set her Stallions loose. They each left and bred and upon the birth of their sons they ceased to exist. For years Caligo was silent until she called the Stallions’ sons back to her. We came and she created the Night Order. We do not know how many Stallions she made and how many sons will keep being born - each original Stallion only has one. Mortal women cannot survive the birth of a Stallion’s son. So we have no family except other monks of the Order.”
He sighs softly, ‘When I came to Caligo was a yearling and began my training. At the age of 3 I took my pledge to become a Disciple. I swore to not have any sexual relationship and to ensure no relationship becomes more important that the one I have with Caligo. I am married to my goddess.”
For so long he says nothing but feels the touch of her lips across his spine. He wonders what those scars look like. “Those scars are from where I whipped myself because I saw you and wanted…” He gives a small laugh. It fades starkly in the firelight and silence consumes it. There is nothing, nothing, until:.
“I saw you and wanted to break my vows to Caligo. You make me wish I was not a monk, Boudika.” His voice is raw, the honesty of his words like a stone shattering in his chest. He feels like broken pieces, each one scarring him. They are worse than the whip marks beneath her lips.
He smiles, remembering her impish remark. His lips suddenly reach for her scar, pressing upon the point where she became a kelpie. At once they are an ouroboros, their struggle never ending, their connection eternal.
@Boudika - -slightly speechless- <3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
06-08-2020, 01:01 PM - This post was last modified: 12-03-2020, 11:15 AM by Tenebrae
The only time she’d ever seen her father pray to the Old Gods, it was upon an ancient stone altar in the midst of a storm. Storms were the most dangerous times to pray, and often the most prolific. The water horses, the Khashran, were all the more likely to emerge in a storm; to climb the cliffsides as terrifying beasts, as horses with long lips and serrated, shark-like teeth. Some had tentacles for manes, barnacles growing lacklustre upon their flanks, oysters at the knobs of their knees and shoulders. Halfway to monsters; halfway to the sea. It is one of Boudika’s oldest memories. The torrential rain; the way her aged father had bowed his head and prayed, and prayed. And the Old Gods had answered. Upon the altar materialised enchanted items; bits of bone, nacre, obsidian that could be bound into a necklace, and disguise her as a stallion…
But Boudika's first memory was when her father took her to the sea on an overcast, chilled October day. The day he had sent her into the water to be Taken, and a white stallion had appeared from the frothing waves. He had stood, and stared, and had not Taken her. He had gone back to the sea and now, inexplicably, Boudika asks: why not then?
Why had the sea waited so long to claim her?
To give her a stallion from another part of the world, where arctic ice shown under the aurora borealis, where their narwhal-like horns spun up and out of the water in droves? Boudika tells of her second becoming, not her first, when she shares her story of Amaroq and all that he had meant to her.
I am not sure what that means, Boudika. Strangely, Boudika had been so drawn into her thoughts she had almost forgotten he was there; Tenebrae’s voice nearly startles her. Does that mean it is was something deeper than love or…
Boudika wonders at that word. Love.
Her smile is small, and sad. “Of course I would go to him.”
Belonging is not the same as love, she thinks. Or maybe it is. Maybe it is deeper, in a way, and more necessary. Belonging is dutiful, permanent. Love seems, to Boudika, something like a child’s ruse; finite, prone to the whims of men and women who even as they live do not truly know themselves. She loved her father, she supposes, as a dutiful daughter ought to. And she had loved Vercingtorix, but that was a love won hard through blood, devotion, and… duty, again.
Amaroq had been different. In nature, some creatures mate for life; and although “love” is a sentiment given to those with consciences, and emotions… there is something to be said for a lifelong partnership, for the belonging of two together. Boudika cannot help but answer Tenebrae as such. She explains:
“I do not say that to be cruel, or to suggest I care for you less. But—“
If she does not say it, she is a coward.
Boudika has never been a coward.
When her eyes lock on Tenebrae’s, there is a desperation in hers; a pleading. He wanted explanations and so she gives them readily, rawly. It is who she is. Boudika has never been able to hide that. “—it is… simply because… Tenebrae, you will never…” It is not his flaw, or his fault. Boudika even now fails to express what she means. You will never understand the way the sea both cradles and condemns; the light refracting from beneath the waves at midday, as if you are staring through so many layers of crystal. Have you ever heard the cry of whales, from miles away? Or the way blood—even a drop—erupts in the water with a scent that stretches for miles? Violence stains the ocean in a way it never will the land.
“The sea, Tenebrae—he—and I—we belong to the sea, the storm, the salt.” Her voice is smaller still, nearly inaudible, when she says: “Just as you belong to the night, and the shadows, and the darkness. It is a part of who you are. A part of you I will never be able to touch, or understand, and—well, I would not hold it against you, if you met someone who you could share that with, without changing yourself.”
Admitting it addresses a fear Boudika did not even realise she had. Changing yourself.
She wonders if caring for this stallion will demand that of her, or him—between the two of them, it is clear something is bound to break, to change.
Whatever thoughts she might pursue are interrupted by the press of his lips, the heat of his body. To Boudika, it is not sin. To Boudika, the touch is revelation. The touch is her own kind of becoming. And when his shadows reach out to trace the scars—fine, delicate things—that Amaroq left, Boudika can only smile.
I am a monk. Tenebrae admits, when Boudika touches his scars. She is not surprised by the answer; it has always been there, in the way they pulled at one another like the gravity of separate plants. They were different worlds. When the gods had fallen apart, Caligo made the Stallions to keep her darkness total—
Tenebrae begins to narrate his becoming. Boudika realises he does not need claiming scars to be claimed by something. As surely as Boudika said, he made me, Caligo made Tenebrae.
There is a cruelness in Boudika that belongs to the sea, and the storm, and the salt. There is a cruelness to Boudika that belongs to women; to Eve; Pandora; Persephone; Anat; Lilith; Shamhat; Anath; even Antigone. As Tenebrae explains, she touches him; soft—nearly chaste—touches. But it is their chasteness that betrays them as something else entirely. Boudika marvels at him, as she never has before. I am married to my goddess. And yet he is here, with Boudika. Everything she had assumed about him from the past has come to fruition—he is a warrior, he is devout, he is conscripted to another life. These traits, compiled, make him attractive as the unobtainable is always attractive. Boudika traces the hard plane of his shoulder with her lips; she admires his muscled frame, the way it says, warrior, warrior, warrior.
She, too, had been sworn to Old Gods and a cause. She, too, had been a warrior. Once. A lifetime ago. But warriors would forever have her heart; perhaps because they were damned, and Boudika loved them all the more for it. Those scars are from where I whipped myself because I saw you and wanted…
A younger Boudika would have felt contrite. She would have expressed regret, and grief, and apology; not this Boudika. Why should she apologise, for a man wanting her? No, it twists in her with a certain warmth, a certain passion. You make me wish I was not a monk, Boudika.
For a fraction of a second, she wishes she was not a kelpie. But that regret is there and gone. And then: her heart aches for him, and aches, and aches. The burden he bears is one she can imagine. The burden he bears is not so different from the one that broke her heart, and exiled her from all she had ever known. Boudika had broken her vows to her people when she had confessed to Vercingtorix who she was; Boudika rather than Bondike. She remembers, still, ripping the enchanted necklace from her neck and breaking the emblems upon the paving stones. The way she said, I love you, Torix. I love you—but I cannot lie to you anymore.
And she had been so sure he would accept her. So certain of it. Boudika wears that grief on her face now; but she wears it for him, for Tenebrae, and it is something that makes her want to cry more surely than any other aspect of their night together.
Tenebrae’s smile in the darkness is a sad one; but then he moves suddenly to place his lips upon her scar where Amaroq had given her the only kiss he ever would. Boudika shudders beneath Tenebrae’s touch; something about it, the accepting intimacy, opens her as a flower opens, privately, for no one else to see.
She closes her eyes.
“Perhaps… it is not so great a sin, if only you were to think of me as the sea.” Boudika’s voice is quieter than the crackle of the fire; it is quieter, even, than their breaths. “The moon has forever been in love with the ocean, and vice versa. They dance together every night and the sea misses her every dawn. Would your vows be broken, if rather than a woman I was the salt, the sand, the sea?” She moves subtly to press her lips against whatever part of him they will reach, a flurry of feather-light touches; his neck, his shoulders, his cheek.
What if she were only the storm, the surf, the shallows? The light of Caligo on the paned glass surface of a calm sea?
The way he kisses the scar is all the acceptance she has ever needed; for the first time in longer than she can remember, Boudika does not feel alone. “What if I am only the waves, Tenebrae? And the cry of the osprey, the laughter of the gulls? What if—what if I am hardly a woman at all, but a part of your goddess's world, her own eternal affair?”
Boudika knows in that moment, she would not go with Amaroq if he returned.
She would stay and hope this ending—the one she and Tenebrae write, the one they speak of in the darkness of their alcove—can be one that does not have to end in tragedy.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae || ooc: here you go Obsi enjoy another NOVEL
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Of course I would go to him.
Those words surprise him with the way they hurt. They are so soft coming from her lips, so full of inevitability. But that inevitability strikes him as swords do. They bite into his heart with the ferocity of the whip he used across his back.
It takes him a moment to name it. To understand the despair, the feeling of something wicked that twists inside of him and claws, terrible and unwelcome, within him: jealousy. It strikes so suddenly. He never expected. He breathes slow, his breath rattling from his lips.
Her next words are a balm upon the sting of his jealousy, ‘ But that decaying emotion is already pressed deep. He searches himself to be rid of it, he knows of the destruction it can bring. This is one of the reasons monks are not to foster romances. He was to cut all ties with her and now, now his jealousy flays him open within the cave. Tenebrae is already condemned.
His girl of the sea does not stop. She paints upon him all the ways that they are different and he feels it. The monk knows it. The salt is dried upon his skin and it lungs still ache with their earlier descent into the depths of the blue sea. They are each bound irrevocably, but to different things. The darkness breathes across the ocean as night falls whole after the storm. The shadows seep in through the mouth of the cave and press cool midnight upon their bodies.
Boudika’s horns are the fierce waves of the sea, his eyes trail them for even in darkness he can see her. Whole and clear. Yet he has never seen her more beautiful than when the sea holds her and splays her hair out in the tide. She is right and maybe this is the crux of it all, they are not made for each other. They do not belong together.
I would not hold it against you, if you met someone who you could share that with, without changing yourself, She breathes as soft as satin upon his skin.
“But would it hurt you if I did?” Tenebrae asks, suddenly so boyish, so young; untried and unsure. He is seasoned in so many ways. War has made him a man but it is so different to love. Though the passion might be the same... maybe. Would if hurt you like this jealousy hurts me?. He does not say though he is learning, slowly, (too terribly slowly) of the costs of love and want and desire.
But then, ah then they are made up only of the shadows of the midnight sea. They come undone and remade with their kisses, seasoned with the salt of their sea-damp skin. Her words fill the cave with something like hope, with a way they might be together. The hope feels like light, yet it is darkened by the sprawling, corrupting shadows of his jealousy.
He swallows the feelings down, he turns from them as any good monk should. He fights as if he fights not for the shadows but the light. Tenebrae presses himself into his girl of sea salt and wild, dangerous tides. “I do not know.” He confesses when she speaks of the moon and the sea, darkness and the ocean irrevocably tied. Her words feel sinful in his ears, sacreligious. She entertains in his mind a terrible hope, a dangerous idea. Did Caligo truly mind if her monks were celibate or was it just rules needed to control the sin of men? “But you make me want to see.”
And for every kiss she places feather-light upon his skin, he presses one upon hers. If Boudika was part of Caligo’s own eternal affair, it makes his next words brimful with assurance. “Then maybe this is why we keep meeting. Is it chance or a god’s decree, Boudika?”
He tastes the fear of tragedy upon her skin. He hears it roaring in his own ears. Yet he does not move, for this night she makes binding himself to her seem not so different to when he vowed himself to Caligo. It is a monstrous thought, it is one that slips lips poisonous, delightful silk through his veins.
Tenebrae does not leave her until dawn, until the sun banishes the shadows from the sea and the cave is filled only with the smoke of the dead fire. When he does leave, it is filled up with dread and hope, contained in a body that has known the sea more deeply, more wholly than it ever had before.
But would it hurt you if I did? The question, inexplicably, surprises her. Boudika cannot blame him for asking; it is what she might have asked, if it were him. But the undercurrent of their conversation has been, the entire evening, a sense of belonging. Does he not understand how he has already hurt her, by being unobtainable? Does he not see, even this conversation has leadened her with a strange weight? Boudika knows that she has hurt him with her truth, and evoked his jealousy. She hears it in his slow breath.
But regardless, Tenebrae's question tires her in a way nothing else has this night. Not even her long, frightening swim to the cave. The storm continues to lash outside the walls; the sea continues to well; and in the deep she knows there are creatures that went after their trail of blood, only to find them land-bound. Yes. The question tires Boudika, because it makes her come to the realisation that she might not feel pain like others do. “Yes.” Her admission is simple; perhaps it is even understated. But Boudika will not say more than that.
If Tenebrae left—yes, it would hurt.
But Boudika is accustomed to the people she cares for leaving. It seems an expectation for her, at this point; the ephemerality of sentiments, loyalty, devotion. They are only words, after all. What gives meaning to them? There is a small, tight, sad smile on her face. It would hurt her, at first; but it would be a flesh wound. It would be another emotional scar to add to the rest and, the more she accumulates, the more certain Boudika is she can survive anything.
So she does not reveal more, except for kisses and brushes of skin against skin.
I do not know, he says. But you make me want to see.
And it is in this admission, this uncertainty, that Boudika knows he will be lost to her.
For whatever reason, Boudika does not draw away; no; she draws as much comfort and warmth from this moment, this meeting, as she can. In it's transience, it has become perfect as few things are. Their truths are laid bare. No one has made promises, or demanded change. They have only revealed theirselves, naked and bare, to be left upon the cavern floor. They are two lonely souls, entwined in darkness. They are two lonely souls and, perhaps, that is all.
Is it chance or a god’s decree, Boudika?
The question is one she has been too afraid to ask herself; but from his mouth, in his voice, it manifests so purely it is almost physical. She closes her eyes and rests her cheek against the flat of his neck. She keeps it there, a steady pressure and warmth. Boudika does not even know if she believes in gods as he does; and in the questioning of it, she realises that she doesn’t and never will. Gods, to Boudika, are old and untranslatable. Caligo, despite her blessing of magic (or her curse) remains unreachable. No, Boudika believes in gods as she believes in the amorphous island and the sea: they are powerful, and primordial, and utterly indifferent.
“Tenebrae,” she says at last. “I think it is whatever we make of it.” Boudika has lived by codes, and nearly died by them; and in her world of magic and men and gods and monsters, it has always seemed as if everything is wrought not by fate but by choice, by decision.
What she is too afraid to say: it is whatever you choose for it to be, Tenebrae. Boudika will not force that belief upon him. Not tonight. Not when, as they stand, she has already begun to sway. The fatigue of the day has caught up to her; and with the storm raging outside, and the fire dying, the only thing left to do is lay down and sleep.
When he leaves the next morning, Boudika is awake. But she does not rise or open her eyes; she only listens to the sound his hooves make as they transition from stone-to-sand, and the steady breath he makes. When he leaves, Boudika does not say anything at all.
In some ways, it seems like he made his choice. But she is not alone as she had once been. No, Boudika walks from the cave and when the sunlight hits her, she becomes a bird of prey and kisses, instead, the sky. The sea would ask too much of her today.
It always does.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae || eee closer <3 what a lovely thread!
