let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Dusk.
He cannot help but think of her in this liminal hour now. He thinks the twilight might be forever changed for him. All because of Elena. The dimming of the sky was a time he relished. He always looked beyond the ebbing light and toward the blooming dark. It bled like ink, sinking its fingers into everything. Darkness consumed the light it swallowed it, just as Tenebrae was made to do. The monk swallowed down darkness like water, he smothered it. Elena made him need it. He swallowed light like water no longer because it was part of his existence, but because he needed it, like his body needed water. Elena made him need her. She had come to be even more than that. Oxygen. But Tenebrae, ever the pious man was determined to choke. Anything to remain loyal to his goddess.
Yet here he is - a choking man - walking through the twilight and looking not for where the darkness consumes but for where the light still gleams, golden. He wanders through the sun’s final moments, feels the warmth of butter-yellow light upon his body. The trees sigh, their boughs creak. Tenebrae feels that noise within his bones. He carries a weight too heavy for his bones to bear. His soul is crushed. It has not felt whole since Elena, since Boudika. There are pieces of him missing.
He turns from the light and feels the way his wounds twinge. They feel hot and wet, as if their grief is still too acute to heal. Not yet his whip wounds weep. Not yet they sob with his tattered soul.
Yet… How can his soul and his heart feel at once so utterly broken, so utterly mutilated and yet so utterly complete? It seems to drift upon wings, carried upon an elated wind, until he remembers what he has done. His religion steals the wind, his lack of faithfulness sends him falling. He has been so terribly, terribly unfaithful to his god, to Elena, to Boudika, to himself. His whip wounds weep, they are multiple in number - he could double them, triple them, but it would never be enough.
The woodland thins. Trees fall back into a small clearing. Nestled into the woodland the crumbling stone skeleton of the old Night Order’s keep juts out like old weathered joints. He has barely taken in the holy ruins before he hears the sound of another stepping up beside him. He does not look to see her. He knows it is Elena. His heart both falls and rises, it makes his stomach clench and his whip wounds ache. This place is littered with memories of the Night Order but the monk’s mind is filled with memories of the night beside the lake.
He turns to Elena, drinks in the gold of her - like the sun, like salvation. But salvation is shadows, or at least it should be. Tenebrae reaches for her, as any ailing man would, and presses his brow upon hers. He breathes in the scent of her and remembers, everything, for the last time.
“Elena.” He cannot help the way her name sounds like a prayer, like hope. He wants to fall into her and never resurface. But he cannot. “I am glad you are here,” it feels like a lie and a truth both at once. He dreads her presence and yet he turns to her, less a man of shadows than a plant seeking her as its sun.
lena has known enough grief in her life, that it is no longer two dimensional. It had taken on an actual form, it changes: shape, pattern, color, size. It swallows her whole, plunges her into darkness, it sets her on top of the sun, drowning in light. Grief has sat on her shoulder, it has lodges itself in her throat. It has arched overhead like rainbow. But it is always there. Like the sun, like the moon, like the ground, like the sky. Like trees overhead, and flowers. It has built itself into her world.
She dreamt of him, often. Sometimes, it was so real; she could imagine the heady scent of him wrapping around her. How many nights had she thought of this exact smell? How many times had she gone to sleep with his phantom touch, the warmth of his body pressed up against hers? It had been so pleasant; so unspeakably perfect. But each morning she woke up and he wasn't there. It hurt all the more for it.
Maybe all he wanted was a night.
“Remember me,” she had told him.
Maybe if she had just given her name and walked away, everything would have been different. Or maybe this is how it was always meant to be.
She’s in the mountains. She is here before she realizes it. She has not been here since the lake, since the night. She hasn't been by these mountains though since another night, with a boy of stars, a boy she doesn't deserve. Elena blinks blue eyes, tries to forget, doesn’t, and hangs the guilt on her shoulder like a shawl. The golden girl (she is so much like sunshine) wanders at dusk. Dusk of all times, when she should be with her kingdom, thinking of nothing but Terrastella, her home. She should be in her cottage, watching the sea tumble. She should be finding Anandi or Lyr and asking them about their days. She just shouldn't be here, not now. And maybe not with him. But, it is too late for that.
He appears to her like a vision—too slow, syrupy and underwater, and then all at once. He is there, and her tongue is swollen in her mouth. He is there, and the air has been sucked from her lungs. He is there and the world tilts beneath her until she is falling.
Falling, falling, falling —
She doesn’t move.
She doesn’t breathe.
There is no warning that today will be any different than those that have come before. No warning of the pain she will feel when her heart is torn free from the safety of her small, aching chest. It is better this way, though, to be able to greet him with a soft smile and love in her blue eyes. “Tenebrae,” she greets him. She steps forward without hesitation to press her head into his strong shoulder. “It’s good to see you.” She breathed in his scent, felt the rush of his pulse.
Because there is no warning, no way to know.
There is so much she does not know, though.
She blinks softly and pulls back so she can look at him, really look at him.
Her heart beats sideways, as if trying to slip through the narrow space between her ribs. An echo of meetings past, enough to cause her lips to curve into a smile
At his words, her heart leapt into her throat, and she closes her eyes against the shocking power just simple words have, and a need that clawed at her. He had wanted her. He had shown that at the lake, at the god forsaken lake. He had wanted her. Like he had wanted others, she reminds herself. Not like she wanted him; not the way that she was coming to need him. She opened her eyes to study his face and lied to herself. It would be enough, she thinks, to have just been wanted for that night, for just that reason. He didn't have to share his heart.
(Lies. All lies. She hungered for that part of him, that part that felt so impossibly out of reach.)
I am yours, she wants to tell him, so desperately wants to tell. Just be mine too.
His eyes find hers when they settle against his face, drowning in the soft angles and faint hollows that are as beautiful and familiar to her as the constellations strewn across a night sky. All the things she wants to say sit like a bruise on her tongue. She wants to say me too
There is no warning that today should be any different than other days before.
Elena wont let it.
“Come on, race you to the edge of these ruins,” she says and takes off before throwing a word of caution over her golden shoulder. “Watch you step, Tenebrae.” She calls, laughs.
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
It is something like a dream when he runs his lips along the arch of her neck. He follows the dips and groove of her throat. The monk memorises it (as if he has not already). He finds the scent of sunset deep beneath the buttermilk silk of her hair. His eyes close, shutting off sight, just for moment, so he can drown, deep, deep within the sound of her, the smell of her. one last time, he tells himself.
How will she take what he has to say? He feels the pulse of her heart thrum against his lips. It is slower than the night at the lake. Tenebrae knows how her heart can beat as fast a hummingbird’s wings. It is a lullaby that haunts him. Will there be anything of her left to him after this? Will he be able to reach out and hold her as he does now? Clinging to her as if he wishes to make her the god he threatens to leave her for. Maybe he does. The thought terrifies him.
His darkness billows. It scatters at its master’s frantic, dangerous thoughts. The shadows press up against Elena’s slim body. They push and they pull. They remember her light as his lips remember her touch, her kisses. They push her away and she goes, leaving only his name to brush across his shoulder where her cheek had just been. His fae-girl retreats as his shadows asked her to. But she is smiling. Elena has no idea.
Tenebrae can nearly taste the drunk love upon her lips, that puts that warm haze into her sea-blue eyes. That taste is upon his lips too. She makes him drunk upon the elixir of her body and heart and soul. His eyes close, etching her smile (absent of pain, high upon them, their love, their everything) into the darkness of himself.
She feels like her heart is slipping through her ribs, beating sideways, escaping its fine, ivory cage. If it did slip free, he would catch it, he knows he would. But what then? Would he hold it like a man holding his first child, terrified to drop it, hurt it, wanting to give it back and yet never wanting to ever let go. Tenebrae does not know all the things Elena gives him. He does not know more hides within her body, that it is not just his heart that tries to beat in time with hers. There is another, smaller, fluttering like a firefly, glowing brightly in the shadow of her womb.
The monk knows nothing.
Except for the agony when she peels herself from him and runs, away. He is not ready to let her go. Not yet. He chases her, and he is not sure what his mouth does. Maybe it wears a ghost of a smile, maybe it twists in fear and the agony of his breaking heart. His back aches, his wounds reopening, crying out in red, for her, for him.
Don’t break anything. His sun-girl laughs as she runs, slim and elven through the twilight wood. The ruins do not trip her, though the stones hide, covered in moss, tripping hazards. Does Elena not know how they were both already breaking each other? They started the moment they kindled their love, breaking their hearts and souls like twigs and branches to set their love alight, like a torch.
He races her, because that is what Elena asked of him and he knows he can deny her nothing - except himself, in a moment, in the dreadful passing of words across his tongue. Not yet, not yet his heart selfishly requests with its every beat.
They are running, their legs in time, their breaths tangling. He spots an overgrown entrance and the way the ruins breath its ancient breath through that mouth. “Elena,” He reaches for her, touches her, pulls her close, out of her run that pushes air breathless from her lungs. “Come, I want to show you something.” And he leads her to the broken door where it leans askew, half hidden by ambling ivy and frosted flowers. The Disciple pushes the old door away and it falls heavy and damp upon the ground. He leads his girl down the spiral stairs, down and down and down, following the open tower deep into the earth.
They come out into an old chapel of marble and obsidian. Silver runs through the walls branching away like arteries from its great moon that hangs like a heart upon the wall opposite Caligo’s high altar. ‘Darkness Eternal’ is carved in an old language into the obsidian stone below. Statues of the Stallions who Swallowed the Sun, loom out from the shadows, as if they still live. They watch the couple, the girl as gold as the sun. They seem hungry, full of ire. Tenebrae thinks, if he brings her here, she might understand why he is about to do what he is.
Perhaps she had known that she walked straight into a trap, into a cage that would shut swiftly behind her. Maybe she had welcomed the bars, the way they made long, straight shadows on her golden face. There could be a part of her the rattled the cage door and watched it swing open, standing there, without moving, the song bird so preferring her cage where she can be admired for her singing, than out in the skies where no one may ever hear her.
She dreams of sunshine.
She dreams of oceans.
They are trapped, running in circles, within this moment that is at once impossible in its strength as it is in its fragility. She smiles back at him, a dimple in return that presses into her cheeks as that blue eyed gaze closes underneath the feel of his lips against her skin. She closes her eyes and focuses on her breathes, inhaling him in deeply and exhaling slowly. She feels vulnerable every moment between he is not pressed against her. Her breathing skitters, uneven and suddenly hard to hold onto, like catching air between impossible fingers.
It is a good thing that Elena cannot read minds because his thoughts would break her. She is already dangerously close to the edge, held together with nothing but strength of will and the barest of threads—the barest hold on sanity. She can feel him, feel something waiting in his thoughts, but she tries to ignore it, to think of anything but. He clings close to her and Elena can almost let this moment become perfect. It has to be perfect. She reaches over to leave a kid in the soft hollow behind the corner of his mouth. This is not a kiss of hunger nor desire, not like the lake, not like that night of wishes. It is just a kiss, simple and true.
And in some ways, that makes what is about to happen so—so much worse.
His darkness, something she was once feared, is now something that brings her only comfort. She had seen his shadows, had seen his face within them and she had kissed them away. Elena knows his shadows are not the only thing that rest against his skin, there feverish kisses she planted there, there is ash from bonfires, and there is glistening lake water from dancing in water that would have been better used for a baptism. But maybe the golden girl would think differently if she knew how the shadows leeched the sunlight off her body until she may lose all her light.
But even when she will grow dull, that little firefly inside her grows and sings and dances. It glows, and will keep glowing until it gives Elena back her light and back her fire.
No matter how Tenebrae’s shadows destroy it, suffocate it, try to erase that light, put out that fire. Not when these shadows had a hand in making that little piece of light, it cannot destroy itself.
She runs, oh she runs. She runs and the autumn air goes right through her, like silk, like ocean water that had rushed into her lungs. Elena hardly realizes that she has stopped running, even when her legs slow and her lungs are enflamed. It is only when she starts laughing that she notices the stillness around her. The monk’s emotions creep towards her like wicked shadows, arching and reaching, but she thinks if she can keep laughing maybe they will never find her.
And then he says it.
It’s so simple, her name.
Three syllables is all it is.
But it’s enough to knock the wind out of her when it forms in his mouth.
Because no one in her life has come as close as him, has known her body like him, his taken and given as much as he has. Something inside her, instinct, spits and hisses in the darkness of doubt in her heart. But in the corners of her mouth, it quivers into a smile.
One golden leg decorated with white lifted as if to follow him, to close the space, but she slowly pulled it back to the ground, listening to him, ears tipped forward. She stilled, not following him yet.Something inside her wilts in uncertainty, something pewter and fragile. Elena then steps headfirst into her fate, following the shadow stallion through the door.
“What is this?” she questioned, her voice a touch lower, an unusual husk seeping into its fog, darkening it in her mouth. It twisted around her innocence, the curiosity that peered out form her blue eyes, the desire to know, to understand him. And whether she means this place or each other, Elena refuses to elaborate, let her, let them, pretend a while longer. She breathes, stopping right behind him, her head dipping towards his flesh, but pausing, hovering, desperate for just one more touch. But here, it feels wrong some how. (Elena will think about this almost touch later in her life, and she will wonder what would have happened if it wasn't an almost touch, what would have happened.)
“Tenebrae.” A single shiver raced up her spine as she opened her wide winter eyes, caught his gaze. His emotions flitter onto her subconscious not with the softness of rose petals, but like the prickling of its thorns. “Why do I feel like you are frightened of me?” She says, even though she is the one who feels like she is terrified. Her eyes look to the carvings, to the statues. It was such a declaration of faith, such a declaration of all that he stands for. Elena no longer feels the chill of shadows, but there is a fire burning underneath her skin.
No, not fire—a sun.
“You're an impossible man,” she swore at him, in a whisper, as if her voice could send this cave crumbling, still pushing a subtle sharpness in her voice in a pathetic attempt not to feel anything too deeply.
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Tenebrae does not know how his shadows consume her, swallowing down every piece of light within her. Except the firefly light it cannot reach. That light nestles deep, protected and entombed - for now.
He leads her down into darkness, where the Order’s magic seeps thicker and deeper than anywhere else in Novus. It is ancient magic here. He knows it is sacrilegious to bring Elena here, but he does. The darkness embraces her, it smoothes over the delicate contours of her face. It tries to ease the lines of sorrow that grow as she watches him, as her magic reaches out to Tenebrae and feels -
It feels pain and agony and sorrow. He does not think, he does not think until she says, soft like a whisper, Why do I feel like you are frightened of me? The Disciple closes his eyes from where he gazes upon the mural of the Stallions. They ask him why Elena is here. He has done so much wrong. Guilt is a lance that strikes him through. He turns to his girl of sunlight. She watches him and she burns. He has never seen her so ignited as she is now. Her fire is a quiet storm of solar energy. She makes him hunger for her. He steps toward her, dark and menacing, his shadows thirsting, desperate to feast upon the fire of her skin.
She is not the only one who will be haunted by her near touch. Still Tenebrae feels the kiss she pressed beneath his mouth. It will be there for an eternity, he will remember it for it is likely the last kiss she will ever give him. Such is the nature of what he is about to tell her. He moves to stand before a depiction of one of Caligo’s Stallions who Swallowed the Sun. Yet he turns back for Elena, he reaches for her, to pull her closer, to have her stand beside him, in the shadow of the Stallion. “This one is my father.” Tenebrae breathes as his gaze trickles up the painting’s rearing body. The Stallion’s maw is parted, ready to swallow a ray of light that blooms down, down, down. “He ceased to exist when I was born. My mother died upon giving birth to me.” He knows that Elena has heard all this before, yet he breathes it again, feeling the way the dust and darkness swirl with his breath. “I fear you,” he says to Elena, even as he reaches for her and yet does not touch. His words touch her instead. His whispers caress the shell of her hear, her curve of her jaw. The monk’s eyes are closed, his brows creased with pain, his body feeling the presence of hers, the heat of her. “I fear you because you make me want to leave the Order.”
His words are shadows, a balm to the heat of her skin, where she burns, scolding his soul as his eyes linger over her body. He knows her body, he has laid claim to it. He longs to lay claim to it now, again, again, again. It is not his to have. “My parents died because my father passed the magic he was given by Caligo onto me. My mother died because women cannot survive the birth of a Night Order Stallion…” He takes a breath and cannot help the way he leans into Elena. Closer, closer until the heat of their two bodies feels like touching, like holding. “If I leave the Night Order what will their deaths mean?”
In the silence after his words, he does not move. He remains close to her, until the scant distance between their bodies feels at once like touching and yet like a chasm is yawning open between them. He does not see the way the black paint of his father’s body falls away from the mural like smoke from a fire. Its tendrils of black seep into the air his son and Elena breathe. Tenebrae is too consumed by Elena and sorrow to notice how the Stallion disappears like magic. “Sacrifices have been made because I am a monk… I have to make them mean something. Besides, if they find out about us, they will excommunicate me and in so doing take my sight from me.” Tenebrae’s low voice trails off, its heat amber, like whiskey. The darkness seeping from his father’s disappearing figure blends with his own shadows. He inhales it, feels the way it burns within his body, sharp like wicked grief. It sears through him. “I cannot bear to live a life, an eternity, without seeing you.”
You’re an impossible man. He flinches from where she cuts him like a blade. Elena turns sharp, her magic blooming. The glow of his half moon sigils cast light across her skin. She blazes and gods, he steps closer, a Stallion hungry, needing. The darkness of eternity seeps from the painting, it courses through his veins, filled with ancient, eternal magic. It sets his body alight, it burns him, remakes him. Does Elena inhale it too? Does she feel the way eternity sears itself into her body, twining into the fibers that bind her together?
“I am.” The Disciple whispers and the words press like tears upon her gilded skin. “I am an impossible man and ours is an impossible love.”
he world outside is washed in twilight and mountain air. She cant help but feel he has the advantage here. Her sun is gone, her blue skies a distant memory until morning. She looks at the mural of the stallions. They ask her why she is here. Why she is here with a monk, and Elena has no answer for them. She just asks that same monk why he is afraid of her. The golden girl feels his fear, but what she feels more is his guilt. He steps close to her, her long, blonde hair rests down by the soft curve of her jaw. She looks impossible bright here, too bright, too bright for what darkness this place will bring her.
She is foolish. She grows more foolish the longer she stays.
His parents, her parents, they died for their children, the ultimate sacrifice, a sacrifice that makes them more godlike than those that watch the world sink into turmoil. “I’ve never felt less like an orphan than when I am with you.” She says, she confesses, and this truth will undo her. “Tenebrae,” she says moving forwards, but catching herself like an invisible net. She wants to melt her body into gold and wrap around him.
She does not move, does not breathe, there sits her heart made of glass in the middle, and just a single glance, one exhale, it could shatter it all. Elena, one voice manages to whisper to her. It whispers as her body sears with heat and magic. It burns against the heart upon her brow, so lovingly placed there by her parent’s love for one another. Your child, it says. And his, it weeps. A vision stretches over her mind, a little girl with a heart upon her brow and a crescent moon snuggling against her shoulder. Blue eyes and shadows dancing at her feet. A warmth sears in her belly as the shadows sink into her. And in that moment, she knows, oh she knows. All mother’s do. She breathes in the immortality, and exhales the secret of their child growing inside her. Then:
I cannot bear to live a life, an eternity, without seeing you.
It kicks the air out of her chest.
Opens up a gaping chasm in the pit of her gut.
She has never fallen from quite this high.
The impact is sudden, abrupt.
Between the secret granted her and Tenebrae’s words, Elena can no longer stay whole. She is shattered and falling apart and his words do nothing to dull the roar that is growing in her ears. They are just lies, she tells herself. It’s a kindness. It doesn’t matter because what he has done, what he doing is already rooted and blossoming like thorn rather than flowers in her chest. She feels the prick of each and every one on her golden skin and is surprised how each fresh wound hurts so completely on its own. One would think that she would be used to it by now. One would think that this would be a familiar pain, something that she could map with her eyes closed, drawing a finger along the familiar ridges of her own heartache.
But it is new, this time.
It is fresh and she has no defense against it.
The chasm between them widens and still, even now, she wants to race across it. She wants to hurl herself over it with all she can, but she can’t, they are worlds apart already. “Don’t lie to me,” her voice is quiet and she aches with it. “It makes it so much worse. Please don’t lie.” She breathes, it was so difficult. “What was her name? You never told me.” She accuses, like it matters, like it would hurt any less. “Would you leave the order for…” She stops, if she does not ask, he cannot answer.
She wants to ask him so many more questions. Why did there have to be another? Why could she be someone’s light without herself burning out for them? Why couldn't she hang onto love? Why did they tell her how much they loved her and then leave all the same? But she knows the answer lies within her own inadequacies and she’s not quite ready to face that truth just yet.
So instead she lifts her blue eyes for one of the last times to trace the handsome angles of his face, studying them, reminding herself of a time that they looked at her with love, with hunger, with fire, her fire, and not with pain and guilt. She reminds herself that she had once been loved, even if maybe it was false, she thinks now. (It will be enough, she thinks, to remember.) A sob threatens to climb her throat, to spill onto her tongue, to press its needy hands to his chest. It is something that only grows worse the longer that she stays with him, something that only grows within her with each passing second, the space between them so tiny and yet so infinite. She can feel entire galaxies pressing between them, new lives, timelines that had no business drawing air pushed up between the two of them as if they belonged.
She should tell him. She should tell him. About her baby, his baby, their baby. Their child. One created from shadows and sunlight, from a dance under moonlight and lake water baptisms. Would their child not be worth leaving the order for? Would it not be worth it to lose your sight? Elena had lost her sight once and she knows already she would pluck the eyes from her skull if it meant she could make her baby see the beauty of the day. But her tongue halts in his mouth when he speaks.
And ours is an impossible love.
And just like that, her world implodes. Her veins splinter, they fracture, pressing metal shards into her flesh until she is nearly crying out with pain. Her lips part on a jagged breath as he continues to toss daggers at her, each one finding purchase in her breast, the wounds opening up beneath his assault. He has been cruel to her before, she should have known he was capable of it, carrying knives in his back pocket. And she can feel her heart stretch thin, so thin, until the skin rips and tears and crumbles to dust within the bone cage of her aching chest.
She is dissolving before him, but she still remains quiet. She is shattering
She is falling, falling, falling.
She is shaking him at the shoulders, screaming at him to love her, to love their child, and he cannot. She cannot fall upon this spear again and again. She is made to love and, in turn, be loved. Perhaps not in the way that is expected (she loves like the wind loves the swirling dunes of the deserts; she is to be loved as the sun loves the ever waning moon), but she is to be loved. She expects it—was raised to expect it.
And he—well, he could not.
She studies him, memorizes him, loves him in spite of it all.
“I will think of you,” she confesses, one more time. “I do not expect you to think of me.” Elena says and looks at him, and smiles, thinks she smiles, even if it is only a muted curve pressed into her cheek. He is still touching her, and she knows that if she stays, if they both stay, they could hold onto this moment forever, live through their immortality, turn to stone statues. Two lovers, that is what they would call them. She cannot yet sacrifice her life for her child, so she sacrifices her heart. Rips it from her chest and covers it in stone, pretending that this can keep him from breaking it. But walls of stone have never stopped shadows before. And she says something, something she meant to say that day in the hospital, but had been far too weak. But everyone forgets how strong Elena grows, like a sun waiting for the morning. “Don’t come back to me, Tenebrae.”
Maybe, at the end of it all, shadows were never meant to be brought into the light.
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She thinks he steals the sun from her, but Tenebrae has never seen her move radiant. It was the glow of her skin, so much like the brilliance of the sun, that first drew him to her. Initially with the hunger to destroy and then, then with a want that surged away from him like a runaway train. But all radical, out of control things end in disaster. He hears it now, the squealing brakes of regret, the grinding, crushing metal of breaking hearts, the cries of pain. He can never go back from this moment. It will haunt him.
He looks to her, for he cannot look away. Elena is beautiful, delicate, breaking. He did not love her as he should. He does not deserve the way she looks at him, the way she wants him and loves him. Tenebrae should not want her as he does, he should not love her as he does. The monk longs to go to her, hold her, pledge his life to her. But he cannot. It is not enough, he is not enough. You deserve more than me, Elena, his star-white eyes say. So much more. Boudika was right when she said he did not deserve to look upon her, but she was wrong too. Tenebrae does not deserve to look upon either her or Elena.
I have never felt less like an orphan than when I am with you. His eyes close, anguished. The disappearing stallion upon the mural, the eternity that it slips into Tenebrae’s lungs, passes into his blood and sears his soul into eternal life. The monk feels it as much as he feels Elena beside him. She is shattering like glass and her shards strike him. He bleeds, cut open, exposed.
“I am not lying.” He breathes when she accuses him so. His word means nothing, he has broken vows in the name of love. But when he speaks now, it is with a truth that comes from his exposed core. “I cannot bear it. But I must.” Her eyes are wide and blue, blue, blue. Tenebrae wants to sink into them. He wants to ask her how his heart can love two women. When, Elena, did he become such a foolish man? Was he always this way?
They are skin to skin and in the darkness that swells around them, he feels whole. Immortality settles itself within his body and he feels one, whole. He does not feel the way she trembles as her magic whispers the truth of them, their love into her bones. It paints a child into her mind, a girl that grows in her dam’s newly immortal body, beside her newly immortal sire. They stand in the darkness, a triad: darkness and light and a child destined to walk between the two.
“Her name is Boudika.” Tenebrae lets the name hang in the silence. They are still touching and slowly he peels himself from her body, unable to touch her, not when Boudika’s name is fresh and bright within the air. Not when he has betrayed them both. “I will think of you, always. Never doubt it.” He says and his voice cracks and his words shutter away. He astounds himself, he shames himself as he flounders, cast between one girl and the other. He is reckless and sinful. The monk is terrible and he is drowning in his own selfish idiocy.
Tenebrae turns from Elena, as he will turn from Boudika too and return to looking only upon his goddess. Don’t come back to me, Tenebrae.” The fae-girl says to his back. “I won’t.” He says, every word a truth because he does not know the ties that bind them, the making of a daughter who will draw her parents to her, in life, in death. He does not know how his daughter makes his every word a lie.
He leaves. Leaving Elena in the darkness but he knows she is more than a match for the shadows that breathe there. He thinks her magic is not empathy but light and love. She sets the worlds ablaze and Tenebrae would lie down and be turned to ash by her splendour.
hey once talked about the power of names, but Elena wonders if they lose that over time. If her name to him, one that once carried weight, will become covered in dust. She wants to cry to him, remember me, but the words die on her lips, broken and brittle and turned to the very dust she so fears her name becoming.
His eyes find hers and it takes all of her willpower not to look away, to keep them from flitting out of reach, jumping through the night like flickering blue sparks. Her brow furrows and her jaw tightens when she looks at him, and though it isn’t hatred, never hatred, that changes her face, it is something dark, something devastating.
She pauses for a heartbeat.
Moments with him feel like eternity. They feel like no time at all.
She could be suspended here, hung between the spaces between his every breath or it could pass in a blur, moving so quickly that she doesn’t even have a chance to catch her breath. It is part of that strange wonder of him, she thinks. Part of that strange otherness that somehow has her on its tenterhooks.
He doesn’t say anything and she thinks for a second that he won’t. That he will not tell her.
But before she can move away (although she does take a step, reluctant and pained), his voice catches her and she stops. Her vision goes slightly blurry and then focuses as she looks at the ground, nothing but a frown pinching her mouth as she tries to catch her breath and remember that she can survive this. As her heart flung itself against her chest like a trapped bird
She can’t imaging touching anyone else. She can’t imagine letting anyone else touch her. That one night has ruined her, and she isn’t sure that she will ever recover. She isn’t sure that she will ever be the same.
But these things go unspoken and live in the bunched muscles and tightness of her body.
They settle in there and she just swallows hard before shaking her head.
Maybe the problem is that she doesn’t understand him.
And how could she?
“Boudika,” she spits with the familiarity of it, feeling the way that the cruelty wraps itself around her throat, letting it linger on her tongue. This stings her more than it would him—the sound of her name aloud, voiced into the air, it echoes around the underground temple.
She swallows it down easily with the rest of her pain.
“If you leave me, Tenebrae, I will stop loving you the moment you do,” she lies and wishes it wasn’t so obvious, wishes that the tears on her cheeks would go away and she could be cold—as cold as him. “I will stop here and now.” She says with venom on her tongue. Her ears flip back into a flaxen mane and she takes a step toward him instead of the direction she should be heading. Her anger is such a volatile thing and it is easier for her to grasp onto it then feel the full depth of her pain, her longing. It is worse, now, looking at him than it had been when she did not know where he was.
It is worse to be so close and yet still feel that chasm yawning open.
So she grows angry. She lets it settle onto her like armor and she lifts her chin defiantly.
His voice almost sucks the anger out of her in a gut punch but she keeps going because the only way through the fog of misery is to burn it down. And if Elena knows anything well, it is how to be a fire, blazing out of control.
A strange desire for violence blossoms like a bloodstain across her chest. She almost doesn’t recognize it at first, but the seductive darkness presses fire under her skin and she finds herself craving the way it, for a moment, makes the pain dull to background noise. But when she feels phantom movement in her belly, the fire suffocates within her veins.
She finds herself railing against him though, still—coming undone and showing all the ugliest parts of her.
Hatred and a painful ache beat bruises into her chest.
She wants to tell him not to leave, to stay with her, that she can protect him, that they are having a child, and they can raise them together. That they will be the parents they each wish they had. She still has tears in her eyes. They fall hot to her cheeks. The truth burns the back of her throat, so ready for her to spit it out. She closes her blue eyes and swallows, wishing she could wipe these tears from her face.
When she opens her eyes again, they glitter with her pain.
“You won’t,” her voice catches in her throat and she has to swallow again, the knives of it burying deep.
She laughs then (it cracks like a sob), tears still on her cheeks as he leaves.
“Congratulations, Tenebrae. You and your goddess win.”
She shakes her delicate head and takes a step back, something like panic rising in her as she realizes how much she has told him. How much she has not, about the child that sits there now. She realizes how vulnerable she has become, in more ways than just one—and how it was all her doing. Always hers.
She swallows hard, and she can’t stop the tears that quietly slip down her cheeks, the tracks they make down across her golden face. She can’t help the flood of emotion as it beats against her chest, her pulse hammering.
“Tenebrae,” a prayer, again, her voice like broken glass. As if saying his name could break through whatever walls he was building and bring him back to her. As if saying his name could erase all of what was wrong about them. As if it could make it like it never happened at all—that they danced and they loved. And the empath leaves him with a parting gift. She gathers all the love in her heart and in an empathetic push, casts it against his skin of shadows. She wanted him to feel all the love she has for him, and let him break underneath it. Break just like she was.
And inside the temple, a statue gains a crack inside its heart. If you look closely enough, you can see a piece of sunlight, and shadows, you cannot tell who devours who, just that it lives inside something broken.
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