tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again, how it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. it's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. look at the light through the windowpanes. that means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable.
The night is full of a wild, primordial energy. The smell of hard cider and mead permeates the air, along with the ever-present woodsmoke and incense characteristic of Denocte's cityscape. The night is alive with festivities; jack-o'-lanterns sneer from household alcoves; lanterns gleam from balconies and some, made of paper, drift up in a celebratory kind of way toward the stars. The streets are heavy with it; with the vivacious life of the city Boudika loves. The effect is nearly intoxicating as children run, fully costumed, through the streets and adults, too, peer between the flames of bonfires in grotesque or intricate masks. Boudika chooses this place to offset the severity of their last several encounters; and, more importantly, the festival is so full of smoke, incense, and the odour of festivities that the sea seems (for the moment at least) a very distant memory. Yet as she walks side-by-side with him, her mind is drawn inexplicably to one of her first memories of Novus.
It had been when she was still searching for Orestes, staring out at Terminus sea—before Amaroq, Isra, Tenebrae, anyone and she had thought, the sea is the only thing I’ve ever feared. Tonight, it is different. Tonight, she is a nothing but a girl, and the sea is where she goes to make her bones not ache and her body weightless. There is no trident at her side; no kelpie guise; no ocean to flee into. There is only her skin and her restless legs and her soul too large for her body to hold, screaming, screaming, screaming—
She is afraid. Not of the sea, no, but of the man beside her. They walk so close through the crowd that their shoulders brush; that he is able to bend his lips a little to whisper something in her ear that is lost before Boudika can register it. There are a hundred incomprehensible shapes clashing within her, the instincts of a plethora of animals; and she cannot listen to any of their voices. No. Not tonight. Not after every one of their meetings have ended with blood shed—
Not because she fears he will harm her—no, at this point Boudika is uncertain if he even could—but because… well, there is an atypical flush to her cheeks and a girlish brightness to her expression. The setting illuminates it; transforms her girlishness into something faelike, and nearly wicked. Boudika's excitement is thinly veiled; and her nervousness is even less thinly veiled but, instead, simmers just beneath the surface of her composure. Boudika glances around readily; the crowd; to him; the moonstones engrained in the streets; an alleyway; a horse with a painted face; children in streaming, silken costumes; small terrestrial dragons spitting flames as if in laughter. The sights are endless, and nearly overwhelming, and before she can help herself she is pulling Tenebrae along with her into a narrow, dark alleyway. The light and noise is muffled between the two buildings and they are forced to be pressed so, so close. It is nearly impossible to distinguish who's breath is who's; and then they are out of the alley and beyond, into a much quieter alcove.
There is a fountain, sparkling, crystalline. It sings into a night full of stars and smoke and magic. Boudika is instantaneously breathless; earlier in the night, the small garden courtyard belonged to a restaurant. But so late in the evening it is left quietly abandoned, with only the fountain to chime in the dark. There are lights strung across the archways and open courtyard; reflecting as the stars do in the trembling, flowing water.
Abruptly, and with little tact, Boudika admits: “I’ve never done anything like this before.” Her voice is loud in the quiet place, nearly abrasive. But it is the truth.
A romantic excursion, shared between two people. No, Boudika has never come close to experiencing such a thing—at best, they consisted of stolen moments between herself and Vercingtorix before she told him the truth of herself. It had been when Boudika had nursed him back to health after his fall from the cliffside—when she had read to him, and brought gifts and updates on the affairs of the state. And that—well, that had not been like this, with stars and lanterns and all the potential for something gentle, and meaningful, and kind.
Yet, Tenebrae’s admission of being a monk is still fresh in her mind; it makes Boudika weary. This is, perhaps, the most like a girl he has ever seen her. Her hair is uncharacteristically well-kept, free of gnarls or seaweed tangles. Even the garish stretch of her mouth—with the help of her magic—has returned to the semblance of a normal equine’s. And, with a bit of irony, there are roses tucked behind her ear. With all that she knows now, Boudika feels almost sinful. Her costume is not ornate; in fact, it is hardly a costume at all. Boudika is wearing the golden warrior paint of her people; arcane; tribal; specific. There are lions painted on her haunches and her hair is braided with bright, metallic ribbons. Her tail, too, is full of bells and ribbons. Her horns are painted gold and everywhere it gleams, and gleams, and gleams. She finds that, with the excitement of the crowd, her breath comes more quickly than she had expected; she looks at Tenebrae in the stillness, and measures him with hungry eyes.
They are a girl's eyes; not a kelpie's. They are eyes that hunger for a different kind of flesh
And in that sinfulness, there is an aggressive, unfamiliar appeal. It is the kind of adrenaline that belongs to the hunt, the fight, the climb. Boudika cannot help it when she leans tentatively close, surprised at how shy she is without the sea. She can smell him; clean sweat; Denocte’s woodsmoke and juniper; the clean, fresh scent of the spring where the monk’s dwell. Boudika abruptly presses her nose into the nape of his neck and inhales. The gesture is almost primordial; not quite claiming, but… there is an edge to it that disguises her girlish shyness.
Boudika hates herself for thinking it, but Tenebrae almost, almost smells like home.
“I—“ and then she laughs aloud. “I don’t know how to act around you when we aren’t trying to kill each other.” The admission is delivered humorously, but still; there is an edge of truth to it. Yet, the idea of violence is almost relieving in comparison to the hurt he could bestow. Boudika, the water-horse, is not fragile. But the girl beneath, the girl who has waited an entire life for love; well, that is a different matter entirely.
Boudika steels herself; she steps away from him, several steps back, until the fountain is behind her and he stands silhouetted by the alley they walked through. Her heart catches and she hates herself for it. Her heart catches, and she is afraid. Somehow, Boudika moves past it. She begins, "Tenebrae... did you know, when I first came to Novus, I swore away violence?" Once she is past the introduction, Boudika feels her courage rally. She flicks her head just so, and the ribbons cascade in a metallic ripple to cover half her face. "I was done with being a warrior. Instead, I became a dancer." Those early memories of Novus are welled with a loneliness like a black hole; but there is also a fierce independence within them, a becoming. Boudika doesn't realise it until know, but she has almost missed performing.
Quietly, in a voice that belongs to bedrooms, closed doors, warm sheets, Boudika says: "Would you like to watch?" It is in that moment Boudika understands there is more than one way to be hungry.
This night was full of wonders and delights. He came wild and reckless. Tenebrae stripped from his body all his shadows, all the things that mark him as a Night Order Disciple. Yet he could not take the glowing sigils from his body. This night he longs not to be a monk but to be like all the others here. Able to slip into the crowd to relish life in all the ways they do.
But a child met him, a girl with ribbons of fire wrapped about her small throat. She ran wild and free through the streets. He looked to her and thought of Boudika. Was this what she would have been like if allowed to be herself? A girl, with no expectations placed upon her, no rules to make her fight.
He stays with the child until she leaves, disappearing with the same vivacity as she had come. Then he wandered through the bustling streets full of revelry and the laughter of the festival. The delight sank deep into his bones. It unwound his muscles until he moved, a prowled. His mask did not give him away. It was painted on in golds and crimsons. It sprawled across his brow, jaw, lips and nose. It reached down his throat. It was elegant, dangerous, it was nothing like a monk of the Night Order should wear. So it is no surprise when through the crowds he finds her.
Tenebrae and Boudika gravitated together, two planets colliding, two oceans meeting, the moon and the sun in an endless dance. She had asked him once, if he could think of her as the sea. Would it ever lessen the guilt he feels, to think of her as part of Caligo’s moon and creation. He holds that image, for maybe he always had. Maybe that is why he kept going to the sea where he knew she would be. Stepping out into the waves and calling her name across the open waters.
But she is here, so far from the sea. Yet the monk goes to her, as if she possesses him. She is a siren call, crying out to him over the sounds of the festival. He moves, spellbound, enchanted. SHe looks so different, her horns painted, as if made of waves of gold. Across her body are tribal patterns that bend over the soft curves of her body. Boudika moves as if caught in a tribal dance that is rung out by the peeling bells woven into her tail.
He comes to her, lured in by the sight of her and the siren song of her bells. He says nothing as he draws level but feels his muscles unwind as their bodies touch, hip brushing hip, shoulder brushing shoulder. They neither say anything, what do they need to say? They walk as one and his lips reach, tracing pattern after pattern. What he does not voice his touch whispers all across her body. Beautiful. He draws the word across her body. He inhales the salt of her skin, the smoke of the bonfires, the perfume of the stalls. In the salt and smoke he is drawn back to their cave. Gods.
She trembles, nervous and bright. His cheek brushes hers, he knows even the mask no longer fails to protect him, not when he is beside her and his sigils glow bright, bright, bright. They betray his vows, they rage out like torches declaring his sin. “They might see me.” Tenebrae breathes low for her ears, “They wouldn’t understand.” He says of the monks and and her, his girl of the sea. Just the sea.
Whether she heard him or not, he does not know. But suddenly they are stumbling down an alley that narrows and narrows until they have to press through and they will not leave each other untouched. They cling together and bump together, laughing until darkness swallows them whole and their touch does not matter for they have become one.
They emerge from the alley into a courtyard. It wraps about a fountain that sparkles. Diamond water cascades through the air into the pool. All above them, looped between buildings, fairylights hang, glowing with a warm light. It is silent here, the buildings fending off the sounds of the festival. There is nothing but them and all the courtyard stills for the monk of shadows and his girl of the sea.
Tentative, shy she presses against him and he to her. Boudika drinks in the scents that cling to Tenebrae’s winter skin. “Me either.” He confesses. Their relationship has been born of violence, yet the cave, where they first learned they could touch and not strike.They learned then that the press of skin upon skin has turned to something innocent, something purer than it had ever been before. “But we can learn.”
Boudika backs away and for the first time since he found her this night, his body feels cold without her. But he does not go to her, not when she gazes at him with her eyes that darken to the colour of wine. He is already intoxicated by her. His heart trembles in his breast. Together they are nervous, together they are wild. Together something binds them deep, deep, so deep he barely recognises it, yet it influences him. It pushes him toward her, over and over. It birthed the jealousy that bloomed in his gut. He does not even know how much to fear losing her, not yet.
He thinks of the first time they met. She had sworn away violence before that. Yet she came to him with blood stained across her lips and a delightfully feral smile upon her lips. Tenebrae delights in the savagery of his sea girl. Yet to see her dance upon land, away from the sea (for he knows how she dances there), will be an entirely different experience. “Yes.” He breathes when she offers to dance for him. “Then can we dance together?”
tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again, how it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. it's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. look at the light through the windowpanes. that means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable.
Me either. But we can learn. Boudika is not so shy to keep the smile edging up the corner of her mouth. Can we she almost asks. In her silence, the question dances in her eyes, reflecting fairy-lights and stars. Boudika is uncertain. After all, it was her nature. Once, it had been war; now it was flesh and blood and the cruel mysteries of the sea.
Yes, he says to her. Boudika thinks of how sweet the word is, how much she wishes to keep it echoing between them. Yes. Yes. Yes. She wants all his affirmations, all his confirmations; she wants him to whisper that word in the crook behind her ear, a promise, an oath.
But tonight is not for such severities.
Then can we dance together.
This time, Boudika does smile. The expression is coy. “Tenebrae,” she whispers, still stepping back. Boudika twines around the fountain where it is backed by a terrace full of ivy. It is remarkable with what ease she rests against it, leonine, a predator in the foliage. She peers at him through leaves and wood, beyond the tinkling of the fountain. “Don’t you know, the patrons don’t get to dance with the performers.”
But Boudika’s voice is breathless, but the tone is high enough it is clear she is teasing.
She pauses—and then begins to tap her hoof rhythmically upon the cobblestones, a taptap tap tap taptaptap that increases in intensity until she bursts from behind the ivy shroud.
Although Denocte always sounds of life—the distant noise of the festival, of children and adults, of music reaching toward the stars—this is different. She keeps her own rhythm with well-placed taps of her hooves; but the dance Boudika reenacts is complicated and story-like. It begins with her rearing. With a deft toss of her head, the metallic ribbons are sent streaming behind her, a current of fire and movement. The bells woven into her tail begin to chime—the darkness and the lantern light are things she uses intrinsically to her advantage, dancing in and out of the shadows. The dance becomes Boudika’s ribbons; a flurry of movement; the thrashing of her head and the lash of her tail. Her footwork is complicated and elegant, the rearing and bucking intended not to be a show of power but instead to be sensuous, made bright with the flash of her paint.
Boudika’s dance is a flurried spiral around him; fast, and faster, and dizzyingly fast.
Until they are nose to nose, her breath rushing out to stir the ribbons that hang, now, quietly in her face.
The music of her feet has stopped.
The fountain continues to cry.
But wordlessly, Boudika steps forward. She presses her shoulder into him, and curls her neck around his own. She presses into him again, forcing him to step, until they begin to dance to the distant music of the streets. Wordlessly, body pressed to body, Boudika cannot help but think of all the ways contrived to make mortality fall, and fall, and fall.
It is this:
The soft sweat of her neck that smells like brine. Him, woodsmoke and high tide. Denocte’s streets full of jasmine, frankincense, the spices of foreign meals and mead.
It is her pulse against his pulse.
“Or, Tenebrae, would you like to learn to be a wave?” She steps passed him abruptly, trailing her leonine tail beneath his chin. It is to guide him with her, to a deeper alcove of the hidden courtyard, to where the dense foliage of the courtyard’s garden opens to the sea beyond, through the wooden fence. Boudika positions so they stand-side-by-side facing the sea but slowly, nearly imperceptibly, she begins to sway. Boudika turns her head to whisper at his ear, playfully, her teeth nipping the fine hairs there—
“It is a little like this, beneath the surface. Constant, soft, an entire world of movement.”
There is something mischievous in her when she says, “But… Tenebrae?” Her voice sounds younger to her; vulnerable; strange. “You were meant to fly, I think. That's what stardust and moonlight is for.”
Then, Boudika's laugh is like breaking glass: high, beautiful, sudden. She lurches from his side and jumps effortlessly over the fence. For once, she does not run to the sea. Instead, Boudika heads straight down the hill at a dead sprint. There are some cottages on the outskirts of Denocte; but before she can blink she is passed them, and into the trees, her laughing rising, rising, soft as a flock of doves. Fly with me, she thinks.
Boudika retreats. Her departure, from where they had been pressed together so closely it was as if they were one flesh, is almost agonising. Made worse by the way she says his name.
Tenebrae.
He has never heard his name spoken thus. It is chastising and yet as coy as the smile that curls her lips, wicked, sensual. He feels the cold where she had been. His nerves are electric, his body bereft. He moves as if to follow, but her gaze, crimson and hot makes his limbs like lead, as if vines rise to tangle about his ankles. She holds him there with just a look.
It is bliss. It is sweet, sweet, agony.
Tenebrae is so out of control. There is no part of him this night that feels holy or righteous. His monkhood is obliterated, it lies in tatters in all the forgotten corners of him. She is veiled, by strings of ivy, but her eyes watch him. He feels them predatory, wanton. His darkness billows suddenly seeping in. It unbanishes itself, or maybe he allows his shadows’ return. But they come to him, fleeing in surrounding the Disciple and his girl of the sea. Their courtyard is hidden, but he makes the darkness around them total, even as his eyes never stray from where she restrains him with a simple look.
“I was hoping you might make an exception for me.” The monk breathes, low, low like port, like whiskey slipping through his veins blissful, obliterating.
All that has gone before him, all that weighs upon his mind, it is all forgotten when she begins to dance. Not even the ocean can make her more beautiful than here, in the moment. Tenebrae wonders how he could have ever sworn to become a monk and think he could live a life without women, without Boudika.
She dances before him, tribal each step is instinct, each step is a savage beauty that drives desire deeper and deeper into his breast like arrows and daggers and broadswords. Her dance is frenetic, she moves with wild abandon, swirling around and around and around him until suddenly she stops-
They breath, their breath tangling, like their souls, their hearts, their desires, their-
Her ribbons tremble against her cheek, her nose, her eyes, her lips. They are a veil that he sweeps from her face with his lips - a kiss, a dozen and a dozen more. She presses her shoulder to his, her neck reaching over him. Boudika moves him. It is small, elegant, movements yet to the Disciple it is an earthquake. It shatters his foundations. Boudika leaves no building standing with her dance - with their dance. He is complicit in razing to the ground all he has ever built, all he has ever known.
Together they are sea and divinity. The temple scents of incense and candles moke are upon him. Upon her is the brine of the sea. He commits sins as he moves with her, yet how can this feel so holy, how can the sound of her breath in his ear, so much like a wave, be like a psalm?
She draws him to her beloved ocean and he goes. It feels inevitable and holy, holy, holy. They sway becoming the ocean tide, the rolling waves of the sea… Her breath at his ear, her teeth along the shell of it, biting, grazing. Tenebrae is unravelling beneath her touch. Oh Boudika what of this monk will you leave? Or will you not rest until every part of his vow is stripped from his skin, his blood, his bones?
“I remember.” He murmurs and he does. She tells him what it is like beneath the sea, held, cradled, moved but even in that moment where she pulled him down, down into the black depths of the ocean where she released him, they paused. They remained still, for a moment, staring at each other, held by the sea, cradled together, hidden. Until his earthbound lungs begged for air and forced him up, up, up.
“I remember.” He says again, more forceful. There is no smile upon his lips and he thinks she has not heard him, has not heard the seriousness of his answer, his revelation, his-
Boudika has left him, peeled herself from his body again. Always wild, always untameable, uncontrollable. She leaves him laughing with a voice as sudden as shattering glass. He does not startle, but her loss is as agonising as cuts from a thousand broken shards.
You were made to fly, Tenebrae, She told him as she left, running, laughing like a nereid.
No.
No.
He thinks, he was not made to fly. Not any more, not when she had drowned him and loved him like the ocean loves the moon. No.
By Tenebrae does anyway. He chases her through the night, flying through darkness and starlight, over sand and sea. She reaches the trees, disappearing within and he follows her. Catches up until they are shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.
Together they fly, away from the ocean, away from the holy shadows of the Order. They run, they run until at last he reaches for a ribbon fluttering in her hair. He tugs it, once, twice. But it is not enough to stop her. He reaches, laying teeth along her throat. Bite after bite, for it is the only language they know, gentle and firm, sharper and softer. He draws her back to him until they slow and stop cocooned in the deep of the woods, so far from the sea, illuminated by the rays of the moon.
I was hoping you might make an exception for me. In the dark alcove, she wants to. She smiles and her boldness from before is replaced by something tentative, and shy—there is a moment when the night in the cave comes rushing back to her, and Boudika wonders how ephemeral this all is.
How can she make an exception for him, in something even as simple as a dance?
And still—Boudika dances for him. The rituals of her people; the archaic practice of calling storms, or fair winds, or summer warmth. All in summoning dances; all wrought into the tempo of her tapping hooves, until the dance has ended (as all in her old life has ended) and they are nose to nose, breath to breath.
She wants him.
She wants him with a sudden, voracious hunger. And it is a hunger that scares her more than her lust for meat. He showers her with kisses and they do nothing but fan the burning embers of her want; they are dancing and that seems to her to be a new, binding contract. If her people believed dances could summon storms, calm terrible winds, or change the seasons—what does it mean when two nearly-lovers dance? A monk, and a monster?
I remember.
Does he? To be caressed by the waves?
Boudika closes her eyes; she swallows against the welling desire in her throat, uncertain of her own sentiments. She feels strangely girlish, and uncertain; her heart is light, elated, in her chest. I remember.
If he thinks she has not heard him, he is wrong.
It is part of the reason she tears away so forcefully; it is part of the reason she cannot bear to stand beside him any longer.
I remember, he says.
And so does Boudika. The tearing of his throat beneath her teeth; and the press of their bodies later, in the cave, and how she wanted more, more, more.
When, she wonders, will it be enough?
Is this enough?
It is a question she cannot yet ask.
And so Boudika lets the thrill of the chase steal her thoughts and her voice to question; with each long stride she becomes heartbeat, breath, power instead of thought, fear, lust. She is beyond him at first, and down the stretch that glimpses the sea; but then they are beyond it, into the trees, and he begins to close the distance with the dogged tenacity of a wolf on the hunt. Boudika is no longer accustomed to being chased and it sends an electric thrill through her; she laughs, high and bright, when he tugs the ribbon fluttering in her hair. It only entices her to kick up faster; to stretch her legs a little longer—
Then he bites at her neck; her throat; the tender, light scars that lay across her jugular like a string of pearls. Boudika laughs a different laugh; deep, dark, the sea turning over stones in its grip—and she does not slow until he has marked her again and again with the pressure of his teeth, small claiming bites that say to her and her feral soul you are mine, mine, mine and when she stops in the deep shadows of Denocte’s wood, Tenebrae seals the sentiment with a kiss.
Boudika does not yet wonder if he understands the severity of those love-bites; the way they spoke to some primordial corner of her soul and said, yes, you and I are one. And, too, she does not yet question the way his touch evokes a deeper necessity, a more primal want than any she has known before—
It is nearly dizzying; nearly intoxicating. Boudika smells and feels and sees only him; and when she pulls away it is to gasp for air.
“Do you know—“ her voice is coy, playful. As she speaks she drags the words out across his skin with her mouth; she stops crooked beneath his chin, pressed into the hollow of his throat beneath his neck. “Do you know, Tenebrae, the things you do to me?”
She is more woman than she has ever been here, before him. She feels a nakedness she has never known in their gods’ moonlight; a strange and freeing fragility.
There had been barriers between her and everyone she had ever loved. An unforgivable lie between her and Vercingtorix; and then an unforgivable betrayal. Prison bars separated her from Orestes, and guilt, too. Amaroq had been too wild, she thinks now, for a girl just beginning to learn to be free—
But she is bare before Tenebrae. Bare of lies, or guilt, or uncertainty. She is more herself than she has ever been; but Boudika is choked on these words, choked on these sentiments. She does not know how to express them. And instead she draws away to smile simply at him; a smile that radiates the affection she feels, suddenly, for who and what he is.
“If you were not a monk, Tenebrae, what would you be?” she wonders aloud. She adds, perhaps to soften the question: “When I was no longer a soldier, I decided to become a dancer.” The foolish naivety strikes her, at times; why had she done that, when she could have gone on to be anything else? Boudika knows now it was because she had seen so much ugliness. She had wanted the chance to bring beauty, to create it; the chance to make something.
She cannot help but see him and his dark facade, the shadows that dance about him, and wonder what he would have been without Caligo's touch.
He is drunk upon her kisses, drunk upon her affection. Boudika paints her words across his skin with lips drenched in salt and hot as a volcano’s core. Tenebrae burns beneath her. She makes him feel like Icarus. She strips from him his shadows, she looks deep into his soul and then she sets him on a course that brings him too close, too close to their love that glows bright and dangerous and wild. He falls, like a foolish man. His feathers melt, he tumbles down and down and down. If he rises Boudika is there, if he sleeps she is there too. He is sure in death she will be there, a phantom at his back. He would always look for her, in the way he always turns toward the sea and looks across it expectantly.
Tenebrae will always seek her out. She has laid her marks across his skin. She had branded him in ways not even Elena has. He does not regret how she has changed his body, how she works his heart and his soul like a sculptor does a slab of stone. She turns him into rough beauty with the way she smiles at him.
She is breathless when at last her body peels itself from his. Her smile is the wild ocean. He still tastes the salt of her mouth upon his lips. She holds waves in the corners of her smile. Ah that mouth could ruin him, she could end him with the smallest downturn of her lips. Do his kisses haunt her like they haunt him? Does she rouse at night to the memory of them? His skin remembers her teeth, there is no part of him that does not know her and is irrevocably changed by her.
Tenebrae is still too foolish. He has not yet pushed too far. He does not recognise all the ways he loves boudika, how she changes him deeply. The memory of her, the need for her is already settled deep within the fibers of his being. She has reached places within him he did not know existed. He does not feel them yet, but he will.
Boudika is bare before him, but his foolishness shrouds him as his shadows do. He loves, he loves too deeply, too foolishly. He is drunk upon it. A man condemned to never love and yet so desperate to he has fallen for two. But he does not even know what love is, he cannot scrawl it down on paper or draw it in the sand. He thinks he knows, but he does not. He feels love and yet he does not recognise it. He will not recognise it until it is, maybe, too late. Until his deeds are done, his sins committed, his foolishness and pride and want and need clear like the clouds after a storm, only then will he be able to read what true love is, etched in clean air across the devastation of his stormy pride. He will feel the damage first. He does not mean to commit the crime and unleash the storm, but there is no forgiveness for ignorance.
Boudika asks him, girlish, sweet and wild in the way she stands with her coloured ribbons. He thinks maeve who stood before him with her ribbons, only hours before. She has so much growing up to do. He tried to make her braver. He hopes she might have all the bravery of Boudika and yet more.
The kelpie is a siren call and he goes to her. Drawn across the wood to stand before her, close and not yet touching. Does he know all the things he does to her? No. But he wants to know them all. He wants her to paint them across his body until he knows, he understands. “No.” He breathes. “Will you tell me?” He asks, small with eyes so wide. Tell him Boudika. Tell him so he might understand when he has pushed too much and realised how far he has fallen. Tell him so he will feel what love is and how it hurts and obliterates.
What would he have been if not a monk? It might be in that long moment after she asks, before she softens her question with her confession, that reveals how little Tenebrae knows of anything outside the Order. He has not thought for a moment what he might be, what else he would have done. Before Caligo called him he was an orphan boy fighting for scraps of food to live off. Before Caligo called Tenebrae was, simply, waiting. Waiting for his goddess. He was made of a Stallion who Swallowed the Sun. His fate was made then. Tenebrae was made to serve Caligo, he knows nothing else. He has never considered anything else.
He smiles, that moment of confusion covered with the smile as drowns himself in the memory of her dance. She drowns him in everything, always. “It makes sense.” He breathes. “There is nothing more perfect for you.” The monk says, honesty blatant and stark in the way he watches her, bathes her, cradles her in his starlight-bright eyes. “I- I was made for this role. I cannot think of anything else I would do.” He breathes in the darkness, his shadows reach for her, beg for her. “What would you have me do or be, Boudika. If I were not a monk?”
Their undoing is in his voice; dizzyingly, it sounds like whiskey tastes. Rough, uncut; heady. There is a moment he looks at her and Boudika is not in Denocte, is not in Novus at all, but is instead transported to long black beaches.
It is true Tenebrae had been her first kiss; haphazard, nearly accidental.
But he had not been her first everything. He certainly had not been her first love and now, with his eyes full of her, Boudika wonders if she does love him; or if she hates her loneliness.
The girlish shine in her eyes is devilish, now; the innocence that ought to soften the expression is gone, replaced with a nearly malicious sharpness. She is not a girl. She is scarcely a woman, anymore, and how can she tell him that he excites not only her romanticism (something she thought long dead) but a more primordial urge? An urge to make, and unmake? An urge to lay claim to something more definitive than blood, than the mark of scars along his throat that she gifted to him like a necklace.
Tenebrae does not know love.
But she does.
Boudika knows the intimacy of it, of how boys first learn to love one another in the quiet darkness of their insecurities, and learn to love one another more fiercely in a bond of brotherhood wrought of pain and suffering. Vercingtorix had never kissed her, not even when he had thought her a stallion--but it didn’t matter. What mattered was his lack of kissing; was the restraint. She knew he laid with men and women alike; she knew he took them to his bed and burned thoughts of her from his skin with the imprints of their kisses. Boudika had always known, and it had never mattered, because Vercingtorix had always looked at her with such fierce love, and never kissed her. She had been apart from those affairs; placed upon a higher echelon, a more noble affection. He had not wanted to kiss her, no, even when she had been a stallion, because he had loved her too much.
She knows, now, it is also why he hated her so fiercely when she betrayed him. Boudika’s answer is too long in coming; her mouth twisted up in the corners, not a smile, but a reminder of her heritage. “I can’t,” she whispers, because her attraction itself is a tell to what she means. “Not in words, at least.”
Boudika wonders why he believes it had been perfect for her; and in wondering she nearly asks if he knows anything about her, at all. They had met at a strange time; and she does not know why not his intimacy and affection is souring in her mouth. Boudika does not turn away; instead she relishes the warmth of his skin. It is so different from the wet chill of the sea; but what does he know of her, beyond her teeth, beyond the blood in her mouth and the flowers in her hair? The ribbons catch the wind; the gold paint gleams.
This is what I used to wear to war.
Boudika does not say it, she only listens. She might have said the same thing, a lifetime ago. Now there is a small, sad smile to her mouth. She had thought--well, they were ignorant thoughts, belonging to an ignorant girl. She closes her eyes and steps toward him. In the darkness, she doesn't know who she is for a moment; she runs her nose down the slick muscle of his neck, and traces it up the powerful arc of his shoulder. A warrior’s body. Boudika keeps her eyes closed. Her breath is soft along his ribs, and comes to rest at the hip. That leonine tail of hers flicks out, brushes his ankles.
“If you were not a monk?” she repeats. Her voice is rose-petal soft. “I would have you be yourself, but I am not sure you or I know who that is, without the title of monk to hide behind.” There is no barb of cruelty there; only honesty. Boudika finds this is her own hamartia; to be fickle, and coy, and flirtatious, and turn on both herself and him. Because ultimately, honesty is cruel. Boudika opens her eyes, glancing toward him over his own back.. She adds, “Tenebrae, if you were not a monk, I would have you be my lover.”
And there is softness there, softness like a veil of death. She brushes past him now, from the warmth of their intimacy, toward the dark and foreboding trees. The words taste like salt, and sand, and she thinks she has heard them before, in another life--
It had been Vercingtorix, when he healed in the hospital. He had said, If we were not bound companions, we would have been lovers. She had said, maybe we already are.
She is struck, suddenly, by an incredible sadness. The flippant joy from earlier--from their dance, and their chase, and being the wind--has made Boudika turn to ash. They cannot be, and she knows it. Tenebrae cannot become the sea, and she (despite their words shared in secrecy, in their cave) knows she cannot be his goddess. She turns to smile, the smile of autumn, of fall, of all things ending. “I meant what I said, Tenebrae, in the cave about the sea and the moon. Do you think you will ever believe it?”
Tenebrae does not know where Boudika’s thoughts go when she stands beside him, warming the air between them, setting his nerves alight where they touch, skin to skin. If he knew, he might wonder if her sign of love is truly not to ever touch, to deprive themselves of that. He would dare to suggest that it was an ill kind of love. Tenebrae is young and untried in love, yet he learns. He is sure love can be grounded in touch, that kisses are healthy too.
Shall I never kiss you again? He would ask her, the question curling over the shell of her ear.
Tenebrae thinks he knows love, and maybe he does. But his love is still a wild and untried young thing; an unbroken colt. He is green in this field of love. The man needs to grow roots and mature with the frigid winter pain of an ending relationship, then bloom into the flowering of a new, spring love. The monk needs to leave the field altogether and neither sow, nor reap its fruit.
I can’t She says, not in words at least. Boudika smiles too and tenebrae know he has spoken, acted wrong. The fever of romance has left her. There is no joy in her smile. It is something primordial. The boy, drunk in love slips away at her look and the warrior slips in. The warrior who remembers how he looked at her as just an adversary that very first time. An adversary to spar with, a girl with a wicked, bloody smile and a trident in her grasp.
It is perfect for you Tenebrae had breathed, for Elena taught him to dance and he knows now how much like war it is. The grace of fighting, the push the pull the proximity, the skin upon skin, the need to move well. It is primal and deep and sinks into his flesh as if he has always known how to dance. But his answer pushes her away, her crimson eyes grow dark and cool as maroon blood. He has extinguished the fire within her and he breathes his confusion across her skin.
Boudika touches him, her muzzle running like silk along the muscle of his throat, his shoulder. Her tail rubs, feline, across his ankles. For once Tenebrae does not yield, he does not reach to return her touch. He stands as he had once, when her touch was a new and strange thing. But his body knows her, his skin cries out its remembrance of the familiarity her touch brings. It sends a rocking shiver slipping down his spine. She affected him then, she affects him now. Even as her unempassioned smile extinguished the heat in his eyes as his touch, his words extinguished the heat in hers.
Tenebrae watches her, his ears twixt to capture every word that tumbles from her lips. It was this, it was always this. He knew, he warned her, he fell and dared to dream without consequences as only children do. The monk dared to think he could succumb to this burning need for her and not be forced to reap the consequences. She makes him heed them. Oh bold, wild, Boudika presses into his ears the things he does not wish to hear.
“Is that what you wish?” Tenebrae asks at last, “For me to be your lover?” The question is acid in his mouth. He watches her. No longer a love drunk boy, but a warrior as if ready to go into battle. He is no longer reckless. Tenebrae knows what she has cost him and it runs deeper than the scars across his throat.
There is ire bubbling within him. It builds like embers reigniting. He moves to her as he had once, as he had so many times before they fell punch drunk, before they succumbed to their primal attraction. She has turned to ash before him. The taste of it is upon her tongue, it hurts him to see it in her gaze. They stand close, her words heavy between them. She reminds him of the moon and the sea, drags him back to that cave where his throat was pulled open by her teeth, where she told him of others.
How has Tenebrae made her turn to ash now? Her eyes grow round as a pool, as a tear drop threatening to fall from glistening lashes. The monk drinks her in as he stands before her, his posture dark, dark, dark. “Do you love me, Boudika?” Tenebrae breathes, responding to the ultimatum she lays between them. The words graze themselves past his lips and press themselves hot and sharp upon her cheek, her ears. “Because I see you as the waves, the salt, the sea. But my brothers will not. They will see you as an obstruction to Caligo, not part of her magic, her world. I am in your blood, Boudika...” His lips trail the path of the artery that thrums in the side of her neck. His ascends until it pulses, pulses beneath his lips. “...But am I in your heart, your soul? What you ask of me demands a hefty price. I am willing to pay it...” And oh how his throat closes at the last, knowing the pain, the cost of being found out. “You said everyone leaves you. I won’t - yet I will only do it for mutual love.” He thinks of the new scar upon his throat. “Is this love Boudika, or just animal attraction?” Tenebrae tips up his chin, until her scars upon his neck catch the moonlight filtering down between the trees. “Do you still just want to claim me, turn me?”
Even the sun, the stars; one day they explode and become dark, and black, and cold. The heat of the inferno dims into the chill, desolateness of ash. That is what cools between them, now; the dying of a fire. Not within themselves, no, but the thing they have held so dearly, like kindling, like… well, like embers, or new life. They have sheltered it from the truth, their hesitant love affair. And now the truth is revealed and both of them speak with steeled tongues. Boudika pulls away; the warmth of her skin is gone, and his is wrenched from hers. She steps toward the forest but, uncharacteristically, there is no violence grace to her movements. She does not aim to leave, or tear, or transform; she only stands, bathed in the dappled light of Caligo beneath the forest canopy. It is silent all around.
Is that what you wish? he asks her. Everything about him has hardened, and this hardening saddens her. Boudika only looks at him quietly; her mouth tastes bitter. Is that what she wants, she wonders. To have a lover? But the answer is clear in the expression of her face: No, Tenebrae her grim lips say. I do not want just a lover.
The inevitable question arrives.
Do you love me, Boudika?
The word has always seemed so small to her. Love. She could say it and not mean it. How many times had her father breathed love to his daughter, hidden as she was, with the smell of bourbon on his breath? He had always been so proud of her, when he had been drunk. He had always loved her so, so much, and her mother too. I love you, child, he would say, whiskey-thick. I am so proud of you, of all you are--
But never, ever would he breathe those words sober. Never did he demonstrate “love” to her, in his chilled actions, his bitter soldier’s repose.
Is this like that, Tenebrae? Boudika wants to ask it. Are we saying a word we don’t understand? The distance between them does not last long; Boudika turns back toward him just in time for them to collide, softly, body-to-body. His lips at her pulse, soothing that sudden, erratic beat.
He goes on to say: Because I see you as the waves, the salt, the sea. But my brothers will not. They will see you as an obstruction to Caligo, not part of her magic, her world. Tenebrae’s words are so soft, so coaxing. Does he not know how the blade slips in, quietly, between her ribs? Does he not know the warmth of his mouth against her throat has become nearly unbearable? The honey is poisoned, for both of them; she knows it.
... But am I in your heart, your soul? What you demand of me is a hefty price… but I am willing to pay it. You said everyone leaves you. But I won’t - yet I will only do it for mutual love. Is this love, Boudika, or just animal attraction?
Then, he shows her the scars. They always seem more elegant in the night, she thinks. Perhaps it is his goddess’s way of softening them; of reclaiming what is hers. Do you still just want to claim me, turn me?
Boudika steps away again. “I did not tell you the whole truth, in the cave.” She confesses. Boudika had not even realised it then; that there had been another story within the story she shared, another facet of who she was that must be revealed. “I told you of the Last Prince - the King Orestes of Solterra -” here, she scoffs. “And I told you of Amaroq. But I did not tell you of Vercingtorix, and the betrayal.”
Oh, Tenebrae. So new to love. There is a moment she almost pities him; but pity is not in an animal’s nature. He speaks of love as if it is easy; as if it is as simple as words, or vows, and not a matter of blood and sacrifice and pain. Is that all you wish, Tenebrae? For Boudika to say, yes, yes, yes as if the words are actions too? “I have loved five men my entire life,” she says. “First, it was my father, who used me as a tool for his ambitions. Then, there was Vercingtorix.” It hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. She has never spoken of it; not once, since she had lost him. “He began as my best friend, my companion. On Oresziah, we referred to one another as rahterei. It meant ‘right hand.’ We grew up together, and survived many battles at one another’s side. We were indoctrinated into the military together. We defeated the Last Prince together. We… we were going to be commanding officers together, for a new pilgrimage. But when we defeated Orestes, I--he… He fell from a cliffside. I spent months nursing him back to health.”
There is no way to surmise all that they were. There is no way for Boudika to describe the intimacy, to explain: “There had never been anyone else. All that I was was tied to all he was, and vice versa. And as I helped him heal, I could not… I could not continue to live a lie. I could see his feelings for me changing, and mine for him. We had lived in devotion, companionship, sacrifice for one another for years… and those were becoming loyalty, affection, compassion, and yes, love. He loved me so much, I could see it, and when he was healed--he made an advance that I had to reject because… well, because all of it had been a lie. I was not Bondike. I was Boudika. But I thought, if I could just show him they were both the same… perhaps he could love me, still. I told him who I was, truly. About the magic. About the lie. He shut me out, Tenebrae. He stopped speaking to me; he avoided me in the street; at our coronation, he would not meet my eye. And ultimately, he turned me in. He revealed my identity. I became Boudika the Betrayer, and my own people had me arrested.”
There is a moment she cannot decide why she is sharing this. It seems cruel, to detail so explicitly her love for another man; love that has not died, but still colours her voice with a certain pain and bitterness. “I share this with you because you ask me if I love you, and love to me has never been pretty words, or poetry, or what you make my body feel. Love has always been sacrifice, devotion, and action. I tell you that story because I do not regret it, even the betrayal, because it allowed me to experience the pinnacle, the incomparable. You ask me of my heart and soul, Tenebrae, but you expect me to quietly answer your call when it suits you, and to hide on the fringes of your religion. Even now: you shower me with kisses, and demand my love, but what will you give in return? What have you shown me you are capable of? You ask, and ask, and ask... for pomegranates and darkness and love, my heart and soul, but already in your words it is clear to me we have nothing compared to your bond of brothers. You fear their judgement and retribution more, I think, than you fear my loss. You say you will leave if I offer you mutual love, but what do you know of love, Tenebrae? Tell me, and I will listen. But when I give, I give everything I am. And in my experience that does not go well when I am giving to duty, and obligation, and a man owned by an organisation.”
Her lips twist wryly. “No. In my experience, men are always more bonded to what they belong to, rather than the woman they want. And I will not be only wanted. I do not want to turn you, anymore, Tenebrae; but I will not change myself for you, either. I will not accept less, or fit myself into a role that suits your religion. I will let you go, but I will not do that. You speak now as if you want both; my love, and the Order. And if you can prove to me that you can have both, so be it--but… I don’t think that you can, and I will not pour all I am into something that will burn. You say you will leave, for guaranteed love. But will you? Will you pay that price?”
He has already said he would.
But Boudika does not believe him.
And despite the resoluteness of her words, the firm expression she wears, she feels her resolve crumbling. Just say yes, the girl in her whispers. The girl who had always wanted love. Just say yes, you love him, and no, it is not primordial attraction. But Boudika has learned not to give her heart away; not to let the charismatic words of men wrest it from her, so they ought hold it in their palms and lord it over her. The truth is, the truth that cools the flame they have thus far fanned:
Boudika does not yet know. She is fond of him, and wants him, and desperately wishes to believe his words; but she does not know how. Tenebrae says he will not leave, but the recipe for it, the signs of the leaving are already written. Everything he is says: It is easier to leave than to stay. So why would he, she wonders. Why would he stay? For the love she has not yet agreed to give, that nevertheless is written in the softness of her eyes and the way they brim with unshed tears?
She speaks. Oh she speaks and she speaks and she speaks. She fills the space they are in with words, memories, a story that rips itself out of her heart. He feels it, he tastes it upon the air. Tenebrae tastes the rawness upon her voice.
Her words.
Her words… oh, she makes him feel young, foolish. He is, he is, but Boudika is being unfair. He listens to her story of the love Vercingtorix had for her, but how it was not enough for him to overcome her secret. Tenebrae thinks that he is nothing like that man, that love overcomes everything. Yet is he not the one who drowns himself too in Elena’s golden skin? Does he not declare that he will leave the Night Order for Boudika, even whilst he fills himself up on the love of another woman?
How has he gone so long without realising, without thinking how reckless, how cruel he is being? His heart thunders in his mouth. It is a wild thing. Gods. He turns from Boudika. Though she still talks, he cannot bear to be near her. He needs the space, the space of a man who is a fool, who carries his wicked sins.
She continues to speak and oh, every word is a nail into his skin. Every word makes him feel young and small and untried. His nape arches, the well-seasoned muscles along his nape arching. He feels the pain of her bites. Tenebrae thinks of them as she talks more and more and more. They drown him and he sinks, willingly beneath their waves. Stil he does not turn back to her, he feels the pain, the longing in her voice, but he looks out into the trees and feels as if this is no living world, but the Underworld. He expects spirits to move between the trees, to adorn her words with their sorrowful faces longing still to be alive. They wail and he hears them when she speaks of pomegranates and how he takes, takes, takes.
The monk does not know the ways Boudika feels he has taken and taken and taken. But he recognises how he has, in all the ways he has met with Elena and Boudika and wanted them and desperately wanted them to stop. Yet he returned to them over and over and over. He took and he took and he took from them.
Gods.
“There is another girl.” Tenebrae confesses, his voice low, wary, slow. This is worse than prostrating himself before Caligo’s shrine and whipping his back raw. It feels like nailing himself to his cross. Why has he not told her until now? Elena knows, why not Boudika? Why has he kept this from her so long?
The words hang, his back is still to her. This feels worse than war, war where he is trained to kill and do it efficiently and without feeling. He was made to compartmentalise. There is no compartmentalising this. The confession breaks him open. It is worse than when he told Elena. A strangled moan slips past his lips. He thinks of Elena’s hurt, how she split apart before him, banished him and yet, yet they still meet, still love.
He fears Boudika’s response more, he knows it now, now that the confession is out, now that he feels her presence behind him and thinks of her gone. She will be gone, he feels that knowing deep within him.
“Boudika. I do not know how to give you what you want. You are right, I have taken and taken and taken.” Now he turns, laying his confession out before her. Shame, draws his lips down, down, down. “I have taken from you and I have taken from her.” He drags in a breath, it cuts him down like a razor. Tenebrae dares not step towards her. His darkness peels back, the shadows crowding behind him, they dare not touch her, nor him, not now, not with such a terrible confession between them. “You kept a secret from Vercingtorix and this.. This is mine.” Torix turned from Boudika. It slayed her and yet she stands.
“The only love i knew was that which i shared with my brothers, Boudika. I am envious you had parental love at all.” He says, small, small. His eyes close, his sigil moon fading dark as his magic weakens with his remorse. “I have never known love like you speak of.” Not until now because maybe this searing, wild panic that is bubbling up within him, maybe that is something of what she speaks. He doesn’t tell her of it but he feels it how it grows frantic and rapid. It is a black hole of despair that is clawing outward moving as fast as an explosion. It wants him to right everything, to go back and change the hands of time.
Tenebrae fears the look of hurt upon her face. He fears her leaving more. “You said.” he breathes, though talking is painful. His voice trembles as that feeling grows wicked and wild. Don’t leave me Boudika. But maybe it is easier this way. If she pushes him away then it is easier to sink himself back into being a monk. There is nothing else for him outside the Night Order, outside of Caligo.
“You said you did not think i would leave the Order. That the love of my brothers is too much. You do not compare to them…” He breathes, he looks up to the skies, the passing moon the blinking stars and bend themselves low and weep for the fallen monk and how much further he has yet to fall. “I never said I would leave the Night Order for her.” He says it low and small and soft. He aches for Elena. The confession flays him open. The truth of it is earth shattering. Tenebrae condemns himself with his confession. He has told Elena he loves her. He has never said it to Boudika. Yet here he stands vowing to leave the Night Order for her. Tenebrae lays himself upon his own pyre. He stands and knows that the only thing left for him may be the Night Order. “You say I put my brothers above you. You told Vercingtorix the truth because you could not live a lie.” Tenebrae breathes. “Love is new to me Boudika. You are right. I have been a fool, let the idea of it intoxicate me.” That pain and despair, frantic and wild is still radiating out, out, out. “You said love is sacrifice and pain. I love her, I do. But I mean it when i told you I would leave the Night Order, turn my back upon Caligo. I will do it for you, if you ask.”
He looks to her, where she stands limned in moonlight. “I love you Boudika.” The monk breathes, the words rasping along his veins, his nerves. It worsens the despair, gods, he feels like screaming. He would bring the mountains to their knees for her if she would not walk away. Yet, though Tenebrae is young, he is no fool. “I am in love with you.” He laughs roughly, “You drive me crazy, but you are in my blood and deeper yet.” His emotions are harrowing, he does not think he will leave the woodland in one piece. He is shattering through the woodland, lost into darkness and moonlight. “The punishment for a monk having a relationship with a woman is blindness.”
Silence descends after his words. He says nothing as he drinks in every inch of her. Her ire, her sorrow, her ribbons, her paint. Tenebrae leaves no part of her untouched by his gaze. His eyes drink in her reds, the black of her tiger print, the arc of her horns, the wild tangle of her hair. He imprints the beautiful sight of her into his mind. The monk says nothing at all, but it is there in the silence, in the way he watches her. In knowing that there is no coming back from his confession.
Tenebrae will never see her again.
“I will pay it. For you.” It is another piece of him he will give her. His blood, his body, his sight, his heart, his soul - even if this love is an unrequited thing.
