let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
He could be in a chapel, but for the absence of voices echoing of stone. The voices drift off into the night and the wind is more open, more free across his skin than if feels within a chapel. So many things Tenebrae is learning about the world now his sight is gone.
The incense drifts, burned upon charcoal and flame, carried up and out upon the wind, laden with blessings and prayers. Tenebrae comes to the festival as a chastened man. His journey was long and arduous. The lessons of learning to live sightless are all across his body. His limbs are bruised and bloody. His shadow magic is not yet accustomed to reaching out before him solid and wide to feel the terrain ahead of him. He cannot read its messages so clearly yet when they press upon his awareness. So the warrior monk stumbles and trips, yet each day grows easier. His remaining senses grow more attune. Already his brothers are making him fight, blind. It is like learning anew. Listening to his opponent, sensing their presence.
Tonight he moves through the crowd that jostles him, knocks him. Crowds are not so good at sensing the impaired within their midst. Tenebrae drifts to the edge, stepping closer until the heat of a bonfire breathes across his silver skin. The bandages across his eyes warm with the heat. Tenebrae basks in the warmth for it is soothing across his now broken eyes. They still throb, filled with Solis’ light, burned out, cast into eternal darkness.
The Disciple stands upon the edge, silent, and thinks of all his transgressions. Promises, prayers and penitent whispers lie across his lips and he murmurs them out into the smoke filled night. They rise with the incense up to the sky and the eternity beyond. That is what Tenebrae has now, an eternity of a broken heart and its punishment of eternal darkness. He is cast into Caligo’s darkness now, he longs to love her more for it, but all he feels now is numb. Yet Caligo might be the only thing left for him. Elena is gone, her ire and hurt still a sun’s rage across his skin. Her child is not his and that, to this monk, is both a blessing and the most agonising curse. He cannot help but be filled with the thought of what could have been. Yet, at least it is a blessing for a monk should not have a child and a father should be able to see his daughter.
10-25-2020, 02:51 PM - This post was last modified: 10-25-2020, 05:15 PM by Tenebrae
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
T
hey race round each other, to fill their baskets first, but Elliana is much more deliberate in her task. She goes from tree to tree, and finds not just any offering, but the perfect one from each. She reaches through each of the piles and adds them, as if practice for when she will eventually throw them into the flames. She does not run off in a group of giggling children, no, she is a serious child who is content to keep mostly to herself, but she cannot help the way she loves to wander. So she goes from tree to tree as a butterfly may float from flower to flower.
Elli collects piece for a collection, a collection to give to the flames, to become ash, to become smoke, to rise to the heavens above in their starry abyss. Her mother once told her that her ancestors live there, up there, way up there. Elli looked at her and whispered quietly under her breath, “not all the time they don’t.”
There is a buzzing in the forest, she knows it is them, all of them. She had come here before and seen the dead, the unicorns had taken her to them, she had seen them, staring and vacant. Blue eyes look around her, she sees nothing, but oh she can hear them. They buzz and hum and she tries to imagine that is the crackle and burning of the fire, but she knows the truth. She has always known the truth.
She emerges from the forest to him, her basket and offerings in tow, the lemur perched on her shoulders, an ever present guardian, her guardian, given to her by the fates. She watches him fumble through the crowd and she cannot take her eyes off of him, she watches. A shoulder digs into his own, another barely brushes him as the party goer tries to miss him, others are so much less forgiving. And then he comes into the light and blue eyes (so much like her mother’s) spot the bandages wrapped around his own. What color are his eyes? She wonders, heady like smoke.
The little girl starts walking towards him, to the edges of the fire. The lemur on her shoulders tries to stop her. No, no, no, we are not supposed to go up to strange men, when will you listen, Elliana?
Ash catches in her hair, embers send flittering lanterns all around her. She moves through the crowd like a dancer, like her mother’s daughter. He would know if he saw her, he would know. The shadows the fire casts press against her, running through blonde locks with loving grace. And she is beside him, the glow of the fire is warm and comforting, his presence more so for reasons unexplained. “Do you want to help me with my offerings?” She asks, her voice is quiet on the night air, the soft whisper of moonlit crickets echoing in a nighttime chorus. She can taste the smoke and the heat on her lips.
And what a curse it is for a daughter to see her father and to not know him.
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Tenebrae does not know if his eyes are white any more. He supposes he shall never know, unless he asks someone. He might see if Elias would tell him what his eyes are like without the bandages. If it might ever be acceptable to remove them, or are they unsightly enough to keep wrapped up, forever?
It would come as no surprise to know that the reason the child comes to him is in wondering what his eyes might look like beneath his bandage. But that is not what she asks when she gets close to him.
The monk first hears the sounds of her footsteps and he turns toward the rustle she makes in the grasses. The glow of his crescent moon atop his brow limns the child in moonlight. If he had eyes still to see her with, he would note the way the light turns her body soft as a pastel beach beneath the moonlight. He would think her beautiful and look at her eyes that would remind him so much of her mother. Tenebrae would know then, exactly whose daughter she is, and he would revisit those confusion emotions again: jealousy, grief and relief that this child is not his.
But oh, if he had sight he would also see how her one limb is identical to his own. That… That would lead to emotions he is not ready for, it would lead to a realisation that all he felt before is misplaced, not needed.
So it is fortunate then that Tenebrae does not know that it is his daughter who stands before him, asking him to help her with her offerings. But, maybe some things are inevitable, for as he lets a smile find its place upon his lips and leans towards the child, agreeing to help her, he thinks what his daughter might have sounded like… if things were different.
“Of course I shall help you.” The monk says to the child, feeling how his magic embraces her small frame, how the shadows enjoy her presence. She must be Denoctian, he think, for his magic to enjoy her company so.
If only the Disciple had his sight, then he would see the way his shadows press upon her skin and know that she is kin. She wears his darkness, born into it, sculpted by it. Maybe neither father nor daughter know what his magic does. Maybe neither of them recognise the way in which his magic sings in her presence, the way the shadows crowd her and beg to be commanded by her and vow to guard her. Shadows slip through her blood, they pressed the golden half moon upon her shoulder, a mirror of his, turned gold by Elena’s unrelenting sunshine. Her light that drew Elliana’s father to her. A light the child holds like an eclipse: sunlight and midnight together as one.
“You shall have to tell me how to help you though.” The monk says to the child, a smile curling across his lips. “You might have spotted that I cannot see.” Tenebrae laughs lightly and then whispers to the little girl, “Are the flowers as beautiful as they said they would be?”
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
H
er mother told her a story once about the wind and the woman who fell in love with him. It was a long story, but it ends with the girl standing alone on a mountain, and the wind blowing half way around the world. It ends with them asking if she was sad, and her saying she knew he would be back, that the wind is such an unstoppable thing—it would tear down mountains and cross oceans to get to where it wants to go. They ask her how long she will wait. She said forever and a day, until a winter breeze tickles her ear, and sparkles snowflakes on her eyelashes.
Maybe this time is fortunate, this time where they know so little about one another, but stand beside each other in such peace that it feels as if they have known each other for ages. This time so unspoiled by what if and could have beens because none of them exist right now, not when that secret stays locked away, like the locket Elli once saw in a store window. (“I could keep a picture of you and papa in it.” Elli had told her mother.) This is a time of innocence.
He smiles.
She smiles back at him.
Elli doesn't remember, but a ghost told her about his eyes once, told a secret from loose lips. Maybe it is better today, maybe it is fortunate she does not know. For now, at least.
His shadows surround her, and maybe, she should be scared, any other child would be, any other child should be. But shadows are not merely patches of darkness to the girl—they are her birthright. “Do the shadows talk to you too?” She asks him gently, peering up at blue eyes, but she looks not to his bandages, but the moon on his forehead. She thinks about telling him about the moon on her shoulder, how it is Caligo’s blessing as her mother told her, but she says nothing because the flames have distracted her once more. What would have happened? What could have happened?
She is all to eager to instruct him what to do. Pressing her own slender shoulder into his, to tell him where she stands beside him, Elli leads him closer to the fire. He laughs, she laughs too. “I have, Dall.” She says, giving him a name that was once heard on the whispers of ghosts when she had opened her eyes and been unable to see in the darkness through the new moon. “We just take an offering,” she says, pulling one from the basket, “and put it onto the fire.” She says as if it is so simple, maybe because it is that simple. “They are,” she responds, throwing another on the fire and watching it as it crumbles into ash. “Have you been?” She asks. “I know you cant see them,” she adds, though it is not said with sorrow. “But you can feel them—in the fields, they feel like spring.”
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Tenebrae is silent as he considers the girl’s question. It is one he has begun to wonder about. In his silence he lets his magic whisper into his soul and his veins. Shadows run like the blood in his veins, they slip through his hear and his soul and hum with their knowing, their voices that as of yet have no words.
“No.” The monk murmurs at last, feeling how they reach for the child, how they surround her, press upon her skin as if it is a mere extension of his. She is familiar. Welcome. “No they do not speak, but, since I lost my sight, they have been changing.”
Gently he muses, gently he reliquishes his hold of them and waits… waits to see what they whisper over his skin, how they press into his senses and bring him joy and worry, or how they push and pull him this way and that.
Another moment of silence passes. Another moment Tenebrae steals to further feel how his shadows move, how they welcome the child and the way she stands relaxed within their embrace. “You are comfortable with the darkness,” He observes at last, a small smile curving up at his lips. The monk does not think for a moment that it could be because this child is his blood. That in her is the latent blessing of caligo, to which his shadows reach as they press upon the burnished bronze of her small frame.
The light of his crescent moon sigils shine upon her own, golden, crescent moon. It is a blessing he cannot see. A blessing that his tongue is not full of questions and his soul torn apart by deception. Instead, Tenebrae continues to stand, a stranger beside his daughter.
He follows her lead, shadows reaching into the basket, feeling across the flowers guiding him to one. His telekineses is clumsy without his sight. It takes not two but four attempts to draw an offering out of the basket. But he does at last.
The fire is easier, his has long felt the heat of it glowing across his skin, soldering the looser parts of him into something new, stronger, more whole. Tenebrae casts the offering into the flames, he hears how they hiss and spit sparks into the dark space before him.
“I have been.” The stallion says, ruefully. He made a flower crown for Maeve there - another girl. A child not his by blood but one who seems to come so close. Maeve gives him a taste of what might have been, if things were different, if he and Elena were not so alike as to let their hearts fall in two directions at once.
Oh and at her last comment. The monk smiles, warmed by her understanding, delighted that she knows that is how he communicates with the world around him now. Touch, sound, taste and smell was all he knew. How had he lived his life as a pauper in all other senses but sight? Each is so rich, he has come to realise how he has always been far wealthier than he realised.
His smile is identical to the girl’s. Or, maybe, hers is identical to his. He was the one who gave it to her, after all. Yet their twin smiles are a secret thing, lost to a blind father and a daughter who has never thought to question her parentage.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
E
lliana. Welcome to the world. Her father had told her. It is one of her earliest memories. And then he held her, held her in a way her mother never could, that no one every could. The way a father holds his daughter. He has been the only father she has ever known, she had never questioned her place in the world when she was able to snuggle closely beside her parents. Not until recently.
The shadows tell her things.
She can feel there is something different between the both of them. Sure stars live in the night, but they are still light, just like her parents.
And Elli is just so oh so tempted by patches of darkness she ought not wander into.
She is patient in his silence. It is only one of the similarities that was passed from father to daughter. Elli is quiet as she watches him, when he speaks. Not because she is shy, but because she has always been one to observe first and talk second. Her words are elegant but rare, the steady girl always content to observe and watch over engage.”How so?” She asks him, so curious because no one ever speaks of shadows to her. They lay forgotten as their eyes shut for the night, blind to them, but Elli knows. Oh how she knows. And she wonders why she does.
“I guess so,” she responds, oddly never having had the word for how she feels about the shadows before. “But sometimes they frighten me,” she admits, staring up at him with blue eyes even if he could not look back at her. Would he feel it? The icy, winter blue of her eyes settling against his own face. They frighten her sometimes, yes, when they yell, when they come to her on a full night. A bent neck lady at the end of her bed.
Maybe if she had been more like her mother and less like her father, Elli would have reached into the basket to pull one out for him. But she simply carefully watches with the practiced patience of a monk. Eyes follow the offering into the fire. “It’s perfectly splendid,” she says, talking about flowers.
She does not even have to look to know he is smiling, but maybe she should have, to the mirror staring back at her in a similar smile that fathers give their daughters. “I have heard sunflowers grow in the fields in the summer,” she says, adding another offering to the fire. “I think I should like to see them.” Her mother has told her enough about them, they have one in the window, but she has yet to see an entire field of suns. “Have you seen them before?” She thinks for a moment. “Can you tell me about summer?” She asks like such a child of winter. “Is it as warm and as bright as they say?” She thinks. “I do not know if I will like any of it—except the sunflowers.”
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
No one had ever been curious of his shadows like this child. Within the Order, darkness and shadow magic is all they know, it is how they exist. His peers no longer discuss the nature of their darkness, except for tactical reasons in fights or infiltration. Beyond the Night Order walls there are few who enjoy the consuming black of his magic. Most avoid the monks when they see them coming, their presence a black chasm in the streets, but for their sigils that glow atop each monk’s brow.
The girl makes him think of Elena and Boudika. The only two who have ever stepped into the dark of his magic, carelessly, bravely. There was something his shadow magic liked about each of them. An affection. But, with this child it ran deeper still. Maybe she was the descended blood of a banished monk?
Tenebrae is silent as he feels the way his shadows respond to the girl. They way they press upon her skin - not with want as they had with Elena or Boudika, not with ire as with Orestes, but with something akin to protectiveness and delight. He is sure then that this girl is born of the Night Order, but the birth of a child to a Disciple is a shameful thing. Already Tenebrae has learned to hold his tongue. His own shame binds it ever tighter. A wash of yearning slips like a cloud across the sun of his soul as he thinks of the little girl’s blood. It might have once been his.
The monk considers how his shadows have been changing. They form and unform before his eyes, without his command. He cannot see them, but feel their morphing. “It is difficult to describe,” Tenebrae murmurs, low, low and rich as whiskey, inebriated with thought and wonder. “It is almost like they are forming their own will. And they communicate with me now, they never have before.” He smiles a small perplexed thing. “I am not complaining though, it helps an old, blind man to get around.”
Beside him, the child possesses the peace of a dawn meadow dusted with winter’s first snow. There is a pleasant stillness that Tenebrae understands, enjoys. He should have known then. But he cannot yet hear what his shadows whisper along his skin and across hers. Mine.
Mine.
The truth is not yet Tenebrae’s to have and though he turns to her voice, into her gaze, he does not see Elena’s blue eyes that peer up from beneath his daughter’s sweeping, ivory hair. “Don’t let the shadows scare you.” He lowers his voice for her, “I do not think that is their intention. They like you too much.” And all he thinks of are morphous shadows. The monk does not dream for a moment how his magic and Elena’s combined into something all together more spiritual, more hauntingly beautiful and terrifying.
“I could tell you about summer, but I think some things are better lived.” His smile grows, softer, warmer. He thinks of the flower crown he made for Maeve. The flowers she so carefully picked. Tenebrae laughs softly. “I came with another little girl she is nearby and I am sure she would love to see the sunflowers too. Shall we find her and then we can discover the sunflower field together?”
Already his shadows are before him, pressing the path ahead. The monk follows them, slowly, each step carefully placed. He would lead her from the meadow, out into the next where Maeve waits for him to catch up.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
W
hisper. Whisper. Whisper. Whisper.
Whisper.
A ghost is here. Does he know?
It rests against Elli’s spine, and he tells a story in her ear. About a boy who stood there, newly born, dead mother, father as absent as shadows at noon. He took the sun from the sky and swallowed it down his throat. Did it burn? Elliana wants to ask the ghost that smiles behind her ear. But she doesn’t. Her mouth hangs open for a moment as if she too may swallow the sun when it rises. She knows she won’t. She may be her father’s daughter—she is also her mother’s and she swallows those shadows, enamored by their mystery and darkness.
Her eyes laugh before she does, lighting up with it before the sound comes chiming from her dark mouth. “You are not old,” she says. “I can tell,” she narrows blue eyes in thought. “Shadows move differently when they are old and weary,” she tells him and it is true. Those old ghosts, their shadows sigh and pull back, and grieve. But young shadows, they move, rattle the cage they have been trapped in, or dance freely amongst the shadows of the flowers. His does not quite dance, does not quite long to escape. She is not as attune to emotions as her empathetic mother, Elli longs to know more, about what his own darkness wants, what it searches for.
They like her too much. Elli does not realize how desperately she needed to hear it, and how she needed to hear it from her father and her father along. The weight of his words fold across her skin and nestles itself between shoulder blades, make her stand a little taller. He cannot see the smile that comes to rest across her face, but she hopes the shadows will tell him so.
She begins to follow him then, him and his shadows, through the light of the bonfire. “I can’t,” she suddenly says as her blood grows hot. And suddenly she wishes to run, to run the race her mother told her about, to stay away from. His shadows gave her this, they alighted wings upon her feet. “Goodbye, Dall,” she says and descends away from the fires and into the shadows once more—she finds now that she delights in the dim, dark rhythm of the night.
