T E N E B R A E
On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells
and in my heart: all Hells
She is so easy to hear in this unnatural still of a world stopped from spinning. Nothing revolves here, all the island is as still as a painting but Tenebrae has never seen one as intricate as this. Never has he seen paint flowers that he can brush his lips over, nor a painted world he could step within.
The silence might have been oppressive, it might have made his throat ache to fill the void with noise. Yet as his laughter dies and she replaces it with her being, her plucking - no, ripping - of flowers he only marvels at the sounds that each living horse can make. Did they always make so much noise? He hears the yielding of the branch, he hears the crunch of it between her teeth.
He sees the battle of it upon her ivory lips.
The girl, the creature, that emerges from the brush is a piece of the sun. She is the wild of the sunset, brilliant in the violence of her skin’s hue. All of her gleams bright as a ruby, savage as blood. She was not content to just rip a sharp stem of a plant, but a piece of the sun right out of its too-still sky. Was she a child of Icarus? Was she the sun he was made to swallow? Tenebrae’s soul ascends in keen delight.
With all the bold pride of a Solterran she steps into the black shadow of the Night Order’s conjuring. No longer is she bright as a raging sunset, but her skin turns as deep as maroon.The white of her face is a pool of moonlight. Every balletic step she takes into the deeper dark of his shadows find her tumbling deeper into a chasm of black with only Tenebrae at its heart. Darkness picks at every sliver of light that gleams along her skin, hungry as a wolf. If this girl is a sun then oh how his magic calls to swallow everything of her being.
Boudika. Her name fills their vacuum of dark and it falls as bold and fearless from her lips as a kiss. Slowly his skull tilts as he drinks in the contrast of her. At her side a trident, that gleams in the light of his sigils and sings with a sharpness that vows to slice his shadows into two. But upon her head and along the slender curve of her throat are flowers woven as soft as a caress into the gossamer of her hair. Her skin is the bright of the sun, a crimson that stirs his magic with its sunbright daring. It is a colour that rouses his soul and lays a wicked, violent and ready smile along his lips. At his side shadows form into sword, fleeting but there, then gone and then there again… over and over that sword forms and reforms. He lifts the shadow sword to point at her as his skull tilts, playful and bold as a raven.
“Boudika,” Tenebrae murmurs her name back to her, his voice slick as ink, as deep as the darkness they stand within. “Sounds like a warrior queen’s name.” Pointedly Tenebrae’s eyes trail along the sharp tines of her trident, each one a cut upon his gaze as the blades gleam in the light of his gaze.
But for every part of her that is bright as the sun and wild as a sunset, her skin smells like the deep dark of Denocte. The tip of his blade reaches to lightly touch the dark groove where her jaw meets her throat. In tandem his muzzle reaches to smell the stars that cling to her skin. “A girl painted like the sun with the smell of night upon her body.” The monk muses lightly, his starlight eyes roaming across her face. Darkness casts the lines of her face into sharper array and he lets his gaze run along each shadowed groove - drawn to each like a magnet. “Are you a friend, or foe of Denocte?” Tenebrae asks her, a grin curling along the curve of his raven lips. He knows the smell of Denocte, he can taste the Markets upon her skin. He is disappointed for not fight. Yet...Yet he keeps the blade angled toward her throat, lets his gaze lower again to her lips, glittering with her blood like gems. He feels how the darkness shivers, how it hungers and demands for home.
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