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
This is not the first time she has come to him with blood upon her lips.
Tenebrae smells it upon the air and where it lays itself upon his tongue. It tastes of metal and sea-salt and life ebbing away with the tide. He takes a breath so full of sea-brine air. He listens to the keening of the sea, so like a straining violin.
He listens to his feet as they pad upon the shifting sands. In the moonlight each grain is as ash and bone, the curve of the beach like a rib reaching out from the crags of its earth body and out into its starlight blood of sea and spray.
She is a chip, a dark fracture in the unblemished perfection of this midnight beach of bone. The seal falls limp from her lips and lies open and broken upon the sand. Its blood seeps out in a dark, dark stain - black as ink. He might have faltered - if he were any other man.
But he is not any other man.
There is nothing normal about Tenebrae; from his creation to his monastic life to the magic that runs through his ebony veins. There is no amount of blood that can sicken his constitution. The Stallion’s eyes lift from her mauled catch, rising up through the blood that falls from her lips - again, again. But this is not her blood, Tenebrae knows the smell of the blood in her veins and this is too full of blubber and fear.
His gaze finds the curve of her lips that reaches and reaches and reaches. They stretch beyond where they once stopped, they grow long and thin and sharp as a knife edge. Ah. There are no thorns between her teeth now. Her teeth are thorns sharp and drenched with a hunter’s prize.
Here he now sees the low, low crimson - once like fire that now glows like embers. Her fire is burned out, drenched in salt-water and kelpie-magic. Ah yes, the monk knows what she has become. Her gaze is like thorns along the muscles of his throat, his spine, digging, digging. Oh Boudika.
“Hello warrior-girl.” Tenebrae murmurs lightly as he stops a distance from her and her quarry. His darkness reaches beyond him. She dares to reach and reach and touch with bold fingers along the curve of the smile that splits Boudika’s cheeks. Darkness cuts itself upon the points of sharp, predator teeth. “When did you swap your flowers and trident for the ocean and teeth?” His voice is darkness that pours like whiskey into her ears, into the space between them.
The ocean pulls at its girl’s slender limbs and the Stallion’s darkness plays with the moonlight upon the crests of its waves. Shadows fall into the scultped lines of her face, carving her finer and finer, more angular, more predatory. The sea frames its prize and breathes its victory out across her skin and into his ears.
Wariness sings a song of salt and smoke in his heart - his heart that beats its rhythm out for her, for her, for her. He thinks she can hear it, in the way she looks at him, no longer coy but wild and deep and ravenous.
She was the girl who opened his pledge-blind eyes. Who roused temptation in his soul and had him strangling himself with regret.
“Ah, Boudika.” He sighs with a smile and a laugh, for her, for him. “How am I to defend against teeth?” And in his voice is the clash of trident and shadows and upon his lips is a smile as black as the ocean’s deep.
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