It may have been different, had he chosen any other weapon save the one she herself has used to gut so many of her kind.
It might have been different, if she did not know intimately the way a true trident would puncture the muscle of the breast and lodge in the sternum, just so—the way extreme force was required to dislodge it from bone, from the evenly spaced narrows of the ribcage. The way it utterly submerged itself into the body; the way it sought the heart, the lungs.
It might have been different, if—
If—
If she were just a girl, playing a game; but such complexity is something she is now incapable of. The intricacy insults her; a tiger is no plaything; a tiger will not be caressed, tamed, only feared, only admired. She thinks it with white-hot rage. She thinks it even as he rises from the sand to follow her, his shadows both a cloak and a promise, and her teeth click against one another. Her tail lashes; her hooves carve grooves into the soft sand, as she kicks at air, as she tosses her wild head.
Does he not realise even his love of darkness does not dim the light of his blood? Boudika is familiar now with the way his shadows eat the light, wherever it may be; she is familiar with the way they encase the scene, abysmal and heavy, as if reminding them both of their own mortality. His shadows are the darkness of death; the promise of forever.
It was not a game, the Disciple murmurs. Yet he had taunted her; not with blows, which might have been acceptable. Not with words, enticing and inviting. No. He had taunted her with a touch as soft as a butterfly’s wing. He does not meet her eyes and Boudika makes a sound in the back of her throat, nearly like the chuff of a cat. She does not believe him. Her chest aches where his hoof struck him; Boudika feels the hot cascade of blood down her breast and wonders if the pain is also her injured pride.
Does he not know how new the sea is on her?
It might had been forgivable, had she not told him.
Does he not know, how badly she wanted to consume?
I am sorry.
Boudika wants to believe him. His shadows undulate; his shadows twist and reach but do not quite touch her, and there is a bit of tragedy in that. Boudika edges away, away, away, the sea is licking at her heels again. There is something in her stomach darker than hunger—she does not know if it is fear.
You could have killed him, something whispers. Did you know this is a part of your new nature? The temptation to feast on more than seal-flesh?
His voice comes back to her. Well then, I had better know what I am up against. Did she even know? Boudika had wanted him to touch her so badly; had wanted to know the exact feel of his throat in more ways than one. Her eyes are drawn to it again, less like a predator and more like an anxious girl.
Listen,
listen.
Do you hear the heart beating?
I am just a foolish man who hungers for more than the sun.
The words bring to mind prison bars; they remind Boudika of the sin slants of sunlight that entered and with them, the sound of the sea. Orestes always just out of reach; the way the sea used to sing to him, but not to her, and now it is a constant whisper in the back of her mind.
Shhh, shhh, shhh she soothes.
And Boudika listens. She listens, because her entire life has been temptation. She knows; she knows. After all, has she not committed the greatest sin of all? Does Vercingtorix’s letter not remind her of it, and Amaroq’s death?
You are one of them.
She has betrayed her own origin; she has betrayed it for something else, something that fills every corner of her soul with the free vastness of the sea.
Perhaps Boudika recognises a bit of that struggle when he whispers, You never said what I tasted like.
Do you want to know, Tenebrae?
Do you want to know how much I liked it when you touched me,
how glad I am I did not kill you?
His laugh is the same sound that chided within her for years; and perhaps this is why Boudika’s ears come forward; her tail quits lashing; and step-by-step she closes the distance between them.
She presses the soft of her nose against his wound; traces it up, along the line of his jugular and then the sharp, handsome angle of his jaw. A molten line; symbolic of all the suns he has devoured, still burning inside of him. Her bloodied lips are against his ear now. Boudika whispers:
“Tenebrae…have you heard the story of Persephone? The god of death stole her from the above-world and Persephone’s mother, the goddess of fertility, went into a mourning so deep the world ceased to grow.” Boudika knows she is too close; and perhaps she is playing her own game now, enticed as she is with her rage.
She will make him sorry.
Boudika’s breath ghosts his ear, his neck, his cheek as she continues: "The king of gods demanded Persephone returned, or else the world would end; but the god of death refused to let her go. He fed her six pomegranate seeds, as at the beginning of Time the Fates had declared that whoever consumed food or drink in the underworld would be bound there for eternity. But the kind god of death agreed to let her stay six months in the above-world… After that, the pomegranate became a symbol for fertility, and for death.”
It is only then Boudika withdraws, pushing past him, one brusque shoulder against his own. She trots toward the sea; leaping, bounding, bucking. Once she reaches the tide, chest-deep, she turns and laughs.
The sound is the high bell of the wind, the gull, the dolphin, the wave.
“You tasted like Persephone’s pomegranate, Tenebrae.”
Perhaps that means I am Bound to you, Boudika thinks but does not say.
Because the sea is calling; the sea is in her ears; and it is time for her to go.
Boudika dives beneath the waves and washes his blood clean of her mouth.
But the taste lingers. Oh.
How the taste lingers.
@Tenebrae || “speech”
