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 was a special day for Tenebrae.
As the sun sets over white snow, turning it to glittering gold, the Disciple stepped into the shadow of the old cave’s mouth. Its lips were carved into an intricate arch, similar to a bow pulled and ready to cast and arrow into flight. It is a half-moon smile with lips drawn down at its corners like a lament, like a prayer.
There are prayers upon Tenebrae’s lips. The thanksgivings echo from his mouth into the black of the cave’s maw. But beyond its maw the cave immediately opens into a chamber large and grandly carved. Sigils of the Night Goddess and carvings of her Stallions are drawn across the walls. Tenebrae moves toward them, a moth to the flame of their story. He needs no light to see where they hide in darkness. The light of his half-moon sigil lights them and they glow as if freshly etched.
At once his soul is at peace, at once his magic surges with belonging. All the walls dance with the swell of his magic. They become a waltz of shadows as if a great gathering of darkness was here where shadows undulate and weave and glorify the walls with frenzied adulation.
How long does Tenebrae take to move through the atrium? How long until he meanders through each and every tunnel that reaches like veins deep into the heart of Denocte’s mountains. With a mountain as its ceiling and a goddess’ darkness filling every inch of this sacred temple, there is no part of this place that does not echo with sacrament and memory.
Tenebrae brings moonlight into the dark of the caves. He no longer knows if the sun still lingers above the horizon or if it has be swallowed by the sea. Tenebrae does not care. He does not even stop to think. And why would he when all of his dreams and desires have been so filled with this dream: to find the abandoned mountain halls of the Disciples. To reclaim what was theirs and call it home.
This is perfection. This has made all the whip-wounds across his back worth their every sting and bloody tear. Tenebrae is welcomed into the heart of the mountain temple, to where the mountain opens up like a crater to the endless sky above. Trees cling to the lips of the stone circle. The reach out across the open air and gasp in the fresh air and light that tumbles down, down, down.
There is a roaring in this chasm with its open roof. There is a river that cascades down and down and down. A mist rises in a silver moonlit sigh where it endlessly empties into the pool below. Rainbows burst in halos as moonlight shatters the mist. The voice of the waterfall is a symphony of litanies that rise in a choral chant to fill the vacant cave. There is no inch of the space here that is not holy. The water channels from the pool, turning from silver to inky black as it drifts into the shadow of the chasm walls. Its water is shadow-filled and Tenebrae moves toward it, he dares to lower his lips, to smell, to taste.
And he would have. He would have blasphemed then if a worse sin did not rise from the water incarnate and resplendent. Lunar halos frame her as the water clings, crystalline to her skin. The sight of her is salvation and condemnation. She is pomegranates and a cage. Boudika rises as his gaoler with her smile lit by moonlight as it cuts along her cheeks.
At his throat, her bite calls from all the places her teeth once were. They beg to remember, healing tissues itch and burn. The Disciple breathes a hiss like a serpent for his sin. Already Tenebrae’s stomach is dirty with dust for how she makes him crawl. He goes to her, to the water’s edge where she stands in the circle of moonlight, dappled by the shadows of trees and vines, winter flowers and ivy. Snow begins to fall as petals and never has Tenebrae seen anything more holy, or blasphemous.
His every whip-wound remembers and cries out in its anguish. It bids him remembers the bite of a whip and the agony of his sins. But the monk is there, holding her in his gaze as though she were in chains. “Boudika.” He says her name, low with a lion’s growl - already his tongue knows the taste of it. So suddenly his lips remember more than the weight of her name between them, but the hot of her skin and the salt of her sea. A soft hiss, from the man with the dusty belly, “How dare you.” It is nearly a whisper, furious and coarse as whispering gravel. It burns as hot as the red of her skin - though she is nearly black as coal in the moonlight. He knows how she burns like embers, even submerged beneath the waves. Boudika is lava and the Arma mountains cradle her deep, deep within their core.
“Get out,” the cave sings with his demand and the gravity of her crime.His toes reach over the water’s edge, but he does not get down into its cool and sacred deep. Nor does he step back when rocks tumble loose and shatter the perfect mirror of the pool’s surface. He leans, less a monk and more a god, out across the water as his neck reaches and he stares at her beneath the wild black of his fringe. Tenebrae’s eyes blaze as stars, his sigils glowing sharp as scythes.
“Now.”
They say she was born from the sea.
And that she is just as lonely
and just as willing to swallow the world.
And that she is just as lonely
and just as willing to swallow the world.
@Boudika
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