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
He sees the copper of her through the thick throng of dancing bodies. They move about her like a whirlpool, spinning, spinning. Tenebrae does not move, though he sees the way she dances: intoxicating, alluring, hungry.
Her lips press onto golden flesh. Her partner smiles dark and pleased and full of want. It took too long for anyone to ask her to dance. It took a night of dancers skirting her, watching this copper creature of danger and delight, before anyone was brave enough. The Stallion had watched it all. He had seen the way she moved through the crowds wanting and resisting. Firelight gleamed in her crimson eyes - they danced like rubies precious and wicked.
Where was the blood? The monk looks for it, he waits for it. He waits for his warrior-girl’s grip on control to loosen - and then he could intervene. But she does not. Ah, this strong-willed girl! Instead she dances and her eyes fill with savage desire. The stallion, gold and bright, is as soft as fruit in her grasp. They are intimate as they dance, their bodies woven together with shadows and firelight. But will this stranger end up like the seal upon the beach that Boudika pinned Tenebrae down beside? His own throat twinges with the memory. Her bite is now a tattoo of white, proud flesh. Even the scar is sharp and wicked as the teeth that made it. It reminds him of her. It is the largest badge of his sinfulness.
The moonlight and firelight are as soft across her skin as the kiss she continues to press upon the base of the stallion’s throat. She picked (or maybe he picked her) a man as gold, as bright as the sun. Tenebrae’s hunger rises. It prowls behind his teeth as they press together tight, tight like a cage. His shadows billow with ire, they slink and stalk restless with something he dares not name. It is something dangerous, something that festers within him. It is something a monk should be too pious to ever feel.
But Boudika strips his piety from him with every passing moment.
Tenebrae has not genuflected enough. He has not crawled nor prayed to Caligo enough for penitence because desire still slips like lightning through his body. It is enough to make him mad, it is enough to make numb the tight skin of his whip-torn back. It is enough to forget that he is a man who should not want - should not lust. Would no amount of flagellation remove his want of Boudika?
Then her eyes find him. Boudika’s look is the same one that threw gasoline upon his ire as she bathed like a nymph in the Night Order’s sacred pool. Tenebrae does not move, he is not alive with rage as he had been then when he begged her to get out, when he promised to deliver retribution on her for her insolence. Yet he holds her gaze, crimson into white. Blood into starlight.
No longer is her attention on the golden stallion she presses her lips to. A stallion as gold as the sun. Was it fate that chose a golden stallion to ask her to dance? Would she have said no if he were not the colour of the sun - the sun that all Stallions are made to Swallow. Was this mockery? Was this her way to draw him in? Or was this mere coincidence?
The monk does not know. Girls were complex creatures and no matter how much he thinks he begins to know his, she keeps surprising him, she keeps him in the dark.
His girl. His. He is already damned.
Tenebrae prowls forward. Darkness billows, it reaches with groping fingers along the tables of wares the merchants sell. He plucks something from a table as he passes, replacing it with its value in coins. Boudika makes him many things, but a thief is not one of them.
Then he is parting the crowd as he moves toward her. Darkness reaches for the kelpie as it shrouds its master. Shadows breathe along all the places where sweat darkens her torso. It moves along the contours of her body, remembering. Yet Tenebrae looks only into her eyes as he stops beside the wanton couple.
“There are many sweet things to eat this evening.” He remarks softly, casually, lightly. The Stallion’s gaze switches from Boudika to the sun-bright stallion. He smiles, dark sinister, full of hunger. His sigils brighten, laying light across Boudika and her partner. Tenebrae wants, to fight, to eat, to have her.
Slowly he returns his attention to Boudika, “And some of us seem hungrier than others.” Oh Tenebrae sees her struggle, sees the way her lips press tight into an unwavering kiss, barely a breath from feasting. He weaves one of his purchases from the merchant’s stall into the golden stallion’s mane: a pomegranate aril.
“Will he really satisfy you for the night, Boudika?”
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