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 should not have come. This is no place for a monk.
Tenebrae skirts the dancers whose silhouettes (framed by fire and moonlight) tangle in songs and delight. Horses pass him in masks made with wild flowers, roots and vines and leaves that still echo the forests from which they were plucked. Eyes gleam bright with the mischief of Night and revelry laughs in the spaces between bodies.
Conflicted, wounded, the warrior monk makes his way toward the small shrine made to Caligo. It is upon the edge of the meadow with the trees for her cathedral beams and the setting sun for her lamplight. The day dies in hues of bronze, lilacs and burnished gold, crimson bleeds across the sky. If all the woodland is her cathedral tonight, the sky is her stained glass window. Tenebrae stands, bathed within its tumultuous, violent, light. It hurts to look upon it and he wonders if, when the sun at last touches the horizon, the sky will shatter as it turns to smothering black.
The monk kneels, hard earth beneath his bones. He prays for all the souls who gather beneath Caligo’s emerging moon. He prays for redemption - that she might turn him again from his sins. Yet each word grows a little more shallow and his heart becomes a little more hardened. Darkness hisses in his ears, words that echo sinner! in his soul. The darkness is a lover as it curls about him, shrouding the monk with the gift of Caligo’s magic and yet it parts along his spine, exposing to the night sky (and all who see him) the whip marks that mark him a blasphemer.
He aches with kneeling and with praying, finishing his prayers with an unsettling mix of piety and disinterest. Already his mind is drifting, already it is snagged like a lamb in the thorn bush of temptation. He rises (though he is continually falling from his hallowed place, like an angel from its position beside his god). Like Icarus, Boudika once whispered in his ear. He hears the kelpie as if she is there, as if the darkness veils the crimson of her body from him.
Gluttonous of her, sickened, he turns from the altar and the dark swarms upon him. They hide his silver skin and the half moon sigils of his Order. Only his eyes gleam with light and they grow brighter as his ire builds, as he drinks in the light of the sun. He is a Stallion made to Swallow the Sun, a Disciple! Yet he is as tempted as Adam. His ire builds in the heart of the darkness that shrouds him like armour. It swallows the light around him, feeds into his glowing veins, into the white of his eyes. Light succumbs to his ire as he swallows it down. Darkness blooms about him. Horses part before the monk, before one of Caligo’s Disciples. He moves and still a litany is upon his furious lips. Words pour out as he fills up the empty parts of himself with prayer.
He does not see the girl at first. The girl with her golden skin and wide, keen eyes that drink in the magic of the festival. Tenebrae knows it is a heady wine and her skin seems to glow with the energy of it. It is that which captures the attention of the Disciple. He pauses from where he walks in darkness and wicked, white light. He turns the glow of his starbright eyes upon her. She is as bright as the torches that herald the coming bonfires. Solis’ setting sun halos her, sends sparks along the curve of her perfect plaits and turns them wilder. The night turns her as unkempt as a faerie and then ever wilder, wilder.
“Welcome to Denocte,” The monk says, breathing darkness along the parts of her that glow. He knows she is not of the Night Court, for no girl of night knows the light of day like Elena does. Framed in twilight, liminal and smelling of wild cliff-side flowers Terrastella sings from her sunflower skin. “What is your name, Terrastellan?” He dares not look at all the ways her body is soft as petals, for all the ways it curves, feminine and alluring. She is bright, bright and by the gods the Stallion is ravenous. Tenebrae keeps his white-bright gaze upon the blue of hers as moonlight and twilight meet in the setting of the sun.
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