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
Would it comfort Elena to know how well she hides her secrets?
As she stands, elvin, in the gloaming her face is nothing but serene. It is porcelain upon which the twilight carves her from moonlight. It paints the careful angles of her face and then sends embers of the setting sun down to illuminate along the angles of her cheeks, her nose.
The girl turns her face to him and there is no trace of the sorrow and heartache she keeps locked between her teeth and heart. Her round eyes move to watch him, no longer drinking in the scene beyond him. His fills her foreground, the dark of his magic billowing like wings, gathering like ominous clouds in a volatile sky. Yet her eyes find his, yet she smiles and no, still there is no trace of sorrow there.
His eyes illuminate her face in all the places the setting sun does not. The burnished gold of her skin captures it all and burns ever bright. She turns bronze in the sunlight, bronze like Boudika, like the sun that tumbles out of the sky. Tenebrae is ready for it. He waits for the falling of the sun and the endless rise of darkness.
His prayers dry up upon his lips when she smiles and when she speaks. What use are prayers here? He should chastise himself for such a thought. But there are so many things Tenebrae should be doing that he is not. The tight pull of skin across his whip-scarred spine reminds him. The twinge of skin at his throat where Boudika bit him reminds him of all the things he has done that he should not.
He is a sinner, this man before her and yet she smiles and hides her secrets better than he. There are better things to learn from girls than the soft of their skin and the taste of their lips. They hide secrets better than he and they are enough to tempt a god out of his throne.
And they want to dance.
Tenebrae has seen the way Denocte dances. He has stepped into the tangle of music and limbs and felt how alien the sensation of dance is across his body. Long has he heard his brothers laugh when their captain likened fighting to a dance. Yet here, when she smiles at him, Tenebrae knows the battle is not amidst the dancers, it is within himself. It is a violent war.
He smiles though he bleeds within, though his skin feels tight across his bones at the idea of dance. He does not know how to move without a sword in his grasp and a foe before him. He smiles and darkness laughs across his lips. “You are not the first to expect a dance from me.” Tenebrae says as he illuminates her with his gaze, sending the darkness of his magic fleeing from where it draws sigils across her face. “I am afraid I must disappoint you. I do not dance.” He pauses and his gaze drifts from her to the altar hidden in the shadow of the forest wall. “I am made for other things, Terrastellan.” And yet -
Please, She says with her eyes still wide, still deeper than any ocean he had dared to stand in. He does not look close into her pool-like eyes for fear of drowning. She is moving, the music there in the bend of her knees and the sway of her shoulders, her hips. She appeals to the night, to a sky too beautiful to allow them to stand idly beneath.
What is the harm?
He follows her with his gaze as she steps beyond him and stands upon the cusp of the dancers, like a girl upon the edge of a cliff, her arms outspread, ready to fall, laughing, into the great open. She hides her wings, Tenebrae knows. Faerie breathes along her spine and chases the words of litanies out of his mind.
He breathes out and it is as smoke from a dragon’s maw. Darkness curls and drifts out, becoming lost in the shift of bodies. Slowly he lets his gaze return to the girl beside him, “A dance for a name then, but you will have to teach me.”
And the Disciple wonders about all the ways he will discover dancing is nothing at all like fighting.
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