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
Candles flicker, reflecting liquid gold light along the ebony marble. Silver veins run through the stone, some like lightning in the pitch of night and others like rivers cutting through black glaciers. It all gleams in the candlelight dangerous, wicked and holy.
But the golden light is not the only one that gleams across the black rock of the altar frontal. A triad of half-moons glow brightly, reflected from the monk who kneels before it. As the woman painted Lyr with crimson paint that oozes a mask across his face like blood across a battlefield, so Tenebrae’s prayers fell like a mask over him. The words hang in the air, invisible and yet palpable. The air falls still as the sacrament of words tumble from his lips, sinful, hopeful of redemption.
But it is no goddess who finds her monk this night. No, neither does Tenebrae expect her. Yet he prays all the same, with his words pouring like whiskey from his throat, gold and warm and rough. The shadows about him breath and exhale. They swell with the air in his lungs and shrink as the air slips from his lungs, peeling from him like smoke from a dragon’s maw.
Lyr comes, a silver hunter haloed in moonlight as all celestial things are. But oh his eyes, Tenebrae does not look and so he does not know how they glow as ruby bright as the mask that obscures his face. The stone floor rings with his approach and the shadows swell with the Disciple’s breath, but they do not stop there. They grow and they grow and cradle the candlelight, until it is only they, as pinpricks of gilded light.
Still the monk’s prayers do not slow, nor their melody falter. The rhythm of his chant is hypnotic, all the marble of the shrine chimes with it. It is almost enough to drown out the way Lyr moves. Tap, like a hunter, tap, tap, tap down the steps toward Tenebrae. Again and again, tap, tap, tap until the starlight boy stops beside him.
Would you not rather be enjoying the festivities?
Lyr asks into the simmering black. There is a pause, the weight of it is a boulder between them. It is the size of a dragon, great and ominous. Chaos brews within it and yet the monk does not falter in his prayers until they are done. When they are, when the vestiges of them fade into a holy silence, only then does Tenebrae lift his head. He has never been distrubed from his prayers before and now is no different.
He opens his eyes and the white gold glow of them limns the petals of a rose lain out as a gift for Caligo. “Festivities are no place for a monk,” the Disciple says softly and without a trace of sadness. Yet, oh, delve a little deeper and remorse pools where his heart beats strong. It squirms with guilt and sends its poison pouring through his veins. No, festivities are no place for a monk though he had trailed a girl there and danced with another. He would not again. “We should focus ourselves on higher, divine things,” Tenebrae tells the quiet man (but no more than he tells himself). Still the monk has not looked up, nor straightened his body from where it is lowered, genuflecting before the presence of his goddess.
But when he rise, it is like the moon in the deep of the gloaming and the darkness that cradles its ascent. They are of similar height these two men and yet in all other ways they are opposite, darkness and light, one god-fearing and the other not. Tenebrae’s gaze trails from the stallion’s ruby eyes, it trails the intricate brush lines of the man’s painted mask. The long bridge of his nose, the angles of his cheeks are sharp as swords, “Would you not rather be there too?” The Stallion asks at last as he moves beyond the stranger to extinguish the candles between them.
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