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
I can take care of you now.
When he left her, her words still tumbling over and over the dunes of his laugh, it was easy to think he could avoid her. Elena’s suggestion was dangerous. The more he ruminated upon it, the deeper he realised its connotations ran.
Yet Tenebrae has already learned that Fate has her own strange way of making her will come to pass. It is what brought him to the edge of the sea as a new spring storm reached her arms out, throwing waves upon the shore. It is what brought him down to the bottom of the sea within Boudika’s jaws. It is what saw him spending the night in a cave talking. It was Fate that saw him far, far from the Order’s keep.
It is Fate, he convinces himself. Though each time he knows that he is weak, he knows that he yearns, he longs and he cannot resist. It has all begun to feel as vital as breathing, as necessary as living. He cannot resist, he longs to survive and oh, he is not sure he can ever live his life as it was before: absent of touch.
Touch. In all of its wonderful and terrible capacities, Tenebrae has come to desire it. Need it.
Yet it is touch that brings him into Terrastella. It is what has caused the open wound about his throat. It is deep and crimson and throbs with infection. His skin still recalls the bite of crocodile teeth. His body still sings with Boudika’s violence and the dark of her lonely eyes.
He had left it, for the night he spent with Boudika in the cave, the wounds they inflicted upon each other growing dry and stiff in the sea-salt air. The monk had hopped he might have healed. That is wound would mend without a need to visit a brother for healing. But Fate is not so kind. His wound festers, another lasting memory of Boudika to match the scar she left upon his throat from her first bite.
It had been days. Tenebrae had left it too long. Unable to explain his injury to his brother yet unwilling to go to Elena he had let time drift slowly by. His tissues did not knit themselves back together. They lay open and weeping. The infection spread, into his blood. Lethargy came slow and lazy and begged him to stop, stop, stop.
So he walked and he walked and he stumbled and he tripped his way to Terrastella. There is nothing grand about the monk as he arrives this day. He comes with sweat slick across his skin, with a wound raging like a dragon’s maw. It bleeds bloody tears and weeps with white tears filled with infection. His magic reaches out as he wades through the swamp towards the hospital. It’s fingers drift through the tree-top hospital. It winds down corridors and calls, calls, calls for the sun. It arrives beside her like a blackbird with feathers made of wispy darkness. The shadow bird watches Elena work. It does not speak to her for it has no voice, but it waits until she sees it and opens its beak in a silent cry. It summons her as it rises back into the air, an urgency in its wings. It leads her back through the corridors and out into the open where trees stand cathedral tall.
Tenebrae stands a short way away beneath the shadow of thicket. His shadows bloom still, though they are turning like flowers growing limp. His stormy skin is slick with sweat. His white-bright eyes are a hazy moon’s glow, their eyelids low. He is a half of a man, too filled with infection. He sighs and it is like groaning. “I tried not to come...” The Disciple says as the sun-girl steps close. The blackbird flies into the dark that shrouds him and disappears, its work is done.
He moves to briefly press his damp brow to hers as they had done before. But oh he is weak. There is a slow, delirious smile that curls his lips and darkness blooms like black flowers in the corners of them. Laboured are his breaths as he draws away and lets his eyes roam across the gold of her skin, as if the light of her might vanquish the festering germs in his wound. “...But the gods conspire against me, Elena. Say-” Rough, like sandpaper, his voice is friction in the air, across the shell of her ears and the soft of his tongue. “-are you true to your word? I think I need your help.” With that, the last of his energy, he falls to his knees before her.
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