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
They said it was something akin to dying when Caligo blessed an initiate, marking them a Disciple. It was everything they were made for. It was everything they had trained for.
Yet it was nothing they could ever, truly, prepare for.
They all gathered, where darkness billows, in the thin place where divinity and mortality meet, in the edges of Caligo’s sacred temple. Veneror is quiet about them, cradling them deep within her core where magics bloom wild and free.
Tenebrae is young, his body bearing the dark half moon sigils. He has watched, so greedily, for many years, the elder monks with their glowing half-moon sigils. The boy has waited for this day, the one moment that tips him from a colt into a stallion. A simple citizen of Denocte transformed into one of her monks.
They make him swear. Oh they make him swear so many things. His vows are bold upon his tongue. He has known for the last three years, each and every vow he will take. He has ruminated upon them in the darkest moments of the night. He has never for a moment thought that he would struggle, that his wayward nature would overwhelm him. Reckless is he as he speaks his vows, his dark eyes twinkling with the fire of the stars. How many times had the elder monks warned of the challenges, the temptations that awaited him? That his life would be full of remembering what it meant to kneel before Caligo and pledge his life to her.
But he is a boy, young and reckless. A man upon the first rung of adulthood. He has a long climb and his ladder is broken and tattered, its grips lined with oil. Everything is set to make him fall. He just does not know how far and how hard it will be. He does not yet know how changed he will become.
Caligo knows.
And yet she presses the black of her magic into him. It is black flames that scold his insides, that purge from him every part of his soul that is not Dencotean. He hears the screams of other boys, as her magic splits them apart. As their shadowed sigils burn open, open like maws parting, reaching greedily up to swallow the starlight. Tenebrae feels the same pain, yet it is his eyes that burn the most. Already their lovely dark, their chocolate warmth is gone. They turn milky grey and then they burn with all the starfire that his new magic swallows from the stars.
Now he knows the agony of what it is to be a monk. Now he knows the price of his vows and slowly he begins to think that his debt might not yet be paid. With his new white eyes, glowing through the shadows that begin to seep out from his soul, he stares at the sombre gazes of the other monks.
“A prayer,” The Commander declares whilst all the boys are still screaming, sweating, sobbing. Darkness pools, it whispers soothing words in the new monks’ ears, presses its cooling magic like palms against their wet skin. “We give thanks to Caligo for our new monks.”
And all of Tenebrae’s tongue is dry. The words stick and do not fall. He does not pray. He does not give thanks.
@Random Events
Word count:555
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