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 does not need his magic here. Not when shadows already gather everywhere. They are found even in the razor sharp smiles of the feverish crowd who crow like ravens once did in Denocte.
He lets the shadows of the fight club sink upon him. They are nothing like his. These shadows are renegade violent, they seethe and smell of bloodlust and sweat. The very air trembles as if adrenaline pervades it. Maybe it does.
Tenebrae is a mirror of Castalla’s calm. The two warriors are the only calm ones here; the stillness of rocks amidst the rapids. The monk’s skin becomes saturated with the violence and his nerves tingle with the feel of violence that lays herself across his body. His torso knows this savage delight, he has felt it upon the training field.
Slowly the monk moves through the shadows at the edges of the club, where the crowds are thin, where people laugh with other business on their mind. But nothing else his upon his mind this night. He watches the way she fights, how her body ripples blows she receives and the strikes she lands in turn.
The man knows her body, he remembers the scars upon it. He watches as new ones are made. Castalla is a portrait of brutality and yet it glows upon her. Even as she pins her adversary to the ground she towers above them in the manner that a lion commands its prey. Then, she slips away without fanfare, her audience is too much of a frenzy to see the way she walks, like a silently through the crowds.
Tenebrae might think her phantom, the way her pale skin glows. But she lives, he sees it on the scars of her body. In darkness he moves toward her, he remembers the way her blue eyes watched the candles of the souls. Neither he nor she could ever light enough. He knows her pain.
He finds her side, silently. They move together, darkness and light, equal and yet so utterly different. And yet the same. Tenebrae turns his white-bright eyes upon her, looking at the crimson stains of her new scars.They are bright and stark upon her body. He can see the way her skin flushes with bruising. “You need not have come all the way here, Castalla. There is a perfectly suitable fighting den at home.” His lips are curling with a small smile. His voice is low, it does not lift above the din for her, it does not need to. They have always exchanged words in the quiet and the den seems to pause, to breathe just long enough for the warrior to hear the monk.
Then, there is a roar, rising to a crescendo as another fighter takes to the stage. Sand stirs and all the air fills with dank dust. Yet through the dust, the violence, the savage delight, a slightly pious man watches an ever-so-unpious woman.
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