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
Incense still clings to his skin as the ghosts of prayers across his body. The scent of holiness presses itself upon the lavender of her skin as if she is a galaxy, as if upon her body is the string that holds existence together.
The monk looks closer, studies her with the somber gaze of a man who suspects she might be something other. She is.
There is nothing of Novus upon her skin. There is no smell that he can place. All of her is different, her body spun together by a different world. A separate existence. Yet she stands as normal as a star plucked out from the sky, her body the twisted colours of galaxies. His shadows press where lavender brushes across the flare of her ribs, the point of her hips. He looks at her and knows he never needs to look upon the cold tops of snow capped mountains, or the swirling dust of a blooming galaxy. In her eyes are river pearls, across her lips and nostrils the blush of roses.
She is earth and sky, winter and spring. He stands before the freshness of her, he breathes her in as if the very essence of her is life. The touch of her gaze upon him is cool fingertips, star dusted. Her knees are pollen stained and the flowers still bend in reverence at her ankles.
She nods her head and asks if her newness is obvious.
He laughs, low and rough like sleep caught between rousing lips and opening eyelashes. Of course it is obvious. She is strange here, in the way that all new things are. The meadow frames her as if it does not yet know how to hold her, this girl, this loosened star of another galaxy’s making.
Tenebrae watches as his shadows stain her darker, darker. The way she wears the shadows, the way they ink her making sharper the contours of her body. Beneath his magic she becomes art, sketched and blushed across the face of the twilight meadow. Of course she does not belong. She is too lovely for here.
Still the sun casts her honey glow. Still the meadow is speckled with the flies of summer’s final dusk. They go by, dancing lazy as motes in the hazy air. He wonders if she would melt such is the fragile ice of her, like a slender sculpted flower. Yet ivory and stardust binds her and the press of magic upon her skin tells him her skin is warm, her body firm.
“It is.” He answers her question at last, with a voice as deep and golden and lazy as the evening’s coming. His shadows bloom against her light, the half-moon sigils atop his brow, upon each shoulder, cast their triad of moons upon her body. “You are not quite like anything here. The meadow does not know what to make of you, yet.” Still the flowers are bowing, still their pollen dusts her slender knees. “What brings you to Novus?”
And the monk wonders if it is loss or love, tragedy or restless wandering. There are many reasons and the truth of hers lie in secrets across the grooves of her face, the curve of her lips, the woven stars of her heart.
Yet one thing he does know for sure, “You have known darkness before.”
It is there in the way his darkness lies across her body, like a veil, like a lover. The way it twines about her limbs, feline, affectionate. Tenebrae can nearly hear the way her bones sing with their remembering.
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