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
The sea washes away her tears with fingers of waves and salt and seafoam. It leaves no room for a girl’s embarrassment. It rages beneath the storm and cries its own violent tears that mix with the leaping waves. Seaspray stings his eyes and yet they are not extinguished. They glow as brightwhite stars in the inky black of the roiling expanse.
Tenebrae, though his eyes sting, keeps his gaze upon her, where she is so close. They rise and fall in the dance of the waves. This carousel-waltz is nothing like the dancing he had hoped for when he stepped out into the sea storm and chanted her name as if she were a goddess. Maybe she is a siren of the ocean? A witch whom the sea exults? A goddess feral and beautiful who comes to lure foolish men of religion out to their deaths. Will she make him abandon Caligo?
He does not dare to wonder.
He thinks he might already know the answer.
Her body feels different when it collides against his in the force of the waves. Their shared anger has abated. Their weariness sits bone deep and their muscles ache. His body and hers, they float loosely in the salt-water. They are softer then they press together. The Disciple sees the downward turn of her lips, the way she keeps her sorrow in and her wilderness out.
Proud girl.
Her horns are wicked as daggers and the rain spirals down to tangle in her hair. Droplets trickle down her cheeks, gathering as pearls in her eyelashes.
No more tricks, She says with a voice strangled by her sorrow. Boudika looks away and the curve of her mouth draws his gaze. He looks to the corner of her mouth where he kissed her - its ghost still lives there, he thinks. Or maybe he hopes. But as he thinks of their kiss, he feels the bite of her teeth, he swallows too, his jaw clenching.
No sooner had she said no tricks and she suggests a change again. He is sure he knows what form she will choose. The Disciple pushes back, fighting the sea that delights in only pushing them together. The sea lets him go, as if it knows that he teeters upon the edge of his limits. It whispers in his ears that it will cradle his bones in the deep. He is too tired to swim to shore. Tenebrae does not doubt the sea’s prophecy.
Her crimson eyes are lovely, even in their hurt, in the moment before Boudika’s gaze turns grey and crocodilian. Tenebrae watches her until she becomes strange and lethal again. The bloodstained water (for still his throat and its distressed flesh bleed slowly out) laps at his throat. His heart cannot help the way it leaps. His magic blooms and billows across the surface of the water. It is dark and ominous. It seethes with warning.
Yet, no longer does the crocodile watch him as it had. This time, when Boudika swims toward him it is slow, weary. She turns at the last and offers her body to him: a float upon which he is to be carried. Pride is little more than a droplet in his blood for wariness surges, wild and feverish through his veins. It cautions him yet he goes to her (of course he does).
But when Boudika begins to pull him through the waves, they get pushed hither and thither. The monk feels how she tires, he hears the effort of her lungs. He never thought he would, but he begins to sorrow for a crocodile.
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