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 feels the way her body labours beneath him. The way the switches of her powerful tail slows. His sea-girl grows weary and yet, he feels wariness mixing with ire in a terrible concoction in his blood.
All of him is as exhausted as she. How long had they been swimming together, clinging to each other as if to let go would be to fall apart forever. The sea had tried to part their grasp. It had tossed them amidst the waves and whipped their faces with seaspray. The winds roared their tempest cry into their ears.
Yet she gets them to her cave. They fall upon rock and lie together, horse and crocodile upon the stone of the cliff’s open maw. He does not flinch as she changes, not this time. Even when she expells water from her lungs, he just watches her with silverbright eyes.
Boudika does not rest. She rises, trembling to her feet. The exhaustion in his bones, his muscles, cries out to hers. Yet he rises to stand beside her. In the darkness before the fire is lit, his darkness swallows them both. It is whole, complete, not even the lightning pierces through the totality of his magic.
The monk follows her, the only sounds are the tap of their feet, the drip, drip, drip of saltwater from their bodies. She lights a fire as if she knows the darkness here intimately. Tenebrae watches the sea-girl work. Flames cast back the darkness and light begins to dance across the walls. From across the fire they watch each other, until she looks away, until the only sound is that of her swallowing.
He has forgotten the roar of the ocean. He has forgotten the lightning that splits the sky.
Here they are untouchable.
Here nothing can reach them.
Slowly he inhales, deep, deep. The air is salt-sea slick.
Tenebrae.
His name upon the air. It is small. Spoken with a voice he has never heard. His name feels frangible, she feels frangible, so far from the wild girl who rose like a siren out of the sea. So different from the mythic creature who lunged for him and grasped him tight in her unyielding maw. His throat throbs sullenly, its blood runs slower now, down the base of his throat and over his chest. It drips and leaves dark metallic stains upon the floor.
The cave inhales their salt-water skin. Never has the sea so wholly consumed him, it is in his belly where he drank it, in his nose where he inhaled it, in his blood where it saturated his wound. He feels so deeply of the ocean and yet, when he beholds the girl across the fire, with her too-wide lips and her crimson eyes, he knows he is less a possession of the sea than he is a god amidst the stars.
I am sorry. Oh her still small voice.
From the roiling obsidian of his black magic Tenebrae watches her. He illuminates her in starlight and slowly moves, walking about the fire until he reaches her. And there he stops. Now there is no sea to push his body into hers, no waves to tangle their limbs. He feels bereft of her, no matter the anger she inspires within him.
They are depleted where they stand before each other. They are drained by the other. He does not think there is a part of him left that she has not consumed with her wicked tricks, her savage bites, her sorrowful eyes, wide and lonely.
He does not know what she has been taught. He does not know what ghosts fill her mind with conversations spoken so long ago. His lips run up the bridge of her nose until, at her brow, they brush her forelock from her eyes. Crimson, red, like rubies, like pomegranates.
“When I first met you,” he whispers at her brow and even the hiss of the fire is louder than he. “You were just a girl with thorns on your tongue and a smile on your lips. I had never met a girl like you. Your smile...” He breathes his memory across her brow.
Silence. It breathes when he lowers his lips from her brow, his memory still emblazoned where he had touched her.
“I have not seen you smile in so long. What has happened between then and now?" He knows nothing of why her smile left, why her pain rose sharp and awful. He wants to know what happened to her. He needs to know. Still his voice is a whisper, his eyes searching out hers. He will not let them go. Silver into crimson, wine within a chalice.
“I came here to dance with you. To swim with you. To -” To kiss you. He sighs and does not say it but his gaze is upon her lips, again at that corner of her lips. “I would not have thought you wished me dead…” He trails off and it is more effort than it should be to tear his gaze away from her lips, the memory. “Do you wish me dead, Boudika?”
There is a calmness he did not possess in the midst of the sea. There is a weariness in his bones. Yet he steps closer as she shivers. And then closer still, until they touch from shoulder to hip. Until the air warms with their bodies and their fire.
“I know you are sorry, Boudika.” Oh her name upon his tongue. Now he knows why the sea adores her, why is rises and crashes itself upon the mouth of the cave. It summons her back. “Just tell me why.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
