I do not know more than the Sea tells me,
told me long ago, or I overheard Her
telling distant roar upon the sands,
waves of meaning in the cradle of whose
sounding and resounding power I
slept.
It does not occur to her until the quiet drip of distant water steels her from her thoughts that she is now in Tenebrae’s domain. It strikes sudden, unexpected fear in her heart. Is this what he had felt, when they floated in the tumultuous sea? Her domain. She had been so confident, then. But in the absolute darkness of the cave where she seeks out her familiar fire-starting tools she realises this is utterly, utterly Tenebrae’s. His shadows come to mind, the way they transform into whatever he imagines. She hears his quiet breathing in the dark, the dripping of the water from their bodies. It is only like that for a moment before the fire flickers to life and she can again see his face.
Boudika examines it, searching for rage or angst. But he is only watching her. She wonders, but does not ask, if he could kill this small fire in the deep darkness of their sea cave. She does not know when it stopped being hers and became theirs and perhaps that in and of itself has to do something with the ominous presence of the shadows all about them, flitting with the rise and fall of the fire’s flames.
He is a different creature here. Not so boyish, she thinks, as she examines the hard lines of his face. She remembers that he is a warrior as his shadows dance and flit to his demand. The light pours from his sigils and turns what it touches whiteish, silvery.
Boudika nearly flinches when he nears her; and nearly flinches again when he reaches out to press his lips along the bridge of her nose and then up, up, until his clears her eyes of her forelock with his mouth. He whispers against her skin and she trembles beneath against him; no longer with restraint, or fury, or anything animalistic. This is fatigue, pure and simple. She is tired of fighting.
When I first met you, 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… Boudika remembers and she nearly laughs with a cruel, hard kind of irony. Just a girl, she thinks, and marvels at it. Oh, how she wishes she had ever been just a girl.
What happened between then and now?
So much, and nothing.
She sighs in a tired kind of way. Boudika cannot stand it, cannot stand the pressure of his touch. She turns her face away. He confesses his motivations. I came to dance with you. To swim with you. And even those ignite within her a desperate, impalpable anger. It is not at Tenebrae, she realises. No, she is not mad at him. Do you wish me dead, Boudika?
How can he not see it? It is a good thing she has become so exhausted, because her frustration at being unable to explain surfaces just enough to make her leonine tail flick, to fill her with—with… well, with what? Boudika deflates before she is even fully ignited.
He does not let her escape. Even after she has turned from him he presses closer still, until the warmth of his body presses firmly against her own. She rests her cheek tiredly against his flank and breathes in his scent. But she only smells the sea.
Boudika is quiet for a long moment and she reels in her thoughts. She had not forced herself to reckon with her own motivations in… in Boudika does not know how long. Something within her had broken, she supposes, when Vercingtorix first appeared in Novus and Amaroq had disappeared. How she had wandered the beaches a newly made water horse and sought… not her mate, but her creator, her partner, her—
And anyways, he was gone. Gone. Gone, gone.
When they had first met, she had only been the General’s daughter, drunk on the islands magic, a place unregulated and without rules. She had been dangerous, and brilliant, and full of all the newness Novus had shown her. Isra’s kindness. Denocte’s acceptance. Amaroq’s attention. Tell me why, he asks. Does he not know how impossible of a query it is? But in the darkness, and pressed so tightly against him, Boudika can now smell something besides the sea: his blood. She owes him an explanation.
“Everyone leaves, Tenebrae.” She admits it quietly, with a voice naked with emotion.“Everyone always leaves.”
It is difficult for her to continue, but she manages slowly, deliberately, to explain. “I was turned—willingly—by a water horse, a kelpie, although I have never called them that. I saw it as my fate, my due—“ she breaks off. Boudika does not know how to explain her motivations, unless she explains everything, unless she revisits the dark corners of her own history.
“I am from an island far away called Oresziah. It is a magic island, where those who land on the shores cannot leave them. My people were trapped there hundreds of years ago, and to escape they turned on the magic that kept them there, the magic of the water horses native to the island. We eradicated them, systematically, and I am… I am the generation that finished it. But I was disguised there as a stallion, with magic, by my father—he had only I as a child. He was a General and his ambitions rested on having a son, with our culture being strictly patriarchal—and anyways, I kept that secret for over half my life. When it was revealed, I was imprisoned.” Boudika paraphrases it. She rushes through the details, the origin, as it remains something she does not want to face. ”I was imprisoned with the prince of the water horses, the very same prince I had captured and sentenced to death. We were kept together for over a year, and—I learned all about them. About their culture, and their history, and their magic, and—how we were the monsters, not them.”
Boudika sighs again. She does not… well, she doesn’t want to share it, the past that explains her actions now. She struggles to articulate it, to voice it without feeling selfish or self-conscious. “They sentenced us to death on an unseaworthy ship in a storm. But when I awoke, it was on Novus. I came to terms with the sins of my past by deciding, eventually, to become the very thing I had attempted to eradicate—his name was Amaroq and, well, I had assumed—girlishly, and foolishly—he and I would be partners. That he would teach me to be what I am.”
But he disappeared. He left her. And she was alone, utterly, save the sea—the sea, which laps at the far end of their cave. The sea, which rages outside and calls her back, always. “He disappeared, though.” Boudika does not share Vercingtorix’s brief appearance in Novus, or how she think Torix killed Amaroq. She does not share the hurt of that wound. Boudika draws away to deliver the last part—the true explanation. She looks Tenebrae in the eye to say:
“I didn’t want to be alone. I will not lie about my feelings for you. You are polarising. You do not fear me. And you sharpen me, my wits, my actions. I wanted to dance with you…and when you came to me in the sea, so far from shore, I thought you were asking for—“ and this embarrasses her. This is a bold assumption she should not make, and so she changes it, she elaborates. “I wanted you to ask to be Changed. That’s how it’s done, you see. You’re pulled below the surface and I strike you but the instinct is, if you are meant to be Changed, that you draw blood as well—you bite back. But you didn’t.”
Boudika is embarrassed—terribly, terribly ashamed—to admit her actions, and come to terms with her mistake. She had never thought herself capable of such an unsolicited act; she had never thought herself capable of behaving as monsters were rumoured to behave. But it hadn’t been like that, in her mind. She had been trying to show him something beautiful, something special and secret, held close to her heart, something that to be understood must be experienced… And perhaps, in doing so, in trying to show him, she had ruined his perception of it forever. Her voice is small and sad again when she says, “I am sorry. I should not have been so bold. I was not processing it then like I am now. I am just—“
Lonely. She thinks of meeting Anandi in the storm, how if she had chosen to be changed by a different water horse perhaps, perhaps she would not feel this way. But it was always meant to be Amaroq and she thinks of the moment he had changed her off the coast of the island, with the ice of his magic curling in the water and her ribbons of blood dancing about it. How the moon had shown and her heart felt full and how she had thought, and decided, she would never feel so alone again.
The silence after bothers her; it drags from her tongue the last, vulnerable admission. In a voice raw with it, with her loneliness and despair, Boudika admits:
“I just wish I wasn’t so alone.” The firelight flickers against them; it transforms them into softer beings, beings of starlight and flame. She longs to press against him again; to close the distance that she has opened. But her admissions leave her vulnerable, and not only does Boudika fear rejection, she expects it. "I never meant to hurt you. I wanted to share with you something extraordinary, but I didn't know how to ask. The storm... the sea... the ability to swim, and understand, and know. It is beautiful, but difficult to convey, difficult to ask. I just wanted to share it with you."
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
come back to the shores of what you are
come back to the crumbling shores
