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
`His lips learn the grooves of her nose, the whorls of the white hair across her brow. They are details he has never seen - there is so much of her he has not seen. There is so much about Boudika Tenebrae knows nothing about.
He feels that unfamiliarity as she turns away from him. His mouth still remembers her, in the way it always does: an echo of taste, sweet like sugar, metallic with blood and the ghost of a touch, the soft silk of her lips - even crimson with blood.
Their every meeting has been red with something spilled. The squash of pomegranate seeds if they are mild, yet most often they leave adorned in each other’s blood. Blood that conceals kissed skin and bitten flesh. This night is no different. For once Boudika is clean, her body drying beside the warm glow of the rippling fire.Yet he stands, bloodstained. Tenebrae’s ragged throat (already marked and claimed by her) is throbbing grimly in the flickering yellow light.
The monk watches as she studies her fire. He does not know how she wonders of his magic. Nor does Tenebrae know how she trembled, not just from exertion and exhaustion, but fear too, when the darkness of the cave was total. Boudika wonders if he could extinguish the light of her fire. Would his darkness bleed into thick, inky black? He could, though he does not, turn the cave into a lightless void so deep the darkness is like satin across her skin.
Boudika wonders too if her unease in such deep darkness was anything like his at the bottom of her deep ocean… She would be right.
Tenebrae has asked his questions and she is quiet for so long. The monk misses her touch, even as they stand with their salt-sea bodies pressed together. Her cheek lowers to his flank and his muzzle brushes across the smooth skin at the base of her throat in answer. He almost smiles, realising that he will never know the smooth of his own throat again. Not since her teeth have changed him so irrevocably. All of her has changed him. Boudika has made a sinner out of a monk. He looks over the red of her and knows he can never forgive her. Yet he does not move, he does not repent, he stays a sinner beside her and learns what it is to live unrighteously.
Their silence is so deep that even the storm is just a gurgle at the distant mouth of the cave. Yet Boudika’s thoughts are a shout within the dark, even with her cheek pressed against his side he can see the way thoughts replay before her, graphic and traumatic. Her past is visceral, he tastes her sorrow in the air.
At last his sea-girl speaks and it is not the voice of the warrior queen he first met, it is not the sound of a crocodile dragging a monk down to the bottom of the ocean. No, it is the small, quiet voice of hurt and loneliness.
A droplet of seawater rolls like a tear slowly down one of her spiralling horns. Even the ocean weeps for her tale. That was why it scoffed at him, why it so wholly claimed her as its own. Now she is talking she cannot seem to stop. He welcomes every word. He bathes within her, within every single piece of her she lays out across their cave. She tells him so much as they stand in darkness and light, shadows dancing as they each thought they might when they first met, this night, in the shallows of the sea.
The kelpie sighs and speaks of his Change. He falls still as he listens. Oh, not once did he imagine her intentions. Not once has he ever entertained even the smallest notion of becoming a seahorse like her. “Do you need me to be like you?” The monk asks. He watches her through his starbright eyes, glowing with the light of the fire he swallows. He is not wholly of the earth. His body is bone and tissue and blood all connected and held together by shadows. “I am a Stallion but could become a kelpie.” He breathes as he watches her, his voice low. “But would it make you happy? Would it make a difference?” Amaroq still left her, the Prince of sea-horses too.
“I do not think turning me into a kelpie will help your loneliness, Boudika.” Oh he whispers the words to her, for they do not need to be spoken loudly, not when even their cave stops breathing just to hear this intimate conversation. Tenebrae breathes slowly as he still watches her face and the way his darkness brushes across her cheeks, as if to catch any hot tears that might dare to fall. Within her eyes is a rawness that feels rough as sandpaper over his skin. The monk inhales, she is sea-salt and jasmine. “You loved him.” You still love him The tense does not matter. Tenebrae observes her grief and maybe he means this of one of the men she has mentioned or maybe both. He does not specify, but lets the observation sit. It fills the space between them, named, exposed.
“You have shared something extraordinary with me.” Low is his voice, silken and rich as whiskey. It burns his throat, it pours through the darkness. He feels drunk with his remembering, the way they sank, the way they turned in the water - something like dancing. Suddenly his lips return to where they had been upon her throat. Pressing against the same place her bite sits upon his neck. “You don’t need to change me to get me to stay with you, Boudika.” The Disciple breathes, he vows with scraping teeth across the soft of her throat. “You are in my blood already.” My skin, my bones, my soul he does not add, but it hangs there in the way his breath washed across the column of her throat.
Slowly the warrior withdraws and all the darkness that had grown sharp, like teeth, like tridents runs their points along the walls of the cave before softening to smoke. It breathes with them as the fire warms the air between them. “Your father though, he was a dick.” The monk laughs low, low, rough and whiskey-warm, more a warrior of the barracks than a monk of a monastic order, “I prefer you as a girl.”
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