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
Elena is sunlight spilled across the beach. The waves of her hair, its ringlets, are twined with Solis’ light. Even raised from the murky deep-sea depths she glows, resplendent. The monk looks at her and hungers. All of him is famished. His desire has harrowed his soul. The shadows know. They gather about him, holding him together.
The crystal in her eyes is a deep blue that ushers him in. Tenebrae looks away. He feels her as if she is a reckoning tsunami. He cannot handle the force of Elena, the way she watches him, drowns him, sinks herself as water into his body.
Their foreheads are pressed together, so tightly that no light can penetrate. Yet she might be all the light he needs. The Stallion sighs, he groans.
Her words are chimes, the shattering of light across the glassy sea. The air is filled with the song of her. This night is his, yet she commands it. She commands him, owning him when she suggests asking if he has missed her. Elena does not wait for an answer for she already knows it. The truth tumbles from her lips. It is lyrical and yet each note is a hammer fall upon the monk. Tenebrae says nothing. The silence speaks instead. It caws out its ominous, lonesome call across the sea. He thinks it might be his soul, splitting, failing, fleeing from Elena’s unremitting truth: Tenebrae has missed her.
I would have been.
Dead.
Forever she will be emblazoned in his mind, sinking angelic into the sea, her hair a halo of gilded light, her limbs elegant, her body dying. Death drips saltwater-slick from her body. It falls from her and Tenebrae will not relinquish her until the last piece of the sea has left Elena.
It is a blessing that his magic is the command of darkness and not that he can feel her emotions as she feels his. His own wants, his own desires are enough as they rip apart a lifetime of self control. His religion is a storm-ravaged flag. It is in threads.
Her lips press up to his cheek, his jaw. They trail down his throat. She draws near, even as she tells him how terrible they are for each other. Her body burns him. He turns to smoke, mere darkness tangled into radiant light, Desperate to touch, to love.
Tenebrae holds her, pretending as if darkness knows how to hold light. Another of her truths fill the spaces between darkness and light. It is atoms and energy. It creates and it destroys. It came like an arrow, poisoned and broken from cupid’s bow; a misstrike, a mistake. They were not right for each other.
She is soft, sweet, dangerous when she steals the kiss from his lips. Fire presses along the curve of their mouths, it threatens to turn wild, to become all consuming, turning all to ash and chaos. Tenebrae feels her now, the soft of her skin, the curves of her body. The monk does not even begin to imagine that the magic he tastes upon her lips, metallic and unearthly, is empathy. Elena fills herself up on more than the taste of their kiss. Everything spills through their connection, their kiss, remorse and love, regret and desire.
Just when he begins to think to end their kiss, Elena is already gone. She darkens like a storm. I can feel you. He does not imagine that his emotions are a sword within her as much as him. He does not know how he is as open as a book within her palm. Tenebrae longs to reach for her and he would have, but for her words: but you did it anyway. The moon soaked beach is soft as it drowns his sorrow in silver despair. Guilt is an obsidian blade opening his veins. He bleeds starlight out across the sands. It is as bright as his gaze that watches her.
The monk reaches for her, confessing his sin in a dark breath across her lips, ‘I did’ His words are a guilty plea. Tenebrae’s penance is Elena’s to decide. Yet he has always been a foolish man, impulsive and uncontainable. The holy man does not shield his eyes from her wicked storm, from the tidalwave she sends to break him apart like a ship. “Do you love me, Elena?” The man asks, his voice rough as coal, warm as embers. They are daring words. He knows they will not stand the tsunami. He knows that in the sea, somewhere, Boudika might be watching him, hating him. She should. Elena should. Tenebrae already hates himself.
The fae-girl’s answer will break him even if she does, even if she does not. Yes and he will loathe how he has condemned her too. No and, oh, it will be a little easier for at least only then it will be his heart shattering. Like a fool upon the shore that dives into the ocean even as he watches the tongues of fire lick across the crest of the tsunami, Tenebrae steals their second kiss from her lips. Finally taking, as she has from him, finally greedy, he condemns himself.
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