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.
The only time she’d ever seen her father pray to the Old Gods, it was upon an ancient stone altar in the midst of a storm. Storms were the most dangerous times to pray, and often the most prolific. The water horses, the Khashran, were all the more likely to emerge in a storm; to climb the cliffsides as terrifying beasts, as horses with long lips and serrated, shark-like teeth. Some had tentacles for manes, barnacles growing lacklustre upon their flanks, oysters at the knobs of their knees and shoulders. Halfway to monsters; halfway to the sea. It is one of Boudika’s oldest memories. The torrential rain; the way her aged father had bowed his head and prayed, and prayed. And the Old Gods had answered. Upon the altar materialised enchanted items; bits of bone, nacre, obsidian that could be bound into a necklace, and disguise her as a stallion…
But Boudika's first memory was when her father took her to the sea on an overcast, chilled October day. The day he had sent her into the water to be Taken, and a white stallion had appeared from the frothing waves. He had stood, and stared, and had not Taken her. He had gone back to the sea and now, inexplicably, Boudika asks: why not then?
Why had the sea waited so long to claim her?
To give her a stallion from another part of the world, where arctic ice shown under the aurora borealis, where their narwhal-like horns spun up and out of the water in droves? Boudika tells of her second becoming, not her first, when she shares her story of Amaroq and all that he had meant to her.
I am not sure what that means, Boudika. Strangely, Boudika had been so drawn into her thoughts she had almost forgotten he was there; Tenebrae’s voice nearly startles her. Does that mean it is was something deeper than love or…
Boudika wonders at that word. Love.
Her smile is small, and sad. “Of course I would go to him.”
Belonging is not the same as love, she thinks. Or maybe it is. Maybe it is deeper, in a way, and more necessary. Belonging is dutiful, permanent. Love seems, to Boudika, something like a child’s ruse; finite, prone to the whims of men and women who even as they live do not truly know themselves. She loved her father, she supposes, as a dutiful daughter ought to. And she had loved Vercingtorix, but that was a love won hard through blood, devotion, and… duty, again.
Amaroq had been different. In nature, some creatures mate for life; and although “love” is a sentiment given to those with consciences, and emotions… there is something to be said for a lifelong partnership, for the belonging of two together. Boudika cannot help but answer Tenebrae as such. She explains:
“I do not say that to be cruel, or to suggest I care for you less. But—“
If she does not say it, she is a coward.
Boudika has never been a coward.
When her eyes lock on Tenebrae’s, there is a desperation in hers; a pleading. He wanted explanations and so she gives them readily, rawly. It is who she is. Boudika has never been able to hide that. “—it is… simply because… Tenebrae, you will never…” It is not his flaw, or his fault. Boudika even now fails to express what she means. You will never understand the way the sea both cradles and condemns; the light refracting from beneath the waves at midday, as if you are staring through so many layers of crystal. Have you ever heard the cry of whales, from miles away? Or the way blood—even a drop—erupts in the water with a scent that stretches for miles? Violence stains the ocean in a way it never will the land.
“The sea, Tenebrae—he—and I—we belong to the sea, the storm, the salt.” Her voice is smaller still, nearly inaudible, when she says: “Just as you belong to the night, and the shadows, and the darkness. It is a part of who you are. A part of you I will never be able to touch, or understand, and—well, I would not hold it against you, if you met someone who you could share that with, without changing yourself.”
Admitting it addresses a fear Boudika did not even realise she had. Changing yourself.
She wonders if caring for this stallion will demand that of her, or him—between the two of them, it is clear something is bound to break, to change.
Whatever thoughts she might pursue are interrupted by the press of his lips, the heat of his body. To Boudika, it is not sin. To Boudika, the touch is revelation. The touch is her own kind of becoming. And when his shadows reach out to trace the scars—fine, delicate things—that Amaroq left, Boudika can only smile.
I am a monk. Tenebrae admits, when Boudika touches his scars. She is not surprised by the answer; it has always been there, in the way they pulled at one another like the gravity of separate plants. They were different worlds. When the gods had fallen apart, Caligo made the Stallions to keep her darkness total—
Tenebrae begins to narrate his becoming. Boudika realises he does not need claiming scars to be claimed by something. As surely as Boudika said, he made me, Caligo made Tenebrae.
There is a cruelness in Boudika that belongs to the sea, and the storm, and the salt. There is a cruelness to Boudika that belongs to women; to Eve; Pandora; Persephone; Anat; Lilith; Shamhat; Anath; even Antigone. As Tenebrae explains, she touches him; soft—nearly chaste—touches. But it is their chasteness that betrays them as something else entirely. Boudika marvels at him, as she never has before. I am married to my goddess. And yet he is here, with Boudika. Everything she had assumed about him from the past has come to fruition—he is a warrior, he is devout, he is conscripted to another life. These traits, compiled, make him attractive as the unobtainable is always attractive. Boudika traces the hard plane of his shoulder with her lips; she admires his muscled frame, the way it says, warrior, warrior, warrior.
She, too, had been sworn to Old Gods and a cause. She, too, had been a warrior. Once. A lifetime ago. But warriors would forever have her heart; perhaps because they were damned, and Boudika loved them all the more for it. Those scars are from where I whipped myself because I saw you and wanted…
A younger Boudika would have felt contrite. She would have expressed regret, and grief, and apology; not this Boudika. Why should she apologise, for a man wanting her? No, it twists in her with a certain warmth, a certain passion. You make me wish I was not a monk, Boudika.
For a fraction of a second, she wishes she was not a kelpie. But that regret is there and gone. And then: her heart aches for him, and aches, and aches. The burden he bears is one she can imagine. The burden he bears is not so different from the one that broke her heart, and exiled her from all she had ever known. Boudika had broken her vows to her people when she had confessed to Vercingtorix who she was; Boudika rather than Bondike. She remembers, still, ripping the enchanted necklace from her neck and breaking the emblems upon the paving stones. The way she said, I love you, Torix. I love you—but I cannot lie to you anymore.
And she had been so sure he would accept her. So certain of it. Boudika wears that grief on her face now; but she wears it for him, for Tenebrae, and it is something that makes her want to cry more surely than any other aspect of their night together.
Tenebrae’s smile in the darkness is a sad one; but then he moves suddenly to place his lips upon her scar where Amaroq had given her the only kiss he ever would. Boudika shudders beneath Tenebrae’s touch; something about it, the accepting intimacy, opens her as a flower opens, privately, for no one else to see.
She closes her eyes.
“Perhaps… it is not so great a sin, if only you were to think of me as the sea.” Boudika’s voice is quieter than the crackle of the fire; it is quieter, even, than their breaths. “The moon has forever been in love with the ocean, and vice versa. They dance together every night and the sea misses her every dawn. Would your vows be broken, if rather than a woman I was the salt, the sand, the sea?” She moves subtly to press her lips against whatever part of him they will reach, a flurry of feather-light touches; his neck, his shoulders, his cheek.
What if she were only the storm, the surf, the shallows? The light of Caligo on the paned glass surface of a calm sea?
The way he kisses the scar is all the acceptance she has ever needed; for the first time in longer than she can remember, Boudika does not feel alone. “What if I am only the waves, Tenebrae? And the cry of the osprey, the laughter of the gulls? What if—what if I am hardly a woman at all, but a part of your goddess's world, her own eternal affair?”
Boudika knows in that moment, she would not go with Amaroq if he returned.
She would stay and hope this ending—the one she and Tenebrae write, the one they speak of in the darkness of their alcove—can be one that does not have to end in tragedy.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae || ooc: here you go Obsi enjoy another NOVEL
come back to the shores of what you are
come back to the crumbling shores
