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
There is distant music playing. The notes are drifting like boats over the mirrored surface of the Lake. The star strewn sky is reflected in bright dots of twinkling silver. The heavens, adorned in midnight array, paint themselves upon the canvas of the lake. Festival goers come with golden-lit lanterns bringing warm licks of colour to the cool, autumn scene.
Tenebrae stands in the midst of the wishers who each hold their lanterns tight. Children close their eyes and hope for things superficial and things so surprisingly deep. Adults cling to their lanterns as if their wish might be something more, magical, capable of a miracle. To whom do those wishes go? The monk wonders. Who is the one who decides if they are granted, and how? Tenebrae thinks of his goddess. Was Caligo good enough to grant wishes? He is beginning to think not. How many times has he wished he were not so sinful, so desperately, terribly in love?
Maybe it was time to lay a shallow, pagan wish upon the wind. The Disciple would light his lantern and let it drift where it may. He would let that flame do what it so desired with his wish. The monk moves past a makeshift altar. The shadows adorning it tremble when he does not think to look at the shrine. They whisper terrible things into his magic. They are full of warnings that limn his blood in moonlight prayers. Darkness still prays where this monk no longer does. They writhe in agony as he collects a lamp like a pagan and lights it with a prayer as shallow as a wish. He does not send it to his goddess or even any deity.
Tenebrae releases the lamp into the sky. It struggles to rise in the breeze, as if burdened by his sin. The lake blinks as she watches the lantern slowly ascend. The stars are weeping, or maybe the sound of their crying is only laughing? Do they know how he is falling away? How he might already be gone?
His faith bleeds black drops of blood upon the moonsoaked grass in his wake. He is a man ailing. His love makes him sick. He thinks he is ready to renounce his goddess. The altar he passed is trembling. It topples in the wind. His shadows seeth across his skin and worshippers flock to righten what the wind full of wishes has wronged. But the monk does not turn to witness the breaking nor righting of his goddess’ altar. The fallen monk merely meanders slowly on along the dark bank of the lake.
The night welcomes him, for he will always be that: a child of Denocte. The music falls away behind him. The sounds of the shrine being righted are swallowed by the gentle lapping of water upon the shore. The Lake welcomes him and as the distant lanterns rise in an arc above him, he wanders out into the shallows. He does not stop there, but lets the water pull him out deeper, deeper until he submerged in the black of the lake’s embrace and her star-strewn sky. The water cleanses him, of everything, or so Tenebrae hopes. It washes from him dirt and the vestiges of the sins he has let loose upon the wind.
When the man emerges from the lake, it is to a golden form upon the bank. He looks at her and knows that what the water has washed away, she will paint back across his body. She will paint him in love and sin and sacrilegious thoughts and hopes and desires. Elena, gilded in sunlight and wanting, taking desire, has come to find him, he knows, but she is looking at the stars. Which one has she truly come here for? Him? Or the stars he invited her to stand beneath, here beside the water.
Tenebrae will make her choice for her, he thinks, as he steps up the bank and his shadows descend upon his flesh as the water spills from him like tears. The monk, the man moves to her, enchanted by the gold of her skin. Caligo’s gift is soldering his veins into his soul and yet, already Elena’s fingers are there, reshaping his heart, his soul. His moons blaze white with divine rage. Their light illuminates her aureate skin, spotlighting her as one who leads him astray. The half-moon sigils almost burn him yet he moves to her, a moth to the light they cast upon her skin. He presses his lips upon the smooth column of her throat letting them rise a heated trail up, up along the elegant arc of her throat until he meets her upturned jaw.
He would ensure Elena came for him alone.
@
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
