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
Of course I would go to him.
Those words surprise him with the way they hurt. They are so soft coming from her lips, so full of inevitability. But that inevitability strikes him as swords do. They bite into his heart with the ferocity of the whip he used across his back.
It takes him a moment to name it. To understand the despair, the feeling of something wicked that twists inside of him and claws, terrible and unwelcome, within him: jealousy. It strikes so suddenly. He never expected. He breathes slow, his breath rattling from his lips.
Her next words are a balm upon the sting of his jealousy, ‘ But that decaying emotion is already pressed deep. He searches himself to be rid of it, he knows of the destruction it can bring. This is one of the reasons monks are not to foster romances. He was to cut all ties with her and now, now his jealousy flays him open within the cave. Tenebrae is already condemned.
His girl of the sea does not stop. She paints upon him all the ways that they are different and he feels it. The monk knows it. The salt is dried upon his skin and it lungs still ache with their earlier descent into the depths of the blue sea. They are each bound irrevocably, but to different things. The darkness breathes across the ocean as night falls whole after the storm. The shadows seep in through the mouth of the cave and press cool midnight upon their bodies.
Boudika’s horns are the fierce waves of the sea, his eyes trail them for even in darkness he can see her. Whole and clear. Yet he has never seen her more beautiful than when the sea holds her and splays her hair out in the tide. She is right and maybe this is the crux of it all, they are not made for each other. They do not belong together.
I would not hold it against you, if you met someone who you could share that with, without changing yourself, She breathes as soft as satin upon his skin.
“But would it hurt you if I did?” Tenebrae asks, suddenly so boyish, so young; untried and unsure. He is seasoned in so many ways. War has made him a man but it is so different to love. Though the passion might be the same... maybe. Would if hurt you like this jealousy hurts me?. He does not say though he is learning, slowly, (too terribly slowly) of the costs of love and want and desire.
But then, ah then they are made up only of the shadows of the midnight sea. They come undone and remade with their kisses, seasoned with the salt of their sea-damp skin. Her words fill the cave with something like hope, with a way they might be together. The hope feels like light, yet it is darkened by the sprawling, corrupting shadows of his jealousy.
He swallows the feelings down, he turns from them as any good monk should. He fights as if he fights not for the shadows but the light. Tenebrae presses himself into his girl of sea salt and wild, dangerous tides. “I do not know.” He confesses when she speaks of the moon and the sea, darkness and the ocean irrevocably tied. Her words feel sinful in his ears, sacreligious. She entertains in his mind a terrible hope, a dangerous idea. Did Caligo truly mind if her monks were celibate or was it just rules needed to control the sin of men? “But you make me want to see.”
And for every kiss she places feather-light upon his skin, he presses one upon hers. If Boudika was part of Caligo’s own eternal affair, it makes his next words brimful with assurance. “Then maybe this is why we keep meeting. Is it chance or a god’s decree, Boudika?”
He tastes the fear of tragedy upon her skin. He hears it roaring in his own ears. Yet he does not move, for this night she makes binding himself to her seem not so different to when he vowed himself to Caligo. It is a monstrous thought, it is one that slips lips poisonous, delightful silk through his veins.
Tenebrae does not leave her until dawn, until the sun banishes the shadows from the sea and the cave is filled only with the smoke of the dead fire. When he does leave, it is filled up with dread and hope, contained in a body that has known the sea more deeply, more wholly than it ever had before.
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