tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Dusk.
He cannot help but think of her in this liminal hour now. He thinks the twilight might be forever changed for him. All because of Elena. The dimming of the sky was a time he relished. He always looked beyond the ebbing light and toward the blooming dark. It bled like ink, sinking its fingers into everything. Darkness consumed the light it swallowed it, just as Tenebrae was made to do. The monk swallowed down darkness like water, he smothered it. Elena made him need it. He swallowed light like water no longer because it was part of his existence, but because he needed it, like his body needed water. Elena made him need her. She had come to be even more than that. Oxygen. But Tenebrae, ever the pious man was determined to choke. Anything to remain loyal to his goddess.
Yet here he is - a choking man - walking through the twilight and looking not for where the darkness consumes but for where the light still gleams, golden. He wanders through the sun’s final moments, feels the warmth of butter-yellow light upon his body. The trees sigh, their boughs creak. Tenebrae feels that noise within his bones. He carries a weight too heavy for his bones to bear. His soul is crushed. It has not felt whole since Elena, since Boudika. There are pieces of him missing.
He turns from the light and feels the way his wounds twinge. They feel hot and wet, as if their grief is still too acute to heal. Not yet his whip wounds weep. Not yet they sob with his tattered soul.
Yet… How can his soul and his heart feel at once so utterly broken, so utterly mutilated and yet so utterly complete? It seems to drift upon wings, carried upon an elated wind, until he remembers what he has done. His religion steals the wind, his lack of faithfulness sends him falling. He has been so terribly, terribly unfaithful to his god, to Elena, to Boudika, to himself. His whip wounds weep, they are multiple in number - he could double them, triple them, but it would never be enough.
The woodland thins. Trees fall back into a small clearing. Nestled into the woodland the crumbling stone skeleton of the old Night Order’s keep juts out like old weathered joints. He has barely taken in the holy ruins before he hears the sound of another stepping up beside him. He does not look to see her. He knows it is Elena. His heart both falls and rises, it makes his stomach clench and his whip wounds ache. This place is littered with memories of the Night Order but the monk’s mind is filled with memories of the night beside the lake.
He turns to Elena, drinks in the gold of her - like the sun, like salvation. But salvation is shadows, or at least it should be. Tenebrae reaches for her, as any ailing man would, and presses his brow upon hers. He breathes in the scent of her and remembers, everything, for the last time.
“Elena.” He cannot help the way her name sounds like a prayer, like hope. He wants to fall into her and never resurface. But he cannot. “I am glad you are here,” it feels like a lie and a truth both at once. He dreads her presence and yet he turns to her, less a man of shadows than a plant seeking her as its sun.
