tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She stands upon the peer and moonlight bathes the curls of her hair silver. She is limned by the moon, bathed in its ethereal glow. There is something godly about her tonight. He thinks of her letters and the bird who carries them. The paper bound in ribbon to its limb, always so perfectly done. Her words always so carefully orchestrated. Except in her lowest and highest moments where she seems to lose herself, where words flow impassioned, each one falling atop the other in a river of emotion that flows as poetry through her ink and down upon the parchment.
Always Tenebrae has been the calmer one, always the one to hold her, ease the tension from her limbs. Her presence still sets his magic alight. Always she reminds it of what it was to fight her atop the mountain, to hear her grief ripped from her throat. But that was easy, it was the dim quiet that followed. When she sat numb within the halls of the monastery, a ghost of a girl haunting the halls of monks. Yet she healed, as much as she could, as much as any of them could.
As he walks to her now, he wonders if anything he said to her was ever of any use. He was so blind then, so delusional. He feels young, even to himself. A foolish man succumbing to man’s greatest temptation. How could he ever have offered her words to heal a heart when he was on a trajectory to breaking others? Binding one up does not make up for breaking others.
Her letter came, asking to meet and he would have sought her out anyway. His heart has grown too inflamed, his foolishness a stumbling block he was blind to see, until now, until the worst has already been done. His shadows billow and trail. They drag after him like broken wings, like sins weighted, pulling him back, back and down, down into remorse and yet more sin. It aches to be in Caligo’s midnight. It feels sacreligious to be adorned in her shadows, a holy magic gifted to him in exchange for his oath. The worst agony of all is how his shadows feel faithful how they still curl about him, how they lay cool across the wounded flesh of his back. They are faithful where he is not? Was that the love of Caligo? Eternal? Was there nothing he could do wrong?
The Disciple reaches her. She is like water to his parched throat. “Moira.” He breathes as if she is air, and until now his lungs have been barren, closed, empty. “Moira I need-” And then he remembers where they are, the peer, the crowds, the harbour and the boats. Grief is a sweat across his brow, remorse has him clutching her tight. “Come, please.” He begs her even as he clasps her like a man drowning and draws her away from the peer, down upon the beach and across into the shadows and a jutting hollow of the cliffside.
Here they are alone, enough of a distance from others where not even a treacherous wind could carry their words to another’s ears. This dark nook within the cliffside, where the sea laps as judge and jury, is a place for confessions. When has his life become such that he could not confess to a brother? But rather seek to confide in another?
The monk falls to his knees before her, the open wounds upon his back bear themselves in angry red lines to the sky and to Moira. They weep red tears, turned to ebony ink in the night, in the shadows. “Moira.” He groans like a man dying and this feels something like death. Tears wet the words upon his lips, they stain the sand at the tips of her feet. He clings to her broken and wounded, penitent and harrowed. “I have sinned.” He gasps the latter word, as if its magnitude is enough to trip his tongue. “I need to confess.” Tenebrae clings to her as if she is redemption, as if she might be the only thing that holds him together and grounded upon the earth.
“Gods, I need to confess.”
