tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
It is something like a dream when he runs his lips along the arch of her neck. He follows the dips and groove of her throat. The monk memorises it (as if he has not already). He finds the scent of sunset deep beneath the buttermilk silk of her hair. His eyes close, shutting off sight, just for moment, so he can drown, deep, deep within the sound of her, the smell of her. one last time, he tells himself.
How will she take what he has to say? He feels the pulse of her heart thrum against his lips. It is slower than the night at the lake. Tenebrae knows how her heart can beat as fast a hummingbird’s wings. It is a lullaby that haunts him. Will there be anything of her left to him after this? Will he be able to reach out and hold her as he does now? Clinging to her as if he wishes to make her the god he threatens to leave her for. Maybe he does. The thought terrifies him.
His darkness billows. It scatters at its master’s frantic, dangerous thoughts. The shadows press up against Elena’s slim body. They push and they pull. They remember her light as his lips remember her touch, her kisses. They push her away and she goes, leaving only his name to brush across his shoulder where her cheek had just been. His fae-girl retreats as his shadows asked her to. But she is smiling. Elena has no idea.
Tenebrae can nearly taste the drunk love upon her lips, that puts that warm haze into her sea-blue eyes. That taste is upon his lips too. She makes him drunk upon the elixir of her body and heart and soul. His eyes close, etching her smile (absent of pain, high upon them, their love, their everything) into the darkness of himself.
She feels like her heart is slipping through her ribs, beating sideways, escaping its fine, ivory cage. If it did slip free, he would catch it, he knows he would. But what then? Would he hold it like a man holding his first child, terrified to drop it, hurt it, wanting to give it back and yet never wanting to ever let go. Tenebrae does not know all the things Elena gives him. He does not know more hides within her body, that it is not just his heart that tries to beat in time with hers. There is another, smaller, fluttering like a firefly, glowing brightly in the shadow of her womb.
The monk knows nothing.
Except for the agony when she peels herself from him and runs, away. He is not ready to let her go. Not yet. He chases her, and he is not sure what his mouth does. Maybe it wears a ghost of a smile, maybe it twists in fear and the agony of his breaking heart. His back aches, his wounds reopening, crying out in red, for her, for him.
Don’t break anything. His sun-girl laughs as she runs, slim and elven through the twilight wood. The ruins do not trip her, though the stones hide, covered in moss, tripping hazards. Does Elena not know how they were both already breaking each other? They started the moment they kindled their love, breaking their hearts and souls like twigs and branches to set their love alight, like a torch.
He races her, because that is what Elena asked of him and he knows he can deny her nothing - except himself, in a moment, in the dreadful passing of words across his tongue. Not yet, not yet his heart selfishly requests with its every beat.
They are running, their legs in time, their breaths tangling. He spots an overgrown entrance and the way the ruins breath its ancient breath through that mouth. “Elena,” He reaches for her, touches her, pulls her close, out of her run that pushes air breathless from her lungs. “Come, I want to show you something.” And he leads her to the broken door where it leans askew, half hidden by ambling ivy and frosted flowers. The Disciple pushes the old door away and it falls heavy and damp upon the ground. He leads his girl down the spiral stairs, down and down and down, following the open tower deep into the earth.
They come out into an old chapel of marble and obsidian. Silver runs through the walls branching away like arteries from its great moon that hangs like a heart upon the wall opposite Caligo’s high altar. ‘Darkness Eternal’ is carved in an old language into the obsidian stone below. Statues of the Stallions who Swallowed the Sun, loom out from the shadows, as if they still live. They watch the couple, the girl as gold as the sun. They seem hungry, full of ire. Tenebrae thinks, if he brings her here, she might understand why he is about to do what he is.
