tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She conjures a halo about his head. It pours golden light down over his cheeks and his lowered lashes.
The halo feels wrong atop his poll. Moira seeks to remind him of his good, she seals her belief and love of him with a kiss pressed to his brow. And yet, all he Tenebrae feels is the remorse and grief that festers black in his soul. Moira Tonnerre is a healing balm. It would always be to her that he would run, in his greatest trials, his deepest sorrows and most bountiful joys.
The sand dusts his knees where he is upon them, before her. She stands quiet, a goddess, an angel before him waiting to hear the confessions of her follower. When she speaks, it is with a voice, sweet and warm. It is an injection of whiskey into his veins. It warms him, loosens his tongue. His friend soothes him with a kiss, with her words that coax his own up from his throat and out onto his tongue.
Her touch traces his whip wounds. They smart and throb and though Moira’s touch is cool midnight, a breath of air across his distressed skin, his spine arches and his limbs tremble. This is, he thinks, a perfect torture that he has brought upon himself. His soul is in agony, a thing so deeply felt, its damage invisible, though he wears the presence of it as tears and downturned lips. His body smarts and stings with the punishment he wrought upon it with a whip that does not care who, or how deeply, it bites.
Moira talks of Caligo and Tenebrae bows his head lower, lower. Away from the weight of his goddess’ name. “Gods…” The Disciple breathes as he thinks of what he is about to confess. The words are lead within his stomach. The sea is morose as it pushes its way up the beach and slinks slowly back. “I swore a vow of chastity, Moira. I vowed myself to Caligo and only her. And yet… I have fallen in love. With two women.” The words come out, disjointed, as if he loathes the taste of them upon his tongue. With the final ones out he laughs, incredulous. There is no joy within that sound. It is flat and dead as rock. He laughs and he laughs until the laugh turns into a scream he prostrates at her feet. Agony pours itself into the scream, despair and self-hatred impale themselves upon the higher notes of it. Desolation laces itself through his scream. The sand trembles at the monk’s confession.
For a long moment he is still. His knees are raw with his bending and his sides heave with the effort to breathe. Sweat glistens across his torso, it shines in the moonlight. “And, I have slept with one of them.” He whispers the last. Suddenly fatigued, suddenly so broken by his own sin. He thinks of Boudika, of Elena. “I have done so much wrong.” He groans, all suddenly so quiet, so aching after his scream. “I have been a fool, Moira.” Tenebrae tips his chin up to his friend, where she looks down upon him and frames him with a halo he does not deserve. The film of his tears, the jagged line of his despairing lips grows dark as his shadows breathe and curse his silvered body.
