tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Tenebrae does not know how his shadows consume her, swallowing down every piece of light within her. Except the firefly light it cannot reach. That light nestles deep, protected and entombed - for now.
He leads her down into darkness, where the Order’s magic seeps thicker and deeper than anywhere else in Novus. It is ancient magic here. He knows it is sacrilegious to bring Elena here, but he does. The darkness embraces her, it smoothes over the delicate contours of her face. It tries to ease the lines of sorrow that grow as she watches him, as her magic reaches out to Tenebrae and feels -
It feels pain and agony and sorrow. He does not think, he does not think until she says, soft like a whisper, Why do I feel like you are frightened of me? The Disciple closes his eyes from where he gazes upon the mural of the Stallions. They ask him why Elena is here. He has done so much wrong. Guilt is a lance that strikes him through. He turns to his girl of sunlight. She watches him and she burns. He has never seen her so ignited as she is now. Her fire is a quiet storm of solar energy. She makes him hunger for her. He steps toward her, dark and menacing, his shadows thirsting, desperate to feast upon the fire of her skin.
She is not the only one who will be haunted by her near touch. Still Tenebrae feels the kiss she pressed beneath his mouth. It will be there for an eternity, he will remember it for it is likely the last kiss she will ever give him. Such is the nature of what he is about to tell her. He moves to stand before a depiction of one of Caligo’s Stallions who Swallowed the Sun. Yet he turns back for Elena, he reaches for her, to pull her closer, to have her stand beside him, in the shadow of the Stallion. “This one is my father.” Tenebrae breathes as his gaze trickles up the painting’s rearing body. The Stallion’s maw is parted, ready to swallow a ray of light that blooms down, down, down. “He ceased to exist when I was born. My mother died upon giving birth to me.” He knows that Elena has heard all this before, yet he breathes it again, feeling the way the dust and darkness swirl with his breath. “I fear you,” he says to Elena, even as he reaches for her and yet does not touch. His words touch her instead. His whispers caress the shell of her hear, her curve of her jaw. The monk’s eyes are closed, his brows creased with pain, his body feeling the presence of hers, the heat of her. “I fear you because you make me want to leave the Order.”
His words are shadows, a balm to the heat of her skin, where she burns, scolding his soul as his eyes linger over her body. He knows her body, he has laid claim to it. He longs to lay claim to it now, again, again, again. It is not his to have. “My parents died because my father passed the magic he was given by Caligo onto me. My mother died because women cannot survive the birth of a Night Order Stallion…” He takes a breath and cannot help the way he leans into Elena. Closer, closer until the heat of their two bodies feels like touching, like holding. “If I leave the Night Order what will their deaths mean?”
In the silence after his words, he does not move. He remains close to her, until the scant distance between their bodies feels at once like touching and yet like a chasm is yawning open between them. He does not see the way the black paint of his father’s body falls away from the mural like smoke from a fire. Its tendrils of black seep into the air his son and Elena breathe. Tenebrae is too consumed by Elena and sorrow to notice how the Stallion disappears like magic. “Sacrifices have been made because I am a monk… I have to make them mean something. Besides, if they find out about us, they will excommunicate me and in so doing take my sight from me.” Tenebrae’s low voice trails off, its heat amber, like whiskey. The darkness seeping from his father’s disappearing figure blends with his own shadows. He inhales it, feels the way it burns within his body, sharp like wicked grief. It sears through him. “I cannot bear to live a life, an eternity, without seeing you.”
You’re an impossible man. He flinches from where she cuts him like a blade. Elena turns sharp, her magic blooming. The glow of his half moon sigils cast light across her skin. She blazes and gods, he steps closer, a Stallion hungry, needing. The darkness of eternity seeps from the painting, it courses through his veins, filled with ancient, eternal magic. It sets his body alight, it burns him, remakes him. Does Elena inhale it too? Does she feel the way eternity sears itself into her body, twining into the fibers that bind her together?
“I am.” The Disciple whispers and the words press like tears upon her gilded skin. “I am an impossible man and ours is an impossible love.”
