tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
How much did you hear exactly? Morrighan asks as she watches him. So many have thought her cold, yet as Tenebrae looks to her, all he can think is how the blue of her eyes are not the icy depths of the sea but the hot heart at the base of a flame. Morrighan burns, brightly fiercely.
“I heard nothing,” Tenebrae says, honestly. “What is said here is between you and Caligo alone, just as what i say here is between myself and Caligo. I would not dare listen in.” He sees the way she bites back a myriad of retorts. Displeasure ripples out from her body. The monk remembers the woman he met beneath the reflection of the stained glass, her body bathed in a pool of kaleidoscope colours.
I wasn’t praying. She corrects him, but the monk merely smiles for this is an area he is more experienced in. “Praying is just communication. It can be done in art or song or dance or writing, or a conversation.” Gently he sighs and his gaze drifts about the temple, where stained glass windows gleam holy and beautiful. He sees the red, so much like his wounded heart, so much like the blood that spills from his spine - tears for Boudika, for Elena, for him. He feels every movement and it reminds him how he is not enough - not enough of a monk, not enough of a man, not filled with enough respect for the women he loves. What has he done?
“If you intend to talk to a god,” He finishes lightly, sadly, “then however you do it, it is a prayer.” She neither tells him to stay. Nor to leave. But Tenebrae goes anyway. Slowly he moves to a darkened corner of the temple, where a ring of candles gleam upon a stand. From below he picks up a candle and returns to the Regent. “Here,” He offers the candle to her. “I know you can make fire from nothing, hold it without effort. But take this, if you wish and light it. It is smaller, weaker than your magic - like the smaller, feebler parts of ourselves. The ones we hide from each other, our insecurities and worries. Focus those smaller, weaker parts of yourself into the flame, let it hold them, become them. Then, when you are ready, blow it out, extinguish those worries, let the darkness consume them.”
