tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She thinks he steals the sun from her, but Tenebrae has never seen her move radiant. It was the glow of her skin, so much like the brilliance of the sun, that first drew him to her. Initially with the hunger to destroy and then, then with a want that surged away from him like a runaway train. But all radical, out of control things end in disaster. He hears it now, the squealing brakes of regret, the grinding, crushing metal of breaking hearts, the cries of pain. He can never go back from this moment. It will haunt him.
He looks to her, for he cannot look away. Elena is beautiful, delicate, breaking. He did not love her as he should. He does not deserve the way she looks at him, the way she wants him and loves him. Tenebrae should not want her as he does, he should not love her as he does. The monk longs to go to her, hold her, pledge his life to her. But he cannot. It is not enough, he is not enough. You deserve more than me, Elena, his star-white eyes say. So much more. Boudika was right when she said he did not deserve to look upon her, but she was wrong too. Tenebrae does not deserve to look upon either her or Elena.
I have never felt less like an orphan than when I am with you. His eyes close, anguished. The disappearing stallion upon the mural, the eternity that it slips into Tenebrae’s lungs, passes into his blood and sears his soul into eternal life. The monk feels it as much as he feels Elena beside him. She is shattering like glass and her shards strike him. He bleeds, cut open, exposed.
“I am not lying.” He breathes when she accuses him so. His word means nothing, he has broken vows in the name of love. But when he speaks now, it is with a truth that comes from his exposed core. “I cannot bear it. But I must.” Her eyes are wide and blue, blue, blue. Tenebrae wants to sink into them. He wants to ask her how his heart can love two women. When, Elena, did he become such a foolish man? Was he always this way?
They are skin to skin and in the darkness that swells around them, he feels whole. Immortality settles itself within his body and he feels one, whole. He does not feel the way she trembles as her magic whispers the truth of them, their love into her bones. It paints a child into her mind, a girl that grows in her dam’s newly immortal body, beside her newly immortal sire. They stand in the darkness, a triad: darkness and light and a child destined to walk between the two.
“Her name is Boudika.” Tenebrae lets the name hang in the silence. They are still touching and slowly he peels himself from her body, unable to touch her, not when Boudika’s name is fresh and bright within the air. Not when he has betrayed them both. “I will think of you, always. Never doubt it.” He says and his voice cracks and his words shutter away. He astounds himself, he shames himself as he flounders, cast between one girl and the other. He is reckless and sinful. The monk is terrible and he is drowning in his own selfish idiocy.
Tenebrae turns from Elena, as he will turn from Boudika too and return to looking only upon his goddess. Don’t come back to me, Tenebrae.” The fae-girl says to his back. “I won’t.” He says, every word a truth because he does not know the ties that bind them, the making of a daughter who will draw her parents to her, in life, in death. He does not know how his daughter makes his every word a lie.
He leaves. Leaving Elena in the darkness but he knows she is more than a match for the shadows that breathe there. He thinks her magic is not empathy but light and love. She sets the worlds ablaze and Tenebrae would lie down and be turned to ash by her splendour.
