tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
He knows she does not believe that he heard nothing of her prayers. It is there in the way she watches him (as Morrighan watches most things): suspiciously and carefully detached. Tenebrae’s star-bright gaze trails over the contours of her pale face. He aches for his Regent. Maybe that is why he is not surprised when her prayers stop suddenly. Her blue eyes fling open, there is a current felt and yet not addressed. She turns from her prayers and the emotions that pool beneath the surface of her skin. Morrighan turns into him and Tenebrae merely watches her with compassion warming the edges of his soul.
Feel He wants to whisper. Feel everything and do not be afraid. The monk longs to whisper to her. Just as he goes to, as the impulse swells within him, Morrighan changes the subject. She mentions his wounds across his spine. Did your prayers bring you to do that?
“Yes.” Tenebrae says with only a moment’s delay. “It is penance for my sins.” He says nothing for a moment but looks to where the smoke of her extinguished candle rises like prayers before Caligo. “It brings me closer to our Night Goddess.” For I have strayed. Again that silence falls, its weight crackling with the static of what goes unspoken. His eyes trail over her cheeks, her eyelashes. He commits her to memory, the parts of her she has hardened and the parts that remain soft, soft enough still to hurt, soft enough to stay beautiful.
You know nothing of duty or discipline. He hears Boudika’s words and they cut him afresh. Everytime he remembers her the memory of her slays him. The effort to stay within the Order, to forget the call of the sea, like a siren in his ears, is too much. But he disciplines himself. “What do you know of duty, Morrighan?” Tenebrae asks low and small and vulnerable as a lamb. And then, quieter still so it is a mere whisper in the space between them, ‘will you teach me?”
