tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Their bodies are as grey and silver as their moods. Even the sky above moves to hues of steel clouds hard and unrelenting in their morbidity. Below, the crystal city of mirrors reflects bleak stories up to the curious onlookers.
The silver stranger looks to his mirror, to the embrace he shares with Boudika in another world, another time, another circumstance. Idly he wonders if his grief and shame is enough to hide it. But he is tired of lies and coverups. He was in love with Boudika, and even if he had cursed any hope for them in this world, he would no longer hide from his truth.
“I wanted to find this.” The monk breathes, openly, honestly. “To know that somewhere in the world things were better than they are now.” But also, I wanted to see a worse world, a worse situation for myself, that I might be content to know that things can always be worse than they are now. That what is happening now is merely fleeting, that it can still go up and down.” Tenebrae turns, drawn by the picture of another man, a warrior, not in the embrace of a woman but faithful in his vow to Caligo. Assured in his faith and piety. “I also wanted to see him.” He says of himself - a better monk in another world. “To know that somewhere I am a better monk than I am here.”
Tenebrae looks up from the mirrors, up to where the stranger watches him with eyes as silver as his, her cheek cut through with golden scars. She has lived a life he wished for. If he knew how she had not loved, how love was a thing that evaded her grasp, he would be jealous of her as she is of the love he wishes he had not found.
“I came to be jealous and relieved, angry and happy. But all those mixed emotions are torturous. It is terrible to want what you are not supposed to have.’ The monk does not look away from Seraphina, but holds her, in his honesty, in the pieces of him he has exposed.
