tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She does not tell him to stay with the Order.
He did not expect her to but it is still a shock when she doesn’t. Her words are little comfort to his ragged-raw heart. It is so wounded, its crisis so at peak that he cannot process the honesty of her words. Even if she spoke comforting words, they would have been as lost to him as a drop in the ocean. They mean little to nothing in his heart that falls and staggers. He does not know what he wishes to hear, but he knows he does not hear it from Moira’s lips. And maybe that is the truth that speaks out in all of this. There is nothing that can be done to help him, no words that will assuage his guilt. Now, he is left with only time that can heal. Now he must decide what path he takes.
Her light is the only thing that holds him together when she calls him a ship with a broken sail. He laughs at the image and turns his tear-stained eyes to the sea beside them. It is a deep blue-black with foam as silver as the moon. Still a mortal man. He was. But the Order is about discipline and he showed none of that. Now all is broken and ruined.
“How am I supposed to live and not have what I love? It is destroying me. My heart…” He has no words for how this loss eviscerates him, how love once so blistering and golden is now beyond his reach and all he wants is to pull it back to him, to let it gild his heart again.
And then, all of his screams are gone, all of his energies spent. Tenebrae has emptied himself upon the beach before Moira and all that remains of him are the empty parts that once had love. They feel bruised and frayed by the violence of lost love.
He is silent for so long. Tenebrae hoped this might be a cathartic conversation, that he might leave feeling stitched together, repaired in some way - even the smallest of ways. But he feels none of those things. The monk feels as broken as he did when he pulled her into the alcove.
Another confession gathers on his tongue and when all of him has been exposed, he longs to rid himself of this too. He does not think Moira will hate him for this, but he does not know, for he hates himself, so why would anyone feel anything other than hatred too? “I slept with Elena.” Tenebrae says, needing this confession gone from his tongue. Needing Moira to know the depths of his iniquities.
He is still in the silence after his confession. It seems even the sea stops its rocking. WHen all the stillness becomes unbearable, he stands. Tenebrae steps forward, presses his brow to Moira. She seems darker now, without the bright of her magic. “I should go.” He breathes, a coward, unable to stand in the tension that follows his confession. The monk looks upon Moira Tonnerre, drinks in the beauty of her, the dark of her eyes, the line of her cheekbones. He emblazons the sight of his friend upon his heart and his memory. Then turns and leaves.
