tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
If Tenebrae knew Seraphina more he would long to be her. To be able to separate gods and love. Yet, for him, it all comes back to his genesis. His future was never his own. He was made to worship Caligo, to defend her, to fight against Solis’ light…
It would have been so much easier if he had not been made for love too. But love was at the core of every religion. Love of a god, love of each other. But he was only supposed to love his goddess and his brothers. It was simple: focus upon duty, focus your love upon Denocte and nothing else will ever matter. But maybe he did not love his land, his goddess enough? Now he has seen what lies beyond religion, what a love of women will get him. Pain, agonising pain, and yet a delirium upon which he drifts, high, like Icarus.
The silvered woman asks the same questions as all the others have. None can seem to understand it, the duty, the love of goddess and court. Maybe that was him. Maybe he did not understand it himself enough to ever give himself over to it fully. Maybe he was always a bad monk, even before Boudika and Elena? “A number of things,” He says softly. “Things I could control, things I think I had no control over.” Tenebrae frowns, unsure of the truth of his last statement. Did he have control over who he was? What he was created to be: a son of a Stallion who Swallowed the Sun and through that, a Disciple of Caligo?
Slowly Tenebrae turns to the silver girl, so much like him. The pain across her face a painting he thinks he can name and understand, for he bears its mirror. But the paint is different, the artist different, the strokes different… but still, it was pain and hurt and its colours were similar. “Because as a monk I was not supposed to do the things I did. I fell in love and then I lost the one i love through my own mistakes.” The Disciple pauses, he wonders over revealing too much, but his punishment is tomorrow, tomorrow he will lose sight of everything. His transgressions will be out, their every terrible detail exposed. He sees no point in holding them in any longer. “I am supposed to love Caligo, she is supposed to be enough. I am not supposed to want a woman and love her so much that I come here searching for a world in which I am not a monk and I have not done foolish things. A world in which i get to keep her. But also, I want to find a world in which she was never there and I was never a monk…” He laughs lightly, but there is nothing easy or light about it. It is the sun melting the wax from Icarus’ feathers. “I want to see an easier world.” Then his smile grows softer at his naive admission. “But there is no such thing. No such world, is there?”
The monk looks up at her, up and away from the worlds where he has Boudika and those where he does not and those where she does not even exist. “But what brings you here? I don’t think i am the only one of us in pain.”
