tenebrae
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
The chill of winter was ebbing from the stone walls of the Night Order’s monastery. The warm hum of spring was drinking the damp out of the stones, pushing the nights back and ushering the dawn in sooner. It breathed life back into the monks. It whispered over Tenebrae’s skin, asking if he was ready to bloom too. He was not sure how to answer Spring’s call. He was not sure if he was still needing to hibernate. Was his soul ready to draw itself out again? Was his heart still too wayward?
The monk does not know that, as he wonders these things amidst a community in bloom, a girl wilts like a flower caught in winter’s grasp. Luvena ails, wearying when all her patients in the hospital wing flourish beneath her healing gift. Maybe that is why the monk comes to find her now, to take from her too, to find life again at her touch.
“Lu.” He murmurs as his shadows press against her door. The black of his magic reaches out, like fingers, to feel the texture of the frame, the panels of the wooden door, its hinges open. Tenebrae steps forward, cautious, careful, almost tentative as a lamb. His blindfolded eyes are growing accustomed to their new blindness. But the man behind them, trapped within the darkness of his entombing body, has not grown used to his new cell. Though he accepts it, sitting in silence, listening to the quiet and the way his other senses tell him of the world.
“They said outside that you are not well.” He had come for himself, but as with all things, he is not the only one in need. The world lives upon the balance of giving and taking. He will wait to be made whole again - though it may take eternity. The monk will sit in the darkness until there is light, until the flickering glow of Boudika’s light grows into anything more than a fragile, trembling glow.
“Can I get you anything, Lu?” He asks, unsure if she is even there, though his shadows drift into the room reaching for her, to remember how she feels against them, to tell him that his friend is there.
