tenebrae
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
Her voice… it is tired, The sound of it, the lyrical tone is more like a lullaby. It whispers of weariness and reminds his bones how tired he is, how exhausted with everything. The monk does not shy from the feeling, but lets the weight of them slow his blinking eyes. He lets his eyelashes grow as heavy as if they are made of lead. They press upon his cheek and brush against the soft threads of his bandage. It hurts to blink and so he stops, though a part of him still does not accept his blindness. It wants him to pull the bandage from his eyes and rub his weary, obstructed lids until light comes pouring in anew…
He doesn’t. His conscious knows how futile it is, how his every moment of forgetting and then remembering is like being dropped to the bottom of the sea. He would become little more than driftwood then, material caught upon the tide. Tenebrae feels worked apart by a tide already. His exhaustion is self-made, he only has himself to blame. So he bathes in his sorrow and his weariness and wears them like a chain about his throat, a noose he waits for that will pull tight. Or, maybe, it will pull him in a new direction, one that will bring him life and not this strange half-life he finds himself within.
Luvena’s words, though wearily spoken, manage to reach into the darkness of his body. He holds them there and presses against the walls of himself, wondering if he can be anything more than the shell he is. Can he be reshaped? A building razed and built anew?
“I am fine,” Tenebrae says with a smile as cool and still as a winter’s dawn. His answer is a mirror of hers. It is a lie as blatant as hers too. Ruefully he laughs a half laugh, soft as a sigh. “They cannot help but gossip. Worse than women at a well.”
He moves further in, still cautious, listening to the strange whispering feelings his shadows evoke within him. They push him and pull him until they build within his body a sensation firm and unyielding. Tenebrae stops, wary and cautious. His head dips until his halfmoon sigil lights the flagstone floor of her room. “It has been too long.” Guided by a sense he has not yet begun to understand, he reaches out careful, careful, until the hair of her forelock brushes against his muzzle.
Oh. Tenebrae smiles into the curls of her hair. His nose fills with the scents of herbs and tinctures that lie upon the soft tendrils - like spider-silk, he thinks. The monk has never stopped to think of the texture of hair before, he would linger a moment longer, expect that he has already taken too long - like an old man clasping an old fond photograph.
He steps away, “I have missed you. But we have time.” Slowly he lowers himself beside her, upon the cold floor. An ear twists toward her, his focus upon her, though he looks across the room, better to hear her than to try see what he will never see again.
