tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Tenebrae is silent as he considers the girl’s question. It is one he has begun to wonder about. In his silence he lets his magic whisper into his soul and his veins. Shadows run like the blood in his veins, they slip through his hear and his soul and hum with their knowing, their voices that as of yet have no words.
“No.” The monk murmurs at last, feeling how they reach for the child, how they surround her, press upon her skin as if it is a mere extension of his. She is familiar. Welcome. “No they do not speak, but, since I lost my sight, they have been changing.”
Gently he muses, gently he reliquishes his hold of them and waits… waits to see what they whisper over his skin, how they press into his senses and bring him joy and worry, or how they push and pull him this way and that.
Another moment of silence passes. Another moment Tenebrae steals to further feel how his shadows move, how they welcome the child and the way she stands relaxed within their embrace. “You are comfortable with the darkness,” He observes at last, a small smile curving up at his lips. The monk does not think for a moment that it could be because this child is his blood. That in her is the latent blessing of caligo, to which his shadows reach as they press upon the burnished bronze of her small frame.
The light of his crescent moon sigils shine upon her own, golden, crescent moon. It is a blessing he cannot see. A blessing that his tongue is not full of questions and his soul torn apart by deception. Instead, Tenebrae continues to stand, a stranger beside his daughter.
He follows her lead, shadows reaching into the basket, feeling across the flowers guiding him to one. His telekineses is clumsy without his sight. It takes not two but four attempts to draw an offering out of the basket. But he does at last.
The fire is easier, his has long felt the heat of it glowing across his skin, soldering the looser parts of him into something new, stronger, more whole. Tenebrae casts the offering into the flames, he hears how they hiss and spit sparks into the dark space before him.
“I have been.” The stallion says, ruefully. He made a flower crown for Maeve there - another girl. A child not his by blood but one who seems to come so close. Maeve gives him a taste of what might have been, if things were different, if he and Elena were not so alike as to let their hearts fall in two directions at once.
Oh and at her last comment. The monk smiles, warmed by her understanding, delighted that she knows that is how he communicates with the world around him now. Touch, sound, taste and smell was all he knew. How had he lived his life as a pauper in all other senses but sight? Each is so rich, he has come to realise how he has always been far wealthier than he realised.
His smile is identical to the girl’s. Or, maybe, hers is identical to his. He was the one who gave it to her, after all. Yet their twin smiles are a secret thing, lost to a blind father and a daughter who has never thought to question her parentage.
