tenebrae
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
As they lie together, the darkness tangling them in shadow, Tenebrae feels her pain. It is there in the way she trembles against him, little more than a leaf upon the breeze of sickness. It is there in the words that fall from her lips, metallic as blood, raw as worried tissue.
Her muzzle is warm. It feels larger than a brush when it passes across his shoulder. It is an embrace, a holding of friendship. It is a bond that sinks through the skin she touches and binds itself into the fabric of his being. Luvena sews herself into him as he into her.
The cold of her room is a contrast to the heat of her memories. They flood between the monk and the healer as warm as the blood that links Luvena with her sons. In silence, Tenebrae only listens. He is no wise guru here. Children are a thing so far out of his remit. There is no experience he has of children except the boys who come as fresh orphans to the Night Order. They grow to love each other like brothers. But never has Tenebrae known the love of a mother. He dares to wonder how different the love of a father is.
Luvena’s words let him have that moment of blasphemous wonder and hope. He entertains a moment as he pretends a child is his, a little girl called Elliana. Would he love her as much as Luvena loves her sons? Many would say no. Maybe they are right? What would a man without a child know? More pertinently, what would a monk know? He had no right thinking such thoughts.
Her anger is a welcome bath, scouring his selfish thoughts from him as if her irritation were acid. She lifts her head from him - from that place where they had curled together tighter than even the darkness could allow. Tenebrae does not miss her flinch, he feels it through his bones. Her hurt is a taste upon the air, a shiver in her body where it presses against him.
The monk reaches for her. He runs his lips along the curve of her neck. Her skin is warm here, warmer than he thinks it should be. Tenebrae longs his touch into a balm, something to ease the fatigue from her body and the pain he pressed into her heart. “I meant no harm, Lu.” He whispers against her skin, where the cold air cannot reach. “I am sorry.”
When the silence descends after her final thoughts, Tenebrae is silent also. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest is any indication that he is man at all and not shadow. His thoughts are a fathomless depth that he sinks into, sifting, considering, fearing drowning. When at last he tires, when the edges of his pool of thought suddenly feel like land and he in the middle of the Terminus Sea, then, then he suddenly pulls himself out of silence. “I had better go.” The monk says with a small smile and no effort to respond to her final words. That pool is too deep. His thoughts too dripping with heresy and faithlessness. “I am due on duty soon.”
The monk rises and his shadows gather. Reaching carefully, moving his muzzle until it at last finds her brow and upon it presses a kiss. “Go well, Luvena. Do not become a stranger now you are here. My door is always open to you.”
And with that he leaves, his manner slow, his shadows reaching before him, something like feeling.
