tenebrae
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She slips out of the crowd and the air fills with the static of star-strewn magic.
Tenebrae does not see her, yet he hears the sigh of her breath and the whisper of feet light as a dancer's. She does not move toward the revellers who move like an ocean to the music of the band. Instead she moves toward him, her every step growing louder, until she stops. Too close.
The static of her fate-magic plays across his skin and reaches out (as his shadows reach out for her) grasping at his soul to turn it like a card waiting to be read. Tenebrae does not need her reading to know what lies in the stars of his fate:
Desolation.
Sin.
Despair.
Loneliness.
It was his curse. One bestowed upon him by a goddess who took the sight from his eyes as punishment. Yet all the same he wonders at her magic as it reaches forward, weaker now, soon to be made stronger. Like a youngling creature it surveys him and his shadows.
That billowing darkness he wears wars with the bonfire light across her slim body. Always his darkness swells. The reach of his magic is hungry as it seeks light to consume. The bonfire hisses and spits in irritation and the starlight blinks.
In the quiet before she speaks, he listens to her breath, the sigh so much like the wind. The firelight licks along the edges of her ribs. she is so different to he, he who is swallowed up in perfect darkness.
His half-moon sigils glow at his brow. What irony, he would think, if he knew how her body bears golden eyes like he bears his silver-star sigils. She scent of her is sun and Solterra. The very thing he was made to consume, to war against, once, when the age of the gods was so different to this one. The energy of light upon him stirs the hunger in his gut and soul. Even before she has spoken, Tenebrae tilts his head toward the sound of her breath. He is little more man than Disciple of Caligo in that moment. Even disgraced he is still one of Caligo's Stallions.
His shadow magic seeps across her golden eyes, their intricacy, the weaving gold. Hungry. Hungry.
Hello?
She says at last and his ears twist forward, lazily, to catch her word. A solitary word, spoken in question. But she does not step into his darkness as other girls have: Elena, Boudika, Aspen. Maybe the fact that she doesn't is safer for them both, for her and for him. With her magic pressing static across his skin he asks her from the darkness, his voice rough, low, "Do you not like festivals, prophet? Since you come and stand here, away from the revelry..."
