[P] I dream in blue [tenebrae]

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

Elena finds herself longing for the peaceful days of her youth. 

For the times spent in the secret fort with her red haired cousin, where Alvaro would so often come to seek them out. “What are you girls doing? It’s getting dark, time to go home,” he would say in that gruff voice of his. And there they would sit, with innocent smiles on their faces, begging him to join in on one last game, and Alvaro begrudgingly doing so. The times where they sat looking at clouds talking about their future. (“Would you travel beyond the mountains?” “I don't know, maybe. Would you?” “I don't know, maybe.”)

Only if you come with me.

She aches for those times when they could just be little, silly fillies, thinking their whole lives were ahead of them. 

She looks as if she had everything together. Elena had found her direction in life, and despite the great sorrow Elena has faced in her short life, she looks assured, determined, graceful. She looks so strong, the immoveable, unshakeable Elena, but in truth, her heart has broken a thousand times over and she thinks maybe it just cannot break any more, otherwise it may never be able to repair itself again. 

She heads to Night Court, like she never has before. She has heard about the land. A festival! They are having a festival and there is such a girlish, giggling part of Elena that says she must attend. Denocte holds some sort of mystery for the golden girl and she vainly looks at her reflection, satisfied when it looks like every blonde hair is in place. She doesn't know that she walks to the land where the blonde man with those devastatingly blue eyes that look like flecks of sky lives. Elena has no idea that Michael  resides in these lands, that his stories echo in walls. 

She is going to a festival. 

The sunshine child arrives in the meadow as her senses are tickled by lavender, excited voices of strangers, and the taste of excitement settling on her tongue as soft as cotton. Blue and gold are etched on every banner. The scent of lavender reminds her of a particular bend by a particular river in a particular place in a particular land that Elena has not seen in quite some time. 

(And it reminds her of a particular friend which brings a particular smile onto her face.)

She settles herself against the backdrop as she watches the groups dance and sing on the main floor, with flowing hair and wild steps and Elena content to be their humble audience member. She knows as the sunsets further that they would spark a fire, perhaps the part the girl is most eager for.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.

@Tenebrae

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 

He should not have come. This is no place for a monk.


Tenebrae skirts the dancers whose silhouettes (framed by fire and moonlight) tangle in songs and delight. Horses pass him in masks made with wild flowers, roots and vines and leaves that still echo the forests from which they were plucked. Eyes gleam bright with the mischief of Night and revelry laughs in the spaces between bodies. 


Conflicted, wounded, the warrior monk makes his way toward the small shrine made to Caligo. It is upon the edge of the meadow with the trees for her cathedral beams and the setting sun for her lamplight. The day dies in hues of bronze, lilacs and burnished gold, crimson bleeds across the sky. If all the woodland is her cathedral tonight, the sky is her stained glass window. Tenebrae stands, bathed within its tumultuous, violent, light. It hurts to look upon it and he wonders if, when the sun at last touches the horizon, the sky will shatter as it turns to smothering black. 


The monk kneels, hard earth beneath his bones. He prays for all the souls who gather beneath Caligo’s emerging moon. He prays for redemption - that she might turn him again from his sins. Yet each word grows a little more shallow and his heart becomes a little more hardened. Darkness hisses in his ears, words that echo sinner! in his soul. The darkness is a lover as it curls about him, shrouding the monk with the gift of Caligo’s magic and yet it parts along his spine, exposing to the night sky (and all who see him) the whip marks that mark him a blasphemer.


He aches with kneeling and with praying, finishing his prayers with an unsettling mix of piety and disinterest. Already his mind is drifting, already it is snagged like a lamb in the thorn bush of temptation. He rises (though he is continually falling from his hallowed place, like an angel from its position beside his god). Like Icarus, Boudika once whispered in his ear. He hears the kelpie as if she is there, as if the darkness veils the crimson of her body from him.


Gluttonous of her, sickened, he turns from the altar and the dark swarms upon him. They hide his silver skin and the half moon sigils of his Order. Only his eyes gleam with light and they grow brighter as his ire builds, as he drinks in the light of the sun. He is a Stallion made to Swallow the Sun, a Disciple! Yet he is as tempted as Adam. His ire builds in the heart of the darkness that shrouds him like armour. It swallows the light around him, feeds into his glowing veins, into the white of his eyes. Light succumbs to his ire as he swallows it down. Darkness blooms about him. Horses part before the monk, before one of Caligo’s Disciples. He moves and still a litany is upon his furious lips. Words pour out as he fills up the empty parts of himself with prayer.


He does not see the girl at first. The girl with her golden skin and wide, keen eyes that drink in the magic of the festival. Tenebrae knows it is a heady wine and her skin seems to glow with the energy of it. It is that which captures the attention of the Disciple. He pauses from where he walks in darkness and wicked, white light. He turns the glow of his starbright eyes upon her. She is as bright as the torches that herald the coming bonfires. Solis’ setting sun halos her, sends sparks along the curve of her perfect plaits and turns them wilder. The night turns her as unkempt as a faerie and then ever wilder, wilder.


“Welcome to Denocte,” The monk says, breathing darkness along the parts of her that glow. He knows she is not of the Night Court, for no girl of night knows the light of day like Elena does. Framed in twilight, liminal and smelling of wild cliff-side flowers Terrastella sings from her sunflower skin.  “What is your name, Terrastellan?” He dares not look at all the ways her body is soft as petals, for all the ways it curves, feminine and alluring. She is bright, bright and by the gods the Stallion is ravenous. Tenebrae keeps his white-bright gaze upon the blue of hers as moonlight and twilight meet in the setting of the sun.


@Elena ~ Please excuse the novel!

 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

It feels like she is always drifting now, a brittle gold leaf caught within the push and pull of dark currents. Everything is different now, changed, and yet somehow same. This pain in her chest is solely hers, carefully hidden and tucked away from prying eyes, a task that is decidedly difficult for a face as expressive as hers. But she tries anyway because this ache is her fault, her burden, hers to bear.

She keeps it safe like a secret.

Elena was so tired of feeling empty—of feeling sorrow.

She was young, but heartache had become a constant companion, carving out space in her chest so that when she woke in the middle of the night, it was with short gasps, the monsters of her dreams still lurking in the shadows of the land.

She would have died from that love, Lilli had said, and she knew that it was somehow true.

She would have died from that love, but back then, back then she had been okay with this.

She had loved the cruelty in him, the sweet agony, and if he had been the dagger she died upon, so be it.

She should have more of a sense of self-preservation.

Elena is lost in the world of fast turns and intimate relationships while she stands stationary with no one beside her. Imaginary flames taste her skin jumping and arching against the roll of her hips and the sway of her curves. She is unaware of the fire she casts against the pale man, unaware of his eyes upon her because she has never been aware when others watch her.

(In the openness of a meadow, behind the thick tree line, to the side of a boulder, in the blaze of a snowstorm, they have watched her.)

Her blood feels ignited, it runs hot like she has been fed the fire that burns not far in the distance. She can feel the smoke fill her lungs, it singes against her nerves, and blaze her soul. And it is there buried beneath her skin as she darts blue eyes to the man who had watched her as he greets her. “Thank you for the welcome,” she says. “It is my first time here in Denocte,” she admits, she feels suddenly so warm even as the sun edges closer to the horizon, falling with grace from the sky.

Her name he asks for, a simple request, something to be expected, but Elena for once finds the act mundane, too simple for what she feels within that golden breast of hers. “I’ll tell you,” she says and there is something feverish buried beneath her tongue that arches up to meet her lips in a smile. “But only after you dance with me,” she says because tonight she doesn't feel like Elena, she feels bold and brazen. She feels like fire, like flames. And fire cannot stay contained in a wide open space. It longs to twist, to turn, to leap—

To ignite.

She moves between the boy and the dancers, she can feel the music writhing in her veins like a butterfly cupped in childish hands. “Please?” It is a question, a simple, girlish plea. “This night,” she says and she looks upwards to the first of the stars that shyly appear from a sky made of blue and fire. “It is going to be far too beautiful to waste sitting idly by,” she says in that way that is so innately Elena, bright like the daytime sun she was named for. “What’s the harm?” She asks him. “We’re only strangers.”

He had been a stranger once.

And him.
And him as well.
And he too.

What was the harm?
Only strangers.

They were only strangers.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.

@Tenebrae

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 

Would it comfort Elena to know how well she hides her secrets?


As she stands, elvin, in the gloaming her face is nothing but serene. It is porcelain upon which the twilight carves her from moonlight. It paints the careful angles of her face and then sends embers of the setting sun down to illuminate along the angles of her cheeks, her nose. 


The girl turns her face to him and there is no trace of the sorrow and heartache she keeps locked between her teeth and heart. Her round eyes move to watch him, no longer drinking in the scene beyond him. His fills her foreground, the dark of his magic billowing like wings, gathering like ominous clouds in a volatile sky. Yet her eyes find his, yet she smiles and no, still there is no trace of sorrow there.


His eyes illuminate her face in all the places the setting sun does not. The burnished gold of her skin captures it all and burns ever bright. She turns bronze in the sunlight, bronze like Boudika, like the sun that tumbles out of the sky. Tenebrae is ready for it. He waits for the falling of the sun and the endless rise of darkness. 


His prayers dry up upon his lips when she smiles and when she speaks. What use are prayers here? He should chastise himself for such a thought. But there are so many things Tenebrae should be doing that he is not. The tight pull of skin across his whip-scarred spine reminds him. The twinge of skin at his throat where Boudika bit him reminds him of all the things he has done that he should not.


He is a sinner, this man before her and yet she smiles and hides her secrets better than he. There are better things to learn from girls than the soft of their skin and the taste of their lips. They hide secrets better than he and they are enough to tempt a god out of his throne. 


And they want to dance.


Tenebrae has seen the way Denocte dances. He has stepped into the tangle of music and limbs and felt how alien the sensation of dance is across his body. Long has he heard his brothers laugh when their captain likened fighting to a dance. Yet here, when she smiles at him, Tenebrae knows the battle is not amidst the dancers, it is within himself. It is a violent war.


He smiles though he bleeds within, though his skin feels tight across his bones at the idea of dance. He does not know how to move without a sword in his grasp and a foe before him. He smiles and darkness laughs across his lips. “You are not the first to expect a dance from me.” Tenebrae says as he illuminates her with his gaze, sending the darkness of his magic fleeing from where it draws sigils across her face. “I am afraid I must disappoint you. I do not dance.” He pauses and his gaze drifts from her to the altar hidden in the shadow of the forest wall. “I am made for other things, Terrastellan.” And yet -


Please, She says with her eyes still wide, still deeper than any ocean he had dared to stand in. He does not look close into her pool-like eyes for fear of drowning. She is moving, the music there in the bend of her knees and the sway of her shoulders, her hips. She appeals to the night, to a sky too beautiful to allow them to stand idly beneath.


What is the harm?


He follows her with his gaze as she steps beyond him and stands upon the cusp of the dancers, like a girl upon the edge of a cliff, her arms outspread, ready to fall, laughing, into the great open. She hides her wings, Tenebrae knows. Faerie breathes along her spine and chases the words of litanies out of his mind. 


He breathes out and it is as smoke from a dragon’s maw. Darkness curls and drifts out, becoming lost in the shift of bodies. Slowly he lets his gaze return to the girl beside him, “A dance for a name then, but you will have to teach me.”


And the Disciple wonders about all the ways he will discover dancing is nothing at all like fighting.



@Elena ~ 

 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

Days did not last for long. 

Or maybe they lasted too long.

It was hard to tell anymore. 

The days all blended together, one bleeding into the next. She slept, but it was thin and fitful, his image haunting her most every night. She awoke with his breath on her cheek. It had all been wrong. Warning bells had sounded in her head, but she had remained rooted to the spot, mind reeling with the rush he provided her. Even as he grew rougher, she did not run, she did not cry, refusing to give him the things he craved so easily. She had willed herself to know, to believe there was something deeper in him.

‘I do not deserve to be saved.’

A pause.

‘But maybe you do.’

And it is the warm breeze that feels like his breath that pushes that golden face to meet his own. But it is his eyes that hold her there. He is no sinner in her eyes, but a man. ‘Men only lead to trouble,’ Rishiri had sat with a flick of a raven tail, and little Elena should have listened then, but she had been too busy watching a swallow fly by.

There is kindness to him, but also a stoic nature, and she finds the combination both confusing and familiar, the edges of him warping as they talk. She tries to note the subtle differences, the tiny shift, but she inevitably gives up, throwing her proverbial hands in the air and just enjoying the difference of his demeanor, the darkness and light that wisps over his body and toys in those bright eyes. He was not Underworld with his ghosts nor Tunnel with his demons. He was refreshing.

At his own laugh, she joins in, the sound welcomed in her throat after so much time of silence. ‘Everyone can dance.’ Comes the voice of her uncle so clear in her mind as he draws her away from the water’s edge and into the easy steps of a dance he knew so well. “And what other things may those be?” She asks a little breathy, the joy of simply being here enough to buy her into an ocean of happiness and grace. Elena has always had a sweet and kind heart, but it has been battered by the world that is more beautiful than mountains and waterfalls and wildflowers by oceans.

Please.

She can feel the music like water seeping over her body, it rings like thunder and it is bright like lightning. It is a perfect storm. Elena looks like her mother, although no one in Novus will ever know. She looks like her mother who so often danced, there is the same rhythm in her hips, the rock of her shoulders, and the grace in her steps. The stars peek out from a blanket of navy blue as if to see if it were truly Elena beginning to move or if Beylani had risen from the grave to dance with death as if she had never left this world at all.

Elena would laugh if she knew him to be thinking about her as a faerie. Although it isn't hard to believe as starlight catches in her hair and her steps leave the ground as if she had wings. Those painstaking hours spent building faerie houses and waiting for them to come, when, in the eyes of the man before her she had been what she had sought all along.

He watches her with her eyes and Elena cannot see his gaze as anything other that excitement, intoxicated on the festival, on the sights, the sounds, and scents. He looks to her and she wants to ask him what he found, what secrets he managed to pull from her skin with such a look on his face. He breathes darkness, but all Elena can see is starlight and moon songs. He speaks, a confirmation to join her weaved in his words like ribbons in a child’s hair. When his eyes reach hers, that is all she needs, Elena turns to face him, his dark face filling the vision of her blue eyes. “Don’t worry,” she says, her voice is like summer and rain, like sunshine caught in the beads of dew. “It’s easier than you think,” she says, a promise that she presses into his hand before turning those blue eyes away from him.

She carries shards of glass inside her that she could not rid herself of. With each breath, she felt them digging in deeper, her breath painful, her lungs constricting. ‘Tonight, tonight would be everything she needed,’ she lies to herself as she motions for him to move closer, towards the dancers, to the music that makes her sway and dip and flow. She is an ocean, autumn leaves strung on a breeze, the sun rising and falling in the sky. 


Elena moves her body close to him one more and breathes a single word into him. “Move,” she says, there is a smile and she lifts her feet in place, watching his own to do the same. Once more she pulls close. “And move again,” she says, she feels the night wash over her and it feels wrong somehow, wrong enough to be just right. A girl of the sun and of warmth has no place being out int he starlight, but she is there all the same. She is illuminated by smoke and fire and Elena no longer knows if she is burning or if it is the world blazing into ash and smoke. She moves beside him, the tough against him innocent enough and she moves her hips towards his. “Do this, whenever you move, just feel it,” she instructs gently, there is a twinkle in those blue eyes of hers. Quickly she assembles herself in front of him. “Move forward when I step back,” she says starting the motion. “You are the man,” she says to him, peering up and him beneath those long, dark lashes. “You have to lead, tell me where to go,” she says, dares, and she begins moving those feet, pretending for a moment she belongs not to Terrastella, not to Hyaline, nor Paraiso or Woodlands, but to the dance, and the dance alone. She is not Elena, for she has yet placed her name on her tongue. She is bright and burning fire, blazing into the night with flickering embers lighting the way.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.

@Tenebrae

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 


She turns to him, as a flower turning toward its sun (but that is, of course, not what Tenebrae is to her). If he had known what she thinks, that men only lead to trouble, he would have laughed dark as pitch. He only recently told Boudika that women were never, ever, worth it. But every day, every minute that passes and carries him further from his goddess he thinks his words might have been a lie. Ah, such words the three of them were fed: that men were trouble and unsatisfying, that girls were, quite simply, never worth it.


Yet here they are: girl and boy in a sea of the, dancing together, laughing together, caught in revelry together. Maybe they were worth it and maybe all of them were trouble. 


Tenebrae knows nothing of where this fae-girl came from, or how she captured the sun within her skin as she has. He knows nothing of Underworld lands, but if he did, he might wonder if there were gods there who trapped girls with pomegranates too. The only things the Disciple knows of are hours spent in prayer, his forehead bent, pressed upon the cold stone, his knees bruised with his piety, his soul as dark as Caligo paints it.


At last his shadows reach for the girl and Tenebrae wonders why it took them so long. They explore, one moment like fingers and the next like the gossamer of a dream, along the slant of her cheeks, the groove of her throat. He does not dare to think what it might feel like, to touch a girl like that. He has only ever known violence and it is easier that way. That is what he was made for, trained for.


The sun-girl is moving, out from the shadows of his magic, out into the gloaming, out into the galaxy of dancers. With his bright eyes he watches her go. She leads him out to dance amidst the planets, into this place that is like fighting and yet there is no violence here, except for that of the wildness of love and lust; comets colliding, stardust blinding. And these are things he knows so little of, so grounded is he.


The dancer-girl (for she seems to be so many things) asks him what other things he is made for, breathless as she does. What steals the air from her lungs? The night? The stars? The anticipation of dance? The mysteries of girls are as fleeting to him as the breath from her lungs. He does not smile at her but gazes at her, darkness steeling along his cheeks, sharp as a sword. There is nothing soft about him as he stands here in robes of darkness his sigil moons glowing as he swallows the light from her skin. “I am made for gods and suns and war,” the Disciple says upon this battlefield of want and grace and beautiful, melodic chaos. 


He does not smile and this is not the time for it because she is making him move. Her daylight body moves close to his but always there is the gloaming between daylight and moonlight and he steps back. The space between them is liminal, filled with stars and the setting sky. Tenebrae keeps them chaste, for it is all he knows. He stole a kiss once and that was crime enough. The sea beckons him again and it is a weight in his soul, his god-filled soul. Divine deliverance is all that can save him now.


He mirrors her, her hips, her feet, her limbs. It is like fighting and yet the only music is the song of instruments upon the wind. There is no violent clash of metal here. He moves, he dances and he is only a warrior moving with all the learning of battle to sharpen his steps. He is the grace and violence of a swan. Tenebrae moves with her, because of her, until, like the sun loosing her planets into orbit she says with a look framed with dark, burnished lashes, Lead, tell me where to go.


So he does and they move like satellites until the battle ends and then he stops and does not ask how he moved (not when their knees collided, their shoulders, their hips - he would have laughed, if he were not making sure they did not touch again). Tenebrae only says as the music fades, “See? I am made for things more violent than this.” He watches the fire spark along her spine, “You owe me your name now, Terrastellan.”


@Elena

@Boudika - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

Men only lead to trouble. She might have believed her. But there is a boy that found her as the snow sparkled underneath a setting sun, who made her laugh, who made her smile and asked nothing of her in return. He saw her light and he had only asked to brighten it. She might have believed her—if she never met him.

Maybe it has been Elena all along, leading into trouble.
But this is a dance.

And Elena isn't supposed to be leading.

He has something of darkness and light within him and she is mesmerized by the way that they coil in his chest. She does not have words to explain what she finds so fascinating about it—whether it is the way he moves or how his shadows spread. His shadows come for her and she isn’t scared. Maybe she should be, standing here like this, looking at him like that. Maybe she should be. But Elena has felt so much fear all of her life, that she doesn't think she can bring herself to feel it in this moment. She has felt a sweet caress on her check, has felt it in hands of men who have loved her and those who have used her, in the end it all feels the same.

It ends as abruptly as it begins, it always does.

What other things are you made for?
Than just love and lust and breaking and mending?

Smiles and starry nights and healing and laughter and quiet moments and beautiful sunrises.

“It is a beautiful and gracious thing then that we are not made of stone,” she says. Moveable, shapeable. He allows her close, and his body near hers is gentle, sensitive and kind, and she cannot help but compare it to the hunger, the demanding touches of Tunnel. He had never been gentle with her; he had been a wildfire that had consumed her whole. He ravaged and burnt all of her, leaving her with singed palms and an empty chest. He took, and he took, and she was always so eager to give. She gave him everything, emptied herself out for him—and the worst part was knowing she would do it again. She was helpless not to.

But here, she finds comfort as she lightly brushes against him to show him how to move to the rhythm of the music.

Elena is made of less rigid things than of iron and steel. She is flames in the night and as the metal finds her, as they find their feet, her fire flickers and dances around the tough metal that binds his bones and stays his blood. It is when the heat makes the metal bend and she relinquishes her hold upon the fire that had been burning.

‘I will follow you.’

This is not the first time she has made this promise in her life,
though it is the first time she has made it tonight.

At his words, she just laughs softly, shaking her head as the music dies and the they are left with chattering dancers and vibrant stars. “I long for nights like this, an easy life,” she says, turning blue eyes to face him, the truth of it wrapped and pressed into his palms. “Is that weak of me to say? You seem so strong and courageous, it is hard for me to imagine you would choose the same,” she says, watching him with a careful intention. “Yet here I stand longing for easy.” Oh how she wants this. Soft afternoons and quiet evenings. She wants to wake up surrounded by those she cares for, longing for simple pleasures and kind smiles.

She wants nothing more than she wants easy. So she says.

Elena is the most honest liar in the world.

But she knows that isn’t possible and so she doesn’t push the subject, instead she closes her eyes and turns that golden head upwards as if it were sunlight brushing against her face instead of moonlight. The song that plays is beautiful and vulnerable and she wants to cry with the stars that twinkle with tears, but she stays quiet for a moment. Twilight had evaporated from the horizon and the constellations have been thrown long and wide above them.

She owed him a name.

“Names are powerful things,” she says, he had taught her that in another land, another place, beneath the boughs of forest trees. “You ask for mine yet you have not offered me yours, Denocte,” she says to him, quickly following her sentence before he can answer. “Don’t tell me—not yet,” she says, those eyes of frost perched with a secret in hand. <>“Come to Terrastella, and tell me then,” she speaks softly, there is still flickering candlelight that rivets off her skin like the fog over the redwood forests she once frequented. “I have seen your darkness, and your stars and your moon, I think it right I ought to see you in the sun too.” She tilts her head, that smile that flitters like butterfly wings on her lips feels familiar. (It is familiar because she had given it to a brooding cousin as she dragged him flower to flower like honey bees.)

She blinks, there is a star caught in the corner of her eye.

“My name is Elena.”

@Tenebrae

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 


His body still hums with the memory of dance. His knees, his hooves, his shoulders and hips still bear the echoes of how they bumped with hers. There is an ungracefulness to his dancing and he recalls it again and again through his body. It is like fighting and yet the soft of her skin is nothing like the cut of a blade or the punch of a hoof.


Tenebrae does not know that as the memory of dance ghosts upon him, the memories of lovers’ touches ghost upon Elena. He has felt nothing like that and dangerous it is to think, even for a moment that he might just wish to. He does and so very quickly, he does not. He wants as men do. He wants as monks should not.


He inhales and she smells nothing like Boudika (with her salt, her sea and wild girl smiles). No, clinging to Elena is the scent of a wild wood, of flowers he has no name for and the incense burning at the festival. Across her skin is the gold of the setting sun, dark and liquid bright. She moves like the lick of a flame and already the monk is burned.


The Disciple breathes in the smoke of the festival, the smell of alcohol clinging to the lips of the dancers who swirl about them. Together they are still as a rock amidst the sea of dancers. Though about them his darkness billows, it swirls as if he and Elena are still dancing, tendrils twining, twisting, tangling. It is not fighting and maybe his shadows learn faster than their master.


She says they are not steel and stone and, “I believe that of you.” The monk murmurs, his voice low and smooth as it cuts through the music. Another song has taken to the night and dancers changed, they move like planets again yet Tenebrae knows Elena is not of the stars but the earth. She is fae- fire and flowers, smoke and laughter. She is the point where Dusk and Night meet. The gloaming embraces her and she gleams as the sun beneath it. Tenebrae hungers.


But Elena is no sun for him to consume in violence and greed. Her wildness not of the sky nor the sea. Her smile is meadow soft, her hair sways like grasses caught in a breeze, her eyes like a river wending through an untamed wood.


I will follow you, Elena says and Tenebrae exhales, he cannot help but think that those are words he should have said to another. But here they are, clinging to Elena’s fae-lips.


She laughs as the music stops, the sound bright as stars against the dark absence of song. But her words are soft confessions that burrow their way into his chest, into his soul that aches. Tenebrae smiles then too and it is a small, solemn thing. The shadows play along it as if to memorise this new curl of his lips.  “No, it is not weak,” the Disciple says, as if he knows - maybe he does, maybe he does not. Their breaths mingle where shadows still dance and tangle. “We all want easy, Elena.” He says her name at last, freshly given, freshly felt upon his tongue, his lips. 


“We are all brave and courageous in different ways.” His skull tilts, the blue and white of their eyes tangling. It is something electric, sharp as lightning and yet maybe cooling, soothing as ice, like water for a parched throat - he cannot decide. Tenebrae settles for both. 


“I pray for easy every day,” He says low, low, the words spoken for her ears alone. “But things are not meant to always be easy.” Darkness drowns him as his eyes close, against his confession, against the admission he makes to himself. He knows he is falling, he begs that life were easy again, away from temptation.


When he opens his eyes again, she is looking up, up, up at the stars. The moonlight limns the contours of her face, her throat and Tenebrae’s eyes trail her cheeks, the curve of her throat until they fall away, guilty. He will not deny her. His name is upon his lips but she stops him with a quick voice soft and full of dreams. 


There is only silence between them after her request. Her smile speaks into the darkness between them, the bonfires light and cast gold across the butterfly smile upon her lips. In answer a smile suddenly breaks across the monk’s lips and it is nothing like the dark, pained smiles of before. Despite its beauty there is something dangerous upon his mouth now, something wicked in its delight. Within him, black magic sings in his white-bright blood. He laughs, low and rough and ancient as Caligo’s Stallions who preceeded him, it fills the space between them, pushes music out and presses against the wings of her butterfly smile. “I will come to Terrastella, Elena,” he breathes, her name once more upon his tongue. “But you might struggle still to see me for all the darkness.” 


The Disciple chuckles, low, low and shadows peel from his mouth as smoke from a dragon’s maw. They reach for the fae-girl and playfully curl about her mane, tangling with fire-bright of her hair.


The monk leaves her an ember smoldering beneath the moon.


But all he can think as he goes is that daylight is when he is at his hungriest.

@Elena - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

Her body doesn't hum as his does, it sings. Despite their stillness, there is still pieces within her that rise and fall with pitches and patterns. Elena feels her pulse race slightly, a sudden and wonderful feeling. The crescendo always is a magnificent thing.

Darkness surrounds them and it is not from the night, nor the shadows, but from the dark man with the eyes like moonlight.

Elena smiles back at him, this beautiful thing that lights up everything around her, rivaled only by the sun that hides beneath the shadows of night until morning. He speaks her name and she can taste the remnants of it in the air as it falls from his lips. It sounds different from his than from the others, but the same had held true when Tunnel had spoken it to her the first time. She loves the way it sounds when others say it, no matter the danger it causes herself the moment that final syllable hits the air.

“If there is one lesson I have learned in my life,” she says, peering up at Denocte man. “I think though, it might be nice, every now and then,” she says, picturing those lazy summer days with Lilli, those wild winter night with Lovelace and Jay within her cavern.

She is too busy, too enchanted by the stars to notice the way his eyes trace those delicate facial features. Maybe if she had she would not have been so open to inviting him into her home. Elena has always been distracted by pretty things, it is how she missed that there was a devil behind his blue eyes, and a demon inside another’s heart. It is only when she feels his lips part that her silver blue eyes return to his own, halting his words with her own.

He dances between tame and wild and Elena isn't sure as she looks into the lion’s den if he is waiting to attack or slumbers peacefully. There is something addicting about walking the tightrope over the lion’s den. Elena has always flirted with danger (there is something beautiful in racing hearts and ragged breath she has found) and she thinks each time that she will escape before she gets hurt. The marks upon her heart say otherwise. It is the moment that his smile holds shadows of wickedness, of something more sinister that Elena shudders, even if she isn't sure why.

‘A chilled breeze,’ she tells herself while the night remains as still as silence.  

The words he says, they echo with familiarity even if they do not rise and fall the same way. She knows to leave, to not invite him in, but Elena is a slave to her affection, to wayward glances, and words hinged with risk. She would banish the darkness then, she decides just as Hephaestus was exiled from Mount Oympus. But Elena is no god, she is no Hera, and the darkness will not comply so easily. “I will still find you.” It is a challenge.

She should have known this by the way the shadows curl around her, but as she watches him disappear she is so blinded by her own flames she cannot see the darkness that tries to dim her light.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae