Lyr had been touched by magic that never took root, or so his mother said. As a young boy when he would lay awake during great and terrible storms, and his mother would come and sing to him in the voice of the Gealach, stories of the Dathuil and the sea. Lyr cannot remember the stories themselves, only the beautiful rhythm of their poetry, the way it did not sound melodic but instead mimicked the intense thunder of hooves, the dance of rain upon metal, the sea crashing in the very storm that kept him awake—
And anyway, all of this serves only to remind him that his affinity of beautiful things is intrinsically tied to their ability to destroy. Lyr loves the sea but does not belong to it. He lays awake to listen to the terrifying power of storms. He dreams of glaciers crashing into the ocean at the end of the world, and the sound of shattering ice that wakes him from his dreams. He remembers fire not for its ability to consume, but it’s ability to purify. These thoughts possess him as he walks through the half-mad streets of Denocte, where a warrior queen of old gods reigns and people paint their faces to dance wildly through the cobblestone streets. A festival. There seems always to be a festival in Denocte, but Lyr does not mind the chaos; in a detached, scholarly sort of way (surely inherited from a father he denies kinship to) he admires their wildness. You will never have to ask a man whether he worships Caligo. They belong to the fanatic sort, who show it with everything they are. Or so his father had once said.
Lyr does not doubt the truth of that statement. The Terrastellan finds an odd familiarity in their eccentrics, one he appreciates.
The city itself is familiar, too; the moonstones and how they catch the light; the dark stone that makes up the sea-side city. His father used to take Lyr with him during his travels, and he went to Denocte often during Lyr’s childhood. Wars. Political strife. The city had been ripe for religion to grow, weed-like, among the desolate. This is a different Denocte; but Lyr still knows where the shrines are kept, in small and quiet gardens, and he goes to visit them.
The first is small and decrepit, in the corner of a building that had once been a church. Renovated, it had become an establishment of law and duty; a soldier’s quarters of some kind, he assumed. The garden kept in the back corner of their militant courtyard hosted in a hoof-sized obsidian statue of Caligo with inlaid sapphire eyes. Another shrine by the orphanage, not as overflowing as it had once been. Perhaps her eyes watch that corner of Denocte more closely.
Eventually Lyr finds his way through the markets, a tangle of buildings and haphazard, colourful tents established for the festival. He stops to toss a handful of coins at a young girl doing face paintings; she rims his eyes with bright red rings, creates intricate loops, jagged edges, some tribal design that splits his face halfway across the nose and leaves him masked.
Further into Denocte’s markets he goes, into their furtherest reach where they edge the sand of the beach. Beyond, he sees the opening of the docks and the masts of ships like some great, strange forest of cloth-heavy trees. Lyr interrupts a group of adolescents playing a game of dice; one of them is bleeding from a cut beneath the eye, and the rest are painted wildly. They scatter with bright, high, mischievous laughter.
The last shrine is the largest; black marble, inlaid with various stones and gems; eyes bright with some stone gleaming, rippling like quicksilver. Lyr expects to be alone but is surprised to discover, at the end of Denocte’s celebration, a man cloaked in shadows with a glowing sigil on his shoulder. He appears to be paying some sort of respects.
An inevitable sort of anger lodges itself like an arrow in his breast; he feels the tug of it with each breath, with each forward step. Lyr steels himself for an interaction he is sure will be unpleasant.
Please, Lyr.
I’m so cold.
Lyr shakes his head of the memory as he approaches to stand aside the other man. Quietly, he says, “Would you not rather be enjoying the festivities?”
His private visitations to the shrines are now interrupted; the night of quiet contemplation ended in one definitive moment. He is always so surprised when he realises anger does not feel so different from adoration, in the way he examines man of devotion with an analytic, critical eye, with an eye as attentive as a lover’s.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
Candles flicker, reflecting liquid gold light along the ebony marble. Silver veins run through the stone, some like lightning in the pitch of night and others like rivers cutting through black glaciers. It all gleams in the candlelight dangerous, wicked and holy.
But the golden light is not the only one that gleams across the black rock of the altar frontal. A triad of half-moons glow brightly, reflected from the monk who kneels before it. As the woman painted Lyr with crimson paint that oozes a mask across his face like blood across a battlefield, so Tenebrae’s prayers fell like a mask over him. The words hang in the air, invisible and yet palpable. The air falls still as the sacrament of words tumble from his lips, sinful, hopeful of redemption.
But it is no goddess who finds her monk this night. No, neither does Tenebrae expect her. Yet he prays all the same, with his words pouring like whiskey from his throat, gold and warm and rough. The shadows about him breath and exhale. They swell with the air in his lungs and shrink as the air slips from his lungs, peeling from him like smoke from a dragon’s maw.
Lyr comes, a silver hunter haloed in moonlight as all celestial things are. But oh his eyes, Tenebrae does not look and so he does not know how they glow as ruby bright as the mask that obscures his face. The stone floor rings with his approach and the shadows swell with the Disciple’s breath, but they do not stop there. They grow and they grow and cradle the candlelight, until it is only they, as pinpricks of gilded light.
Still the monk’s prayers do not slow, nor their melody falter. The rhythm of his chant is hypnotic, all the marble of the shrine chimes with it. It is almost enough to drown out the way Lyr moves. Tap, like a hunter, tap, tap, tap down the steps toward Tenebrae. Again and again, tap, tap, tap until the starlight boy stops beside him.
Would you not rather be enjoying the festivities?
Lyr asks into the simmering black. There is a pause, the weight of it is a boulder between them. It is the size of a dragon, great and ominous. Chaos brews within it and yet the monk does not falter in his prayers until they are done. When they are, when the vestiges of them fade into a holy silence, only then does Tenebrae lift his head. He has never been distrubed from his prayers before and now is no different.
He opens his eyes and the white gold glow of them limns the petals of a rose lain out as a gift for Caligo. “Festivities are no place for a monk,” the Disciple says softly and without a trace of sadness. Yet, oh, delve a little deeper and remorse pools where his heart beats strong. It squirms with guilt and sends its poison pouring through his veins. No, festivities are no place for a monk though he had trailed a girl there and danced with another. He would not again. “We should focus ourselves on higher, divine things,” Tenebrae tells the quiet man (but no more than he tells himself). Still the monk has not looked up, nor straightened his body from where it is lowered, genuflecting before the presence of his goddess.
But when he rise, it is like the moon in the deep of the gloaming and the darkness that cradles its ascent. They are of similar height these two men and yet in all other ways they are opposite, darkness and light, one god-fearing and the other not. Tenebrae’s gaze trails from the stallion’s ruby eyes, it trails the intricate brush lines of the man’s painted mask. The long bridge of his nose, the angles of his cheeks are sharp as swords, “Would you not rather be there too?” The Stallion asks at last as he moves beyond the stranger to extinguish the candles between them.
Lyr admires the man in his devotion. He has always found those at prayer to be beautiful; beautiful in the way their faces pinch and soften, the way their eyelids dance with images Lyr could never imagine. Does he pray for retribution? Forgiveness? Strength?
Does he know the only way to get what he wants is to seize it himself, and never let it go?
The prayers are melodic, rhythmic, nearly hypnotic. Lyr does not press the man. He lingers and admires, taking great stock of a declared enemy. Despite the warmth the summer night, this stranger is marked as if by winter’s cold breath. He is grey and luminescent white, the white not of the first snowfall but the second, when the whole world is waiting. He is flecked as if with stars, or more snow, with sigils on his shoulders shaped like Caligo’s crescent smile. There is another upon his forehead. Lyr takes particular account of the puckered lash-scars that mar the muscles of the devout’s back.
The monk speaks of festivities, and where his focuses lay. Lyr’s expression remains placid as untouched water; despite the mild expression, his eyes are hard as tempered steel. They do not miss much, from the rose offered Caligo, to the shadows that dance at the man’s feet, to the glow of his irises, to the puckered scars of punishment. Still he subjugates; still he offers; still he does not rise.
At last, longer after than what is socially acceptable, Lyr has chosen his words. “A monk is only a man.” Magic be damned. Lyr has seen those more Touched by it than this monk.
Eventually, he rises. Lyr in his admiring must admit the man strikes a formidable figure; corded muscle; devout intensity, more an effigy than a man. The thing of effigies? They are meant to burn.
The Disciple begins to extinguish his candles, one by one. Lyr watches with those same hard eyes, expressionless. He says, “I am not one for crowds.”
The last candle goes out. They are lit by silvered darkness, by the moon and nothing else. In the near distance the festivities can be heard; bright, raucous laughter. Embers charge into the night sky from bonfires, and the smoke lingers in the dip toward the sea where the ocean breeze rakes it back. They sit in a hollow of noiselessness, of—
Pause. It is the pause between one inhalation and the accompanying exhalation.
Then, he says: “I am Lyr, from Terrastella.” The introduction is awkward, but Lyr wants to learn the man’s name; after all, names have power. It is the reason Lyr never gives his full one, the reason his name has been barbarically cut in half. He adds, not conversationally but stiffly, because there is no other way for him to speak. Lyr is one of mechanised civilities; everything he says is overshadowed by the greater knowledge that it never matters, overshadowed with the memories of long and wild nights and the abandoned gods of the north: “Have you always been so devout?”
He almost adds,
Do you know, monk, what happens to gods when we no longer need them?
Does he know they become pagan, ritualistic? No amount of praying brings them back? Makes them merciful? They go to the ends of the earth and become other, become the point where heaven and earth touches, where Atlas's skeleton rests with the sky still on his shoulders.
Lyr remembers praying to Caligo among those old, dead things. He remembers Frasier's conquest further and further into the reaches of limitless space, of the plane where death and mortality collide; the ember-eyes of war gods, the whispers of immortality, of power. The hunt for greater and greater novelties.
He remembers it at vividly at the breath he takes in that moment, in the breath he lives through.
Caligo hadn’t answered.
In the cold north, their misfit goddess had been too afraid to answer.
In a land of endless night, she had not even shown her face.
If the monk has his scars of worship, so too does Lyr.
On my body, the grace of shadows and in my heart: all Hells
A monk is only a man.
There in the calm of Lyr’s eyes is a well, deep and terrible. Tenebrae gazes upon it and wonders what secrets lie there where the sun does not pierce. Oh what do you draw out when you lower your bucket into that crimson water, Lyr?
They are close, close where the crimson paint of Lyr’s intricate mask is a maze through which Tenebrae’s darkness wanders. There is an intimacy there - but they are in a religious place and all encounters here are intimate and bathed in the holy.
Lyr’s words seem to carry a double meaning. It seeks to cut to remind him that all men are sinners, weak against mortal pleasures. All monks are men and thus are sinners and fools by nature. Tenebrae lets a smile gleam in the corner of his eye, sharp as a pinprick, bright as a blade unleashed before the sun. “What else would we be?” The monk murmurs and the smile is gone from his eyes, lost to the sharp white of his gaze that follows each crimson ribbon of Lyr’s painted mask like a scalpel.
When the last of his words fall to silence, there is nothing but the pull and push of their breaths. The sigh and groan of the night as it keens between them. Denocte twists in tension, even as a part of her dances bright and alive. Something brews between the monk and the unholy. It is something ominous. It swells, it hums with chaos and violence. It is the song of a thousand wasps readying for flight.
Lyr is the moon cradled in the dark of Tenebrae’s shadows, of Caligo’s holy space. The moon speaks of not liking crowds and the Disciple blinks, slow, slow. “And so you chose to come here?” Non-believer Tenebrae does not label him but watches the shadows that loom in the dark of Lyr’s eyes. He holds that gaze and counts each shadow that dances - how many do you have Lyr… 1, 2, 5, 10 a dozen? A thousand?
Lyr of Terrastella is a cat prowling, waiting, waiting to strike. He baits like a hunter and Tenebrae plays the part he is cast. He is no deer, no fox, no lamb for the slaughter. The monk stands a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His skull tilts, curious. “Would it make a difference if I said no?” Already the monk knows it will likely not. Already he can feel how the air trembles between them.
“I have not.” The truth slips out soft as satin. “I was a savage orphan until Caligo summoned her Stallions back to herself.”
Lyr, in his travels, had seen many sigils for many gods. Some took the shape of brands, or tattoos, or arcane and delicate gilding. Tenebrae’s sigils burned with dead light and Lyr imagines, again and again, the expression in a stag’s eye as it dies in a timeless loop. Is that not the same as the brilliant, winking light upon Tenebrae’s shoulders, or at his brow? Is the light he consumes not a beautiful kind of death?
Lyr does not voice his thoughts but thinks, instead, if he were an artist he would take the time to sketch in charcoal the beautiful man in front of him. How long, he nearly asks, until the beauty of the devout becomes the sanctity of pillage? How long, Lyr wonders, but not aloud—no, never aloud—before Caligo’s worshiper turns his beliefs to some violent, dark purpose. The time, Lyr is sure, will come.
What else would we be?
Where Tenebrae’s smile is absent, Lyr’s appears as serene and placid as a still lake. “Many things. A monk may be a philosopher, or a tyrant, or a warrior, a sadist or an idealist or a masochist. To be a monk and a man is, perhaps, the mean of many extremes.” It is the only subject that does not dissolve into embarrassed stuttering, or shameful introversion. It is the only thing that lights his sickly pink eyes with something vibrant, like life. Or the memory of it.
There is no confrontation in his voice. Lyr practices the calm Delumine tone he learned in his youth, the voice and confidence of scholars. This is, perhaps, the only subject he can speak on with such confidence. He remembers his father, a monk, and how monk-hood had cost him the special privilege of being a man, and father. It had cost him everything and transformed him into what he was so devoutly following; the last time Lyr had seen his father, the man was a mere effigy of Oriens.
Lyr watches the shadows of the Disciple with vague curiosity. Magic no longer intrigues him; instead, it fills Lyr with a, expectant kind of dread, the apprehension one may feel when they fear heights. And so you chose to come here?
“Why not? Places of worship are always places of thought.” Lyr says, noncommittally, and listens with the aptness of a man accustomed to listening.
He does not derive pleasure from clever phrases, quick or quitting quips, or intellectual conversation. Truly, he would rather be alone. But Lyr does derive pleasure from the sort of straining of wills that becomes just barely perceptible beneath the surface of their conversation, like a fierce fish in muddied water. Lyr, if he were more honest, more forthright, might have said, it matters because to lack devoutness and become devout means you once saw the way and, like a coward, turned from it. He does not narrow his eyes, but Lyr is no longer smiling.
