[P] hungry dogs are never loyal

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

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

 

I can take care of you now.


When he left her, her words still tumbling over and over the dunes of his laugh, it was easy to think he could avoid her. Elena’s suggestion was dangerous. The more he ruminated upon it, the deeper he realised its connotations ran.


Yet Tenebrae has already learned that Fate has her own strange way of making her will come to pass. It is what brought him to the edge of the sea as a new spring storm reached her arms out, throwing waves upon the shore. It is what brought him down to the bottom of the sea within Boudika’s jaws. It is what saw him spending the night in a cave talking. It was Fate that saw him far, far from the Order’s keep. 


It is Fate, he convinces himself. Though each time he knows that he is weak, he knows that he yearns, he longs and he cannot resist. It has all begun to feel as vital as breathing, as necessary as living. He cannot resist, he longs to survive and oh, he is not sure he can ever live his life as it was before: absent of touch. 


Touch. In all of its wonderful and terrible capacities, Tenebrae has come to desire it. Need it. 


Yet it is touch that brings him into Terrastella. It is what has caused the open wound about his throat. It is deep and crimson and throbs with infection. His skin still recalls the bite of crocodile teeth. His body still sings with Boudika’s violence and the dark of her lonely eyes. 


He had left it, for the night he spent with Boudika in the cave, the wounds they inflicted upon each other growing dry and stiff in the sea-salt air. The monk had hopped he might have healed. That is wound would mend without a need to visit a brother for healing. But Fate is not so kind. His wound festers, another lasting memory of Boudika to match the scar she left upon his throat from her first bite. 


It had been days. Tenebrae had left it too long. Unable to explain his injury to his brother yet unwilling to go to Elena he had let time drift slowly by. His tissues did not knit themselves back together.  They lay open and weeping. The infection spread, into his blood. Lethargy came slow and lazy and begged him to stop, stop, stop.


So he walked and he walked and he stumbled and he tripped his way to Terrastella. There is nothing grand about the monk as he arrives this day. He comes with sweat slick across his skin, with a wound raging like a dragon’s maw. It bleeds bloody tears and weeps with white tears filled with infection. His magic reaches out as he wades through the swamp towards the hospital. It’s fingers drift through the tree-top hospital. It winds down corridors and calls, calls, calls for the sun. It arrives beside her like a blackbird with feathers made of wispy darkness. The shadow bird watches Elena work. It does not speak to her for it has no voice, but it waits until she sees it and opens its beak in a silent cry. It summons her as it rises back into the air, an urgency in its wings. It leads her back through the corridors and out into the open where trees stand cathedral tall. 


Tenebrae stands a short way away beneath the shadow of thicket.  His shadows bloom still, though they are turning like flowers growing limp. His stormy skin is slick with sweat. His white-bright eyes are a hazy moon’s glow, their eyelids low. He is a half of a man, too filled with infection. He sighs and it is like groaning. “I tried not to come...” The Disciple says as the sun-girl steps close. The blackbird flies into the dark that shrouds him and disappears, its work is done.


He moves to briefly press his damp brow to hers as they had done before. But oh he is weak. There is a slow, delirious smile that curls his lips and darkness blooms like black flowers in the corners of them. Laboured are his breaths as he draws away and lets his eyes roam across the gold of her skin, as if the light of her might vanquish the festering germs in his wound. “...But the gods conspire against me, Elena. Say-” Rough, like sandpaper, his voice is friction in the air, across the shell of her ears and the soft of his tongue. “-are you true to your word? I think I need your help.”  With that, the last of his energy, he falls to his knees before her.

@Elena - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

Novus had changed her.
Dusk has changed her.

Although those pretty blue eyes still hold ghosts like graves hold bones, Elena is stronger, she has learned to stand on her own, without the protective embraces of her family, or without Lilli only a moment’s notice away in Taiga, just waiting for her. But Elena is a slave to her past, and the same mistakes have not been so easy to leave behind.

Elena, for all her light, is the sun in the sky to light up that bright blue that reflects in her eyes. She is the contradiction of solemn, pain looks that is hidden beneath the honey tongue and silver-bell voice that laughs too easy and smiles far too often. She is fear swallowed in the mouth of bravery and want.

It is both foreign and frightening how whole she had felt in his presence, so unlike the broken creature she had always known herself to be. She would forget how her mind would wander, the way it swallowed darkness and sorrow as grief would breed beneath her skin. She felt so wanted, so desired in his presence. She had felt electric with his eyes on hers, with his brow pressed against her own.

He feels more like a phantom now than a man, but she knows no spirit could alight her soul like he had. (“A dance for a name then.”) (“I would catch you.”)

He might never come back to her, she has considered the thought. She may never find him again, she has ponders. But Elena is doomed to always be within arm’s reach of suffering. That would not be the last time she saw the Denocte man. Maybe she was always destined to be sought out by those with darkness surrounding them.

The shadows of the trees cast dapples across her back as she moves about the hospital. She turns those blue eyes only slightly and the bird has appeared before her, covered in shadows. Elena knows who has sent this creature for her and there is a moment that thinks she shouldn’t, wonders, but she is drawn to him, always drawn to him. It goes into the air, and like the dutiful girl she has always been (not matter how it has cost her) Elena follows.

He stands there alone (alone as she had once been, by circumstance, not choice.) She stares at him and his shadows for a moment. They say if you if you stare too long into the abyss it will stare back at you. But this is no abyss. And Elena is at his side. He is the angle of a sharp blade, and one she presses to her cheek so willingly, the sweet agony of it. He smells metallic, and cold, and the heat of the infection makes her dizzy. Yet it is so familiar, the former apprentice, a previous healer, and an ex politician knows what to do, this she can do, this she knows with such certainty and the ground grows solid beneath her feet.

Elena was not blind.
Even with wounds, with blood, Elena knows how handsome he is, how beautiful he is with darkness.

“Shhh,” she says, and those blue eyes turn winter as she focuses her attention on what she needs to do. She is not the girl of light playing amongst shadows in this moment, but Elena the healer, the medic, the apprentice now grown. But then his brow moves towards her own and she has no choice but to move it back him. It is the tide reaching towards the moon. She pulls back just in time to see his smile and it is almost enough to undo her, to make her lose her concentration, but Elena, sweet Elena, she can be steely when she needs. Those eyes like summer blue skies are chilled to frost as she looks over his wounds. Is she true to her words? Elena turns to look into his eyes, and they instantly warm. Had this been another universe, another time, and she were human, she would cupped his head within her hands and held him there just so. “I will always help you,” she says, before he slips onto his knees.

“Stay awake,” she orders him. “I will be back,” she says and she runs to gather supplies. She needed to draw out the infection and ease his pain. The large gash on his neck would need to be closed. Comfrey she finds, it would mend the tissues and reduce the swelling. Usnea would help to drawn out the infection. She makes poultices out of each of them before returning to the Denocte man.

She first uses the unsea to draw out the infection from his throat, but Elena cannot help but wonder what creature could have given him this. Comfrey is used to then mend the tissue and would aid in easing his pain, she hoped. Only when the blood looks clean does she wrap his wounds.

Elena sits with him then, closing her eyes for a moment with the effort she had felt, only then letting panic wash over her if she had not found him in time, what could have happened. Elena turns blue eyes to the shadow man, unsure if he can hear her. “Why didn't you come sooner?” She says to him quietly, an accusation no matter how gently she speaks it. She breathes. “A life for a name, Denocte.”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

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

 

Shhh She breathes. Her voice is the soothing sound of a faraway sea to an ailing man’s ears. How had he ever come to be bound so inextricably to the sea? In Boudika’s soul, in Elena’s eyes. It was the sea that wounded him and it is the sea that heals him.


When he looks up, his star-bright eyes no longer blazing with light, but muted with fever. His gaze has dimmed to the hazy, soft glow of a young moon’s light. And maybe that is all Tenebrae is: young, weak, fleeting.


Mortality throbs meekly in his veins. His foolish deeds have brought him to such terrible illness. Death feels only a turn away, looming beyond the veil of existence that has grown so thin. He is not truly near death, no. But it comes close anyway, to remind him of all the ways he is not truly living. 


The monk moved to press his forehead to Elena’s but she moves back, their brows untouched. He sighs and the sound is something like loss. Yet he smiles, for feverish delirium curls like a drug through his veins. That ailing smile is slow and lazy, as if all that fills his blood is alcohol, not poison from a festering wound. 


Her eyes, chilled to ice with the cool of her concentration is like a balm across his too-hot skin. Can his salvation from his sickness be found in the frost of her gaze? He hopes. He does not take his hazy gaze from his healer’s.


But, as Elena was the one to refuse his touch before, so she is the one to break their gaze as she tells him to stay awake and that she will be back. The monk chuckles. It is a low and listless sound. Like gravel, like water rolling in the deep of the ocean. He knows what that sounds like now - ah, how his wound twinges at the memory. How his lungs remember what it was to strive and suffer.


He stops his laughter and takes a rasping breath. Darkness blooms in the space where her sun-light body once was. Tenebrae is still upon his knees and idly his feverish mind wonders if she has ascended - a divine creature sent down only to test the weak will of man.


The man sleeps. It is yet another example of how he fails to honour requests and expectations:


Pray daily.


Focus upon training.


Worship only Caligo.


Fill your life with serving Caligo and Denocte.


Do not concern yourself with material things.


Do not allow yourself to be distracted by relationships.


Caligo is your only relationship.


Stay awake.



He rouses from slumber as his blood, at last, runs clean. About his throat Elena winds a soft, white bandage. He cannot be trusted with such pure things - why white? He knows why, to see blood, of course. Yet he is unworthy all the same.


They are silent, for a moment. She sits back like the sun at the end of the day. He is warm like the earth, no longer chilled, no longer feverish. How long had she treated him? Did she know? Did he? 


Weariness paints itself in dark lines along the contours of her face. Her soft lips are drawn down like a bow. The arrow of her accusation bruises him, the soft her voice little more than a blunt arrowhead. Yet it sobers him, it draws a heavy breath into his tired lungs. “I had hoped it would heal on its own,” The words are rough, coming from his too-dry mouth. It is a partial truth as all things seem to be that pass his lips now. His secrets are gathering, piling up behind his teeth, his tongue, his lips. He can only guard them so long. 


“I should not be here.” Tenebrae’s long limbs feel as spindly as a foal’s when he stands, yet his muscles remember what it is to hold him and to fight. They lock, weaker and yet steadfast.  “I should go.” He breathes in a low voice still coarse, still rough like sandpaper. 


He does not leave then, but steps toward Elena who watches him with large, dark blue eyes. Her forelock covers one eye, the hair golden, sheer as a gossamer veil. His magic is already pressing his gratitude across her face. Without a smile he moves to brush the veil of hair from across her sky-blue gaze. The curve of his nose touches hers as he murmurs earnestly, “Thank you, Elena.”  The monk presses a kiss of thanks to the soft of her cheek and is already retreating, turned away from her, when her next words come to him upon the breeze.


A life for a name, Denocte. 


The words stop him. They press along his back and swoop to catch his plunging heart. Guilt blooms in bright, jagged flowers, poisonous and unwelcome, through his core. “You put too much of a price upon a name, Terrastella.” He thinks it might be easier if they forever call themselves thus: Terrastella and Denocte.


But he owes Elena. Already her name has a familiar place upon his tongue. Already he knows the shape of it, the sound of it. 


Tenebrae is turning, walking back to her.  Again his head lowers to meet hers. He stands, no longer feverish, no longer weak. Thanks to her care he stands dark and formidable over her, a warrior, not a young man, an orphan, discovering what it was to be held for the first time. “I have told you it is better that you do not know my name. It is for the same reason I came to you and why I never should have come to you.” Low, low is his voice, soft and quiet enough that only her ears could catch his words. Not even the trees and leaves can discern the words he breathes close, close to Elena’s ear.


“If I tell you my name, will you leave me alone, Elena? I promise I will leave you alone.” He dares to barter and realises how he is taking, taking, taking. Like she always takes, takes the distance between them. They both want too much.


Already the consequences of his proposed agreement sits cold along his skin. Imagining it feels sharp with a sense of loss. He is remembering what it was to be held and touched. He remembers then why it must be done. He wants too much.

@Elena - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

“When we aren't sure what to do, or when troubled times come, we pray,” Melody had told baby Elena, with earthen eyes looking into her own before bowing her head in prayer. “But who are we praying to?” Elena had asked, never a child satisfied with one sentence answers. “The Gods, our ancestors,” she offers, her head remaining bowed, that voice strained with whisper as she tries to remain quiet, a voice that told Elena questions were done, until Melody finished her prayers. And so Elena had been taught to worship these faceless gods and these ancestors she has never met. But, she had never found comfort in clinging to a salvation she never truly believed or understood.

The line ‘fear no evil’ had left an impression. She remembers in the prayer. And maybe that is what she has done, time and time again as she caresses monsters, warms herself against demons, and dances with shadows. Fear no evil.

“Salt water, that is how you clean a wound, Elena,” the obsidian healer had told the young apprentice. Salt water. She can smell the sea on him, and it feels almost unfamiliar as she looks to him with those sky blue eyes. Salt water would heal, but she has no idea that it had been the very same that had nearly killed him.

She does not think about what would have happened if he had not found her, she does not think of it now, but it creeps in the back of her mind promising to come again.

She longs to mirror his own actions, to press against him, but duty fogs her desires. But there is a shadow of a smile on her features as she notices his face ghosts his own. She can feel his eyes on her as she analyzes his wounds (she would know the intensity, however weak it may be right now, of his gaze anywhere.)

When she returns his eyes are closed and Elena sighs, but she works, and works, blue eyes flittering to his chest to watch it rise and fall. It is when his blood runs clean that his eyes open and Elena finds him. He is beautiful in this moment, tired, but healed, and she traces the lines of his face with blue eyes. She had found surprising kinship with the Denocte man. (It begins and ends with their title: orphan.) “A wound like this would never heal on its own,” she asserts. But she searches his face and it is then she softens into a smile.

“Do you have to go?” She asks him, and her voice sounds so small in that moment. Elena moves her body close to him as he moves to stand on shaking limbs. “You should rest,” she says, and though it is true, she says it for reasons other than his health. But he doesn't leave, he comes close, so close to her, brushes her hair from her eyes. and those lips press against her cheek for the briefest of moments. (However brief the kiss is, Elena will think about it for so much longer, she can feel it linger on her skin after his lips pull away.) She doesn't say anything in response to his thanks, just blinks those blue eyes in his direction.

He turns to leave and she draws him back to her. “Names have more power than you may believe, Denocte,” she says with narrowed eyes. ‘Give a thing a name, give it power over you.’ Lilli had said to her underneath a Taigan night sky not so long ago when Elena had turned up in its forest with magic layered on her skin. ‘There is magic in names.’ And he denies her so.

His rejection of her echoes in the back of her mind, haunting her. But there is still that damn curiosity, the want to know his body heat, the want for him to cradle her delicate curves against his side, to feel the press of his lips against her cheek once more and let it trail down the arch of her neck. Everything inside her lurches to move hold him closer to her chest, but she doesn’t.

The sigh of her breath slips easily enough between them, it sits uncomfortably amongst the tension. Why was she so eager to be hurt? Elena needed to learn to keep her heart to herself instead of placing it at the feet of another and praying they would not trample it.

“Leave you alone?” She questions him, lacing ears back into that flaxen mane. “Have you forgotten, Denocte?” She asks him. “It was not me who approached you in Night beside the bonfires and dancers,” she begins, her blood rising, that fire whirling inside her, much more than the beautiful embers that so often burn there. “It was not me, who found you at the edge of the cliffs here in Terrastella,” she seethes. “And it was not me who came to you in the hospital reeking with sickness.” Elena bites at him with words, they gnash their teeth and bare their fangs. “For one who does not wish to be here.” (To be with me, she bites on the sentence, reeling it in before it finds its wings.) “You sure have a knack for ending up beside me anyway.” She accuses him.

“So perhaps you should not make promises you don't intend to keep.” The girl retorts, so different from the golden girl who had laughed while dancing, and smiled while perching herself on a cliff side. “We both know you cant stay away.” Promises are foolish things, and she is a fool to make them, but that has never stopped her. Though this time, maybe she is a fool for not making one. “No,” she says. “I don't want your promise.” She says, even if she is lying to herself. She wanted him to promise her, but just not this.

But there is a look in her blue eyes as she stares back at him, the softness of summer blue sky. There is still a fire in her chest, but it burns with want and curiosity. “Have you missed me?” She dares to ask him after everything she has said, she knows what she does, but Elena, as she is there beside him, his blood on her coat of gold, she just doesn't care. The sentence comes out from her in an exhale, as if her lungs could no longer hold the words back. As if her very body had been cradling it for years. It sticks to her lips, unwilling to leave her lips until the question is answered. “Don’t lie to me, Denocte.”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

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

 

He did not know, when he speaks like a foolish man, that his words will be gasoline upon the embers of Elena’s ire.


But he should have. (All foolish men should). 


This is a valuable lesson for Tenebrae to learn. All of him is filled with his own regret. He is selfish and his soul is not at rest. So inward looking is he, he does not see when her blue eyes spark like lightning. So concerned with his sins is he that he does not witness how they press pain deep into Elena’s breast.


It all began slowly, slowly, something like a storm that brewing out at sea. The moves to leave, no, to flee. Yet in answer Elena turns to follow him; a flower leaning toward the sun.  


Tenebrae is no sun. 


He has nothing with which he can nourish her, no light he can cast upon her slim body. She was already sun-kissed - was that not why he followed her first? He was a Stallion starved. He is always a Disciple yearning to swallow the sun and, oh, is Elena not so much like the sun? Is it not there in the way her soul is fire, the way her skin is limned in Solis’ purest light?


He pushes her away and yet the monk stays; unholy, sinful. He barters because he thinks he has anything at all to barter with. But Tenebrae has nothing. A monk always vows to possess nothing.


He remembers.


He remembers too late.


Elena. 


Her name sits like a possession on his tongue. Names have more power than you may believe, Denocte, The sun-girl breathes into the space between them. He watches the way her eyes narrow, clouds drifting together until the blue of her eyes is a thin flash of wicked lightning. It is enough to electrify his veins.


“Elena,” Tenebrae speaks her name back to her. He lets her name form across every part of his mouth and up from healing throat. Already his lips know the shape of her name. Already his mind knows the sound of it in the air. It has become a familiar song upon his tongue - too familiar. So now he speaks it, as if it contains a mystery, as if within it is a formidable magic. He says Elena as if it is taboo. From his lips, it might as well be.


The monk stands closer to her than he ever should and lets his eyes roam across the contours of her sunbright face as he watches her reaction to her name spoken aloud. “And who does your name give power to? You, or me?” When her eyes lower into a blink, he watches the dapples of light across her lashes. The Disciple waits until they lift again, until he can feel her electric gaze spark across his vision. “I am a monk. I am supposed to possess nothing and exert no power over anything at all. So I shall give you this: My name is Tenebrae.” He reveals himself to her now. Giving away his name feels like peeling his shadows from his skin, leaving him exposed, able to be summoned. Able to be asked after.


Don’t ever ask after him, Elena. Don’t.


He has played a dangerous game and now he is caught within its tide.


Knowingly, his dark magic seeps its shadows across her face. They paint Elena darker, darker until all that glows is the bright blue of her eyes. In them he settles his gaze, drowning, drowning. He can feel his lungs constricting, remembering the deathly embrace of the deep. Boudika’s bite claiming, killing, cradling.


Then she burns. Elena ignites like kindling caught by a spark and by his gasolene. She burns, she glows. Her words bite at his cheeks. He turns his head from them, from her. In that movement he surfaces from the ocean of her gaze and breathes in deeply, deeply. But the sun-girl is not done. She scolds the monk with words that burn like a dragon’s breath. Anger paints her in a resplendent glow. Elena scolds him as she becomes transcendent in her ire. Ascending. She becomes more goddess than a girl.


So he lets himself bleed from her words. He lets them feast upon his flesh. His body has learned the ire of women now and a part of him is struck in wonder. When Elena is done, when her words have drawn his blood and wrapped themselves around his sins, exposing them, only then does he turn back to look at her.


Tenebrae smiles as he clasps her in his star-bright gaze. His sigils burn and paint their reflections across her body. Sun and moon and stars bow down- before him or before her? The Disciple does not know but the celestial skies are kneeling, stooping low.


Do not lie to me, Denocte.


And Tenebrae does not.


“I want you to stop wanting to see me because, clearly, I cannot stop seeing you.” The truth hangs heavy as iron between them. “Of course I have missed you, Elena.” Again he says her name, slowly, slowly, asking her again with it, Who does your name have authority over, Elena, you, or I? 


Her name makes him a slave. His want of it, a sinner.


The man smiles. It is a dangerous thing, as sharp as the knives his shadows forge, able to cut the sun and slay his enemies. He turns it upon her where it softens to smoke, blowing across the fire of her ire. “You already know I am a monk and that I want what I should not.” Tenebrae’s voice is rough, rough with the trauma to his throat, rough with the confessions that claw their way up from his soul. “I came to you now because I could not take my wound to my brothers to be healed.” He laughs and there is nothing joyous in the sound. It is the sound of a man drowning, struggling. “I am already a sinful man, Elena.” He breathes, across her poll, where her hair smells of salted honey. “Please do not add to my sins.”

@Elena - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

Elena has always burned, always blazed. (Had Lilli not told her once that that Elena was always meant to blaze the world with her light? And it was up to those around her if they did not want to burn?) She has always been fire. The shadow man had seen her flames and had thrown upon it patrol soaked paper without regard to the destruction it would cause the both of them. So maybe he was foolish, but Elena stands there incinerating and she does nothing to smother the fire that flares in the middle of the hospital, this summer’s day.

She is to be just as equally at fault as the man that stokes the fire.

“Lead me,” she had told him and now lead her he does, right  into the dark, into the shadows. Lead me. Lead me. Elena will shine brighter than any of the darkness he can give her, it is the only reason she can step into his shadows without an ounce of fear. Because she so believes that she can cast a light on his darkness and he will not swallow her whole. She thinks maybe, if it were him to be the one to drown her in shadows, maybe it wouldn't be so bad in the dark.

And then he says her name and it is just the same, just as hopeless, just as reckless, like being swept out to sea. Oh god, why did he have to say her name? Why did he have to form those letters the way he does, the way it sits on her tongue until she greedily snatches it to listen to the way it sounds on his lips in the comfort of her own thoughts. There is an instinct buried like a blade in her chest, pressing dangerously close against her heart. Her heart is suddenly heading for her throat and beating so fast. A million butterflies trapped in her chest. She feels almost sick. Her barriers so easy to break down, made of cardboard and thin glass. He must already know this.

Elena had thought she felt lost when she was wandering from Beqanna to now, but it amounted to nothing compared to this moment. When he moves close to her and she aches for him in ways she doesn't know or understand. Elena was no stranger to tense moments, and she was well aware of the live wire that passes between them now. She doesn't reach for him now, doesn't press into him. There had been danger in the way she had folded into his embrace on that cliff side, it has only taken her until now to entirely realize it as she stands firmly looking up at him. There is no scripture written for what she should do next. So Elena takes the blank piece of paper and draws arching lines of heartbreak and bold lines of passion and zigzagging uncertainty.

Who does it give power to? These names. Lilli had never told her this. She thinks herself, her own name, the fire that rests inside it, but her knees could so easily tremble with the way it tips from his mouth, there are still shivers down her spine when Tunnel had spoken the very same. “Whoever wields it,” she says with certainty. A deadly sword in the hands of an ally or an enemy. A power for villain or hero.

And then he offers her a gift that Elena cannot be so sure she wants.

Tenebrae.

His darkness comes for her then. Perhaps she had known it would. It does so envy the light.

There is only smoke left billowing from her when she releases her fire upon the monk. Her stomach clenches like a fist. Anger is a poisonous thing and she can feel it filtering through her veins from her heart with each thump thump thump. With each ruinous pound of her aching heart, she unravels and she is flooded with feelings of longing, wanting, fury, hurt, each one stripping back a layer of skin until she is nothing more than a bundle of raw nerves trembling in his wake. She hates herself for wanting him to stay, for letting him undo her. (Hates the way she stands here, clawing at the chest of a man who so clearly does not want her there.) She hates the way their eyes locked and a wicked fire burns, ignited by his words, in her veins until her heart nearly bursts with it.

She remembers, underneath a Hyaline sky, with the great lake out in front of her, and the mountains cascading around her, she had prayed for something, for what Elena had not been sure. She has always been so unsure of her own fate and what she was meant to do in her life time. Elena has begun to believe that perhaps fate has forgotten her, and casts its light on another instead, forsaken its golden child and the light she offers the world.

He smiles at her and the temper of a father she barely remembers flares behind the blue eyes of her mother. It is more than just a winter chill, the look she gives him, it is glacial. Ice.

Of course I have missed you, Elena.

Elena likes to think she has grown strong having been surrounded by monsters for so much of her life, but he shatters her so easily and she has never felt so weak. She is beautiful in her desolation. Those ears fold back against her flaxen locks. She is grateful for him in this moment, a body to direct her anger towards, her frustration, instead of turning it inwards to tear apart herself, like she will do when the sun sets and she is left with only the ocean for company.

“You would be happier if you learned not to push people away,” she says, another accusation. Why does he smile? She feels fire burning in her veins and it cannot bring her lips to curl upwards as his do. She wants to respond again. He is a monk that can't want, but does, she has so much she wants to say, but Elena, for once, bites her tongue and listens as he speaks. “What did you do?” She finally asks him when he finishes. “What sins did you commit that you could not return home?” Elena says, a step closer, because she never learns, because Elena leads with her heart and not her head, even when she fights it so. “You keep far too many secrets, Tenebrae,” she says his name, the first time, and it lights her lips like bonfires in the night. It is said with gritted teeth and a seething tongue. “Tell me—please. I want to know, I want to understand.”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

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

 
You would be happier if you learned not to push people away.


She looks lovely as her ears fall to her skull and anger blooms like sharp thorned roses across her face. The monk does not shift his gaze from her, but lets it drink in the sight of her, resplendent with her fury, her hurt. He wonders at the irony of how he tried to hold a girl together atop a mountain as she shattered into pieces from her hurt and yet in just one turn he is the source of another’s hurt.


Slolwy he breathes, through the pain of Boudika’s bite, all the places she marks herself upon his throat. It no longer feels like his own, it is not smooth as it once was. Her mark is everywhere along his neck, her presence a deep, healing pain within his body. Boudika is a constant reminder now, their meetings forever displayed upon his body. He cannot escape her.


You would be happier if you learned not to push people away. 


Oh he studies Elena. Her slim body, the way she has taught him to learn the beauty of sunlight anew - even if being beside her still makes him wild, still angry, still so ravenously hungry… He wants nothing to do with her or Boudika or any other girl he has met. He wants everything to do with them. He cannot imagine is life without them now - to know what touch felt like, an embrace for the sake of sharing something. Being held.


But he has made vows. Vows that burned out his half moon sigils and his eyes. Vows that makes him glow and pierce his body with their sharp reminders. How long had he been looking at Elena now? How long had he been allowing himself to fall into her anger, her sorrow, bathing himself within it as if she might offer him some kind of answer.


You would be happier if you learned not to push people away.


“I have to.” He says and does not like its pitiful, weak taste upon his tongue. His lips curl with distaste and he sighs, something like groaning, like frustration rising.  How much more can he tell her without exposing himself so openly? Any more and he would be ripping open himself, spilling the tar of his sins upon the ground between them, staining him, staining her. They may never be able to remove the marks of this encounter from their bodies, their souls.


Elena asks him more. Of course she does.


This is what makes his eyes close, what tears his gaze at last from the vibrant fae-girl beside him. He looks out along the path he came. He barely remembers it. He feels weak with his wound again. Weak like a man carrying too many burdens. Weak like a monk losing grip upon his religion. His wound smarts. It throbs.


He takes a breath and it feels despair and anger tangle their way up from his core. When they reach his tongue he turns his white gaze back upon Elena. He frames her in star fire, in the wicked heat of the light his magic swallows. He turns her gold back upon her. She has stepped close, as she always does, as she likely always will. He does not chastise her for it. He does not beg her to step back. He thinks he might like it. Crave it. Need it.


“When we become monks, we make a vow to pledge ourselves to Caligo. To put her above all else - above each other, above the love of another, above sex, above earthly things.” Tenebrae does not put distance between them. He lets the words fill the space bwteeen he and the girl who glows as morning light upon a meadow. He looks into her face as lovely as a wild-flower. His shadows trap the words to come, anything to stop the shame of others hearing.


You keep far too many secrets, Tenebrae.


“If I tell you them, will you keep them, Elena?” The monk asks as he watches her, longing to press his brow to hers. The words breathe along her cheek, her forelock brushing against his lashes.


She asks him. She longs to understand. 


He swallows deep and it is something like drowning. 


“I went to the sea. To hook up with a girl there.” Then he laughs, low and coarse. There is no joy in it, the salt of irony stings his throat, “She bit me and tried to drown me.” He sighs, closing his eyes. “My brothers will have asked too many questions. If they knew...“ 


The monk trails off, letting his eyes wash across her face. “I would be punished.”


And all Tenebrae can think is how he should have gone there. How his back needs to know the bite of more lashes - anything to turn him from his ways.


@Elena

- <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

A better setting would have been a rooftop. With Elena bathing and Tenebrae looking upon her from the streets. (The man who should be her Uriah waits for her on a starry mountain with a glowing pendant around his neck.) He has taken her, he would so flatly refuse if she told him it was so. A monk would not take a woman, but ask Elena and she would say he took her all the same. Maybe if Elena knew how this would have played out today, she would have avoided those rooftops all together. (The mountains were so much safer.)

She wants to let it go, to let all of it go, to not feel the way she feels. Why did he have to stir her so easily, so quickly, like simmering coals just waiting for his touch to stoke them back to glaring life? There is a feeling in chest that she does not want to submit to. She can see with glacier eyes his pain, the injury that presses against him, and she pretends that she does not feel the ache of sympathy rattling her body at the sight of him. She has felt this before, it is why she had healed the demon even when the first move he made after was to destroy her.

He has to.

“I don’t believe you,” Her voice is soft, weary, but she still lets her words strike him like a stone. He doesn't have to rip himself open, Elena is already peeling back the mask that covers his face. The masquerade is over, she decides as her own falls to the floor. But he closes his eyes, and she feels her anger continue to flare, why would he so refuse to look at the blatant truth before him? Even when it stands exposed and as bright as lightning across a ink black sky. It is this and this alone that stands as the only thing that could ever make Elena believe that the Denocte man could be weak. He could return to the hospital after battle, a skeleton, bruised, bloodied, unable to stand, to breathe, and she would not think him as weak as she does now.

She studies him with eyes that are just a little too sharp as he speaks. “You have told me you are a monk already,” she retorts. Why does he speak this information she knows? And then he is looking upon her once more and this is the only thing that can keep her steady and halted in this spot so close before him.

He kept too many secrets, she can see it on him now, even the cloak of shadows cannot hide that which glows off him like moonlight. Her eyes settle stonily upon him. “Without fail,” she promises. The word sits like poison in her belly. She will no doubt come to regret it later. She always does. Without fail.

He flays her, and she lets him.
She can’t help herself.
No one can.

To her sea he went.
To her beautiful, beautiful sea.

If she fell—
Did he promise to catch her too?

She feels like she can barely breathe, she is being smothered by her own jealousy. It is followed by her heartbeat thundering loudly in her ears. For a moment, stretched further than the oceans, she withers beneath the blade that is his confession of just what had happened when he went to the sea. She has never felt jealousy in her heart, and she isn't sure what to do with it now. She wants to set it free as it ravages her inside and rattles the walls of chest. She feels herself breaking (splintering) right into her very core.

The weight of him, of his words, the gravity of it is crushing her, turning glass to dust. And still she clings to those words, because they are his, even as they keep carving away at her. Still, jealousy is such a poisonous thing and she can feel her stomach clenching like a fist at the thought of Tenebrae with someone else. It is then she knows that this is temporary, it is fleeting. And it pushes into her heart like the force of an avalanche.

“You said you pray for easy every day,” she says to him then as she stands close. And there is fire that is creeping back into her voice and those eyes she fights so hard to keep flat and emotionless are like white hot flames of blue. So she closes her eyes, glacial blues sliding underneath long, dark lashes. “Well, here you go. I will make it easy for you now,” she says, those eyes staying closed because she thinks she can only say it if she does not see his face because impossibly, she is keeping the unravelling pieces of her soul stitched tight. But she thinks she may just come apart if she opens her eyes now. “Don’t come back to Terrastella, Tenebrae.” She tenses suddenly and pulls away from him but she is certain she has left her heart behind because all she can feel in her chest is a cold, empty ache. But there is a fire on her lips where his name had just been.

She leaves to walk back to the hospital, leaving Tenebrae behind, to make his own way from her home. It is only when she is alone the sun moves across the sky to come streaming in through the windows, illuminating that golden coat of hers that she realizes what she has said: Do not come back to Terrastella. It was not don’t come back to me. Because maybe, through the jealousy and the hurt, buried there (deep, deep, deep) where she will not see, where he will not see, she doesn't want this to have been the last time.

If Tenebrae was weak, oh, then so was she.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

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

 


Maybe the difference between Tenebrae and King Solomon is that, when Bathsheba became pregnant he had her husband, Uriah, killed. Unlike King Solomon, Tenebrae knows nothing of the man who waits for her upon the star-strewn mountain top. He knows nothing of another man to whom her heart might belong. But of course there would be another man; a better man. Elena is beautiful, loyal, caring, as gilded as the sun and as free-spirited as the sea, the woods and the fae that inhabit both. Tenebrae is but a Disciple with loose morals. He clings to the few he has left and will not stop her falling into the man atop the mountain. She deserves more. He deserves less.


But, if he did know of the man atop the mountain - the man a better suited lover - what would he do then? The answer for Tenebrae is simple, he would not lie with Elena this night, he would not keep her from the arms of the man she should be with. In many ways Tenebrae is not King Solomon, though he watches Elena as if she bathes and dares to fantasize about all the ways things could be different. 


But Tenebrae knows nothing of a lustful king and the great son awarded him through his adultery. He knows nothing at all.


Elena does not believe him when he says he has to push people away. The sun laments for her. It turns its gaze from his dark shadows. It lets them bloom, black like sin. 


Her anger is divine. It sharpens the line of her face, it makes her fierce and brave. She becomes a gilded eagle in his sights. Tenebrae feels little more than a fawn beneath her gaze. Elena picks apart each piece of him that he exposes. He is flayed open before her…


Yet she sits, regal as a sunflower, soft as the fae. This girl is fierce, yes, and yet soft. There is something that trembles within the monk. It whispers to the part of him that is not weak, newborn, inexperienced with love and girls. Elena is lovely in her righteous anger, in her sadness that hollows him out with the blue of her wild-water gaze.


The Disciple smiles and still there is no joy in it. Sadness draws itself into the dark corners of her downturned lips. He sees it. The fine lines of her face make her slender, delicate, sun-born. He sees that too. Her ire is salt in his veins, it stings and his body feels sick with its presence. Yet even in her ire she vows to keep his promises. Wretched, Tenebrae does not question her. The monk does not think for a moment that she would not. Maybe it is because of the loyal honesty in the way her chin tilts up and she watches him. Or maybe it is the fact that something lingers deep in the darkness of her blue eyes, something like devotion, like… 


He dares not name it. He fears it. He recognises it for it is within him too. It has a voice that yearns and answers hers.


Tenebrae breaks her with his revelation. She has a man waiting atop a mountain for her. He has a girl within the sea waiting for him. (Though he cannot have her either!)


His words pick at the threads that hold her heart together. He watches her unravel. The monk is not ready for the pieces. He will cut himself upon the sharper parts of her, bleeding as he tries to reassemble what he has broken.


Elena denies him the broken fragments of herself. Instead he watches as she hastily pulls herself together. There is nothing neat in the way she holds the pieces of herself - all twine and uneven edges and sad, broken eyes - yet there is grace in the way she stands, a pride that sets his body ablaze. His fae-girl glows like coals, embers reigniting beneath the night. He moves to her, wanting to hold her, to together keep the pieces of her whole. But Tenebrae is still too-blind to know how he has managed to unravel himself too. So wrapped up in her is he that he does not see how he is unspooling, unspooling, unravelling.


She rises, more a queen than a girl with his blood smudged across her body. 


“Elena…” Her name is strangled when it comes from his lips. It falls fragile as glass and shatters across her, across him. It hurts more than the wound at his throat. She closes her eyes. In doing so she denies him the sea, denies him a look at that raw emotion that gathers in the deepest parts of her. Tenebrae’s eyes trail across her lashes, he lets light pool upon her cheeks.. 


She glows like Bathsheba. 


The monk watches her.


He is close enough to drink in her every word. But they hurt. They carry the poison, the ire in her core. The Disciple takes every piece of her righteous punishment as if she were the whip that cuts his back. He dares not breathe as his fae-girl whispers her decree. They are so close he can taste the words of it across his lips.


The Disciple reaches for her, his darkness clutching at the gold of her body, to offer his own vow in turn and seal it with a kiss, a touch, a press of his forehead to hers. But she is leaving and he is banished. Her body pulls from him and something within him is breaking - even while he feels like he can breathe, at last.


Tenebrae turns from the hospital, his wound still aching, his body more painful, more vacant than when he had come. Yet the truth is that neither he nor Elena leave complete. They each have lost a piece of themselves and gained a piece of each other.

@Elena - Heartbreak ~   ~   ~   ~   ~