let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Tenebrae weeps. It is not just tears upon his cheeks but sweat trickling down his spine, stinging as it seeps into open wounds. His back is a garish lattice that gleams ruby red slices in the lamp light. He walks as if the wounds do not ail him. They do. But the worst pain, the worst wounds are invisible, unseen. Though their agonising effects tear the man apart.
The sun gleams with her midday light. She bathes the holy mountain, reaching her rays of light into the mouth of Caligo’s temple. Though she searches, the sacred area is empty, but for Tenebrae upon his knees. He is far, far out of the reach of Solis’ seeking sun.
Dark, limp anguish bends him low to the ground. The weight of his foolishness is too much. Always the monk has been reckless and now he pays for his misdeeds in blood and tears and a broken heart. Tears drip despairingly upon the floor; black as ink. They write his every sin upon the cold stone ground. Ever the sunlight reaches out to shine light upon them.
Tenebrae cannot see for his tears and remorse and even if he had dared to lift his head and look upon his goddess’ altar, he would not be able to see it for the messy grief that films his eyes.
Is there any vow he has managed to keep sacred? This temple is full of his memories. In one he is a boy, pledging himself to his goddess. He swore to her and only her. Has only been a few years and already he has become distracted, defiling himself with the desire for women? So many have gone before him, monks in their older age who have never dared to even consider all the things that Tenebrae has done. Why him? Oh foolish, wrongful man.
The whip cracks against his spine and bites into his flesh. His shadows tremble at the sight of Tenebrae: master of his own punishment. The instrument quakes in his grasp, yet he does not lower it, nor cease with the endless crack, crack, crack. The noise cuts silence and flesh, it is a reminder - a stroke for every immoral thought. Laid low with the burden of his punishment. There is no strike that lessens his pain, his grief, his wretchedness. Does Caligo watch and know how he is unclean? Does she know that a worthless man kneels before her now, his faith too weak, his lack of self control too strong.
This is the only choice he has left himself with:
Leave the Order or renounce his ways, devote himself more fully to Caligo - if she would even keep him as a monk amidst her ranks. He has placed women above her.
Women.
It is not just for Caligo and the Order that he weeps. But for Boudika and Elena. Love, love, love. That word blistering now upon his tongue is so full of joy and yet… Oh terrible temptation. He has lead them three along a terrible path: He and Boudika and Elena. He traversed the path like a drunken man, oblivious, distorted, reckless. But he was not drunk - except upon lust, upon want.
What will it be now he has come to this time of reckoning? To be a monk or leave the Order…
He swallows her and the darkness convulses. It’s wretched black is like a noose about the monk’s throat. Tenebrae is in love and yet, is it enough? Like a fool is parcels up the box within his heart and thinks he knows the cost of shutting it away. He thinks, still high upon ignorance that he knows his feelings, he understands the costs of his next actions.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
The monks of Saint Volta wore red from head to hoof, and baptised themselves in lamb's blood.
Some believed that the red of their linen robes were so dark, so rich, that the dye could be none other than blood itself. Some believed it was a monk's own—pints of it drained day by day as he sat in his cavern cell, bare of warm furs and food, and touched his forehead to the cold earthen floor.
From day to night the monk prayed and fasted and drew pints of his own blood, until bottles started lining the room, until ribs started poking from skin, until the day, blessed day, a wash basin and a bolt of white linen was placed at his aching hooves. The monk would rise, smile a skeleton's smile, and rejoice that at last! His Saint had Heard him.
Yet most believed the red linens were bought by the bolt from Magda's Yard. That the monks were little more than fanatics.
And what had Caine believed?
In the beginning, the monks of Saint Volta had fascinated him. Their gruesome blood initiation; their relentless self-mutilation; their ghastly asceticism, buzzed necks, red robes, bony smiles. How could one dedicate one's entire life to a Saint? he had wondered. Even if it was Volta.
Caine, like everyone else, poured the most wine at the Saint's glorious altar come Midsummer's Eve; Caine, like everyone else, read stories of the Saint's exploits and thought to himself, If there is an existence after death than to Volta's realm I wish to go. Perhaps the monks had only wished for that a little bit more than the rest of them.
And then he had been sent to kill one, because a monk in red robes had violated a baron's dowried daughter, and the baron paid in bars of solid gold.
When Caine sees the dark man bent double over Caligo's shining altar, he slips behind a tree as quietly as a shadow and listens to the whip crack down on sundered flesh.
Crack! The man must be a monk. Crack! He must have committed a sin. Crack! He must be trying to kill himself.
So even here, men tore themselves apart for a being they saw as Holy. Even here, divine decrees split mortal deeds into Piety and Sacrilege, and for those who lived by the Word, Sacrilege was a fate worse than death. What had this monk done? Caine wonders. And then he sighs, because a morbid curiosity has gripped his heart in an iron fist, and the monk's relentless whipping is making his own scars ache.
He steps out from the tree's shadow and walks until he sees his own reflection staring back at him from the altar's nebulous marble. Dead silver eyes. Black tumbling hair. Four symbols carved in one neat line down his forehead. He looks to the monk, knelt shaking by Caligo's polished hooves, and drags his eyes over the red lines carved into his dark, bloody back.
"What sin have you committed, monk," Caine says, each syllable well-rounded and precise, his voice so soft he is almost crooning, "for you to mutilate yourself so?"
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Tenebrae does not hear when the other man approaches, when he stands behind a tree to watch and remember the other terrible order of monks he has seen before. This Disciple is too lost within his grief and anguish to think much of others around him. Yet it would shame him more to know how he is watched. The revelation will be a painful one, when it comes.
For now that whip cuts the air with a whistle. It cracks across his pale, shadow drenched skin, splitting flesh, yielding blood. It is agony and yet the monk does not relent. The agony of punishment cleanses him. It reminds him, forces him with bistlering pain to aspire to be better.
There is a rhythm to his punishment. The whistling fall of the whip, its startling bite, the monks murmured prayers, they roll over and over. Anticipation, pain, repentance. Again and again. His rhythm does not break, even when the tap of feet on stone rises above the whip’s whistles and cracks. A dark shadow of a man stands, his presence stifling. It imposes itself upon the flagellating monk and awareness sears hot and cold along his side where the man stands.
Their eyes meet across Caligo’s marble breast. They each glow, one with fire, the other with white light. The man’s sigils glow in a line down his forehead. It is a barest glance, fleeting like sunlight over a humming bird’s wing. There and then gone. The monk continues his punishment until through exhaustion he can barely raise the whip. His back is slick, the whiplines a black and garish lattice. He rises and his limbs tremble. Caine has not left. Yes, Tenebrae has heard of him, though they have never met. He has heard of a man as black as obsidian with eyes of fire and sigils that gleam strange and eerie down his brow, his nose.
Caine’s question still hangs over them. It dirties itself with its prying, congealing with the blood upon Tenebrae’s whip wounds. What sins have you committed monk, to mutilate yourself so? The words caress his broken flesh with gentle consideration and curiosity. It is soft as the breeze that blows into the shrine. Its touch is the sting of a wasp. Tenebrae turns and the movement is agony. His skin is alight, the flesh moving, aching, opening and closing. Perfect, blissful agony of repentance.
“My deeds are known between Caligo and myself alone.” Tenebrae says as he retrieves the bloodied whip from where it lies at Caligo’s feet. The floor is slick with sweat and blood and Tenebrae slips upon it, weak, ailing, exhausted. Yet he stumbles, staggers away toward the living pool that glimmers like black ink, its surface as smooth as silk. It is a sacred pool, used for initiations and to wash the sins from the sinful.
The monk does not care if Caine follows him, though he continues to speak to him, “Why would I tell a man I do not know the reasons I flagellate myself before Caligo’s mercy? Would you?” There is no ire in his words, but weariness and dark, deep shame veiled with indifference. He does not close his eyes, he barely blinks, for seared into his mind is the red of Boudika, the gold of Elena. They haunt him, beautiful and dangerous.
Tenebrae staggers up the steps, stumbling, tripping with his leaden legs. He looks down at the black, still pool. His reflection gleams back at him, but for the glow of Caligo’s half moon upon his brow he could have been any man. What would you be if you were not a monk? Boudika’s voice whispers to him yet again. If you were not a monk, I would be your lover.
“Love.” He gives his answer to Caine as he steps into the pool, shattering his reflection into a thousand pieces.
08-27-2020, 06:25 AM - This post was last modified: 08-27-2020, 06:28 AM by Tenebrae
