[P] cause I don't see what you see [Tenebrae}

[Elena]

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

When she had slept so soundly she had been taken back to a tree fort in a deep valley, with a thundering waterfall as the ever present backdrop. “If you could be anything Lilli, what would you be?” She had asked her best friend as they watched a chipmunk make its way across the valley floor. Back before the sorrow, before the heartbreak, before the trouble. Lilli’s blue eyes had flitted upwards to the treetops. “Perhaps a bird,” she says in earnest. “What better way to hear the wind sing than to soar with it?” Lilli had said, turning to Elena, clearly determined not to be alone in answering the question. ”I think I should like to be one of the ancient trees. One that has been here for hundreds of years, with branches that reach to touch the sky.” She rushes her words, always getting ahead of herself. "Imagine the things they have seen, the stories told, and the legends witness.” She breathes. "Yes, I think a tree, unmovable, unshakeable, eternal. That Lilli, is true immortality.”

This feels so long ago, when their eyes were not haunted, and the weight of the world was not on their back. Elena had thought she could escape it, to run to Novus and leave all her hauntings behind, but she has not been so lucky. 

Her ghosts had followed her here.

She can feel them, their fingers tangled in her creamy hair and the way it is electric down her spine. They would not be so easily forgotten. She can feel the remnants of salt and sorrow, butter in her mouth, the stale taste of tears long dried up and sorrow long gone to dust. She is hesitant to open her eyes. Hesitant to take in this landscape she loves so much and let it be plagued by a past rough with pain, rooted with anguish. They are there. She can feel them. Still, for all of the pain and aches, she is not fearful. She does not turn her golden cheek. Instead she lifts her chin slightly higher as those eyes open with protest. She would not bend. She would not fold. 

Not to this.

Not today.

Instead, each step, gentle and searching, is deliberate, the sound of hooves pressing onto the rocks and grass of the cliff side. It sounds like victory as it rings through her ears. It has been years. It has been years since the moments that gutted her and left such deep scars whittled into her bones. It has been years since she was a young girl, crying into the wind, as she ran and ran and ran just as her father had told her to do. It had been years and yet—and yet—the memories do not fade. The ghosts do not relent. There are bruises in her eyes that tell her enough when she looks into her reflection. 

She takes a steading breath, the sweet scent of summer honeysuckle grounding her, she does not cry, it has been a long time since her tears had fallen over. The weakness of her brings shame to her cheeks, she can feel it, hot and stubborn. 

She was meant to be stronger than this.

It had been years.

Years.

Still, the memories do not feel old. They do not feel brittle or aged. Instead, the edges still slice and cut and she has to deliberately turn from them to face the afternoon sun that begins to warm her. The intense summer light washes across her face and she closes her eyes again but for a moment, wishing away the ache that gnaws at her bones and lights in her belly—the memories painful and vivid.

She would not bend.

She would not fold.

Not to this.

Not today.

The summer sun beats down upon her as she stands on the edge of the cliff, above her precious ocean water. Elena looks down over it all like she is looking at infinity, like if she can just stand as eternal, as strong as this cliff, maybe she could conquer anything. It is a romantic notion, a fantasy, but one she pretends all the same. Her face tilts upwards to the sun, to let its res trace the delicate features of her face and she stands there, on the edge of her home, perched like one of Lilli’s beloved birds, ready to fly away. But the ghosts would not make it so easy, their shadows reach to grab her ankles and pull her down, and in an instant, Elena feels grounded once more.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae (what can possibly go wrong?)

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

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

 


I have seen your darkness, and your stars and your moon, I think it right I ought to see you in the sun too.


That is what she said when last they parted and like a fool he said he would find her. But Tenebrae has always been impulsive. No matter how the masters berated him as a child, no matter how they tried make their charge more mellow, still Tenebrae was untameable. Recklessness is the child’s bones was what the abbot had eventually surmised. It was this impulsivity that saw him pinned beneath Boudika’s teeth upon the beach. That had him pressing a kiss to the corner of her lips because, what could it hurt?


It always hurt, he knew that now.


Now he resists and fights and yet his recklessness makes him weak. Inside him a magic pours black and white and paints his skin in myriad grays. Tenebrae lives his life in the greys, drifting between shades of black, his brothers watch him from the darkness, wary. It was such recklessness that had Tenebrae laughing low, low, his mirth pouring out like gasoline and Elena was the match to spark alight the ravenous magic within him.


Daylight.


Oh, daylight!


His magic stirred with his thoughts of the sun. Creation and meaning forged within him, reminding their vessel just what he was made for.


And it is why he is here now, why he walks out beneath the open sun with his goddess’ gift billowing from him.  


Elena stands, a shard of the sun parted. He thinks of the day he met Orestes, the Sun King, in Verenor. Ah his hunger is so similar. Their magics warred, everything Orestes gave Tenebrae swallowed down and down and down. But Elena has no light to forge and the monk is ravenous as he comes to meet her. His magic sets his eyes feasting along the contours of her body, along her spine where the light pools like ichor.


Does she see how the meadow falls to darkness behind her, gathering like the dark of the ghosts that press upon her heart, her soul. Foolish, foolish he draws to a stop beside her, drunk upon magic, drunk upon light. Darkness shrouds him, its edges fade to a mist, but all it reveals of the monk is his bright eyes, his triad of sigils. 


She is perched, flighty as a bird upon the edge of the cliff. He wonders where she hides her wings and his eyes are at her shoulders, her spine, looking, looking. “It is a long way to fall,” The Disciple says at last, looking down to where the sea embraces the cliff. He does not know how her ghosts twine about her ankles and hold, hold her down like roots and vines. She is more wild than a flower or a tree. He wonders when she might realise that she is fae and all fae hide their wings.


She saw him in moonlight in starlight, but she never saw him at all. Not like his brothers and Boudika when he banished his shadows exposing his wintry body with its hues as bleak as a winter’s sea. Tenebrae is the bite of cold upon her cheeks but she is warm, hot like sun. She scolds him, yet he hungers, oh Tenebrae always hungers for things of the sun. 


Night does not hide her this day though his shadows yearn to with tendrils that dance like butterfly wings. They flutter where sunlight pours upon her cheeks, her nose, her hips, her spine. He draws them back and she is gilded in sunlight once more. 


I will still find you She had dared to say, but...


“I found you,” Tenebrae confesses, his voice is solemn, weighted. He should not have found her. Just as she should not find him. “But I should remain nameless to you,” And this might have been the greatest truth he has ever told. He has learned much from Boudika. The monk now knows how easy it is to want what is forbidden.


But gods how he wants.


The shadows hide the fresh whip-wounds upon his back. The pain reminds him, it makes him less reckless. But it is not enough, he is still here, despite the angry lashes across his back. He is still here with wild, black magic in his veins.


He is here because, gods, he is hungry.

@Elena - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

For someone who longs for companionship, it is surprising how often she finds herself here: left to her own thoughts.

She cannot pretend that she has not thought of him.

She cannot lie, even to herself, and say that he has not permeated her thoughts—her dreams turning to darkness the way the shadows waiver and they curl around every corner. He had given her a night to forget, to dance, to live, and to breathe. He had looked to her with darkness and danger in his eyes as she halted his name on his breath. He told her he would come, but Elena has yet to find him. This mysterious man of shadows and violence.

So, of course, she thinks of him.

Of course she dreams of him.

She thinks of the strangeness of him, the intimidating beauty, the darkness that seems to slip so closely to the surface. She thinks of the way he had looked to her, his voice low, his smile ominous, the way his body was built for fighting, for ferocity. It should scare her more than it does. The violence in him, the need—but it doesn’t. Instead, her pulse races and her spine shivers.

There is a part of her, bruised and battered and scarred that had expected him not come, to have had his fill, to have stolen embers from her fire and moved on.

It’s what life has taught her, after all.

This was entirely the same.

This was entirely different.

Life is so cruel to cause Elena to think of him when she is entirely unaware of the shadows that creep behind her like clouds to try to block out the sun. She has always been drawn to the dark ones—something within her dove heart endlessly fascinated with the shadows and the poison. She was made for the sunshine, for the summer and the spring, and yet she always finds herself in the shadows, pulled into the toxic winter that both traps and entices her. She cannot speak to what inside of her is so drawn to it, what part of her reaches for the knife that she knows will only draw blood, only that she does and thus it is not surprising to her that she is here now, that she looks at him with nothing but bright eyes as the sunshine illuminates her face. She doesn’t show such fears now as he appears to her, such trembling insecurities, but neither does she offer such a warm smile as she did at the festival. “Would you catch me?” She asks him, a challenge that she feels cut her tongue as she speaks it.

Glacial eyes see the hunger within his own and there is that part of her, that foolish, foolish part of her that aches to fill it. She welcomes his shadows, taking it as fleeting touches, but she shudders with the cold they bring to her, longing for her sunlight. As if he has read her thoughts, they recede and she is bathed once more, her skin warmed as if she had never been shrouded in darkness to begin with.

She supposes that ghosts find them all eventually. For her, they had found her young—torn at her heart until it was unrecognizable. They had warped her reality, ripped away her defenses and shaped her into something different, something new. It is difficult to not think about what she would have become had they had not found her. It is difficult to think of the life that she might have led had she not run across the stallion of shadows and bone that day in the meadow, if she had not followed Hades down, swelling the pomegranate seeds and coming back for more. Her ghosts simmer on the surface, bruising her blue eyes, and she is unable to keep herself from looking at him with her defenses stripped away, vulnerable before his declaration. “I’m glad you did,” she says to him.

‘But I should remain nameless to you.’ He is begging for her desire. Elena loves nothing more than masks and mystery, its has been proven by her history, the ghosts that lurk now in the backdrop against the sun kissed ocean. ‘The mystery has to fade at some point,’ Lilli’s words of warning echo in her ears, and Elena banishes the thought, but she recognizes the trill at the end of her spine to not be over her own, but the caution of her cousin.

She can feel her now, Lilli, pulling her back as Elena walks towards him with the confidence that only comes from diving into a darkened pool where she doesn't know what lay at the bottom of it. Each steps drags her closer to the lion that waits with baited breath and ready jaws. “And what, Denocte, do I need to do to get you to tell me?”

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

 

Tenebrae does not know that she has thought of him since that festival night. It is just as well or else he might flee. Better for him to escape the presence of this sunshine girl who sinks her dreams and desires deep into his veins, than stay and risk the consequences. 


But Tenebrae does not know. In fact, he knows nothing at all and he is still a fool. Elena trembles beside him, with something like want. It flutters the pulse in the groove of her throat, quick from her trembling heart, fleet like a rabbit. It is a shiver down her back as if it is ice that pools in the dip of her spine - not ichor, not the golden sunlight poured out in this midday hour. 


They stand together, the girl clinging like a leaf to the grasses atop the cliff. So fragile her whimsical thoughts make her but when she turns her blue eyes to the boy who stands adorned in his shadow and religiosity there is nothing fragile there. Her eyes are the gleam of the deep blue ocean, caught by the sunlight that glitters across its rolling breakers. The sparks of her soul glitter there and she will turn his shadows into the residual smoke from the fire she lights in his soul. Such is the sun in her, such is the hunger her golden body inspires.


Tenebrae would gladly burn for just a taste and that is his curse.


Her toes seem to grip to the edge of the grasses and she has turned away from the sea that reaches its salt-water hands up to welcome her (and him). The fae-girl watches the monk, but Tenebrae feels the drop, he feels the cut of her challenge, sharp like golden shards. Do they cut her mouth when she speaks them? Can she taste blood as the cost of her daring?


Tenebrae is learning that she is so very daring. 


Once she called him strong and courageous but his is nothing like hers. The Terrastellan holds hers in her gilt smile, the way she steps closer when she should be stepping away. The way she dares to ask questions she should not to men she should not. 


“I would catch you.” He says low, low into the cliff-side breeze. It carries his words to her, through the tangle of her hair that it pulls from her slender neck and out, out over the edge of the cliff. “Though we would both perish for my effort,” The monk adds, gazing down, down into the beckoning sea and speaking of more than just the sea and a long, terrible drop.


Elena looks up through the winds that tangle her hair about her, she looks up to him with eyes wide blue and bruised by a heart woven together with ribbons of time. He can almost see it where she holds it too open, too exposed. He breathes out and his lungs twinge with the effort, his breath rattles past his lips. You should not be glad. He wants to say, but does not. There is a sin in pulling girls in, but a sin too in constantly pushing others away. He feels the tightrope line he walks, it cuts into the soles of his feet. 


He pushes her away and yet she steps closer, closer. Elena steps into darkness like the sun chasing the night. Shadows mute the bright gold of her skin, they steal along her spine and swallow down the light pooling there. Is it cold here, Elena? Where light cannot shine?


Even in the darkness his moonlight eyes illuminate along the sun-bright glow of her skin. She is still that shard of sunlight, set to pierce the night. Tenebrae’s magic delights in her.


And what, Denocte, do I need to do to get you to tell me?
“If I tell you my name, would you leave and not look back?” The Stallion asks. Her eyes turn deeply, darkly purple here in his darkness. He wonders what hurts they herald, what bruises he might cause her. 


“I am a monk, Elena.” He breathes to her through the darkness, his voice little more than a whisper to smooth along the shell of her ear. “Made to swallow the sun and you are so very much like it.” He reaches out, as if to touch her, as if to drink in the heat of her sun-drenched skin and wonder if she tastes anything like light and life. The air grows thin and tremulous in all the places he reaches out to touch and yet does not. He draws back, they remain untouched.Only his breath dares to curl like smoke across her body.

@Elena - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

She remembers her first night in Murmuring Rivers after Marcelo brought her there, having found her a lonely, sad orphan child, he had taken his younger cousin. She remembers looking at the sky, thinking how her parents were gone and how there had been no new stars in the sky to mark the passing of her happy little family, no dancing soul-lights twinkling up above to show they’d made it safely into the next world. And she remembers how angry she had felt.

“I think we could both use some quiet,” she has said and laughed with Lilli in Hyaline. “We have had far too many complications, I think it would be nice, to live a life, without anymore of them.” What would Lilli be thinking of her foolish cousin now? Elena, for once, is glad that Lilli is not here to see her spiral downwards once more so soon after finding her wings again.

She tucks away the sadness, folding it small and hiding it deep.

This was not the time to let it consume her. This was not the time to be consumed by it.

Elena is not the kind to shy away from shadows.

She has been drawn there from birth. She has always found herself staring too long into them, something in her dove-heart fluttering and racing at the possibilities. Perhaps it this that kept her clutching to a love that threatened to shred her. Perhaps it is this that kept her seated in the middle of the inferno, the roar of it in her ears and in her heart.

Her eyes search the hard angles of his face. She knows then, she knows, that there is darkness in him—something that moves beneath the surface. She does not think that he does not carry sin upon his shoulders, that he has not delved into darkness. He was darkness.

And she wishes—oh, but for a moment—that she could find someone light.

Someone pure and good who brought softness to her world.

It would be simple and beautiful but oh—

It would not be him.

There is something beautiful that blossoms between them, in the light and the dark, but something dangerous. She recognizes him for the shadow he is, recognizes the knife to her throat—the blade she holds so willingly. She invites it into her chest, pulling the poisoned air into her lungs and letting it simmer. There is part of her that tells herself that this time it will be different.

‘I would catch you.’ The only thing that she needed to hear from him in this moment. His voice is dark like oak and bourbon. Her eyes of blue cannot help but follow his own down the cliffside and to the end of it, far below them where only the bleakness of death would await them with open arms and a wicked smile. “Better than to perish alone,” she finally whispers to him, finding his gaze and holding onto it. A soft exhale. She is Juliet constantly throwing herself all the blade for all the men who disguise themselves as her Romeo.

It is only when the breeze reaches her that she turns that golden, sun kissed face to meet his own once more, blue eyes wild with wind, like tiny hurricanes blowing. He lays a tightrope for himself to walk, but Elena finds her unsteady feet joining him, she tests her balance all because he has said he would catch her. The sunflower child always so eager to trust them and what they say.

Those December eyes shine out from beneath the shadows that try to warp and steal the sunshine from her skin. “Maybe,” she says with a shrug. “But you’d probably haunt me forever anyway.” Another ghost, that is what he is, just another ghost. “You’re here now though and I don't think you are going anywhere.” She says, so confident in her own ability to invite the darkness in and hold it there like a child holding onto a honey bee in clenched hands after they’ve already been stung. Somewhere there are red flags going up in the back of Elena's mind, but she either doesn't see them or doesn't mind.

Elena has no defense against someone like him.

He reaches out to touch her, but the space remains and Elena wants to ask him why. Why he does not reach out as so many had done before. The gentle caress of Aerwir, the way Underworld’s shoulder had dug into her own, Tunnel’s possessive way of dragging his teeth along her spine. It feels almost foreign as no touch lands upon her skin. She almost hates it. She forces herself closer, tilting that head upwards to look at him. “That doesn't mean you are without a name,” she says again. Bold. Brazen.

She pulls away then, like the sun rising in the East through the darkness of night. “If your name is to remain a mystery, then tell me something else about you,” she says, and she looks so childish in this moment, like that little girl in Paraiso asking her godfather for just one more story.  

“Tell me a secret, 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

 

Elena’s eyes follow his down the cliffside and together they are tumbling, tumbling, down, down. Better than to perish alone. They are drowning, together in tangled limbs and relentless waves. He does not think he could live without the sea anymore. It is in his lungs. It is his breath. He does not yet know how close he will come to death tangled in the dark sheets of the ocean’s deep bed.
But you’d probably haunt me forever anyway….You’re here now though and I don't think you are going anywhere.


And that is the truth of them is it not? If he is the blade that presses to her breast, that she welcomes as it presses deeper, deeper leaving something terrible, something wonderful, behind in the soft of her heart... a poison that drifts in her veins and turns all to wickedness and want… then she is no better. 


It is her smile that undoes him. The way it picks at all the ties that hold him together and she lets him fall apart. Tenebrae is desperate as he clutches the parts of him she has exposed together. 


But he is a wonderful liar (just one of his ever growing list of sins) and he watches her with his dark, dark eyes and seems so utterly unbroken. She watches him through blue as the sun watches the moon fall as she rises and rise as she falls. She holds him with that unwavering gaze. It is her gold that glues the parts of him (that she so deftly unraveled) back together. 


They are doomed to die (aren’t we all?) yet if she is Juliet then Romeo is her ill-fated lover; their love so pure, so utterly forbidden. Oh Elena why do you stand with the dagger in your heart and Romeo a ghost at your shoulder?


There is one thing that Tenebrae knows of Elena that many may not: she is cruel. She sighs, and aches when he does not touch her. He draws back, his confession spoken like a warding spell between them. But it has no power against Elena. It was a plea for her to stay away and yet she steps close, close, close.


He knows how they crave, he can almost see the question forming upon her lips, ready to be asked, why?. Up she gazes at him from beneath the bow of her dark, dark lashes. From where they stand so close, too close, where breaths mingle and distance is felt as wondering just how they are not yet touching, he can see the way his darkness frames her. He knows how she smells, of wild flower meadows, of bluebells in spring. Daylight breathes across her skin and never has he thought it tasted more wonderful, than it does now.


 But she is gone.


He breathes and remembers who he is, what he is. 


Elena asks of him a secret. “I want,” Tenebrae answers without pause. It is a secret that comes with the agonising weight of a confession. It is rough and deep as it cuts like liquor through his veins, his nerves. “And monks should never want.” 


But he does, he does, he does.


He craves, he desires, he yearns, he wants.
“Tell me a secret of yours, please.” And it is something like a prayer, a plea. His voice is low and rough, the words just for her, for this place where they stand upon the edge of the world, surrounded by ghosts, by dreams and tales of ill-fated lovers.


And he looks to her as if she could absolve him, as if she might be the balm for the whip-wounds that smart across his spine. They remind him, they remind him that he is failing.

@Elena - <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

At first the world had seemed like a perfect place, a safe place. She had sat in the grass with those spidery baby legs that were still tripping her occasionally as the sun bathed on her. Eyes bright, new and wide enough to swallow entire worlds. She can remember being tucked by her mother’s side, wth her father just next to them, smiling down at her. Those were the best times, the right times.

And then she became an ugly truth, because she needs. Because she does not want to be alone, because she’s been alone already and watched her as time passed and her heart ached while her bones turned to dust. Because she cannot exist in a space surrounded by a single mirrored reflection – her own. She is made up almost entirely of flaws and mistakes, broken and fragmented but stitched together by the love of her family. For so long she had relied on them, to fix the mistakes she had made herself. She knows that being afraid of love and being afraid to be consumed by it are made from different things. The trouble is, Elena cannot see these differences, no matter how hard she may try.

The sea.
It is a thing they have in common now. For Elena believes she can no longer breathe if the air is not coated in salt and sea bird cries. She has found solace here in the chaos and violence of the thrashing ocean against the rocky cliff side. It was volatile and it brought some strange comfort for her warring thoughts.

She is no better than him, it is evident in the way she Elena looks up at him with silver blue eyes that looks like the frost that clings to emerald blades of grass in the early morning morning hours. Elena has wanted for most of her life, from the moment she lost her parents, there has been an undeniable desire within her. It has merely shifted and molded itself as she has grown, but it still remains there all the same.

She doesn't know how to interpret his silence. She just gives him that smile that makes sunflowers turn believing it to be the sun, with blue eyes perched at the ready beneath dark lashes. She should leave she thinks as she looks at him. If she wanted a quiet life, Elena knows looking at him that he is not it, that he is far from it. ‘But what’s life without a little risk?’ Ori had said to her once with mismatched eyes and a bright smile.

Just a little risk.

What’s the harm?

If she doesn't know his name, then they can still be only strangers.

If Elena knew what she was doing to him, if she, just a blonde girl with a heart that was too big, could do this to a man of shadows, she wouldn't know what to do. Probably pick up the pieces unraveled and with a needle and thread and stitch him back together again, like some sewn together Humpty dumpty. Instead of falling off the wall, he tumbled down a cliff side and into the sea.

She takes another one step toward him.
Stops herself short before he has to ask her to.

Maybe, the mouth hadn't been drawn to the flame at all, but the shadows. With bluebells sprouting where eyes should be her breath becomes staggered. He is a thief, stealing it from her like that, a thief, a scoundrel, a bandit. But Elena has had worse things stolen from her than just the breath from her lungs.

“Dont fight the darkness,” Lovelace had told one night inside their cavern as she peered out at world shrouded in darkness. “Accept it, embrace it, love it even,” she had spoken as she wrapped the ever growing apprentice into an embrace. “Darkness does not resent the light.”

He wants. He says.
She wants. She thinks.

They all want. They know.

She offers him no words of wisdom for his admission, no comfort for his honestly, no reward. She lets his words come to rest in the golden breast where her heart falls and catches itself like snow onto blades of grass. “You want,” is all she says, a repetition of words as she, in such a desperate act of cruelty and longing for something for anything (a look of disdain, a look of affection—they were one in the same when all you want is want) she takes another step closer. Can he feel that she has been so infused with sunshine that she radiates heat? Darkness does not smother fire, however hard it might try.

Tell me a secret of yours, please.

“Tell me something you want me to know about you.” They are not the same but his words batter around in her ribcage in much the same way. This is not Tunnel, she knows, but why then do those words still burn the same under her skin? (She should go, she thinks.) (She should go, she forgets.) And once more there lay the option of so many things she could tell him, something vague, something that would not give him anymore information about herself than he already had. “I’m an orphan,” she says again, because Elena never learns from her mistakes, because she will make them again and again expecting a different color when she keeps using the same paint and brush to create her life. While she uses that same paint, that same brush, that same canvas, Elena makes another stroke she has not made before as she speaks again with another truth, another admission.

“And I don't want to be.”

She wants, oh how she wants—she just does not want everything.

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

 

Yes, Elena is cruel.


He knew it before, he is reminded again as she steps toward him. She moves through his darkness like the sun at the dawn. Before her he had not known to crave the dawn.


She moves like a comet passing close, dangerously close and then she is gone. But always Elena returns. It is like gravity, a yearning that holds them tight, tight and always returns. She moves toward him, cruel and warm, warm, warm. He had not known the cold of his magic until she is there and the air is trembling with the heat of her skin. If she told him now she was the sun here to end him, he might believe her, he might fall to his knees and offer himself.


With her fae lips she speaks his secret back to him. She does not keep it cradled like a fragile bird. She returns his words to him. They fall from her mouth, pensive, and part of him wishes to take his confession back, to have never spoken it at all. Tenebrae feels foolish here, a boy full of want. He wants to open his lips and if he cannot bring the words back onto his tongue then he wants to tell her that he is expected to want for nothing. That only Caligo should be enough for him. But so great and terrible is the looming realisation that she may not be. Not for him, not anymore. 


Elena bears his confession so simply, it holds none of the weight that his tongue gave it. From her mouth it is simple and obvious. 


And she steps closer again. “Elena.” Tenebrae implores her, rough and low and warm as her skin that he dares not touch. She does not cool and snuff out beneath his magic, not like sun does. Does that make her greater? The monk thinks it might. 


He looks up, he dares to take his eyes from her, from the girl who edges, closer, closer. The Disciple looks to the sun and half waits for her to touch to whisper across his skin.


It does not come and the sunlight is all that bathes him. It laughs at the Disciple, it mocks the man who thought he could ever endlessly hunt the sun and not tire. 


Tenebrae’s eyes close against the deriding sun, against the disappointment that begins to form with a twinge in his nerves. He wants to be touched.


Oh, he wants.


Tenebrae has turned away from temptation and its deep yearning. It was easier when all he knew was war, when every touch was violent and filled with malice. It was even easier with Boudika, where her every touch was some sort of exquisite agony. 


He breathes.


Elena is like none of those things. He swallows his yearnings down and lowers his gaze to look at the fae-girl. She is smiling and there is something of Solis in her. It makes him hungry and yet, he knows she is nothing like the sun. Even as she stands close, like an ember. He is the touch paper, she will burn him so completely.


There is sweet sorrow in the spaces between them, in the way her breath catches and he counts all the beats she does not breathe, until she does again. He thinks he can hear the way her heart races, he wonders if his is faster or slower. He dares to believe the first. 


I am an orphan. 


How still he falls, how wide her open heart breaks to him. Her eyes snag upon his, water across the moon. Electric blue into the white lightning of his. He wonders what planets might be blue like hers. He wonders how the sun turns its sky so blue and how she stole a piece of it. Mysterious, wild Elena. Maybe her father is the sun and her mother a winding river. How ironic that would be when his was a Stallion Made to Swallow the Sun.


The first of her confessions has him exhaling low, low for her and then the next comes. The words are small, her voice little more than petals on the breeze. The words are soft, vulnerable, the wind catches them and they are gone in moments.


Yet while her confessions fade, whilst she lays before him the things she is and the things she does not want. Tenebrae is a young child again. There is dust on the road, he can feel the way it chafes his limbs, his knees itch with the memory. In desperation and hunger, in loneliness and sorrow the child Tenebrae follows the trail of caravans praying that they might stop. Praying that this might be the day they take pity on him and welcome him back.


Yet Tenebrae killed his mother and his father ceased to exist (a god creation, made and then so utterly, unmade). 


He takes a breath and it is deep with sorrow, deep with want, deep with their shared loss. He wants to be touched, he wants, he wants…


Tenebrae covers the distance she does not, all the space she leaves that offers him salvation. He presses his brow to hers until they touch brow to bridge to nose. His eyes close and he breathes, the smell of her, the sea salt breeze that already claims her skin, the wild flowers that press ther pollen into the caramel of her mane. 


“I am an orphan too,” Tenebrae gives her another confession to draw them level. He gives her another confession because this one matches hers. Sun and midnight, so different and yet the same beginnings.


How long do they stand this way? Time ceases, it slows as it reaches them, seconds are hours and minutes a lifetime. When he moves, it should be to part from her, but it is not. Sinful, terrible Tenebrae. Instead he reaches up, smoothing under her mane, his breath hot against her neck. He reaches across her and stops as he holds her. Their hearts beat together as they stand breast to breast. “Did you know your parents?” the question breathes across her skin, it chases his shadows that swirl patterns across her body, sigils of crescent moons. Such sigils seem blasphemous against her sun-hewn skin. Yet already Tenebrae is already damned and so he does not move from where he holds her, where begins to learn of something other than violence.



@Elena 

 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

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

His hesitance doesn't escape her, but there is another part of her that just doesn't care enough to stop herself. Sunlight scattered across the gold of her skin before it is swallowed by shadows. His shadows.

It is cold, it touches against her skin and melts against her heat, but she feels the chill of it all the same. It is dangerous standing here with him, she reminds herself, but it is a weak argument and the soft percussion of the ocean makes her all too entirely unsure. She fights that knowledge by looking into his eyes with her own of climb. Her heart climbs into her throat as a shiver transverse the length of her spine. Go, she should go, but she wont.

Everyone knows that at this point. There wouldn't be a story if she left so soon.

A step closer. Her name on his lips, one word, three syllables, just an exhale of sound catching in the wind and she can feel her heart trembling in her chest. It batters at the confines of her ribs like a bird trapped in a small cage. She blinks, those dark eyelashes like spiders racing across her skin. She doesn't need him, doesn't need this, and everything else he will surely bring, she tells herself, but there is a pit in her stomach as he breaches her thoughts and her name twists on his tongue as if she were never meant to hear it allowed from his lips.

The golden girl wants to touch him as he looks away, he leaves too much space between them, it feels like canyons, like mountain passes. She hates the space that he builds between them. Elena has lived her life with spaces, the ever present six feet between herself and her parents is the most heartbreaking one of all. She tries to fill her space with other things, and she wants the shadow man to be apart of filling it.

She sucks in a quiet breath as his eyes return upon her. In heartbreaking truth, she would burn him if she could. Like petrol soaked paper. She would not mean to, but she would burn him all the same. Elena was fire, had always been fire, and fire blazes and engulfs, until ruin is left behind.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice is like the sound of glass breaking on stone.

She has felt hot kisses down her spine, passionate ones on her lips, and teasing ones in the crease of her cheeks. But some how, the intimacy of all of those pales in comparison to the touch her offers her now. She feels wanted in this moment, with him, and it is undoing the walls she had so clumsily built around that broken heart that she never put back together just so. She has always yearned to be wanted.

And he gives her another confession. She wants to cry, for him, for her, but she has learned to hold them back and build a dam to keep it from spilling. “I did, they were taken from me when I was a year old.” She confesses into the curve of his shoulder, in a voice so small, she wonders if he will understand the shape of her words. Taken, stolen, removed from her life.

It feels like forever that she stays crushed against his chest like that, and for a heartbeat she feels that strange sense of belonging that comes with touch, with embracing, like a tattoo branding itself across his skin. That delicate frame cannot help but find comfort in his strength. But forever always ends too soon and slowly they are pulling away from each other, and she cannot help but trace her lips against the curve of his jaw and down the narrow slope of his chin. Her touches, they should be more sensual than what they are. She has known no other orphan in her life, and she had always wondered what they were like. Did they ache like her? Bleed without lacerations? Break and crumble apart while still appearing whole? She stops just as she reaches the end of his cheek, unwilling to move further before pulling away to watch him with sorrow and grief like a stain across her delicate face. There are so may things she could tell him, ask him, a dozen thoughts bouncing around like dropped beads in her head. But there is one that finds its way to her lips first. Those depthless blue eyes like cloudless sky of summer look up at him. “I may have known them, but there is much that still remains a mystery to me. I have lived far longer without them, than with them” she says, admits, looks away a moment, before blue eyes blink towards him again. “And you, did you know yours?”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae <3

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

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

 


The wild flowers sway atop the cliff and they do not care how he is remade.


It is only now, with their touching, simple as breathing, that he realises how numb and incomplete he has always been. It is easy for a monk to never be touched. It is easy for an orphan to never be embraced. It is easy for them to never realise how much they have craved it.


They are fire and smoke upon the cliff top, a sign of something consuming, a sign of something becoming destroyed. Tenebrae and Elena are a warning lamp seafarers would know. One that warns do not land here, but here they are, turning to ash upon the wind. Waiting for new life. As if in knowing his shadows begin to drift out upon the wind, trailing over the sea in tendrils of smoke from Elena’s fire. 


If she feels the cold of his darkness, the acute absence of light, he does not realise it. How can he when she burns him with the fire of her fae-soul? How can he when he has always been numb within his solitary darkness?


He thought salvation was in the spaces they left between them. Oh he thought to keep himself apart as his goddess had (from her siblings) was right. But even Caligo had family, even she once knew what touch was.


The monk is enlightened as they touch. He is remade and remodelled by Elena’s embrace. It was not like their hold when dancing. It was not like Boudika’s kiss that ripped his soul and made sure it never forgot her.  This was the light of revelation resoldering back the parts of him that fell away, untended to with love. This was realisation dawning, shedding its light at last upon his impenetrable shadows of unknowing. 


At last the monk realised what it was to touch, be touched and realise how he needed it as much as living. 


Time does not rush them. It gilds them in the glow of Elena’s skin and lets a monk’s dark magic fade away a wild meadow and a beckoning sea. Still they burn together as bound together as flames upon wood. Already Tenebrae is new life from the ashes, yet still he gives oxygen to Elena’s fire as she turns him wholly to charcoal in her hold.


Now he thinks he might be able to name that look Elena had cradled within her dark eyes. It was a look that had betrayed the lovely, storybook smile upon her lips. It was a look that had been dark with the eternity of space between them. It was a look that had wanted touch. Was this the curse of orphans? Were they destined to always wander and crave touch and comfort and love?


In the dark of the dorms the boys had never spoken of their parents. Their histories were identical in this regard. Mothers unable to survive the births of their boy children and fathers who disappeared, unmade by magic, unmaking their sons as they dissipated. None of the Disciples knew their mothers. None of the Disciples were ever told they should need love. 


Now Elena embrace opens him like a book and he longs to read his story upon its pages. To learn about himself and the ink that fills in the pieces he never knew he was missing, until now, until this golden fae-girl and her confessions.


She whispers more admissions across his shoulder. The words seep into his skin, reaching into his soul with grasping fingers. Her voice is breaking into a thousand pieces and he cannot collect them all; he laments. 


His shadows grow restless with the need to morph and transform his sorrow into shapes and creatures. The monk wonders what animals represent death, what objects, flowers or piece of nature. All he knows is those he has used to bring death upon others, shadow spears and knives. But there is violence gleaming in the shards of her broken voice. He can see where it has painted her red and so his shadows burst into fleeing butterflies, taking flight across the cliff top where Elena and Tenebrae cling together. 


“You knew them,” He observes that small and joyous gift of hers. “How were they taken?” He asks and wonders how many children he has left orphaned too. Ah.


Oh.


He drinks in the smell of her skin, the soft of her body against his, anything to avoid the sinking of his soul. It was easy to be bloodthirsty when you do not consider the collateral damage of war. She is slim and fragile as a dove. Still Tenebrae finds himself wondering where she hides her wings, but still he sees no evidence along the curve of her back, the slope of her fine shoulders. He exhales as they part and already he misses it, already he grieves for what it was like to be held.


Yet Elena grieves too and her lips trail his jaw, his cheek, his chin. There is darkness when his eyes close, better to listen to the nerves she sets alight with her touch. He does not dare to forget this moment of awakening and his eyes open again to watch her. They meet in bluelight and starlight eyes. The monk exhales and moves forward, pressing his brow to hers because already he is greedy, already he feels bereft of touch. The fae-girl has given him too little and yet too much.


Her forelock tangles with his closed eyelashes. All of him is filled with meadow flowers and summer heat. “Me too,” He says of all the years he has lived without them. “But do you ever wonder,” He dares to breathe, ever sinful, ever blasphemous, “What it would have been like if things were different? What would you change about your life until now, Elena?”

Then, in a whisper, "I did not know mine. I unmade them both." And that is all he says, because Disciples do not talk of their creation.

@Elena

 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~