T E N E B R A E
On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells
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.
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