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
Oh Boudika. If he sees the hurt in her eyes, the twinge of sadness that rises from her struggling soul, he is not aware of it. Survival has a way of clouding out everything but the essential requirements for living. And Tenebrae cannot breathe. So he leaves her where she floats - a goddess in turmoil, the sea set alight by the fiery crown her hair makes.
He breathes upon the surface. He gulps air in the pauses between thrashing waves. When he is filled he hunts her out, swimming down, down until he meets her rising up. They bleed together. They turn the sea red with their fascination and their desire.
They bleed because of each other.
How many times will tenebrae know the bite of her teeth? First as a kelpie and then as a crocodile. He should have known, the moment she stepped into his shadows. It seemed for her as if stepping out into the light. It was simple, easy. She had blood upon her lips then and she has blood upon her lips now. Tenebrae thinks that she has had blood upon her lips every day since they first met.
She makes him bleed for her. His throat knows her more intimately than Tenebrae has known anything in his life. She has brought him closer to death than any warrior he has faced upon the fields of war. Was this Caligo’s work? Was this her revelation to him:
Oh Tenebrae, you are not made for women or love.
Caligo made him and Boudika is unmaking him.
He was made to glory, laud and honour his goddess and yet his eyes have turned away. They dare to concern themselves with things unholy, with a woman who is not his goddess. To chose a mortal woman is to reject what he was made for and what is left for him then but to be unmade?
His heart skips each time their limbs collide, each time they tangle as the reeds she dragged him down to. They sway morosely beneath them as if there is a lament within the sea for the girl who is changing and the boy who is being unmade. What tales does the sea have for the ill-fated pair? What words of warning does she hiss in their ears as her stormy waves surge over their heads?
Boudika is low, low in the water. Still she watches him like a crocodile as they together turn the water red, red, red. Sing them a crimson song, of hearts that bleed and oceans that bloom red as roses. She swims to him and he flinches, like a mortal, like a man only a shred away from death. Still his darkness is a knife at her throat. It does not gleam malevolently as steel does. It needs not to. It is a shard of obsidian, the bite of crimson earth pressed against the red of her ocean-red throat.
But he yields. He lets her get closer than a crocodile ever should. She presses equine lips to his throat and all he feels is pain, pain, pain. He groans, nearly felled by her kiss, by the exquisite pain of their tumultuous desire. Her bite is too much and her kiss ever more painful. His groan was lost to the earth-splitting thunder, but even the storm silences at his, “No.”
He pushes her back with the black blade that vows it will bite deeper than its snakebites had. It is unyielding as it commands a retreat from her. In his eyes is a new kind of pain, something that hurts worse than dying, worse than knowing oxygen was gone and the sea was so terribly, awfully deep. It was a long swim, and he only feels worse now for breathing.
It is well she does not tell him how she wanted him to change. Already she is demanding he change and Tenebrae is not made for changes like this.
Not discouraged and oh, ever brave, the wild warrior girl swims back to him. She presses her muzzle to his wound again and whispers of beasts in the deep. Hungry, wanting beasts tasting blood upon the water. Tenebrae laughs. It is heard above even the thunder. It is rough (with his ravaged throat) and it is cold as the sea they swim in and hard as the blade still at her throat. Now they are closer than they have ever been. With their legs tangled like anemones, their jaws pressed together and her muzzle pressed to his ragged wound. It feels even more intimate than the times she has been buried tooth-deep within him.
“I cannot believe there are beasts much worse than you.” Those words are as sharp as they are rough. He aims them to cut. No, he cannot imagine any creatures worse than her in this great sea. It is only Boudika he is not supposed to survive. He knows that now. But still, but still there is a part of him that thrills at the wild of her, that would have him falling to his knees for her.
“Go back.” He breathes, coarse as sandpaper in her ear (such has she ruined his throat). “Go back.” He repeats and does not mean for her to return to the ocean’s deep, though it would be easier, it would help, even for a small, fickle little moment.
“Show me.” Is all he demands, cutting off the apology her tongue cannot find. And all the while his first question presses itself upon her body, every piece of it he knows and yet does not.
What the fuck was that?
Who the fuck are you? New questions begin to bleed in, striking across her back like the thongs of the whips he uses across his own.
What the fuck are you?
And he will have his answers, Boudika.
@Boudika
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