There is something homey about the dark verge that consumes him – that consumes them. Something familiar, felt before, and so she takes a step forward. Crosses the sill of an in-between, here and there, and settles comfortably. She can breathe. She can be and not be; tie and untie the frail moorings of her around him in careful, ritual ministrations. Around him and the memory of another like him. Around something she can feel without touching; grab, though it slips through her fingers as sure as shadow and sand.
The smell of incense mixes with the newness and the void, sharp and hallelujah. She knows godliness, had met it at an altar once, offered herself as a sacrifice to it. Blood. But blood is a cheap commodity. She is full of, had found in the end that she had more than enough to spare. Would have spared more, if she could. Would. (What would her father think? He had raised her differently.) Known godliness in the cathedral of her own heart. Genuflected to a god now dead, rived by a sin more mighty than holiness because it had really been the god’s own weakness, after all.
Serenely, as she watches the shivering edges of herself and the world and all that coils around him slough off like bright skin from the soft eventide, she wonders if his darkness could slay divinity.
Were it not set to a supplicant purpose.
“Hmmm,” she tries to remember what had come before him, just moments ago. The bright, golden gloam. The mauves and the oranges, the way they bled like tides into inchoate night. Before. How it had held her like a novelty; a curio of another time and place. Feeling her heft, testing the make and measure, the delicate details and gaging her worth in the weight of the purpose she had brought with her. “Nor I, it,” she admits, remembering, faintly, trying to find some brushstrokes of her past in the yellowing sway of grass and the vibrant dance of wildflowers on their stalks.
They circle like prizefighters, and at the toll of the bell, they will all find the way they come together.
But him. This place knows the cloudy fingers of his ministerial formlessness as kin or kith, or as monastic pilgrim. So unlike her, it seems to bow to him, to know him as something proffered by a divine hand, given unto the world as a gift from shepherd to flock. She knows not the names of Novus’ gods but can see the strange way they work in the quietest of labours.
She smiles, distant and dreamy, “need,” she says simply, sadly. “It took me as a refugee from judgement. I am grateful for that, at least.” She regards him, with gentled, astral eyes, coils of white hair slipping across her endarkened cheek. You have known darkness before, he says, she shakes her head, a small giggle slipping from bruise-black lips. “How do you do that?” her brows knit together in curiousness, catching his lamplight eyes, “oraculum, I have known your kind. Of a kind of your kind.” Had touched the tattered, unloving edges of his vicious predation, and had delighted in it. Had felt teeth like lover’s caresses, soft as silken bedsheets.
She wonders if he can scry all of that as well. Can untangle the lovely weakness of her, the pliant way she had bent like a sapling in gales, around his stygian fingers.
“Except, I wonder whose god yours obeys.”
If it obeys a god at all.
The smell of incense mixes with the newness and the void, sharp and hallelujah. She knows godliness, had met it at an altar once, offered herself as a sacrifice to it. Blood. But blood is a cheap commodity. She is full of, had found in the end that she had more than enough to spare. Would have spared more, if she could. Would. (What would her father think? He had raised her differently.) Known godliness in the cathedral of her own heart. Genuflected to a god now dead, rived by a sin more mighty than holiness because it had really been the god’s own weakness, after all.
Serenely, as she watches the shivering edges of herself and the world and all that coils around him slough off like bright skin from the soft eventide, she wonders if his darkness could slay divinity.
Were it not set to a supplicant purpose.
“Hmmm,” she tries to remember what had come before him, just moments ago. The bright, golden gloam. The mauves and the oranges, the way they bled like tides into inchoate night. Before. How it had held her like a novelty; a curio of another time and place. Feeling her heft, testing the make and measure, the delicate details and gaging her worth in the weight of the purpose she had brought with her. “Nor I, it,” she admits, remembering, faintly, trying to find some brushstrokes of her past in the yellowing sway of grass and the vibrant dance of wildflowers on their stalks.
They circle like prizefighters, and at the toll of the bell, they will all find the way they come together.
But him. This place knows the cloudy fingers of his ministerial formlessness as kin or kith, or as monastic pilgrim. So unlike her, it seems to bow to him, to know him as something proffered by a divine hand, given unto the world as a gift from shepherd to flock. She knows not the names of Novus’ gods but can see the strange way they work in the quietest of labours.
She smiles, distant and dreamy, “need,” she says simply, sadly. “It took me as a refugee from judgement. I am grateful for that, at least.” She regards him, with gentled, astral eyes, coils of white hair slipping across her endarkened cheek. You have known darkness before, he says, she shakes her head, a small giggle slipping from bruise-black lips. “How do you do that?” her brows knit together in curiousness, catching his lamplight eyes, “oraculum, I have known your kind. Of a kind of your kind.” Had touched the tattered, unloving edges of his vicious predation, and had delighted in it. Had felt teeth like lover’s caresses, soft as silken bedsheets.
She wonders if he can scry all of that as well. Can untangle the lovely weakness of her, the pliant way she had bent like a sapling in gales, around his stygian fingers.
“Except, I wonder whose god yours obeys.”
If it obeys a god at all.
Hover for translation.
@Tenebrae
@Tenebrae
☽
