he walks like a ghost: head held high, wings tucked tight, body tense and ready for a fight. Exhaustion is written in every line of her body, every nook and cranny and crevice all the way from wilting hair, loose and flat in a darling disarray, down to the droop of her eyelids, the way her tail is not carried like a flag in the sky, but like a silk sheet dripping over the ground.
This is the Moira that Tenebrae knew in his temple alongside his brethren. A girl eaten and spit out by the world, a girl destroyed, a girl crumbling, a girl who gave and gave and gave until she just gave out. Oh, her heart beats but she doesn't feel it beating fiercely. That fire, the indomitable Moira Tonnerre is shaken by how deeply she feels felt, by how thoroughly and completely another could destroy her. In the temple, with Tenebrae and Sut and the rest of the Night Order, she was a wraith in the halls at all hours of the day and night. Skinny nose pressed against scrolls long into the hours of darkness, gentle hands were covered in dirt when the sun shone on their vast array of plants. The garden was huge, well tended, and flourishing. She helped it along as best she could, getting lost in row after row of herb and flower, contently pulling weeds, watering shrubs, and choosing vegetables for dinner.
If there was one thing she missed, whenever the man cloaked in shadows and dressed in brown asked, it was the sweets of the city.
Eventually, Moira returned from her retreat into the mountains and resumed her duties. It is here, now, how the monk will find her. Like a snake in the courts, she bustles smoothly through the halls; a Tonnerre never rushes, never seems to be in a hurry - no, they simply glide and float never appearing to touch the ground from room to room, meeting to meeting. Even though she has long been gone from her home for so many years now (three, four?) she still holds the stature of a Tonnerre in the straightness of her back, the squareness of her shoulders, the curve of her neck and coyness of her glance.
Although, unlike the days of girlhood that clung desperately to her skin for many, many years, Moira has a warmth in those once distant eyes. When she looks at another, she truly looks. They are not portraits or patients - still lives or creatures to heal - but people of her court, people visiting her court, simply...people.
The business of the day is coming to a halt and Moira feels the way it winds down. Tiredness that once plagued her, fatigue heavy on her brow, still escapes her just as it did at the temple. No matter how exhaustion loves to find her as easy prey, Moira cannot escape the call of insomnia that has her bidding others of the court goodnight as they retreat to their chambers. The halls of the keep empty and the stalls of the market grow quiet. It is here, now, in these hours of dawn, that the woman in red leaves her library and her study, leaves her warm rooms and the kitchen in the lower levels of the keep. Bright eyed, very much alive, she ventures onto the cobbled and sea-shell streets of Denocte to watch as her people find their way into the arms of lovers, parents, brothers; curl themselves tight in blankets and houses, shutting doors tight to keep out the heat of the day and autumnal breezes that are known to rush from their Oceanside trading ports.
Down she goes further and further along winding streets, meandering through alleys and beside small gardens still found within the city until, at last, she reaches a pier. The ocean beckons to her like Asterion does - her heart still thundering, still storming, still shattering but quieter at the thought of him - like Michael does - he who finds her with fresh fruit (strawberries and dragon fruit, sweet apple turnovers and more) to make sure she does not die (not yet) when he's only just learned to hold her tight. It is not the ocean she looks to though, instead golden eyes find safe passage on the edge of a ship slipping in and out of a distant line of rolling clouds just atop the water. Brows draw down, eyes narrow as her skinny nose goes up.
Perhaps they would dock and trade with her people. Perhaps they would be nothing but trouble.
The tides are too low to come in safely, and so for now the woman waits with a weathered eye on the horizon.
{ @Tenebrae"speaks" notes: I hope this is alright! }
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She stands upon the peer and moonlight bathes the curls of her hair silver. She is limned by the moon, bathed in its ethereal glow. There is something godly about her tonight. He thinks of her letters and the bird who carries them. The paper bound in ribbon to its limb, always so perfectly done. Her words always so carefully orchestrated. Except in her lowest and highest moments where she seems to lose herself, where words flow impassioned, each one falling atop the other in a river of emotion that flows as poetry through her ink and down upon the parchment.
Always Tenebrae has been the calmer one, always the one to hold her, ease the tension from her limbs. Her presence still sets his magic alight. Always she reminds it of what it was to fight her atop the mountain, to hear her grief ripped from her throat. But that was easy, it was the dim quiet that followed. When she sat numb within the halls of the monastery, a ghost of a girl haunting the halls of monks. Yet she healed, as much as she could, as much as any of them could.
As he walks to her now, he wonders if anything he said to her was ever of any use. He was so blind then, so delusional. He feels young, even to himself. A foolish man succumbing to man’s greatest temptation. How could he ever have offered her words to heal a heart when he was on a trajectory to breaking others? Binding one up does not make up for breaking others.
Her letter came, asking to meet and he would have sought her out anyway. His heart has grown too inflamed, his foolishness a stumbling block he was blind to see, until now, until the worst has already been done. His shadows billow and trail. They drag after him like broken wings, like sins weighted, pulling him back, back and down, down into remorse and yet more sin. It aches to be in Caligo’s midnight. It feels sacreligious to be adorned in her shadows, a holy magic gifted to him in exchange for his oath. The worst agony of all is how his shadows feel faithful how they still curl about him, how they lay cool across the wounded flesh of his back. They are faithful where he is not? Was that the love of Caligo? Eternal? Was there nothing he could do wrong?
The Disciple reaches her. She is like water to his parched throat. “Moira.” He breathes as if she is air, and until now his lungs have been barren, closed, empty. “Moira I need-” And then he remembers where they are, the peer, the crowds, the harbour and the boats. Grief is a sweat across his brow, remorse has him clutching her tight. “Come, please.” He begs her even as he clasps her like a man drowning and draws her away from the peer, down upon the beach and across into the shadows and a jutting hollow of the cliffside.
Here they are alone, enough of a distance from others where not even a treacherous wind could carry their words to another’s ears. This dark nook within the cliffside, where the sea laps as judge and jury, is a place for confessions. When has his life become such that he could not confess to a brother? But rather seek to confide in another?
The monk falls to his knees before her, the open wounds upon his back bear themselves in angry red lines to the sky and to Moira. They weep red tears, turned to ebony ink in the night, in the shadows. “Moira.” He groans like a man dying and this feels something like death. Tears wet the words upon his lips, they stain the sand at the tips of her feet. He clings to her broken and wounded, penitent and harrowed. “I have sinned.” He gasps the latter word, as if its magnitude is enough to trip his tongue. “I need to confess.” Tenebrae clings to her as if she is redemption, as if she might be the only thing that holds him together and grounded upon the earth.
dove always seems to swoop near enough her now, awaiting her next words to be sent to some partner or another. Most often, they now go to Tenebrae where once they would have gone to a King sitting alone, left to stare at an ocean with too heavy a crown upon his beautiful brown head. Now, the white and grey bird flutters as shadows grow nearer before dawn, its nerves increasing even if it recognizes the monk who approaches. Often enough, she'd been sent to deliver messages to just this man, yet still there is an apprehension in her, a feeling of being so alone having to travel so far from her nest, from her flock. Moira notices this, looks to her little writing dove, and blows at her, sending her back to the aerie where she would wait further messages, socializing with her flock once more and saving up energy for the next long trek.
The Emissary turns her head then to watch as lights flicker out in her friend's presence, his shadows gobbling them greedily, hungrily. Oh, but she remembers a time when they were much greedier, hungrier, choosing instead to devour everything she had just as she made his shadows flee with her own light. Two faces of the same coin. Golden eyes light up, relieved to find something other than prospective trouble on the horizon, and her face splits in two, a gentle grin to ease him into her company. Quiet was always their forte. If they weren't screaming and growling, snarling over the same bone they both wanted, fighting and lashing out until one or both lie exhausted from the overuse of their powers (divined by the gods or not, Caligo's chosen son and Solis' bastard daughter or not), they were quiet. He anchors her regardless of her storms or sunny days, he pulls her close to him with just a breath and she does not feel her heart flutter for the nearness of a male as it might were he some golden man with white hair, or some dark knight promising sweet nothings, or some old king she cannot help but love and mourn. No, Tenebrae is tranquility sliding onto her skin, pushing away the prickles and coarseness of her left always to worry and worry until she'd die.
"Monk," she replies gently, her voice cooing and caressing him as only she knows how. Then, he breaks, he looks to shatter just as she did. Entirely in pieces, he pulls and pulls. It is not a request but a demand, one she kindly accepts and follows close by his side.
One might think them conspirators or more with how she presses into his side, into his shadows, so familiarly just to feel the way his blood pounds and his nerves dance with indecision and pain. Was she this warm when she burrowed canyons into Venoror? It's possible. Moira remembers so much of the emotions and so little of the physicality of herself that night and does not reflect too long upon it when looking to the past for introspection. Instead, she simply offers herself as a house, a temple of comfort, a sanctuary when Tenebrae is weary, when he's taken so much and is ready to burst, when he's drowning and can't find air.
How he drowns before her now, how he swallows the moon and comes back begging.
Concern beats within her breast for her friend as she watches him bow, watches him fall down crying. This is not the silent, sturdy monk that she knows, this is not Tenebrae as he had been: young, naïve, so full of love for his goddess that he could do nothing but all that she asked, desired, demanded. Something happened, she guesses, and she wears the face of an angel, resplendent and redolent, a willing shoulder for his tears, a locked diary for his sins. "I am here, Tenebrae," she whispers unto his brow as she leans forward. Slowly, softly, dark lips press against his forehead and she wreaths him in light, puts a halo over his brow, wrapping around his ears. In their little alcove, the light is faint but beautiful, a sliver of the moon meant only for him. It sits there and glows and glows and glows, casting the lashes upon his back in stark relief.
She cannot help but trace them, knowing they are not inflicted from another, but from himself. Gods above the turmoil he should feel to do such a thing. She wants to wash away those tears, she wants to bandage them and care for him until they are gone, erased. Instead, she whispers, knowing what he needs, feeling it deeply in her bones, "speak, sweet child of Caligo, and I will be your ears. Confess to me your transgressions and sins, let them fall from your shoulders so you would not bear them so nobly and painfully alone. Tell me your troubles, Tenebrae. Now." Her voice grows hard and soft, more of a hypnosis than anything else, lulling him into her comforting embrace as a phantom hand brushes the tears from his cheeks, gently traces down his nose and then wipes the tears from his lips before they can fall.
She waits, patience and forgiveness already written in her bones.
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She conjures a halo about his head. It pours golden light down over his cheeks and his lowered lashes.
The halo feels wrong atop his poll. Moira seeks to remind him of his good, she seals her belief and love of him with a kiss pressed to his brow. And yet, all he Tenebrae feels is the remorse and grief that festers black in his soul. Moira Tonnerre is a healing balm. It would always be to her that he would run, in his greatest trials, his deepest sorrows and most bountiful joys.
The sand dusts his knees where he is upon them, before her. She stands quiet, a goddess, an angel before him waiting to hear the confessions of her follower. When she speaks, it is with a voice, sweet and warm. It is an injection of whiskey into his veins. It warms him, loosens his tongue. His friend soothes him with a kiss, with her words that coax his own up from his throat and out onto his tongue.
Her touch traces his whip wounds. They smart and throb and though Moira’s touch is cool midnight, a breath of air across his distressed skin, his spine arches and his limbs tremble. This is, he thinks, a perfect torture that he has brought upon himself. His soul is in agony, a thing so deeply felt, its damage invisible, though he wears the presence of it as tears and downturned lips. His body smarts and stings with the punishment he wrought upon it with a whip that does not care who, or how deeply, it bites.
Moira talks of Caligo and Tenebrae bows his head lower, lower. Away from the weight of his goddess’ name. “Gods…” The Disciple breathes as he thinks of what he is about to confess. The words are lead within his stomach. The sea is morose as it pushes its way up the beach and slinks slowly back. “I swore a vow of chastity, Moira. I vowed myself to Caligo and only her. And yet… I have fallen in love. With two women.” The words come out, disjointed, as if he loathes the taste of them upon his tongue. With the final ones out he laughs, incredulous. There is no joy within that sound. It is flat and dead as rock. He laughs and he laughs until the laugh turns into a scream he prostrates at her feet. Agony pours itself into the scream, despair and self-hatred impale themselves upon the higher notes of it. Desolation laces itself through his scream. The sand trembles at the monk’s confession.
For a long moment he is still. His knees are raw with his bending and his sides heave with the effort to breathe. Sweat glistens across his torso, it shines in the moonlight. “And, I have slept with one of them.” He whispers the last. Suddenly fatigued, suddenly so broken by his own sin. He thinks of Boudika, of Elena. “I have done so much wrong.” He groans, all suddenly so quiet, so aching after his scream. “I have been a fool, Moira.” Tenebrae tips his chin up to his friend, where she looks down upon him and frames him with a halo he does not deserve. The film of his tears, the jagged line of his despairing lips grows dark as his shadows breathe and curse his silvered body.
ilence feeds her soul, festers as a puss-riddled wound between them, boils as the ocean does when the gods are displeased, and how it pains her tonight. Silence, she knows, is as beautiful as it is terrible. Silence is the purest home she's ever known.
Silence is not for them.
The phoenix watches, perched before him as some mighty bird waiting for its prey to fall, watching as he crumbles. A great echelon of control, a pyramid of a life devoted to a single cause, a single being, beginning to crumble, beginning to burn. Did she look like this, so hopeless, so despaired when she fell before him, too? Would the glass castles that rise up when he finds his footing once more be just as strong, just as beautiful and resilient? To these things, she cannot speak, cannot dare to know the answers. The future, as always, remains a mystery clouded by decisions not yet made and decisions still to come.
Moira Tonnerre, so short a time ago so solemn and lonely as he is in her own fortress of ice and moonstone, is now humbled before him as he screams, as he cries out to whatever holy or unholy beings would listen. Could she take away his pain, she would in a heartbeat, but it is not her burden to bear, it is not a cross she could so easily lift from his brow and unnail him from his post. Tenebrae shatters and the shards left before her are beautiful and terrible and she wishes so dearly she could panic, but to soothe is as much a part of her as the light on her back, as the crown she made upon his brow.
So she does not, she does not speak until he is again panting, silent.
Hers is a soft brush of phantom hands against his cheek, hers is a mother's embrace as she grips his cheeks in those same hands and presses her forehead to his. The saltwater on his face is not wiped away, left to run uninterrupted into the sand that devours it as easily as it takes all of the ocean and still finds a way to stay in place, to keep on living. "Tenebrae," she murmurs so gently against his nose. Her own skinny face is thin against the long, straight line of his. In that moment, the phoenix seems so delicate, so breakable, as just a girl before a boy, embracing him as though he were her own flesh and blood, her heart beating within his breast - broken, unhinged, utterly clouded by grief and doubt and blame.
She knows what it is to hurt so badly, but she does not know his reverence for Caligo, for his is a religion she would never share. "To love is a terrible thing. It brings as much sorrow and suffering as it does joy. I wish I could take it from you so that you would not be brought so low. I would wish for a great many things, I think, if I were able to. But," she pauses, she sighs and shakes her head quietly against his.
They are bound, connected, and she does not wish to break that, cannot pull herself away from him in his grief. Moira is a black hole eager to consume, as eager to study and feel and know what it is for another to hurt as she dissects herself, too. "I do not know what it is to belong solely to a god... I do not know if I ever told you that I am not a believer, not truly, in all that is divine. Where I am from, we worship no deity, we fall at the feet of no greater power; our ancestors watch over us, they guide us if they so wish it, and when we die we would join them and take care of our family even in death. It is a comfort then, I suppose, to not wear your guilt. But Tenebrae," she lifts his chin just barely, looking into his eyes until they are but a single focal point. "We are all fools in love, and if we are not then we are liars."
How do you comfort one who is not sick or dying? She cannot tell him it will be alright, she cannot diagnose him with some cold, or poison, or a death sentence and hold his hand until he goes. All she can do his exist beside him, offer herself as his comfort, the only thing she knows to do now when she lowers herself to her knees so that they are level, and breathes the same air that he does, syncing up with Tenebrae until, slowly, she normalizes the tempo of their inhales once more. When he is not huffing and puffing, panting before her, she settles further, slides nearer, and wraps herself around him like a rope about a tree. Her wings, those lovely pinions that haunt her still, home up and curl as a tent above the two, effectively hiding them from the world, ensconcing him in shadows that he loves once more.
The only light is the light of his halo and the light of her stars.
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
Moira brushes his cheek, easing the sorrow that gathers tight in his muscles. Then she presses her brow to his. He nearly flinches, he nearly rips himself from Moira’s hold and… and… he does not know what. All of him is a cacophony of emotions. He broils with them. Every part of him is overwhelmed, full of a teaming darkness of searing ire and depression. Instead he groans, “She touches me like that.” It is pleading in his low whiskey voice. Stop, Moira and yet, please, I need this.
Moira speaks his name as she holds him and he is glad her voice is nothing like Boudika’s or Elena’s. She speaks of love and he listens, as if Moira Tonnerre holds the keys to understanding it. She calls it a terrible thing and it feels right to name it thus. So often he hears of the wonder of it. He hears the purity of Caligo’s love and yet here he is wounded, aching, feeling only the shallowness of his Goddess’ love. His devotion is a pool running dry.
Moira talks of her home. He thinks of a world without Gods, like Mephisto spoke of, like Moira speaks of. What would you be if you were not a monk? Again and again Boudika’s words haunt him. If he let go of Caligo now and renounced his faith in her, what would he be then? He was partially made of her magic. His devotion to her was already latent in his body at the moment of his conception. His birth killed his mother and his father. He was made to have no family but his brothers and his goddess, Caligo. If he left the Order, if he renounced the part of him that belonged to the Night Goddess, what then would be left of him?
Slowly, painfully, he realises Moira has no answers for him, not where gods and goddesses and the tangling love of mortals are concerned. She said so herself, yet he asks her anyway, he asks her like a man clinging to a precipice of a bridge wondering whether to jump and see how the water below will change him, “What would I be if I were not a monk?” Tenebrae prays Moira knows him because he does not think he knows himself at all.
The Disciple takes a breath. It is deep and harrowing. The stars in their firmament shudder with the force of the monk’s fetid grief. “I need you to tell me to stay with the Order, Moira. I need to turn back to Caligo. Or else I might lose myself.” And it is fear that works his tongue. It is innocence and ignorance that fans the flames of his fear. She cannot tell him, his decision should not be based upon Moira. He knows, he knows. Yet he asks, he begs.
“Divine love is supposed to be the greatest love of all. Yet I am drunk upon the love of women… If they find out how i have broken my vows, if I dare to step away from them, my magic will be stripped from me. It will take my sight…” He breathes and looks up at Moira, the brilliant red of her, glimmering as a ruby uncovered beneath the moon. He looks up beyond her to the stars and weep as they watch him. The sea reaches for him and whispers of Boudika. If you were not a monk, what would you be? The sea asks him in the kelpie’s voice. He knows his answer now, I would be blinded by love, Boudika.
e would flinch when her brow touches his, when her wings and light wrap them in their own cocoon. Skin both lunges and withdraws from the press of her own, and she would weep for him if he were not already crying enough to drown the world. Shame is a heavy weight, like too much honey stuck on her tongue, it is not sweet any longer as it should be. The pain of his bleeds into the atmosphere, pulls starlight down to be a cloak as she bleeds with him.
At last, at last his croaking, shattered voice finds hers. When he is not screaming, when he is only flesh and blood and bone and sinew prone upon the ground, when she is level with him and finds his eyes hiding from her own as he begs an answer she doesn't quite know how to answer in a way that he wants...yet, Moira takes a breath, and then another. She does not knit her brows together to think, does not look troubled or weary or doubtful at all when she answers in kind. "You would be Tenebrae, my friend," and it is cool water spilling from her, lapping at his legs buried in the sands. "You would be lost until you are found, a ship with a broken sail." Perhaps this is not what he wanted to hear, and she knows it likely is not, but she continues regardless of these thoughts. "It is not easy to leave all that you know, all that you were born to, and dive into depthless waters that would rather see you drown than surface...I do not have the right answers for you, and I think you know that, Ten." She knows...
Moira Tonnerre knows what it's like to abandon everything she knows and charge headlong into something different, something new. Was that not the very thing she did for her cousin, for love? Still, looking back, Moira knows she would do it again. Although Estelle is still not with her, she would have left no matter if Moira stayed. And without Estelle, the Estate would have been intolerable, it would have become a stain upon her soul, a wound festering and pussy until she bled out onto its cold, pristine floors that would reflect nothing but her family's disgust. 'At last, at least she won't breed,' they'd whisper to her corpse.
No. Even if she could have changed it, Moira knows she would have done the very same thing over and over.
His breath is deep and hurting, scratching his windpipe, banging against his lungs, and she can feel her light beg to flee, to run from the suffering it sees. The phoenix holds firm, she does not drop their shell, their little protection from the world that would wrap vines about their feet and then about their throats until they were made into limestone statues left to watch the waters come and go. Tenebrae asks her for a command, and she knows he does not mean it, should not mean it. If there are tears in her eyes, they could be easily mistaken as the starlight reflecting there along the bottom line. Her own words a hoarse, but they are sincere as they thread themselves into his world as simply as the sun. "Is that what you truly want?" she asks him.
With a shake of her head, dark hair tumbling and pulled by the wind, Moira at last sighs and stands. She towers above him as he kneels, as he seeks guidance from someone who is not her. The monk's tears still stain her cheek where she brushed against his skin, his words still carve hollows in her ears and bounce around. Will they ever fall out and find a grave to lie in? These are more questions she cannot answer. So she does not. Moira Tonnerre does as she always has: she keeps moving forward. With a voice like a goddess or like death itself, she tells him "With or without your temple, you are still a mortal man. You are still bound to the same mistakes as any other who is given flesh and a beating heart. We all fall... What will you be when you rise?" She challenges him harshly; it is not soft coddling which he needs, it is not forgiveness. Even if it were, the phoenix could not give that to Tenebrae, she is not the being that he wronged.
Gold eyes demand his look up, demand he meet her where she stands, hoof to hoof, nose to nose, breath for breath. Her heart urges him to stand, her magic reaches out to press into his legs, to splay along his belly in encouragement. But that is all she does.
Only after a moment, two, when she counts the space between her heartbeat and her breaths, does Moira stop, drop her light, and wait.
The rest is up to him. This is not her battle, not truly.
{ @Tenebrae"speaks" notes: when he tells of of Elena next is when she'll break that baby bubble too! she a reminder for me <3 }
let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going, no feeling is final
She does not tell him to stay with the Order.
He did not expect her to but it is still a shock when she doesn’t. Her words are little comfort to his ragged-raw heart. It is so wounded, its crisis so at peak that he cannot process the honesty of her words. Even if she spoke comforting words, they would have been as lost to him as a drop in the ocean. They mean little to nothing in his heart that falls and staggers. He does not know what he wishes to hear, but he knows he does not hear it from Moira’s lips. And maybe that is the truth that speaks out in all of this. There is nothing that can be done to help him, no words that will assuage his guilt. Now, he is left with only time that can heal. Now he must decide what path he takes.
Her light is the only thing that holds him together when she calls him a ship with a broken sail. He laughs at the image and turns his tear-stained eyes to the sea beside them. It is a deep blue-black with foam as silver as the moon. Still a mortal man. He was. But the Order is about discipline and he showed none of that. Now all is broken and ruined.
“How am I supposed to live and not have what I love? It is destroying me. My heart…” He has no words for how this loss eviscerates him, how love once so blistering and golden is now beyond his reach and all he wants is to pull it back to him, to let it gild his heart again.
And then, all of his screams are gone, all of his energies spent. Tenebrae has emptied himself upon the beach before Moira and all that remains of him are the empty parts that once had love. They feel bruised and frayed by the violence of lost love.
He is silent for so long. Tenebrae hoped this might be a cathartic conversation, that he might leave feeling stitched together, repaired in some way - even the smallest of ways. But he feels none of those things. The monk feels as broken as he did when he pulled her into the alcove.
Another confession gathers on his tongue and when all of him has been exposed, he longs to rid himself of this too. He does not think Moira will hate him for this, but he does not know, for he hates himself, so why would anyone feel anything other than hatred too? “I slept with Elena.” Tenebrae says, needing this confession gone from his tongue. Needing Moira to know the depths of his iniquities.
He is still in the silence after his confession. It seems even the sea stops its rocking. WHen all the stillness becomes unbearable, he stands. Tenebrae steps forward, presses his brow to Moira. She seems darker now, without the bright of her magic. “I should go.” He breathes, a coward, unable to stand in the tension that follows his confession. The monk looks upon Moira Tonnerre, drinks in the beauty of her, the dark of her eyes, the line of her cheekbones. He emblazons the sight of his friend upon his heart and his memory. Then turns and leaves.
It is rarely what one wishes it to be, and she knows this. Moira knows it most desperately, yet it pains her to tell Tenebrae that which does not fit with his grand plan or answer every question. To let past her lips raw, unfiltered reality of the situation and the choice before him is harder than she would like. His pain, his suffering, is no salve upon her heart.
No.
New wounds are ripped into the threads of her, painting the canvas of her soul wish splashes of red and dashes of darkness that tears and tears as his shadows do. Sometimes, Moira is left to wonder how the light still filters in to reach that battered, beating thing that still fights even when she does not want to. Now, she does not cry any longer. She cannot cry when her dearest friend is still before her, on his knees, with every sob empties from his belly and every tear unleashed upon the fury of the ocean.
Moira Tonnerre waits. She lets the shock settle into him, let it wind itself around his thoughts until he is able to take a breath. Then, ”Could I take the pain from your flesh and paint it upon my own I would, Tenebrae, I would.”
She does not whisper.
She does not yell.
Moira only talks softly, calmly, and listens in much the same way. She looks to him as though he is every star in her galaxy and she depends on their light every night. She looks at him like he’s a map and she’s still learning how to read. And when the monk is done with his questions, with his heart wrenching secrets piled onto her like weights about her neck, Moira tells him another truth.”The heart is fickle and it is cruel.”
Between them silence stretches. Cold. Cruel.
She wonders if her words are too hard, too sharp. Would they slice him? Would they help him?
When did she forget how to comfort? Or is it that she’s never truly known how? Moira knows how to comfort loss and pain, to kiss the brow as a last breath is drawn and walk away with dry eyes. Now, here, the living have not died and his confessions are not yet in their graves.
Patience courses through her while he gathers himself, rallying for a final blow. At last. At last it spills from him and Moira’s heart stutters.
Elena?
Her brows draw together, but before the woman can speak a word, her friend flees. Only his shadows are left for her to wish well. ”Stay safe, my friend.”
