intention erased

DEIMOS And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame Perhaps it would’ve been a much better story to spin, had they won their battle. But he wouldn’t lie in this distinction, not when he’d been so readily carved, molded, and sculpted out of its remnants and bones, after its crushing blows and seditious spurs. Before Samuel could lean forward, before he could enact and instigate further, Deimos could hear the age-old, primordial bellows and howls echoing through his ears. It was as if he’d never left those cataclysmic battlefields, where the mist and fog soaked the earth, where the trees lined up in desolate copses, where mysteries and enigmas intertwined to unfold and unfurl and uncoil; never to be theirs again. He could recall the bodies falling, clashing, demolishing, lacerating, piercing, puncturing, until they couldn’t go on any longer; the outcome fated and decided. His hand dragged the sable dragon across the table, placing Mirage’s namesake along the columns of the Edge. “We were defeated.” The rumble of the Sword’s vocals didn’t change, didn’t alter, didn’t give a hint to how much that entanglement still burned somewhere in the depths of Reaper transgressions, how it would be a pattern of conquering and devouring. “We were forced out of our kingdom, and fled as refugees to the Frostbreath Steppe.” Maybe that was when the mountains, the cold, the summits, and the chill had scraped against his irreverent heart; when they had to abide by its mercurial, tempestuous wake, when they had to learn how to survive or die, fend in caves and flattened contortions of endless snow. In absence of a home, maneuvering the rest of the Qian allies back to their respective Throat symbol, the monolith constructed and contorted another piece. This was flattened, coated and lacquered in ivory, walls of snow, caverns and ilk. “We spent a season or so there, gathering ourselves, and trying to cause trouble.” Makeshift rebellions, petty thievery, irritating, vexing, letting the world know they were still there; fortified, malicious, vengeful heathens stuck in their own gallows. master of nothing place; of recoil and grace