Deimos the Reaper You can't take back the cards you've dealt on this long and lonely road to hell the throne must be such a sad and lonely place There’d been a thousand stares directed at him over his scalding lifetimes and lifelines; the quick utterances, the shifting gasps, the swift departures and escapes – or the menacing curl of lips and hackles, the rise and fall of tempestuous designs. He’d bore their weight in the beginning, felt his shoulders and chest ache from the culmination of dread and apprehension, from foreboding intervals, from the decadent, cold, unwitting airs smoked and fumed in his direction. Eventually those moments wore away though – when he wandered, when he roamed, when he scalded and seethed, when he swore vengeance, when he claimed blood and ichor from adversaries. Desecration and derision held more promises than the stones of their mettle and the burden of their ultimatums; Deimos became all the more indifferent, nonchalant, reticent to the fleeing factions, to the shivering, shuddering public, to the quaking imbeciles, to the rotted, wretched, inept. He dug his heels into sand, into soot, into ash, into snow, and didn’t root anywhere; the world had been his annihilating maelstrom, and he’d breathed calamity and woe into their beings, into their spotlights, into their opulence before their eyes had spotted him from the crowd. Their scrutiny, their cutting, their splitting, their seething, their examinations meant so little to him now that he was surprised hers remained – studying him without pretense, without charades, without semblances or provocations. He waited for some notion to sear and the artifices to play their way across her features, for spells and invocations to be cast, for dark, eldritch titans suddenly waging war on his soul. It’d happened before, time and time again, like a seasonal, perennial dance of the macabre, eerie and forsaken, cadaverous and torturous, one more terrible, ghastly, gruesome pinnacle for him to strike against. He refused to shy away from her scrutiny, grabbing his glass again and raising it to his lips, swallowing, bearing his unearthly countenance, a challenge, defiance while he tested, while he processed the next thing that spilled from her mouth.
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Photo taken at Hero's Square in Budapest, Hungary