Whoa, you let your feet run wild
Time has come as we all go down
They’d always solved their problems with brutality, savagery, and ferocity: a universal language anyone in Helovia eventually understood. It’d been a cultural norm to stomp upon an adversary the same way one ventured into the market for wares, to punish and pummel those who dared to unravel something or someone important, influential, to a kingdom’s worth. It’d been instinctual to arrange revenge, to pull things apart, to unfurl and watch maelstroms unwind. Here they kept encountering chaos after chaos, hardly any of it their own making, caught unawares in the manifested bedlam and mayhem. Always consequences, always effects, always lasting appeals and junctures curling and fanning into minds. There was an aspect of vulnerability within Caido’s threshold, because sometimes he thought he comprehended the game, and other times he was caught stranded, lost, lost, lost. No grounds of certainty, no parallels to fathom and undertake, each moment cast could be entirely new, foreign, or fumbling along in ignorance. It ground. It flared. It seethed. It rankled. But in between those ruminations, after loss, after brutality, after barbarity, it also hurt – which was where he haunted and labored now, striving to move forward, mired and anchored by the weight tied around makeshift tethers and lines. Not enough. Not any better. Nothing to show for his efforts. Nothing to make sense of why they were magnets for trials and tribulations (except they still tried).
But he refused to fall apart – maybe by sheer willpower alone, a resolution in clenched jaws and silence. Still collected in her arms, he felt her hand reach up towards his cranium, but he didn’t bow, he didn’t break, didn’t fall into her collarbone, nodding and breathing instead. Exhausted, fatigued, mentally drained of anything but a wealth of consternation, he unfurled, uncurled, from her grace and poise. A sigh released, eyes on the alcohol, on the remnants of everything else. “Yes,” rumbling agreement on soft smiles, on the strangling unknown. Forging onward, on and on and on, because sometimes there was naught more to be done (except falling, splintering, and fracturing – the sinking sensations waging and churning, his head barely above the surface). His gaze shifted back to her, on hurt, serrated edges, on paralyzing contortions of Valkyrie’s, how they’d move forward, how they’d persist, how they’d force their bones into the earth until the end of time. “Do you need anything else?”
But he refused to fall apart – maybe by sheer willpower alone, a resolution in clenched jaws and silence. Still collected in her arms, he felt her hand reach up towards his cranium, but he didn’t bow, he didn’t break, didn’t fall into her collarbone, nodding and breathing instead. Exhausted, fatigued, mentally drained of anything but a wealth of consternation, he unfurled, uncurled, from her grace and poise. A sigh released, eyes on the alcohol, on the remnants of everything else. “Yes,” rumbling agreement on soft smiles, on the strangling unknown. Forging onward, on and on and on, because sometimes there was naught more to be done (except falling, splintering, and fracturing – the sinking sensations waging and churning, his head barely above the surface). His gaze shifted back to her, on hurt, serrated edges, on paralyzing contortions of Valkyrie’s, how they’d move forward, how they’d persist, how they’d force their bones into the earth until the end of time. “Do you need anything else?”
Yeah but for the fall—oh, my—
Do you dare to look them right in the eyes?
DEIMOS
