DEIMOS
Deimos hadn’t always been carved, wielded, or sculpted out of stone. There’d been years spent in wild, glorious youth, where the entanglements of sinister, savage movements hadn’t touched, hadn’t scorched, hadn’t mauled, permitted and allowed to aspire beside the leisure of the sea. The world had been varnished in color, in skylines of luminary glows, in sea-salt ambiguity, touches and glimmers of ambition fired into its sands, cultivated, rooted, in its citizens and children. Then things fell apart – as they so often did, and it was impossible to return to days of irreproach; too heavily flawed, too vengeful, too contemptuous, beaten and beaten and beaten into his monolithic prowess by the scarring blades of eons and lives thereafter. So he understood Remi’s surprise, muffled the lightest of snorts at it. Yes. The mountains came after. After wars started, after fathers were slain, after rudimentary fundamentals were suddenly cut and slashed and all he had left were the fortifications and prowess lodged in his soul, desperate not to break. The question gave him a pause though; a ruffling of feathers portraying the barest of shrugs. He hadn’t asked Amalia, hadn’t thought of venturing out into this force beyond staring into the beyond and remembering palisades of sand. Too many homes. Too many memories. Too many caustic wakes. I am not certain. Our responsibilities remain in the Grounds. Duties, council positions, promises made to current Queens. He’d never been the type to abandon, to retreat.
But then it grew quiet again, and he absorbed the silence for what it was worth – mulling, musing, conspiring in the stretch of sun and pools. And when the alchemist was ready to discuss, the Sword listened, piercing, avian eyes rounding back upon the other. Remi had never seemed the type to dig into personal gains and aspirations; not before incidents and events spiraled out of control amidst the Grounds. But perhaps, after being used, after being utilized, driven to so many other terrifying, treacherous ridges, the man had simply been done with it all. His gaze went back out over the horizon, contemplating how best to answer, if there was anything worth noting, if, in his experiences, he could shed light on the possibilities and parameters. Congratulations. On the role, on the games he’d soon find himself playing, on the underlying schemes rankling through minds. I suppose it depends on what you stand to gain. His jaw clicked, suddenly eternally grateful again for the nuances of attuned bonds. Perhaps he wasn’t the right one to talk to about underhanded possibilities, about hatred and contempt, a fuel, a stoking, eternally bound in his soul. Do your memories fuel, blind, or bind you? To go forward, onward, into cycles of vengeance, or stifled, trapped, mired in their ruin?
"who's gonna let you?"
they asked. i said
"who's gonna stop me?"
