who we are and all that we're trying to be
There’d been days where there was no doubt to how dangerous he could be.
An anthem to fiendish incantations, a stiletto hilt to ruthlessness, fixated on those crooned corruptions sinking into flesh and blood and bone. A malignant, vicious essence, entropy and detachment carved straight into the outline of his form, acknowledging existence, but fixating it within breadths and breaths of revolution (of sedition, of power). Despite all his hidden, tangible threads, the world had still passed on his name, through savage whispers, through fearful, tremulous disdain, through the same melded abhorrence that he strung their comrades upon. Reaper, now Sword; the former a monstrous beacon of exactly what he sought to bring to the earth, the latter established in finessed forbidding, but far more willing to flicker his ire away.
Perhaps it was lucky, fortunate, for this stranger that others had already molded themselves into the General’s heart and lungs, his entity and soul, ensuring his piercing seething only went so far. Still, the potential remained (was it ever truly locked away – or merely remaining, immersed amidst all his other emotions and clarities; biding, biding, biding its time?)
Another breath or two, the lulls along his sides and ribs the only indication he’d moved, save for the flick of a canine ear. There was too much honesty, warmth, and hope embedded along this attuned bond – not what the carnivore irreverence craved – and so he sat, hind end coming to rest along the earthen path, the long tail motionless upon the ground. A name: Chulane, signified nothing to him; he didn’t know this creature from all the others within this world. Someone new, someone foreign, someone likely dropped from one portal to another, the same as the rest of the Outlanders.
His piercing gaze etched and scrutinized, narrowed and defined. While the Sword couldn’t be eternally declared as scholarly, he was always eager to learn – would be foolish not to live in a world of wisdom and sagacity, grasping at what granules were offered. It was another means of survival, of adapting, of assimilating, of enduring. Were his hound body to allow it, there would be a slight arch of his brow, a tilt of his predacious head, a more human aspect to the rest of the canine features. Deimos, lacking the fundamentals of Chulane’s warmth, an icy decree and title, General of the Hollowed Grounds. When he had a blade in his hand; for now the fangs, the claws, the promise of power would have to do. What do you want to know?
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
