You learn to speak so calmly

DEIMOS And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame The Sword had managed to keep his composure through the funeral – reverting to primordial, stoic emblems, forced, fake nonchalance, his despair rendered inward, across a blackened, scarred heart and other lacerated sinew. The temptation to escape immediately after was all the more present every time he looked up, Rexanna’s paintings and poignancy an instant reminder of legacies she’d left behind, and the monumental mistakes he’d enacted. So he’d kept himself composed, biding his sojourns back to his own silent pit of despair, head down, eyes on nothing at all but the floor. Until the departure had been nearly enacted, the door so close, and Bastien found his tall frame in the sea of people. Deimos turned his skull, and withheld a sigh, uncertain of what more he could do that wouldn’t segment another barrage of cataclysms, mayhem, and irreverence. Perhaps Bastien wanted to punch him again. For some reason, the words that followed weren’t expected, and a single brow quirked upward, breaking the reticent veneer. Another penance perhaps, but not even remotely close to redemption, and he’d be haunted by the Penumbra every step of the way, on this area filled with her likenesses, her artifacts, her essence. The beast stifled a sigh, a sorrow-filled reverberation, and nodded, clamoring to the silence as he moved ahead, uncertain of where to start as the rest of the funeral procession filed out. “Where do you want things?” master of nothing place; of recoil and grace