who we are and all that we're trying to be
The other soldiers, for now, left him alone. He could hear their muttering, their whispers, their mumbles, the hushed ranges that still echoed and bounded over stone – the change and alteration too alive and well when he came in. When he didn’t instruct. When he didn’t teach. When he simply grabbed a target, something nondescript, and hastened out into the opened proportions, beneath the sky and immersed in snow.
It was easier that way, he told himself. To start out into the roots of isolation again. To try and pierce through the stupidity of his actions and simmer in the corner. So he withdrew his sword, and let it do the talking for him.
Movements in monstrous grace, harnessed from warrior prowess and hellish anguish and the constant need for survival possessed him: the slash of a sword, the archaic motions of maneuvering around the immobile form, of rendering it to nothing in the shape of his self-loathing and stupidity. At least those proportions had never ceased; old friends, in and amongst the grief, the death, the rampages.
Deimos rolled his sleeves up past his forearms, glanced at the supposed enemy, and attacked it again. Not a man possessed, but indulgent, loosening the walls of his anger and antics into something fueled, something menacing, something disastrous. Wasn’t that what he’d always been? The blade did his bidding, and it was glorious for a few seconds, stepping back, breathing, and glancing over the ribbons of mutilated fabric, stuffing, and wood.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
