Open this FUCKING DOOR

DEIMOS And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame He'd buried his parents near their destroyed home, along a stretch of quiet woods and glade, untouched by the invasion, by the destruction, by the chaos. His father would’ve appreciated the kindling for flames and amusement (because sometimes all he remembered of him was the cheeky sort of diversion, the glow in his eyes, as embers raked across fields). His mother, though she wouldn’t have said it, might’ve at least glanced over the copse with a serene, tranquil nod, the slightest indentation of a smile. He’d found stones fit for monuments to place over the fresh dirt, sat down before their resting place, and openly wept – strangled so many confessions and vows from his mouth. I’m sorry I wasn’t here and forgive me had carved their way through his lips, but the wind hadn’t said anything in return. He’d buried his friends on stretches of clover and blood, with their shields, with their swords, with a few oaths and pledges, a clenched jaw, a crestfallen furrow to his brow, pondering over apathy, if it was easier to become an indifferent sort after everything was gone. He buried her by the river, where the stream babbled into its inlet and the waves rose and fell with gentle, soothing undulations, where it covered up the worst of his agony and anguish, where he waited, day after day, for something else to come swallow him whole. Might as well take me too, because he’d been done, sunken and broken and ready to meet them all on the other side, or to watch them scale across the heavens while he sank below the earth, punished for his lifetime of sins and treacheries. It never came, and Deimos supposed that was the gods’ last set of retributions and penalties; to let him wither and decay into nothingness, a rusted weapon, cast aside when its usefulness seethed away, when its edges withered, faded, and died with the rest of its comrades. It would’ve been fitting. He would’ve embraced it. But it never came for him. It mauled others and left them clinging to life. It pierced in violent swings and upheavals, senseless brutality, the make of monsters and demons. It slid along an infidel’s course, within deceitful traps, burdened others with the taste of what was to come. The familiarity burned across his skull while he watched Amalia’s form remain rigid, the opposite of her everyday stature and clarity, and thought about turning away so he didn’t have to see it anymore. But then, he would’ve missed the magic, the winding of enchantments, cross over from healer to victim; his eyes widened a fraction, fascinated, as life was brought back into a soul ready to cross over. He swallowed down the vicious, bitter, rancorous growl clinging to his insides; because no one had ever done that for any of his friends and family, because he’d never been capable, because he was the opposite, granter of executions and annihilations, the end instead of the beginning. It followed him in a feral, sadistic cycle, and maybe he shouldn’t have been there at all. The notion to back away, to flee, gnarled its way through his bones, but it felt cowardly and stupid, so he stayed perfectly motionless, holding down a figure who’d been like stone moments before. Bastien’s words echoed across the chasm, and he could still nod, he could still breathe, he could still collect something of a voice. “Well done,” he managed to muster, as if it were an everyday thing; but he knew it wasn’t, had seen life fade in his hands, had almost seen it again. master of nothing place of recoil and grace