Shoot the Messenger

D e i m o s

Send a heartbeat to the void that cries through you
Relive the pictures that have come to pass

Oh, he longed for violence. It contorted straight into his frame and rampaged along his spine, affixed itself to his limbs and urged them into malice, into bedlam, into those unfettered moments of unholy vehemence, where blood streaked and raced and pulsed into vivid marks and rendered lacerations. He yearned for those war tapestries staining his rapier, his blade, his cutlass brushstrokes, the acrid, rancorous, bitter taste flooding his skin and the keen edge of a weapon finding its way home – a carcass torn, crevasses shorn into bodies, the stupor of a last breath, the crackling shards of a fallen form. He craved the inner workings of a battle cry, the screeches, the howls, the wicked doldrums sinking and slinking into his vicious ultimatums, the wicked, nefarious invocations tapped into his ichor, into his lifelines, and distorting the framework of the land (the world withering and decaying before his very eyes, enemies and opponents folding one by one, shining stars gone out in whimpering flames, shorn too early because of his hate, because of his menace, because of his savagery). He was the Reaper. He was death. He was desecration and devastation. He was ruin and abomination. He wasn’t about to let the world forget it. But it wouldn’t have mattered here – Jigano didn’t capture them. Jigano didn’t snag them, force them to disappear into the void. He had enough sense to conquer the wrath curling over his tongue; it would’ve been easy to blend blame into the bard’s feet - you were responsible an inkling, a dagger, he could’ve pierced straight into his heart. The frigid, analytical proportions to him knew he required Jigano for all his intentions, for all his knowledge; but the fury thundered against his ears. He saved the information about Amalia’s Attuned nature for later – tucked it away with the notion of claws not hers. Anger was a tangible, weighty thing though, a tense, blunt knife held in his hands, in his clenched fists, in his rogue, taut stance, ready to seethe, ready to pledge, ready to shove a blade directly into another’s skull. But so was sagacity and wisdom, and he begged for it to simmer further in his brain, blend and brew, so it could froth and fume over the corporeal indignation, the frustrating aspects that he couldn’t go out there then and now, find them all, drag them home, destroy whatever had come to claim them. By Jigano’s words, it was going to take more than brutal force to tear them away from the foreign world, the manipulative woods, the trickster warrens, and vicious labyrinths sheltered by glades, by promises, by the infernal unknown. Just gone echoed in the curling webs of his skull, and he didn’t stop to imagine what that meant, didn’t dare. There would be time to revisit the torment later, when everything had fallen into place, when friends were liberated and released. “Fae,” he finally said, stewing in his vivid silence, after all the inquiries had been answered, after all the notions had been shared. The piercing slate of his gaze, naught left in them but promised, seditious barbarity, stared and centered entirely on the Loreseeker, leader of this damned operation. “We need to gather those willing to come. Resources. Information.” It came out clipped now as his mind reveled and worked, eager and fervent to be back into the machinations, into the Machiavellian tendencies, into the shades of things he’d thought he’d left behind. “I can speak to Ianto.” The fox owed him  - and if he was the sort who abandoned others in a fight, known to save his own skin, Jigano’s rage might send him off before they could even investigate further. “Perhaps we should question some Fae. There must be a reason they were taken.” Taken; if that was what truly happened at all. For now we stand alone, the world is lost and blown And we are flesh and blood disintegrate with no more to hate