[Mini Event] Woods of the Rising Sun

DEIMOS Delivered from the blasts He’d had too many homes: most of them destroyed, altered, misshapen in some capacity – wondrous masterpieces given way to vast calamity and acrimony, open hostility waged in battlefields, then on dirges and requiems, on catacombs and sepulchers, in the darkening, hastening voids. Again and again, mountain summits reaching towards the heavens, celestial bodies and galaxies he’d never see, never touch, damning his figure, his throne, to an avaricious embodiment of living, breathing weaponry, the sword in the glacier, pulled from its sheath and piercing into adversaries’ souls. He’d strung them all silently within pits and pendulums, hanging nooses, torturous wails, a warning, a sign, of everyone else’s impending doom – and when he’d finally crumbled in the rain, eventually Helovia wore into erosion too, tricked and deceived, his tomb shattered with the rest. Then moonlit tides and endless beaches, intervals of sand beneath an paralleled luminary glow, running across the sand as a child and screeching at the gulls, the swift intake of salt air – and then the drumbeats hastening, pulling him away, away, away, until there naught left but the smoking plumes and the curling alms of smoke, bodies of friends buried where they’d fallen. Only thereafter was Caido – pressed and held between portals and the unknown, and his restless, ridiculous soul felt trapped in its tethers, in its lines. Send me back to hell he’d asked, and it hadn’t delivered – wearing down the stone and rubble, shifting it to more pliable, malleable pieces, the people beckoning, the compassion concerning, different, hastening to his form and figure despite his nonchalant demeanor, despite the way he’d chiseled himself into ash and dust. The reasons why were quite clear to him now – in his hands and on his shoulder, unworthy and undeserving of it all, but grasping hold, closer and closer, tighter and tighter, taking and taking, giving and giving. The beast leaned into her then, lips ghosting a shroud, a halo, along her gilded hair, breathing in the starlight alms and the sunrises’ visage, Jyoti basking in his locks – he might’ve laughed, but he didn’t want to disturb the moment, the quiet, idle peace, the intonations of acceptance. The warrior had always waited for something to undermine it, for the world to remember who or what he was; unaware of the changing, altering molds, the re-sculpturing, a shifting of alignments; he didn’t have a potter’s grasp, only callouses, rapiers, and machinations. He was pulled, lured, beguiled again, twisted and turned on her command, a silent, unspoken agreement in the twirl of twilight nestled between fingers and affection. The Reaper had no idea of where they were going, but Amalia clearly had a plan, making way over other partakers in the sunrise, in the setting of the moon, in the glory of another morning – until they reached Ronin, his daughter, a suggestion of joining on the blankets. He smiled too, a careful scrutiny and study, pondering if he should make a joke, some ridiculous attempt at appeasement, if Ronin has no intention of accepting them along their threads. He had nothing to offer, not at the moment, for the child or the man, brought there because Amalia thought him worthy of it, ready for the rest of the world to tell him no. the last of a line of lasts