Serenity

DEIMOS Delivered from the blasts There was a condescending derision hanging on her first words, and though he didn’t say anything about it, it contorted against him. Good for them for not understanding barbarity. Good for them for never having to devastate or ruin another country. Good for them for not comprehending the measures of war. It left them sitting ducks, but it also meant they survived by other means, skills, and pursuits; they weren’t built on destruction and mayhem. Not like him, who’d once served king and country based on the notion of conquest, who’d descended straight into oblivion and never looked back, who never once thought of reaching for the skies, the heavens, or the stars, always presuming oblivion and Stygian wiles would catch him in the end, immerse and sink him into his hate, his contempt, his loathing, his savage, unworthy throngs. “Yet, they also seem to realize how to accomplish things without violence.” The beast shrugged, staring across the water, having a strong urge to dive into it and simply not return; swim below the surface until the sun sank and the moon was full. Reigning and roaming in his impassivity, he merely listened to the slide of her history, to the beats of homelands scourged by war; similar circumstances, except his family hadn’t been completely shacked and tethered in mage tiers. He’d gone with his friends, and they’d plagued and ravaged because their sovereign had demanded it, and something in between his ribs stung because it sounded like it was going to happen again, again, again (and he couldn’t bury them all over; wouldn’t be able to find enough space for the graves, wouldn’t be able to dig into those tombs, the cycle calculated and swirling over his shoulders, pressing down into his spine - you never escape your demons). The same detached air pulsed against his features while his mind seared and smoldered, a riotous octave piercing through his skull. “I survived several wars.” Which time, which place? The doomed invasions of Helovia, before he sat upon a throne, when he was a soldier, fighting for their home and losing it all? The damned crusades, embarking with grins and infidel regimes at their backs, until it was nothing but death? Was this the pattern, the refrain, the stanza, he was condemned to repeat? the last of a line of lasts