DEIMOS
Heave the silver hollow sliver
His features locked back into stone and rock, rubble and ruin, mountain and beast – reticent, jaw clenched, as she revealed the first chord of their impending discourse. Another deal with the devil – Thief skills woven back into place, maneuvering and motioning her hands into devilish deals and ruses. A frustrated growl threatened to loosen itself through his chest, a deepening rumble, a force to be reckoned with, but nowhere for it to go except out into the hollowed void. His eyes narrowed instead, pinpointed on her – a sigh managing to flicker its way through his nostrils instead of the vexation, careful, cool, and composed. How? he wanted to ask – how could she possibly want to work for that woman? Why didn’t she want to resist? Why was everything a dally with the court, with diplomacies, with tremulous lines? Why couldn’t she ask them for help? Why did she place herself deliberately into the warren, into the catacombs? He swallowed down the bile, the rage suddenly cloaking over his veins, pulsing between muscle and sinew, flesh and bone, speaking for all of them (the arrogance was back and churning, burning, along his insides; but he couldn’t imagine Kiada yearning for this situation either, no matter how she felt about her mother). “We do not want you to risk yourself for us.” He stood tall and firm, an unyielding, unattainable presence again, as if they were back along the summits, the peaks, the valleys, the ice vivid in his eyes, in his guard, in the way that he didn’t want to break apart again. Couldn’t she see the pattern? Couldn’t she see the lines drawn? “Especially at her hands.” They had no idea what the Merciless was capable of – but she’d already sizzled and barbed against the seditious, the irreverent, the irked and exasperated. “What is she having you do?” Unite and spread the heart apart
