DEIMOS
Heave the silver hollow sliver
Damned and consigned to an eternal oblivion: he was going to start losing them all again – he could feel it – one by one, starting with Rexanna, repeating those cruel cycles because he couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have a choice when there was always a choice, always an option, always a solution – why not violence, why not a riot, why not a coup, why not something other than agreement? Was that how this world was going to work too – where everyone bowed their heads and submitted, resigned to their fates, ready for gloom and disaster to pluck them until they disintegrated? What a life to lead once more: to have things and watch them slide out of his grasp, loss and loss and loss.
You cannot have them he yearned to roar into the columns.
Wasn’t it time for him to do something other than wallow and linger in the shadows? To brood and crave and yearn for a time before the chaos and destruction? Wasn’t it time to break the rotation? But what? his skull ached with the darkness of the strife, with the noose tethering them all together, binding their frayed strands, their endless entropies and enmities, the smothering, choking drawstrings catching over his throat.
He gnashed his teeth together, jaw clenched again, arms folded against his chest, listening, listening, listening, but not wanting to – defiance and sedition cultivating its roots in his soul until he was vibrant and vehement with the claws and daggers, with the cloaks and hostilities, pondering when he could break everything apart, and if he could ever put it back together. If this was the start of the end, and he’d seen it before, the little hands rotating, the fervency shrieking its tell-tale heart chords at him, and he still couldn’t find a niche to land his knife in, to stab its chambers, to decimate, obliterate, the adversaries who threatened what he considered his own. “What do you mean – little choice to say no?” Was there something more? Why would someone like Rexanna succumb so easily: when he’d known what she was, when he’d understood and comprehended her snares, her traps, her ways to flicker around, to blend into crowds.
He almost didn’t tell her he’d already been alone with Zariah, there on the oasis banks, with his calculated airs and his machinated schemes and his belligerent, reticent folds: features blank and unforgiving, granting her meager morsels and scraps, because she hadn’t taken anything of his, not then, because he’d learned to play a game too. “I already have been.” His eyes glanced back over to Rexanna’s fiery abyss, wondered if she’d attempted to use it in the furtive corridors with the Queen, and if it had mattered after everything else. “I proposed the open forum.” He inclined his head, a slight tilt, as if to say and you saw how that went.
Unite and spread the heart apart
