fair warning

D e i m o s

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

There were other sanctions and sections to the Spire – he hadn’t been any further than that bizarre room, with its entangled plants spewing venom, with its mounds of earth hiding the Tulmhainar from its doomed fate. The fact that there was some serpent, living stone, nettled and brambled behind columns of marble and the paralyzing unknown. He wasn’t surprised to hear Jigano discussed matters with it – a bard thing to do – but that it was guarding a portal (not between worlds, even for a split second as he remembered mountains and auroras, as he recalled peaks and summits he couldn’t go back to – they were just as dead, just as destroyed), but between places on this world. His breath sharpened and something bloomed along his mind, edges and fringes honed in, keyed and keened, riveted and kindled, by the potential of regions other than these Hollowed Grounds and Greatwood. The information wasn’t alarming or surprising, but such a stark range of potential that his cranium and machinations clambered for more and more and more, the avaricious plunge into curiosity. “Places on this world,” he emphasized, intoned, and repeated, speaking through the clarity. It was another way to evade upcoming disasters and ruins, or meander their way into others (the Fae’s village a startling example of what discovery and inquisition could do, could become, could enable). “Did the books say what kinds of settings?” Were there mountains, rising towards the heavens and the sky, painted and glorified beneath the sun and the moon? Were there oceans, wide and bottomless, shoal and sand? He swallowed down the excitement; just for the moment, dimming the brighter fringes of his eyes – no need for hope just yet, when they’d failed to conquer anything in that damned Spire. He grew more taut and rigid as the exposition on upcoming tasks inclined his way. Jigano seemed to be puttering around the obvious, and why Deimos couldn’t fathom or explain. Probably because, in the end, at the notion of life drain assailing his ears, it meant he would have to go. He’d have to face the unholy reaches, the burning vitriol in his lungs, the stinging in his eyes, and the death throngs coiling in his ears. The beast didn’t admit this out loud, or add his roster to the names already listed (Vai wanted to go there again?) The depths of his stare scorched back to the Loreseeker, whatever smile that might have appeared there suddenly losing all notion, sliding away to drawn lines and reticent contortions, the calculations already spinning and unwinding. “What about the gas? My masks were not effective for long.” For now we stand alone, the world is lost and blown And we are flesh and blood disintegrate with no more to hate