who we are and all that we're trying to be
Memories displaced in the ether were beckoning, unwinding things; usually coming to him in the form of dreams, the swell of nightmares in the middle of evenings, sometimes toxic, sometimes indulgent. The mountains called most often, like haunting, siren songs, rising in peaks, descending in valleys, puncturing and piercing the shards reality couldn’t quite contain or define. Perhaps the Dragon’s Throat was the same for Cera – all Deimos’ recollections coiled into smoke, embers, fumes, and sand, an endless desert as far as the eye could see, magical bridges under lock and key, keeping the rest of the world at bay. The Basin had its own unique traces of borders and surroundings, with its red-eyed monoliths guarding the only open area, with its savage, bestial King roaming the boundaries, begging for an opportunity to unleash, unravel, a condemned, barbaric interlude, with its illustrious thieves, with its cloak and dagger ramparts. The fact that there were no hard feelings or bitter entanglements, the art of rancor, shuffled between the pair was alarming and surprising at best; Cera would have been there then, when the swords came to clash, when they growled and hissed, when they rampaged and descended.
When they lost.
Midas was not a subject the Reaper would’ve dwelled on for long; the lightest of snickers resting on his mouth, and then nothing more, wicked and gone in a flash. He wasn’t sorry for the golden beast’s death. He wasn’t sorry about a lot of things. “Ridiculous is a good term for it.” It had been idle, rampant hatred, prejudice, bias, and abhorrence exposed and lanced upon innocent children – only amusing when Gods had reprimanded the glory hound for it. He didn’t bow or bend away though, watching the Prince’s gaze flicker into a grimace, then cast away by the mention of Gaucho. Deimos hadn’t known the Wildfire well; big, broad, tough, a fortitude to match his name, nearly destroyed by the Moon Goddess’s antics, coming only once or twice to the Basin to discuss politics and diplomatic factions. Neither of them had been well-suited to the task, but understood one another; the way warriors often did, when soaked in the blood of their enemies, when striving to do what was best for their kingdoms. He shrugged at the notion of names and titles; that Gaucho would have to be accorded for the Prince to have been known. “The Basin always had information.” And there was a glimmer of a snicker, a smirk again, proud of his people, of the inhabitants gone, lost, or somehow come back to him again. “You were known.”
At the encouragement of former ranks, the Sword repressed an eyeroll. There was no need to associate him as a former King here; he had no use for those measures of diplomacy again, no political ventures waiting for him in the wings. He’d received the crown by pure coincidence anyway, and then hadn’t fettered it away when he likely should’ve; standing as a tower, as a beacon, on top of palisades and precipices, warning the rest of the world to stay away. The grin on the Prince’s features, however, appeared in accordance with good humor, so he snorted, then continued moving, dragging the makeshift cart over stones littering their less-than-stellar path.
The discussion of attributes was at least intriguing, and didn’t reach too deeply into folds of the past. “I always had life drain,” which Cera likely knew anyway; it was how the beast had always lived and breathed, born with the insurrection in his heart, in his lungs, in his soul, well before he’d even sought its indulgences and whims in the fiber of his blood. “But never creation. That is new.” He lifted his head, traced over their route, and swung a little wider, catching the sunlight presses of an aperture up ahead, closer to the Outskirts, to worn trails and familiarity. “It seems the longer one is here, the stronger they become.”
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
