the replays run for you

Deimos the Reaper You can't take back the cards you've dealt on this long and lonely road to hell the throne must be such a sad and lonely place There’d been a thousand stares directed at him over his scalding lifetimes and lifelines; the quick utterances, the shifting gasps, the swift departures and escapes – or the menacing curl of lips and hackles, the rise and fall of tempestuous designs. He’d bore their weight in the beginning, felt his shoulders and chest ache from the culmination of dread and apprehension, from foreboding intervals, from the decadent, cold, unwitting airs smoked and fumed in his direction. Eventually those moments wore away though – when he wandered, when he roamed, when he scalded and seethed, when he swore vengeance, when he claimed blood and ichor from adversaries. Desecration and derision held more promises than the stones of their mettle and the burden of their ultimatums; Deimos became all the more indifferent, nonchalant, reticent to the fleeing factions, to the shivering, shuddering public, to the quaking imbeciles, to the rotted, wretched, inept. He dug his heels into sand, into soot, into ash, into snow, and didn’t root anywhere; the world had been his annihilating maelstrom, and he’d breathed calamity and woe into their beings, into their spotlights, into their opulence before their eyes had spotted him from the crowd. Their scrutiny, their cutting, their splitting, their seething, their examinations meant so little to him now that he was surprised hers remained – studying him without pretense, without charades, without semblances or provocations. He waited for some notion to sear and the artifices to play their way across her features, for spells and invocations to be cast, for dark, eldritch titans suddenly waging war on his soul. It’d happened before, time and time again, like a seasonal, perennial dance of the macabre, eerie and forsaken, cadaverous and torturous, one more terrible, ghastly, gruesome pinnacle for him to strike against. He refused to shy away from her scrutiny, grabbing his glass again and raising it to his lips, swallowing, bearing his unearthly countenance, a challenge, defiance while he tested, while he processed the next thing that spilled from her mouth. A younger Deimos would’ve spit out his drink at her proclamation – the present-day fiend arched a brow, tilted his head a fraction, and wondered if she’d been inebriated before she’d arrived. “From where?” The possibilities were nearly endless – he’d traversed countries and kingdoms for as long as he’d been alive, master of nothing, wandering and wandering while the earth crumbled beneath his feet, while time and beings withered away, while politics reigned, while benevolent creatures died, while he mourned the loss of kinsmen and family, while grief became normal, a constant occurrence. She could’ve been a part of the background, blending into the surroundings like she’d attempted earlier, born to camouflage and subterfuge, ether and sky, charms and spells, deception and dismay. The Reaper eyed her again, a little more indulgent, a little bolder, pondering why gold suddenly clouded his brain and dazzled his senses, why she was suddenly a reminder of halcyon moments and aureate tenacity, why mountains washed over his form, why the winter seemed attainable when he was unreachable, why gilded crowns never fit quite right on his head, why betrayal stung and nestled its way into his heart; thorns and loyalties crossed. Even her name was something like a whisper, a memory, a formation of times long since passed, but he couldn’t recall anyone or anything with such a herald or moniker. It ate at him, made his jaw clench, his nostrils flare; a hunt, a chase, for intangible notions and concepts. Perhaps he’d been dropped on his head when invisible portals and strings tied him to these gnarled lanes, and this was nothing – a whimsy, a folly, a wrinkle meant to be smoothed away. He didn’t though; there were no intentions to escape, to liberate himself back into the unknown. He stared it plainly in the face and provoked, poked at the bear. “Deimos.” Then the demon lifted his hand away from the favored mug, and offered it to the woman.

_{Photo and Table by Time
Photo taken at Hero's Square in Budapest, Hungary}