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 As a child, he’d felt the weight of dreams and nightmares. There’d been glacial walls and high-rising peaks, floating just out of reach, resolute and dauntless, never cowering, never bending, and he’d called out to it, another cold fortress beckoned by the opulence of ruin. There’d been calamity and hatred chiseled and engraved into his psyche, broken swords and callous horns, divisions and enmity spouting, sprouting from valleys, layers of triumph and treacherous gallows sinking between his ribs and heart. There’d been war and outcries, betrayal, duplicity, savagery rippling on mayhem and menace; towers faltering, brick by brick, stone by stone, dismantled for reasons beyond his means. There’d been never-ending rain drowning his senses. There’d been thieves and wolves and monsters springing from shackles and shells, roaring beside him, howling at him, growling and stirring the irreverence, the sedition, the despicable, yearning claws of war from his breath. He’d always woken up from the end though – blackness, sharp, stark, and Stygian, glaring at him from frozen plains and winter foundations. The youth didn’t recognize the patterns though, and soon forgot them – but in hazes, in trances, in staring out over vast fields of prairie and ponds, sometimes he thought he saw wraiths, ghosts, phantoms, sliding along the horizon, forms of bestial monsters with ties to fiends, to contempt, to bloodshed, to annihilation. Perhaps they’d been mere premonitions, because soon after the specters faded away and reality dug its way into his careless, heedless wiles; everyone gone in an instant, in flames, in fire, in persecution. The impressions, the reveries, the chimeras never came again; he’d become too locked in the forlorn, in the desolation, to see, to hear, anything else. His gaze instantly became riveted to something else, ears listening, catching the intonations, the decibels, the harsh realities of imaginations being very vivid, very whole, very tangible – woven threads that spelled out collapse and wreckage, fate’s intervening methods. He was not one to fall into the traps of destiny or predetermined courses. The soldier believed in his own efforts, in his own worth, in his own abilities – but to hear history sung like it was providence, like it was meant to be played over and over again (you will lose, you will fail, you will be nothing) nearly made him snarl. Was he already doomed to become rubble again? Had it been prophesized, to name a boy as death and let him lead the world to slaughter, to let him believe in conquering when it would simply be his downfall? Not this time he wanted to bellow, carve and etch into the surface of the bar; but that would mean he believed in some higher being mapping his soul towards misfortune, and the man was too tenacious and obstinate to ever admit defeat at the hands of gods, at the strands and threads of Fates.
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Photo taken at Hero's Square in Budapest, Hungary
