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 The avid denial yearned to pierce his throat. Deimos knew himself well: his actions would never dictate well-orchestrated sovereignty. His life was fine-tuned to the battlefield, to the stretches of war cries, to the bellicose veins of immortality, to the decadent, discordant reveries and raptures of death. He’d sent men to oblivion. He’d carved entrails and insides. He’d laid waste to villages simply because he was commanded to – rage and crusades, glory and fortune favoring the bold, battle for battle’s sake. Did foretold kings leave their heritage behind to seek triumph? Did great, grand emperors seek out prestige and splendor in trails of ichor? Did wondrous monarchs summon devastation and ruin for amusement, for diversion, for supremacy? He’d committed each and every action because he’d been told to, because he’d bent down his head and roared out strength and brutality, because he’d relished in the feeling of victory over the weak, over the inept, proud and foolish, already condemned, already slaughtered, already incensed and fueled for corruption. When they’d returned from their halcyon merriment and their irresolute wonder, there’d been nothing left – lives altered, transformed, warped, and desecrated in their absence. Everything gone, gone, gone, and even in his most idle moments, he couldn’t imagine the conquests he’d chased down had ever held such a high price. The regrets curled and contorted along his sharpened mind again, the drink had done little to curb the aches, and it seemed no matter how much he drenched the images, they’d still come to the surface, remind him just how infernal and revolting he’d become. No, even in a past life, even in a parallel universe, even in some wretched, other world, there was no way he’d been a great lord; the Reaper traversed as a nefarious stone, smoldering havoc, anarchy and bedlam in statuesque depravity. Rexanna was mistaken; perhaps drawn to some other bright, shining beacon, for it certainly hadn’t been him. His nonchalant gaze watched her smile, and he couldn’t understand it, closed himself off from its illuminating fixtures – always the way of his being – close and closer still until he failed to justify the meaning, denying absolution and deliverance. She might’ve been the key to gaining access to any deeper notions, to any fathoms of what he’d lost, but the ineffectual, apprehensive contortion of his character meant he balked, clenched his jaw, became the unyielding cretin again. But she kept telling these illustrious stories that he wished were more tangible, more attainable, than the current doom and gloom he’d drowned himself in; thieves and forgotten men, vanishing acts and apparent manipulations going on behind cloaks and daggers, his Machiavellian pursuits a mystery to the rest of the terrain. He shrugged, not knowing what else to say, how to proceed when the walls were slowly coming back up and the mountains seemed out of reach. So the beast merely listened; attuned to the sights, to the sounds, struggling to align himself to a time where he might’ve existed, where he might’ve been awful and unredeemable, where he’d followed the same clockwork pattern, where he’d failed and failed and failed again. “And then what?” He said to her – brief and curt, almost a keener edge to his words, because something etched and sketched its way around his membrane, more than flirtatious spies, more than coy intervals, something akin to betrayal, duplicity shoved his way, notched and caught on a tether, on a sword, on an arrow. Then there was the afterwards, the intervals of extinction: for sometimes his dreams had merely been surrounded in black, like a dungeon, like a cauldron, like a void, where he no longer breathed, where he no longer did anything but succumb to the Stygian veil. Perhaps it’d been his curse, his fate, the punishment for terrors and treachery. Maybe he’d earned his way straight to the bottom, a level of Hell, doomed because he’d damned so many before him. In response to her other statement, for he’d nearly ignored it, too detached, too reticent, too withdrawn, he stared at his drink, but didn’t touch it, lowering it back down to the surface of the bar. “Not anymore.”

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