this is not your destruction

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

There was a dull ache residing in his bones beneath moonlight, for all his failures, past and imminent, presuming the end result would always be the same (you are nothing a reverberation resounding so strong that it might’ve endured far longer than anything else in his existence). What had he accomplished since his fall into Caido? The list was small and meager, hardly anything worth mentioning – a cycle of trials and errors, frowns and sacrifices, blood spilled with naught to show for its stains and agony. It didn’t mean his plans now would even come to fruition, or be worth the efforts – and for all his sinking, all his barely, floating above the surface (treading water when he once swam with such a mighty crescendo), he’d yet to entirely give in.

You will be better an anthem, a tattoo, a stiletto digging its way into his essence, at the gilded glow in his hands as he created an offering for a goddess he’d only seen once (blighted at the scene of her new-founded shrine, galaxies and constellations in her wake beneath the pestilence). His palms orchestrated and concocted, created and devised, until his grasp was filled with a mirror – reflective glass in the center, surrounded by enamel and lacquer embroidered and embossed in stars, sieges of aurora hues and blends he’d once seen at the top of mountains, beauty, grandeur, and opulence, unfiltered, raw and tangible.

Then he crossed over to the sanctum he’d helped create, to the pale stones, tilting his head at the sound of the wind chimes, eyes slinking over the starwhale light and its flickering dust, flowers in the frame of dusk and twilight, a weight on his shoulders, machinations striving to stir while the rest of him pondered the inevitable. For all his savage steps and motions, apprehension clung to his insides, and pummeled at his heart. Safrin wouldn’t come – following the patterns of any other time he’d meandered to a shrine, abandoned and forsaken, forgotten and ruined, a marred weapon that the gods had no need for.

But he promised that he’d try, bowing his head and placing the mirror across the top of the shrine, swallowing down the cloaking bile of unease, brushing aside the mantle of his desecration. He was hollowed, not hallowed. The Sword was well aware of foreboding intervals, of the ominous seclusion gathering over his brows – baring the words between his teeth before he could stop himself, before he could back away, before he could find the shadows again and escape, evade, the inescapable void. “Safrin,” he paused, swallowing, waiting for the silence to follow, for the pause to be prolonged, for the wind to send him on his way. You are not worthy. “I wish to become stronger.”

--

Deimos is turning in his hybrid pass!

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

SAFRIN

She is there like a ghost of the cosmos; energy verging on the kinetic but remaining tightly coiled. Bound by the blight. Weakened, but not weak.

"You are a surprising one, Deimos." She hums. Her body is nearly see-through, her physicality as unfettered as the wind. Drawing her knees to her chest and placing her chin upon them—a pantomime of Amalia if there ever was one—she regards him with an inscrutable and worldly gaze.

"I can indeed make you stronger. I can give you the strength of an elephant, the cunning of a fox, and the forest-silence of a jaguar. But.." She pauses, her head tilting to the side. "Why should I? You have been good to Amalia...helped build this—" Safrin gestures to the shrine the reaper helped build. "—what do these things add up to? The spire..the plants..Even Zuriel, there. All just moments."

Coding base by Sky!

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

Deimos didn’t expect anyone to hear him. He presumed wind would carry on through the ether, silent as the grave, and he’d walk back out of the area, forsaken again. So it was another bewildering thing to see the flicker of otherworldly cosmos, ghosts and fragments, not entirely whole (the sickness there; as harsh as it had been the first time he’d seen her), suddenly near. His heart thundered, a war-drum beat in his chest, careening along his ribs, in the presence of a god, sharper inhales and exhales over her hums, eyes widening and then narrowing.

He wasn’t prepared. A fleeting, stupid notion told him to run before he made some despicable error. Her words stopped him, froze him, kept him segmented in galaxies and constellations, a surprising one. Perhaps he was. Maybe he was a mess of contradictions, trials, and tribulations that made her shake her head and grimace. Maybe he was portions and pieces of broken fragments, and there was nothing left to do but send him on his way. Maybe he was just a piece of moments, wretched and nonsensical, not worth a deity’s time or efforts.

Why should I? indeed; the very inquiry he asked himself.

What makes you think you’re worthy? laid in there too – and damning brambles and thorns poked their way into his figure, and he leaned into them, bereft and wild, lost and misplaced. “I want to protect the ones I cherish.” He hadn’t done enough, hadn’t become enough; she would’ve seen the Sword’s efforts, would’ve seen him falter and come up with naught, a disaster of his own making. But he’d do anything for them, those who’d accepted, tolerated, and loved him despite his multitude of flaws, despite his hankering for power and vehemence, despite adding up to nothing. He’d heard the echoes of screams in a cavern, and followed them to bring others to safety (nearly dying). He’d crawled into the Spire to help save an ancient, primordial force (nearly dying). He’d saved a unicorn from an infant landshark (nearly dying). He’d returned to the fortification’s basement to assist in unraveling a potential cause for the blight, in destruction, in ruin (surprisingly, not nearly dying – but the end result had been the same: trifling, indistinct matters, and dead ends). What good was he to them when he wasn’t strong, capable, or enduring? His previous actions spoke for themselves – willing, but ineffectual at best. The warrior dared to glance at her, a vow of fervor and might, if given half a chance. “Because I have tried, and not been enough for them.”

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

SAFRIN

"No.." She agrees. Memories will careen through his mind like a riptide pulling him asunder. A voice, Deimos' name on her lips. She is honey to this stone of a man, ocean-eyes and vows of forever. Static. The smell of petrichor and an unyielding god with storm clouds for eyes. A home freely given, walls of ice, but peace hidden in the desolation. A family, but no more.

And where are they now?

Bathwater, flickering pleasure and tongues, eyes as dark as the night sky. Amalia. She was the incarnation of new life here, of all this new world had to offer. Like the basin, there is beauty in the depths should you be allowed to pass.

"You have had strength before, Reaper." Safrin says in a voice like strained starlight but eyes like hardened steel. "Much more than now. Resurrected though you might be, are you not the same soul? What will this power bring you, that it could not before?"

Huyana twice gone. A family ravaged by storms and faceless gods. Portals into unseen dimensions. Death, and death, and death.

Coding base by Sky!

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

Her no was the last moment before the crashing waves, before riptide, before he was pulled beneath fathoms and strangled into depths, struggling to find the surface, lungs ferocious while his heart sunk.

He knew the voice, he knew the songs, he knew the words, the echoes, the fragments, the reveries, the moments not strangled, but tied together in bliss. Huyana, whole in memories but not in reality; twice, twice, twice, seized and taken and struck down, away from him once, and then riddled in death the second time, no matter what he tried. It had been love and devotion beneath mountains, beside oceans, under crag and stone and marble, billowing in on plumes of rain and sighs – and then gone, because he was weak. Because he was useless. Because the anthem and tattoos and stilettos were all the same, tapping the drumbeat to his destruction, to his flaws, to his defects; all brawn and tenacity and endurance couldn’t keep her with him, couldn’t keep her safe, couldn’t keep her from –

The spark of more gods, more ineffectualness, more ineptitude, anchored and tied to the Basin, to prominences where he sat upon his throne and decayed, where he was rubble and delusion, and the world could see what desolation and swords did to a man – family in the decadence of corruption and aspirations. A disheveled crew, made up of thieves in the night, corrupt doctors, weapons and soldiers, beasts and fiends and some valorous efforts tied up in nooses and knots – something in his chest ached, and he fought to breathe, fought to stand upright against the tides.

Where are they now?

Dead and gone, buried beneath shadow and wilting, wilting, wilting – his body left in its tomb, a part of the artifice and rocks, when he’d failed, when he’d tried, when he’d drowned in showers and thought to see her again.

Then Amalia, and something inside him threatened to burst. Do not he wanted to shout, howl, and yell, do not take her from me on his tongue. He’d lost enough. He couldn’t bear to lose her. He’d said it to her before, again and again and again, because his life was a series of defeats and follies, no matter how strong.

He shook his head, forcing the insinuations out of his skull, out of his mind, webs and fractures and fissures – breaking, shards and slivers. She talked, stars and galaxies in the midst, and he tried to focus, tried to see beyond the follies, but they kept careening, rankling, nettles on his skin.

Was he the same soul?

Deimos the Reaper had been cloaked in terror and treachery. Deimos the Sword had wandered and meandered, and found himself accepted, loved, and cherished. Deimos the Reaper had been absolute barbarity, a force of vitriol and vehemence, toxic and nonchalant, ripping things apart because he could. Deimos the Sword thought and fought and sought to save those he considered family. In some ways, they were similar, and in others, they were not – the Reaper had hid from his opportunities and chances, sunk into the sea, into the snow, into the ice, the Sword had found a shield and created other notions, purposes, and lives.

“In some ways,” he answered, throat aflame. “But I once hid. I cannot now.” He refused to, even when the inclination was there, even when the sinking mire spread its way across his chest and yearned to suffocate him.

“Another way to save them.” Opportunities he hadn’t had before; all death and destruction and torment, fire, rubble, ruin. A way to solve matters without violence – even if he’d always crave it.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

SAFRIN

Do not take her from me.

No Deimos. Such passive phrasing. It is you letting her be taken. It is your fault. It always has been.

"Oh, you can still." The goddess mocked mused. "Hiding is intrinsic. Running, fleeing from that which is hardest. And why not?" Pulling in a breath Safrin considered. Overhead the stars twinkled and laughed, their light falling upon Amalia as she slept. "Another way?" The goddess rises, leaping nimbly off of the stones to stand before the Sword. She is slender and slim and though he is taller, the world bends such that they are eye to eye.

"When will you learn, Deimos? When will you cease looking outside of yourself for answers? Gods from other worlds, from this one. Power, muscle, crowns?"

With dizzying speed, Safrin's hand is suddenly around the Reaper's throat and they are high above the Shrine, high above the Hollowed Grounds. The world has fallen away as if only Safrin and the Sword are its only inhabitants. There is nothing holding Deimos up, save for the goddess. His strength, his lofty promises, the events of the past, none of them mean anything here.

"I will give you one chance, Deimos. Only one. Either you find the strength you seek within yourself, or you will die. Ask me to bring you back and I will, but it will be with the knowledge that you were too cowardly to fail, such that you will never succeed again." A brisk wind howls by and below, oh so far below, the lights of the Ground twinkle, mirroring the stars above.

Coding base by Sky!

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

The goddess found his weaknesses and plucked them for all to see – except it was just them, in the here and now, while his eyes flickered to Amalia, the mocking, the jeering, crooning over his form. So intrinsically flawed, so defective, so lacking, and she knew, had seen how he’d tucked himself behind high walls and massive fortifications, how it was the easiest route, to not let anyone in.

Then she was before him, eye-to-eye, sword and stars, and he held his breath, a sharp inhale as she riddled and scorched. When will you learn? Perhaps never – too daft, too slow, eroding, decaying, wilting before he ever managed to understand or comprehend what was required. He took hold of blades, cutlasses, and shields because they were steel and iron, because they were better than himself, because it was an extension of him –

Outside of himself – as if anything on the inside had any value at all. He didn’t want to look inside. He didn’t want to see the shards and claws and scars, the void, the abyss, lying in between ribs and lungs.

Before he could truly contemplate what she meant, he was lifted by the throat, incapable of growling, of screaming, of howling into the skyline, along the horizons. His hands thought to wrap around hers and claw, rip, tear, but then – it would be him and the clouds, falling, falling, falling. His chest heaved and he forgot how to breathe, staring at her, a singular chance while terror and damnation pulsed in his veins. The wind brushed against his ankles, and death loomed, just as it had done from his incantations, from his enchantments, since the moment he’d been baptized in blood and barbarity.

But none of that was here now – just the ghosts, just the sprigs of the breeze, just the open sky beneath his feet.

This was a test.

He was going to die.

Too cowardly to fail. Hadn’t he failed before? Or maybe it didn’t matter anymore. He hadn’t been sent to the gallows for a third time yet. But he was about to be.

Strength in himself. Strength in himself. It was a ballad in his panic, in his trepidation, and then, a strange, eerie, otherworldly tolerance, what all the others he’d sieged his power upon must’ve felt. Death would either sing in his bones, or something else would take root, take hold.

His jaw clenched, and he nodded. Do it would’ve pierced from his mouth, but the notion of acceptance was already there in the singular movement.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

SAFRIN

He nodded, and so she released him.

It wouldn't just be the wind that whipped by the Sword as he fell, but all of the ghosts of his past. The faces that had gathered around him at meetings called, those that slunk and plotted behind his back. The faces of those killed in battle, of those abandoned and betrayed. Loves gone, children that might have been in other lives. Amulets and tents, swords of blue-glass and laughing gods with thunder in their smiles. Hands tangled in hair, on hips; promises made in fervent whispers and broken. Failure, and failure, and failure.

But certain as anything was the ground racing up to greet the Sword, to embrace him as he never had been before, and finally answer the question as to the colour and calibre of his soul.

Coding base by Sky!

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

The Sword had asked the Shield earlier that day, a catalyst, an impetus, what it was like to fly.

She’d said freedom.

But as he was released, massive form hurtling through time and space, it didn’t bear the same weight as liberation or deliverance. It coiled in his gut on a silent, feral scream, the air rushed out of his lungs as he sank like a stone through ether and clouds, through darkness and stars, no one to see him down below until he’d crashed into the ground, until he’d left an imprint of his massacred, decrepit body in the fields.

He thought about closing his eyes, about not seeing buildings come into view before his death; but then that would be cowardly too.

And then he wasn’t alone.

The ghosts ran rampant along his senses, curling and coiling beside his figure, as fleeting as they’d been in life, as he struggled to breathe, as he thought about reaching for some of them. There were thunderous whispers and crackling schisms across the void, gods of time and spark, sneering, derisive, shaking its head as if he’d never amount to anything, had known all along. He could see the canvases, the faces, of those he’d crushed in battle and left to die, contorted spears left in their chests, forms shoved off the sides of mountains when he couldn’t be bothered to do anything else, plotting reverberations echoing across his frame, Psyche’s tossed crown looming at his feet, a thousand other moments buried, come to hollow and carve him out as he fell.

Monumental too, were his favored phantoms: fire tangled near his ear and yelled, a familiar, broken sound: fly. Water distorted somewhere along the wind and ordered: fly. There was rain tethered in his hair, on his hands, on his fingers, gentle and imploring, begging: fly.

Another anthem on his lips, hushed and irreverent. Fly, fly, fly.

Puddles, images of feathers, of gilded, sienna plumage, an instant in time, a formation of the future. He shook in the wind, billowing, as if he were nothing, just one more flickering ember about to go out.

Deimos managed to extend his arms, on a whim, on capriciousness, on mercurial parameters because if he was going to die, he might as well have tried, looking into himself, himself, himself.

Then they were on the tips of his fingers, wild and pinioned, rapacious and coiling, following the lines of shoulders, torso, and legs, vision shifting, the unknown beckoning: wings shaping his accord. On instinct and naught else, he twisted and turned, flapping, gliding, hovering, rising in the wind instead of plummeting through it.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts

SAFRIN

Feathers catch the falling Sword much as laughter does, and suddenly Safrin is there around him. She is in the warm air currents and the stars that light his way. She is in the new ache of his feathered body and each shift that sends him careening this way and that as he learns how this new form moves.

"Well done. You truly are now resurrected. More than before, and not just in this world, in this one place and moment. For all time, for the change is within you. We can add armor, bestow gifts...but to truly change, it must be from the heart. And that is where you will now find your strength. Abandoned you were, but no longer just that. Now your soul sings with our magic too."

---

Congratulations! Deimos is a HYBRID! Enjoy re-levelling :D

Coding base by Sky!

We're lost in the space between
who we are and all that we're trying to be

There was laughter pervading, surrounding him, as he found his avian bearings; swallowing down the bewilderment, the surprise, the own, somewhat buoyant round of amusement puffing through a bird’s chest. His eyes were narrowed, true predator slits and precision, the air hoisting him upwards, an ascent in the once-haunted shrouds; now it is freedom, liberation, and deliverance – he wanted to hasten across the world, he wanted to soar along stars, he wanted to grip with talons and rip apart with his beak. He shifted and the ether preened around his plumage, ruffled his feathers, his heart lighter, lighter than it might’ve ever been.

Because he’d done it. He’d been forced, he’d been dropped, he’d been languished, but he’d done it.

The Sword could hear her in the midnight oils, in the sable sky, you are truly now resurrected, the change within him, in his heart, in his lungs, in his soul.

Thank you, he prospered, without a voice for a moment, thank you, not solemn, not bowed, not broken. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t know what else to do, except glide, except hover, except follow the wind, the earth.

DEIMOS

Stop trying to show how to save our souls
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts