DEIMOS
Maybe he deserved it; the bounding course of mocking laughter. The jeers and taunts scorched and reeled, desolate and forsaken, and the beast had found himself somehow returned to those days where he was a useless, tattered shell, bent and broken, snagged and bleeding, existing with nothing to show for it. No matter what he’d done, the patterns and cycles had come back to haunt him, always another edge to their knives, to their daggers. Why hadn’t you done more? a blur on the horizon. Why didn’t you save everyone? A piercing blade to his heart, an unraveling in his chest that had nothing to do with the blood staining the tawny surfaces of plumage he’d been proud to display for mere, strangled, strained seconds. It cursed him now, much as she did, and the weight of everything else punctured at his shoulders, at the lines of wings, at things he’d strived for and carved into so desperately. His eyes focused on harpy lines and conjectures, but he couldn’t shake away the echoes, the boundaries she segmented, ridiculed, beating, beating, beating, ominous, motions and movements he’d heard before, in different world, in different layers, in different alterations – but the gestures, the results, the anguish all the same. It blinded and bound him, deliberately not hanging his head and descending, understanding the nuances, the strife, of the blight’s edges; but the kernels and granules of truth had simpered and slithered out, given no restriction, granted freedom in its hate and discontent.Perhaps this was what he was after anything and everything: furtive and hiding himself away from the world, isolating, forsaking –
He understood what it meant to be ineffectual and ruined; but he’d never thought of Kiada in such a form. He’d wanted to protect. He’d wanted to defend. He’d wanted to wrap all of his cherished things in armor and chainmail and somehow presume they’d never be annihilated, lacerated, or punctured again; but it wasn’t how any kingdom worked.
He didn’t know she would’ve wanted to go to the Spire. He hadn’t asked. For all his intentions at keeping her safe and guarded, he’d restricted, he’d defied, he’d mired her purpose. It was the opposite of what he sought, but there were too many contradictions lined in its brow and onslaught, in the torture and terror. Could he have witnessed her, potentially dying there in the Spire’s basement, lost to poison, to vitriol, to vehemence? Wasn’t it better that he sink into the fires, into the drowning, overwhelming, overbearing tidal waves, than any of them?
Some part of him wondered if he should just let her pluck him out of the skies and let it end. Another contortion to him tried to drown out the noise, the pain, the melancholy.
She dove, but he was faster, faster, faster, even with the wounds; a smaller form, answering her challenge with silence – because no matter what he said it wouldn’t have mattered, it wouldn’t have bludgeoned past the pestilence, would’ve given more fodder for the fury.
At least this way, Deimos knew where he stood – paled in comparison to anything and everything – specks of dust and shards of yesteryear. He rose on the wind, ascending, doubling back, intending to hover and harpoon above her, talons and thorns angling down, down, down along her spine.
"who's gonna let you?"
they asked. i said
"who's gonna stop me?"
