Before the storm

D e i m o s

Send a heartbeat to the void that cries through you
Relive the pictures that have come to pass

Grudges; Deimos knew about resentments and piques, the way they held and knotted and gnarled, their purposes sometimes melded and molded straight into vengeance. How many times had he committed to those felled nuances, to the twist and turn of bitterness, curling them into knives and daggers, instigating, invoking, and incensing the rest of the world to burn with him? The Aurora Basin had sometimes been his inferno, feeding the flames of their disastrous wake, of their havoc-wreaking collisions, wild with the potential of uprooting anything and everything that had dared to scorch them. They’d reached across voids and plucked at heartstrings, at limbs, at bodies, at kingdoms, until they thought they’d had their fill – only for it to surge again and again, a never-ending reel of enemies and adversaries howling at the door, and their wolfish, rapacious edges seething into the maelstrom. But that wasn’t what was happening here – the implications he wasn’t courageous enough, wasn’t strong enough, were nettles and thorns barbed and twisted back into his ribs – and it might have made him far, far worse in his protective spheres and hovering, striving to put and place himself before allies, comrades, and loved ones in attempt to guard. Were they enough to wage war, to continue and escalate the fissure between him and the Sage? Or was it mere irritation, proclamations of his weaknesses, when he knew valor and strength weren’t contortions of his faults? There were far more that Jigano could have picked – he’d just attempted to segment and sever the few virtues Deimos actually held. Which was why the monolith expressed, accepted - he wasn’t sure how to ascertain forgiveness, had little experience in it, beyond Rexanna and her sojourns. The bard was not the Penumbra; they had enough trials and tribulations between them, mistakes and mishaps, floundering and fumbling motions split and spilt along Fae woods, Spire intonations, and the pulses of the bakery’s basement. There were also the moments and sentiments of the thorns, of the rage, within clutched roses and planting reverberations, but he didn’t mention those – not now. He didn’t seek to stab at the tenuous. That he was forgiven was new and foreign too, causing a movement away from the door, and back to the table, maneuvering pieces of armor around in case the Sage required space or deigned to sit. He gave the other man a firm nod in the quiet, the uncertainty brandished hard; never had a way with words, once he’d stoked the edges of war, bloodshed, and death. “Kiada told me you were going with her during LongNight.” So they could hover there instead, with his stalwart nature still remaining, but potentially concocting it along a different interval. For now we stand alone, the world is lost and blown And we are flesh and blood disintegrate with no more to hate