DEIMOS
Heave the silver hollow sliver
Sometimes one could see there was no point. No hope. No promise. No future. Raw and real in its stark, cold abyss, in its harsh, unrelenting void. Deimos only remained here now after everything else because of those surrounding him, because he pushed and crawled and bit into the bindings, because he knew exactly what it was like to descend on one’s own, scraping their way into portals and pieces of darkness. He was there for Amalia because she’d always been there for him – patterns and complexities, routines and devotion, promises and convictions from his mouth, from his heart, that hadn’t bent, hadn’t broken, hadn’t fallen. The heathen could’ve lanced and brutalized himself amongst seclusion and indifference, apathy and nonchalance, like lifetimes ago, the Reaper re-possessed in his stoic, reticence haze; but that wasn’t who he was any longer. And he wasn’t sure what Sunjata was bound to do either – if this was just one more legion and league of onslaughts, of terrors, he was meant to overcome, or one more interval where the waves never quite let up. The boards fell into place, and so did the story, the tale, of the mud monster – Sunjata inside (the whale?), ice walls breaking, piercing, penetrating, bodies clustered together and then demolished, all the excitement, all the merriment, extinguished on screams, wails, and massacres. His brow furrowed, hesitant to say anything for the moment; for blame would’ve been easy, anger would’ve been raw, ferocity would’ve been in his heart, lashing out at split hairs and intangible, murky things. He could’ve traced the fault lines and fissures just like everyone else: had the fiend been stopped, then the festival wouldn’t have been destroyed, then Aoife wouldn’t have perished, then Ronin wouldn’t have gone to destroy the Temple – a cycle, a current, a rivulet of fragments and misfortune. Should all of that been laden across their shoulders? Or were they just occurrences, fleeting, bounding things, compounded into a series of sagas and events that no one could’ve foreseen? “But you tried,” came first, hammering another nail in, a pulse for frustration, for vexation, for things that could’ve gone so many other ways. “When the blight started to grow worse, a group of us went into the Spire, to destroy the poisonous plants. We believed they were the cause for the sickness.” A pause for the memory scraping over his senses, for the venom choking over his lungs, for the spread of death and damnation, and for nothing at all. “We did – but it had no effect on anyone. The blight continued to spread.” And then the siege of all the broken, despondent individuals had begun. “Sometimes it will not work. But does that mean we cease altogether?” His brow arched; perhaps an armor-piercing question for both of them.
Unite and spread the heart apart
