prevail

DEIMOS

Her words held shape and meaning, but he might’ve been too far gone to allow them to settle over his mind. It was a machinating, ruminating, calculating machine, but losses were heavy, burdens were cumbersome, and sometimes it was entirely too much. Perhaps that had been how she’d felt during LongNight, when he’d tried to reach for her and grant her some form of advice, some notion to hold onto when everything else seemed so wiped, obliterated, and blown apart: a little empty. A little overdrawn. A little mentally exhausted, fatigued, by the way failure carved and whittled, sculpted and molded, far more than success or triumph ever seemed to. In Helovia, he would have simply shifted into the shadows and sought to lacerate and annihilate whatever circumstances or individual had led them to this point, a challenge he might not have come back from. It was harder here, much more difficult, to even ascertain which enemy or adversary to obliterate; and in the end he had no one to truly blame. A man consumed by the grief of his daughter? Deimos understood, comprehended, the netting of rage and all its gnarled, conspired knots. Those who’d tried to heal and simply couldn’t undue all the damage caused? Who was he to say whether or not they’d put their heart and soul into it, when they’d all been just as exhausted and terrorized?

It’d all been too much.

She’d wrapped herself around him again, and he was effectively trapped. A sigh echoed from his lungs, and could’ve come directly from his bones. “It would be nice to have a season without disaster,” and his arms curled back around her. He didn’t have much else to add, eyes glancing skyward, because wishing and hoping weren’t going to do a damned thing now.

i'm in the mood to dissolve in the sky