near half-empty

Deimos His soul hadn’t come from Caido’s expanse: twisted and turned along the Moonlit Tides, given life near tides and rivulets, close to crashing waves, and then given prestige and prevalence once more beneath the power and prowess of mountains. He’d lived multiple lifetimes in multiple lands and worlds, bombarded his way through kingdoms and fields, through disaster and ruin, holding it together through sheer willpower, spite, and vitriol. He wore a mask and he bore it well; carefully cultivated and constructed through those pits and pendulums, where vulnerability was a flaw, an adversary’s weapon, where hearts weren’t allowed to show anything more than their blackened, acrid abilities. He’d lost his willingness to impart emotion, save to a collect few, long, long ago, when life draining magic made its presence known as a child – when ice and glacial walls were easier to impart than kindness, compassion, or feeling, when the shadows were safer than his mere presence. The beast had eroded and worn down eventually, but no, Caido hadn’t made him. He’d assimilated and fumbled his way through its branches, brambles, and nettles, but he would never be a creature, a cretin, of the bubble’s orchestration. He knelt nearby, hands shifting through opposing leaf litter, plucking at various stems, roots, and vestiges, meandering away from her pile so they didn’t end up going through the same measures, wasting ample time. He didn’t turn towards her, but listened to the surprise in her voice, lowered his gaze back to the ground, a pause in the ministrations, searching, and tactics. Everything under control; maybe he was far better at faking it than he realized. Motivations kept him tethered and lined, coiled and contorted, composed and rigid; otherwise he’d be a damned mess. Maybe he was anyway. And like so many times before, the beast didn’t know what to say. “I do not,” he inclined; he’d tried more than once: planning for LongNight (it hadn’t mattered), orchestrating stalls, kiosks, and perimeters for Fiat Lux (it hadn’t mattered), venturing down into the Spire to destroy poisonous plants, to cease the blight (it hadn’t mattered). In the grand scheme of things, he’d done very little. The dissimulation seemed to have worked though: but Libbs was new, and hadn’t experienced the rash, cold, hard reality of a world that promised benediction and took it within an instant. “You will,” he promised and assured; but it felt like a cold, unwinding thing to say, when naught ever seemed to go right, when they were barely skimming over the surface, when the land seemed intent on anchoring them straight into oblivion. She’d see it all too, every last inevitable surge of trying, trying, trying, and watching it became a futile void. So his hands went back to the fronds and leaflets, swallowing down the choking nuances and notions. Out of sight and out of mind Make everything alright So let the sky and sea collide Just not in our lifetime