DEIMOS
It was a ritual he’d followed time and time again, grappling, pouncing, mauling, until life drained away, until all that remained were carcasses and food, intending to utilize every aspect of the animal who’d had its last rush of air, its final heartbeat. He’d been so embedded with death that it wasn’t a figment he thought about until it was someone close to him – and then it gauged and carved, then it sculpted and tore – but there was no satisfaction in it. The violence and vehemence done, his jaw snared and snagged around the deer’s throat, the flickerings of the creature fading away, and he began to drag it back to where they’d once been. Easier, he shifted in semblance and accordance with arms, hands, and legs – lifting the doe over his shoulder, tilting his head in retrospect to Aisha’s response, the lightest of smirks reappearing. He’d missed the vitriol, the raw undulation of power, the unfurling, unleashing, of machinations; away from the melancholy that plagued and overwhelmed, that marched to a beat of a different kind of damnation. “Do you want half?” An offering; he could cut the beast apart right then and there, once she’d been drained, automatically tying a foot around some rope left in his bag, and tossing the fibers around the limb of a nearby tree. Tried and true, done many times over along settlements, outskirts, camps, and citadels; he tested the weight of the bough before raising the doe upwards, placing an incision in the nape to begin the expend the ichor.
Thereafter though was a waiting game, and from where he stood he arched his brow, a more pointed look towards his fellow warrior. “What do you plan to do next?” Ambitions and aspirations – where she’d go, where she’d linger, what she intended to do, with the world churning and coiling, with the rapid changes only escalating, prevailing, over extended nuances.
You aren't afraid of throwing yourself
in the path of danger
but you're terrified of letting anyone in
