[Seasonal Event] stitch away from making it

DEIMOS And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame Perhaps he’d been sculpted and carved out of the bones and sinew of his past so many times that he’d scarcely thought of the future. Before, when he’d beheld a sense of purpose, when he’d slid his swords through ribcages and hearts, when he’d sworn allegiances and oaths to an avaricious king, when he’d fostered brutality and barbarity as an occupation, there’d only been the next day. The next hour. The next moment. The next second. Thereafter, when they’d all fallen apart in mass, when defeat scalded the tongues of those still living, he’d returned home, tried to restore the flickered, cindered parts and contortions. Layers of unrest, sedition, and the briefest of respites ghosted their way through his methods and motives; until the rest fell away, and he’d sunk down into the thresholds of this place. Here, in the present, in the now, he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing. They didn’t need soldiers. They didn’t need warriors. They didn’t need the ignorant, the futile, or the inept, so he averted his eyes and listened to their phrases, their songs, their proclamations. He listened to recitations about how to survive Long Night. He chose a house and piled wood outside its aperture. He hunted and gathered and wandered, but there was no taste of adventure, no relish of the unknown, no beckoning, siren calls haunting him until he chose something. The Reaper amounted to nothing, just another form, another body, another being taking up residence in the sullen corridors. It was the latter that vexed him the greatest, because he didn’t understand why some things occurred (especially Long Night, and why they continued to suffer throughout year after year), or why they couldn’t bludgeon the world, the barrier, apart with their bare hands and escape the idle futility. Death wasn’t foreign, but the rest of the world was. He grabbed hold of another larger piece of garbage and tugged, this one was less rooted to its chosen domicile, and came up with the ease of his strength. At Lily’s inquiry though, his head snapped back in her direction, eyes narrowing for the briefest of instances, still, stoic, walled up and fortified with his iron-clad reticence and upheaval. Was she concerned about him? Was there something to be perturbed about? He’d spent so much of his last few seasons brooding that it felt like normalcy, a brewing, boiling surface of regret, rancor, and ramparts; a defense, a shield, against further terror and onslaught layered upon him. Had he given himself away, that eventually he was going to fray all those seamless strands, come apart, shards of revolution and unholy, nefarious deeds gone to waste? That he was striving towards something, but couldn’t identify it, couldn’t see it on the horizon, marking and chiseling his way with forbearance, wrestling with the unknown? “I am fine,” he finally responded, diving along the blurry line of lie and truth; shallow depths of veracity. He released the smallest of sighs, pondering if she had ever felt the same, treading over those sketches and dominations, uncertain of where to go or what to do. “Out of place, perhaps.” Then the heathen shrugged his shoulders, as if nothing were amiss when it was everything sullying his figure and clawing through his shadows. His piercing gaze flickered back to her as he grabbed hold of another larger entity of trash, pulling it along towards the sled. “And you?” master of nothing place; of recoil and grace