wound relentlessly

DEIMOS And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame He had no intention of breaking her, of fissuring her away to darker corners of the world, of befuddling the senses or addling the mind. The Reaper’s destruction and terror were onslaughts and upheavals for adversaries, for opponents, for enemies; and Kiada was none of those things. But it was bound to be that way because it was the nature of the kingdom, of the world, meant to mock and infuriate, meant to exasperate and bleed them dry again. Purpose, renewal, and resurgence had a time, had a place, but his hands were clenched in fists at his side, and he didn’t know any other way to grasp the sensations, other than to throw them into the fire and vitriol. “I think so,” his eyes wrapped in their wraith quandaries, memories of the Thief puncturing through his schemes and wiles, the missions he sent her on, the success they’d gained and triumphed beneath aurora skies. Then, there’d been the birth of Kiada and her twin, a rampaging beast along his threshold (and he’d hunted him down, guarded, protected, but from naught), and subsequent departure, away and away and away. Then he’d been gone too, under the drowning skies and the enveloping denizens of hell, coming to take away their favored weapon, reigning no more, only to return decades later, a new shell for an old vessel. But in the present, she was much the same; gilded and bewitching, delightful and scheming, and he once thought he was looking at a ghost, a depicted scene and canvas of the past haunting him straight through his core. In a way, it had; except she was alive and whole and real, and so was he. The warrior didn’t have any other answers for her. He was rattled and befuddled, beguiled and fumbling, tearing down the wicked walls and fortifications simply so he could see on the other side, but too apprehensive to glance at the wares, at the surface below his carefully constructed ramparts. He was a ghoul and a menace, a phantom and a heathen, a fiend given another opportunity to live for an unnamed sake. And if Rexanna had been sewn into these hills and valleys, had it been the same for her? Were there titles and duties granted to her, conformed to a new life, a new past, a new sense of burdens. I know you, and repetitive foundations had rattled his cage and opened a door he hadn’t dared to breach. They were all fractured and dissolved, reborn again to flourish into the unknown; and it sickened him that he wasn’t in control of his own machinations, of his own destiny, of the chiseled moments that led them all here. Not anymore, he clenched his jaw and promised; vows for the iniquitous and seditious, cast aside and away in a constant cycle. Why? “I can show her to you.” His eyes slid back to Kiada, another girl from another time, when boldness and audacity were celebrated, when naught was foreign and everything was understood – hatred for hatred, contempt for contempt, a spread of wrath and greed in the shape of sovereignties. The mountains were on his breath, glacial and chilling, a cold-blooded depiction of what he once was, the oath on his tongue, the picture of brutality and resilience. “Then you can decide what you want to do.” master of nothing place of recoil and grace

Kiada