wound relentlessly

DEIMOS And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame Deimos presumed the luxere would wander off the moment he touched it – because he was a hollowed entity, desolate, abandoned, a nature embedded with barbs, thorns, and desecration. How many times had he been told they were meant for the lighthearted, the virtuous, the promising paragons? Yet, this one stayed, and he didn’t know what that notion meant. He swallowed down the inquiry, pressed it beneath his chest, funneled it away in his mind; there would be greater things to occupy the moment. So he nodded, as if he understood anything at all, as if he were not one of the hundreds of ignorant cretins sheltered in this world. The enigmas lent themselves to other interests though. “How did you acquire him?” He must’ve caught her curiosity too, for in the next stead she asked about his invocations. They stirred, coldblooded and vicious, along the rush of blood and vice, and he contained the sigh rampaging in his lungs. “Death.” It’d always been death; the stark, slow rush of life fleeting and fleeing another being’s eyes, body, and soul. He’d watched it time and time again, sometimes a quiet, withering, decaying interlude – other times a rush into oblivion, desecrated and decimated in the heat of battle. He’d never looked away from his opponents, witnessed as they fell, shoved their images and memories aside; hardened, stone and ice, beating heart of rock and rubble and ruin. Then he’d done the same as others either retreated from him, grew afraid, intimidated, or snagged him as their living, breathing weapon. Maybe she’d do the same. But then something else occurred, and his gaze caught hers twisting in confusion, hurt?, like his name had been a bramble, a prickle, in her side; he inhaled and exhaled sharply as her words softened, as the keen echo crept over his mind. Rexanna had said the same thing once before, when he’d first come to this land and attempted to drink himself into a stupor. It gnarled at his edges, clawed at his bones, flickered and burned corners of his mind where he dared not stray too far: glaciers and rime, peaks with crowns and summits, a lake that never froze, aspirations rekindled over and over and over again. He’d tried to dig deeper before, pondered over the nuances of blended lives, of reincarnation, of sins passed and glossed over, chances and intervals lacerating down his flesh and blood, and then wondered how far was too far. Did it even have any meaning? Was it a shadow of his former self? Or not him at all – someone else who’d claimed terror and upheaval, sedition and rebellion, in the name of shadows and kings? He laughed, but it was inwardly drawn, cruel and dark to his heart and lungs and mind; softer in the air, masked and indifferent. “This is not the first time someone has told me such a thing.” Deimos shook his head, disbelief still readily apparent. After all, who would follow him? What was good? What was great? Nothing, his skull howled. master of nothing place of recoil and grace

Kiada