wound relentlessly

DEIMOS And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame The truth of the luxere descended – LongNight’s tales and reaches hadn’t deterred her from venturing out into the abyss, encountering monsters and mayhem, possessions and poignancy. Perhaps she’d been braver than him, the man who’d heeded the words of the Naturals and stayed in the damned Rathskeller instead of his own home, poorly equipped with ridiculous ignorance until he’d opened the door to grab Amalia’s lifeless body. His eyes strayed down to the fawn, starting scratching behind its ears again when he realized he’d gone still, staring at the tiny, virtuous thing, wondering at how it had created and sparked a haunting masquerade. Was it worth it? he almost asked, sitting on the edges of his lips, drawn in their reticent lines. Would you do it again? Was she constantly reminded of that evening’s misadventures and sheer, damned luck when she looked at it? He didn’t notice her growing closer, lost in his curiosity, in the darker folds of his skull, only riveting his piercing stare back on her when she declared his invocations fitting, and the resounding titles, the nickname, stabbing, lacerating, puncturing the deeper segments of his soul. We called him the Reaper. He wanted to fight against it, a familiar pattern in his life. Deimos was used to bombarding with action, with power, with potency, until everything in his path was destroyed, consumed, smothered, and vanquished. But this – it wouldn’t go away, because his memories kept ricocheting back and forth, smoldering and seething in design, in execution, as if he’d lived a hundred lives before and they always came back to those singular captions, legends, and descriptions. His friends had started it at first – in bars, after victories, when there was food and alcohol in their stomachs and the sensation of glory hadn’t been lined with bitterness, when they’d been alive instead of maimed, bludgeoned, and buried by his hands across battlefields. Three cheers for our Reaper! and they’d laugh in their drunken stupors, in their triumphant highs, because he’d swung his sword across someone’s throat and he’d invited another’s death by his eldritch incantations. He’d chuckled too, not taking it seriously; he was not ferrying anyone across the river Styx, but the name stuck. Each battle ensured more demises and executions at his ruses, schemes, and acrimony. Before long, they’d all gained some form of nickname and moniker, hollering at each other with humorous banter, stupefied wit. The cold, desolated mountains curled their way behind his eyes, and Deimos still didn’t understand any of it. Maybe he could hide again, withdraw from the world, from the blend of befores, beginnings, and the vast unknown reaching, grabbing for him. He’d already choked on the past – he had no intentions of suffocating in its clutches again. He was only saved by her description of a son, Erebos, whom she’d played with, comrades in some other time, in some other place. Deimos wheeled away from the declarations, from the sudden spark of blue, blue, blue contorting in his mind. “Must be a coincidence then.” A grim, slight smile reached his mouth, and his gaze snapped entirely back to the luxere, because for some reason, looking at her gave him the slightest apprehension – that she knew more and more, that there was something deeper, something clawing its way to the surface. “I do not have any children.” Even those words tormented and disturbed him; a rancorous sigh escaping from his lungs. They hadn’t been blessed before the end; he’d buried the rain by the river bed, alongside a fissure of dreams, aspirations, and ambitions. master of nothing place of recoil and grace

Kiada