D E I M O S
The sunshine returned, radiant and beaming, and he took it all in for a few seconds, his own Cheshire grin lifting the corners of his mouth. “Very well. You?” he applied his answer with a dipping of his head, listening to the flower crown shift forward, blossoms shaking, all the more ridiculous and amusing. The beast had been accepted again, back into the humming circle of friends and compatriots, and it continued to surprise him, to befuddle his senses, but he snagged and clenched and took it for all it was worth, a craving, a yearning, he didn’t know he’d had until it coiled back in his face. For a time, it’d been all he’d ever known, the sensation and vividness of camaraderie, blended into frontlines, into victories, into combined devastation and ruin, men at arms becoming a force of nature and munitions, bestial weaponry forged in brotherly bonds.
But then it was gone with each death, with each debacle, with each demise. Then he’d closed himself off, away, away, away, lined his walls and fortifications with a vicious, indifferent demeanor, waited for the world to come at the gates so he could growl and roar, so he could tuck himself behind the layers of apathy and enmity, so the open hostility pervaded from his frame, so the rest of the realms left him alone.
Until now – when they crept their way back into his soul, and he didn’t force them aside.
The warrior was never given a price, however, for another agreement was forged. His eyes flicked away from
