He absorbed the darkness, blended into the nocturnal gallery of desecration and supremacy, distorted in the touch, the taste, the flavor of tainted silence. Outcast by virtue, corrupted and defiled away from the dangling strings of mercy, from clemency, from the ties of morality crisscrossed along reverent hearts, the beast choked, strangled, and smothered the righteous acts of purity. He stifled, suppressed and hindered rectitude, compassion and beneficence, clawed and crawled across the walls of its laced, woven principles. He burned with the caressed decadence of Satan’s scholar, Lucifer’s laureate, reaching for the reticent rapiers of long-lost tomes, scalding, scorching, simmering flesh from bone, studying the arts, the masterpieces, the ancient, arcane desires of an unholy wraith. A void, a hollowed, aching shell cast upon the sea, ignited even in the blustering winds of the Basin, rock and fire, ash and embers, furtive secrets pressed against the callous chambers of his colossal indifference. Fear and terror come to life, renewed and sanctified, sacred to nothing place, immorality and iniquity stroked by the bewitching, alluring danger of his unholy consecration. Hallowed bones, brushes and sinew tangled by the nonchalance, the apathy, the entropy strung by villain upheaval, anarchy woven into raptorial appetite stood amongst the brooding waifs, raindrops cast upon the carcass, the vessel, of macabre sedition, feral, fierce insurrection. His heathen furor consumed the wanton piety floating from the world’s resolute exterior, swallowed, devoured, until the land was left with shrunken carapaces, tied away into the mast of primordial ruin and mayhem. The breathing statue, cleverly seduced from the perilous passages of decomposing tapestries, ripping out compassion from the immaculate, the angelic, the saintly. Conscience relapsed, forgotten, discarded for the infallible craft of wickedness, and he stared upon her with the same vile, horrible blood coursing through his viperous veins, invariable since their last meeting in the scene of ash and snow. Drawn into himself, formed into marble and depravity, cast iron in serpentine, sinuous machinations, enigmatic craft and creation molded into rigid, possessive supremacy, he neither smiled nor smirked, but simply, remained.

The fiend strayed, stayed, because she didn’t carve her way into his psyche, didn’t pry into his cracks and ridges, into his carefully molded walls, into his scarred, radioactive figure. She didn’t attempt to fix him, build up each rupture, each fracture, into tiny shards hiding the ruin underneath. She didn’t scratch at his surface, comb away the bracken and the nettles, or scrape away the tended thorns. She didn’t intrude into his ruminating silence, grab words from his tongue and hope they nestled into the thick air, festered into his black, black heart, or rumble in the runes of his nonchalance. The hushed layers lulled him into leisure, into sedateness, crooned, hummed, hymned into a latent, listless state, shown the restraint, the composure, the hard, unbending, unyielding lines of his frame didn’t always need to be rendered so hostile, so tenacious, so bound to cruelty, incensed, invoked, impassioned by the ardor, the fervency, of havoc. Deimos breathed across the vapor, cold and impassive, but calm, composed, pacified. His stare fell to her, whimsical and fanciful even in the rush of winter, even in the vehemence of autumn’s fibers, smiling, not taken in by the waves of malignancy, the avaricious gleam of barbarous, remorseless touched, tantalized, ruined by his relinquished features. So why did she linger in the stead, in the presence, in the entity of his frigid expanse, of his colossal, demon hostility, in the caress of a seething maelstrom eager, waiting, yearning to slink in the coiled, taut, minute motions of fatal intrigue, of formidable, sinister terror? Why did she remain, poised in the rancor, the bitterness, of his execution, of his slaughter, of his abhorrence and contempt? What bewitched, ensnared her gaze where others fled, hid, disturbed, haunted and frightened? The behemoth’s stare, transfixing, beguiling, alluring, lancing, shifted only to glance about both her sides, then no further inquiry, no further movement, was made. His voice intertwined with the air, polished a statement without the poise of a query, allowed the words to drift over her seraphic skin. “You are well.”