Deimos hadn’t always been a monster, the eldritch titan swallowing the rapture and reverie of pious saints, subduing, weakening the foolish, meek and inept, massacring dreams, goals and motives. He’d coveted the brief luxury of youth – for a year, settled beneath the stars, the tides, the warm rolls and dunes of sand, rubble and stone. He’d been cherished, glorified, taught, and anointed with the artifices, the wiles, the cunning of his mother, the poise, the power, the domination and fire of his father, been swaddled and delighted by the creatures he called brethren. He’d been sown and sculpted into a gangly child woven with promise, laced and threaded with prestige, potential, and capability. He’d had greatness strumming against his eardrums, pride collecting in his mind, boldness saturating his movements and motions, soaked by the deluge of portended eminence. But the world was cruel, and to survive the strange incantations spilling from his hooves, his body, his entity, to not wound his companions, to escape his family’s compassion, to withdraw into the vacant shell he still inhabited, he had to become heartless, ruthless, and merciless. He stripped the core of empathy away from his flesh, he dismantled the beat of humanity from his heart, and he disassembled the forbearance of morality from his soul, watched, witnessed, his reflection change from that of a stumbling, tender scion into a remorseless, barbaric vessel. At first the alterations had been miserable, moments sprinkled with small, tiny flickers of hope that were altogether banished when the necromancy failed to cease its upheaval. From this horror, from this isolation, desolation and despair, sprouted the annals of anarchy, the arches of indifference and vicious, cold nonchalance. Nothing moved him. Nothing touched him. Nothing stirred him into longing, yearning or desire: no goals, no dreams, no lofting, fanciful things inciting, invoking the clamor of rectitude, the frozen depths of his essence, antipathy, animosity. The earth had become his primrose path, his angles and avenues of haunting savagery, of effortless entropy, of elegant, vehement violence. All he’d become was a carnivorous knife, a devilish dagger, a swinging, sinuous sword, a callous cutlass, armed with bestial blades, spells to render hearts silent, to steal lungs’ last, fleeting breaths. The follies, the twists and turns of childhood had died alongside his victims, rotten, decaying, gone.

But this rain girl before him, with her watery memories and fleeting treasures, still contained her whimsy, her indulgent impulses and mermaid notions, and he didn’t understand how she held them there, aloft for everyone to see, to adore and revel in just as she enacted. How did she allow her vulnerabilities to surface, for her weaknesses to be uncovered? How did she permit the world to take and take, to steal and abscond from her livelihood until all she had left was her rain? How had she not become a bitter, twisted core, dabbling in the ache, the pain, the anguish the world had bequeathed her? He’d long since lost the fabric of foibles and inclinations, preferred to wage war, harbored iniquitous intentions, lavished and lacquered, scarred and maimed the entrails, the innards, of foes. Others could take naught away from him that he hadn’t already tossed over ruins. The cretin, the fiend, the infidel said naught as she smiled, collected her soused frame into a dance of delight and coy intrigue, fiddled her gaze into his aloof, frigid stare. Deimos stood amongst the gathered darkness and twilight as she settled, cast off into the lake’s grasp, witnessed her reunite with her element, damned and doomed to be eternally alone in his. When he could no longer bear to observe her, the maiden of the lake awakened by the chill of the water, evaporating into mist and midst, his blue eyes drifted to the bank, inclining his head over the stretch of rippling pool. Its shimmer, its mirror, reflected back exactly what he’d known himself to be: cold, hard, unyielding, unattainable, and unreachable. The stare, rigid and villainous, the countenance, lined with nothingness, the stretch of emotionless features, the lock of ivory resting upon his poll, drifting into forelock, mane sharpened and shaped into a skull, into augured brutality.

Water suddenly streamed towards his face, made little dips, indentations and impressions in the reservoir, swindled and cascaded down the length of his visage, and he snapped his stare back towards the girl he’d left wandering in the brine. Mischief kindled across her features, and she’d somehow morphed into an elf, a minx, a nymph, a siren, a dangling, dancing coquette coated amongst the darkness. He attempted to hide his surprise and disbelief, but his eyes had already widened, befuddled, addled and rattled. The only other hints of his apprehension were a brief snort and the dampened forelock stuck across his impassive brow. She was extending an invitation to play, but his appreciation and comprehension of it had changed long ago; now his version of entertainment was to pluck souls away from bodies, to covet and harpoon, to ravage and pillage until his wicked, avaricious appetite was sated. He quickly refused the seduction, the beguilement and allure, the bewitching surface of vixen and lake, staying on land, ice and rime, straying to entice the battlefield instead of the inveigling temptations of diversions. The chiseled cranium returned to its former position, and undulating muscles coiled, a hot roll of condemnation pouring and pervading the idle thought of this sudden persecution. Taut, iron and armored, but incapable of releasing the manacles and chains of his annihilation, of his abomination, of his scorned, forlorn, and twisted soul.