Deimos had seen some peculiar things in his life. He’d felt the cruel grasp of Lucifer reach for his soul and pluck it apart upon his first birthday. He’d heard the tale of his father’s death, his mother’s demise, the parting, sinister echoes of a life unknown, untouched. He’d witnessed the rise of an empire, watched it fall and wondered how far he could have flung his nefarious armaments to shield it from such a vile storm. He’d wandered into the depths of the ice and became part of its wanton glacier, walking winter, the barren, desolate season molded into corporeal form. He’d assisted in the carving of a new realm, thriving amongst peaks, valleys, and had become all the more frustrated, vexed and exasperated when children were taken from their corridors, when two wars remained unceremoniously ruptured, unraveled, useless. But perhaps, as he gazed across the horizon upon two images, one familiar, one distinctly foreign, this apparition was to be the strangest of them all.

The Time Mender’s unmistakable call, once constant, once vigilant, incensed an ignited an infernal twist in his chest, fury and ferocity brewing into the cataclysm of his moving limbs. Where had he gone? Why had he abandoned them amongst trials, amongst sieges, amongst battering rams and valiant efforts? Had it not been for his children, his beloved? Had they not carved flesh and sinew from their own hides to share with his anger, with his torrents, crusades and brutality? Why – in the peak of rancorous contortions, had he fled into the nocturnal decadence? The queries sparked a grand laceration amongst his defiant, revolutionary mind, probed and guided the thousands of machinations wired and webbed into his infernal bestowal, for all the respect the Reaper heeded, granted, and gifted the Doctor, he’d been so disappointed in the latter’s actions. Behind all his umbrage, indignation, and wrath, he’d committed naught at all, rendered humiliation, annihilation, at the hands of desert tribes, dune birds, sand gnats and rats. D’art’s return meant many future discussions and discourses, explanations and answers, but as his penetrating stare slinked from unicorn to the unknown, as his powerful steps protruded into their surroundings, only one more inquiry flickered, pricked and flared into the roaming calculations of the General.

His routine nonchalance, his composition of reticence and indifference, was disrupted by the puzzling appearance of the chestnut creature before him. For a moment, Deimos thought himself hallucinating and delusional, caught in some poisonous vector the Mender had managed to secrete and release into the air, spoiling the atmosphere with his vexations and cataclysms. The monster’s piercing gaze narrowed, and he forced himself to blink rapidly, then ceased altogether when the perplexing, mystifying image failed to leave their icy, rimed gates. It held shambles of normalcy, the structure and containment of equine flesh, proud, undiminished, towering limbs, but upwards, spiraling from his chest, was another being entirely, pale, not matching, like dueling, vivid enigmas assembled together, a wicked, specious, treacherous chimera. On the pallid portions was no pelt at all, nude and bare, until it crossed into shoulders, appendages that ended with clawing, grasping tools, a short nape, and a flattened face. Mane sprouted in wild, vacant knots, but didn’t hide the irregularities, the quirks and rarities. How had D’art come to discover such a brute? How could they use him? The most important fixation was drawn from his blunt chords, rippled over the horizon to Doctor and illusion, plagued fool and bizarre deviation. “What are you?”