He was never grateful that they existed, let alone captured their children. He was never grateful for the humiliations and defeats the Basin had suffered at their hands, at the foolish, grasping, avaricious cling of old wounds festering, deep and open, withering and decaying at the edge of conquest. He was never grateful for his own capture by their specious chicanery and deceptive ploys, at absconding his enchantments and invocations, the cruel necromancy pulsing amongst his veins, for an opportunity to unravel their lands into further bedlam, subdued. The Reaper would rather crush his own carcass into one bony pile then allow them to swindle, conquer and devour their heathen, infidel aspirations and ambitions again. To even submit the art of peace discourse and conversations was enough of a sacrifice of his contemptuous, incited, incensed loathing. Their perils and frustrations enamored and lacquered to this mare’s tongue all over again only tore and unraveled him further into the Machiavellian regime of furtive, treacherous designs, wishing he could consume, devour, ravage and pillage their misty earth until there was naught left but the burning coil of their feverish mendacity. For now, he had to promise for peace, for a passing, idle season where their hearts calloused and their fiendish, diabolical schemes drove them to the weight of augured cataclysms, where they could rise from inept ashes, not by valor, not by honor, not by the treatment of sanctimonious creeds, but from malice, menace, and abhorrence. Their fires had been stoked, the embers had been fanned, and the distorted rapture of their bedlam, of their mayhem, of their enmity and acrimony had been unleashed into a languid, blistering fortitude eager to bend, break, destroy. The monster’s indifference was worn into the strong muscles of his face, the clenched jaw, the devilish aperture of his piercing, lacerating eyes, the depth and brevity of his glare singeing, unholy, villainous peril waiting for the taste of victory, for the pedestals of sedition and revolution to unravel the world beneath his feet. He offered no response to her attempts at further exposition over cruelty, brutality and barbarism, eternally reticent, behemoth silence, and merely answered to the finale of the deal, waited for the clink of the locks, the opening of prisons and oubliettes. “I accept.”

@[Mirage]