Deimos wasn’t the only ominous beast nestled in the lands.

Monsters; brewing amongst the poisonous pedestals, waiting, fermenting, decaying the endless empire, festering and bubbling, entombed malevolence, bedlam, anarchy, and sedition. They suffocated beyond the fathoms of his merciless necromancy, as if the devil birthed, painted, carved another regime, another withering imbalance and maelstrom he couldn’t convey, couldn’t convey, couldn’t grasp, beyond his understanding, beyond his comprehension and enigmatic position. The sinister, Tartarean behemoth, with his rapacious, unrelenting munitions, with his venomous raptures and reveries, was forced to admit confusion, unease and apprehension – incapable of reaching towards the fathoms and plucking Lucifer machinations from wraiths, writhing and tugging, chaining and rasping. For once, his nefarious arts, his diabolical precision, his smoking wrath and silent opus couldn’t guarantee safety; he couldn’t bear arms to formulate devastation, not when it crept unseen, not when it whispered covetous requiems and beckoned beyond their walls, infiltrating through terrible, soulless rhythm, unpredictable, erratic, capricious, foaming and choking. What were they to become: a mass of crumbled souls, plucked and riddled, mauled and broiled, charred bits and pieces of powerless, hollowed shells? Were they to be buried in the rubble of all their failures, pressed together in an unmarked crave, slaves to the wandering catacombs of undead, unholy vanquishing? And did the world expect them to crumble, fettered and discarded, forgotten and furtive, specious stories of the old, the destroyed? Through determination, through resolution, through fire, hell and irreverent tempests, he refused to admit defeat to a pestilence, to an aching, perilous disease, but couldn’t combat it without assistance, without notions.

An infidel’s first rancorous, vicious sculpture moved in accord with the restless beat of information pervading their borders, slinking from the hallowed distortions of their quiet mountains, no longer sanctuary, but a temporary precipice of wavering conviction, creeds tarnished by the unknown and the ignorant. Was this one more fiend waiting to poison their blood, awash their ichor in the wasteland of shadows, nocturnal splendor caught and enamored by the raucous decadence shackled to their wares? For a moment, murder and mayhem stirred his impassive stretch of limbs and movement, motions stoked by fervent, untamed hostility, animosity lacquered to the strings and filaments of turbulent tendons, contemptuous boleros, but further ahead, his puncturing eyes captured in the appearance, the silhouettes, of those unfamiliar and not. The GildedBlade, worn and tired, reaching the stranger first, the unknown head of another femme, sword extended, rapier brandished. Instead of running his own cutlass through the frame, the body, of the interloper, he snagged the words formulated, the creeds dictated, the nuances and sentiments expressed through quick interventions and inventions; calculations brewing upheaval through trenchant, mordant desperations.

He was not a believer of salvation (because he tore it away from the reels of tranquility, because she smothered serenity in the sinuous bend of his coiled, curled treachery), but now, when the world heaved his patriots, his soldiers, his people into the throngs of an unforeseeable chaos, he listened. His pace slowed, his head conveyed the slightest of nods to both mares, a brief introduction formed between cold, rough lips, “Deimos. Lord of the Basin,” and then he reveled in the silence, in the strangled threads of his suffocating reticence. Notions, details, particulars and facts nagged at the back of his Machiavellian mind, a constant cataclysm of stratagems and ruses, carried upon the radioactive hymns of mercurial rust.