DEIMOS

The Reaper

The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose.

Death in living impasse, waiting for the finality of destruction, sowing and reaping persecution through callous, ruthless indifference, annihilation seeping and pervading from his bones, from his sculpture of reticent ferocity. He stood amongst the wicked tundra, surveying, speculating, contorting mayhem from the tips of his daggers to the serrated tip of his rapier, a twisted, annihilating force of mayhem and distortion, calamity endowed in the quiet, unattainable fortress of his solitude – when curiosity was stoked by the arrival of Arah’s griffin flapping overhead. At first, the notion that their Impersonator had somehow managed to maim herself into another maelstrom conjured a rancorous ferocity, a brief growl, an unholy sibilance through his lungs, but the rancor died away at the slow, listless, languid wings, the encouraging clicks of its beak. Something else brewed within the masses, serious enough to warrant his business and intrigue, and with only the slightest reluctance (because he’d much rather brood in the hymns of the violent, of the monstrous, of the heathen he’d become and those he sought to destroy), he followed the gliding eagle-lion. They pursued along the sweeping boundaries of the winter sovereignty, and he encompassed, possessed, grasped the realm of its element; chilling, rapacious, and wolfish, breathing demise into each step, crooning acrimony with each stride. He spied figures ahead, neither prompting suspicion, one instantly recognizable and likely dealing with the other; ivory, pale, Arah’s fixture, and the stranger, golden and furnished with a sword. His approach, shadowed, apathetic, frozen and Laodicean, an intimidating, severe structure laden, layered and lacquered with devil’s puissance and infernal exposition, was furnished with a subtle nod of his cranium towards both, and then speculation registering on the golden stag. Was this another offering from the Threshold, capable, accomplished and adept, or a weakling, rescued from the boundaries by Arah’s kindness? He tilted his head in vague curiosity, the piercing slate of his stare grasping the stallion’s stature, pondering the worth, the measure, of his life. Vocals, like beasts from the mountaintop, wolves stalking the summits, conjured and brewed in the denizen of his calculations, of his machinations, of his schemes and intrigues. “Deimos, Lord of the Basin.” Bestial conjectures, scythes, cutlasses, augured predilections and inclinations towards the licentious, uttered a single query mottled with a thousand unsaid. “Who are you?” Judgment day, rancorous and seething, loathing and scintillating, the maddening press of trials and appraisals.