The satanic, nefarious Lord, with his eldritch titan irreverence, with his seditious serration, with his noxious, unearthly, unattainable revere, became the Mephistophelean witness, the rigid, cold, calculating gaze of a hardened villain. Through devilish eyes, through abhorrent breaths, through chthonic decibels and doldrums, he studied, examined, investigated in raw, keen, sharpened silence. The fractious, teetering edge of a knife; others wandered into the curious reception, but the puncturing slate of his stare remained solely upon the banshee and all of the poisonous vectors, the toxic indulgences, the myriad of callous, cruel intricacies lacquered and embedded. The Corporal had found another of their kind, the brutal, the fierce, the undone and unholy, eager and fervent to distort, to maim, to destroy, and all of the feverish contortions, the coiled ministrations, the yearning, longing for bedlam reached through his soul and whispered immoral hymns. Liriope, drawn through the shades of the Threshold, and marched into the icy banners of their supremacist sovereign, could be the next bottled brew, the next enticed beast to roar amongst their avaricious might, claw and pierce the layers of repose and antiquity, glimmer amongst the gallows. For so long the wanton air of his hellish machinations had been worn and frayed away, victory only cast by few, triumph not experienced by his molten crew and their mislaid proportions, tempests unwound and blown over no-man’s land, pale, desolate, untouched, and the rapacious slide of their torrents unanswered. Like all restless barbarians, with their scorching, searing veils and their cloaks and daggers, they fought, allured and beguiled by the hellish convictions of their darkened, emboldened creeds – but for what, for who? Merciless, relentless, remorseless; with only the chords of his wintry empire and his licentious brethren nettled and nestled into the scintillating folds and veins of his terrible, blackened heart – they deserved the taste, the relish, the tang, the ambrosia, the sliding consumption of a kingdom’s entrails fallen by their hands. The Reaper recognized the conniving reveries, the devious raptures, the unwavering demands amongst her brambles and thorns, and permitted the most minute of smirks etched into a corner of his virulent mouth; he wanted it all, every corridor of every kingdom, and deep into the pernicious precision of his bones, he believed this mare would help them achieve that tangible, mutinous goal. Could she manifest revolution, tie sedition into her tongue, foster glory for the chilling ramparts? Could any of them?

She bowed; he was no god, no idol, no deity, only the infernal, diabolical statue of their cold, marbled malevolence, finessed forbidding, pariah to emotion, locked and gleaming in his hostile scabbard until annihilation awakened, brooded, and depravity seethed into the acrimonious concoction. But he permitted her reverence through the gales and distortion, remembered and harnessed the foundations of loyalty; she was another turbulent siege, Tartarean guile, in his predacious flock, and he’d allow her to descend and dominate amongst the heathen brushstrokes of their simmering lair. Even as others gathered, promised her service to his glacial throne, she snipped, she bit, she rankled, and he nearly snickered aloud (processing how the GildedBlade would respond to her snaps, to her growls, to her electrical current of ferocity and valor) – instead, the apathetic haze of his features doesn’t alter, doesn’t change, remaining taut, rigid, and unreachable, all but his lips, conjuring acceptance upon the rancorous brim of his cool tongue. “Welcome to the Basin, Liriope.” Amidst Sialia’s arrival, the burning flames of damnation heightened and relayed, or Deodat’s daughter resonating through the lines of snow, he stayed to watch the newest dog of war bait and lure, if the other femme would slip away from the trap, from the snare set by wily rasps; if he should release his hounds from their cages and pervade the world in gilded anarchy, in swindling bedlam.