She is quick through the light and meager whispers of dawn, touching the cold of frozen ground with deliberate and passionate caresses. Her body quivers and stirs beneath a liquid cloak of bells, silver casings and jewels and chiming winter fractals rising into the thin air like constellations, broken shards of sky, falling just to melt into her skin again, and she moves as a tattered, forlorn ribbon, fluid and flitting and swatches of violent and vibrant hue between the pale of earth and cloud, delicacy equal to the braids and chords and lyrical muscle that sing down her legs, and the freckled liquor of her gowns fight restlessly upon the wind. She races, lonely, unwary, until she is hurting and her lips are dry and parting in time with rasping gasps, and there is a thing in her way, a tall, brooding man, and he is black and blue and sorrow and power and she is recognizing, realizing, and she reaches towards him with a shivering, tired heart.

He is achingly dark and torrid and quaking, too harsh, too real amongst the curvature and pillars of the intricate snow kingdoms, ivory ballrooms, the easy line of the Basin's towers against his shadow, the little waltzes of snowflakes disrupted by the soundless warmth of his breaths. He gathers fallen frost and angels as he parades, artful, torturous, melancholic, almost, and she could not help but admire the aesthetic, careful machinery, the curves and swooping dips, the taut and well-worn tapestry of such a haunting creation, and her forgiving eyes consume the etchings that have made him. His frame does not bow or sway or creak under some ethereal hand, some arbitrary decree, for he is the hand, and he is the decree, and even as the distance screams onward between them, she could feel the prickle and wash of untethered, unadulterated dominance that demanded so of her weakened knees, that he so breathlessly spills upon his crowned coterie, paints upon his council and his wordless lovers with colors of scarlet and gold, and, oh, to be near him, to be wreathed with the brusque thorns of his attention; what bloody tales they could exchange, what truths they could contrive. He is statuesque and bleeding onyx into the ice, glinting softly with the metals of a king's that go eternally unseen by beggars; he is scorning the machinations of summer children, the whimsies of peacemakers, the playful brush of those liberated and unburdened with no more than a turn of his mighty head, the resonating trumpet of his restless, burning glare; he is beautiful, he is hideous, he is exhilarating.

He is the reaper and his scythe, and she remembers him well.

"My Lord Deimos," she says when she reaches him, her sides narrowly heaving, bowing her head and tucking a foot into the space between arm and breast so as to look upon his radiance freely, and she ravages and bores and unfurls her lustful curiosity unto his flesh, fumbling to grasp what it is that he has cast, what it is that he has abused to make his eyes so brutal, but there is only black, sinful and empty, wrong and mouthwatering, and she is ensnared in his many shades of nothingness, of darkness, of wickedness, and there is suddenly foreboding. She finds her voice thrashing behind her teeth, all thick and lavish and velvet and deep, deep as the roars of seas and the cackle of bone against bone, and she asks of him his purpose, his reasoning, here, walking by his majesty's lonesome inside this unforgiving snowglobe, asking that he may bestow some knowledge, some tangibility upon their meeting, some meaning, with an absolute and obvious statement:

"You patrol alone."