Fire - it licked and scorched, fueled and torched, kindled and keened behind his eyes while he slept, brought him dreams and reverberations of a world tethered to his lineage, to his father encased in brimstone and embers, coals and ash. It funneled and churned, boiled and seethed, and all he could see were infernos licking tendrils of darkness, neither assuaged nor soothed by the shadows, combining, conjoining, into a heathen’s maelstrom, a devil’s opus, a noxious, Tartarean splendor. He opened his gaze and thought his sire was in his presence, simmering and stoking in the darkness of the cavern, brilliant and blazing, luminescent and coiled, full of boldness, resolution, promise, so his heart frothed in one of those miniscule, hopeful gestures, beat frantically, chased a lingering, childhood ambition – and only awakened to silence, trenchant anarchy. No Ignatius, no Isilme, no toxic throes of Isilme calling him home, only the burn seeping and slithering down his spine, exploding in the infernal, nefarious ducts of his mind, carnivore amore slinking, reminding, beckoning in sweet, indulgent siren song. He hid his disappointment, his pain, his torment, his torture, in taut, rigid, unyielding, predatory fixtures, cold-blooded machinations rocking and ricocheting, struggling to ignore the bestial expanse flooding his senses, depriving him of anything, of everything, but the wild, savage tempest building and brewing through his body. Maybe it was betraying him, maybe it was sacrificing him back into the winds, back into the soil, taking and absconding the eldritch hymns and the unholy vows, the creeds and convictions, removing him from the inside out, layered and lacquered to devastation one more time. In vain, the Reaper struggled and floundered, pressed a step into the cavern floor and lurched when it coiled and struck like vicious, vehement cinders, leaned his skull against the cold arches of the anointed aperture and glanced over his kingdom – pondered if this was how he was to die, sinking between the gallows and the thirteen steps, devoured by a fire he couldn’t cease. There was no relief, no sanctum, no refuge in his comfortable havoc, in his settled decadence, and the Lord of winter shuddered, shackled and chained in an ancient combustion.

It ached and haunted, it plunged and harpooned, and eventually he could do naught but respond to its pull, to its taunting, to its alluring, torturous enticements, a scythe turned to moth, a monster turned to lamb, flaming, blistering, and smoldering his way down rocky pathways and glacial tides. There was no relief, no moment of clarity, no singular stretch of junctures where he could cry out his endless queries, his enduring curiosity, his cold-blooded machinations, following ruin and destruction through the chaotic interludes. Perhaps Ignatius, maybe Stone, had come to claim their son, reminded him of their horrors, their trepidations, their love sheltered and secured beneath the cauldron of mayhem and brutality (they were taken, taken, taken before he had a chance to say goodbye; the only moment he missed from Isilme, when he didn’t return in time). Somehow, someway, he’d meandered and managed to bow his head against the sweltering waves and the flourishing current, beguiling his demonic ministrations, intoxicating the swoon, the fiery abyss cloaking his soul. What was one more step to the might of Cinnoru and the swirl of Poseidon? Sanctuary? A haven? A port in the ferocious storm? An end to a maddening pulse, a vile haze?

But something else crooned in his ear, and he turned, twisted, tried to dash it away from his surroundings, drown it commanded, vanish it demanded, and all at once he lurched from his coaxed whims, from his spellbound tenacity, and hissed against the rise, the fall, of another controlling his existence. While he smoldered, while he burned, the beast shifted to face the barbaric storm dictating his death, uttered one more defiant tirade against the world, so the realm, so the behemoth, could remember the rebellious, subversive demon he tried to exploit. “No.”


[Fine by me! But I'd also like to keep the thread moving along. ;D]

Death, you bring death, and destruction to all that you touch.