Confusion, frenzied and chaotic, seemed to be the theme of their skirmish. He hesitated, he paused, he broke step and merely listened, struggled to grasp the strange segment of her movements and motions – for they seemed so fumbling, stumbling, and befuddling. Perhaps he had mistaken Ophelia the Forsaken, believing she’d been granted her title through bloodshed, through war, and had tokens and ages of experience under her isolated veneer and draconic mastermind. Maybe she hadn’t been given her armor through the pledge of crusades and granted its shining exterior amidst graces and bestowals. Was she unseasoned? Was she unschooled? Were all the pompous, arrogant speeches made by the General truly naught, just pieces of information combined to appease the crowd? How had she come so far, and not known how to play on the stage of violence? Of warfare?
His anger almost ebbed – it seemed mundane and foolish. Would he have been furious at a staggering, tottering foal? Would he have been malicious towards a newfound soldier, pledging his heart and soul for the Basin? He knew the answer, and it drummed mercilessly through the folds of his membrane; all their past experiences now seemed so utterly stupid, stemmed and honed by a constant strain of ignorance. She’d churned whatever enchantments she’d held towards him, and in fury, in agony, in panic, he’d lost segments of control. The Reaper didn’t even think to preen or show satisfaction at her failures, and watched as she continued her launch, her attacks, her assailments, drawing a thin line across his mouth, claiming reticence all over again.
But then, like a haunting, poignant reminder, the Lord’s thoughts were interrupted once more. Tied and chained, tethered and grating, she plagued over his mind, reigning, dominating the traces and threads of his memories. You can’t have them, he wanted to yell, he yearned to bellow, because they were his scars, his ruminations, his sentiments, and he’d never deigned to invade hers. He wanted his secrets kept right where he left them, behind his black heart and amidst shadows, and he knew all his previous efforts at not maiming, at not scorching, at not pressing forth and ensuring she bore some of this misery were not going to last.
He succumbed to the pressure, to the distortions, to the acrimony building in an endless cycle throughout his veins. Fight and kill, murder and slay the devilish claws told him, rasping along his muscles and sinew just like when he’d been a child, bloodied and confused. The fuel of his magic rushed and lanced, extorted and exhumed, and while he yearned to plunge his aching cranium into the depths of the nearby lake or hot springs, just to feel whole, just to feel empty of her rampaging through his membrane, he heard movement. From where? How?
Released and liberated from her enchantments, he felt drugged, listless, strange and stupefied (and the minute portion of his skull rampaged that he’d been caught as a victim in her clutches again), listening for a chance to return to the battlefield, to the tundra expanse and the wide-open air. Her motions caught him off-guard, towards the front of his left shoulder, and he swayed, enervated, towards the right, feeling only the slight tip of it graze his skin (a promise of an assault, but nothing more – what were her true capabilities?).
The Reaper tried to shake it all away, the fury, the restlessness, the anxious pull sculpting a cumbersome ardor across his crown, but it drowned and beleaguered him, forced him into retaliation. There could be no more of these head-games, no more of her flying and gliding through his inward possessions; and he thought, perhaps, with the inkling and memory of his feral invocations, she’d take the warning and heed its tangible threads. I could kill you. Don’t make me do it.
The sorcery whispered and crooned in bestial sketches, an outline of demise and upheaval. An acrimonious vice, christening and anointing those it touched with an infernal imbalance; death, it sang, death, it hummed, a dangerous, lethal incantation. It pulsed from him as a wave of monstrous memoires – their first meeting at the Edge’s border, her idiotic rampage, his infidel threats, her sister’s timely arrival the only thing saving her from the brink of quietus. It surged towards the Lady and her dragon, a constant indication he was not to be trifled with.
[@[Ophelia] 3/3. 733 words.
Hit by her magic again, Deimos is caught off-guard by her movement, but only feels the trace of her horn as he dodges to the right. In retaliation, he sends his death magic towards her.]
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[JUDGED] Reap elsewhere [Deimos Birdsong Battle]
