The pavilion, the weight, the hallowed howls of victory contorted and beckoned the merciless forms, and he watched them maneuver closer, closer, but his fevered mind saw them only as ghosts, whittled merchants of the past, motioning through thickets and plains of ice and snow. One with spots, dotted and patterned, one smirking, snickering, laced and lanced with poisonous concoctions, one with burning tendrils and ashen hues, one with rain slinking and drifting, threatening to drown him in her wake, and he stared at these wild hallucinations until voices pricked through the merciless haze, and they were gone. Standing amidst the borders was a stranger, offering him salutations and thoughts of conquest, another, their lone Time Mender, granting him assuaging, soothing sensations of sanctuary – he closed his gaze for a moment, swayed and swindled in the summer breeze, forgoing artifices and nonchalance, breathing in the hours and junctures falling away. They spiraled and convoluted, distorted and spiraled, stitching back the ruptured seams, cleaning out the infected wounds, tending to the lacerations, and then they were no more, riddled and schemed away by the powers of time, by the measures of gods and deities. He opened his eyes to clearer, more vivid imagery, narrowing them immediately, honing the keen intellect, the wild calculations, the searing, scorching parallels of an unrelenting, menacing figure, staring at the masses: D’art’s daughter, asking if Confutatis had fallen, the Forsaken, reaching past prior tribulations and circumstances, even Thranduil, the reason he’d gone to do battle with the indignant foe. Through all of this, he said not a word, chiseling and formulating the sentences, the doldrums, in his mind, hastening the crowd with his immoral shades and his decadent upheaval, brushing sedition into the haze, into the presence, of their dangerous, heathen whims. “Thank you,” his blunt, appreciative tones reached out to the throng, courting towards the Songbird, then Aviya, Grimalkin, and Ophelia – the Thief was merely granted a slight lifting of his brow, as if daring him to touch the bone armor resting at his daggers. At once, he’d hoped to deliver them all pieces of the carapace, break apart and split the bones one by one, toss them towards anyone and everyone who had ever been affected by the merciless harpy and the skull-banshee, the howling Regime and the hapless empire, but realized it would have little use outside of its shell, not as striking mementos, memories of horror and terror. As the queries burned along their mouths, the Reaper, the monster, the infidel, stared at the pale panoply, and realized the conquest could be shared with each of them as a story, as a mythos, of another day where the femme had been defeated. His murmuring came quiet, distant, dragged and drug through his unholy tongue. “Confutatis has been subdued. I was rewarded her armor.” But the unsaid things still lingered, frayed and chaotic, rambling and fumbling, questioning and enigmatic: would she rise again? Would she bother? Would she dare? Was she the licentious phoenix, or had they finally vanquished her?