The ethereal fatality, the chilling, sinister devil, breathed over his kingdom and watched from its high ramparts, from his plunging gallows, from his wicked, poised tower. When the night dragged on, quiet apart from the nefarious winds, he settled into the brimming recollection of the past days – felt the rise of ire trickle down the back of his throat, felt the bestial, savage frustration climb and clamber along his sinew – because he was too immersed, too detached, too separated from the ways of others to even know where to begin, how to act, what to do, what to say. Instead of launching regrets, rue, or apologies, he would have rather stayed along his castle walls, basking in isolation, in irritation, for seasons to come. Already, however, the world, his brethren, his kin, had proven those actions were a fatal, hollowed flaw. The more he disappeared, the more he clung to the shadows, the more he unknowingly scorched or tore open so many other things; Arah or Ulrik’s loyalty, alliances, and armistices, consuming all the flares, all the sparks they’d already polished and rendered. Did he want to be known as the ghost, as the wraith, as the unknown King of winter, seen but rarely heard, noticed but barely acknowledged, leading by damnation, by dedication, and ultimately, by ruin?

A query led him down his weary path, away from the boleros of destruction, away from the rampant, devouring taste of predilection, of acrimony, of feral, rampant unsung violence: how? How could he become better? How could he be more for a herd he cherished, for a kingdom he beloved, for a world he’d served diligently?

His notions are broken by the presence of his son, and he took a few tender, fatherly moments to watch the child barrel his way through the earth. Perhaps his only ease was the idea that the child had been allowed to prosper, to grow, without too many woes, without too much weight crossing over his shoulders. He’d seen the ghastly ways of the earth (he’d wandered into the hills of murderers’ intentions, he’d seen the way those of their haunted ilk manifested, waned, and withered), but he hadn’t been forced into isolation, into despair, into ruin. He’d grown, he’d flourished, and he’d blossomed. Deimos couldn’t want anything else for the lad.

A piece of the beast wondered if he could’ve been like that too – if his views, if his identity, hadn’t been so swiftly uprooted and altered on his first birthday. If he hadn’t become the devil’s toy, Lucifer’s sword, Mephistopheles’ favored pawn, would he have been like his youthful son, still bounding across chambers, still leaping over revolutions and tribulations?

The Reaper had no answer. He slipped away from the haunting, poignant hush, and prevailed in the formidable, eldritch contortions, trying not to gleam as the tinier beast threaded his way towards him. The contentment rose in the hint of a smile as Erebos recognized his presence, sculpting his way through rime to reach his side, the companion adrift and aloof (recognizing the savagery of death?), the wild, untamed exuberance on full display as they triumphantly swindled to his form. The infidel, the cretin, the Machiavellian beast, lowered his maw to casually loosen a breath of mortal air across his son’s forelock, as close as he dared to touch, before composing a few searing notes for his child. “Erebos.” A nod was performed, and it was like he’d never been damned at all, a boyish grin sliding over his lips, “I am fine. Yourself?”

i'm not here looking for absolution,

because I found myself an old solution