The winter Lord followed the lines amongst the sand, chilling, wanton, bold, and ferocious, clinging to particles of mercilessness as the world forced him to change again. Like so many times before, he failed to embrace the act of erosion: he growled, bared his teeth, sought disaster and demolition – concocted pieces and plots of rapier remorselessness and insolent iniquities, and conducted silent loathing within his skull. He resisted, a rock, a stone, a monolith, only twisting and eroding after millennia had touched, scorched, and maimed, planting his feet so firmly into the ground he may have started roots, became one more frozen oeuvre for the Siberian landscape. But the realm shifted, the powers folded and morphed all over again, and despite being one of the firmer, more resolute pieces of the puzzle, once stagnant, once constant, once impenetrable, he was coerced into morphing, into breaking, into restructuring the feeble, flawed portions of his life. Reaching down into the ramparts of his weaknesses, however, was a disturbing motion he’d discovered at a frequent, alarming rate; and the days of simply standing amongst the shadows, brooding, hating, corrupting, and devouring were depleted, finite, finished. The throne he’d presided upon had become all the more confining, chaining, curling over the dominion, the might, the potency he sought, carried, and protected – the more he carried his crown, the more his weaknesses showed. And while all the Reaper yearned to do was bury his defects, imperfections, and deficiencies, the empire had already seen him for what he was worth: death, battles, and blood. Sometimes destruction, debauchery, and devastation were not what the Basin needed, no matter what they, he, and others craved. If he did too little, if he said naught, if he was encompassed further and further into his Stygian wake, then what would he have accomplished? How would he be remembered? He wanted to be feared, and he wanted to be understood, and he somehow wanted to comprehend the others in his herd, however fleeting, however timeless, however intangible the feeling was.

Despite his son’s youthful insistence and exuberant encouragement, the monster didn’t dwell on the notion of making friends. He was likely a poor companion, incapable of much conversation beyond means of war, skills, and strategies; gone were the days of presiding near Huyana and tracing over so many unsaid things (she always knew what he meant, how he felt, but she wasn’t there – so he said nothing to no one, to anything), and it had become the same indulgent pattern – nod, take a name, remember a face, indulge them with a rank, grant them access to the wintry world, stare and protect and recite another silent vow, explain in what little ways he could when they were hurt, when they were angry, when he couldn’t figure out the social meanings and conjectures behind their concerns, their phrases.

Maybe it was too late. Maybe he was too far-gone. Maybe he was meant to be as miserable as the day he discovered his magic, maybe he was meant to be as wretched as the days where he’d learned to channel, harbor, and crave it, and maybe he wouldn’t be able to alter himself into anything but the stony, impassive, nonchalant heathen he’d become. But he still tucked a promise within his frozen chest, within his nefarious heart, to not let his realm, his dominion, fail due to his shortcomings.

His strides were massive beacons of blighted, ravenous movement; he carried himself across the sand and shoal like a tyrannical behemoth, like he owned it, like he cherished it, like he christened and anointed it as his - just as much as the ice, just as much as the glaciers (and he remembered towering mounds of dunes rising from the tides, his sister teasing him further down the lane, his father’s ashen, fiery presence a flickering, beating bulb of light and contentment – it had been his once – and now it was gone). Fleeting and quick, full of iron, of detachment, of battlefield crescendos and warrior hymns, he arched beneath the pressing barbs of the moon and reigned about the darkness, trying to embark upon this new journey without a specific pathway set in mind or matter. Instead, Deimos chiseled his way out of the frozen tundra and into the midst of his past, and while they would never be the Moonlit Tides of Isilme, he wondered, pondered, if they could help him resurrect fragments of olden days, before he was the Reaper, before he was marble, before he was a statue of licentiousness and acrimony.

@[Ashamin]