At another interval the colossus might have conjured malevolent conjectures and thunderous toils, wreaking havoc, courting dissolution, coveting irreverence – cast off into the Stygian pigments of shadow and disaster, swallowing and consuming the lighter, virtuous hues until each luminescent bulb shuttered out. He might have mauled and murdered, flaying and lacerating and plunging with his long, emblazoned knife, casting away all the coiled, meandering merchants of beneficence and repose, throwing away the clamor of the innocent; had the scent of another not lingered amidst the threshold of ocean and tide. For a few moments, he did naught about it – continued in his damning march and decadent stride, reaching across pillars of sand and stone and relishing the devastating power melded and molded from his movements, each a work of Mephistopheles’ sorcery, Lucifer’s brushstrokes, Amontillado’s cask, until they too fizzled in plucked, decayed, prestige. The monster’s skull didn’t twist towards the scent, familiar, not malicious, not abhorrent, but instead lingered, watching the ebb and flow of the serpent waves rolling across the damp shore, picturing pieces of empires beneath their hollowed revolution, pariahs simpering and sinking at the siren’s beck and call, a world beyond their own, touched and tortured by darkness; intangible, unreachable, all the same. In the breadth of the sea’s winter fragments, he posed for the gallows, standing still in a cold, unholy clarity, glaring and staring and seething in the grip and grasp of domination, a supremacist’s prose fighting, aching, longing, and lingering for a nefarious, predacious prize – lonely and miserable all the same. As the ocean pressed, stretched, glimmered in the wake of the lunar torment, he was nothing and everything: Hades forgotten and adrift.

The piercing eyes shifted away from the water’s throng, catching portions and glimmers of the stranger tucked into the abyss, placing his heedless stare upon the distortion amongst the open grove and eaves. He did naught for a stretch of time, breathing faint plumes of chilling air, granting signs of his mortality, penetrating the evening carnage with his acrimony and debauchery, piecing together the forms of recognition: the deer, much like Thranduil’s, but the larger stag not encompassed or bound by gold. Too much silver and sable, streaked together in the whole of the luminescent plume: Ashamin, the Haruspex. The beast whom had talked to their lightning God and received nothing for his efforts, the manifestation of hard work, of determination, of keen skills awaiting their opportunity to embark – and that was all Deimos knew of him – another member of his domain whom he hadn’t touched, whom he didn’t truly know. He could hear Erebos’ words nearly mocking him in their glory, in their hope, in their polished exuberance, as if one day his social skills would somehow rub off on his father, and the pillager, the ravager, the desolate, torn behemoth shifted ever so slightly, becoming whole, not a mirage, not a wraith, not a phantom, embarking closer to the oracle. It was a slow, methodical motion, embarking on the nonchalant, predatory fringes of tidings and ferocity, slinking in taut, rigid contortions to grant and bestow Ashamin an opportunity of escape, should he yearn for one, before settling into the dust and wake of the earth a few yards away, lowering his crown for a brief nod. When he raised the demonic pieces again, he attempted the smallest arts of conversation, struggling not to grimace at their blunt, empty chords. “Evening, Ashamin.”

@[Ashamin]