Sometimes he avoided the world. Sometimes the world avoided him. The lonely arrangement was suitable, simple, and concrete. He didn’t deserve the rites, the practices, the arts of finesse or camaraderie, the semblance of assurances and oaths, for death had bled through his veins for too long, he’d mastered the bitter eloquence of barbarity ages before, and he didn’t believe in second, third, or fourth chances. But in random moments, he’d aspired to courting the opportunity, the vestige, of those virtuous snippets: when the rain had kissed his pelt and scorched his skin and he’d felt free, when the icy mountains reigned supreme, and when the sea rolled across his limbs, reminded him of first homes. Then, for surely he’d overstepped a line, it’d been taken just as quickly, just as swiftly as it’d came, and the dark Lord, with his insouciant brow, with his indifferent shades, with his twisted, nefarious, rancorous heart, would pretend as if everything and everyone was beneath him, because it was easier than nursing the wounds left behind. He lived amongst pretenses and ghouls, wraiths and phantoms, touching over the strokes of memories and the acrid plunges of bestial plains – he wove anarchy through the threads of his savage plumes and the heat of his coiled brawn, and the iniquitous trail led him to slaughter and to ruin and to everything else in between (life: burned and mauled and ripped apart, cords upon cords of dominance, of supremacy). So as the void wrapped itself around his form, as it clung and stuck and webbed over his muscles and his soul, he knew naught more than the rush of danger, than the stench of treachery, than the zeal, the fervor, the ardor, of damnation and strife. To even offer the Haruspex a bite, a taste, a flavor of the realm settled around his satanic skull had been a costly endeavor, and his eyes flickered off towards the rolling horizon, feeling infinitely juvenile and foolish, as if he were a lad again racing against the tide. The notion to disappear, to fade into the backdrop, to bleed back into the shadows, was an overbearing sentiment.
 
So he didn’t take note of the paint’s waning motions, he didn’t take care to heed the approach of the other beast, flicking an ear absentmindedly towards the soft murmuring in response – the Reaper thought to offer naught more, glancing along the line between withdrawing and deciphering, The only thing alerting him to foreboding, to a glimpse of tribulation, was a flailing of the other’s companion, and he maneuvered his cranium rapidly to scrutinize the enigma, catching the fleeting feet of the deer, before Ashamin’s maw came to stretch out before his deadly, lethal, deleterious frame.
 
A sense of panic manifested through his chest, thoughts tumbling over one another in haste to beat the next. What on earth was he doing? Wasn’t the Haruspex aware of his magic, of his abilities, of the toxic, fatal, skeleton he carried with him day in and day out? What was his goal, his purpose, in reaching towards agony and demise? The speck of loyalty he held for the mountains, for the ice, for the glaciers, were always extended towards his kin, even if they didn’t hold in the same regard, he’d never attempt to brandish them with the keen, toxic edge of his powers – what if this one died here, spilled and spoiled against the rocks and the dunes? Marking one of the few instances in his entire life where he aimed to retreat, his hind limbs pedaled backward, sailing against the sand, nostrils flaring, voice exuding a brief inferno of alarm: “Do not-“, before the touch of the diviner’s muzzle came to rest across his shoulder and he wondered just how wise this individual was.