It took him days to reach his home.
 
The King’s movements were slow, laborious, tired, and listless. His wounds had long since stopped their bleeding, but hindered and tightened motions all the same. He didn’t dare twist his neck. He didn’t dare look anywhere else except the path ahead, forging for snow and ice and chilling, inhospitable winds, ceasing motions only to dunk his head in fresh water and relieve his eyes of their burning, searing pain. The cuts to his flesh ached, the laceration along his nape smothered, and his hind had become a slave to misery and agony.
 
But his nefarious soul was alive and burning with conquest, with triumph, with undisputable relish. Lucifer’s motif, Mephistopheles’ design, the devil’s own withered, decrepit handiwork, fervor and ardency beat a heathen crescendo in the merciless wails of his cracked, brutal figure, lent him solace when pain crept through his skull, lent him sanctuary, refuge, and devastation when agony chipped away at his infernal nothingness.
 
The Reaper had wanted more – so much more. He’d craved bloodshed and violence and absolute villainy; he’d yearned for merciless, fiendish friction, when malevolence and mutiny had morphed into acrimonious indulgence, when he’d watched his enemy fall, when he’d listened to the havoc flood their surroundings. But most of all, he’d longed for the death of the Pegasus, bleached bones and haphazard feathers fraying and falling apart, silence strung on a decaying heart, ichor pouring out of gaping wounds, scavengers hunting and prying flesh and marrow from one of their own. He afforded no mercy to those who sought to reign over the Basin, who thought to scrape and abscond and take from their cold, calculating veins; proved they were might and dominion, power and influence, persistence and persuasion all over again. If it warranted anything thereafter, if it meant that the infernal fool would never prey on their home again, remained to be seen.
 
But he’d be there again if the inept cretin did – and he’d slash him apart, bit by bit, bite by bite, until he was only ash and embers, scalded and smoking rubble roasting in the distance. No pyre, no funeral; just a mere spit of a worthless carcass left in the wake of disaster and abominations.
 
Deimos’ eyes widened at the sight of the crumbling sentinels, at the rising fortitude of mountains and beauty. He bent low beneath their stare, wandered under their mass, their fortitude, their judgment and decadence, remaining upright only because his daggers knew their way to hell, because resilience and resolution, passion and endurance, cold-blooded persistence carved and sculpted its way through his titanic opus. The beast loosened the smallest of sighs as he strained closer and closer to the lake, as his strides simply became dragging arches through the building snow, as his skull craved beautiful, blinding, elegiac destruction, and his body desired naught more than rest and repose. He breathed, vigilant and ruthless, and formed a smile around the wolf pelt contained in his mouth, embracing the feast of friction, the solidified anarchy of the Basin’s pride, power, and mettle. He, the devil’s backbone, had conquered again, had lived to see another day, and had taken back what was rightfully theirs.
 
The wounds would always be worth it.