Deimos was born of wreckage, demolition, earth, and fire, and all of them conspired into a mass of elements and vestiges carved from death itself. He moved without inhibition, he stalked without pretense, he sculpted Machiavellian defiance without apprehension - cold and dastardly, treacherous and powerful. He was permitted condemnation, he was rewarded with bestial shades and the rapture of demise, with the promise of conspiring cataclysms, chilling, scored, incised, rancorous reverberations – he was the Reaper, a moving scythe, a brandished sword, an eternal reminder of Hell and all of its iniquities.
 
But today was not to be one of rapacious claws and licentious discord. Instead, it seemed to swarm, breathe, and brood in curiosity.
 
Perhaps one of his flaws, or small, minute virtues, was the scope and range of his intrigues. He was forever endowed with the endless possibilities of the world, of its creatures, of its fiends and cretins – how to maneuver them across a chessboard, how to pry a pawn from another’s grasp, how to shuffle and distort and tether them all to the damned mayhem brewing in his mind. How could he mutilate and destroy an enemy? How could he obliterate an opponent? How could he ruin one more noxious scavenger? How could another benefit his herd, his empire, his compatriots? How could one more offer ominous opportunity, foreboding turmoil, dastardly deeds, for the palace beneath mountains and ice? How could one more bestow that sinuous unit of power, of might, of strength and fortitude, into the colossal wares of their crowned anarchy?
 
His eyes narrowed across the morning abyss, catching, snaring, on the movement of blue and shells (Tiamat – sweet and sanguine, somehow remaining unbound by the nefarious bits of hate strewn between rocks and glaciers), on the motion of a stranger at her heels, and the older fellow he’d seen time and time again. There, the interest curled along his calculating mind, and he followed along the lines of hoof prints in the snow, hunting, stalking, a composed, wolfish brew of silence and iniquity, before sliding before all of them.
 
The Reaper proffered a bob of his skull to each, perhaps even deeper to Tiamat (since her healing prowess, he’d had no aches, no pains, from the legion of new scars crossing over his nape and hind), and then the scalding, brooding contortion of his narrowed, piercing eyes pinpointed directly to the newcomer. He was a large beast, likely drove through the snow and banks as if he could plow them into oblivion, painted, antlered, and seemed to resonate a quiet measure. The Basin’s ability to utilize his form had already sprung through the demon’s ominous, foreboding skull, but he said not a word about it. Instead, he parted his jaws, keen and blunt. “Welcome to the Basin. I am Lord Deimos.” His stare moved briefly over to Tiamat, arching his brow in inquiry, in pondering over why she’d snagged the Colossus from wherever he’d come from (what were her plans, her designs?), before twisting his chilling gaze back to the stranger. “Who are you, and what do you seek here?”