The boy and fox sauntered through one of their preferred haunts, gallivanting because it was freedom and disaster, soullessness and monstrous, ruthless and satisfying. They wandered amidst ghouls and goblins, combing endlessly for treasures neither could claim, pretending to be wraiths and demons, unaware of how much their souls and beings had altered into true fiend fruition. For a time, for a space, they lurked amongst shadowy corridors and howled at the moon, at the snow, laughed until their ribs hurt, gazed across the endless, Stygian horizon for a chance, for an opportunity, to harness strength and unleash power. Temptation stoked a fine edge in their hearts, in their minds, in their blistering, smoldering, searing inclinations, urges and impulses kneeling on barbed wire. They patrolled a vast empire of hazes and mirrors, of inky reflections and terrible tremors, watching the ghostly frame of their breaths mingle between the snow and the sky. Beneath boughs they feasted on runes and puzzles, stared upon labyrinthine pools and collections of blood – heightened their awareness of danger, deception and treachery – then wondered when they’d be the ones everyone feared. Their steps were mirages and their footfalls were calculating, eventual menaces, potential cretins, a foundation of fools and Machiavellian guises, and for all the world they played along a great many stages, contorting the arts of their satanic brows and their bewitching, alluring sketches. One smiled and the other brooded, one smirked and the other marauded, and together they were whittled pieces of foreboding flesh, minds emboldened and tethered together in discordance, in hostility, in the funneling and fueling for something, for everything.

They forced away unpleasant notions and sentiments. They forgot envious requiems and petty jealousies. They discarded and neglected the feats of failure. Instead, they listened to the wind and the snow, the ice and the rime, the piercing void and the hollowed sanctions of the nefarious – strung together in features and faces of the charismatic, of the gentle, of the ebullient.

The prince heard a stomp nestled amongst the thickened wood, and listened to the trees betray their other prisoner. He tilted his head for a fraction, giving way to curiosity, to friction, to movement and motion other than destruction and mayhem; following over an enticing, luring fragment of scents and smells he’d encountered eons before, and another he had no notion of. Even while Orsino grumbled behind him, for the kitsune would rather prance back into midnight shards and collect more ruin, more exploitation, more demonic forces for their future, the prince meandered and stoked, courted and shuffled, as if he were a piece of the frozen forest. Only when they’d arrived amidst the same shadows as the girl and her companion, only when he recognized the speckle of pelt and the elongated horn, did he call across the nocturnal boughs. “Sjal!” He grew closer, losing his imitation of a monster or wraith, plaguing the otherwise malignant world with a grin, with a smile, with a radiant glow of regal abandon and captivating glee. “Congratulations on your companion!” Orsino hissed something barbaric, and Erebos ignored him entirely – stare floating to the griffin, then back to the femme herself (Psyche’s daughter - he reminded himself; a child of the mountains even if she had no yearning to be amidst them). With an effervescent ease, he settled into the pockets of shadows and brutality, beguiling and unwinding, kind and considerate (and so, so very enticed by the lengths, depths, of his curiosity). “How've you been?”