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Erebos was attentive, poised, eyes and soul riveted squarely upon the horned femme, appreciating the layers of history stoked amidst rabble and ruin. The past, the experiences, the weight of so many things could instigate, incense, and fuel motivation, spark inspiration, tempt ambition, and he’d be eager to see where the lines of the mountains would take her. Helovia had a way of twisting foundations, of promising oblivion, of plunging each and every soul into its casket and catacombs, ripping apart innocence until there was a hollowed shell, a vessel, either fighting or stumbling, crawling, dying.
Then they scorched over the topic eating at his essence, distorting the rippling accord of his charismatic persona – the pretenses frayed apart, the mask fell, and he visibly flinched, a momentary shudder, a harsh, recoiling, unrelenting entity of his father gone. He felt whittled away down to nothing, naught more than a bitter distortion of the exuberance he once shared, held, nestled in his gallant heart, wanting to leave, wanting to retreat, to lose himself in the memories, in the failings, in the way his life had crashed down around him. “Sorry for your loss,” he choked out, staring at the ground, at the nestling of small shoots and leaves trying to become saplings, attempting to forge out roots, when he felt entirely pulled away from rudiments of his existence. Not a General, not a soldier, not anything more than an instrument of faltering smiles and awakening discord; the foolish prince with a tipping crown. Tiamat’s words were muted, soft, dulcet against his ears, but incapable of truly destroying the caustic, tarnished filaments of his hopes and dreams (his sire’s smile, proud of what his son had accomplished, the protective stance as he thundered against onslaughts and tyranny, as he notched another success, another triumph, another promise fulfilled). They echoed and curled, we will learn to rise again, coiling along his temple until he wanted to shout back at her (how?), roll menace and frustration across his tongue, become that raving, molten fury locked within his chest, within his bones, sinking down into pernicious veins and tainted whims. The boy couldn’t imagine a time when he’d be truly mended, soothed, assuaged from the potent venom sliding through his wares – but still, he didn’t yell, he didn’t unleash his wrath, his contempt, his feverish abhorrence upon the world and all its crimes. He didn’t even move away from the healer’s touch, her attempt at comfort (because she knew too, how it felt to lose someone bigger and larger than they could ever be; a pillar, a backbone, and no one there to fill the void).
The General tried to move past it, tried to pretend nothing was amiss, tried to lower the simmer of his raging heart, but the damage had been done; a small smile barely reaching his lips, not even close to his eyes, punctured into the lapse of judgment, of secrets, of specious onslaughts tearing him to shreds, poised upon Wessex as if she were another tether for him to grasp, to hold onto. “Perhaps you’d like to accompany me on patrol soon?” Anything to get him away from the tempest brewing on the surface of his skin, feverish and cantankerous, a diversion meant to sweep him entirely aside, or where he could throw himself off the nearest peak.
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