They were a squall, they were a menace, they were a tyrannical piece of tempestuous souls gathered for the rise of dominance, of supremacy, of chicanery and bestial arts – and they ran. The prince led the entire way, down into the legions and leagues of forest, fading in and out of Stygian shadows until he was just another piece of the immoral backdrop, fighting off the blackened fiends encrusting his heart; another one of the wolves, another one of the foul, the decrepit, the specious, rampaging because he could, because his wanted to, because his mind was otherwise a tomb, a catacomb, a wasteland, and he was tired of its cobwebs. An infernal spread of mischief pulsed and pervaded against his heart, and he must’ve seemed spellbound by its efforts, for his head swung down to the drifting beasts at his feet, the wild and wicked Orsino (eternally galvanized by every unrelenting purpose known to condemnation), and the curious, inquisitive Enyo, who fanned out her feathers and clicked her beak. It’d been the griffon who regaled him with her predilection to devilry, just the same as the other two, already doomed and damned to a life of trials, tribulations, and sneaky, subversive measures of defiance and diversion. Had she been capable of drilling thoughts into their heads yet – for she was too young, too new, too fresh – she would’ve spun all the merriments of the rebellious across their skulls, and they would’ve laughed, would’ve grinned, would’ve smirked.
 
But he could feel it regardless, that deep, endless bounty of her interest – why they’d settled here, amongst the eternal, warped, knotted trees, where everything seemed to combine into a labyrinth, a warren, a maze, a puzzle with no end. So the prince’s gaze softened, and he looked down upon her raven-esque form, smiling. “I lost a battle here once,” he proffered, and he could see her brows furrow, the mind whirling, working its way through monsters and defeat, what it meant to be triumphed over, bludgeoned until there was nothing left. Orsino huffed, grunted, snarled, stared out over the horizon, pretending not to still feel the traces of anguish, of bitterness, of rancor. But Erebos, mighty, stalwart, and every bit still a cretin, bestowed a conviction, a promise, into the void. “But I’ll try to never do so again.” The child griffin nodded, accepted this vital information, the pact between companions and kin; the way her enchantments crawled and seethed inside her, the way they were all together - shades of predators and demolition. They’d be devastation and ruin some day too, locked and cloistered and tethered like lifelines, like fiends, like magnificent opuses of the demonic oeuvres, cast aside from the reaches of Hell – reigning supreme for their herd, for their empire, for the Reaper.
 
Then, they ventured, deeper and deeper still into the verdure, into the midst, lost, atrocious souls, an inspiration to infernal misdeeds and iniquitous sojourns, a crusade by heathens, by forged blades; blinking past the memories of storms, of bear jaws, of monsters crawling, rasping, and destroying – because eventually, he’d be the devastation everyone feared, deadly and poetic, justified and vengeful.

[Open to anyone. <3]