I am a brewing storm. Eyes flashing, tail sweeping anxiously, ears tied back to my head. The world has become eerily still and I cannot help but think it is the perfect backdrop for the oncoming hurricane. Kaos, his name is poison, spat from the mouths of those whose lives he has since destroyed. The land itself was a victim of his passionate crime.Kaos a porcelain God swept in by the sea and greeted by his fellows as the Princely man he proposed to be. Forsake such pithy hopes, for he is no more than smoke and bones, knitted flesh and weeping darkness. However, by her own hand, Helovia brought ragnarok  into her bosom. Now the world around me lay dying, each step pressing black dirt and brown grass to the side.

Horses were fleeing, turning tail, racing to escape the growing shadow of Kaos’ influence. Lands I once wandered as a girl were now lost to a thick miasma, choking the life away from all it met as the mongrel God stood laughing from his skeleton throne. I did not see, but I heard of horses throwing their potential to waste in a feeble attempt at fighting him. It. Knocked them down, gored, skewered, singing out a sweet tune on the fraying thread of hope this cursed island yet clung to. Some were whispering, the occasional passerby that still dared to dream, that something new was happening, that some new force of magic was at work in the background. Some called it their last resort (“The Gods have not forsaken us!”), while others treated it as it deserved to be - just another one of Kaos’ tricks.

Suddenly there she was, like a black sentinel in the already growing darkness of this place. I have searched high and low, seeking, believing that someday I would find her. That perhaps I would have the strength to lead my errant mother home. She loved me, right? She wanted me to be happy above all else, right? She - “Corporal Siala, how good of you to crawl out from under your rock. It took the world ending but, here you are.” the words are sharp, bitter tasting on my tongue as I stand there, still and unmoving like the great stone centurions that guard the Basin. We are not alone, unfortunately, for a blue woman has capered through the withering trees to greet (“Sialia?”) as well. My whole being has been muted, so chaotic (fitting yes?) were my thoughts, a whirlwind mess of garbled jargon and inhospitable logic. There was no sense to anything right then, for all I really wanted was to strike out and hurt her, cause this woman the terrible kind of pain that she left me in. But I knew I would not, could not, so I stand there wondering if she will even recognize the creature I have become in her absence.



"Talk."