Deimos stared into oblivion, that iniquitous, abhorrent gaze locking onto snippets of peace and lacing his acrimony into its virtuous slits, a puncturing lance amongst the trembling horizon, the yearning, burning haze of calamity and destruction. The beguiling creation of his heathen sanctity stood, breathing predilection, shepherding augured travesties, amongst the ethereal world and devoured its aspirations. Ever the blight, the scourge, the plague, the behemoth ushered nothing but the slate of his cruelty, the chilling frost, villainous grandeur, the suffocating expanse of strangled silence. He could ruin the finest halls with his keen predilection, with his overwhelming allure, with the hedonistic elation of heathen munitions, tempt and delude, possess and destroy. He was the black cloud and the decadent dusk that promised wreckage, disaster and decay, the withering contortions and distortions of a realm sundered by maledictions and moroseness. Like a laureate’s grim, morbid mirth, rapture, he was twisted into the armaments of siege and stillness, to prosper violence, to shelter hushed boughs, dissonant serenity. To the gallows and the shadows, executioner and recluse, fostered and renewed in the darkness of passing days, forgotten tranquility stolen by the barbs of sedition, smoldering havoc, severe, enigmatic reticence. Cool, and close to naught, never tempted by the harpsichord rhapsody of virtue and enveloping veils of beneficence, companion to the reaper’s scythe and the deadly cords of immorality; friend to none and enemy to all. Primal duplicity, innate and inherent, lingered in the bestial movements of his chaotic bliss, of his unholy insurrections, of the beating, bleeding heart with its frozen edges and debauched soul. Slaughter and obliteration, lethality and venom carved into each undulating muscle, lacquered and layered piece by piece into his molten, infernal carnage; unrelenting, pending menace coiled into a hallowed, hollow vessel, stitched into stoic friction, into imperial discord.

He heard her appearance before she claimed a voice, the rainchild stroking against ice, twirling in the midst of chilling, ravenous air, unwinding in the ivory abyss. He thought to ignore her, to chase away her presence like so many before, taut, minute motions that offered brutality, intimidation and annihilation, where forgiveness couldn’t reach, where massacre reached a whimsical weaver and seethed in their bitter plaits. His gaze reached elsewhere, studying the vast, evergreen expanse below the tundra’s pale line, the predacious opulence of danger and forbidding, the argent domination blooming against the sky, away from the mystical, fanciful design she contorted and cavorted. But she didn’t allow him the chiseled forlorn expanse, she didn’t grant him the desolation, the malice of a familiar despair and despondency, prospering the dreamy, otherworldly grace that seraphs could charm and offer. She stayed, remained, and he could not help but wonder why. He nearly snarled, yearning for the sanctity of his eternal suffering, everlasting detachment and predatory amour, not the embrace, warm and inviting, of jovial pursuits and effortless candor. Instead, he kept that piercing stare locked onto the earth, escaping her relentless clutches – until her singsong entropy caught his ears, harked and called for his attention. Death, she sang, she crooned, she murmured in the midst, and for some odd reason he felt the need to correct her, that such a calling was not the only thing he was known for (but quickly realizing that it was, this poisonous haze that shattered souls into nothingness, this noxious mortality that ensconced and rippled from his veins). Deep, guttural, and grating, his voice hissed against the flesh of air, swift, pernicious in its own depravity. ”It is Deimos.” He dared not face her, because there was something destructive in her sheen, in the cerulean shape of her frame, and he didn’t want the sinister, moral decay, feeling to flee, be drained, from his chest.