Deimos blended into the silence, decadent, brooding and brewing, fractions of hushed friction and harbinger hostilities, choking the grand repose and sanctum of beloved heights and cherished tundra, ripping, tearing, ensnaring the fabric of life until it strung across the tips of his necromancy as weary, withered fragments. Mute transgressions were the satanic harmony of his upheaval, fleeting iniquities bolstered and holstered by the next mingling, molding, immorality scorching the surface of his skin, sin layered upon sin, infernal finery, scintillating and pernicious. Her mellifluous tones didn’t touch him, didn’t reach him, didn’t pluck at the armaments and miradors of towering walls, of ancient rubble and stone maneuvered to resemble his statuesque regime, his structure of apathy and indifference. The monster was too consumed, too ravaged, too viciously, heinously unholy to rekindle any spirit of cordiality, any reckoning of compassionate tombs or tender hymns; the rain mare would be left to wonder where it had gone, where it had vanished, where it bloomed once and fell apart in the latter stretches of his trials and tribulations. If she sought the warmth, the glow, the benevolent shades of kin, she was mistaken in hoping for it here, in the chiseled, cold, desolate and dissolute haze of his corruption, of his destruction, of his ruin and annihilation. He had nothing to offer her, no absolution, no indulgences, no whimsical truths to make the world a better place – he did not wish for it, lament for it, yearn for it like she did, wild showers seeking the sun. He’d been cast into shadow and wickedness, seared by devils’ hands, caressed by vile venom, woven into the pinnacle of peccadilloes, and would be remembered for cruelty, for vice, for death and desecration. She lingered in the boughs of unbroken melodies, but he couldn’t join here there, in the shards of luminescence and grace, in the pieces of grandeur and perseverance, because bit by bit he would dismantle her, everyone and everything, to devour the world with his puissant knife. When she spoke, nothing more than a soft sigh, a listless, wandering trace of humanity, he turned his blank features back to her, catching the voice and letting it slide over his dark ruminations. He was equally as sharp, the piercing, puncturing juncture crossing over villainous tongue and mouth, grating, harsh, blunt moments later, a vicious slash of scythe and sword. “I am not your reaper.”

His eyes bore into hers, chilling, distant, nonchalant structures that wreaked havoc and destroyed hapless vessels travailing their dangerous depths, bestowing naught but that icy core of his unyielding menace, forever a threat, eternally presaged wreckage. She whispered his name, drew it with tranquility, with serenity, and he’d never heard such an arrangement for the murmuring of terror and horror, the personification of peril, so for a moment he is stilled, rigid and taut again, letting the reverie slide over his hide. Then the whim disappears, lost under the inky irreverence, scorned by the lull, beguiled and allured to sacrifice. His movements, barbaric, sinuous, sinister motions of undulating precision, of calculating carvings, of meticulous sedition, brought him closer to her stance – so when he breathed, callous, bestial croons of life and death, the ghosts of vapor touched upon her skin, stole fancies and made them calamities. In the following calm and persecution, he felt the snowflakes remain idle on his hide, before they too died, and he was left with the audacious slate of her blue gaze, the haunting requiem of her beliefs and follies, the gestures of her convictions that refused to resemble his own. Did she wish to wither and decay too? Like the forest, like the earth, like the simpler, weak creatures that were smothered and suffocated in their perilous journeys to some greater heaven? The dominating, fierce, ferocious crackle of his overbearing, overwhelming whisper drifted from severe, merciless lips, poised to billow around her frame in an alluring melee of might and malice that could not be withdrawn. He was not a savior, not a liberator, not an emancipator, and did not weave lies around his throat. He couldn’t grant her clemency, or the reprieve of a gentler world. He had never bid an individual to Elysium. “Nor am I merciful.”