Malevolent, vile, and muted, he was a study in cold, heedless calculation, in infernal exposition, in pariahs to emotion and renounced, forsaken invocations. Nothing touched his lips, revolution scorched his frame, fed every fierce, feral, rampant stitch of decadence with acrimony and debauchery, and the resolute carnage of his forbidding wake remained the cold, unholy clarity of a devil’s distorted manifest. Callous, cruel, immoral junctures seared across his skin, poised for domination, posed for supremacy, swallowing, consuming the cerulean hues of her damsel interludes. In the brooding, meticulous silence, he stole, captured, invaded, all her secrets, listened to their dying throng as they, marching into damnation, fell across dissolution and despair. Was she really so careless, foolish, heedless, to feed her pillaged alms to a monster? He devoured every virtue of her absolution and ravenously clung to their restless, moral eaves, raptorial and predacious, nefarious, seditious annihilation as she lifted veils and concealments. He could have clamored for more, licked the rancorous wounds of her twisted, contorted haze, lapped, lavished and tasted the torment of her downpour, of her torrent, burst, blessed storm. He could have entombed her into her own miserable factions, watched her demise, and surrounded her soul in the meticulous, puissant ferocity of his wicked, irreverent persecution. He could have drowned her in her own sorrows, fed her the wallowing melancholy of her despair, slowly sinking her in the darkening depths of devastation and ruin, ravaged the essence of her beneficence and wrapped, choked, strangled her whole until there was naught left but the shards of deliverance. He could have singed and plucked her bones of dignity, rectitude and honor, thrown them into the thicket where they’d be forgotten, bleached ire. He could have corroded her in her own walls of sadness, placed her in Amontillado’s cask and abandoned the traces of compassion, cordiality, winsome, foreign sentiments, satisfied by her persecution. He could have swiped her heart from her chest and caressed its fluttering, beating wings until it withered, decayed, rotted. He could have drenched her hidden, cryptic scars with the pain, desolation, and torment of his own - but he didn’t. One word trailed, slender, hushed, from her lips, and his ears caught its vibe, its syllables, its accented power and prestige in a despondent, singsong requiem. Isilme. Savagery, brutality, barbarity – halted.

He knew the name well, had it sown into his blood, felt it immersed along his vicious sinew. From birth, he’d touched, briefly, its stones, shells and remains of innocence, kindled them into the fibers of their livelihood were smoked, seared, and sullied by the churning of Mephistophelean sorcery. He’d heard his sire whisper promises of bloodshed, of supremacy, of grandeur, of glory, of conquest and victory into his auds, vowed to follow their convictions until his body gave out and demise caught him too. He’d played in his father’s fire, he’d sauntered into the vicious, virulent dusk and the frolicked in the slithering, crawling dawn. He’d been strengthened by his mother’s confidence, ideals, he’d smiled along the heady haze of wind and rain, and he’d breathed hardy words and crooned wild, youthful bliss. He’d belonged, once, to a world that had seen a scion before it transformed into a demon, and he’d cherished the precious, futile moments where simplicity had been strung like taut, little strings, then witnessed as they snapped and a world came crumbling to his feet. He’d left, and like the chilling, nonchalant rapier he would become, he never looked back. Pieces of dust, rubble and fragments, remembered and restored, for brief, fleeting interludes – the baleful, menacing trek of eyes bore into hers and found similarity, commonality, a history frozen and shared. His voice curled around her frame again, villainous, disquieting, an unfurling quietude of the past. “I know of Isilme.”

Even as her chronicle echoed in his mind, twisting and turning until the sinuous membrane of his satanic, devilish decree found solace there, in the chaos, in the bedlam, in the monstrosity that he’d not been a part of, he bestowed no comfort. He couldn’t offer her sympathy for lands altered, changed, morphed by the hands of obliteration, for given the opportunity he would do the same, and the sadness that flickered from her soul only lightly touched, then ricocheted from a hardened, blackened heart. He’d been given years to retreat, to expel, to find the glimmer of memories and destroy them as he did every other living being. She altered many times before his nefarious stare, and while he stood resolute, unmoving, impassive and apathetic, she transfigured from forced smile to perilous frown, the weight of scorn, hopelessness and melancholy colliding with her bones. This Huyana, with her rain, clouds and rancor, had bit into debris, had thrown her sentiments and scars towards a behemoth, and would find them concealed again, never flowing past his dark mouth. He could have shattered her all over anew, and chose, in his stony silence, to hide her story from the rest of the earth.