His walk of freedom started in the morning and finished at twilight. Hours vanished by his hide, the day rushed by his skin, and the entity of time passed in a toiling roll of desolation, bleak, stark, and barren. Slow, laborious and draining, the fiendish, blistering burn against his flank erased all traces of an elegant, deadly opus, and instead, heightened the waves of pain that hastened his core with each wavering step. Stunning, reeling and searing, it encased him in the enamel of agony, crossing over the taut control of his demonic composure. However, the raw undulation of recent injuries were not the most unsettling quandary slithering against his skin – for deep in his chest, crawling, disturbing and agitating, was the tiniest granule of emotion quivering along his lungs. Amongst the hushed reveries of nocturnal opulence, he’d become haunted by sentiments long forgotten, brooding and brewing, looming and threatening, intertwining with the clamors of his sins. He knew its name and face, the blackened features of insecurity and disappointment that leapt and preyed, another predator hunting and devouring its quarry in the silent halls of satanic sculptures.

Shame.

Deimos had disregarded the notion of remorse, disgrace or indignity years prior, left it in the ages of youth where it’d been consigned, doomed, condemned, to oblivion along with so many other passions. But now it festered, coiled, and rippled, a ruffling, troubling vexation that grew with his ire, with his wrath, with each passing moment of torment that fueled, incensed, the layers of his belligerence. The hollow trappings of this disgusting concoction sinuously poured its armaments into his veins, strangling, choking and smothering the livelihood of their savage upheaval. With a flick of it siege, he felt the tightening noose of ignominy pulsing along the crisp barbarity of his creation, and even as the crooning arch of demonic treachery surged against it, there was no ceasing the misfortune of adversity, the pricking of mortification. It cut deeper than the ailments aligned to his frame, it lacerated further into the core of his being, reminded him of when he had a heart, when he had a soul that cherished, encompassed, beloved something enough to despise its departure. He’d been captured, stripped of his enchantments and absconded into the wailings of pretenses and sanctimony, he’d challenged for liberation and found it wanting – he had not been able to catch, grasp, or snatch his own deliverance. The great and terrible monster had believed in his powers, in his domination, in his intimidating, supreme force, and it had not been enough to render the enemy obliterated. What kind of General was he to have been weakened so much? What kind of soldier was he to have failed at his one occupation? What kind of withering, wavering infernal essence was he, to be so unraveled at the seams of frustration? He hated it, the very depths of this desecration, the reeling, sinking feeling that despite his efforts, he had accomplished naught. Confidence, arrogance, assurance, had been sullied, stained, and tainted by inabilities overlooked and ignored. He’d trapped himself in the boiling arts of sedition, and had been burned, alighted, ignited twice by it; a lesson he’d rather not have learned.

He wore humiliation like all other sentiments: behind closed doors and walls of impassive features. He wished to remain untouched, unattainable, unreachable by the hymns of blighting, coursing frailties, longed and yearned; a return to apathy. His face was a mask of tight nonchalance, indifference tracing the line of his severe gaze, the arch of his brow, the silence of his mouth. But he couldn’t hide it in his movements, in his motions, too strained, too forced, too dismal without the oeuvre of his wicked, quiet strokes. Pain and tarnish contorted, trickled, glided over each sinuous decree of his daggers, each serpentine chord, until ultimately, when he reached the pinnacle of mountains and valleys, the kingdom of his creed, loyalty, the crown of auroras and midnight trappings, he hardly dared to cross its borders. Undeserving, unworthy, drenched in the lacquer of his failings, in the enamel of his afflictions. Instead, he stared at the stars, blended with the shadows, and hid the snares of his fall beneath the canopy of darkness, the muted reverie of defeat and rancor. He’d returned, but not whole.