While he wallowed in the shadows and shade of stars, another approached, rustling the undergrowth, tangling the weeds with excitable ease. When his nefarious eyes pinpointed upon the culprit as it burst beneath the eaves, he found the occasion to be wholly unremarkable: a child languishing its power for curiosity. His experience with the youth, like so many instances of his social knowledge, was severely limited. It smiled and watched, moved and talked, fixated its dual-colored gaze upon him and he stood rigid, firm, unrelenting in the wake his vicious tyranny, wishing to be left alone in the arches of his chaotic foreboding. The filly bumbled and jumbled words, stringing them together in a loose cauldron of babbling nonsense that Deimos remained indifferent about, features rendered stony, impassive, inscrutable. He stared down at the scion and did very little, hoping perhaps that it would leave by the same way it came, enthusiasm and ignorance, for it didn’t sense the looming presence of his dangerous stature. Were all youth so ignorant, so foolish, so ready to take on the world that they would brush against death and draw their last breath before they’d finished their first?
The babe is saved from further scrutiny by his silent, commanding opus as a familiar spirit, the doctor, the Mender, drifted through the meticulous haze of mountain and air. The terrible monster frequently did not enjoy the company of others, but with the burning, scorching pain riddling his figure, he almost didn’t mind the appearance of the healer. He turned his narrowed, savage slits towards the sienna patriot, noted the jaunt of his own stride (off, almost indistinct, but the mark of battle – what had he missed in the trials of capture?), listening for the pitch of his voice as it encountered presumptions the satanic warrior would have to correct. He swiveled his eyes away for a moment, speaking to the wind, gruff, indistinct measures of indignity and humiliation so that perhaps if the world didn’t have to hear it, they wouldn’t consider him folly or fool. “Released.” He remained poised as the medic examined him, formulated the portions of his enchantments to calculate patched, assuaged wounds, but allowed the lids of his tired, haggard gaze to drift closed, once, twice, holding his head high, noble, regal, commanding, against the silhouette of nocturnal horizon and immorality; a silent conviction of ferocity bursting from his limbs. While the other beast worked, tending in a hushed hum, his speech registered, tore against the cloud of pain that had somehow washed over his thoughts, his intuitions, his candor. The exuberant child must have belonged to him, praised and chided in the covenant of the Basin. “Yours?” His voice grated, skull gesturing towards the flicka merely once before remembering torment and anguish, and then the final strings of muted affliction settled over him again, and he remained quiet until the magic had rendered his body whole.
Time, stolen and absconded, wove its weary track over his hide, and like spirits, like ghosts, like wraiths, dissipated the cumbersome arch of a dragon’s flame. When the pressure, the toiling, the scorching tides melted from his frame, he didn’t know how to express gratitude, how to explore the depths of his appreciation, and offered the Mender then a firm nod, a deeper, struggling bow, and felt the fiber of his whispering, crooning death slinking against his veins, the tenor, the opus, of his oeuvre reclaiming vengeance. Hate brewed, hostility incensed, and fury remained locked again, in the solace of disorder, turmoil, and mayhem. The raw, deep tones were summoned anew, sweeping the grounds with the merciless, beguiling indulgences of a dangerous, striking criminal hoping to contort the world into his favored bedlam again. “How goes the Basin?” And then, the puncturing nuance of another’s noise entered his core, fleeting, discarded, but among the rubble of its finery, he promised future upheaval, terrible, horrible, havoc.