The effigy of somberness, of terror, of Ares’ war clad son, of savage, sinister, nefarious harpoons and lacerations was dissuaded and befuddled by the continuing laughter of the rain goddess. Courted, beguiled and bewitched by a vicious onslaught of her makeshift instrument, stringing a torrent, a deluge, of follies and murmurs, sweet nothings tasting of ash, burning and singing his flesh. He bore shame from her twittering, he was perturbed by her lilting essence, and he altered delusion and misguided remarks along the icy shoal, lifted his pride into a crescendo of mockery and disdain. His features stroked by war, caressed by battle, brushed, pressed and painted for carnage, chaos and cold-hearted manifestos, the oil and ink of a darkened laureate viciously conducting his most infamous lyrics. The stare hardened, the molten core of his wrathful soul incensed, invoked, kindled by ice and fire, choked and suffocated under the breaking silence. The water spoke and moved, became lips, eyes, ears, a muzzle, a maw, lady of the lake dressed in blue again, swindled by the night-time air, capturing the noxious plumes of his incorruptible vessel in all its beauty, in all its rapture and opulence. She offered no sword to the demon, for he was no Arthur, no noble king, no valiant hero, the titan, the behemoth, the dragon, and she gave only the warbling retort of watery affections. He looked away from her lissome existence, limber, mermaid stature to catch the canopies as they drowned in the infernal press of the twilight hour. What brought forth her assurances, her mockery, and her derision? For his had not thrived in her presence, his insurrection, his mutineer scandals, his seditious splendor refused to appear in the midst of her patience, of her virtue, of her morality scattered in its scabbard. He had not threatened to break away, to ruin, to ravish and ravage the innocence still left within her entity, he had not abashed the entirety of her figurine with his lacquered calamity, brutal animosity, vicious, overbearing, overwhelming violence. But she still felt the need to pry, to nettle, to thorn and prick at his shield? Why didn’t she let him be the lawless, the immoral, the condemned, the wicked and treacherous? Why did she wish to remove his flesh from his decadent distortions, why could he not be at peace with his severe acrimony, his trenchant, mordant embodiments and emotions?

His gaze returned upon her to see the gentle grin appear across her liquid features; he did not offer one in return. He was rigid again, invariable, stringent, tragically poised to forever be encased in the armor of his persecution. Unholy carnivore splendor, licentious bearings trapped and twisted in the Tartarean rapture and reverie of chilling, glacial indifference, the sumptuous, slender clarity of severity and smoldering havoc, the undulating, argent sinew entangled innate enmity. Bestial temptation, wild, feral decadence, enticing, alluring, rapacious abhorrence in the scathing, seething rigidity, muted, taciturn, sinful credence of a silken predator, captured in the menacing opulence and grandeur of Mephistopheles’s masterpiece; deadly elegance in a poet’s savage, nefarious prose. Feasting, consuming, and swallowing the tombs of raptorial predilections, harboring the strife of damned beings, corporeal foes layered into the conceited catacombs of illustrious death and monstrous divinations, so sculpted from the outstretched arms of heathens, so discarded from the virtuous strings of society – and she stated that seriousness did not suit him. The notion perplexed him, because for all the worlds he’d ever crossed, for all the sentiments he’d scattered and turned to dust, for all the tenderness and warmth he’d have to leave behind – this was who he was. He’d been created from the macabre twist of festering, brooding armaments, scornful sieges, the acerbic caress of the devil, the mordant embrace of the reaper. He was grim, he was silence, he was power, persuasion and precision, and without out the archaic, arcane blend of rapier convictions, subtle annihilations, searing acrimony and brutal diligence, he was not sure who he was supposed to be. The world had been torn away from him, and he carried on, adapted and altered himself to its piercing blades, to its horrendous shades. What more did she want from him now? What was he supposed to piece together for her? His vocals carried a terrible, nefarious weight, gliding over ice and rime to puncture, to slide in the frightening hymns of a rattled, thorned pestilence. “Then what suits me?” He could alter no longer, not when he was too overcome with apathy, with immorality, with iniquity clambering over his blackened, corroded, misshaped, misaligned heart. This was how he survived, reaching for nothing, caring for nothing, ruining, pillaging and crumbling.