The reverberations of their power kindled and invoked across the North must have allured many, the intoxication, the rubble, the vipers, the vacuous, seeking their fortune amongst mountain, ice and dominance. The dreamers saw beauty, magnificence, opulence, the avaricious saw gold, the liars saw opportunity, the twisting, turning mutineers and revolutionaries saw the tantalizing, relishing taste of destruction, chaos, and mayhem established. Drawing their eyes to the midst of superiority and persuasion, an empire cloaked in frost, a world discovered by creatures lost and scattered, torn and frayed. They wandered, traversed and trespassed into poison, left the realm scorched and scarred, chiseled and perplexed, weakened and demurred, seeking a fortune not carved, not molded, not sculpted by their own brawn. It was the stubborn, the staunch, the debauched, the resolute, the fiends and demons who built the castle walls, stone by stone, valley by valley, until the sovereignty was finally drawn into their fervent appeal, their rancorous ideals. Those who encroached, those who intruded, spat upon their loam with their zealous corpses and their harpsichord lies, their cheapened benedictions and their demanding oaths were unworthy to even glance at the Aurora’s horizon. For here, the damned walked the earth, the condemned bound their chains to the walls, and the desecrated renewed their plight from persecution over and over again, an eternity cast in immorality, iniquity and animosity. Those unwelcome were forced to leave, by force, by death, by way of impending doom and augured annihilation that was held in breathless assailments. The monster had held off fools for days, snipping their tongues, slashing their hides, clashing with the tirades of petulant, inept imbeciles. Yet, now, with the wind courting another scent waltzing upon the chilling grounds, Deimos knew this was no intruder.

His motions unwound from their taut, rigid stance, no longer frozen, but a polished, refined statue, the gargoyle, the titan, the behemoth trapped in the grasp and hold of Lucifer’s laughter. His approach is nearly silent, hushed and mute like his mouth, dispassionate, nonchalant, impassive in the roots and snares of the earth, commanding, eldritch titan composing cold-blooded cadence. The smell curled around his memory, made him recall the brief snippets of conversation between him and the lad, the familiarity that invoked curiosity where others failed to do so many times over. He moved as entropy, disorder and chaos, a hostile breath, a virulent exhalation, a serpentine, sinuous decree of callousness, unmerciful and trenchant, mordant and caustic, the molten, infernal knife ready to carve into carcass, pierce prey. A merchant of death, demise and licentiousness, the carnivorous, the despised, the reaper hissing alongside the gallows, he was eternally ravenous for the next calamity, the next upheaval, the next seditious splendor that could irk his veins and hum against his bones. The beast followed his inclinations, traced along the fortifications of rime and glacier, until the piercing blue stare caught and captured the rune, the puzzle piece, of the scion he’d known before. Time had passed, the child was grown, and in his place there seemed to be more tangled webs, more lush, listless enigmas covering his hide - fellow demons stolen in the light, harboring for darkness. Perhaps because of this assimilation, of creatures hiding in the midst of impassivity, this strange, striking resemblance towards one another, Deimos did not threaten, did not chide, did not intimidate, did not render hostilities and vehemence across the atmosphere. Instead, he plucked, inquired and demanded the one thing he’d sought from their first meeting. “Your name, scholar.” The voice carried an almost humorous lilt, lifted from the cold, harsh wave of his utterance, and the smallest, slimmest smirk curled across his lips.