Bound to the darkness, woven into its Stygian chords, into its ancient, clandestine, covert chains, Deimos eternally answered its melancholy twists and turns with the hum of anarchy, with the flesh and sinew of lawlessness, of discord, of strife and upheaval. Soldier and General, warrior and pariah, recluse and blackguard, seized and seared by the diabolical whims of unholy raptures, decadent atrocities, heinous, ruthless audacities, nefarious prose concocted and possessed. He clutched at the shadows as they dragged him from ruin to rune; the barbaric, brutal hymns of the somber animosity, of the silent, listless and languid insurrections, the quiet annihilation building across hallowed halls. The piercing juncture of his eyes told him everything about his cherished scenery: the Aurora Basin was vacant, without moonlight, without luminous decay, without incandescent withering. It sang no wicked song, uttered no grave sonnets, spat no toxic doldrums, no asp, viper, sinous dissonance and postured no vicious creeds, simply remaining glacial, frigid nuances and portals, deprived, dismantled, hollow and vacant.

Without warning, without forethought, without augured cautions, he too was stripped, Satan’s gifts discarded, Mephistopheles’ bestowals forlorn, taken from his surreptitious sinew, from his malicious muscles, from his smoldering tides and shadowed puissance. Liberation and desolation shattered and shaken in the same breath, the absence and loss of his incantations, invocations and enchantments, the sweeping hands and grasp of death, the ghostly breath of his Reaper chains – but also the salvation, the freedom, the deliverance, to walk where he chose without the kingdom crumbling, without his brethren shaking, without fear, without trepidation, over a loss he did not wish to cause. An itch he couldn’t scratch, a deficiency, a lack, of chiseled arms and alms, of provisions and assailments, that he’d carried through misery, through melancholy, through despair, disappeared, stolen, thrown to the balconies of enigmas and puzzles. Only twice had he encountered the same stead; once as a child, drinking in the pleasantries of youth, dabbling in the finery of curiosity, compelled wits and mastery of nothingness, with no need to recoil, with no need to hide, with no need to forget those beloved. Another in the oubliette of the Edge, drained and depleted, an experience where the condemned became the consumed, rancor reminded and revisited in the ambiguous portals of these shaded corridors. As he walked across the layers of rime and snow, drew to the pine annexes, the mountain peaks, and ultimately along the hot springs smoldering heat, the earth failed to weep, whisper requiems, proffer laments, and the trees didn’t collapse, bow their limbs and boughs to their quietus. His expression gave away naught of his perplexed nuances, detachment sown carefully along raw, frigid features, an inscrutable, nonchalant, insouciant brow

He didn’t quite know how to feel or what to pluck from the neglected shambles of his sentiments and emotions. Did this alter him? Did this change him? Did he lose the intimidating prowess he’d so carefully cultivated, created, carved? Did the mold of his avaricious gleam dim? Did the ground no longer shudder, did the flora and fauna no longer hide? Was he vulnerable, in the shared expanse of ghosts, ferocity and cruelty? Was he altered, broken, beaten, no longer immune to the caresses, the strokes, the fondling and touches of invincibility? He answered all of these queries with a silent no, because he was still beast, savagery and villainy, violence given to vehemence, fury relishing annihilation, poised devastation in the sieging wings of detachment. He was still composed bedlam, sculpted iron, irreverent, licentious, and immoral severity, potency, fervency and power, ethereal dissolution and destruction. He could still construct chaos, he could still unwind morality, he could still demolish, wreck and ravage, stab, obliterate, pierce and puncture, but for once, blended into the wicked winds and the perilous heights, he was touchable, susceptible, attainable, a mortal in the ice.

[Deimos bonding while you can! This is for character development, so if you do intend to post, please do so in a timely fashion. Thank you!]