Selfish dregs constructed his severe sinew, bedlam, iniquity, and immorality composed his flesh, and he remained eternally aware of his mercenary murmurs, his rasping, avaricious, acquisitive machinations. The Reaper was a Machiavellian monument and monolith bent on cravings, longings and yearnings, carving intimacies of each greedy ambition, each ravenous, voracious slip of the tongue, the press, the twist, the distortion of his covetous, selfish appetite. When he wanted, he sought, plucked and ravished, ravaged empires, destroyed kingdoms, untangled flesh from bone, harpooned legacies into meaningless, debauched fragments. When he desired, he absconded, stole, obliterated and annihilated, became witness and ferryman, scythe and sword, to the massacre of benediction, to the murder of beneficence. When he coveted, he mauled, brutalized and conveyed the predacious existence of his ethereal, sinister conjectures, sinuously gliding into the mist, into the murk, for satanic treachery, for malicious abhorrence. To scar, to devastate, to maim and mutilate, sunder and tear apart the cataclysms, canvases, and chaos. Deimos could be naught more than a black, black heart, divided and rotting to the core, irreverent under the covers of his meticulous, scrupulous necromancy, grasping, toying, clinging to the rippling sanctity of derision. Callous indulgences, heated lacerations, molten altars to wicked, Mephistophelean catastrophes, lecherous salutations from devils, demons and fiends, carved, sculpted enigmas of heathen debaucheries; the unraveling of his bedroom hymns. Diabolical, sinister wake of nefarious essences, the body, the tempest, the tumultuous, the pernicious and powerful figure of an infernal pillar, grating, harsh, unrelenting and ruthless, possessive. Only now was he lost and perplexed, caught in the feverish ache, the unwinding midst of anomalies and queries, consuming, devouring, swallowing the veritable virtue, the delicious divinities, the sweet, noxious bloom of cascading showers; allowing his frame to slip into the dusky hallows and hollows of the rain.

He was drowning.

The General didn’t dare inhale or exhale, lost in the art, in the web, in the fold of grace, cleverly seduced, enticed, beguiled into muted contortions. Blinded and decomposed in the ravenous compassion of his feral incantations, his heart spread apart in licentious temptation, heated anticipation, sumptuous labor, villainous embraces and upheavals. Infatuation, like a serrated blade, sunk into the gallows of his iniquitous patterns, unraveling distance, detachment and menace, entangling in the reticence absolution of his weakening bastions and barricades. She’d worn away the edges of his carefully constructed walls, eroded merciless breaths, swept over the undone, the atrocious, the heinous, until he was frightened to discover what lay beneath, until he detested the idea of losing himself to the whispers, to the dreams, to the lucid repose of her tranquil grasp. Pushed into the deep fathoms of her serene grandeur, paralyzed, trapped, ensconced in the scalding, searing, smoldering labyrinth, and failing to unravel the threads of departure. But, if she stripped him down, what would he be under the deleterious canvas, the stony statue? If she confiscated his fortifications, what would be found beside his wretched considerations, his sinful sentiments? Naked and bereft, a desolate wasteland renounced, forsaken? Smothered in the wake of innocence lost, scions forgotten, tarnished, warmth revoked, tenderness fettered, withered? A forging of degradation, seditious and longing, clutching to the bombardments of immorality, to the choking demands of sinuous art and Tartarean discord? Loss, unfeeling, ruthless conniving eaves of wretched sovereignty, the spells, the chains, the laments and dirges strung into silent croons? If he gave himself to her, offered the rigid, unyielding slivers and splinters, the shambles and scraps, would he be completely, mercilessly, undone? What would it be like to fall apart, seam-by-seam, stitch-by-stitch, bare, exposed, uncovered?

Structured into antipathy, sculpted into animosity, singed into acrimony, he followed the wayward trail of her travels, haunted her primrose paths, stalked the feverish contemplations of her nymph wanderings. Snarled and besotted into the boughs’ incredulous strokes, the rancorous morass, the bitter warren, the fractious forest blended and blurred his movements, contorted his motions into the sinister scrape of his infidel intentions, contorted and cloaked his demonic entanglement. Intertwined within the bold, audacious splendor of its haughty prowess, disastrous desires, ravenous, hushed furor, unsung insurrection. Primordial treachery cast across a savage, scintillating undulation, chilling, formidable muscle enameled and lacquered upon abhorrent rubble and ruin. Drawn by the swell of her laughter, the pique of her soul, spirit, nature, dominated and controlled by the spark and kindle of her purity, he pursued, hunted, chased, plundering the streaks of sunlight, the radiance of rapture. The roughened deliverance of his Stygian munitions blended the vicious vessels of his blood, constricted them into vile, inflexible, unbending inclinations, suffering at the strokes of her merriment, the intense deliberations of her exuberance. Already caught, already derailed, already seized and apprehended, he didn’t fight the destruction of his fortress, and for once, left nearly everything unguarded – only the fixated angles of an indifferent face hid the fire, ferocity and passion, incensed into garroted chords, into neglected, laboring hisses. Terror and horror only made its presence known by the sibilation of its dangerous strands with a feral, wanton, corrupt sound, sliding amongst the ornate shadows of its fervent inflections, standing lengths away, untouchable, unattainable all over again. “Huyana.” Heresy and salacious predilection on his breath, friction, grinding and unwavering in the stoic cloistering of his throat, ushered only the rapacious glimpse of his tone, molding into the veils of the boughs, the lavished decadence of the tangled intimacies, the heathen desperations.

An amulet winked in the light, bright, luminescent, hanging from the scabbard, the cutlass, the blade hastened to his brow; dangling in some immoral rapture beneath the idle waves of its intended purpose. For a few moments, it merely swayed amongst the vestal broodings of the cumbersome shadows, before he sighed, breathed, and poured the ruthless incantations of his invocations into its raw, untouched stone. Monstrous, venomous, vindictive strokes fed and fueled the bombardment of his art, of his opus, of his oeuvre, until they tangled amongst one another, covered and embellished enamel, rendering bane, virulent toxins into its strong, enduring jewel, resisting the demise of its presence, the death of its incarnation – and suddenly, he was nude before her, offering everything and nothing to the sylph. The potency of his body, the strength, the brawn of his persevering danger, and the endless, boundless, emptiness of his pyrrhic existence pierced, punctured and penetrated through the ceaseless supremacy, puissance, of his stare, completely consumed by her watery image. He concocted the weight of his demands in one short, wild, intense clip of his tongue, the roughened candor, the fiendish, hot whisper into the barbaric grove, the sumptuous, sinuous, sensual fold of his mouth, resolute for a few ferocious moments, “Let me have you,” and then the vulnerability of the command settled in, ending on a strangled plea.

Deimos lifted his cranium, permitted the talisman to ricochet from its string, and plummet to her feet. Power in her hands, resting in idle repose at the cloved fixtures of her sea laced hooves – bestowing her the rupturing moments of rejection or acceptance. He’d fallen to the grasp, to the whims, to the inclinations of a raingirl, and stood, watching, amidst the darkness, ready to be ruined by heavenly dismissal and refusal.

Death, you bring death, and destruction to all that you touch.