The Reaper was not a creature meant to escape, to bolt or retreat; too consumed, too wretched, too rigid and unyielding to provide the notion of failure and unwinding ineptitude upon his brow – he didn’t wear vulnerability well, felt it choke like a vice around his throat. The sentiment collapsed along the taut foundation of his wake, a relentless visage of reticence and damnation, swallowed by the innards of a cavern and driving his soldiers, his brethren, his patriots, into another world with unknown fathoms and furtive depths. He’d been forced into a binding multitude of frustration, instead of extermination, obliteration, abominations, curving unholy filaments across monstrous scales and undaunted wakes, chiseling, piercing, slicing and severing the soulless eyes searching for his kingdom. He couldn’t fight malice with menace, couldn’t cast aside the weary threads of thrones and crowns, couldn’t chase, wander into the murky entrails of the searing palaces, the wayward pathways, watch the land burn, simmer, boil around him, stab and maul chaotic doldrums, embrace the labyrinth heresy. A twisted, disregarded, infernal devil, as though his hands were tied, mind fixated upon the unfamiliar, with no machinations or knowledge in sight beyond the gleam of safety and refuge upon a loam he’d never crossed, never tread, never seen. A forgotten piece of Mephistopheles’ power, left in the forgotten, stark, abandoned whims of a capricious irreverence, insignificant in the heartless throngs, lacquered for battle but incapable of arriving upon its vehement dais. With great power comes great responsibility. Thirsty and deprived, strangled and smothered in the midst of havoc, he seethed in quiet, silent, hushed licentiousness, brewing a potent anarchy, manifesting contempt through the imbalance of mortal souls, beasts left to rot and wither in their once monstrous cataclysms. What he wouldn’t give to see an icy chasm open along the ground, a sliver of frozen calamity rise from the ashes of their bleak circumstances, something he could hold, something he could claim, something he could harpoon into the veils, shades and phantoms persevering beyond the door. They’d crawl and he’d annihilate, breathe ferocious fumes over the molten havoc, touch and stroke bestial, eldritch hymns until the last of their fortitude collapsed into the hollowed void.

But Deimos was distracted from the yearning, the burning, nestled in his nefarious mind, as the creeping of another figure, too easily recognized by scent, by voice, by mere presence, that he nearly smirked. The Doctor, whole, alive and well, a rancorous, bitter reminder of unending days across fringes, borders and edges, cliff walls stoking rolling tides, scorched forests and laborious invasions fought and lost. Passing moments had meant destruction, altered croons had promised desolation, slaughter, termination by the wicked, for the wicked. When tangible ruins had been seized and possessed, ensnared and gnarled by his rapier brutality, when it was only chaos that fixated his mindset to the stoked fires and ignited infernos. Before he needed to care. Had the Nightshade been the same, dripping poison into the mouths, the ears, the eyes, of his victims, caustic and callous, permitted to bend venom into his blend of toxic derision, scorn and deceit? Upon departing, upon leaving them behind, had he found what he’d yearned for? Was his appetite sated, was his quarry left in their same disheveled ambience, distorted and decayed? Should Deimos have been envious of his freedom, no longer locked and corroded by the chains of kingdoms and palaces? He welcomed his old friend with a clenched jaw and a haggard tone, deep and loathing, not for the behemoth before him, but for the haze he’d been pulled into, a crown suddenly, maddeningly heavy. “We were forced to flee.” The uttering of truth rippled through him in a vicious, frustrated growl, tumbled into the pervading walls with a lone, agonizing hiss, sibilance of seditious souls. And what if by escaping they’d left their homeland to be varnished and cloaked with the daggers of pariah interludes, framing their glaciers and peaks, their rime and summits for gestures of a new regime, a foreign reign of deadly infidels? The notion turned him into a more unyielding state, unattainable, unreachable, burdened by the massive exploits of a Machiavellian membrane. A question posed along the tip of his tongue, for curiosity, abandoning the ferocity, the shambles, for one moment of inquiry plunging through the din of familiarity. “Did you find Mauja?”