Cloaked in enmity, in antipathy, in rancor and avarice, he swindled and swept the caverns with the taut, rippling chords of daggers and cutlasses. The grotto made whispering motions he sought to destroy, made hums and croons vibrating along foiled apparitions, clung to the webbing and lattice of unsatisfactory sanctums. While he desired annihilation, extermination, slaughter in blackguard ruminations, demolition amongst unholy vitriol, he was tied and tethered within this ravaged sanctum. Poised for acrimony, wanton for devastation, yearning for bedlam, toiling and turbulent for maelstroms, and incapable of striking the meticulous chords – and all the while he brewed, felt the strands of Machiavellian designs and croons wrap their coils around his skull, breathe fervent, howling, harpooning ferocity. The Reaper clawed and cawed for the measures of violence, for the reeling menace and distortion, for the perilous clarity of treachery, soldiers falling, saints perishing, bloodied masses lamenting, dirges unrepentant and flowing, but only silence stretched between the crypts’ walls. Heinously, he ravaged their heart-spun sinew, and when only the hushed quietus, the layered demise, was left in the vacant corridors, he strived further animosity, king of nothingness. The Reaper, the demon, the unholy, rancorous fiend, bit into infernal, hallowed grounds and said naught when they bled from his ichor, from his wrath, from his loathing, and only followed the trace of loud sounds, a din wreaking and chasing, in effort to obtain information. War and all its vices, all its desires, all its wanton, torrid beliefs pulsed and pervaded throughout his system, caged and carved, blended sinuously into the rampant, devouring strides, unwavering persecution maddeningly lacerating, ripping, tearing into the mysteries, enigmas, of this world they’d been forced into. He refused its iron bars, its molten, infernal oubliette, its searing, delicate void, and still, had to remain within its barbaric hold, when all he cherished was left in unknown tombs and sepulchers, adrift in its barbaric winds and mountaintops. Living death placed in an eternal capsule, vicious and vehement, cruel and callous.

Loud, bleating fragments of conversation leapt and bound across the halls, what are you all waiting for? and he clenched his jaw on the answer – opportunity, throats left flayed and open, strangled and suffocated, blood dripping across stony floors. Instead of offering the retort to the raucous din, to the sudden appearance of his shadowed, Hades’ exterior and the once-matching sovereign nearby (Mauja, always signified by ice and vanishing acts), he serpentined into shadows and ravines, pressed himself into hollowed pathways, lent an ear instead of a voice. His healer proffered her sentiments; his stare fixated momentarily upon the familiar silver Pegasus, once an intruder (and would it take much to finish her as he’d done to her companion, foolish and idiotic, tracing their homelands with entitled volatility, leaving with only one living body in his wake?), and the other unknown frames sank into oblivion, nonchalance, apathy. Deimos had naught to offer but the antagonistic press of his vices, burning hearts away, sending cinders and ash across hapless bones, and remained in the pernicious throngs of soundless tyranny and intimidation.