Tangled amongst infernal ease, the eldritch titan bore a thousand itches to scratch and was left wanting. Chiseled into the stony apertures of his home, cloaked in daggers and enmity, he stoked, stalked and seethed behind an iron, reticent brow, patrolling the earth, waiting for a chance to enslave some portion of ineptitude. The world had taught him many things in the past season beyond the art of vigilance and violence; in order to parallel corruption and contortions, he had to enact his own, consume, devour, implore travesty and treachery – otherwise other demonic forces took his place, enforced condemnation without his vicious rapier embedded in their chest. The Reaper had waited too long in the devil’s hands, chains, and shackles, left into the dust and decay of caverns and sanctuaries, when the crooning luxury, the avaricious opulence, of his kingdom had been waiting for them, the only toxic palace, refuge, and haven they required. So the shadow burned along its wake, scathing and coiling, rippling through the masses of pine and fir, beating zealous, fervent mazes of decadent warrens and prying for massacres, when the whittling of another scent poised aloft, foolish, unfamiliar. No longer listless or withering, he sought the debauchery of trespassing cretins, with their imbecile gestures and sown ignorance, remembered the taste, the spectacle of the last intruder. He and Arah had dragged his body through the gates, out into the chilling, sinister winds and frosty, gelid glades, still far more alive than he’d wanted – and the many others before his wounded figure. A Pegasus with a shattered wing and heart, a comrade fallen to the ground, poised in demise, bones bleached and forgotten beneath layers of snow and ice. What would he find within his sovereignty today, neither blessed nor consecrated, waiting to atrophy and perish in the wicked, callous, ruthless endeavors of a malevolent soul?

He was not the first to encounter the flier; the honor went to the GildedBlade, and he hid his disappointment in not being able to scrap and peel apart the enamel of the stranger’s veins, cords, and sinew. Words were spoken, tongues flapping into the breeze, but he heard none of them, too far away to piece the webbed imprudence together (were they strings of excuses? Sonnets and strings of phrases over how they’d failed to locate their sense of vision?). Instead of harking murderous endeavors, though the thought crossed over his monstrous, Machiavellian mind, he simply haunted, loomed, pressed into the terrain as an intimidating fixture of the land, death pervading the distance, closing the gap between intruder and Lady. Reticent, impassive and collected in the fine fervor of a precise warlord, the demon drummed his silent, infidel maelstrom towards the femmes, and said nothing. Only a single look passed from his expression, proffered to Illynx, a hushed depth of query, an arched brow of warrior prowess: if he needed to unleash his sword, fell the stranger into heathen, underworld embrace, or merely stay within the boundaries, a threatening glimpse of savages and monsters dwelling within icy corridors.