DEIMOS

The Reaper

The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose.

Each individual had their worth, layered amongst rock, rubble, fortitude and might, and he openly absconded virtues, sins, follies, and tribulations from his patriots, bestowed their credences, their promises, with ruminations of their capacity, with prowess and opportunity to enhance their pernicious abilities, their carnivorous appetites. But as he studied the gilded brute before him, as his calculating eyes, as his indifferent, apathetic gaze searched and seized, he pondered only a few queries, a parcel of notations. A sway of the spurious, a simpering of the fallacious? To whom does he play for: the ivory Impersonator, or the Reaper, with his scythe armed, ready, devouring and eager? To what end did this Thranduil intend his mark: the world, burning beneath his daggers, the kingdom, ice palace thrown asunder? Or did he hold, contort, no control, no motivation beyond the slip of destruction, wanton chaos, swinging pits and pendulums, incised and acrid? Considerations flowed and mused through the flow of the Machiavellian titan, fused and embroiled over what to make of the beast before them, feigned for masques and corridors, or capable of being molded into a furtive gatherer of information. But as the day bellowed, another joined their minute throng, Crash Course, and threw exposure, revelations, condemnations. A moron, a fiend, a fool, brought to his doorstep? Was this a jester’s courtyard, taken to juggling and minstrel idiocy? He nearly queried why they’d even bothered him at all, but dragged the vexation, the frustration away, remained the intangible, the impervious, the reticent. The statue’s ears flicked back and forth, captured the drawl of the unrelenting warrior, the hints, the mythos, unraveling and shredding credibility. If the stag’s maw was always open, and his senses always listening, the abomination felt no necessary edge to his sword; if the tongue was faster than his rapier, unwinding, unveiling, pouring out secrets, clandestine, confidential oeuvres, he’d only be a hindrance. Complications, interferences, and inconveniences were blights on the horizon of their corrupt campaigns, of their avaricious sights, of their rotten, wretched munitions. For a moment, he pondered over whether the beast should be expunged, eliminated, and eradicated right on the frost-laden doorstep, buried amongst the ashes of others who’d followed his same ignorant methods, dancing in the glow of foolishness and concealments; suddenly detected and discovered amidst their infantile snippets. If the stag sought grandeur, he wouldn’t find it here. One appreciative glance, a slight nod, was given to his soldier, to Arah, before the chiseled gravel and gavel fell before the swing of disapproval, the rise of malevolence. “We have no need of flapping mouths.” And for the moment, Thranduil had naught to spout but the noxious, nefarious spurn of his frame – sent back to unknown regions, off into the distance, to coil and sow his embers elsewhere. Finality pulsed, then reigned with the arctic distortions of Deimos’ sinister demand. “Leave.”