The air failed to crackle with worship, veneration, or reverence, fought and brought a searing tension, snapping, hastening, bidding the eerie sonnets and the cool, blue lava waters to a briny fixation; his eyes loosened from their riveting hold, narrowing their curious gaze to the ruffled contortions outward and beyond, something lurking in the distance, stones moved, rumbled, misfired and fled from their prior places. What poised within the outer threads of a god’s eye: Another designing sacrifices and immolations? A beast parading over the decrepit shrines, shaping, sculpting, perusing and devouring their further demise? A wraith, threatening desecration of the mighty, the fallen, the divine? His zealous inquisition stole over the fabrics of the real reasons he’d arrived, turning his lanky frame away from the veins and land bridge of the Sun God and his fellow deities, attempting to decipher what other phantom lurked in the hallowed void, harkening into the shrouded shadows with pieces of bravery and courage. “Hello?” A flash of ivory caught his attention, and his stare followed, deciphering the outline of a skull fashioned to another’s head, as if it were his own, carrying his trophy in a masque of black death and infidel shrouds, and the lightest, smallest gasp escaped his body – remembering Zikar Sin’s token, bleached cranium from their lessons, but this was not equine. Ominous, foreboding, too pronged, gesturing upwards to the sky without the nuptials of their brow rapiers, and then closely followed by more and more spears trickling down an obsidian maw; he almost queried the stranger again, wondering how he’d fit it over his head, if he’d killed, slain, massacred the previous owner (how, why), but one more distraction prolonged inaction, and he was lost to constant inquisitiveness.

Something he’d never truly seen flourished before his eyes, blinding amongst the edges of the forlorn temples, golden, winged, draconic even though Cera had seen they no longer existed in such a massive fashion; perplexed and confused, befuddled and spellbound, his head tilted to a massive degree, and the audacious splendor of his childish splendor burst over the grounds, fumbling and toiling through the broken spires of spirits. “Hi!” Seemingly without pause, he brandished the exuberant query over the pebbles and lava, streamlined into the gilded plates of her coated armor. “What are you?” Was she a dragon, swept up from the glories of time and fables, breathing fire over towns, villages, herds and rising to her old Throat home, claiming each towering block of sand and dirt for herself (he thought it would be neat to be a dragon, a colossus of the wind, the sky, the fires of hell)? On closer inspection, she seemed to be a mixture, horselike and then endowed with scales of legends, but he wasn’t near enough to figure out the massive conundrum. The little scion began to roam forwards, advancing through the overpass and the crumbling fortress, when more strangers flickered into the expanse – and his blood thinned to a nefarious degree, pulled and entangled with the sinister embers of the oncoming cretin.

Had he been born within the trickling ills of the corrosive pestilence, he may have been able to surmise the distinction of overwhelming, overbearing, overpowering perversion, the maddening, crawling, slithering deception and disease, noticed the signs, the symptoms, of the barbarous infection. Instead, Erebos ceased all movement and simply stared at the bestial formation, the long limbs of a colt, but the head of a wolf, bristling with vehemence, with venomous predilection, extending cordial greetings but meaning absolutely none of them. He was almost paralyzed with indecision, unsure, unaware of what the infidel plotted or planned, frozen with one foreleg extended, ears pricked, eyes widened, breath fizzling and renewed with each passing moment. One more entered the fray, off into the distance, sprinkles of sienna and gold, shouting Amaris, and he wondered if she was about to enter the realm of stalwart formations (and if she was, he would too). Driven to action, he hastened closer, advancing, and though the youngest and smallest within the peculiar crowd, he bellowed over the divine horizon without prayer, without grace - only the proclamation of intrepidity brewing in his chest. “Hey – leave her alone!” Brow narrowed, he swiftly proceeded, with naught but the strength of his valor and the coolness of his convictions.

Take just what I came for