Monstrous rhythm scored and scorched the vibrant, lush vestiges of Frostfall’s breath; a disturbing figure cutting through the chilling whims with his own crafted solidity, acerbic, reticent, unholy, unkind. He pulsed, he pervaded, he filled the world of the Basin with his savage, sinister touch, a heathen forged and sculpted from the arcane, from the hollowed granules of Lucifer’s amusement, Ares’ blades, a motion, a movement, of the nefarious. His wanderings took him past the borders and outcrops of icy crags, puissant glaciers, pernicious caverns, and it would have been a languid journey of taut, rigid persistence and penetrating stares embarked upon the horizon, had a familiar scent not riveted his attention. At first, it was ghostly and tranquil, and then began to uncover slowly, bit by bit, from the seasons and ages of the Edge, where loitering forms failed to yield, failed to listen, and the death throngs built within his soul and hummed their vicious onslaught, to the days of his General hours, listening to contracts made between The Grey and his own. His jaw tightened, teeth clenched, Machiavellian calculations forming and coiling, a vindictive, malevolent haze searing across his mind: what was her purpose within the Basin? It was certainly another noteworthy pattern, a cycle of her constant, moronic choices, likely made with naïve, ignorant, idiotic haste, like an inept fool drumming around in circles and wondering why naught changed. The Reaper had half a notion to chase her out, to drive her away, to make her remember days of old, where her failure to comply nearly ensured an early demise (and how he could have pressed more, more and more and more, until she suffocated under the weight, the crescendo, the magnificent, blinding opus of his abhorrent invocations), pondered if her sister wandered nearby too – waiting to choke, waiting to smother. The beast followed the wafting smell, the flapping of draconic wings, the overwhelming frustration singeing his veins and molding his movements into fierce, feral, barbaric motions, a King bent towards annihilation, a Lord searing and boiling in the layers and lacquer of frost, of rime. His fiend ministrations brewed intimidating, deadly threads, a sinuous snap of the depraved, of the relentless, so upon his approach he was once more the deleterious, treacherous, dangerous barbarian she’d met long before. The deep, blunt candor of his vocals sliced through the edges of her amiable ease (she looked entirely too comfortable here, taking a lively jaunt in his home, like she belonged to the snow, to the peaks, to the valleys, and he loathed it), piercing through any warm, lingering moments – a puncturing, harpooning wraith of wrath. “Why are you here?”