It begins as most things do; a feeling. It's an unavoidable sensation that prickles a tingles in the back of your mind, like a thought that itches. You reach to scratch, but its just beyond your grasp, itching further, more intensely, simply because you cannot relieve it. The itch becomes a burn that sears across your nerves, fraying them until its is all that consumes you, encompassing you day and night in ash and ember alike. Your dreams are a cacophony of flames, a jungle of emblazoned spires that reach and gouge and embed like like coals in the soles of your hooves, flaring up with each step you place and smoking like kindling just coming to life even when you don't. It is inescapable. It drives you, like a hot spur pressed into your sides, hide singing, flesh peeling, relieved by only one thing.

Move it begs of you. Your kingdom of ice and snow may seem the perfect refuge for your plight, but the sensation endures, unrelenting, until you travel south. The mountains have kept you steeled away too long, locked in a spire of tundra like some ancient beast set to guard a gem. There are more ancient things that exist in this world though, more beastly too, and that is why relief only comes as you near the sea's spray. It calls to you, sings to you with each dancing wave. The surf and the foam shine with a familiar light as they curl and tumble, wild and reckless against the surf. The burning subsides like a low tide in the ocean of your flesh, crawling, creeping, but receding.

It beckons you to enter the waves.
Drown it asks beneath a guarded smile.
Vanish he asks as his hooves cut the sand behind you.

Will you succumb, Reaper, or turn and face he who yields the hot iron pressed so firmly at the back of your neck?

@[Deimos]
He may decide if others are open to post here or not.

He did not succumb to the passing whims of the fire that overtook him like a plague. It wasn't expected that he would, but it would have been easier for the both of them. He chose to resist though, fighting an inevitable fate like so many of the victims he swept into his towline. That was fine, the lord of darkness would be lit up this day.

As the Reaper turns, he comes to face the beast that has driven him here. A testament to the flames which course within the dark one';s veins, before him stands a massive bull. A red bull with hooves licked by fire and a tail tipped with an inferno, thrashing with a furious trail of light and ash. Where he stepped the ground became molten, then smooth and shiny as glass curled into place. His horns curl wickedly beyond his broad head, easily spanning the length of the stallion before him. They sway to and fro, threatening in nature, but it's herding in its intentions.

The red bull is driving Deimos into the sea, or was.

No
Deimos' answer is like a whip to the crimson bull, his own response building within the great expanse of his breast with a horrendous grumble, resonating in a flurry of indignant vibrations from his wet nostrils and tremoring into the sand they stood on. Fire flew out like exhaust from the bellows of his gut, blazing from the corners of his maw which gaped open in reproach. The red bull was not accustomed to refusal, but his might was not simply for show.

If Deimos refused to be plunged into the depths of the endlessly moving monster of water, where his brethren danced in the seafoam, running and sparkling with each rolling wave - well then he would be set to burn away into naught but a pile of ash, easily picked up and dispersed by the wind. The red bull roared another breath of fire and rage, head lowering and horns swaying with weight as he charged the lord of death. He was already trapped by the ocean behind him, and with the length of the spires that climbed out of the bull's head, he was certain that he could only fall back, fall and melt into the waves where he belonged.

His steps were only as fast as they needed to be to corral the Reaper, else the giant bovine drenched in fire and flame, stained the deep crimson of blood and anger, did not hasten this most delectable of moments. To watch the fine body of a horned beast not unlike himself be torn into little more than sparkling droplets of saline and whipped into pale froth - there were no other pleasantries in life. Surely of all his victims, Deimos would best understand the surge of triumph, of control, of power in its most absolute forms when he drew the last breath out of something, forced it against its whim, the soul struggling against all odds to survive and he, with a mere glint of his baleful eyes, wrenched it away.

Though where Deimos stole, the bull repackaged, gifted, transformed. The sea was alive with the might of thousands of unicorns ceaselessly running against their fates, pulling the surf back and forth with their turmoil, their grace, their beauty. It was a poetic demise, far more justified than the cruel snares Deimos employed, his garden full of shed coils.

For this reason, the inferno saturated titan could not understand Deimos' refusal to submit.

Hooves tore apart the beach, flinging sand and glass alike as he moved, a perfectly toned beast of war and destruction. Yet, so was his foe, and with little more than a steely resolve the dark lord retaliated. Just as strong, just as precise, just as damning, Deimos' touch wound its way to the bull, clenching onto his heart like the skeleton hands which earned him his infamy.

A bellow tore free from the hefty bosom of the charging cretin, the rage previously thundering free now a strangled, haunting racket of pain. His limbs locked up, his eyes bulged, his breaths drew ragged - the red bull slowed, a comet trapped in its final blaze down towards the ground. Manically he swung his horns at the foul beast that was to be of beauty and instead was of decay. Given his girth and his own nefarious nature, the red bull struggled to resist, fighting, urging, shoving at Deimos in an attempt to continue to drive the unicorn into the depths, even if he no longer remained to watch that dark water stir.

The flame that encased him swayed, a candle flickering in the wind, easily extinguished with blood and stolen breath.

There was something in the bull's face when he struck Deimos at last. Joy perhaps, to have inflicted something upon this most irksome of unicorns, yet the feature did not suit the lines that graced his countenance. Sorrow was another possibility, given that he was forced to bruise his most precious of goods, stain his beautiful dancer. Maybe it was just the creases of ensuing death also painted there that blurred the true identity of what the bull felt, but either way he did not feel it much longer.

Where Deimos fell, his blood a red eye just blinking open, the inferno wrought bovine continued. He staggered, stumbled, crashed onto his right shoulder. His momentum carried him into the sand, spraying fine grains and glassy shards until the crushed shells and broken shards had piled so high that they threatened to consume the dark beast. Dark indeed.

His fire was snuffed out fully and finally, leaving his crumpled body as nothing other than dead coal left to turn cold and dissolve. His flesh, once alive and alight with power and flame was now nothing more than hardening rot, as full of dust and discoloration as any one else.

Where the blood was drawn on the dark lord's skin, crimson mixing with slate, fire with ash, a new found burn placed itself. As if the touch of horn to hide had been a transfer rather than a last stab from a desperate creature, the bull's fire seemed to have crawled into Deimos. Even the wound itself closed quickly, the flesh heated from the inside out. For a moment the inner blaze crawled like a massive worm, wriggling into all of Deimo's regions, riding on his veins and snaking through his arteries so that he burned in all places and exhaled with the glow of ascension. Then it faded, submerging deep within him, there to be summoned like his skeleton hand.

The ocean roared, applause for its fallen keeper. The waves crashed, foam spraying as wild as ever.
As for the red bull, he was nothing more than a monument of defeat.

Congratulations! Deimos has been awarded his active magic :D Please post to the Character Records Update thread to receive restrictions.

[Magic: Fire Blast | Capable of releasing blasts of fire on a specific target.]