Chaotic inflections of the barbaric strummed and slithered through the icy vestiges, through the bellicose threads of his home. The Reaper wandered from the seething depths of the lake, cooled, chilled, masked and immersed in its callous fathoms, soothed and assuaged from the blistering waves recently bound throughout his frame (fire, like his father, like his ancestors, brimstone and embers clenched in his veins), to the distinction of visitors lining his sovereign’s border. When he’d shaken the droplets from his marble form, when he’d pulsed and pervaded the loam with his nefarious puissance and pernicious schemes, the behemoth followed the wayward particulars streamlined into his sector, the intriguing bounty of Dragon’s Throat legions marching amidst the peaks. As the devil’s manifestation maneuvered, struck against the cold, the rime, the pockets of snow left and lingering, his machinations spun, convoluted, pondered over the arches and schemes of the dune settlers. To what purpose did they arrive? The world had been tossed and churned as of late, hostilities bound and brewing, circling overhead like bestial scavengers, ready to pick and clean the bones of the foolish: whose skeletal remains would they be provoke? While he burned with anarchy, while he seared with rebellion and revolution, the rest of his herd couldn’t embark within such artifices: not until they were ready, not until their muscles undulated, coiled, rippled with power, with potency, with macabre glee and tense, rigid, unyielding hymns. They had to be careful, wander on pins, on needles, on nettles, on barbs and thorns, clench their jaws and rub their teeth against the circumstances festering and colliding. Upon his arrival, the dangerous, treacherous means of his occupation, of his existence, surrounded the heathen raptures and infidel reverie; protected, shrouded, the most toxic of sanctums – extending a subtle, immoral nod towards the beasts grasped in snow, blocked by sentinel whims, permitted to step from beneath the haunted gallows. The Throat had been wise in sending one particular missionary: Sacre, a son of the Doctor, who had seemingly longed for sand and stone instead of glaciers and ice. He’d grown since the necromancer last saw him, launched from lad to adult, and received an understated smirk from the corner of his lips. The other, a golden mare, drenched in markings, followed by a fox (were they all wily, or did they require a cunning bonded to fulfill their flaws?), was unfamiliar, like the rest of the traveling troupe. His piercing, puncturing stare roamed over the visitors, the wayfaring vendors, announcing his title, his supremacy, “Deimos, Lord of the Basin,” before turning towards the sable stag, rendering his blunt chords and ferocious tidings. “Sacre – what does the Throat require?”