Frigid monstrosities brooded by the shoal and sand of the never-freezing lake, staring once or twice across the landscape with naught much but cold, chilling calculations fermenting in a devilish mind. The world was a rapidly changing place, and with new information, new designs, new machinations building and colliding everywhere, he struggled to make sense of it all. Murders, with no true form or reason, galvanizing for future, unknown enterprises, monitoring the borders for fiends, for cretins, for infidels he could chase and maim: the realm hadn’t been quiet for ages, and the stirring of anarchy bolstered his veins, heightened his awareness, and encircled his mind like a wraith. The bellows in the distance, thrown and tossed from the borders, were almost ignored; he had no ambitions to treat another messenger or interloper with stiffened, polite credence, but then he recognized the tone of the General. With one more piercing stare lanced across the waters’ edge, reminding him of her and any lingering remnants of repose, he marched across his frozen grounds, his rancorous empire, with the rapture, the reverie, of a cold-blooded machine. He was war and travesty, treachery and death, a Reaper’s scythe balanced alongside his long rapier, and he had no intention of masking it; his arrival only signaled his domination, his supremacy, and the puncturing slate of power. His skull twisted towards one beast to another, recognizing two but not the other, a stranger in the midst, and the silver Mender, Tangere. To his compatriots, he bestowed a curt nod, and to the newcomer, a look of curiosity flickering between reticent deliberations. “Welcome.” The other beast, painted in sable and gold, reminded him so chiefly of others he knew (were those horns the same as Torleik’s?), but couldn’t quite picture the answer in his mind, it chewed and churned at him while his stare remained, chiseled and sculpted in scrutiny and examination. Without infusion or awareness of his personality, the Lord presumed the stag could be a worthy fighter, muscular and refined. If his talents delved elsewhere, into deception, into subterfuge, into hostile provocations, he could always join Thranduil’s quest to lie and steal his way through Helovia. Healing or crafting could always be a worthy pursuit as well; all of their ranks yearned to be filled with aptitude and talent. He’d fix the notions for later inquiry (maybe Torleik had found something worthy in the strange, unrelenting halls of the Threshold), and completed the task of introductions. “I am Deimos. Who are you?”