Pulled from his castle walls, the Reaper stoked and stalked, fettered and unchained, drafted from the high, chilling winds and the low, glacial expanse, a tyrant amongst the thistles and thorns. While he roamed, while he wandered, while he picked apart the pieces of divinity and virtue, swallowed and consumed the fragments of piety, the bellicose heat of infernal loathing conspired through the air; his ears perked, his mind fastened, gleaming and dreaming in rancorous, avaricious speculation. Were it not by the vocals of his own Thief he may not have even tended to its anarchical squall, could have left it for another day, another hour, another moment of voracious rumination, but the unwinding of the gilded brigand was not something to be ignored. The Lord and King followed the vicious unwinding, coiled and curled like a spring, like an unyielding fortress, like a immoral bow strapped and waiting for its declarative harpoon, because curiosity lent and tended the draw, the inquiry, of how Thranduil had come to be undone. Didn’t the golden cretin lavish and lacquer masks at every invitation? Didn’t he sputter and fawn at every moment? Didn’t he trap figments of poison in ears, not the wily incantations of hate and loathing (at least, not on the surface)? The behemoth imagined the sight would be almost amusing, to be a witness to a scoundrel’s exposure, truth beyond the lies, deceptions, and fabrications. But as Deimos approached, stolen from the shadows and lofting in the thicket (a tale of ferocious claws, a myth of dangerous toiling), the subterfuge lost its glamor, its decadence, its opulence, and descended into a mutinous fury. Perhaps it was one thing to toy with a puppeteer, but it was another entirely when a monster he considered part of his sovereign to be manipulated, coerced, threatened under his rule. What could have occurred to make the swindler scream for his compatriots? He answered in molten silence, narrowed eyes scrutinizing over the caked sweat, the beaded bitterness, the noxious fumes of the self-serving Thief, examining, investigating, internal, inward, bestial invocations building and brewing. Apathy was chased away by the sculpting of anarchy, chipping and contorting at his bones, wild and untamed, vicious and heartless, needing only the proper provocation to be unleashed and unraveled. The only indication of his concern, of his wrath, reveled and piqued in the blunt candor of his tones, in the puncturing glance layered upon Thranduil. “What happened?”