The Reaper, barbaric and monstrous, brooded and presided amongst one of the lower caverns, a reticent statue, a corporeal blade, a tangible slab of marble. Lacquered in cold malevolence, his piercing ire shrouded and simmered, bowed to naught but the meticulous winding of his calculations, plundering, plaguing, plotting annihilation and devastation as the sun lanced over his hills, his summits, his valleys, and his plains, presiding as a master of depravity, an unforgiving reel of vengeance and callousness. Utterly alone all over again, a creature of distinction if only for his cold, shrewd desolation, maneuvering across the world with nothing and no one, a fiend on the wilds with only a constant companion of savagery, finessed forbidding, heedless traps and snares – but it hadn’t always been this way. He’d been tamed once, felled and brought to his knees by rain and her drowning sorrows, her deluging virtue, her veritable tunes, her notes of peace and repose. He’d ignored her speeches, too carnivorous, too rapacious, too avaricious, clinging to violence and vehemence and her, lost in the wickedness and the pernicious schemes, an ethereal ruin bound to the chilling mountains. When he devoured her ambrosia, when he swallowed her morality, she never complained, she never shirked, she never yielded, and instead, complied, offered, bestowed until his arched detachment became besotted armaments, enveloping veils of imperial munitions – then she left. No reasons given, no answers provided, no apologies conveyed, just a sliver in the skies, sliding with the water, vanished. So, the isolation continued, ripping out compassion, scorning beneficence, frozen, shackled heart spread apart between ice and torrents, and he could only follow one. He couldn’t remember which one had abandoned the other; but he still saw her in flickers and hallucinations, in phantoms and wraiths, sometimes in his fevered dreams where the world was set on fire and she hastened to shower the realm in her love and desire, and once, when the great, red ox had sought his disaster, she’d danced in the ocean, a mermaid, a siren, a commanding temptress seeking his absolution, his demise. The infidel would have fled into the water and submerged his body in her essence, had she been real, had she been tangible, had he not been so corroded, so condemned, so corrupted. Instead, the behemoth just stared across the lakes, the rivers, the streams, and snagged her presence for a few seconds, then turned away, undeserving and inept. He couldn’t hold onto the sea, the ocean, the tides, or the currents – it would make sense that she’d dissipate from his clutches.

A familiar scent unraveled in the aperture, and curled and coiled and clawed around his heart. He lifted his skull to the wind, narrowing his gaze to a sharp, predatory stare, pondered over the trickery, the devilry, surrounding his core. Surely the manifestation of her wake, of her presence, was a mirage, bumbling and unwinding before his senses in order to deprive him of something, to forge weakness, to ensure incapacity, and he almost didn’t believe its existence, stepping back into the cave and shirking the sedition. But it continued wafting, chiming with the summer breeze, with the soft munitions of his Siberian realm, like a call, like a demand, and he maneuvered one stride out of the entrance, staring down at the world before him – the Lord, the King, the beast, surveying his kingdom, quietly begging, yearning, longing, and trying not to tether himself into those beguiling notions (they’d happened before, and she hadn’t been there, another dream leaving him bereft). But there, along the lake, drinking in the shoal, the shore, the embankment, appeared a figure, lithe, small, delicate (but never in anything but foundation), and something in his chest burst.

Like a fiendish whisper, like a minstrel, a master, of death and all of its desecration, he flew from the catacomb, striking flint, stone, and rubble, a rapid stretch of demise and devastation, a ruin seeking the only essence of absolution he’d ever craved, galloping headlong down merciless paths and recoiling trails. Deimos had to know if she was real, if she was definite, distinct, or if he’d truly lost his presence of mind, leaping and bounding, unaware if he was making sound or if he was a silent, stealthy predator cast and harpooning into the wind. It didn’t matter, because he longed for her just as much as the first time he’d set his eyes on her, saw past the innocent veneer and the pious certainties, drenched himself in the enduring tides and unraveling, cascading regimes. He reigned closer, fed on the fractious, feverish elements, swept past dangerous, treacherous pitfalls and only discerned blue; it haunted the back of his eyes when he slept, it drifted through his skull when he stared at his citizens, it remained supreme, regarded, and revered, even when she’d maneuvered away. The cretin ceased all movement, stood on the opposite side of the lake, afraid of what he might do if he drew too close, frightened to find she was only one more mirage, only one more ghost, only one more specter to starve him of his desolation, to lure him into ruin. He stared, eyes wide, not the narrowed slivers of penetrating, piercing ire, not the exasperated, resigned slits of vexation, but a familiar craving, wanton feature, chiseled and sculpted only for her; devilish devotion, vicious orisons. Then, like a prayer, like a hallelujah, he drew her name across his lips. “Huyana?”

@[Huyana]