A living blade, a scorching menace, a vile, deplorable, seething menace coiled and curled in the devil’s hands shirked all emotion except the timeless essence of contempt and loathing. It riddled along his skin, molded into his pelt, plunging monstrous animosity, shaping avaricious manipulation, rancorous ardor. Cold, chilling, wretched malevolence brewed and festered from the penetrating credence of the illustrious, potent pariah, hardened, primitive, and arcane. Serrated and immersed, unfurling, uncurling, inveigling iniquity, fanning entropy, bending into acrimonious surges and sinuous machinations, consumed by the ineptitude, the foolishness, the provocations landed and singed upon his hide. He’d met a number of idiots in his lifetime, parading morons, cavalcading ruffians, feverish fools, but never had he crossed so many barbs, so many wires, to chase after an empty-headed, thick-skulled dunce. No sooner had he carved armor away from a boney hag, did she attempt to abscond his son, his flesh and blood, his legacy. It was the daring, the audacity, the constant provocations she sculpted across their wake that truly unwound his taut, rigid motions into unyielding, unrelenting tides: he smoldered with havoc, devoured discord, harbored the possessive swings of bedlam, imagined her decapitated head on a platter, buried in the deepest banks of snow, forgotten boils of the stupid and inadequate. Retaliation and retaliation and retaliation, the renewing cycle of which monster was stronger, which monster was braver, which monster could ensue the most cruelty. What more did they have to do? What more did they have to say? Why did she continue her flailing, ridiculous attempts? Did she want to die (because he’d gladly serve the wench her demise, watch her sink into the farthest reaches of Hell, and smirk at her last, final breath)? Did she yearn to be their triumphant opus, the harem, the empire, the sovereign who crushed her bones and lungs, who flayed her flesh, who laid her to rest in the fierce friction, in the scintillating annihilation, of their fatal abhorrence?

Ophelia’s approach was almost unwelcome. His hardened iron craved villainy and violence, treachery and sedition, danger and hostility, and even as she delivered news of alliances going well, an armistice clearly established, a thwarting of more thieves (from the Falls, Midas’ goons), his muscles undulated, rippled, pierced with nefarious implications. His features were feral remnants, soulless ferocity brewed and smoldered from an unrelenting sway of unholy machinations, gathering and brooding, carnivore amore, predator grandeur, the imperious reverie of devils’ regimes. He nodded at her particulars, clenched his teeth together, grating upper jaw against lower mandible, narrowing his lacerating gaze towards the horizon, where he pictured the skull-heathen hung and swinging in the gallows, a jolly roger emblem notched upon their sentinels. Finally, when he could piece together a flat, even breath, one not hollowed or hallowed in absolute barbarity, he chiseled a piercing slate through the granules, antipathy and malice puncturing through each syllable, each word, each sound. “Confutatis tried to steal my son.” The notion of the little princeling in the witch’s clutches caused him to swallow one useless breath of summer air, and it stung deep into his throat, nestled like a wire, like a sword, bitter and anguishing. The Reaper’s stare fused finally upon the Forsaken, fire-forged friends in their unlikely ceasefire, searing, frustrated, vexed, blistering with savage temptation, with sinister invocations. “What would you like to do?” Because he knew what he wanted to do: perhaps stab her on her own armor, hoist her up by her own petard, watch the blood drip slowly from her wounds until she succumbed. What would make her go away, other than beautiful, sweet destruction?