The Reaper knew death, embodied it, strived for it, created and carved its crawling opus, its seething maelstrom, its beating, bleeding magnificence, granted, gifted, and bestowed its sinuous raptures from the days of his youthful contortions. He wished it upon enemies, he craved it upon infidels, he yearned for it upon the inept, the frail, the virtuous, the toxic, the threats unwinding and serpentine around his home, his empire, his brethren. He bent beneath its immoral doldrums and listened to its blistering outcry, provided its release with the cool, enamoring wiles of enticed devastation, venomous ruin, and irreverent provocations of the merciless, of the relentless, of the heedless. But on this most recent quietus, on the crooning hells and heels of a Lord murdered and martyred within their icy walls – he was silent, brooding, ruminating on the endless debacle, on the sullen ways of the earth, on the twists and turns of mayhem. Where they once held and clenched acrimony and anarchy with an iron fist, the realm dissolved back onto its trappings, its snares, leaving them reeling with blame, with havoc, with wreckage well after the dust should have settled. Had they relished Midas’ death? Had they coveted for his slaughter? Had they beckoned for his assassination? Never in his soulless void had he truly manifested the desires to see the gilded one felled in rime and snow; defeat and failure absolutely, perhaps a sinking of his knees into sand and stone, maybe a chink plucked from his armor, but not the end of his life. Midas, like all of them, had been set in his ways, failing to change and alter and morph through the times, and while Deimos fought and clenched his teeth, bristled and seared, he’d also smoldered into the rhythms of life, drove onslaughts where they fit, cast away the broken, torn foundations, cast aside remnants of the past (and let them bleed in plaguing forms, secret, furtive, where all his hate resided, all his malice and menace could wane away the days, the hours, the minutes, the seconds) – the Falls King had ignored their requests. He’d committed error after error, flawed and faulted like all mortal men, but had paid the price for his inadequacies, faltering until he could do so no longer. There’d been no opportunity to rise from his mistakes (as the Basin had done, time and time again, the constant test of endurance, perseverance, and strength, when dominion and supremacy seemed so far away and so very close all at once), because they’d galvanized, fortified, and lanced through the holes, the defects, the deficiencies, and one by one, the towers fell, the walls collapsed, and the golden touch flickered away. In the end, it just meant they were all perishable.

But now, the northern King wanted truth, wanted distinction, wanted reality and corporeality, to see, to view, to witness the sight for himself. He followed the murmured trail of Thranduil’s prior whereabouts, he flanked the patchwork wiles of heaven and its glorious fields (his Elysium was different, painted in ichor and darkness and tainted beyond the stars); the piercing, puncturing void of his eyes, like hallowed heartlessness, saw the shift of movement beyond the rows of grass. Ulrik, stark and desolate amongst the gathering crowd, a cart carrying the token of Midas, murmuring, babbling souls crying for their fallen, gallant steed. The behemoth stood away, a thriving, beating, living shadow, staring at those assembled, waiting for something, anything, to carve them away from the tomb, from the sepulcher, a notion, a reason, for the vibrancy in his veins to split them apart. He recognized Africa, had known her before she was one-winged, had smirked when he murdered her fellow, trespassing kin, shook his head when she spat and hissed, tore about her outcries (for she’d been committed in the series of errors too, watching them spin and roll, witnessing them set flame). Stupidity, blunder after blunder, heartfelt, whimsical airs split apart in merciless shades; Helovia was not for the dreamers, but for the bold, for the treacherous, for the deceitful, and she, like so many of them before her, had stumbled into the faltering, gaping wounds of weakness, of shifting sides, of power tipping, tipping, tipping its ambrosial chalice into their machinations, their calculations. Midas’ death had merely been an unfortunate blip on the lilting triumph.

He advanced then, not saying a single word. He was damnation, he was corruption, he was upheaval and chaos and bedlam all rolled into a singular carnivore, and bowed his head towards the painted figure, charred and damaged. Thereafter, he moved to stand beside his Engineer (one who protected, who pledged, while they were off embracing the croons of devils and the slide of iniquity), lending support, adherence, credence, through the quiet, hushed tones of his depravity, of his wickedness, of his sinister insurrection; a sword of brutality providing the most meager of comforts, the most minute of amiability. It was all he had to offer in the circle of calamity.