A Mephistophelean finale, coursing and drumming and winding its way through the thick columns of autumn, pressed its wicked, gnarled fingers across the vicious harpoons, against the acrimonious calculations, unsettled, but still triumphant. They’d already managed a victory, a hold over the Falls, a bludgeoned battle of mixed anomalies and broken spirits, but this one, the beckoning, siren-song of vengeance, had been the culmination he’d been looking for, a piece of violence, a promise of vehemence. The Lord of winter, with his Siberian wiles and his cold-blooded machinations, had waited for revenge as patient, as stoic, as ever. While the world rose in a swell of panic, while the earth chimed and echoed in her grandest outcry, while the Edge fettered into leadership quandaries and maligned purposes, the beast was ever-composed, a titan on the horizon, a calm, composed monster. Hotaru had written the rites, the scripts, the alterations, and he’d beseech her every credit for the figure behind their prison gates. She’d orchestrated, she’d arranged, she’d adapted, the malicious tidings ghosting behind their eyes, and the Reaper grasped, clenched, and tightened his malice, his menace, into its ambitious fragments. They hadn’t tricked and deceived, mauled and bludgeoned, for no reason – the clarity, the sharpened bouts of purpose, of motivations, clipped along his skull and made silent raptures of the unholy reveries. A mother, a nurse, a citizen, a soldier of the Basin, snarled and snagged and taken without warning, without cause, worn into demise and quietus, fumbling into the coils of scythes. Deimos could remember her in bits and pieces, a white woman, like a ghost, scolding Mauja’s insistence on his acceptance into the Edge, a healer tending to her wounded flock, a dam resting with her babes in the wild, untamed regions of a new land, a new empire. She’d proved her loyalty time and time again, raised Basin children, soothed Basin soldiers, and rattled the dominion of their icy world until it pulsed with satisfaction. Then, she’d been gone, laid to waste without objectives or scorn. Retribution was upon them now, layered and lacquered between the iron slate and wooden door, a murderer chained and shackled within their confines, awaiting his sentence, his quick, rapid trial, his shifting, plunging weight plummeting into pits and pendulums.

No one took from his kingdom without retaliation. No one stole from his empire without reprisal. No one killed one of his own without requital.

The Basin wasn’t weak, bending and fraying to the cheapened ruin of another. The Basin wasn’t a cowing, miserable cretin, coiling and fawning, crawling and withering, at the strength of another’s vicious hand. The Basin wasn’t a simpering dog made to pant beneath the strung commands of its master. Their sovereign was beautiful, treacherous, and powerful, a den, a home, a sanctuary to heathens and predators, to seditious raptures and clarity of severity. To allow this oaf any appeasement, to bestow him the charity of wandering amidst havoc and bedlam, to sit back and do nothing was impossible, inconceivable, and absurd. The King’s smoldering predilection, the beast’s scalding, smothering, seething conscience couldn’t bear it. The word trifled with them again and again and again, a pattern of cyclical ineptitude, like skull-faced mares and sullen, depraved harpies, like golden Lords with prejudiced thoughts, and they always reared back up, a face of disaster, a visage of acrimony. They were a persevering land, they were an enduring force, and they held calamity strung between their muscles. They immersed annihilation into their souls. They embraced menace and breathed devastation. They crooned monstrous divinations. It was simply happening again.

He stood before the jail as a devilish masterpiece, savage, nefarious prose. Taut and rigid, he listened to the bellows, the promises, and the convictions of a fool, muttering and storming behind a wall he’d yet to break apart. Resolute and mordant, caressed in the arts of the devil, in the cool, damned prowess he’d used to fell the titan earlier, he leaned in closer, a rapacious carnivore with the taste of satisfaction simmering along his tongue. His words were drenched, soused, in abhorrence, in contempt, in loathing, grinding against his flesh in a tone of pure predilection, of rampant, ample decadence, in a siege of immoral, indulgent corruption, ignoring the wailing tones, the drowning shouts. “You murdered a member of the Basin. You will have no release.” Cruel, bestial, savage, he gripped the words as he did a sword, eager to drive onslaught, terror, and horror into the abomination beyond the gate. Only thereafter did he turn to the Doctor, the only one who deserved the credence, the splendor, of condemning the contained. What would he do? Had the passing seasons nulled his grief? Had the fissures of time altered his course? Or would he blend ferocity through the hum of his poison, through the measure of his hate, of his violence, of his contempt, for the imprisoned? Deimos knew what he would do, but it was not his decision. His entangled, innate enmity scoured with a crisp, cold gaze, meticulous and devouring, scathing and brooding, twisting to stare vividly at one of his oldest friends. “The choice is yours, d’Artagnan. How will you see him punished?”