For a beast so in control, for a monster so readily composed, it was difficult to admit when he was lost.

But it’d all happened so slowly, a trickling, eclipsing noose, tied knot-by-knot, inch-by-inch, until suddenly it was strapped, pulled, and tightened around his neck, choking, strangling, and suffocating, and he had nowhere to go. The gnarls and wires were marks of his failure, the cycle of steps he’d taken again and again, never realizing how deeply he’d entrenched himself. Reaching out to Huyana, bearing children, becoming Lord and King – all magnificent highlights, all anointed, consecrated favors – but what had he done after? What good was his crown? What deeds and duties had he possessed, had he seized?

War? Battles? Defenses? Brooding? What would he be remembered for, when his body collapsed into the soil, when his cold, nefarious heart ultimately failed him? His silence? His nonchalance? His arrogance? His powers? It would never be for how much he adored his herd, his brethren, or his kin, because he never told them, because he hoped somehow, someway, his actions conveyed all these sentiments, that his muted reticence forged bloodthirsty whims and sinister requiems: how he protected, how he shielded, how he thrust his sword, his rapier, his cutlass and blade into monsters, into fathoms, into pestilence for them – always for them.

But the Reaper had spun his own maze, his own web, his own labyrinth, entombed his soul in the longest reaches of claws and catacombs, fastened his entity, his presence, into the icy summits and barricaded himself from the aches, from the pains, from the numbing anxieties of the day. He didn’t get close to them. He didn’t them about himself, and he didn’t query for their secrets. He didn’t smile for them. He didn’t ask for their support, and didn’t lend his wisdom. He permitted them to live amongst the valleys without ever knowing the monster, the guard, the demon or infidel marching across the borders, patrolling the wilderness, sinking faster and faster into the wake of the earth. Eventually he’d likely be in Hell and never know it for weeks later – too festered, too succumbed.

He’d cycled back upon his old antics, when his life took a fatal turn, when his touch grasped and clenched and wielded death; hiding, shirking, doing naught but fighting cretins, fighting fools, fighting at growth, at resolution, at the crowd nestled within the Basin, at the walls closing in all around him. It took Ophelia, with all her screeching, with all her banshee antics, with her renouncement and abandonment, to realize perhaps he was truly nothing after all. When everything was over and done, what had he accomplished for the Basin?

So, the northern Lord wandered out of his empire, trailed after fire and brimstone, rampaged in stony fixtures and abolished ruins, neither screamed nor bellowed, but echoed in a widening abyss of predator movements; stalking the midnight oils, scaling the mountain heights, beating and bleeding a sinuous torture, a benign, numbing tension. He tore into his self-made warren and growled at its clawing, rasping talons, leaned into the irreverent doldrums, composed bitter, rancorous songs of death and damnation, labored through them in his constant, potent silence. He became shadow and hollowness, empty, void, listless and languid, a satanic, rippling bolero of sinister, routine upheaval, spreading sedition through his veins, through his lungs, through his skull until it defined a maddening, stinging, irritating pulse, and he’d somehow managed to surrender to the chasm, to the rifts, in his entity. The Reaper was nothing. The Reaper was no one.

The soldier of demons lingered around the heart caves, all of its acrimony, all of its potency, because it felt right, justifiable; too many parts of him had been made from infernos and infernal machinations, head hanging towards the great gallows, the gulping lava, and wondering how to make himself whole again, how to achieve greatness when he’d already thought it’d been thrust upon him. But, oddly, strangely, his ears pricked at a sudden noise (perhaps the motion was the only one announcing, registering, his existence, for otherwise he was stone reflecting embers, reflecting ash) – like the world carved his name across rocks, across rubble. All at once his memories stirred the wake of a great bull, forcing him to his knees, into the sea, torturing and flogging and begging him to die, and maybe this voice was too; a siren entity intertwining the abyss with its fallen King. But it came again, rushed against the grass, taking form, taking shape, scorching reality through the copper, smoke-induced haze, like a friend, like family, like a piece of him that had long since died. He dared not call out to him for fear it would dissipate, for fear it would disappear into the chilling, winter wind, and he’d be alone again (don’t I want to be alone?), but the familiarity of it, the worn edges, the pieces gathering in his mind begged, craved, yearned for it to be –

Could it be?

He hadn’t heard the same sounds, the same tones, the same resonance since he was a boy, jaw slackened or grin widened, in awe, in reverence, towards the possessor of such reverberations, and for a few treacherous moments, his heart clenched with feverish, wild, untamed hope. The monster whispered back into the grass, into the fire, into the blaze, eyes narrowed, body cautious, rigid, and taut, and his whole mind offering the slightest of reverent prayers. “Father?”