The titan listened, grave and decadent, unholy and immoral, glancing back and forth between the two mares, lingering amidst peccadilloes and scintillating sins; causing an imbalance between the fleeting chipper dwellings and the higher reaches of pandemonium. With Tiamat’s gentleness and Wicka’s softness, he was the most scalding, brutal contortion in their abyss, and it plucked at his nefariousness, maneuvered the stone-beast to irreverent fragility and loitering isolation, becoming more and more detached as the moments spun on – ill-equipped to foster anything but upheaval and disaster. Seared and scorched by devils’ hands, caressed by vile venom, unleashed from the annals of darkness and the pernicious outreach of clawing, rapacious devils, the molten monster felt out of place in their virtuous field, and he stifled a few muted breaths, brooded and brewed in his restless armaments, pausing for rapture, for reverie, for resolution in the entanglement of mellifluousness and dulcet alms. The effort of standing amidst innocence cut across like a puissant, potent knife, searing deep within his nefarious heart and unnerving the debauched highlights of his coiled veneer; no predatory claws were unsheathed from his scabbard, no abhorrent indulgences whispered, murmured, or contorted through the luminescent bounty – he was more witness than master, satanic whims distorting and destroying the harmony between cherished tundra and laced unfamiliarity. Without Erebos’ provocation, without his curiosity, without his determined, wicked pinnacle, he may have dissolved and disappeared into shade and shadow, fading into the crisp, destructive alms, chiseled, cold, and desolate all over again. He tilted his head, like an inquisitive slip of a more childish gesture, framed and waxen in a yield of juvenile tendencies, ruminating along the dark horizons at Wicka’s idle murmurings, recalling his unholy barbs into the rubble and stone. “You do not have to choose now.” He recalled the beast Mortuus Nox, whom had been invited and coaxed towards a Phantom position, but refused it outright for a chance to discover and explore his passions, his talents, his aptitudes beyond the remarks of predilections and woven lies. “You may learn from those higher ranked, and see where you fit.” While Deimos had known what his role would be from the day he entered Helovia (all blood, all power, all potency, ravaging and suffocating and mauling, the thrill of chaos, the swell of bedlam), others couldn’t say the same. They had to endeavor, they had to pursue, and they had to grow.

Poised to drift back into silence and ambiguity, the monster hadn’t expected the light of her eyes to reign in inquisition, to bask and glow straight into the malicious spoils of his life – he raised his skull, his crown, his cranium almost abruptly, chiseled a sharpened arch to his brow, attempted to start piecing together whatever puzzle she’d tossed his way. He hadn’t been born in Helovia, in fact, far from it, across seas and empires, mountains and valleys, down deep into fathoms of rock and shoal, where the tides rippled across moonlit stretches (and here his heart lurched and his teeth ground together, tight within his jaw). The Reaper’s poise and prose hadn’t begun amidst this tempest, but in Isilme, where the reach of hate and contempt and pure, utter loathing spilled along the runes and wishes, where it was normal to beat and bludgeon their way through life, where politics were woven dreams and aspirations, where war fed every nuance and spark of life, where he’d drifted across the damp sand and listened to his father, his mother, his sister, and where he’d turned a year old, then watched the world decay around him. But why did she wish to know? Did it make him seem unworthy, to not have been carved from this earth, but another? Or did it align him to prowess, to potency, to precision, where he’d lived in one villainous wake and drove his ferocity into the next, learnt and polished his merciless, heedless skills upon a carved beach, then lent it to the ice, to the rime, to the summits? He could have lied, but the sense of mystery, of enigma, and inquiry led him down the audacious path – and he wanted to tell the sovereign where he’d come from, wanted to feel the weight of his sire’s words across his shoulders again, wanted to see his mother’s warning glances, wanted to witness his sister’s antics – he wished for them to be remembered beyond fables and mythos. The King’s words dominated, not fierce, not severe, but mighty and absconding, feeding into the croon of curiosity and the intrigue of interlopers, a swell of power, a rush of sedition. “No. I was born in Isilme.”


@[Tiamat] @[Wicka]