you can't offer your poison to me
in your kingdom of filth

Dawn is approaching.

He hasn't slept in three days, and his heart thrums with constant, unsteady adrenaline. His blood is hot with something deeper than the literal magma in his veins, and his lungs are tight with anxiety. This is the riskiest move he has ever made in his entire life. And living in the Rift, in the squalor and dirt, where death was around every corner and in every unnatural shift to the wind? Wrath had made endless stupid decisions. Most of them had kept him alive another day, another night, another meager hour. The Rift was merciless, blackened and scorched by the sins of their forefathers and the corruption of their tyrannical gods. Wrath had been knee deep in blood and expelled internal organs far too many times in his relatively short life. He'd seen foals turned inside out for fun, had watched fellow soldiers turn mad with unknown sickness and develop a sudden craving for equine flesh. The Gods of the Rift were merciless tricksters, he and his men mere pawns on the board for minor gods to gain favor from the ancients. A never-ending social ladder that was slicked with blood and death. 

Wrath knew war. He knew it intimately, because it had seeped into every crevice his soul had to offer, filling him with tar and turpentine that spoiled the bits of his being he could not keep safe. Jaeger was locked away beneath a thousand iron bars, a cruel sort of love for whatever remained of his past life and existence. Wrath knew the shudder of unwanted pleasure that trickled down his spine like the claw of Lucifer himself when he watched the light die out in his opponent's eyes. A soldier for hire, a grunt, a brute meant for one thing. His past was as blackened as his hide, and yet...

Kratos where is Kratos, near keep him near! Whirling the massive beast swung his head to find the youth, a periodic motion he could not keep in check. Their cover of darkness would not last forever. Dawn. Dawn is breaking. Wrath knew fear, he knew stupidity, but this? This was something so much more. He'd entertained the idea of smuggling Kratos away before, from the tenuous favor his fucked up family held with the gods. He'd raised the whelp from babe to adolescence, and in his heart of hearts he was fond of the kid. Royal blood or no. Truly the midnight boy was no child, but Wrath would forever regard him as one. Helpless but to fall into memories of big doe eyes and trembling lips as he stood before the babe Kratos had once been. The disgust he'd felt to hear Pallos demand Wrath teach him the art of war and wreckage before his bones were hard enough, his body hardened by age that Wrath could not promise him. Every day was a blessing and a hellish curse in one, and he'd seen a new world in the child's eyes. A world with peace and safety. A world Wrath wanted to offer to the young colt. 

And so he had started to plan. The most dangerous of risks, that anyone should know he was trying to find a way out of the Rift. A seemingly endless, abysmal land where you lived a skeletal, meaningless life only to die and become another notch on some celestial asshole's bedpost. A gamble, one where far more than his own life was placed upon the table. He'd been risking Kratos, his loyal bachelor band, the soldiers who had stuck by him as he led them through veritable hell each evening. A thousand low-voiced whispers, wary glances and bared teeth promising to ensure eternal silence. In the most bloody, gruesome way he could manage. His name preceded him, for he was not called Wrath without reason.

The Rift grew impossibly more unstable, until Kratos was sent to Wrath's quarters on a more permanent basis. And as the Bear and the strange warping portal appeared in the Rift, Wrath made his move. 

It was beyond dangerous. To flee at the most critical time, however, was a strategic move that Wrath knew well. The others, gods included, would be too consumed with this destructive disruption to care for the two souls that fled beneath the cover of new moon darkness and sick, rotten winds. Or rather, one soul and his damaged, wraith protector. He kept Kratos close, for three days and three nights, never sleeping nor allowing his eyes to do more than stutter a blink for fear of what lay beyond the shadows they kept to. Kratos knew his way around his own body, knew as many takedowns and killing blows as Wrath could teach him in three years, but he'd never have the edge Wrath did. He'd never have the cold-blooded ability to wrap his blunted teeth around the delicate spine of an opponent and yank until the vertebrae snapped apart and the body spasmed beneath his hold like a kicking kitten in its mothers jaws.

Wrath would sooner die than see Kratos turn into that kind of monster.

Shaking free of the thoughts that plagued him, he turned his ember eyes to the stallion at his side. The one similarly mired in muck and disease, their coats in turn spotted with muck where the literal of that sentiment was unavoidable. Mildly disgusting, of course, but it covered their scents and disguised their coats - most importantly Kratos, for there was no concealing the magma that was forever part of Wrath's body. He was the important one, the one that needed to see the light of a new world. Wrath would die for Kratos to make that journey. 

Truthfully, he did not intend to make it out of this alive. 

"Stay low," he rumbled gruffly, turning and leading the way from their copse of blackened trees into the grey light of pre-dawn. They needed to make it across the meadow to the next stretch of foliage, and fast. Stay away from the light. Move with the shadows. Become them. There was no real need to speak the reminder, it was something he repeated each time they had to venture across open spaces. Three days, three nights. The fourth was far too close to approaching. And only when the shadows swallowed them back up and they were away from the outskirts of the forest did Wrath turn to signal rest. "Dawn is too close. Rest." It was a mere grunt but he stood and motioned towards the earth, prepared to stand guard for another day.

Lazarus has got no dirt on me
and I'll rise to every occassion