The Reaper had spent a lifetime wasting away.
 
At first it'd been easy because there’d been nothing for him but the savage, layered torrents of treachery and deceit, where he could harbor naught but ill will, where he could burn under the freedom of Lucifer reaches and Satan sword handles. Then there was loyalty, and he fueled the fire beneath the banners and flags of the World’s Edge, and when they lost he beckoned more hate, more contempt, more pure, bitter loathing, reserving it for the enemies of the Basin. Then when he took the throne, when he loved and cherished and said nothing for it – thought of only action, only motion, only maneuvering through the gallows and hoping they could see what his heart was truly sculpted and carved for – he lost so much more. Every decision took him one step away from ones he used to inspire, invoke, and protect, every travel across the earth to another land brought him further away from all those lofty goals of annihilation and persecution because he had to preserve, defend, and shield those marooned in his shelter, and soon, the Lord of ice and winter and frozen boundaries felt all the more faded, withered, and decrepit.
 
He knew they’d left – one by one, marching to the beat of different drums, no longer listening to the chilling, barbaric winds, no longer yearning for the swift call of the whistling caverns, no longer rummaging past icy paths and down glacial hills. Their scent grew stale, faint, and then nonexistent, removed from the pale, gone without saying goodbye, without explaining why they couldn’t stay within the wintry walls, and he knew, somehow, someway, it’d been because of him. Some choice, some error, some decision, some rhyme or reason he’d enacted and they’d shunned; and the notion that it bothered him at all, a King of indifference and reticence, was even more incensing.
 
But he’d considered them his allies, his comrades, his companions, his friends - had risked life and limb for them and would do it all again in a heartbeat – and they slithered away, grown distant, became immersed in shadows, away, away, away from him and his heavy, overbearing crown. And like some ignorant child, he appeared weak and foolish to them, helpless and wondering, ineffectual and ridiculous, unsure and unaware of how he could repair the damage he’d caused.
 
Deimos wandered through a preferred haunt, because the widening sunset shrouded him from all the mania cluttering his skull, because the open, endless sea reminded him of Huyana and all the other things he’d lost along the way, because he’d once lived on the Moonlit Tides with his family and wondered what would become of him. Alone, sinister, beguiling, alluring, and contorted, one more crumbling shrine, one more ruinous temple, veiled in his unattainable nonchalance, he marched across the sands with no true purpose, no notion or regard, staring out at the mass of water and pondering how far he could go until he sunk to the bottom, until something reached and pulled him out or watched as he was silenced for eternity. He may not have even noticed another nearby had the shouts, had the familiar noise not loosened him from brooding, brewing shackles, had he not lifted his piercing, puncturing gaze to the mist and fog. The screech, the cry, of a griffin, not a gull, fixated his sights upon strange gatherings, upon bewitching spells, upon does and antlers and someone altogether familiar. Lost in the swirl of abyss and desolation, the Reaper peered between the layers, the mysteries, the enigmas, and merely loosened one word across his mouth. “Arah?”