Perhaps there was a dual surprise from both males – and where the Engineer vocalized it, Deimos registered it with a snort and a narrowing of his eyes – because he hadn’t thought the beast would show.
 
How malicious, how pathetic, how glacial and cold they’d turned out to be.
 
There were many words, phrases, and syllables the Reaper could have directed towards Ulrik. Why did you leave? Why didn’t you say anything? What has become of you? What has become of Illynx? - but they were stuck, mired, brooding inside his cranium, never unleashed past his lips. He wanted to be able to come up with something, anything to pulse together the source of barbarity and brutality they once shared – because it’d been great, glorious power, it’d been supremacy and sinister ambitions, it’d been a brewing convolution of intrigue and disaster – and that’s all they’d ever needed. The world had been so much simpler before he’d ascended to the frigid throne; full of mayhem, full of bedlam, full of blood and battles and sheer, overwhelming hate for the realms beyond their own. It’d been strife and anarchy, revolution and sedition, thundering and booming and callous, everything he could ever crave, yearn, or desire. Now all he seemed to do was make mistake after mistake, falling beneath expectations, wandering down scorching paths, yearning to annihilate but having to hold back because of alliances and repose and peace to save his brethren, and no matter how feral, how ferocious, how vehement his toxic soul was, he was tied and tethered to an overbearing crown and an all-consuming land. Nothing he did was ever enough. His movements were judged. His decisions were criticized. His passions fizzled, his ambitions died, and he wandered, wandered, wandered deeper into oblivion. Even in the last days he’d seen Ulrik, especially at that voracious herd meeting, the Engineer had lost faith in him – and perhaps that was when the ax had truly fallen across his neck and his cold, blackened, shriveled heart wondered where he’d gone awry. When he explained, when he tried to understand, attempted to perceive how he’d scraped and bled and smoldered through the condemnation, all he received in response was silence. He was potent, he was strong, and he was formidable – pernicious power, enigmatic unholiness - but the life he led was slowly swallowing him whole, devouring and swallowing and relishing the taste of death and damnation.
 
Perhaps pride stifled him. Perhaps disappointment haunted him. Perhaps he was too carved with indignation and rubble and ruin to be able to fix anything he’d damaged; he always left the void acrimonious and broken, shattered and unattainable. Maybe if Ulrik had been willing he would have done something else, would have said one of the many tenors striking his mind – but the tethers of savage, lethal entropy gathered too close, and the wounds, the thoughts, of Ulrik being frustrated enough to have left his company, his herd, his empire, didn’t warrant all those seething words to come slithering out. Instead, he was formal, he was stiff, he was everything he always used to be, a hollow vessel, an empty shell, a reserved, reticent blade cycling his way through shadow and storm. He extended a nod, brief and dignified, solemn and silent, tracing his stare over to the cliffs beyond, where the mountains laid stretched out and brooding, acrimonious and pernicious. “Your sentinels are crumbling,” he said into the punctured, pervading tension, gaze sweeping from the horizon and back to Ulrik, where the merest of glimpses into his eyes may have told of those despairing thoughts, those haunting, poignant losses, before he continued. Without you, they are nothing. “If you wish, you may have your metal back.” Then he said no more – waiting for the decision before providing or bestowing anything else.