The Reaper had always granted his children endless freedom. They’d be permitted to wander where their hearts and souls desired, they’d been allowed to travel the world and dictate their own fates. Bestowing this could bring them fortune or failure, further encompassing and emboldening their pursuits, their dedications, without him forcing it upon their wild, untamed nuances and regimes. He’d never fixated them with his bridges and mass of hate, of wrath, of villainy – and simply because he’d been taught to indulge in danger, in disaster, in ruin, in creeds and oaths, did not mean his son or daughter needed to either. They would collect and gather their own enemies, their own allies, their own friends and companions (surely more than he’d ever snag and ensnare), without his overbearing calculations and overwhelming presence; but it was slightly amusing to see his child had made an impression with a Pegasus, with a Captain of the Edge, with a maiden who could fly and stab and curl smoke from her mouth. He’d say nothing of meeting her to Erebos, keep it tucked away as a piece of mirth under the all the queries and speculations, all the chiseled foundations of acrimony and distaste (because what drew his son to her, how, why?). The notion sparked a small chuckle from his throat, easing along in a finite smile, likely looking more like his child than ever (for the boy seemed capable of always grinning, just like his mother). “Then you have met my son.” The beast had a thought, now fully distracted from his pursuits, from his hunts, from his depths into the infernal darkness, to explore about what his child had been up to in the woods and along the isles, and parted his mouth to inquire further, but then the other mare (the one who was familiar, but not, all at once; a sea, a spark of contradictions) proceeded with her questions.

Are you from the Basin? He’d claim to be from nowhere else, except as a once refugee from the bitter, rancorous, broken Edge, where they’d fought for what was theirs and it’d been taken from them anyway. But she continued, before he could even begin to process what to say, delving into bits of her sister Hotaru, and the strangeness, the comprehension of her build, of her stature, made sense. The Queen had never spoken of her siblings, and he’d never done the same for her, but neither of them had openly discussed anything beyond herd matters. He was too far-gone on the icy edges of his empire, of the power, of the prestige, nettled and thorned behind their mountain summits and rising peaks, too absorbed in how they could endure, on how they could conquer, to remember and realize how many of them existed with others branching off elsewhere. As she seemed to end her series of observations and deliberations, the beast tilted his head, a mass of predatory, carnivore existence, a substance of sin and earth, a brutal, barbaric entanglement of dominion and supremacy, warriors deluge and calculating airs. “You are correct.” Oh, he was from the Basin, etched and sketched into its very foundation, chilling and sinister, savage and malicious, an unwinding, choking display of their vehemence, of their hate, of the stories and legends that’d brought them amidst the glacial chasm. He was sewn into its sails and had bled across their banners. He’d do it time and time again too: for the sake of their empire, for the sake of their compatriots, for everything and nothing. “I am its King.” And its servant, its warrior, its guardian.