No clamors, no battles, no fights or feuds echoed across their meeting – just the truth, brutal and blunt, forthright and keen, scorching and smoldering. The Thief’s first words left a sharp intake of shame scratching down his chest, notched carefully down the thickened walls of his heart, closer and closer until they could almost touch the violent, beating crescendo of the nefarious, blackened organ. They haunted the inside of his skull and rattled through the caged machinations, harpooning legacies and triumph, skewering predilection and potency, devouring any fledgling notions that his actions could be salvaged. They burned and seared along his flesh, along his soul, along the essence of him that had always strived to be better than everyone and everything, trying to lift stone, ice, rock, and rubble from its ruins with his violence and upheaval, with his chaos and control. She’d noticed the disappearances, the quiet, the desolation – far more than the mountains had ever seen – and if it was growing all the more apparent, they might as well have been damned, consigned down into the reaches of failure (and he knew, at some point, it was his fault, and the sword should’ve been pointed towards his chest, keen and honed, fervent, eager, and ready to send him to where he truly belonged). His eyes flickered to her frown, then cast back onto the ground, as if he didn’t deserve to speculate, to reflect on her sentiments (was she disappointed in him too – their failure King, their worthless, garbage Lord, their despairing, foundering sovereign?). Would this be a deserved berating, beating, a chastising of his ridiculous efforts, a stumbling, a fumbling, a prickling of thorns against his heavy, cumbersome crown?
 
Deimos waited for the ax to fall.
 
Do you think less of me too?
 
But instead, instead, she proffered a notion, an idea, and the Reaper’s head lifted, piercing eyes back upon hers, utterly mystified and bewildered. The King stood there as a caricature of his normal nonchalant self, appearing dumbfounded and perplexed, a demon-child nestled along the cavern walls and boulders, bewildered by the direction shift, by the compassionate change. He might have smiled beneath the weight of his burdens, because for once someone had a concept, a vision, without screeching or maligning, without bitterness or recourse, without designations of damnation bored through his cranium. The beast listened, rapt and attentive, as she spoke of recruiting, hosting a festival, allowing others to roam past their borders and walls, to stand, gawk, and admire the beauty of the evenings. Interacting had never been one of his talents, but he was willing, willing to try anything and everything, because he couldn’t stand to see the Basin crumble and flicker away anymore than it had. “You think they would come?” The query was innocent, without fault or deception, attempting to whittle away the core of their purpose and motivation – to bring more and more into their world (so they would stay); and his mind raced at the possibilities of other, awful things happening (enemies suddenly crawling through the door, threatening their livelihoods, their children, their power and prestige). They’d attempted a similar thing when the GildedBlade had been Queen, but their clamor, their din, their riot to the God of Time had occurred on clouds and dust, and demolished by phantoms, by monsters, by threats soon after. “We tried, once.” He offered to her, a speculation, while his stare settled on the sky, on the horizon that always prospered and promised a flicker of bright, vivid colors and hues; he’d rarely ever reflected on them before, passing beneath their wares just as he did with the mountains, promising to guard and protect them but not much more. “We held a festival to honor our patron God, but it was elsewhere, and soon diminished by an incoming threat.” He half-smiled, one side of his lips curling upward, appearing very much like the lost boy of the tides, born to a fire king and a woman of stone, before death took his heart. “I am willing to try again.”
 
He paused, mouth pressed together in thought, eyes sliding back and forth over rock and rubble, over valleys and ice, spring songs and machinations coiling their way through his mind. “We could present the idea at a meeting,” he hid his inward grimace (because even the notion of another one gave him a head-ache), and proceeded onward with what Rexanna deserved. “Thank you for the proposal. I am grateful for your insight.”

Death, you bring death, and destruction to all that you touch.