The prince had taken too long.
 
Winter had melted into spring by the time Erebos had finally stalked again. He’d become distracted from his convictions, faltering and fumbling along the sidelines, entrenched in too many things all at once, and he feared he might have missed his opportunity. For while his heart had been emboldened, tangled, woven with the facets of requital, the pernicious, minatory indulgences of vengeance, it’d been twisted in other directions simultaneously. He mingled too far into warring emotions, feuding sentiments, from checking upon Enna to ensure she was well, discovering his father’s death (grieving, waiting for his soul to shatter beside the Reaper’s scythe, for him to go into the doldrums of hell too), and then collecting bones for Kisamoa’s task. Between Thranduil’s avid discovery of a red and bloodied Pegasus (embedded with a vicious temper), Deimos’ demise, and the thousand other things suddenly hoisted upon the boy’s mind, he’d lost the fragile, tenuous chance to finally overcome an enemy without a name.
 
So the frustration bled into him, barbed his soul, thorned his hide, and every step taken along the northwest channels of Helovia was covered, coveted, collected, and collided with calamity. He was malevolence and grief coiled, curled, in serpentine motions, sin sliding and staining the very roots, the very foundations, of all his virtues – until he was just as corrupted as the next nefarious inclination; possessed by sorrow, destruction, and mayhem. Not a single name had been crossed off of his list, but it didn’t cease the fiendish glow, the fiery ambitions, the tarnished, greedy, avaricious longing tugging through his vile essence; determination pressed against his skull until he was trapped in its unholy grasp, hungry, ready to devour. No one had ever told him he couldn’t or he shouldn’t, and he consumed the ashes of persecution, craved for everything to fall, to whimper, to die and decay. The prince wanted so many things all at once, and it took over him, chained his spine, looped his sinew, fed over the rapacious decadence brooding throughout his lungs – he wished for his sire to return to the heavenly plains and pretend it was all a hoax, a poorly planned prank, he yearned for his mind to not pulse with the maddening rush of violence (but it gleamed and screamed all the same until he was thoroughly sure it was just another part of him, bursting and brewing), and he desired for the world to give him one bright spark in the midst of treachery, ruin, and disaster. The boy hadn’t been enough, but there was bound to be a time, a moment, a stretch of hours, minutes, seconds, when the realm thought he could be. Then, he promised through his clenched teeth and his thriving vehemence, then the rest of the empires would see, would know, would understand, just what he was truly capable of.
 
The fiends, the monsters, and the cretins of this earth would rue the day they ever crossed Erebos.
 
On a satanic whim, he followed Thranduil’s previous directions, roaming northwest, along the pinnacles of shoreline and sand. His features were cast into an impervious shade of blue stone, like his father’s unattainable marble, brow rendered in a blank accord, as if he wasn’t about to burst his irreverent seams with each and every stride, as he dared to glance along embankments and bones. Orsino rumbled and growled beside him, otherwise silent to the opulence of the salty air, reserved, ready, waiting for his bonded to shatter amidst the rubble and ruin, or conquer the detachment, the ire, the unspeakable amounts of abhorrence walled inside of him. The Endless Blue had been a particularly favored haunt throughout his life, but it didn’t bring a smile to his face now, and he didn’t traverse across the wide-open sea, didn’t venture towards distant sovereigns. Instead, the demon only looked to the horizon, daring a beacon of his wrath to appear from its hazy lines. He knew better than to hope, knew better than to dream, to aspire for another instant where he could tie his hollowed, ominous, contemptuous loathing to something meaningful, but it still flowed there, in between the lairs of his caustic machinations, his Mephistophelean discord, and his anarchic poise.
 
Please, he begged, as if by sheer will he could make storms and barbarians appear.