Strung by bayonets, rapiers and cutlasses, he wanted to be left alone, lacquered in his puissance, varnished in his melancholy, sown and tossed away into the frosty, glacial portal of malignant threads, where he could consume, devour, and destroy the earth in one abhorrent incision. Desolation was his shelter, his sanctuary, a mantle of barren, wild temptation that harpooned weaker spirits into incomplete, delicate creatures; that lifted him to corruptible, baleful heights, beloved in the devilish croon of predilection, presaged villainy. The fiendish, demonic scion, encased in the decaying isolation, craved for its solitude, yearned for its seclusion, where detachment was a tapestry woven from his decrepit, inveigling enchantments, swallowing each virtue whole, calamity and bedlam smoldering in his unholy chest. His prowess demanded the scintillating scorch of withdrawal, the meticulous sequestering of starkness, bleak and pale, amassed in winter’s gaze, in the frigid march of the heathen wind. She threatened to invade it entirely, this fragile, delicate wisp of spring, strings of charity he did not deserve nor hunger for, cordiality that stung his eyes and lapped at his malevolence. He didn’t know why she bothered to stray in the regions of his heresy; there was naught to see there, underneath the enamel of immorality and mayhem, acrimony and villainy. He breathed in the polar vapor, strengthened his vigilant core, felt the pulse of its miserable strands bind to his veins, steel him further into molten marble, into statuesque brutality. Only the hot roll of muscles bound to his jaw could be seen, the grind of ivory against ivory, the fierce, feral rampancy of his irritation, not voiced, not solidified by his tongue, but by the reel of his severity, the Mephistophelean despondency embroiled in his warrior prose and poise. Layers of ire tangled themselves in his few, minute motions, the ravenous elegance of a nefarious, raptorial titan, whispers of havoc crawling from his heathen bastion. What would it take for her to disappear? What would he have to enact for her to be plucked away from the roots of his forbidding, the callous world of his privacy? He could take her heart and rip it from her body, he could abscond her soul and offer it to the underworld, and he could tear her from limb to limb and leave only the shocking, startling rivulet of red to stain the snow. Would she still smile at him then, and deny to be banished?

Even now, Deimos refused to glimpse upon her, glaring into the wilderness, plundering the snowfall with the heinous disregard for anything and everything, waiting for her to crumble away, to be pilfered by the midst, by the abyss, to be the only one bearing witness to the tundra’s clarity. Her words echoed off the expanse of ice, bounding for the wind, chilled and serious, not a sonnet’s stanza but a resolute clamor that bristled against his argent body. Did you fight? He could have chuckled, dark and foreboding, but didn’t. Amongst his heavy silence, that hushed, portended strife, the battlefield was the only place he sang. It was his maelstrom composition, the heady, curling, unfurling whim of blood flowing from his sword, the savage, bestial requiem that sprung from his still lips, the carnivore rapture, the infernal splendor that prospered and awakened his ferocity, his ruthlessness. Not for valiancy, not for knightly, obstinate humility, but for the blackguard carving of his barbarity, the swinging, loathsome scythe that clung to his soul and longed for acrimony, for revolution, for insurgency that wrapped around his vessel and let it croon. Chaos and duty had fastened him to that terrain, where invaders stole, where mayhem reigned, and he’d been so immersed in that fervent blade, in that feverish, pyrrhic ecstasy, the devilish friction of war that for once he’d felt whole. He’d do it all again, over and over, driving the onslaught of his corrupted essence into the bliss of Ares’ reverie, brutal, fierce and violent, erupting into the frame of his blackened, corroded heart – and this girl, this tender nuance of gentleness and divinity would scream at the vicious, iniquitous candor that reigned from his hedonistic fervor. He had no regrets, no rancor sprung from the supremacy of his mercenary splendor, he’d overwhelmed, he’d conquered, he’d tortured and he’d killed, left a body upon the floor to become ash and soil – he’d been the ethereal ruin, he’d been the namesake his parents had bestowed upon him, he’d been everything mayhem and depravity could have asked for. He’d breathe it once more too, the sweeping taste of carnage, possess it in his grasp and render it his predator enticement. “Yes.” His answer, swift and strident, poured towards her, inky and seditious, a winding, slender wound that swallowed the hush surrounding his ethereal carcass. He knew she hadn’t been there, he would have recalled the rush of blue in the mass of colliding bodies, and she couldn’t hark the cords of atrocity to hum against her movements. Yet, still, his eyes settled elsewhere, claiming the oeuvre of his forlorn cataclysm against the rocky outcrops of stone and snow: not willing to answer the other queries that had likely settled into her expression.