Tranquil, idle fury lapped and layered his bones, lacquered, corroded the daunting turbulence of his fiendish, infernal mind. He waited, lost and forlorn in the arts of his own desolation, silent but still a vivid presence against a landscape he once guarded, and now terrorized, with the brutality of his haunting, alluring travesties. He stood amongst destruction, claimed it as his doing, his actions, his resolutions, without a single word, the harbinger of demise, the eternal end, the quietus in the hushed absolution of decay. He’d wrought and sown, and naught had come of it, so he lingered in the melancholy of not defeat, but a draw, a tie, that left him to dwindle in the arms of the Edge again, ensnared in their coils, entangled in their chains with wounds and thoughts to occupy his time, space and entity. He’d tasted freedom, briefly, and suddenly the rancorous convictions of something he’d always possessed fueled and drove his muted core over and over again. Like an avaricious devil he’d clutched and grasped, ripped and clawed, to no triumph, to no victory. What more could be done – he’d attempted escape, he’d challenged and found a worthy adversary, and still he was locked in this oubliette. Patience, composure, would have to be incensed again, and with injuries that bound the black heart to an aching, withering decay of burnt flesh and acrid sentiments, cloistered, nettled, trapped, he was all the more ushered to persist in the delusions of soundlessness, listless and languid.

He offered nothing to those present but the sinister scope of his stare, loathsome, trenchant, coated in contempt, a steady, insouciant stance laced, carved, sculpted into his frame. He wouldn’t admit his wounds scorched and seared, he wouldn’t tell the world of his disappointment, he wouldn’t express or exude anything but the terror, the horror, of his behemoth grace. Deimos glanced at the draconic equine, the leader now thriving back in her homeland, ignoring the Glazier altogether, and refused to hint at a single sentiment driven into his stature – the complexities of his features were merely endowed with the snippets of his derision, callous, cool, apathetic and indifferent. When she spoke of her demands he could have laughed, because if anything had been proven within the last dwindling seasons, it had been the harsh, rapier brutality of mutual hatred passed between the two cadres. He was not a beast of politics or machinated designs of emissaries, the oeuvre of conquest eternally whispering the simmering caress of his presaged, augured opus; war would always come before peace. Ultimately, it was not his choice in the matter anyway, he did not lead the Basin – he led the harking militia, the drums of battle, the hostile tirades of vengeance. His voice managed to crawl from his throat, not yet used in the state of his capture, grating and dissonant, harsh and deep, as if longing to return into the wake of anarchy, resonating in the clarity of upheaval. ”It is not my decision.”