His walk of freedom started in the morning and finished at twilight. Hours vanished by his hide, the day rushed by his skin, and the entity of time passed in a toiling roll of desolation, bleak, stark, and barren. Slow, laborious and draining, the fiendish, blistering burn against his flank erased all traces of an elegant, deadly opus, and instead, heightened the waves of pain that hastened his core with each wavering step. Stunning, reeling and searing, it encased him in the enamel of agony, crossing over the taut control of his demonic composure. However, the raw undulation of recent injuries were not the most unsettling quandary slithering against his skin – for deep in his chest, crawling, disturbing and agitating, was the tiniest granule of emotion quivering along his lungs. Amongst the hushed reveries of nocturnal opulence, he’d become haunted by sentiments long forgotten, brooding and brewing, looming and threatening, intertwining with the clamors of his sins. He knew its name and face, the blackened features of insecurity and disappointment that leapt and preyed, another predator hunting and devouring its quarry in the silent halls of satanic sculptures.

Shame.

Deimos had disregarded the notion of remorse, disgrace or indignity years prior, left it in the ages of youth where it’d been consigned, doomed, condemned, to oblivion along with so many other passions. But now it festered, coiled, and rippled, a ruffling, troubling vexation that grew with his ire, with his wrath, with each passing moment of torment that fueled, incensed, the layers of his belligerence. The hollow trappings of this disgusting concoction sinuously poured its armaments into his veins, strangling, choking and smothering the livelihood of their savage upheaval. With a flick of it siege, he felt the tightening noose of ignominy pulsing along the crisp barbarity of his creation, and even as the crooning arch of demonic treachery surged against it, there was no ceasing the misfortune of adversity, the pricking of mortification. It cut deeper than the ailments aligned to his frame, it lacerated further into the core of his being, reminded him of when he had a heart, when he had a soul that cherished, encompassed, beloved something enough to despise its departure. He’d been captured, stripped of his enchantments and absconded into the wailings of pretenses and sanctimony, he’d challenged for liberation and found it wanting – he had not been able to catch, grasp, or snatch his own deliverance. The great and terrible monster had believed in his powers, in his domination, in his intimidating, supreme force, and it had not been enough to render the enemy obliterated. What kind of General was he to have been weakened so much? What kind of soldier was he to have failed at his one occupation? What kind of withering, wavering infernal essence was he, to be so unraveled at the seams of frustration? He hated it, the very depths of this desecration, the reeling, sinking feeling that despite his efforts, he had accomplished naught. Confidence, arrogance, assurance, had been sullied, stained, and tainted by inabilities overlooked and ignored. He’d trapped himself in the boiling arts of sedition, and had been burned, alighted, ignited twice by it; a lesson he’d rather not have learned.

He wore humiliation like all other sentiments: behind closed doors and walls of impassive features. He wished to remain untouched, unattainable, unreachable by the hymns of blighting, coursing frailties, longed and yearned; a return to apathy. His face was a mask of tight nonchalance, indifference tracing the line of his severe gaze, the arch of his brow, the silence of his mouth. But he couldn’t hide it in his movements, in his motions, too strained, too forced, too dismal without the oeuvre of his wicked, quiet strokes. Pain and tarnish contorted, trickled, glided over each sinuous decree of his daggers, each serpentine chord, until ultimately, when he reached the pinnacle of mountains and valleys, the kingdom of his creed, loyalty, the crown of auroras and midnight trappings, he hardly dared to cross its borders. Undeserving, unworthy, drenched in the lacquer of his failings, in the enamel of his afflictions. Instead, he stared at the stars, blended with the shadows, and hid the snares of his fall beneath the canopy of darkness, the muted reverie of defeat and rancor. He’d returned, but not whole.

Deimos was gratified by the hushed lull of the Basin’s outskirts, the tranquil, listless haze of dominion, power and supremacy, soaking in the ardor of its pinnacles and parlors until the vast land of ice drove its wayward soul home. The quiet fixation of loss and defeat, ties and draws, clambered, crawled and clawed along the entrails of his lacquered regime, numbed, frozen, again. He drenched himself in the enamel of brutality and fed upon the lacquered armaments of calloused miradors, hostile turrets and trenchant minarets. Shame and mortifications were the locked chords woven around his debauched heart, beating like a steady drum of hallowed hollowness, splitting and derailing as the juncture cracked, splintered and frayed, and had he been heroic or virtuous, valiant or righteous - he would have been martyred, torn asunder, by his own audacious threads and bunt failure. But he was not, and would never be, knotted morality or incorruptible bliss, crooning the carnal sanctity of violence, brutal, heinous crimes that lapped at his wounds and writhed in his blood. Were he given the world he would have crushed it in his grasp, allowing the sanctum to crumble, bit by bit, from his apathetic brushstrokes, from his indifferent canvas, witnessing the infernal fires slowly dip the shades of his menace into striking hues of overwhelming destruction and calamity. Yet, the earth was not delivered to him, ashes were not torn from his vices, and the realm, the kingdom, of his capture still stood, and here, he drifted, in the midst and mist of shame, damnation already painted across his Stygian figurine. The devil lavished him with gifts, and he starved the souls of his bestial abyss with the vibrant sinew of malice and contempt. He’d proven his strength and it hadn’t been enough to conquer, devour and unleash the full scale of his contempt, the full anguish of his yearning, his longing, for anarchy, for sedition. Time would only prove if he could find more of the pernicious requiem necessary to consume again, and again, and again, the endless, eternal cycle of puissance, derision and domination.

While he wallowed in the shadows and shade of stars, another approached, rustling the undergrowth, tangling the weeds with excitable ease. When his nefarious eyes pinpointed upon the culprit as it burst beneath the eaves, he found the occasion to be wholly unremarkable: a child languishing its power for curiosity. His experience with the youth, like so many instances of his social knowledge, was severely limited. It smiled and watched, moved and talked, fixated its dual-colored gaze upon him and he stood rigid, firm, unrelenting in the wake his vicious tyranny, wishing to be left alone in the arches of his chaotic foreboding. The filly bumbled and jumbled words, stringing them together in a loose cauldron of babbling nonsense that Deimos remained indifferent about, features rendered stony, impassive, inscrutable. He stared down at the scion and did very little, hoping perhaps that it would leave by the same way it came, enthusiasm and ignorance, for it didn’t sense the looming presence of his dangerous stature. Were all youth so ignorant, so foolish, so ready to take on the world that they would brush against death and draw their last breath before they’d finished their first?

The babe is saved from further scrutiny by his silent, commanding opus as a familiar spirit, the doctor, the Mender, drifted through the meticulous haze of mountain and air. The terrible monster frequently did not enjoy the company of others, but with the burning, scorching pain riddling his figure, he almost didn’t mind the appearance of the healer. He turned his narrowed, savage slits towards the sienna patriot, noted the jaunt of his own stride (off, almost indistinct, but the mark of battle – what had he missed in the trials of capture?), listening for the pitch of his voice as it encountered presumptions the satanic warrior would have to correct. He swiveled his eyes away for a moment, speaking to the wind, gruff, indistinct measures of indignity and humiliation so that perhaps if the world didn’t have to hear it, they wouldn’t consider him folly or fool. “Released.” He remained poised as the medic examined him, formulated the portions of his enchantments to calculate patched, assuaged wounds, but allowed the lids of his tired, haggard gaze to drift closed, once, twice, holding his head high, noble, regal, commanding, against the silhouette of nocturnal horizon and immorality; a silent conviction of ferocity bursting from his limbs. While the other beast worked, tending in a hushed hum, his speech registered, tore against the cloud of pain that had somehow washed over his thoughts, his intuitions, his candor. The exuberant child must have belonged to him, praised and chided in the covenant of the Basin. “Yours?” His voice grated, skull gesturing towards the flicka merely once before remembering torment and anguish, and then the final strings of muted affliction settled over him again, and he remained quiet until the magic had rendered his body whole.

Time, stolen and absconded, wove its weary track over his hide, and like spirits, like ghosts, like wraiths, dissipated the cumbersome arch of a dragon’s flame. When the pressure, the toiling, the scorching tides melted from his frame, he didn’t know how to express gratitude, how to explore the depths of his appreciation, and offered the Mender then a firm nod, a deeper, struggling bow, and felt the fiber of his whispering, crooning death slinking against his veins, the tenor, the opus, of his oeuvre reclaiming vengeance. Hate brewed, hostility incensed, and fury remained locked again, in the solace of disorder, turmoil, and mayhem. The raw, deep tones were summoned anew, sweeping the grounds with the merciless, beguiling indulgences of a dangerous, striking criminal hoping to contort the world into his favored bedlam again. “How goes the Basin?” And then, the puncturing nuance of another’s noise entered his core, fleeting, discarded, but among the rubble of its finery, he promised future upheaval, terrible, horrible, havoc.