Moral, mortal decay and ash slid from the haunted parlors, the arcane, reticent hallways, the dark, decadent corridors masked and lacquered with demonic enamel. It pulsed and pervaded, the gliding avarice of a demanding folly, the twist, the turn, the yearn, of a sublime spirit rendered cold and disembodied, drumming, toiling, unraveling. A desperate ache, a feverish plight, a cast iron entity frozen into the severed wake of annihilation, pending, augured menace and malice, for at his feet, the world burned, withered and decayed. His heart, unaltered, untouched from the corroded, blackened shambles of its minute existence, caressed the rusted pinnacles, the shuddering streams, the shivering, abandoned copses, laying his monstrous foundation of anarchic motifs and compositions. Insurrection brewed from the heat of his incantations, from the might of his movements, turmoil loomed in the vehemence of his violence, and travesty harkened from the state of his quiet opus. Ever more reclusive, wasting amongst incorporeal seams, he stuck to the hollowed sectors of the Basin, where the wind scarred, where the valley ended and peril began, where the road to ruin was driven from his daggers and his muted tongue. He clung to desolation, a tangible thread woven into his deadly canvas, a rapture, a reverie that neither bled him dry nor scorched his bones. Isolation was a second skin, buried deep into his marrow, lined into his veins, quivering in his lungs, rubble and ruin, barrenness and wild, untamed opulence, where he couldn’t crumble, where he couldn’t vanquish; where he merely breathed inside his makeshift tomb, alone. It came with the snow and the ice, the cool, harsh nonchalance of his heresy, of his nihility, prospering with the vile, horrible existence that threatened livelihoods, that decimated futures, that sank into the delusion of grandeur, sought terror, brought horror. The beast, the devil, Mephistopheles’ sword, sank into the pit of devastation, crooned mayhem across his lips, felt the frigid, hedonistic elation cross over his nefarious, broiling muscle, and became ever wound into the layers of allure: danger, pernicious, Tartarean, the condemned. Too distorted, too frayed, taken from bliss and harkened to naught but idle, primordial treachery, he was fed by the consumption of fear, by the awakening of abhorrence, by the trenches of raptorial predilection, ambrosia for wolves, for carnivores, for rancor and maleficence. Deimos, monster and demon, lunged from infidels and enmity only when the earth craved for more, chasing the fiends crossing into his borders, maiming, ripping, tearing, ensnaring the comfort of his destruction.

A silent rapier, he stalked the unholy sedition humming amongst his layers, ravenous, brutal, the hot, undulating acrimony of his motions only encompassed the puissant maelstrom of his presence. He crossed borders to consume and he traversed lands to devour. Wicked and damned, the macabre gift to a sovereignty that knew dominion, supremacy and depravity, godless, irreverent, that craved and sibilated immorality, that witnessed the beauty of finessed iniquity drenched and dragged across their peaks, he marched and guarded, pervaded and demolished. The rain lingered, cold and idle, listless and languid, wintry brushstrokes painted across his cheeks, along his flanks, down the length of his spine, altering his route as he craved its solitude, its sanctuary. The freezing air curled around his nares, and for brief moments of time his piercing stare watched the puffs of warmth dissolve, deluded into the stroke of midnight oil, disappearing under the weight of unseen stars and harkened catastrophe – heat and fervency, bursting, then lost. His path snaked around the never-freezing lake, perhaps the only creature within the Siberian husk that didn’t share his frigid indifference, his eternal detachment, twisting and distorting the callous waves of grass still standing in the arch of winter’s incoming-reign. He would have witnessed their fall, their collapse, had the slightest glimpse of blue not caught his eye. For a moment, he was inquisitive, searched the grounds for the bright disturbance, and when he caught the radiance in his puncturing gaze, he recalled the luminescence, the glow, the illuminating trace of grace and elegance that sketched the drizzle. Huyana.. The twilight’s toil, the evening’s prevail, the fall of the discordant sky; he was in her grasp, frozen, ensnared and allured into the cascading droplets clinging to his brow. The behemoth remembered her, wisps of clouds and water, sea and foam, lithe, slender minuets of words framed by watery transgressions. Memories reflected in stormy eyes, revolutions, turbulences, gales brewed and bellowed across the stretch of silence, the anguish of nations, the apocalypse of worlds forgotten and transfixed. He didn’t move towards her, allowing his bones to cease their scintillating havoc, their smoldering serration. Only a lush whisper, harsh, unrelenting, parted his mouth, invoked his tongue, incensed a simple word, fierce friction, demanding prowess, chiseled armaments of a ruthless blade calling to the rain. “Huyana.” He sanctioned the syllables to rot in a ruthless grate, a feverish hiss, intangible threads of unattainable, unreachable melancholy.

He absorbed the darkness, blended into the nocturnal gallery of desecration and supremacy, distorted in the touch, the taste, the flavor of tainted silence. Outcast by virtue, corrupted and defiled away from the dangling strings of mercy, from clemency, from the ties of morality crisscrossed along reverent hearts, the beast choked, strangled, and smothered the righteous acts of purity. He stifled, suppressed and hindered rectitude, compassion and beneficence, clawed and crawled across the walls of its laced, woven principles. He burned with the caressed decadence of Satan’s scholar, Lucifer’s laureate, reaching for the reticent rapiers of long-lost tomes, scalding, scorching, simmering flesh from bone, studying the arts, the masterpieces, the ancient, arcane desires of an unholy wraith. A void, a hollowed, aching shell cast upon the sea, ignited even in the blustering winds of the Basin, rock and fire, ash and embers, furtive secrets pressed against the callous chambers of his colossal indifference. Fear and terror come to life, renewed and sanctified, sacred to nothing place, immorality and iniquity stroked by the bewitching, alluring danger of his unholy consecration. Hallowed bones, brushes and sinew tangled by the nonchalance, the apathy, the entropy strung by villain upheaval, anarchy woven into raptorial appetite stood amongst the brooding waifs, raindrops cast upon the carcass, the vessel, of macabre sedition, feral, fierce insurrection. His heathen furor consumed the wanton piety floating from the world’s resolute exterior, swallowed, devoured, until the land was left with shrunken carapaces, tied away into the mast of primordial ruin and mayhem. The breathing statue, cleverly seduced from the perilous passages of decomposing tapestries, ripping out compassion from the immaculate, the angelic, the saintly. Conscience relapsed, forgotten, discarded for the infallible craft of wickedness, and he stared upon her with the same vile, horrible blood coursing through his viperous veins, invariable since their last meeting in the scene of ash and snow. Drawn into himself, formed into marble and depravity, cast iron in serpentine, sinuous machinations, enigmatic craft and creation molded into rigid, possessive supremacy, he neither smiled nor smirked, but simply, remained.

The fiend strayed, stayed, because she didn’t carve her way into his psyche, didn’t pry into his cracks and ridges, into his carefully molded walls, into his scarred, radioactive figure. She didn’t attempt to fix him, build up each rupture, each fracture, into tiny shards hiding the ruin underneath. She didn’t scratch at his surface, comb away the bracken and the nettles, or scrape away the tended thorns. She didn’t intrude into his ruminating silence, grab words from his tongue and hope they nestled into the thick air, festered into his black, black heart, or rumble in the runes of his nonchalance. The hushed layers lulled him into leisure, into sedateness, crooned, hummed, hymned into a latent, listless state, shown the restraint, the composure, the hard, unbending, unyielding lines of his frame didn’t always need to be rendered so hostile, so tenacious, so bound to cruelty, incensed, invoked, impassioned by the ardor, the fervency, of havoc. Deimos breathed across the vapor, cold and impassive, but calm, composed, pacified. His stare fell to her, whimsical and fanciful even in the rush of winter, even in the vehemence of autumn’s fibers, smiling, not taken in by the waves of malignancy, the avaricious gleam of barbarous, remorseless touched, tantalized, ruined by his relinquished features. So why did she linger in the stead, in the presence, in the entity of his frigid expanse, of his colossal, demon hostility, in the caress of a seething maelstrom eager, waiting, yearning to slink in the coiled, taut, minute motions of fatal intrigue, of formidable, sinister terror? Why did she remain, poised in the rancor, the bitterness, of his execution, of his slaughter, of his abhorrence and contempt? What bewitched, ensnared her gaze where others fled, hid, disturbed, haunted and frightened? The behemoth’s stare, transfixing, beguiling, alluring, lancing, shifted only to glance about both her sides, then no further inquiry, no further movement, was made. His voice intertwined with the air, polished a statement without the poise of a query, allowed the words to drift over her seraphic skin. “You are well.”

Deimos hadn’t always been a monster, the eldritch titan swallowing the rapture and reverie of pious saints, subduing, weakening the foolish, meek and inept, massacring dreams, goals and motives. He’d coveted the brief luxury of youth – for a year, settled beneath the stars, the tides, the warm rolls and dunes of sand, rubble and stone. He’d been cherished, glorified, taught, and anointed with the artifices, the wiles, the cunning of his mother, the poise, the power, the domination and fire of his father, been swaddled and delighted by the creatures he called brethren. He’d been sown and sculpted into a gangly child woven with promise, laced and threaded with prestige, potential, and capability. He’d had greatness strumming against his eardrums, pride collecting in his mind, boldness saturating his movements and motions, soaked by the deluge of portended eminence. But the world was cruel, and to survive the strange incantations spilling from his hooves, his body, his entity, to not wound his companions, to escape his family’s compassion, to withdraw into the vacant shell he still inhabited, he had to become heartless, ruthless, and merciless. He stripped the core of empathy away from his flesh, he dismantled the beat of humanity from his heart, and he disassembled the forbearance of morality from his soul, watched, witnessed, his reflection change from that of a stumbling, tender scion into a remorseless, barbaric vessel. At first the alterations had been miserable, moments sprinkled with small, tiny flickers of hope that were altogether banished when the necromancy failed to cease its upheaval. From this horror, from this isolation, desolation and despair, sprouted the annals of anarchy, the arches of indifference and vicious, cold nonchalance. Nothing moved him. Nothing touched him. Nothing stirred him into longing, yearning or desire: no goals, no dreams, no lofting, fanciful things inciting, invoking the clamor of rectitude, the frozen depths of his essence, antipathy, animosity. The earth had become his primrose path, his angles and avenues of haunting savagery, of effortless entropy, of elegant, vehement violence. All he’d become was a carnivorous knife, a devilish dagger, a swinging, sinuous sword, a callous cutlass, armed with bestial blades, spells to render hearts silent, to steal lungs’ last, fleeting breaths. The follies, the twists and turns of childhood had died alongside his victims, rotten, decaying, gone.

But this rain girl before him, with her watery memories and fleeting treasures, still contained her whimsy, her indulgent impulses and mermaid notions, and he didn’t understand how she held them there, aloft for everyone to see, to adore and revel in just as she enacted. How did she allow her vulnerabilities to surface, for her weaknesses to be uncovered? How did she permit the world to take and take, to steal and abscond from her livelihood until all she had left was her rain? How had she not become a bitter, twisted core, dabbling in the ache, the pain, the anguish the world had bequeathed her? He’d long since lost the fabric of foibles and inclinations, preferred to wage war, harbored iniquitous intentions, lavished and lacquered, scarred and maimed the entrails, the innards, of foes. Others could take naught away from him that he hadn’t already tossed over ruins. The cretin, the fiend, the infidel said naught as she smiled, collected her soused frame into a dance of delight and coy intrigue, fiddled her gaze into his aloof, frigid stare. Deimos stood amongst the gathered darkness and twilight as she settled, cast off into the lake’s grasp, witnessed her reunite with her element, damned and doomed to be eternally alone in his. When he could no longer bear to observe her, the maiden of the lake awakened by the chill of the water, evaporating into mist and midst, his blue eyes drifted to the bank, inclining his head over the stretch of rippling pool. Its shimmer, its mirror, reflected back exactly what he’d known himself to be: cold, hard, unyielding, unattainable, and unreachable. The stare, rigid and villainous, the countenance, lined with nothingness, the stretch of emotionless features, the lock of ivory resting upon his poll, drifting into forelock, mane sharpened and shaped into a skull, into augured brutality.

Water suddenly streamed towards his face, made little dips, indentations and impressions in the reservoir, swindled and cascaded down the length of his visage, and he snapped his stare back towards the girl he’d left wandering in the brine. Mischief kindled across her features, and she’d somehow morphed into an elf, a minx, a nymph, a siren, a dangling, dancing coquette coated amongst the darkness. He attempted to hide his surprise and disbelief, but his eyes had already widened, befuddled, addled and rattled. The only other hints of his apprehension were a brief snort and the dampened forelock stuck across his impassive brow. She was extending an invitation to play, but his appreciation and comprehension of it had changed long ago; now his version of entertainment was to pluck souls away from bodies, to covet and harpoon, to ravage and pillage until his wicked, avaricious appetite was sated. He quickly refused the seduction, the beguilement and allure, the bewitching surface of vixen and lake, staying on land, ice and rime, straying to entice the battlefield instead of the inveigling temptations of diversions. The chiseled cranium returned to its former position, and undulating muscles coiled, a hot roll of condemnation pouring and pervading the idle thought of this sudden persecution. Taut, iron and armored, but incapable of releasing the manacles and chains of his annihilation, of his abomination, of his scorned, forlorn, and twisted soul.

Fury, animosity and ire were all he knew, stone chords wrapped around his heart, bound across his chest, covered and cloaked in the feverish, fervent daggers of his turbulence, trials, tribulations, toils and mayhem. The rainchild was something else altogether: carillons and minarets, spires and harpsichords, ocean and breeze, brine and the soft roll of cascading rivulets, archaic waves drenched in forgiveness, forbearance and tenacity. He flicked his ears forward, capturing the pealing toll of her whimsy, and as her laughter rang at his expense, bells, chimes, whistles, a trill, a warble of watery whims, he was unsure of how to react. Was she mocking him, deriding him, scorning him? Was she ridiculing his foundation, his finely taut fibers, his pernicious, puissant blade? Was she tearing down the walls of his carefully wrought iron simply to gaze, to inspect, to taunt and taint at the nothingness that lay beneath? Why did she giggle? What drove her to such foibles and follies? What had she seen that he did not? And how should he behave now, when all the machinations he crooned, created and crafted couldn’t manage to surmise the reasons for her light jeers? Did she wish to see him as a fool, a jester, dancing in the air of her marionette poise? His life was a sculpture, a masterpiece, an oeuvre to heresy, to war, to blood and glory, clawing and ensnaring, death and demise, triumph and vanquishing, rubble and ruin - not the easygoing gestures of games. He couldn’t recall drifting on the bracken of cackles and chuckles, couldn’t remember the simplicity of jokes, jests and tricks, long since derailed by ruses, wiles and Machiavellian scheming, calculating meant to abolish, annihilate and destroy. The only disparagement he concocted was upon his enemies, waiting for their breaths to be stolen, patient and composed as they fell to their knees, collapsed in the ache and wake of his ferocious tyranny. He was amused, gratified, and satisfied when he’d stolen flesh from bone, peeled life into anarchy, mayhem and bedlam; sin sliding upon sin, atrocious, devastating humanity. He never chuckled, he never smiled, and he rarely drew his lips in any amiable gesture. But this nymph did, and he didn’t know whether to cease the vile rancor that twisted in his throat, to hiss, enact discordant tones to abolish her torrential giggles, or permit the silken, dulcet croons to continue their dance, solidify their persecution of his bewildered stance. The demon’s pride was blemished, altered, brandished by the titter of this girl; he narrowed his gaze, sharpened his blue stare to mere slits, and allowed the laughter to wash over his dark carcass, defiant against the beguiling sounds of her parody. Even then, the taste of satire was unpleasant.

She swiveled amongst the rippling rivulets, as natural as he coveted the Stygian shades, born beneath the veils of rain and sky, prospered another bewitching stare that left him glaring in return, hooves sliding back against the ice and slush in effort to evade some new assailment, bombardment of a cool torrent. There was mischief in her eyes, foxy, entrancing, fascinating and siren-esque, but he was not a soul led out to sea, he was not a sailor adrift on the rocks, ushered to his demise by the Scylla or the choking, strangling hands of the current. He refused her coquette distortion, and watched as she seemingly disappeared into the murky depths, gone, discarded. For one moment she was corporeal and whole, the next, transfigured into nothingness, and he was instantly alone again, the plaguing tirade of desolation returned.

They both held too many mysteries, enigmatic, specious ploys and ruses that enticed, captivated and ensnared; his icy glare dismissed the notion of looking away from the cool, crisp, flattened reservoir by the sentiment that he may be unraveling a paradigm, a riddle, the Sphinx’s tongue lacquered to brimming, brewing undulations. Was she mermaid, fish, dolphin, toying, grasping for his armaments, waiting for him to remove his armor, to join her in the vacant sea, to pull him under, drown him in the grind, friction of her despair? Would she wail, sing, and lament the dirge, the warble of her requiem? Did she wish to divest him of his shield and carapace, lead him towards temptation, into upheaval, into disregard and folly? Did she yearn to distort his framework until he was no longer monster, beast nor behemoth, but a demon submerged, immersed, into the strange paradox of her candor? Was she a temptress, carrying her worn corpses to desecrated depths? Did she twist reveries into contorted ideals until they sank with her, ships trapped by the weight of her smile? He would not be her plaything, not her trinket or doll to string along into the cataclysm of whims and fancies, for the devil’s opus had already proclaimed him as his idle gift, and Deimos spurned to be lulled, pulled and tossed again. A sibilance drummed from his vocals, rough, grating, severe in their query, settling across the pool in pernicious, cold splendor, the chilling decadence of his maimed morality, the coldest, feral, savage kiss of darkness to water. “Why do you mock me?”

The effigy of somberness, of terror, of Ares’ war clad son, of savage, sinister, nefarious harpoons and lacerations was dissuaded and befuddled by the continuing laughter of the rain goddess. Courted, beguiled and bewitched by a vicious onslaught of her makeshift instrument, stringing a torrent, a deluge, of follies and murmurs, sweet nothings tasting of ash, burning and singing his flesh. He bore shame from her twittering, he was perturbed by her lilting essence, and he altered delusion and misguided remarks along the icy shoal, lifted his pride into a crescendo of mockery and disdain. His features stroked by war, caressed by battle, brushed, pressed and painted for carnage, chaos and cold-hearted manifestos, the oil and ink of a darkened laureate viciously conducting his most infamous lyrics. The stare hardened, the molten core of his wrathful soul incensed, invoked, kindled by ice and fire, choked and suffocated under the breaking silence. The water spoke and moved, became lips, eyes, ears, a muzzle, a maw, lady of the lake dressed in blue again, swindled by the night-time air, capturing the noxious plumes of his incorruptible vessel in all its beauty, in all its rapture and opulence. She offered no sword to the demon, for he was no Arthur, no noble king, no valiant hero, the titan, the behemoth, the dragon, and she gave only the warbling retort of watery affections. He looked away from her lissome existence, limber, mermaid stature to catch the canopies as they drowned in the infernal press of the twilight hour. What brought forth her assurances, her mockery, and her derision? For his had not thrived in her presence, his insurrection, his mutineer scandals, his seditious splendor refused to appear in the midst of her patience, of her virtue, of her morality scattered in its scabbard. He had not threatened to break away, to ruin, to ravish and ravage the innocence still left within her entity, he had not abashed the entirety of her figurine with his lacquered calamity, brutal animosity, vicious, overbearing, overwhelming violence. But she still felt the need to pry, to nettle, to thorn and prick at his shield? Why didn’t she let him be the lawless, the immoral, the condemned, the wicked and treacherous? Why did she wish to remove his flesh from his decadent distortions, why could he not be at peace with his severe acrimony, his trenchant, mordant embodiments and emotions?

His gaze returned upon her to see the gentle grin appear across her liquid features; he did not offer one in return. He was rigid again, invariable, stringent, tragically poised to forever be encased in the armor of his persecution. Unholy carnivore splendor, licentious bearings trapped and twisted in the Tartarean rapture and reverie of chilling, glacial indifference, the sumptuous, slender clarity of severity and smoldering havoc, the undulating, argent sinew entangled innate enmity. Bestial temptation, wild, feral decadence, enticing, alluring, rapacious abhorrence in the scathing, seething rigidity, muted, taciturn, sinful credence of a silken predator, captured in the menacing opulence and grandeur of Mephistopheles’s masterpiece; deadly elegance in a poet’s savage, nefarious prose. Feasting, consuming, and swallowing the tombs of raptorial predilections, harboring the strife of damned beings, corporeal foes layered into the conceited catacombs of illustrious death and monstrous divinations, so sculpted from the outstretched arms of heathens, so discarded from the virtuous strings of society – and she stated that seriousness did not suit him. The notion perplexed him, because for all the worlds he’d ever crossed, for all the sentiments he’d scattered and turned to dust, for all the tenderness and warmth he’d have to leave behind – this was who he was. He’d been created from the macabre twist of festering, brooding armaments, scornful sieges, the acerbic caress of the devil, the mordant embrace of the reaper. He was grim, he was silence, he was power, persuasion and precision, and without out the archaic, arcane blend of rapier convictions, subtle annihilations, searing acrimony and brutal diligence, he was not sure who he was supposed to be. The world had been torn away from him, and he carried on, adapted and altered himself to its piercing blades, to its horrendous shades. What more did she want from him now? What was he supposed to piece together for her? His vocals carried a terrible, nefarious weight, gliding over ice and rime to puncture, to slide in the frightening hymns of a rattled, thorned pestilence. “Then what suits me?” He could alter no longer, not when he was too overcome with apathy, with immorality, with iniquity clambering over his blackened, corroded, misshaped, misaligned heart. This was how he survived, reaching for nothing, caring for nothing, ruining, pillaging and crumbling.

Tucked away in the vestiges of his memory were the wanton days of childhood, where the resplendence of day set and the darkness of his world began. Twisting, nocturnal veils and the nefarious grip of the devil across his shriveled, decomposing heart: cruelty born and mayhem unraveled, christened and anointed for the shambles of heresy and savagery, when his incantations, uncontrolled, unfettered, were relinquished and scattered to the world. They drowned and demolished the fabric of his beloved tokens; the earth, brightened by the midday sun, tossed by the luminous rays, folded and withered beneath his hooves. The tides, where the horizon met the waves, ceased their fervent current amidst his wandering. Animals fled, screeched and screamed from the twisted manacles of his macabre despondency, and over time his youthful, tearful, melancholy aches shriveled into impassive masses, watched and witnessed as the plains wilted, castles eroded, and rock became rubble. Where there weren’t tainted embodiments, where there weren’t painted shadows, where the land did not cease to contort from his infernal oeuvre, he created iniquity, he painted immorality, drew it across the canvas of virtue, whims and majesty, slithered and destroyed the impeccable foils and foibles of lost harmony. He bewitched, connived and annihilated, chased and devoured, led beasts to slaughter, held daggers aloft, pinpointed into hearts. He murmured enchantments, necromancy and spells that drove wickedness into the core of the firmest believers, carved infidels from the sanctified and sacred, lavished demise onto crisp foyers of the living. Unholy, corrupt and depraved, the sinned became sinner, ceased lamentations and composed, sang, sculpted, the raptures, the reverie, the reasons for dirges and requiems. Beguiled, tormented, allured and devastated the rectitude, honor and morality, constructing tribulations, traumas, the molten monster ready to set sovereignty ablaze, the blackened, corroded pariah, the seditious, insurrect cretin waiting to consume dynasties and districts of humanity. If he couldn’t find misery in the strings of righteousness, he plucked their harmonious instruments until they rang only iniquitous stanzas, distorted, disorderly lyrics christened for the wealth of debauchery and turmoil, the tangled mess of lawlessness. Anarchy plagued, fueled, incensed and invoked by the restless candor of an annihilated soul – no mirador, no tower, no campanile to be found to hasten to its steeple, to wreck its walls, to tear down its statues and rubble; satanic harmony poised for persecution, prosed for grinding, unwinding friction; slaughter carved into corporeal form.

She shivered, and his tyrannical glare studied as water shriveled, shuddered, a pool, a reservoir, a ripple in the silence. Even as she quivered and quavered along the lake’s edge, he knew it was not by his intimidation; she was too stubborn to allow derision, to permit scorn, and to be garnered into withering shards by the ruthlessness of his diabolical entity. Out of malevolence he almost yearned, almost desired, almost coveted the touch of her ire, the caress of her vehemence and elegy, but the thought is cast aside moments thereafter, to fall adrift in the midnight foils and toils. She’d seen disintegration, dilapidation, and still wandered in his harsh, unrelenting presence, not choking, not drowning, not escaping. Instead of committing to his ferocity, to his brutality, to his callous, heartless, savage regime, he awaited an answer from her inquiring gaze, from her curious depths, from the drawn range of her fixations. What was he suited for but the arch of detachment, the shadows of the evening and the heat of execution? What was he created for but the touch, the taste, the savored relish of the devil’s harmony, of Lucifer’s whispers and Mephistopheles’s machinations? What else had he been conjured for? What was left of the world for him to squander, destroy and demolish? What more was he to accomplish upon the earth: unending calculations, eternal runes, the hush, the silence, of tombstones, graves and catacombs?

The rainchild didn’t tell him, leaving curiosity uprooted and shambled, broken, bent fragments, slivered pieces, like chaotic croons in the vapor of her exhalations. The world is not such a dark place, you know. He nearly laughed, because he created darkness from the shambles of his heart, his pernicious puissance, the cruel cutlass of his soul. He brought the mantles, the veils, the curtains and canopies of tainted intrigue, left them swallowed and devastated in the barbaric wake of his candor. Forsaken once more, he traced the movement of her finesse, her lissome, limber pose, drew closer as she dipped her head downwards, defiling, polluting the nocturnal fervor of the twilight consecrations. His arcane, enigmatic features lowered, invading, capturing, seizing, followed her motions until the reticence, the rapier formation, were locked upon hers, a breathless, rancorous, whispering hum, soft, crackling murmur, away. Molten mouth, parted, licentious, carnal, brutal, stoked the heat of his bestial armaments, the siege of his torment, pulsed over, against, the shell of her ear, uttering the discordant trace of quietus, of interest brewing in the doldrums of decay, the heinous, seething brush of bedlam. “Show me.”

[100th. <333]

The rainchild drowned him in the wake of her cascading deluge, in the ardor of her torrential abstraction, in the canvas and tapestry of weary whims. Each rivulet was the sweeping, cold caress of her silent sorcery; each droplet was the sinuous, light stroke of her foibles, of her caprices, of her mercies and regrets. It drank his sin, ate at his malicious marrow, licked the vast tirades of bestial pursuits, barbaric containments, savage vessels and hollowed grails, licentious, iniquitous flavor. It itched and carved over his Tartarean marble and sculpted stone, tore, laced and lanced the aperture of his soul, wilted it to further darkness, further decay. It settled into the layers of his unholy vehemence and found more, digging into the enamel of nonchalance, of steel, fortitude and ramparts, until there was naught left but the desperate, forlorn upheavals of a wretched cretin and desolate devil. It parted ways with his severe monstrosities, his perilous, pernicious scrapes, and his masterpieces of arcane, reticent annihilations, contorting the fabric of his hide into darker shades of black, iron, hallowed conquerors and conniving demons. It drizzled down the fierce, insouciant contours of his face, slinking past the piercing stare, not obliterated, not destroyed, feral and seeking, touching where she could not. A ghostly trail of patterns, whispering, wanton traces of elemental design, enchanted, absorbed, beguiled and allured into the enriched sphere and scope of his anarchy, his acrimony, his trenchant, mordant enmity. It crooned melancholy, fostered snares, culminating in a wily, cunning scheme that brought his eyes to glare into hers beneath his dampened forelock. Was this her light? Her divinity? Her virtue? So why, when it reached his mouth, slipped across his tongue, did it savor of sadness, did it relinquish purity, did it regenerate hope where none should have existed? What was there to show from the pieces of her moroseness, misery and dismalness – for he had his own impart, share and bestow without her dying dreams, without her dimming heart, without her fervent ardor. Grandeur slid, hidden beneath the dusky heart of the Basin, raptures chiseled and thrown away, leaving only the mortal bones of the wounded, the proud, the strong and mighty. He’d survived nothingness, he lived through terror, domination and bedlam, and she, with her stalwart gaze and her harpsichord bliss, still tried to feed him the carnations and taffeta of her livelihood; irony bit through two souls.

He doesn’t belong in her showers of affections or the vestal ages of virtue, he cannot stand long in her essence without feeling the burn of avaricious anger, the coursing rage of feverish malcontent, the withered pinnacles of his nefarious, sinister distortions. Her elements dragged him into unknown territory, and the only reaction he could embody was challenge, opposition, scorn and derision, too weighed down by the crushed, twisted, maligned blood coursing through his veins, along his skin, across his muscles until each taut surface forced him to disorder and debacle. He yearned for calamity, he desired for destruction, he pleaded for affliction, misfortune, tribulation and catastrophe, to escape from the foibled laces, the mercurial hold she’d grasped upon his ominous, baleful soul. How dare she be able to see his scars, how dare she be capable of gripping upon his corroded, consumed entity, how dare she unwind the fabric of his labyrinthine conjectures, unholy regards and hungry, heinous sieges. Soaked, immersed and absorbed in the fingertips of her silent incantations, he backed away from her form, slowly, carefully, traced where he’d come from, towards the shadows, towards the inky shades of Stygian oils and containers, to where he felt secure, safe, the sanctuary of darkness. The minstrel of mayhem slunk and slithered in the drawn corridors of rain and shower, lancing stare hiding the inundated poisons, the vexed venom, of his blemished barbarity. He was silent again, hushed, withdrawn, hiding everything within the core of his hallowed shell, refusing to extend towards her again; she’d already witnessed too much. Like nettles and thorns pricking at his sides, dangerously tempting, alluring and out of reach.