The monster’s tome was lined with tragedy; the loss of empathy, the deprivation of ties forged by family, by bonds, by the trivial pursuits of childhood and the collapse of compassion. Plucked and torn away from his youthful body, discarded and distorted into filaments of incensed entropy, enmity, hostility and rancor, driven into ruin, into rubble, into ravaged intoxications, withered and dead with the unearthly condemnation of his infernal caresses. Where there was power also dwelled peril, chaotic, fraying whispers that choked life from limb, breaths from lungs, beats from hearts. Where there was danger, there was damnation, and he’d fled into the rocky fixtures of the abysmal mists, the coiled raptures, the hedonistic fringe of reality. Ghosts of friction, kin, floated into the void, destroyed, swept away, tombs of the unknown, balancing precariously in the labyrinthine conjectures of his fervent, ferocious mind. There was no way to regain what had been erased, no invocation he could concoct that would bring back his father’s strong convictions, his mother’s keen eyes, the staunch, stalwart, valorous embrace of spirits united by blood, by creed, by perseverance, puissance and promises. The passions, the allure, the finality and mayhem brewing in his blood ceased the arduous claims, composed the latent requiem of his distraught decay. A curse, a gift, a bestowal and a malediction all woven into his arcane, reticent rapier frame. Once a boy forged by everything his parents instilled, taught and nurtured, thrown into the hands of Mephistopheles, molded and sculpted for the finery of marble, statue terror, horror, war drums nestled in brambles, in thorns. Youth spent on delusion, treachery and calculating, reducing the scores of his laments as one by one, they went unheard, they went unanswered, deep into the dwelling of his shadowed, tainted bedlam. Scion turned into savage, confidences into condemnations, innocence to iniquity, leniency to licentiousness, and all the while, burning softly, brightly, deep within his heart was still the raw, incandescent need, yearning, to make his sire, fire and brimstone, his dam, assurance and dignity, proud. What would they see if they could look upon him now? Would they smile, cherish the lad that had once been theirs? Would they grant him their earnest wishes, their grandest gestures, their fleeting, aloof grins?

Because when he looked upon this boy, the familiarity was brutal, unconcealed, unrestrained, as if little pieces of their livelihood had been sown into his frame, and the behemoth couldn’t tear himself away for fear of losing that small emblem, that lingering fragment that he hadn’t seen in many years. The nagging portion of his mind nettled, too raw, too real, consumed and devoured by the enigmatic twist of the lad before his piercing stare. Witness to many portals, oubliettes to the soul, his bitter entity encroached further, swallowing the shambles of his sinister, nefarious wake, glaring at the stag as if trying to rip away the recollected shards, put them back together into a form he’d once known. Only after he’d spoken, chiseled away at the finery, at the confusion, was Deimos allowed to come to his conclusion; buried, deep, deep into the recesses, into the gully, into the gorge of his sentiments, he found an anchor, a tie, a frayed string to knot and entangle his blood. Belial, the name seeped into his bones and wrapped around the sinew, and the comment thereafter sank along his darkest veins, pulsed, pervaded, surrounded him in the glory, in the hallelujah, of a tale’s riddle coming to an end, solved. Son of Zuriel. A beloved sister, a reverent legend, a name captured by his family’s lips to fall along the courtyard of supremacy and valor, a world he’d lost too many years ago. The other’s words caused the briefest glimmer of a smirk hastened to his lips, crooked and hell-bent, foreign across the mouth of a warrior effigy, and he offered his own calling, crooning it from the depths of salvation to a spirit that would remember the utterances, the phrases, the names. “Deimos, son of Ignatius and Stone.” He paused, and the snicker is replaced by stony nonchalance, but the assurances are laid there, between the daggers of bloodlines, demons and infidels. The child is of his brethren, of his kind, of his kindred spirits that he’d never thought to behold again. His sword is the child’s shield, his blood is the child’s protection, and his word is the child’s sanctuary. They are fellow gods, locked in decay and reprieve, awaiting the clarity of their derision, their puissance, their distinction, and in the silence, he pledged for anarchy, for pandemonium. “What do you seek here, nephew?”