The Reaper listened as turbulence disturbed the boundaries of their iced aspirations, halted ambitions, torn and frayed audacities, as Lady and engineer turned against one another. He kept a silent hold over the shadows, bent and molded into the shades of Stygian corruptions, captured each ripple of shambled, simmering damnation, offered not a single opinion to the tension, to the tiresome, loathsome contention and discord. Psyche exhaled her torrent, Ulrik maintained his savage puncturing of her leadership, and the General absorbed, a corporeal presence of deadly contortions, of vicious, infernal convictions, as hostilities fell apart and only the boiling, bubbling animosity filled the night’s flourishing gloaming. Absences, losses, failures and defeats built and stirred the rhythm of their anguish, of their heated wrath, of their screeching, screaming defiance and insurrection, and sedition, revolution, landed, harked and heralded its bewitching, beguiling innards, claimed subversion over hands that’d merely asked for answers and declarations. Blatant, festering wounds, scything tongues, nefarious lacerations clawing and ripping, engraving abhorrence and contempt into the loathing gestures of both, scarring their once heinous munitions and motions into crumbled bits of antagonistic animosity. Superiority brutalized and fumbled, and all the while he was the pondering, meticulous, calculating witness, wondering how they’d unite tyranny again, how they’d corrupt virtues, how they’d embark on heathenous sketches and molds, how they’d blend their twisted hearts and distorted souls into the same breadths of domination. Poisoned and contaminated, blighted and spoiled, the rancorous clarity, the severe doldrums, the heat of their riotous clamor and uproar only spelled out the disastrous art of their former triumph; they’d spun quickly into a downward spiral, into the incensed umbrage, into the cold, harsh, unrelenting truth of catastrophes. Barbarians’ wills tightened and stiffened, soldiers’ hands incapable of encompassing swords, indifference and complacency soiled into the roots of their specious brutality – perhaps all along they’d been deluded by their strength, by their philosophy, by the weight of their might and dominion – and the General stoked the flames of his apocalyptic strife, harbored and harpooned the absolution of their remorseless bounty, their ruthless embers, thought how to destroy over and over again instead of making enemies of themselves.

But his name crossed over their molten mouths, and Deimos’s attention was drawn back to the torrential schemes of monarch and mechanic, captured the edges of their statements. He’d been sown into the winter tapestry, he’d been unearthed and christened for the raw brutality, for the wild, heinous, ferocious debacles, for each and every brushstroke of satanic origin, gleamed when the prosperous, warped calculations severed virtues, puzzled and attempted to fix the broken shells when conquest stomped upon their rasped backs. He’d held his rapier, he’d allured, beguiled, seduced death upon their opponents, beckoned the Tartarean, carnivore sentiments to move, to swindle, to stitch and stain their adversaries, clenched power aloft, possessed dominion in the strength in his stride. He lived for treachery, for the vicious, vile villainy pressed into their minds, into their debauchery, for the horror, for the terror, of unwinding the lesser; except now, it appeared as if they were the indulgent, the weak, the inept and vacuous. His eyes widened a fraction once more, as their lips blended, sank into the murmurs of sovereignty pressed upon his skull, a crown to bear. Instead of contemplating further, for perhaps it was to blight Ulrik, perhaps it was to muster the weaknesses of Psyche, he swore himself again, felt no need to repress the bestial, feral anarchy built into his lungs, into his chest, into his veins. “My efforts are for the Basin and the Plague.” It hadn’t been for Lordship, for a throne, but for disaster, for destruction, for ruin and abomination. And if he so deserved the mantle, rule, monarchy and kingly pursuits, he said naught about it, and instead, permitted the notion to ignite inside his cranium, slink and crawl, past the burning fires of his father’s prowess, and into the alluring, entrancing tides of complete, utter domination. Even indifference couldn't sunder the image of conquering foes with a darkened, deadly coronation.