Callous and chilling, the meticulous scythe studied the youth, relished the sight, the distorted features of intimidation pressed and clustered over the lad’s face, the structure of a body subdued, persecuted, bending to the reality of his terrorizing onslaught and agonizing fixture, persistent, pervasive, permeating precision and prowess. He’d met many cowards, enjoyed the edge of their sanity, their mania, their tangible trepidation and anxiety, the satisfaction of their broken reveries. He savored fear and rewarded bravery, became witness to the courage and valor sparking upon youth, the bold endeavors of shirking a constant, persecuting flame, dominant and superior, consuming arches, thresholds and corridors, absorbing the finely wrought decadence of each corporeal empire. Sharp, caustic, brutal and barbaric, an omnipresent severity and savagery balancing the weight of winter upon his shoulders, the gravity and graves of nefarious tombs, the slashing, merciless knife unwinding from sinister seams. His piercing eyes slid upon each rogue motion the colt constructed, molding his audacious heartstrings into formulated motions, into touching the earth he’d eternally damned. The Reaper made no movement, stiff, unyielding, dark, stone statue in the midst of haunting dawns and twisting enigmas, prospering no revelations, offering and bestowing no indulgences, no formulated welcomes, no enveloping gratitude. A solid, resolute, relentless and tenacious carving on the horizon, raised for the deadly armaments of the devil’s Tartarean gifts and vices, sins and iniquities, vicious guile, imperial reticence. If the child dared to reach for demise, Deimos was merciless, cruel, vile enough to allow him one last stroke of the living, before quaking, trembling, shivering and shuddering, grasping for breath, gasping for serenity, and was nearly tempted to extend his enchantments, bestow the art of his terror, the laureate’s final monody. But the other beast quivered, limbs wobbling, quivering, and advanced no further; the Reaper still did naught but study, listen, capture the breadth of speech, the alterations of language. Carnesîr, foreign and indistinct, ruffling no memories of specific heritages or bloodlines. Belonging to nothing, a nameless figure wandering amongst the vast wilderness, travailing upon this primrose path. The calculating demon pondered many prompts and queries, postured none across his lips: What ushered the child into these frozen doldrums, into these chaotic, cretin exploits? Or was he seemingly unaware of their strife, of their malice, of their menace? Did he comb the land for approval, for purpose, and if so, would damnation be sparked and incensed from the satanic grasp of their infidel sovereignty?

Then he asked for a story, and Deimos had none to bestow. His brow didn’t move, his impassive face remained in the same stoic balance, not wondering, not bestowing, not holding any information but the harsh reality of his disposition. He was not a beast of contributing tales, his methods, convictions and creeds remained enigmatic, blistering, smoldering until unwound by action, eloquence in battles and blood. There was naught to impart but the sanction of his invocations, the nature of his power, the rhythm of clawing, avaricious fingers, slinking, crawling, crooning for the livelihood of divine souls. “I kill by touch.” I annihilate, I destroy, I ruin and ravage. Simple, unraveling not a single complexity, no ounce of desolation, no scars of forlorn enmities, so the child could put it in his storybooks: the stained, tainted meeting of the Reaper, death and persecution, abhorrence and solitude, contempt and ferocity. Only thereafter did he honor the creature with another query, to advance, to speculate, to place the youth into proper alignment, where he’d grow, where’d he flourish, invoke mayhem and bedlam in the name of their glacial walls. “What do you seek here?” Maelstroms, chaos, anarchy, the sundering of fools, the rendering of superiority – or was there too much peace in his soul, too much weariness in his motivations?

The General was no idol, no reverent being, no immortal, omniscient existence pressing divine scriptures upon thresholds, empires and kingdoms; instead, he was a meticulous, haunted figure caught and enshrined in Mephistopheles’ hold, and had never attempted to escape. The Reaper possessed a foundation amongst the winter conquest, upheaval and sedition, insurrection and revolution, contorted, wicked seams and chilling, gnarled animosity. He couldn’t invoke convictions and creeds unless they were tarnished in blood and violence, couldn’t stroke the land in opulence and splendor unless it longed for the oeuvre of demise, the passion, the imbalance of quieted, hushed souls. He bestowed no grandeur other than the uprooted shambles of others’ destruction, mayhem, brutality and barbarity, watched as the world burned, witnessed the earth churn into slivers, fragments, preempted enmity with his nefarious apathy. He was no God, but claimed many other things: bedlam, chaos, sinister hymns in the mistaken wind, severe clarity slinking over hearts, across napes and throats, foreboding, haunting annihilation, fallen prosperity, quiet, reeling furor. The lad wanted all the answers, and Deimos could only impart the satanic truth of his pathway to oblivion, tilting his cranium, blending into the aperture of shadow and light, timeless pieces of villainy and unholy sentiments. His voice parted the curious air with the raw candor of his wild essence, blunt, curt, raw and grating. “No.” Not a deity, but a phantom, living, tangible immorality and iniquity, twisting and pillaging, beguiling, inveigling, pouring filth and fury, ferocity and fierceness into the edges of sovereignty, mauling worlds until the foreboding incantations of his vile menace struck them into damnation, corruption, falling, searing, smoldering, smothering. The youth’s voice beckoned again, conjured up one of the many questions he’d layered upon himself at that tender age of his shifted aspirations and ambitions, when a scion turned from prowess to detachment, from ignorance to desolation. How does one explain the alterations in a child, the groaning land as it sunk beneath his feet for the first time, the surprise, the devastation as wreckage tangled from his steps, from his strides, from the simplest caress and the briefest stroke, weariness to obliteration and elimination? The puncturing, vivid course of his stare remained on the fellow beast, and he uttered a half-truth. “I was born with it.” He didn’t describe its slow incubation, its methodical wait, its unraveling hands, its clawing fingertips as it erupted and bloomed on his first birthday, how he’d been given time to appreciate the world and all of its opulence, but never fully regarded all the pathways, all the virtues, all the pleasantries now locked and broken from his frame. All he embraced now were the requiems of malevolence, slinking and slithering from the frozen armaments of his soul.

The raingirl distracted him, as she always did, with the regal finesse of her lips, with the noble embodiment of showers and cascading whims, capricious, mercurial repose, and he slid his gaze from the boy to the maiden, listened, captured, viewed and witnessed. The behemoth eternally failed to ignore her, prompted and stoked by the merriment, by the beneficence, and perhaps the notion played well for the juvenile, for the rapier pondered, wondered, claimed reasoning. He considered her words, mulled and mused; the child with a million queries requested and sought a home within the Basin, the world of beauty, the kingdom of danger. Would he survive? Would he spring from the facets of stories and intimidate, allure, and merely sing his endless sonnets, his eternal stanzas of legends and tales? Would he serve a purpose in the rancorous, loathsome air?

The lad answered for himself thereafter; want to immortalize. He yearned to create tomes, compose ballads, weave tales and narratives, speculate and unravel mysteries, write accounts that would slip from the mouths of so many, pass from generation to generation. Myths, sagas, epics rising from the tides of the future, tugging into the mythos, the insurgencies, the pariahs, formulating measures of all their past deeds; from the conquests, from the triumphs, to the failures, the losses. Was this how they would live on, into memory, into history? Another machination crooned into the machinations of the Machiavellian brow, and his notions, his ideas, his formulas, for he was not a monolith to worry if his reaper invocations wouldn’t be remembered, but there were other methods, other ways to embark and use a story. Deimos’s war plagued mind fed and fueled the assertions, allured and beguiled the malicious finery of an impending macabre crusade. His decree flowed through the coiled eaves, prospered to the augured author. “You may live here, Scholar.”

Carnesir’s queries never ceased, and the stony, marble soldier, the living, breathing death, leaned into the lad’s presence, taut, rigid, unyielding, daunting and formidable, the intimidating branch of the Aurora’s gleaming wilderness. How do you live, when all around you die? With abhorrence, with indifference, disconnection, with loyalty tied to land and not creatures. A hiss followed, sibilations of havoc. “Control.” The lacerating conjecture of his nefarious stare pervaded the child’s, but meant no threat, no warning, but only the ominous ways of the scythe’s existence, to plague, to ruin, to ravage. Will I die? “Do you want to?”