Iniquity dragged over the horizon, and Deimos stared into the midst of its immoral burdens, amongst the wild horizons until they festered and bled against his sights, and he moved in their ferocious chambers, untamed, hostile, brewing animosity from the fervent, ardent coils of his undulating muscles, of his unchained acrimony. Too many worlds not yet toppled, too many fresh bruises marring the empire’s reign, too many indulgences and weaknesses exploited beneath the flesh of thriving shadows, and each pernicious footfall of his puissant prowess and presence couldn’t fill every monstrous, gaping hole. Frustrations distorted and contorted the fabric of his Tartarean mind, meticulous machinations, callous calculations, leaving no grandeur, no grand gestures, no shallow gasps of triumph or revelation, but the quiet, burdening damage of another folly, and how to render it immobile, twist and turn the heady, diminishing apertures of failure. Nonsensical torrents and tribulations of weaker individuals, of mindless barbarians, of molten, inept cretins sank into the abyss of his sentiments, the daunting press of his movements and motions, blending into the Stygian depths, heathen brushstrokes and rancorous strides choking, strangling, suffocating the chords of silence into further debauchery. The Reaper, dominating, strong, ravenous and rapacious, grew hungry, grew feral, grew predacious, for a moment of victory, for a hint of conquest, for the slightest, serrated edge to dip into the virtuous flesh of his enemies, to scar, to mutilate, to maul, to obliterate, the crawling, searing whisper of demise quaking within their last breaths. Swallowing, consuming, devouring the plains of frigid, glacial expanse, entombed, enshrined, enraptured in its abhorrent abyss, the slinking, serpentine, sinuous, treacherous devil mourned the loss of their cold-blooded gallows, and sown his unholy possession into the land once more for the touch, the taste, of imperial design, of potent, carnivore rapture, of vulturine, wolfish splendor, where the overwhelming, eldritch titans stuffed, fed, annihilation into the smothered mouths of vestal, divine weavers, of capricious, mercurial pursuits. Laced and woven into their vile, atrocious chords, he was another garrote for the wicked, for the licentious, for the cruel and indomitable, and wondered when they could live up to the latter.

The General preyed upon the strung darkness, punctured and pierced the cascading fabric of gloaming, nocturnal dusk, haunted and taunted, plagued and burdened as the scents of others entered the frustrated core of his enigmatic patterns; were one not familiar, not pressingly, achingly versed in all the manners of his essence, he may not have bothered pursuing the stranger. Deadly curiosity piqued the infidel’s interest, the lines of the Threshold warmed and lingering amongst the passing breeze, the ancient earth quaking beneath the quietus distortions of his motions and movements, yearning for his touch to cease, for his caresses to halt. Carnivorous, he struck against ice, glacier, rubble and ruin to extinguish the intrigue, to maim the allure, treading upon pathway after pathway until his movements knotted, coiled, molded into irreverent sedition, malicious, menacing, horrible and nefarious, paying no heed to hide the wake of his unforgiving disdain. Reticent features molded into the venomous rapture of his indifferent, dispassionate haze, severe gaze sliding towards the raingirl, a slight nod given, acknowledging her earnest find, her well-being, an agonizing breath loosened and released, before turning his full attention to the new charge, young, silvern, horned. The piercing weight of his stare fell upon the beast, penetrating, slashing, unwinding, seething, finessed forbidding, the guarded arrogance of imperious recherché, the arched detachment, iron and intimidation of a broken, stony greeting. “Deimos, General of the Basin.” An ensuing pause in introductions, an antagonistic plunge of upheaval and pondering munitions: what could this youth offer, to indulge Huyana into plucking him from the gates? Did he possess strength, mind, body, power, or was he another lost soul tossed upon the rocks, eager, but incompetent, flailing in each storm. “Who are you?”