DEIMOS
Why did the Sword give out advice, if no one listened to it? If no one bothered to adhere to it? He’d given the Abandoned plenty of explanations as to why the Voice was no one to admire or seek advice from, and yet here he stood, yearning to hear both sides. In another time, in another place, it could’ve been bent as admirable, understandable, and brave. But right now, on the bridges and brinks of war, when the horizon threatened its mettle, it seemed very stupid, foolish, and naïve. He shook his head, continued pulling the sled, eyes straight ahead, glancing only at the snow. “You could ask any Natural.” Stories of before the barrier, written in tomes somewhere; from elders who passed their knowledge on down the line, from the history of those who’d once lived and breathed it. The warrior’s tones were flattened, indicating nothing but a feigned stoicism, while he fought down the frustration, the vexation, angling its way through his mind. “Rather than walking straight into the lion’s den.”A goddess who didn’t care that her monsters murdered, maimed, tortured, and tormented her very own; LongNight had ample cases of the same injustice. A goddess who placed plagued upon people. A goddess who made her loyalists into machines, dependent on her, so their survivals intertwined.
His cranium only whipped around at the notion of some pending lecture on the battlefield, his brows furrowing as Sah stepped on some dangerous lines. Deimos didn’t require any reprimands on what open fields of destruction were like; it lived and breathed in the echoes of his veins, his pulse, his bones. “I do not understand your hesitation, nor will many others, because we have lived through it.” Thereafter, he raised his cranium again to the wind, wondering when this was all going to blow apart, strides elongating in his irritation. “Do you want to suffer firsthand as well?” She could curse him. She could maim him. She could destroy him too.
He was something solid
to lean against
violent and fierce and unmoving
