[seasonal event] wasted faith

Deimos the Reaper master of nothing place, of recoil and grace Disaster: unfurling before his eyes like smoke and fumes, like it had a thousand times before, curling amongst ethers and vestiges, pandemonium, chaos, a tempestuous edge with serrated knives cluttered along its boundaries, its nettles, its thorns. It was a weight he’d carried from other times, from other worlds, from other storms, fettering away at the cluster, at the conflagration of his soul – because in the end, his efforts had been meaningless, and seemingly, so had everyone else’s. Monsters came and went, thundered their way through anything content, anything sacred, and destroyed – dismissed whimsical memories for stained, bloody ones, remnants of bodies and broken, brittle, entanglements. So he walked, Zuriel roaming back and forth from his side and to anything else that seemed to distract her; occasionally his hand would reach out and pat her neck, or brush his fingers through her mane, otherwise, left alone in his solemn, reticent platitudes. Reviewing and remembering the scenes did little in the wake of missed queues or what might have beens – only the blistering notion that they had to have done better. Should he have constructed defenses along the field? Rock walls? Fence-lines, a border instead of ribbon? Would that have made a difference? His jaw clenched and he brooded, the wake of other terrible things clawing along, the seasonal changes hardly bothering – stewing, brewing, mind warping between dismay and ruminations. Eventually they meandered closer to the Oasis, perhaps out of habit, and he chose a large, flattened rock to sit upon while the unicorn grazed on long blades of grass along the embankment. She’d been far better suited to the upheaval of Fiat Lux than he’d been; healing, mending, soothing, contributing as best she could as the world cracked open, as screams echoed over dance songs and swells, as temples were torn apart. Useless all the more, he glanced upwards at the sky, at the new reign of another summer, at the christening of suns – pondering if it was any better than last year’s debacle, as they raced through the Greatwood in efforts to save abducted brethren, as they listened to stories, as they prepared for more festivals (and a sense of dread in that too; patterns and cycles). Out of habit, out of routine, his palms began to glow, gilded, gold, the beginnings of a basket taking form.

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