[SE] behind devastation

DEIMOS

the fire can't touch me
for I have burned too many times

There was an incessant need for flames, for fire, for ignition, for conflagration, and it built, it built, it built around him as he walked, as he wandered, as he followed after the war drums droning in his ears. A command, from some general lost in his memories, and not from his own beleaguered efforts, like a lot soldier striving to find his regiment. There were ghosts in the highlights and the trumpet flares, casting him aloft, and the maddening pulse of fatigue was ignored for pressing on and on and on.

Until he came to the ruins, which reminded him of other years, other lives, where battered acrimonies, hostilities, and antipathies had driven them to exactly the same reaches, watching as the hallucinations, the chimeras, the flickering, bounding forms scattered into lights, into factions –

Battle. Skirmishes. Instinct drove him to muscle memory and contortions of old – and the embers, the cinders, rose around him in a mighty crescendo, circling, swarming, and surrounding. An inferno, a kindled, rapacious edge, until there was no end and no beginning, but the spiraling press of fire courted and contorted around his frame.

Now the world couldn’t swallow him whole.

Because maybe he’d do it first.

the sea can't harm me
for I have been drowning all my life