The Deserts are soft and still after the war, as they had been before it. The sprawling kingdom had never been known for its thick ranks or riotous nature, it was a quiet giant that lay slumbering by the great sea until riled. Kratos had never appreciated it before, his nature just simply wouldn’t allow it. The skull-faced stallion had loathed the calmness of his father’s land – he had especially hated its boring nothingness as a child. He had ached for the Dale, where his fabled mother ruled and where the land was fat with shadows and forests and things to sink his lightning into. Where he should have been, if it hadn’t been for his slurred-mouth twin who had to be coddled beneath their great mother’s care. Yael had always been too quick to snake into his thoughts when the white-fire began to build in his mouth as his eyes had slid across some unfortunate desert creature. She had never been any fun, he had growled so often then. But he had never been a particularly agreeable child, there wasn’t much he did enjoy. Well, not anything good, anyway. He had been a wolfish, menacing colt, bearing traits even his warrior mother longed he would grow out of but his king father merely overlooked. Kratos, the once favored son – oh, how far the high has fallen.

It had never been a secret that the Nightwalker had always chosen him, but he had always shrugged away from the weight his father’s tried to shoulder onto him. The gentility, the aristocracy of it all was just left too much of a sour taste on his tongue. Kratos had a vein of nastiness that threaded through – even then he knew he was too selfish, too hateful to rule. But still Vanquish had expected him to rise up behind him like a shadow, but he had flouted the black king’s expectations well before the day of his death.

But the dragon-winged king had been reborn, a black phoenix from the ashes of his own bones long bleached white with time. He had come back from the Otherworld to wear his crown again and this time, Kratos would not fail him. And he hadn’t, not yet at least.

The painted titan was quick to appease the Deserts needs, especially with Rhy at his side amongst the dunes. Even if it meant facing his brother; the once ill-favored son, the once mistreated child, the now king. Kratos had been malicious to him as a child, unrelenting and cruel when he should have been bolstering and protective. He remembers overhearing two Desert mares gossiping about how he had crippled his brother in their mother’s womb before their first breath and had felt a wild heat of shame since. A shame that had always made him angry and malevolent, perhaps it had been his way of pushing his feelings of guilt on Kreios, or perhaps he had just been a wicked child.

Either way, the king's twin idles at the edge of the kingdom’s border, lightning rumbling softly in his throat as he called for him, and then he waited.

Kratos

the electric titan of vanquish and lyric