the apple of your eye, the rotten core inside; any.

[Deimos]

He is brought here from the wind. He has been here before, collecting his own gathering of flesh to taste and sample at a whim. How many had he had? 20? 25? He had always loved the slope of the feminine flank--he could get drunk on sumptuous flesh and a good tup. Sinking his teeth into warm blood, feeling their blood draining down the back of his throat. The children; oh there were many of them. They kept producing.

He outlived them all.

A dark smile plays on his lips, and he slinks quiet into the field. This time he does not seek women. Those days are beyond him. Death fits nicely on a pair of slim hips, but much more than that and he finds those memories that haunt him from a lifetime ago. The dark, the mountains. He shakes his head--cracks...Kinks in his armor.

He pushes forward. He wonders if any will come. If there are any who wish to have a dead man.

If there were any brave enough.

Any alive enough, to tame and cheat death itself.

[Pollock]

He is comfortable with death. Knows it so intimately.

He has watched it take over bodies, leaving them inanimate and uncared for as abandoned buildings. Dark. (Goodnight.)

He has seen it. It drips like thick, red sap in the spaces between eyes and thighs. It is bone-white and organ-blue. It is wide-eyed and bare-toothed.

He has heard it. A many-mouthed song – the crack of thick skull bones; the final, tongue-tied sermons of total arrest; the splitting of the atlas from the axis. (Goodnight.)

He has felt the way it prowls down the spine, each vertebrae lighting like a bulb awoken by electricity – that’s Fear.

He knows that well, too.

He knows it like a young boy in the pitch dark – knows it for the uncertainty it sows in soft, yielding gray matter. He dreams of it, in the blank and pupilless green and the clear, sharp ring of sleigh bells. (He wishes for ‘goodnight’. Sleeplessness comes in its stead.)

He knows it like a knight knows his greatsword – every inch the same sharp, pale blade; his comrade.

So, when depravity calls to depravity, he comes to it like an old friend. Comes to him, though those coal-black eyes still admire the dark stallion like a rabid dog – grace? They had never become acquainted; he was weaned on the sharp knowledge of his own mortality and the burnt offerings of what might once have been hope. Cruelty? He feeds on it, and he finds it in abundance here – mixed with the familiar tangs of sweat and seed and blood and he follows it like a wild animal on hunt for meatier morsels. 

He comes to a stop in front of him, golden-skinned and horn-crowned; his limp wing hanging from his side. His shame and his beginnings. He tilts his crude, unkind head, exposing some of the shiny, pink-silver scars along the bottom of his jaw to the sky.

“I would have said you do not look like you belong here,” some do. Some slip through the cracks and in that unwanted space, they grow weak and pale. Needy. (Easy.) “...yet here you are.” But he can see there is something there in this deadman. Something wicked and impressive – so what, pray tell, would draw him to this mire of desperation, if not hips?

Play, perhaps?

A hunt? 

The gift giver grins, crooked and perverse, “fuck this hellhole, mine’s better. I think you’d fit in there.” A deadman in a dead land. Poetic. “Pollock, of Pangea.”

[Deimos]

It had been another world that Deimos had held dominion over. He had wielded power as a mace—war was his device and he held it close to his breast as a lover. When it became time to meet Hell as an old lover, he took to the dust as if he’d been made to it. So many times before he had been responsible for the blood dripping out of the bodies of others, and when he had laid down in death, Deimos had known peace for the first time in his life.

To be spat out of Hell and knocked back into life as if he were nothing more than a cheap tourist was something that did not sit well with the Son of Mars, and that war machine was left to bring death and pestilence upon the world that he had known in a previous life. And so, to find himself in the field, where those who pass by him are just looking to start their lives or look for unconditional love—when the only thing that is unconditional is the coffin that they lay your corpse in—Deimos seeks an ending. A way to bring about this destruction to their so-called peace.

He wanted to rewrite their nightmares.

So, as the Krampus approaches, Deimos can feel the air growing colder and the wind shifting away from him; the scent of foreign blood stinking up the air around him. His fire-red eyes are hooded by black lids, but black billows on his exhale confirm the scent; this creature is from Carnage’s land. Pollock speaks, making his pretty words that are anything but classy—Deimos’ kind of language, to be sure—and he is offset, pushing on his backhand. The words are cracked as the bent man approaches, but the message is clear.

Come to Pangea.

Deimos smiles, his thin lips wrapped around yellow teeth that bear a set of fangs; he knows Pollock as one of his own. Indeed, there was no real need for introductions. Death greets a select few as an old friend, and this creature is one of hell’s own. His wings rest beside him, that thick black leather sweating with the need to attack. Impatient slag. Know your place. Black blood pumps through his body—his power for the time being sated. This creature could serve for other uses. Ally. it said. And so, he speaks. “How do you know where anyone belongs unless you know them well enough to taste their flesh?” Acid drips from his mouth, but he does have to concede the point; the Field was a complete shithole. “Deimos.”

He says nothing further. Instead he nods, indicating Pollock to lead the way. Pangea may have been created by Carnage, but it provided shelter from the open areas. There was still some dark places in the world left for creatures such as they.

DEIMOS

are you going to deny the savior in front of your eyes?

words:___ points:___ HTML by Call

[Pollock]

“Hm.”

They are like two great, iron rams locking horns for the sake of feeling them crack together – for the sake of hearing the noisiness of their own power. They are the kind of men that do not coexist – they’ll wait, a hundred towering, broad-backed behemoths, for the right moment to strike the other down.

Fine. He knows many of these men.

He respects them; conspires against them. And one day, one of them will raze him to the ground.

(One of his sons, perhaps? This war machine? A father? Brother?

The weight of a million memories, seeking him endlessly?)

The lifecycle of a monster.

“In my experience, even once you’ve tasted, you can still get it wrong.” It would never sit well, to know how ineffectual his labours have really been. Skin is as easily mended as it is broken, it would seem. Sometimes. 

Sometimes, bones do not obey the base law of might (splitting axis from atlas – should have been goodnight! And yet, those stilled and oxygenless lips and lived another day to smirk at him); sometimes, the soil hemorrhages blood, filling up ruptured, hungry vessels. (He’ll never forget that cracked altar – that beautiful and profaned holy site.)

“So I choose to be wary of my senses. They are like so many disloyal things. Sometimes.”

Deimos. He smiles, “I am, for the most part, a good judge of character.” 

She calls, blood to blood; depravity to depravity. The gift giver turns, says little more as they pass by the mountain’s looming, purple bruise. It holds so little over them now. Pangea is like a rabid dog on her heels – forged from unwilling flesh and home, now, to a multitude of parasitic creatures:

—Deimos, Harmonia and the blessed son, wielding powers she had meant to keep to Herself.

“Welcome. I will find you again, Deimos, I think we could work well together, you and I.” He leaves him on the border of their vast, aching kingdom, turning to her western shoreline and his thoughts, nestled on the cliffs, waiting to hatch.

ooc - that was not good, and nobody deserves this :/ figured just end it there, keep one timeline, I might throw Pollock into his Pangea thread, if I can write anymore.