All strange orders of monsters - Deimos

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

Deimos.

So few capture Pollock’s… appreciation. like he has.
—Sinew, of course, because even as a girl she was endless and offering; Lirren, because she refused to break, and that meant he could continue to bend; Her;
—the god-king (and his pantheon, in which, he knows now, Deimos occupies a pedestal and effigy);
—Bruise.
—Rapt, because he was yielding and docile and devoted;

(So few know his appreciation—it is a smarter thing to ration praise. Sinew and Lirren and Her became acquainted with it quite intimately; Bruise, he thinks, knows it without having to be coddled with it, something he refuses to grace any of his whelps with.)

He had sensed something (as with Harmonia before him) in that man when they first met. How could he not? Though he been beaten and striped by those thieving whores, as they all had, he felt like a storm—sounded like a war path being beaten through the very earth he walked on.

(But of course the bastard is a magician.)

The gift-giver had left, very shortly after having drawn him from the wretched dredges and into a dustbowl hell. He had paced his brine-soaked, craggy, perilous coast. He had examined the hinterlands—the salt flats and the strange, twisted rocks that lay beyond the nerve center. He had mulled things over, felt the weight of that kingdom and thought to cast it off his back.

That would not do.
He likes being king. A lot.
So he came back.

He is glad, then, when the war machine finds him. He had noticed, tangentially, the monster’s activities as he brooded and muttered and thought about fertilization. He doesn’t ask, he’ll ask him why he collects small things when his mind is not so preoccupied.

A bone-dry wind blows, as it does, and it carries the savage scent of stagnation, dust and famine. “I have been thinking,” he does not let his eyes drift from the vast, grey waste below, but his mind (that viper’s nest that beast can ast his claws in with ease), paints it with gaudy, hematic strokes,

(...and where they fall, tough but fair tussock grass grows; a promised land unfurls…)

“this place could use some color.”

POLLOCK
the gift giver