History

A native to the realm of Edana (a world of ash and shadow), Deimos is an oddity of a creature. His species is unique, settling into immortality within the midst of their prime. Forged for the purpose of firebringing and chaos, his people comrpised a tribe of warbeasts that thrived within the mountains, mating into culturally monogamous pairs and often bearing but one child. Deimos was the product of one such coupling.

But he cannot remember his birthday. Nor much of his childhood, or the sweeping elegance of his dam’s wings, the aging draw of his father’s grey brow.

No, he remembers only war. Only the mountainous reaches he called home, a people contained only by nature's walls.

Perhaps it is because his childhood was so mundane, neither blessed nor catastrophic, that he cannot recall it. Indeed, his days as a colt were often spent in anticipation of growing up, to fill his ordinary slate with tales of adventure. With purpose. He knew what his duty was since the day he'd been born, after all. His destiny, like so many others, was set upon an iron slab. The Dracolisks of Edana; the King's Arsenal. That was the oath his species had taken taken centuries before, an oath to the lineage of the monarchy: to breed and to train as no more than an immortal army.

It’s easy for him to miss those days of relative tranquility now, with so many scars on his skin and so much weight on his back. The blood stuck in the soles of his hooves.

Beneath the thumb of a King who thirsted for power, Deimos was just on the cusp of adulthood when the notices of conscription came. And so his people answered the summons, as was their blood-sworn promise, and joined the ranks of the tyrant’s army. But where some quivered with fear, Deimos was lost in the thrall of excitement, captivated by the tempting offer of escaping the so-called misery of domestic life.

He rose through ranks quickly, mercilessly, and heeded every command with no regard for the blood on his skin. Towns were slaughtered, rebels quelled, yet Deimos rarely batted any eye. Not when the king knew his name, not when his peers watched him with carefully concealed revulsion. Deimos drank it in as envy, and he bloomed with it.

Made and unmade by centuries of battle, it wasn't long before Deimos forgot who he was before. He was impersonable, he was relentless; more beast than man.

But his soul quivered beneath the weight of his crimes, and only when his peers claimed it was enough did he begin to wonder, to question. Only when the friends he had grown up with denied the King did he doubt his allegiance, and the connotation of the word slave began to sound frighteningly familiar.

Edana was in ruins. With so few kingdoms left to conquer,that even his mountain home seemed to shy behind the clouds. He was the General of an oppressive despot, the Commander of death. When rebellion and protest ensnared his tribe, Deimos snapped, recoiling with the sharpness of a rubber band. He had been stripped of his morality, of his sense of self, but the courage of his fellows drove him onward. He did not dare claim to lead his rebelling friends. No, he did not trust himself enough to guide them onto battlements against a King he had served unconditionally.

He was a follower, and he had spent his life thinking otherwise.

But Deimos fought. Oh, how he fought, until he was covered in the blood of Dracolisks and Equines alike. But the King did not stand a chance against the monsters of his own making, his war machines, and it was not long before he was the one on his knees.

It is within that chaos that the stag is often lost, his body present, but his molten gaze lost in the centuries of old. For nearly 200 years he fought, bled, killed; and he hadn't the slightest idea of what to do, who to be, in the wake of that.

And he might have wandered, aimless, were it not for the kindness of an aging village woman within Edana's wilds. The woman was a self-proclaimed seer, and assured Deimos she saw goodness in his free heart. And so, after falling helplessly in love with the legends of her culture, he received a piercing from the woman. A simple nose ring, intended to represent his life a liberated man.

That happiness was fleeting, and lost not long after the village's campfire faded from his line of view. Sometimes, he wishes he'd stayed.

But, like so many of his tribefolk, Deimos became one with Edana's woods. A lawless beast, governed only by survival, by nature. He might have fallen to the primitive roaring in his heart were it not for the fire within him, imploring him to open his eyes to the wildness that'd blinded him. The flames snarled for his attention, guttering and clawing, until he was able to speak his name. Until he was able to look upon cities as a man, rather than as a predatory creature.

But Edana was no more to him. His people were scattered, worse off than they'd been as instruments of war, and he hadn't the slightest idea where to turn next.

And so, Deimos looked towards the heaven and flew beside the sun. An ashen streak across the blue skies, until he crashed, bloody and unconscious, upon the shores of a new land.