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━
EIKEROS ADAMAS
scorpio / 29 / aniketos / ferrokinesis / bitch idk
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I. . . . . ..
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II. . . . . .
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III. . . . .
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☐ │technology, working, chocolate
☐ │ fresh fruit, honey, hot drinks
☐ │ reading: philosophers, nonfiction
☐ │ gambling, melodic music, boardgames
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☐ │ alcohol, clever people, flowers
☐ │ blue skies, social events, fire
☐ │ hard candy, smiling, losing
☐ │ paperwork, porcelain, travelling
a sinner is just a saint with too much money in his pocket
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"isn’t this how a hand
guides a rope?
towards salvation or
strangulation."
moral alignment: lawful evil
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These days, Keros spends half his time lounging on down feather spreads, dipping fruits into honey, welcoming bodies into his bed; the other half he spends much like he spent his early life—working away in the darkness. He considers it a form of paying his dues, an homage perhaps, a remembrance of the person he was. A reminder of how far he's come. How much he stands to lose. But he won't lose. He never loses anything. And he's proud of it too, a vainness teetering on hubris, but he's spent too long at the crest of the mountain to reign himself in—too much power drives a man mad, they say, but Keros has always been furious.
Since the first swing of the pickaxe, in fact, since the reverberations of the metal striking rock rung his hands ragged, bloody and blistered, and the clamor of it began to sound like music. Canaries in the mines: a kinship that rose in the dark, damp caverns in all their rising voices singing old lullabies. It was the melodies that filled his stomach when it growled with hunger at night, as it must have been for all the rest. He didn't need comfort. He just needed a place to lay his head at night, and the warmth of the family he'd come back to. It dwindled with each ember snuffed out.
When the famine grew more severe, so did the riots. While the king and his ilk drank whiskey and port, workers dropped dead from exhaustion, hunger, still clutching their hammers tight. Keros watched with impassive eyes. He'd stopped singing after his mother came down with fever and her body had burned her away from the inside out. Too much warmth. And here he was freezing.
But he couldn't afford to make any waves, not when his stomach still ached and he could hear his brother singing Mother's song a little ways down the tunnel. So he kept his head down and chipped away at the rock, and swung and swung and swung until the chime of the metal drowned out the music. Only when he stopped swinging there wasn't any music to hear anymore. The next day he went back to work, found kinship in the hollow eyes of the workers beside him, in the silence of the ringing tinnitus. Outside, another small scale riot was crushed under the boot of the aristocracy.
The pickaxe slipped from Keros' hands. He was all hollow except for fire. He wasn't sure what he'd do, except that it wasn't going to be this any longer. He smuggled home a large chunk of stone. It took five days for the poison to distill, a rigorous process his father had taught him once, a physician, back from when there'd been a need for those. He whispered into the crevices of the mines, whistled a tune, stoked dying embers in the guts of men with his words. When the day came, the mine was empty. The largest riot there'd ever been, coaxed into being by the vibrant words of a starving young man who knew how to coat his tongue in honey, even if he'd never known the taste of it.
These days, of course, he can't get enough of it. Why not indulge if you have it, right? He thinks his speeches come out more fluid when he takes a teaspoon of honey before taking the stage. It's something of a jinx of his, a little ritual to quell the fear, appease the paranoia, he'll admit. But it hasn't failed him yet. The cheers of the crowd are deafening, so many voices raised in exaltation. And the ones that aren't, well, they still know what to sing along to.
Sneaking into the palace was easy when there were only bare bones of the guard detail remaining. Poisoning the king's wine and concealing himself until the final moments even simpler. He'd dangled the cure in front of the desperate man's eyes in exchange for power—all the power. And somehow, it worked. (Keros did not pass along the antidote).
He finds this practice useful even still. The desperation of death; the desperation of hunger, of fear, of exhaustion. He makes use of it all. He is both the carrion and the savior, knows what to offer and at what price to offer it, and knows at precisely what moment to pull it away again. His smile is sharp, but his teeth are sharper.
When they found him, it was too late. But they didn't know that. And he wasn't about to tell them. They shoved him forward before the crowd, ran down the list of his crimes, and carted him off to appease Epiphanôn, oblivious to the snaking grin he couldn't conceal. (He'd considered killing them there, of course, but that wouldn't make much a statement. And if there's one thing he knows how to do, it's craft the perfect statement.)
He'd expected a gamble for life, a test of the new abilities—he reached out and felt for the mass of the rolling fire, grabbed ahold of the iron within as the heat pressed on him. And he collapsed. He clutched at his body where the crystal made its mark, tearing at his skin where pain seared through the flesh. He watched hopelessly as the magma rolled towards him indifferently. But then there was a warmth—gentle. Soothing. The fire parted at his body, and the pain faded to a dull throbbing, then finally, subsided into nothing. He stood, pulled the iron from the ground, and returned, triumphant. There was no denying the divine rights of power, even if there was nothing divine about it.
The blood tasted tender in his mouth when the pushed the fattened pigs before the crowds and raised the heads up high.
Life is much less bloody, now. At least, in the wide open it is. Keros does what he has to do behind closed doors. And he needn't let the people worry—or doubt. No, all they need to know is that Keros is in control. And he is, he is, he will be.
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I. . . . . .
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II. . . . .
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III.
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x
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