Níðhöggr

@lordrylo

“Should have opened the pit for you. You’re nothing but..but Tartarus.”  Nico spat, fighting the lad’s hold as more provoking blood curdling words unleashed from his asshole mouth. His voice skimmed over the boy’s head like a bullet. This guy is just nasty, an archetypal evil palavering that Nico couldn’t take but to give him a punch in the face. Yes, he tried. Fury ignites within the younger boy as his composure betrayed him upon taking the derision. There’s no analogy going on and not even a simple dark correspondence might have engaged between the two; Nico thought that this is more of a nonsense electrical discharge which could hardly last at some point.  “Shut up! Your death won’t even be preferable for Hades.” He retorted exchanging glares.

 As soon as the older boy probed in complete relish, Nico insisted to muster his powers, though something impeded him to release them. Still the ground at his feet cracked a little as grass died and withered away like he was a poison. However, Nico’s skeletons wouldn’t showed up yet, he could hardly wait for them and for the love of death before he could take advances, the guy grabbed him and tossed him into the waters. The son of Hades yelped following a little splash. In hindsight, it was blatantly obvious that the guy was going to attack further, yet it was too late for some defense.

The cold swaddled thoroughly on Nico’s body, he gagged at the influx of water into his lungs and he hadn’t been able to hold his breath long enough from the greedy current below. A surge of panic overtook the boy every time he felt drowning. He used to give remarks against the water just to piss the son of Poseidon, but beyond that, the ghost king solely avoided it since water can truly weak his system. Fortunately, he fell by more than 5 feet in depth, so good thing he didn’t crack a bone down the river floor.

Nico cringed, he began to feel some pain going through his chest at the very thought he would meet his father because of this foolish river dragging him down and that demonic asshole guy he stumbled onto. No joke, he was helplessly drowning, but apparently Nico has tremendous strength of willpower, since he was able to survive in Tartarus on his own, he shouldn’t just die in the unknown, especially not with water. He tried to swim up.

This time it wasn’t too long before his head broke the water and his mouth gasped for air; his hands reached for the boulders, then he struggled climbing on them. Nico turned even paler as his lungs started to burn as he kept moaning in his silence. His eyes darted around until the demon guy came to his view again, still towering the stupid bloody creek. Nico emerged unscathed remaining in silent, though his face was twisted in anger and pain.

“I hate you.” He gritted his teeth trying not to cough.

Beside Nico, a rock started to crack further along the river floor through where the guy was standing at. He wouldn’t notice until a skeleton hand emerged from the earth and pulled his foot that would topple him before the ground underneath him spilt in half. It splits enough to eat his body in half. Nico smirked seeing the asshole now stuck in his dirt trap. Despite the exhaustion, he crawled over to him. Nico faced him and overwhelmed lifting his Stygian iron to point it directly at the guy’s face as the tip of his sword practically touching his forehead. “I .. Don’t… play with demons..” Nico said weakly.

“But you seemed to want to play with… death… I have no problem with that.” He tugged a grin panting.

“I’m Nico…Di Angelo. The Ghost King of the Underworld.” Nico playfully coos, twisting his sword and cut the skin to draw an “x” on the cheek.

Threatening toddlers were something the demons could easily tame. The difference in their size was considerable, and Rylo let the boy sputter about calling him something that he hardly even recognized. Though he was unaware of the origin, they were not. The demons didn’t feel pity on the words spat at them because the child held nothing above their power. He was an Upperworld teenager, and nothing more.

The piteous argument drawled on to the point where the male felt only chagrin for his encounter with the child. Their meek, deranged ordeal was nothing to guffaw about, primarily because it led to nowhere. The end of the argument was the boy screeching about Hades, and yet all Rylo could exchange with him was a mild chuckle. Hades was not real, this ill mannered child must have been improperly informed. Thus making it seem that he knew of Rylo’s previous home—the Underworld.

Perhaps the child had not seen his move coming, but since they were both in the waters—together—Rylo left his attention to remain on the drenched delusion that bobbed up and down against the waves. The boy held little to no value to him, and their encounter in general made him feel slightly inferior. It had nothing to do with the fact that he felt challenged by the boy’s nature or aura, but rather that the child was convinced he was more powerful than Rylo was. It did not, however, strike him as a sworn enemy, he knew the boy stood no chance against him—the vessel—yet he stood even less of a chance against the demons that would likely take over if Rylo were to falter in his abilities to dominate.

The struggling boy had made his way back to the land, but he appeared more simply as a drowning rat than someone with any sense of superiority. The demon knew this boy’s dysfunction wasn’t something he could help, but he held no emotions for what he’d done even while he was chastised with an:

I hate you.

The words alone did nothing to the stone that rested in the cavity between his two lungs, as it beat upon impact of each word. They were useless, to him, and thus the entirely of their encounter had become as such just as well. Rylo crossed his arms, with his dark eyes directly displaced to the dripping rat across the way. A nearly unseeable shrug went through his shoulders, and yet words were not jumping into his throat. He felt no need to do anything about the strong distaste that the boy had, simply because there was nothing that would dilute it, and he had no intentions of doing so.

However, the power that this child had was some sort of a dark, black magic. Rylo didn’t believe much in witches and sorcery, but when the ground beneath him morphed and held him in place, he decided to rethink his initial beliefs.

Rose heard Rylo growl her name and looked up. Rylo hardly looked like Rylo. Dried blood caked his body, some of it washed away by the seawater, and the whites of his eyes were still a bright red. He stood above her and moved the dead body away. Playing with the blade, he splattered a bit of blood and other fluids right onto her. Rose instinctively closed her eyes as the droplets hit her face, and she wiped it away with her right hand. Only when she opened her eyes did she notice that Rylo had tossed her only blanket overboard.

Immediately, she shot up to watch it float down to the waves below. The blanket had taken quite some time to hit the ocean’s surface, and when it did, it simply floated there. Rose had half the mind to get into one of the small boats to retrieve it.

“What the hell,” she muttered to herself, only to hear Rylo’s firm instruction not to interrupt.

Rose turned to see Rylo stabbing the dead body straight in the heart. She couldn’t understand why Rylo did what he did. What was the point of stabbing him if he was already did? Furthermore, why did the cabin boy have to die, and why didn’t Rose stop it before it was too late? The mere gesture of covering him with a blanket seemed pointless. Rylo could just dispose of the blanket and further defile his body. Rose couldn’t protect him when he was alive, and she can’t protect him while he’s dead.

Rylo’s words burned her in a way she couldn’t explain. Even when he intended to berate and intimidate her, he admitted that he wouldn’t touch her. The fact that he wouldn’t touch her was well known among the crew, no matter how much Rylo wished otherwise. The woulds because I won’t touch you reminded Rose why the rest of the crew had wanted her back after she had been gone for a week or so. Whenever Rose was on board, fewer people seemed to die, according to the crew. They weren’t sure what kind of power Rose held over Rylo, or why they were connected, but they figured Rose was some sort of key to fewer of Rylo’s murder sprees. Rose had come back not for herself or for Rylo, but for others. The thought of preventing death was the only thing on her mind as of late.

And she failed.

“I don’t have power over anyone, Rylo!” Rose spat at him, furious more at herself than at him. “I didn’t tell them to stay below the deck! They chose to! You want to know why? You want to know why they didn’t stay on deck?”

Rose pointed to the murdered cabin boy. “This is why! This is why they don’t wait on deck! This cabin boy did what he was told to do – mop the deck – and you killed him! You killed him! He didn’t do anything wrong and you killed him!”

She was already getting teary-eyed mid-speech. Already, she could imagine Rylo yelling at her for daring to let her voice get shaky. She couldn’t stand to look at the dagger lodged between the boy’s ribs. She couldn’t stand the memory of watching Rylo murder the boy. She couldn’t stand the thought of this man, the man who wouldn’t touch her, the man who had given her his sword, the man who had seen her as light and innocence that dulled his lust for blood and power, killing innocent people and her being unable to do anything about it. As far as the crew’s rumors go, Rose had a strange influence over Rylo.

They were relying on her with their lives.

Rose yanked the dagger out of the cabin boy’s corpse and threw it into the ocean. Unlike the blanket, the dagger would sink. Rylo would have no way of retrieving it. She knew that such an act would probably piss him off, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care how angry he was at her so long as his attention was off the rest of the crew. She just hoped he didn’t have the bright idea to go below the deck.

Rose couldn’t stop her tears. She couldn’t assuage the guilt, not even with a simple gesture of mourning. She couldn’t do something that Rylo could undo. She decided she would keep fighting for her right to mourn an innocent life. She just hoped the crew could take care of itself now that Rylo had returned from what Rose assumed was a massacre.

She placed her hands under the boy’s armpits and lifted him up. She couldn’t just cover him with a blanket, or throw him off the deck. She decided she would take him ashore to give him some sort of proper burial. Still weeping, she struggled to drag the boy to the other side of the deck, where one of the spare boats was waiting.

He would never admit how often he fought with the creatures of the Underworld, who, at times, could do nothing more than tell him ideas on how to finish Rose off. Never had he given in to them, but there were moments he would wake up in the black of night, staring at the cabin door in hopes that she would appear and he would no longer have her around him. The problems that her presence presented were plentiful, and at best, they made him fight against the one power consuming him that was not partial on losing. Furthermore, just because Death was on a losing streak while it came to Rose’s demise, there was something that protected her from Rylo finishing the deed. His humanity.

Waiting for the spews of absurdities to spilled from the girl’s lips felt like a millennium. Letting her rant was the only option presented because she would likely interrupt if he tried to walk over her words. “Yes, I murdered him. It was inevitable. What do you plan to do about it?” disdain crept into his own words as he spoke, leaving no room for an argument. If she planned to do something, she should’ve done it earlier when he was on his rampage. There was no other option, the pitiful boy was already stone cold on the deck. “Am I required to feel some sort of remorse, because regardless of what actions I falsely take, it’s not going to seep into my soul, lass.” Rylo paused and stared Rose dead in her dark eyes, “The boy’s murdered. Death will always find a way.”

Exhaustion had made its grand entrance into his wavering spirit and when Rose moved to extract his dagger, he watched blasély with tired eyes. Unexpectedly, she launched the weapon into crashing waves that licked the sides of the ship. The ebony within his chest skipped a beat, forcing him to swallow the lump that had lured its way into his throat. Rylo had not expected her to be so intrepid, and the nearly silent splash of the weapon that killed Black Bear hitting the water made the fire within him begin to surge.

Wishing that hate was an option, it seemed petty. It wasn’t enough to surmount to the fury that began to race through his blackened veins. Rylo wanted to remind himself that she was only human and thus would react differently than he would, but he demons remained livid, scratching up through his limbs to be the first to take a blow at the girl that he wouldn’t have previously harmed. Making her aware that she’d made a dangerous decision was redundant. Rose must’ve known she was crossing a serious line by playing with a fire that would never burn out.

Death was anything but pleased. His faithful servant had achieved nirvana with the Underworld by taking the life of a known man. The Chief’s death would go down in history, especially amongst the people of Severland.

Regardless of the streaming fury that he could not stop exuding, Rylo did not openly react to her deed. Rose had certain pushed a trigger that was anything but wise, but that did not guarantee her death. However, he did have every intention of letting her know the wrong that she’d done.

It was as if the sole emotion Rose had was to resort to crying. The male could not stand her indecency and thus decided to advert his eyes because he wanted to pretend that she wouldn’t cry over a child she hardly knew. It didn’t make him uncomfortable, it made him furious. Why would she emit emotions for a boy that perhaps she had spoken to once on the ship? He was a useless individual, and he meant nothing to the rest of the crew. He may have been doing his job, Rose was correct in that, but Levi had been in the wrong place at the right time, and Rylo had decided to strike.

Inadvertently, the male’s dark eyes followed the girl’s movements as she went to the young boy and tried to pick up his deadweight body. An irritable cough stuck in Rylo’s throat, but he didn’t allow it to be released. She spoke to the boy, coddling him and her pathetic attempts to get him to a boat were anything but valiant.

Approaching behind her, the male put his hand on her shoulder, his eyes darker than ever while Death seeped into the small crevices that he still controlled. “He is where he belongs. With the rest of the filthy mongrels. I was waiting for him for quite some time, just as I wait for you.” Rylo coughed without giving permission to his body. The darkness in his eyes bled further than ever, filling up the whites and his irises.

Swallowing words that the Devil wanted to tell her was the last bit of humanity that fought against the darkness of the Underworld. Rylo pleaded that she wouldn’t know the secret he’d taken so many precautions to keep from her. Rose did not need to know, and when she knew, he’d have no choice but to kill her.

I’ll start…

i am