glower

Malos emerges without parallel, without peer. Practically, he appears without context - for as much as that would even do for anyone concerned.

His arrival is silent, if not humble. His posture is as small as it ever will be. He never shrinks. He never stumbles.

What is this? This miracle. This scourge. This soldier, wild army, that defects and defers to no understandable or obscured, obfuscated human programming. What is this robotic, unapproachable, razor-blunt gleam-edge beast?

(If there had been divinity, in advance of the Aegises, it was cloaked in Indoline white and blue sterility, and bathed in a blithe green healing ether. Chanted. Enacted. Observed. It did not look, sound, feel, breathe like Malos's brusque alien mind.)

Kindness is hardly a factor. He really isn't given much of a model. Not a lick of training time, for that matter. Just wind it up and let it go.

And he goes - with Amalthus, without. With preamble, warning; without. What is terrifying and unpredictable to Alrest is of a perfectly consistent internal logic to Malos. That's not to say that it's satisfying, however.

Must be divine inspiration, then. There are no better rules to follow, it seems.

Those that come close enough to gaze - to perceive - remark that the Aegis is arrogant, cocky, even a bit charming. Somewhat devilish, except that the Aegis does not deceive with misdeeds or lure with lust. There is no pretense to his actions. He is as he says: performing a cleansing, told to be righteous. And he knows everything.

Everything but why.

It appears of no objective to Malos to admonish the humans: do not misread the Aegis's smile. But he smiles nonetheless.

This face which was given to him, which he so deftly articulates, which he made for himself...

And if the humans had known that the Aegises reigned above, ready to descend and pass judgement, would they revel in this sight? Would there be those that had been waiting?

They had not known. Some reject it now. Some squint and process this disturbing blight. None read him well, in his glory.

If no one on Alrest understands Malos, then he must be from an entirely separate and higher world order beyond their mortal lens. Mustn't he?

But Malos can't be Jesus, Savior and Messiah, the Son of God, because what is it those foregoing angels always say?

Be Not Afraid.

And Malos is too goddamn scared.

Too angry. Too invested. Too precarious, ready and unwilling to topple.

At least, on the inside, he is. That tumult locks to stone, once he falls, dies and is reborn. The tomb is not empty, will not dissipate; Malos carries it with him, an outsize burden, as a mask affectedly stable until the bitter end of his infinite time.

On the inside. The Aegis's implacable, inexplicable reverse-folded mind is constructed of intricacies and eyes, failsafes and executables. To express from data that complex a directive that simple... Even the bleakest, blackest materials, retardant of flame and pity alike, seem fragile when set whirling at such a scale.

On the inside. On the outside, he's actually pretty damn foreboding. Almost scarily well put-together.

Oh, beautifully and terribly made.

He reassures nobody, with his disquieting, off-putting, loudly harbingering presence. What messenger, what intermediary, what sentinel - and what god saw fit to expel this unigrim greaper into communion with the living?

Bear your wings, angel. Be not afraid. Serve your purpose. Bear your wings.

Malos's unreal composure is his armor. Beyond calm to the crazed, he presents actively impregnable. What fear could there possibly be of strike from impurity?

He is absorbing light. He is discarding the profane physical plane.

And then, he loads up into Siren like a piece of ammunition that never would lend itself to transformation into shrapnel. Never would deign to be dirtied like that. This precedes the fall: Malos's delusion, that his body is not the instrument. Perfect composition, up to be mounted upon the cross. Indeed, the crucifix; laid picaresque in his time of dying. Infinite arms, clamping down to the pins of the universe.

Really, can you imagine Malos bleeding, falling to pieces? Can you imagine the carbon fiber of the creator shredding into cyber sinew at the bite of a sinner's fang?

Of course you couldn't. Malos's fangs have long been bared first.

And yet, Malos is destined to be destroyed. He has none of the humility and all of the too-perfect teeth being grit.