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((Triple Saturday -- Page 1 of 3))
It was useless to argue with Feromas, Damian knew. The only thing to do was wait, it seemed.

So he did. He might’ve liked to bust his way out of here, but he had learned early on that the bars and walls of his cell were far too strong for him to break through. Feromas could squeeze through the bars, of course, but the greater prison beyond those bars was filled with guards who had already demonstrated their joy in killing.

Still, it might’ve been possible for Feromas to leave Damian alone and escape on his own--not advisable, perhaps, but possible.

And yet the reaper didn’t.

Damian supposed Feromas deserved some credit for that. Maybe the reaper’s claim of being Damian’s great grandfather was actually true. Damian’s parents had never told him his great grandfather’s name, so he’d been rather doubtful about the whole thing ever since Feromas told it to him all those years ago. Damian had never actually voiced that doubt, simply because of how much power the reaper had over him, but now the last of his doubts were finally abating. It would have a been a rather strange thing to lie about, he figured.

And of course, Feromas knew things. About Damian’s father and grandfather. The reaper claimed to have been following Damian’s father throughout the Machas War--the war of which Trintol had been a casualty. Feromas said that he had wanted to revive Damian’s father as his servant instead, but when news arrived of the enemy advancing toward Trintol, the reaper decided to rush back there in order to check up on the rest of the Lofar family. Overra and Nerovoy had agreed to help.

But they arrived too late, apparently. There was a strict time limit on when a soul could be resurrected, the reaper said. So his mother and grandmother were gone.

Naturally, after being told all these things, the first thing that Damian had wanted to do was go find his father. And Feromas and the others had obliged. It had taken nearly a year, but they found him.

Dead and buried. The man had been given a respectable tombstone with the words “Our Heroic Brother-In-Arms” carved into it.

Damian had cried that night, and for once, he hadn’t cared that the other boys saw. That year of searching had been driven entirely by hope, and yet that was how it ended?

It was simply too cruel. Life. This world. All of it. So little of it was fair or good.

Damian had been utterly numb by the time he parted ways with Parson and Germal. This plan that the reapers had... to use their connections in order to infiltrate the Vanguard and Abolish... to play a very long and dangerous game...

Damian couldn’t have cared less about it. And even now, his feelings on the matter hadn’t changed much. But they had changed on another matter.