I remember this place. It's not the first memory to flicker back to life behind my eyes, but neither is it the strongest. I'm not even sure if they will get better, or come back, or anything. I just know sometimes I feel like I walk into them, like a dream, and it stirs some part of my subconscious. It's intriguing, to say the least, but it's definitely little more than that. I'm not overly worried if I forget, because I remember enough to function, and to pray.

His teachings remains burned into my base of knowledge, rooted there, wraith or not. She had done a fine job of that, my Mother, one of the few things she had been good at. I wonder actually, as I walk through these fields that once bent with wheat and grass (now snow collects at my sides), if he was responsible for the wraiths? Mother said he'd been buried in darkness when the land fell to it, and with his familiarity and his strength, it made sense to me that he could learn to control the darkness. Like a little gift wrapped up for me he'd sent it here, giving me power greater than I had ever yet tasted.

Or so it went for a year until that bitch ripped it away.

I flick my tail, annoyed at the thought of the bay mare and her tune, annoyed at my mortality once more. To make matters worse I had forgotten how to be anything other than a god. My words were short, simple, sometimes slurred with dis-use. My mannerisms, ever influenced by my mother and her oddity, were only that much stranger after a year suckling on souls in the bosom of shadow - a year of my as yet short lifespan, longer than anything else I had know. It made me feel, desolate. Like I was walking around this strange world where nothing made any sense any more and I was trying to fit in but damnit how can you when you can't feast on souls any more? Grass is so bland.

Murder might be just the thing that would help Öde rediscover his interest in this plane of fleshy existence, at least until he could figure out how to thrust himself back into the divine kingdoms. So imagine his surprise when a voice, another flicker of a memory reviving, spun over the smothered plains. The black boy paused, head tilting, horn cutting the sky as he listened.

Awkwardly turning, his limbs like stiff chunks of wood, pulling through the packed ice with newfound direction. He had come here hoping to find his mother, for no reason other than she was something to remember, but to encounter Reginald was far better. Brother of ambition, is it stronger than blood ties?

"Why do you?" Öde asked, raspy and slow as he drew into view behind the girl. He dismissed her after a cursory glance, his true attention drifting to the familiar monolith of stone. A crooked smile flashed under a dark muzzle. "Clouds," he began breathy, "kneeled." A tittering laugh broke from his chest then, unwinding like a demented toy until all his juice, all his air, was extinguished. Even then his eyes, puddles of blood, shone with mirth. More than clouds had kneeled to him.

Was this killer, this black hair, a key back to his godhood? He was intent to find out.