He feels the pain. He recognizes an all too familiar friend with him once more, a dark passenger if you would which manages to bring only hurt in its most literal of forms. He thinks to cry out; not for any of the good that it would do, although sometimes feeling that burn in the windpipe is just distracting enough to dull the fire of blood, but it doesn't matter this time because he can't. He just, he can't.

The more he wants to, the more it hurts, the more time which passes, Öde starts to recognize other things. First, it's not just his screams which aren't working, it's everything (except for the ability to register pain, apparently), and two, this hurt isn't the same hurt he felt before.

That is to say, this hurt is in itself different, because as the wolf already proved, he was looking and ripping at something inside the body - the flesh just got in the way. It's more than that though, because Öde remembers the brown bull on the plains. He remembers the scream he cut loose from his functioning pipes, and the way he shied to the side before charging forward. He remembers that, and those pains, and that overwhelming thing that took over and apparently led him to whatever the fuck this is.

He doesn't remember dying, because the body protects you from shit like that, because it's awful and there's enough shit in life to bother you without it being the memory of your own death (even the fake kind, like in dreams, or with immortality). Still, he can focus on the events before, and now after, and although they're blurry and hazy they come into focus the more he tries to stare into the nothingness that's the pit inside his body where his death is stored. It's like staring so hard at something that it goes fuzzy and everything on the outsides turns sharp like crystals.

All of that stops mattering the second the wolf runs though, because Öde is dragged along and as he goes he also watches himself leave, and that sends chills up his spine like nothing else. They run for forever, but also no time at all - time doesn't even exist here (it doesn't really exist anywhere except in society). The running stops, and the darkness peels away like paint on an old house that's stood up to too many storms and too much sunlight - because whether life is good or bad it wears away. What's beneath that top layer of paint is the wood, and it's a land that is literally woods. The trees are so huge that Öde could walk on their boughs, if he could make it up there.

He would have stared at the magical forest longer, but the motion at his side caught his eye, because somehow amid all of the "what the fuck", he forgot about the wolf that stole him away but also left him behind. The wolf isn't a wolf any more though, it's a horse - no, more than a horse.

"God?" he asks, so cautious and careful because he doesn't want to scare the being away and those this opportunity. He's so intent on the dark horse he doesn't even realize his voice works again, or why it works again - all he sees is a monument of black, brushed with white feathers and a white face. Wait, not a white face, a black face underneath a white (yellowish really) skull. It's like it's swimming in the dark, a rabbit's tail flashing through the brush, but this is the hunter, not the prey.