Red eyes flick open in the dark.
Lungs gasp, choking on dust and cold.

Öde raises from the confines of his earthly tomb, crawling and pawing his way back to the top soil after a year of being furnished by worms and decay. He has spent the seasons like Prometheus, trapped in an eternal cycle of dying and reviving. The difference being that the Greek boy was serving penitence underneath the watchful gaze of his god Zeus, where as Öde had merely been a servant of misfortune and was buried too low for even gods to see - or if they did they thought him only the crust of sleep and flicked him away carelessly.

Not today.

Standing in the depths of a pit, hide so matted with mud and blood and animal piss it has become a part of him, legs quivering so violently they could start their own percussion band, but none of it matters because he is standing. There's a tilt of pride to the way he holds his head, or perhaps it's just frozen at that particular angle. His hair and flesh are matted in a horrific manner best described as gristle. It's the residue from the puncture he sustained in the back of his skull, the simple method of felling an immortal, executed by none other than the bitch Nature herself.

Öde had stumbled, rolled, and finally fallen at the bottom of this pit where a wooden spire waited like a coiled snake, until it struck and then stuck in the back of his brain. There, entwined like quarreling lovers, Öde and the stick had remained for a year. Similar to a light flickering on its last wattage, so Öde's consciousness fluttered around his corpse, torn between the inability to die, and equally the incapacity to live with a stick lodged up his cranium's anus. Only when time and weather (and probably some termites) wore the wood away into splinters, only then was the perpetual stabbing finally able to draw to an end - Öde finally understands the impatience of mares that have to endure the same. He vows never to prolong a climax lest he withdraw like the wood, wet and sloppy with blood and regret.

So he stands, shaking on legs that haven't held him in ages, but he demands they be strong now because fuck if he's going to lay down any time soon. Instead Öde hurls himself against the muddy slope, grimacing and grunting as he buries his tired limbs into the supple meat of the earth. His joints complain but he cries out louder than them with frustration and impatience. He reaches desperately for nearby vines to grab onto, and inches with every bit of body he has, at times crawling on the tip of his nose, breath held against the sludge that pervades his flared nostrils as he does so.

He gets out eventually, more brown than black, and so cold and exhausted he shivers uncontrollably. He's hungry,a nd maybe a little delirious, but fuck it he's alive and that feels good. The hurt and the cold and the hunger only serve to remind him of that, and so as pathetic and shit-sorry as he looks wandering around the Labyrinth, he smiles.