He returned some time in the night.
He slipped into the hot springs to wash away the year of turmoil he'd reveled in, and then, shivering from the absence of heat, he'd pulled his wolf cloak over his back and set about to sleep. He awoke with the rain and the keening.

There's a noticeable weight when his head lifts and the world gradually bleeds into view between sleep-dusted lashes. It's a presence that presses down on him, contained within each droplet that burrows into his pelt, resonating with each cry that carries across the tundra. Öde wonders at it, but is hesitant because for all the wonder there is also an echo of familiarity. Öde is not familiar with many things, and from that list even fewer are good.

He rises on stiff legs and bows against the cold before setting off towards the dark gathering of shapes on the horizon. The snow crunches underfoot and the noise is deafening among the strained silence that creeps around him, shuffling to and fro like mice trying not to be noticed. Yet he notices it, this abnormal, stifling silence. It's that presence again, that weight of something poignant. Öde's teeth clench with an uncertain despair at it. He presses on.

The dark masses gradually smooth into the shapes of horses. Some he recognizes, others less so. His ears twist to catch the exchange of words, murmured gently, and somewhere a background noise of stifled sobbing. His ears flick back, nostrils flaring. He knows what this is now, why it is familiar, why it is so heavy on them.

Death.

He hesitates in the back for a while before he finds the nerve to creep closer and finally see. He already guessed who it was based on the stories passed. To know and to see are entirely different however. So as Öde's red gaze washed across the still and hardening corpse of Deimos, he couldn't help the strangled breath that left his throat. The Reaper had finally met his mortal scythe. Now he would await them all in the next life, guiding them there with the curvature of his sickle that was often mistaken for his crown.

Öde exhaled, feeling weary and utterly childish. Deimos had been a distant king to him, but something admirable and timeless, as grand and untouchable as the glacier mountains they nestled within. His passing was more than a horse's death - it was the end of an era, and the finality of us all, for if a marble monolith like him could fall, then so could we all.