I have been hiding. I have been sleeping. I have been... broken.

Ever since my boy was lost by my own hooves, his anger a bright star that burst in on itself, blinding me... I haven't been able to live. I haven't been able to die either though. I walk the thin line of both, moving, breathing, being, but only barely. Every time I move, my curtain of black flesh rolls over noticeable bones. Each time I breathe, it rasps. I would eat, but no matter how sweet the grass it falls like ashes upon my tongue, too revolting to consume.

Mostly I just stand with the trees, thinking maybe if I stood there long enough, that I might become one. No luck though, my friends run a strict club in which I have never been given an invitation. Truthfully they've rather shunned me; everything has, including me. I don't deserve to live, but I don't think I know how to die either.

Why not though? Why can't I just go?

As isolated as I've made myself the news of the world travels slowly to my ears. Ears which hardly even hear any more any way, but they heard one thing. They heard murder. They heard death. They heard about him. At least, I think it's him, because he's just a small child that few pay any mind too. Yet the more I heard, the more I listened. I thought I had already lost all my hope, but it sparked fresh, like embers that burned quietly among themselves until a strong enough wind carrier them to tinder. I was afraid to feel this strongly again. I was terrified if it was true, because then it meant he was DEAD. For so long I preferred to just think of him as lost. It made it easier. It helped me... hold on, I guess.

Now though?
Now I'm going mad with the possibility that he has been found, but that he is still l o s t.

Rabid with the uncertainty of it all I broke through the haze of my self destruction, reaching like a shadow through the maze of trees and horses that milled around. I bounced between them all, desperately begging for what they knew, but my tongue felt fat when I used it, throwing spit rather than words more often than not. It had seemed to shrivel up in my isolation, forgetting the language which was so important to function in a society.

I learned enough to lead me to the caves though. Faster than a rabbit running from it's teeth shaped death I scrambled to the tunnels of doom, remembering them all too well for their sanctuary during my most troubled of times. I had hid here, in this fucking fox hole, hiding from my son. My son!

"My son."
The words choked out of my rasping throat, each breath an audible sound as my lungs struggled with the aftereffects of my run.

There he lay, as cold as stone and as rotted as a termite riddled tree. A strange sound warbled in my chest; a prelude of sorrow which stabbed me efficiently. I crumpled like an old cobweb next to him, shaking, moaning, hurting. I flung my head against the ravaged bundle of meat, pulling his corpse into me like death's pillow.

Now there was truly nothing left for me.
I closed my eyes, willing myself to die here, to fall into a dreamless sleep on the bed of my dead child - no finer sleeping arrangement would suit me and my weakness.

So I tried. I tried to sleep, I tried to die. I tried for what seemed like forever, though time was hard to tell down here in the dark and crystal-flecked light. At some point though I realized it wasn't going to work. I was still alive, and he wasn't.

Distraught at this injustice, this unfairness, I became hysterical. Like a wild windstorm I rose back onto my feet, whirling against the caves with various kicks and screeches swaddled in dark hair. "MY BOY!" I keened, the sound shuddering through the caves with such force I trembled. Only in that moment of utter exhaustion, where I had fallen to the very bottom of my being, did a flicker of something stir.

I clutched myself, butt tucked against my ribs, neck curled against my breast. An orange eye slid over to the fallen prince, glossy with damaged sanity, but bright with purpose. "They never last," she muttered to no one, not even herself. A wet tongue licked dry lips, nervous, but excited. "They never last because I stop. I stop before they take it all. Not this time, not this time. My boy...my boy..."

Madly I set myself to the task of resurrection. It was nothing new, though like the rest of me it hadn't been used in a long time. Part of me feared my lack of energy to complete the task, but most of me didn't bother to think that much about it. I only knew I had to, I had to try, I had to succeed.

I am still alive because he is not, but I can make that change.

Little by little my magic poured over the aged corpse of the colt. I pulled him up on his feet, and with each exhale, each heart beat, each blink, I renewed him. His flesh stitched itself back together, spatter pulled from the walls and the dirt where it had begun to decompose. His eyes rolled dead inside his skull, as all my reconstructed skeletons always had, but I kept working. I was not content just to have his bones dance. I was not satisfied with merely mending muscles. I would not rest with only his heart pumping, his lungs pulling, his eyes twitching.

I wanted all of him back, alive.

I stumbled, staggered, and finally fell, but he stood. He stood, blood dripping from his mouth and his nose as the organ in his chest thumped back into an irregular beat before settling into rhythm. He snorted, froth and pus spraying from his nares, dribbling out his eyes, but with each sneeze it cleared and he breathed fresh.

I smiled, seeing him for the last time as my vision blurred. I felt, tired, like I was floating on the ground. I didn't stop though, I kept pouring myself out, even when it became hard to bring air in, even when I couldn't sense anything. I gripped my magic and thrust it at him, finishing with one single gasp as my body perished and his revived, the light flickering back on in his eyes.

He was empty, but I filled him back up.
I lived for something, just in time to die.

My son.

Worn out places, worn out faces
No expression, no expression
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
O C T O B E R :

Öde awoke with a gasp which quivered through his entire body. He was standing, but reeled to the side as if struck across the face. The wall of the caves took his small weight easily, head coddled by the gnarled trunk of a tree that had similarly just woken. The blood from his mouth smeared against it, but was lost in the red glow that emanated from its depths.

"No," he stammered, the word choppy as it crawled from his hoarse throat. It wasn't something he even meant to say, rather i just sort of came out, as if it had been dwelling inside of him; the last thing he uttering when he died. Fuck, he was so thirsty. Dazed, he glanced around, his crowned head throbbing with a dull ache that seemed to buzz inside all of him. He pinched his eyes shut, trying to shake the sensation out of his head, but to no avail - it only seemed to prod the pain, like a bee hive, its pain resonating through him.

Swimming through this confusion was like trying to bathe in mud. The harder he tried to focus on what happened, what was still happening, the more lost he was. All he could recall was darkness. It was something so absolutely drenched in a void, no light could hope to reach it, and it hurt to look at.

Öde blinked again, a quick flash of crimson under onyx lashed. He made to move, his legs wobbling beneath him as he stepped. It felt like being born all over again...

Abruptly his foot caught on something and he stumbled. On a better day he would have caught himself, probably even noticed the thing he tripped on, but today he went down in a tangle of legs and agony. "Wha-?" he started to ask, meek and lost. That wasn't entirely right though, was it? He should have been asking who.

Nestled on the fresh corpse of October, Öde had turned and now looked down at her lifeless face. He froze, recognition not instant, but the idea of what he was on, that it was someone that he was on, was immediate. After an initial reaction to shove away from the body, limbs flailing in his delusional state of panic, Öde slowly came to know that face. That familiarity only drove him wilder, his movements a frenzy to escape.

Panting, he threw himself back at the tree, eyes pinching shut again. It can't be he thought fiercely, but a slow peek back at the body revealed him the truth. Patches of her flesh were missing, like burn marks of scrapes of sand. Worms and maggots wriggled against her skin, though it felt warm to him still when he was on it - what would the grubs of the earth be doing with her so soon?"Mother," he whispered, startled by the pain which clutched his heart. He had considered this day countless times, and never had he imagined he would be overwhelmed with this sorrow that drowned him now. She had left him after all, she didn't deserve his love. She didn't deserve anything good. He wanted to HATE her, and he thought ht had, did...

Then why was it so hard to deny her? Even now, when she asked nothing of him, when she should get nothing of him, he gave it all, unable to resist.

Tears swept down his cheeks, unbidden by hot and endless all the same. Choking back a sob of her name Öde flung himself at her, kneeling by her neck where he buried his head into the folds of her darkness. She stilled smelled like he remembered, so he breathed in her deeply, clinging to that last shred of her that he could, like a child does to the security of its blanket.

Nothing made sense, but his mother was dead, and that was enough.

@[Reginald]?

The boy stills as his name cuts through the dark and the distress. It comes at such an opportune time, this moment where the king weeps in the lowest of his lows, that it cannot be anything other than a command to rise to the occasion. Whispered as it was in the dark corridors of a ruined sanctuary, tumbling rough and stern through the emptiness, Öde swore it was his god talking to him.

Oblivion.

In an instant his tears dry, seeming to crawl back up into his eyes, floating in the moisture of his body like a small sea to drown in. Slowly his head lifts from the corpse of his mother, hazy gaze stabbing into the depths of the glow-touched caverns as he searches for the devil himself. "Yes?" Öde answers after a moment in which he searches for his voice. It comes out thin, worn down by sorrow, distorted by weakness. "Rise" a new voice demands, on within, one familiar. It's not the echoes of his conscious, the ricochet of his thoughts. Öde knows it though, and it comforts him. "Quickly!" the voice demands, hissing with frantic impatience. She is afraid. She has a right to be.

Shamed and pushed to the edge of scared, the colt struggles to his feet, taking a moment to wipe the remnants of his brokenness upon an outstretched leg. "What need have you of me, Demonking?" Stronger now he spoke, bolder, ready. Öde opens himself up to the evil of his bloodline. He has nothing else left to lose, and nothing better to give than the vessel of his flesh, the malleability of his mind. "Bow!" October admonishes, and Öde complies. His neck curls finely, nose pressed against the bottom of his chest as he submits to the shadows.

"I will do whatever you ask of me, father." Öde uses the final word tenderly, endearingly. Though the god he worships is not the direct cock that bore him, they were related, and fatherhood encompassed more than sperm in this case, In the heavens above and the hells below, his god, his king, his father led him in all walks of life, protected him in all perils, and guided his proverbial hand to do deeds in his name.

In the false light of the caves he grins.

His name whirls through the dark again, but it seems to be encased in light, chasing away the shadows and the voices, flowing direct and loud rather than scattered and whispered. Öde turns sharply towards the sound, head twisted to the left, cheek pressed by his shoulder. Red eyes slip through the caves, narrowing on Reginald with a certain effect of anger. Oblivion steps away, and October grows silent.

The moment passes, his wrath quells, and Öde is left like a husk in the wake of that monumental event. He was a knife poised for a strike, but at the last moment was withheld and sheathed, something which took more energy than the killing thrust would have. He felt woozy, and wavered on his feet before catching himself.

"Brother?" he responds, the word affectionate, caught as he was in this family moment. "What's happened?" he asked after a moment, confusion still wrinkling his 'brow as he shuffled around his mother's fresh corpse. The inquiry was weighted and open, given no further direction, but standing no less as important. Why was he here? Why was his mother dead? What happened with the murders? What happened?

Öde shook his head, wondering where his mother had gone, why she didn't guide him now. He could trust in his gray brother though, Reginald the goliath of gods, the king of stone, the mason of massacre. So int he dark Öde smiled at him, his teeth glittering beneath a wash of saliva, shining in the false and eerier light of the glowing hall to hell.

He replies in ways that Öde could never have prepared for. A goddess? the boy thinks, bewildered, fascinated, and disappointed. Their feelings about the murderer differ though, in that Reginald found her gender a despicable weakness to her strength, Öde was grieved to know it was only a god and not something he could harness for himself. Still, it was a testament to the heavenly bodies, so much greater than the kings they both played for. If Öde was to wear a crown, he wanted it made of stars.

He wanted to make those fucking clouds kneel.

A dark head turns in the darkness at the revelation of his blood brother's felled dam. Öde is quiet, unsure of what to say that would be fitting, though internally his blood roars with likened sorrow, bitter vengeance, and cold understanding. What can be said though? Nothing will make it better, nothing will bring her back, and if it was a goddess that wrought the demise then their revenge would be long coming, if at all. All that existed was a familiarity between them, each understanding the other's loss, and in so providing a stoic support. "You'll carry on her work," Öde exhaled, intending to do the same of his own milk giver.

Reginald had not finished his tales though, and under the blow of his words Öde laughed. It might have been an inadvertent response, his body's attempt at silencing the truth for the sake of sanity, but whatever it was he cut off the sound sharply, frowning at its finish. "Dead?" he echoed at last, hurt at the notion that eh would simply cease to be when he had so much left to accomplish.

The thoughts that churned in his head, but thankfully Reginald offered him a simpler respite, leaving those dark hallways for Öde to walk alone, another time. In the gloom Öde smiled at the mention of his lord, and happily stepped closer to the interest of his lost sibling. "He is the devil in the darkness, the god of the damned, the king of demons." Öde grinned wolfishly, enamored by the tales of his king.

"He reaped a land that lies just beyond Helovia, his might crushing many foes and bestowing many crowns. He assembled masses of the wicked, leading them into battle so that they might done on blood and build in bones... he struck horror into the hearts of all those that lived in his domain." Öde smiled, imagining it all as if he had been there. "He would have conquered the world, but so much gold attracts a lot of greed. His own faithful soldier felled him, but he never killed him, not entirely. He lives on in my blood, in my name, in my deeds. He is my guidance in this world, placing each step."

Öde grew fervent, excited and loud with his faith. "HE PULLED ME FROM MY GRAVE, HE IS MY GOD!" The dark head swept down swiftly to his chest, prayers muttered rapidly beneath his breath.