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]?