It looks just as he remembers, these empty, haggard halls of his: the kingdom underneath the earthen crust. It glitters as it should; shadows cling where they should cling; water drips and stalagmites form exactly where they’re supposed to be. Moss flourishes; bugs skitter beneath doom-bringing hooves; he hears the squeal of a bat somewhere, clicking in the depths of some cavern he does not care to venture towards.

It seems smaller. These tunnels were grandois once, perhaps, to the cunning eyes of a thin, wheezing babe; now they barely contain his chest, his awesome, beautiful neck, the contours of a body that swells with pride and something else. He scowls in the darkness, the muted, eerie light that emanates from the living things who never perceive the sun’s gentle rays. There is no wind here to cleanse away the smell of hordes; there is no rain here to wash away the residue of vermin, tiny and tremendous alike. It is a cloud of musk that follows him, mocking him, a perfect record of those who desecrate this sacred place, oblivious to his laws, defiant to his will. He smells mares, the good kind and otherwise, as well as the accompanying rank odor of useless filly-flesh; he smells the hides of young-ones of long past, the heat of stallions who walk these corridors with abandon and a complacent stupidity he has seen before in the male sex. He smells lovers and mothers, fighters and the lingering stench of cowardice; he smells their sweat and the rolling of their eyes, their tears echoing in the din of the chasm, their beating hearts, their blasphemous breathing, their--

--blood?

Blood..and other things.

He does not hurry to his destination; he is tired, if only in mind. Blank and frozen, empty of some things and full of other, detestable things. He walks to soothe that part of him, the absence of a fire he has possessed long before childhood. He is cold, and it is with this coldness that he comes upon a peculiar scene; a colt, not much older than himself, cradled within the foul-smelling corpse of a mare who seems to have just perished.

He stops; he watches from afar. He knows this colt, brother of blood instead of womb-water; he who disappeared from their midst shortly after he had found his presence once again, lost to whatever fate decided to snatch him. He watches the tears falling from his face; he hears the misery that grasps his throat, catching it and constricting it, pulling the life from him. The fire.

“Öde.”

It could have been a distant rumble of the caves far below that spoke his name; it could have been the echo of some memory cast into the depths of these caverns, lost and forgotten, discarded for the sake of one’s sanity. Reginald only stands; he does no go to intrude upon the tears of a lost mother. He had not cried-- he feels them nonetheless.


"This is how I talk"