The battles had dispersed, the dust had settled, and the bodies had stopped. Öde remained however, standing there on the field of grass and rock as false twilight waned into the actual darkness cast by the set sun. He looked around with eyes of red, watching as his horned kin took to each other and their hooves, heading back to their northern domain. Many, if indeed not all, moved without limp, or wound, or bruise. His head turned, gaze sweeping towards the gathering masses of the truly victorious - those who would claim this poorly fought for land, so vague to him he didn't even have a name.

He had come for blood and it alone, and he had received SHIT.

"IS THAT ALL YOU'VE FUCKING GOT, FALLS!?!?" he bellowed out suddenly, his silence surmounted with disgust and coiled rage. Each strike he dealt that garnered no response had filled him up, like pus inside of boils, spreading each time fresh flesh touched it. His heart hammered wild in his chest, a temp of adrenaline which wasted away with every stagnant moment he spent on this battlefield slaughter yard. This was war? Big fucking deal. If this was the only piss they could manage to fire out in their greatest time of need, then he'd easily mount the world.

"HOW PATHETIC!" he roared out again, a boil of anger bursting. His left foreleg tore eagerly at the turf, repeatedly striking it, mauling it; a need to burn energy and dirt his only goddamn release. Like a viper his tail moved behind him, spurring him into a restless pacing that carved his hooves against the topsoil.

In outrage he lifted his hind feet in a buck, horned head shaking towards the ground. "FLIES GIVE ME A BETTER RUN!" he sneered, punctuating his insult by spitting on their precious home they couldn't even break a sweat to defend. "What a waste of my fucking time walking all the way down here, for this."

For moment there is nothing other than Öde's breaths, still hot with the anger and the rush it left behind in his body. Then it came, a response, a sound, a scream.

Öde smiles; the movement is slow and deliberate as muscles pull taut the line of his lips, wrinkling the corners of his dark mouth into something darker. Like a wolf which grins just before it delivers the killing blow, so Öde looks as he turns to face the owner of the shrieking, all haughty and full of youthful arrogance. It's more than just that though. Öde is full of nothing except that, as though all other sensations have bled out of him. They must have, the day he fell in the caves, the day he embraced his mother's last breath, the day he prayed to a twisted god.

Öde saunters too casually though. He thinks too much of himself when so little has been tested. As he turns, he faces not the pitiful, battered body of a defeated warrior, but the hulking form of a bull which has set his horns into an aligned path. Too near, too fast, too furious with due cause, Rostislav comes at Öde like a creature truly born of this earthen domain and the war it just witnessed. Öde blinks, red, and then the color is all over him.

An indignant squeal thunders from the boy's maw as his body leaps away, triggered by the terrible slicing of meat and muscle. It is the answer he has been looking for, but not the way he wanted it. Rage instantly fills all the spaces left inside his body, spilling over his thoughts the same way his fluids drench down his shoulder. "Fucking SHIT!" Öde rasps, toes dancing easily on the grassy knolls of the Falls, first away, then towards.

His own head bows, exhales coming in heavy snorts that align with heartbeat. He thrusts himself off his right side, the strong side, aiming to throw himself left and towards Rostislav where his triple horns can impale the loser's hide. That Rostislav has risen up, above him, bulkier than him, doesn't seem to phase the green boy dressed in black and red. He thinks he has the power to simply run into Rostislav, trampling him with hoof and horn alike. So he throws all of himself at the stallion, because he cannot comprehend any other outcome.

That Rostislav has drawn first blood is unforgivable, and for that, Öde will make him perish. This is the fight he had been looking for. This is the fight he needs.

He feels the pain. He recognizes an all too familiar friend with him once more, a dark passenger if you would which manages to bring only hurt in its most literal of forms. He thinks to cry out; not for any of the good that it would do, although sometimes feeling that burn in the windpipe is just distracting enough to dull the fire of blood, but it doesn't matter this time because he can't. He just, he can't.

The more he wants to, the more it hurts, the more time which passes, Öde starts to recognize other things. First, it's not just his screams which aren't working, it's everything (except for the ability to register pain, apparently), and two, this hurt isn't the same hurt he felt before.

That is to say, this hurt is in itself different, because as the wolf already proved, he was looking and ripping at something inside the body - the flesh just got in the way. It's more than that though, because Öde remembers the brown bull on the plains. He remembers the scream he cut loose from his functioning pipes, and the way he shied to the side before charging forward. He remembers that, and those pains, and that overwhelming thing that took over and apparently led him to whatever the fuck this is.

He doesn't remember dying, because the body protects you from shit like that, because it's awful and there's enough shit in life to bother you without it being the memory of your own death (even the fake kind, like in dreams, or with immortality). Still, he can focus on the events before, and now after, and although they're blurry and hazy they come into focus the more he tries to stare into the nothingness that's the pit inside his body where his death is stored. It's like staring so hard at something that it goes fuzzy and everything on the outsides turns sharp like crystals.

All of that stops mattering the second the wolf runs though, because Öde is dragged along and as he goes he also watches himself leave, and that sends chills up his spine like nothing else. They run for forever, but also no time at all - time doesn't even exist here (it doesn't really exist anywhere except in society). The running stops, and the darkness peels away like paint on an old house that's stood up to too many storms and too much sunlight - because whether life is good or bad it wears away. What's beneath that top layer of paint is the wood, and it's a land that is literally woods. The trees are so huge that Öde could walk on their boughs, if he could make it up there.

He would have stared at the magical forest longer, but the motion at his side caught his eye, because somehow amid all of the "what the fuck", he forgot about the wolf that stole him away but also left him behind. The wolf isn't a wolf any more though, it's a horse - no, more than a horse.

"God?" he asks, so cautious and careful because he doesn't want to scare the being away and those this opportunity. He's so intent on the dark horse he doesn't even realize his voice works again, or why it works again - all he sees is a monument of black, brushed with white feathers and a white face. Wait, not a white face, a black face underneath a white (yellowish really) skull. It's like it's swimming in the dark, a rabbit's tail flashing through the brush, but this is the hunter, not the prey.

His breath hitches in his throat, trapped and squirming in his lungs as he waits for that reply, afraid even the slightest disturbance outward might break the fragile moment.
"Yes."

Relief slides out in a deep exhale as Öde embraces the shared space of his divine sovereign. If only the same could be said of his tightly wound muscles, of his body so stiff he seems obsidian rather than horse, carved out onto stiffened legs and wide eyes. Yes this entity is his god, but holy shit yes this is his god! An odd mixture of euphoria and panic competes for the roost inside Öde's soul, and in the wake of their war he is left a trembling, stammering idiot.

Oblivion is staring at him, and it feels as if all the color is going to drain out of his body, like those haunting eyes are going to carve holes into him where his blood can drain free- a machine ready for an oil change. Öde's mouth runs dry and it feels oddly enough like someone has stuffed fuzzy plants down it, filling him up and choking him with their moisture absorption prowess. Its enough to make him choke, a sound which rasps out like metal on stone just as his lord of darkness breaks the silence with the gravel of his baritone.

Öde straightens up, then quivers, because it has worked.

His prayers, those feverish mutterings offered in the dark and the half-breaths he takes beneath his audible words, they have succeeded in ways he never thought imaginable. His heart beats, or always was but now he notices it because it sings inside him with a furious flurry of mortal rhythm. "Thank you," Öde murmurs, his neck arching in a bow which drifts down to the girth between his forelegs. He feels himself, lower lip brushing under chest, and the discomfort which it brings he holds, a small token of suffrage for his almighty devil's desires.

He cannot help but wonder though, at what the Demon King means when he says not yet. "I am dead, aren't I?" It's odd how easy it was to say that, as if he weren't commenting on anything more noteworthy than the shape and color of the day's clouds. He is eerily calm with the fact, because he just knows that he is (dead), and accepting it is just natural really, because what else is there to do? "We're in your kingdom." His arrogance seeps in somewhat, as he is certain that he has made it to sit alongside the eternal company of his god and his throne of bones.

Mortal again Öde thinks, wondering what he is defined as now in this place and this state, whatever they are. He remembers dying, knows in his very being that he is indeed dead, but his god is saying he will not remain here? That he will be mortal, again? Öde shakes himself, unsure whether he wants that or not. He didn't want death originally, but now that he's here, in the presence of the almighty, now that he has stopped hurting, why return?

How would he even return?

He thinks then of the time he awoke in the caves, and how Lena had insisted he'd perished in them. Öde had found his mother's corpse and new her magic- she had saved him. His mother was gone though, who was going to save him this time, Oblivion?

Fresh words from the god king demanded Öde's attention, particularly for their sharp, chastising sting. Öde physically flinched in response, his head tilting away as though preparing to be struck, but no blows ever came aside from spiritual ones. "Then how do we get to the place of the gods?" Öde asked after a moment, chewing on something he really wanted to ask, which was why was Oblivion here if this was the place of the dead? Was it because of himself? Surely.

Öde had learned of Oblivion's true death from his mother, who had been privy to it's facts. Betrayed by Nato the Ninja, and felled by his own soldier in the woods, alongside his mare and before his fresh babes. The tale was gruesome,

Öde has often let his thoughts linger on what defines a god, what makes a god, how a god is born. He has been arrogant in his dwelling, but he has not been stubborn nor ignorant. So what Oblivion had to say on the stairway to heaven is not nearly as enlightening as it is reaffirming. In response his dark head nods, while his red eyes gleam with ideas and appetite. He has already forgotten his petulant wish to stay here forever with the Demon King, letting his mind instead drift over the promises his mother left, the fables of his ascension and his gilded kingdoms. His lips find a smile.

The dark demon does not stop with meager crumbs however, extending then into advice that seems like it comes from experience. Trust few- a regret of the Demon King's? Paranoia would hardly benefit though, so Öde wonders how you can know which few to trust, but he supposes that he'll learn in time. He can't ask, because Oblivion goes on, detailing... family?

Surprised, Öde tilts his head, unaware he had anyone besides his dead mother- he assumed the only family he had left was what he had made in Lena and Reginald.

"Go,". The word is deafening in his buzzing brain, and he feels a feeble urge to resist. The hot breath of teeth are upon him though, as Oblivion is wolf once more and cast to chasing him. Terrified, angry, eager... to many things to name, Öde runs. He runs back through eternity and there, with his corpse in view and his own feet due to trample its meat...


Öde awakes with a gasp in the Falls.