Post by ODD NAGEL on Nov 4, 2010 16:01:54 GMT -5
LIVE A LIFE LESS O R D I N A R Y
"You blew away my storm and strife
and shook the bones of me"
and shook the bones of me"
It had an uncannily ability to be drowned in shadows, beyond the hills and valleys of the Western Mountains. Nothing buzzed in the underworld—not necessarily lifeless, but still and whispering while he knocked branches in the grove and kept under ironclad, Gothic arch ways. Odd held the lantern at elbow’s length, light cutting through the black and oranges of mid-evening, and shook the hair from his eyes before kicking a pebble into the underbrush. Seppel, unusually quiet for him, made no effort to ask or even speak at all; it was business as usual, with one crippled soul to pass through the realms and the possibility to be eaten while doing it.
Perhaps because he was a ghost—Odd understood them, but he wouldn’t claim to know everything there was about it—being so near to the otherworld drained him of his energy. That, or he may have been nervous in a place where phantoms were a reoccurring thing, and not some evil to rid a house of or solicit for a pretty good place. (It could very well have been both, since Seppel enjoyed his power in whatever manner he got it.) Here, Odd thought distantly, it was not a matter of being dead—no, death came long before most people reached its plains—but the idea of being reborn that was frightening; if you were reaped, than whatever ties you had to Forestille were cut smoothly and with efficiency. Living people don’t want to die, and dead people don’t want to live.
Face stern as he chased after Death, some part of him knew he was doing futile things. Odd saw him in childhood—he was small then, watching a visitor to the doorstop of a crazed old woman and a young girl with the plague—and it was such a looming, heavy feeling. “Most people don’t know me,” was all he told him, very plain and well-spoken although chilling at the end of it all. And he saw him often, for his own parents, and tens of others before them until he was not sure that he had anyone left at all in the world. It was then that he decided to help spirits trapped between life and death, simply because Odd thought meeting Death again and again meant he’d learned something secret about the world. He was fond of him, as contrary as the idea was to most normal people.
It was nothing at first, but then it became a duty. Soldiers still bloody even when already gone, family members, young wives, and nameless children all plucked at his heart strings in one way or the other. He heard all their different stories, and began to realize that death was a very mundane occurrence in Forestille’s grand design. Each time he moved a soul to and fro, Death was there—and they spoke because Odd enjoyed his eccentric company. Before then, he did not deal with demons and shapeshifters—just people, but that changed when he was forced to take care of Seppel. Death wasn’t there as he bled on the sidewalk after attacking him, and thus Seppel was not destined to die anytime soon. They traveled together for six months, which was perhaps the longest he had anyone else’s company, and he found he wasn’t particularly interested in following Death anymore.
Stepping over a slick of mud and ice, Odd remembered that he—for some reason—never realized that Death could bother with him because he was already dying. They were friends once, and enemies when he came for him instead of someone else. He fought and ran, found himself caught somewhere in the mountains with the cold seeping into his clothes, and was horrified that the end always comes quickly. When Seppel agreed to die for him, he was speechless, but—selfishly, Odd knew—couldn’t say no to the proposition.
And now, in the belly of the beast, how he regretted that silence as he spoke into the dark of the pomegranate trees, “Death!” After a struggle to find him here, Odd wanted to know how to elude the oldest staple-mark of being alive: mortality itself, because he owed his one friend that much. This was perhaps the only person who could answer, but his anger was there. Buried, typical of him, but there.
OOC: :'D SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG, PLEASE FORGIVE ME, ASHTON. )8 I also wish it didn't seem so srs business thread, but . . . it just sort of ended up that way from his POV. I hope you don't mind . . .
tagged to: death.
