@croftcursed
the darkness confuses him when he awakens.
awake in the afterlife, ( VALHALLA ), felt different than awake in the physical world. stiff and smelly for starters.as the warmth of being alive began to flood his body, his bones began to crack. by now ragnar imagines most of the snakes died with him or slithered else where all that time ago, but the gods had made certain that the tail bone of one particularly dead-tasting snake rested comfortably on his tongue when he came to.
ragnar spits abruptly, the tail end of the snake sputtering out of his mouth. a crackled groan grumbles past chapped lips and he drags his palms over the bits of shredded snake skin and stone to rub over his face.
it’s too dark to see much of anything from the bottom of the snake pit. from what he remembers it was fairly deep. he half expects that the god would let him rot there for a good time before presenting him with the brains to find a way out but this was not the snake pit. he presses the pads of his fingers to the surface below him again. definitely not dirt or a pile of dead snakes. he pushes himself up to rest on his palms before his head is rudely interupted by a bed of stone.
he growls. perhaps the shrine they built him outside whatever stone crypt they threw him in would have ale. he heaves his weight into the top of the stone, it budges barely. counting to three, this time using the strength in his shoulders to boost it up once more. the heavy grey slab scoots only slightly once again. he sighs. in one swift motion, he shifts his weight so that his ankle can rest against the bottom of the stone box and his knee props up his elbow. with his palms pressed flat to the surface of the slab, ragnar forces his body up into the core of the rock. the slab protests with a loud rock on rock scratching that would hurt his ears if the sounds of his own Viking bellows didn’t pierce the air so strongly.
the rock falls away in pieces, first sliding off the edge of the coffin and then smashing into the ground. he hoists himself up with a grunt, cracking his neck once to the left and then to the right before shaking his limbs. stray pebbles cling to the hair on his arms and legs and fine coat of grey dust covers his naked exterior.
a violent sneeze shudders through his body, back of his hand coming up to wipe away a layer of sticky green snot.
“achoo. ”
