The world fractured, memories colliding with hopes, dreams, and fears.
Mom, look what I painted
Fire crawled through her veins. Her body convulsed, limbs flailing against something solid. Arms? Holding her? Movement. She was moving but couldn't see, couldn't think past the inferno consuming her from the inside out.
The gallery lights are too bright, too many eyes watching
Voices called out to her from above. No, it was just one voice. Male. Calm despite the urgency threading through his words.
"Nearly there."
Where? Where was there?
Her body jerked again. Cold air rushed past her face. Night sounds filtered through the roar in her ears. The singing of crickets, wind flowing through autumn leaves, the distant rumble of traffic fading to nothing.
First kiss behind the art building, hands trembling as they touched her face.
Heartbreak when she found him sleeping with her best friend.
They had stopped moving.
Lily's eyes cracked open. Shapes swam in a soup of grey and black. Trees maybe. Stars? Too bright to be stars, these were like diamonds glinting in the inky black sea above her. Now branches were cutting across a darker sky. Everything blurred together like wet paint on canvas.
"Stay calm."
That voice again, closer now.
"Your body is dying. This is natural, we all have to suffer this. Fight through it."
Dying.
The word should have terrified her but the torment left no room for fear. Only pain. Only the sensation of her body tearing itself apart and rebuilding her from scratch.
Through the haze, she caught glimpses. A figure moving with purpose. Tall. Menacing. His hands gripped something, a shovel maybe? The rhythmic sound of metal biting earth reached her ears, steady and methodical.
Digging.
Her vision darkened further. Colors drained away, replaced by shadows and vague impressions of movement. She tried to focus but her eyes refused to cooperate.
Something shifted behind her pupils, a crawling wrongness that made her want to claw at her face.
Blind. Going blind.
Her body arched off the ground. When had he put her down? Her spine bent at an impossible angle. Bones creaked. No, not creaked. Snapped. Small fractures spider-webbing through her skeleton before fusing back together denser, harder.
She felt every single break.
A scream built in her throat but emerged as a strangled wheeze. Her ribs reformed, pressing against organs that were healing from the physical damage the gang had given her. Then they began dying, slowly.
Your first painting sold for fifty dollars and you cried
The man's silhouette appeared above her again. She couldn't see his face, couldn't make out anything beyond the vague outline of his form against the sky.
Headstones. She registered them now through the failing vision. Crooked markers jutting from earth like broken teeth.
A graveyard.
He was digging her grave.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. Fast. Too fast. The rhythm climbed to impossible speeds, a hummingbird trapped in her chest trying to escape through her sternum. Faster and faster until the beats blurred together into one continuous vibration.
BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM
Then it slowed.
Gradual at first.
BOOM…
BOOM…..BOOM.....BOOM...…..
She pressed a hand to her chest, searching as the last drum beat faded away.
Nothing.
Panic flooded her system but her heart didn't respond. No acceleration. No racing pulse to match her fear. Just silence where there should have been life.
Air. She needed air.
Lily gasped, dragged oxygen into her lungs, but it sat there heavy and useless. Her chest rose and fell searching desperately. There was no relief. She was going to suffocate.
Her lungs stuttered, burning with pain from starvation.
Can't breathe can't breathe can't—
Her mouth opened in a soundless scream.
Fingers clawed at her throat, at her chest, desperate to restart something that would never start again. The man knelt beside her, hands firm on her shoulders, pinning her down.
"Let it happen."
Pain erupted in her stomach.
Everything before paled in comparison. This was agony in its unholy, purest form, concentrated in her gut and radiating outward. Worse than menstrual cramps. Worse than food poisoning. Worse than the beating that brought her here.
Her intestines were burning and she could feel the peristalsis pushing every nutrient, every bit of mortal food and drink out of her system.
She felt herself void everything. Waste, fluids, the last remnants of her human body purging itself. Shame flickered somewhere in the back of her mind but the pain drowned it out.
Cold seeped in.
It started at her extremities. Fingers then toes and crawled its way inward. Not the chill of winter air or ice water. This was the cold of marble tombs and frozen earth, the absence of warmth that came with the absence of life.
Her skin hardened. Not literally, but the softness drained away, replaced by something smooth and unyielding. Flesh that couldn't easily be harmed by foul mortals anymore.
Through vision that had faded to almost nothing, she saw them.
Eyes.
Red as fresh blood, hovering in a void that shouldn't exist. Not above her or beside her but around her, everywhere and nowhere.
They blinked and the world inverted.
Darkness rose like flood water. Not the darkness of closed eyes or unlit rooms. This was the primordial dark from before creation, the nothing that existed when there was no light to banish it.
Tendrils emerged from that nothing.
Shadow given form and purpose, they wrapped around her consciousness like the arms of some deep-sea horror. Squeezing. Constricting. Each coil tightened around her thoughts, her memories, her sense of self.
Mom dad graduation the smell of turpentine sunrise over the Quarter
The tendrils crushed them flat. Not destroying but compressing, condensing everything she was into a singularity too dense to escape.
She felt herself lifted. Her body moved without her input, suspended between the man's arms as he lowered her into the earth. Soil rained down on her face, her chest, filling in the spaces around her limbs.
Buried alive.
Buried dead.
The last thing she registered was the odd sensation of moist earth pressing down, and those red eyes watching from the void as the final tendril wrapped around the core of her being.
Then silence.
Then nothing.
Then darkness absolute.