Time has no meaning in death, she finds.
Was it minutes or hours? Hours or weeks?
She could not answer, even if she had the voice to do so. She could not give form to the questions that linger in the back of her mind, frozen in time as it was. Instead, she is cast into the belly of the ocean of stars, sent spinning out into the tide that washes up endlessly onto the shores of death.
It grows colder with each passing moment.
Colder as the sound of his breathing, at first a reverberating echo around her, begins to fade. As even the pinpricks of light are swallowed by the darkness that comes on faster and faster—
Until he drags her back to the land of the living.
She gasps her first breath, the cold air flooding into her lungs with frightening speed. She rolls onto her knees and closes her eyes as she continues to drag in shuddering breaths, the swear that coats him also coloring the dark mahogany of her thin neck. For a moment, there is silence as she tries to steady herself. As she ties to find the ground beneath her again. As she tries to remember what it is to breathe fully.
Finally, she opens her pale brown eyes to find him again, taking note of the exhaustion.
“Indeed,” she says with a smile that does not fully curl her lips, just a hint of her usual mask falling away to reveal the girl behind it. “I am glad that it was a lesson for us to put off for another day.”
but in all chaos, there is calculation