Death comes quickly. Quicker than she would have expected.
She doesn’t shudder when he snaps. When the fire touches her. When he lunges. Her mother would be proud, she thinks, of how brave she is when she looks down the barrel of the gun. She shifts into a tiger then because it is the most comforting form that she knows. She swipes and bites, does everything that she can to mark him even though she knows it’s a losing fight—it was always a losing fight.
But she doesn’t beg when he has her pinned.
She doesn’t whimper when his claws are to her throat.
Instead she arches and hisses, blood streaming down her face—staining her coat. “I hope he drags you screaming into hell,” she manages through her gritted teeth. “I hope his is the last face you ever see.”
It’s the final thing she says before her first death.
She feels her leg disconnect from her body in a haze, as her vision goes red and then blurry. She feels her body come apart and she floats above herself, as the veil between life and death stretches, snaps.
When he skitters away, leaving the boy in charge of disassembling her body, she is barely holding onto the connection to her body. She watches in a way that she will never remember. Watches as her first body lies broken and strewn across the ground, her blood feeding the earth underneath.
In the moment, death feels infinite, overwhelming, eternal.
It would be easy to sink into it. To never come back into this body of pain, to never let the weight of the agony sling across her shoulders, but there is a fluttering of something on the edge of her consciousness.
Yadigar.
She thinks of him in death and her eyes flutter open.
Born anew.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in