Death is dark.

The last thing Niki remembers is watching Puffy’s eyes, opened a bit and clearly horrified about what was about to happen. She remembers her arm hurting terribly, and she remembers being afraid. Then there was an axe blade and... nothing.

It’s like all the lights were immediately snuffed out. She doesn’t even know if she has hands, but if she did she wouldn’t be able to see them in front of her face.

Death is cold.

Niki had always run warm, even before the whole phoenix thing. And when she got her wings, there was practically never a time when she was cold. Her feathers gave off their own warmth, and she learned pretty quickly that she could control at least a little bit of fire to keep her warm inside as well.

This is the first time Niki can remember being truly cold.

It shakes her down to her bones, stealing the flexibility from her joints and turns the blood in her veins to ice. She’s sure that being locked outside in Snowchester during a storm would be better than this.

Death is slow.

She can’t have been there long. A couple days, maybe? Her internal body clock is completely out of whack. She doesn’t really sleep, and she wouldn’t have any way to know if she had or not, being completely submerged in darkness.

It feels like it’s been much longer than she thinks it has been.

(It’s only been a few minutes, half an hour at most.)

Death is... burning?

One morning (?) she becomes aware of the smell of smoke. It smells like a campfire, and makes her think of late nights in L’manburg. It’s nice, and almost lures her back into the state of sleep (??) she was in.

Until it becomes overwhelming.

Smoke clogs her nose and her mouth, and she coughs. Trying to expel the stuff seems to only make it worse. It’s suffocating, taking up all her senses at once after days of nothing.

Then, there’s light.

She looks down at her own hands to find that they’re glowing. Hot and red and burning. It looks like coals from a fire, but hotter.

After that comes the pain.

Burning hot and excruciating, it ripples through her body in waves. It dances and flickers across the surface of her skin. It builds and builds, and she tries to scream, but she’s smothered by the smoke in her throat.

And it all stops.

The pain is gone, as is the darkness. It’s replaced by a soft yellow light, like the kind produced by a lantern or a candle. There’s something soft pressing into her back, and she’s lying on her wings uncomfortably. Slowly, she opens her eyes and is met with the familiar wooden beams of Puffy’s house in Snowchester.

She rolls to the side of the bed and promptly throws up.