Chapter Two: The Box

There is no horror equal to waking inside your own coffin.

I do not know how long I had been unconscious - the physician, I would later learn, was Cordelia's cousin, paid well to declare me gone within the hour, no real examination performed, no mirror held to my lips, no proper waiting period observed. In our district, burials happen fast. Faster, I think now, when certain people want them fast.

I woke to wood pressing against my shoulders. To a smell of incense and turned earth. To the distant, muffled sound of chanting - not prayers for the dead, I realized with a horror that froze whatever blood still moved in me, but something else. Something rhythmic and strange, words I didn't recognize, layered with the murmur of more than one voice.

I tried to scream. My jaw would not open more than a crack. My limbs answered nothing I commanded them to do - heavy, leaden, drugged into uselessness, though my mind was horribly, fully awake. I understood, in that moment, precisely what had been done to me. Not magic. Not curses. Something Cordelia's eastern-quarter friend had prepared with great care: a poison that mimicked death's stillness without granting death's mercy.

I heard Jonah's voice outside the box. Pleading. "Please - please just wait one more day. He asked me. He told me to make you wait three days, just three-"

"The boy is delirious with grief," Victor's voice answered, smooth as oiled wood. "It's been six hours, Jonah. The body is already changing. Surely you don't want to watch your uncle rot before your eyes?"

"He's not - something is wrong, I know it, please-"

"Enough." My uncle Reginald's voice now, flat and final, the voice of a man closing a ledger. "We bury him today. That is what's decided."

I screamed inside that box with everything that remained of my will, and not one sound escaped my throat. I felt the casket lift. I felt the terrible, swaying descent. I heard Jonah's voice break apart entirely - not shouting now, just sobbing, a single raw sound repeated like a prayer with no answer: "Uncle. Uncle. Uncle."

The first shovel of earth struck the lid above me like a verdict.

I want you to understand what it is to hear dirt falling on wood while you are alive beneath it. It does not sound large. It sounds almost gentle, almost kind - a soft patter, like rain on a roof - and that gentleness is the cruelest part, because your body is screaming and the world outside is so calm, so unbothered, so finished with you.

I do not know exactly when my heart stopped truly beating, only that somewhere in that suffocating dark, the poison that had stilled me finally became the death it had only pretended to be. Whether it was the drug itself, or the lack of air, or simply a heart that could not bear what was being done to it - I cannot say. I only know that the absence I had woken from became, this time, the absence with no waking after.

I died twice. The second time was real.

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End of Chapter Two:

A.N. - If you felt that ache in your chest, good. That's exactly where I wanted you. Chapter 3 is going to hurt more.

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

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