Serafina opened her eyes and saw nothing but black. It was as if she hadn’t opened her eyes at all.

She had been deep in the darkened void of a swirling, half-dreaming world when she was awoken to the sound of a muffled voice, but now there was no voice, no sound, no movement of any kind.

Just black.

She closed her eyes and reopened them. But it made no difference. It was still pitch-dark.

But she wasn’t floating in the black void of the cloak anymore. She was lying on her back on a long, flat, cold surface.

Where am I? she thought. How did I get here?

Then a sound finally came: a thudding in her ears that was more real, more pressing, than anything she had ever heard.

Thump-thump.

For a moment that was all there was.

Thump-thump, thump-thump.

The beat of her heart and the pulse of her blood.

Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.

As she slowly moved her tongue to moisten her cracked, dry lips, she detected the faint taste of metal in her mouth.

But it wasn’t metal.

It was blood—her own blood flowing through her veins into her tongue and her lips.

She tried to clear her throat, but then all at once she took in a sudden, violent, jerking breath and sucked in a great gasp of air, as if it was the very first breath she had ever taken. As her blood flowed, a tingling feeling flooded into her arms and legs and all through her body.

My body…she thought, trying to comprehend it. I’m in my body…I’m alive…I’m truly alive…

She frantically tried to think back and remember what had happened to her, but it was like trying to grasp the fleeting details of a powerful dream that drifts away the moment you wake.

She pulled air into her nostrils, hoping to draw a clue from what she could smell around her.

Dirt, she thought. I’m surrounded by damp, rotting dirt.