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She knew she was dead before the hit.
It was a stupid thing. It had been raining a bell before, and all of Midrath had bathed in the stormwater. She had danced on slick grass with the Sinecure patrol, her boots and theirs kicking and sliding along as they fought. She had done it a hundred times, but it was the hundred and first where finally capricious luck abandoned her. There was a jerking sensation, her body moving to recover to the slide as it happened, then the brief fall. A grunt, a shock of impact, a laugh, muffled and ringing through Ode'n helm, and then a flash of a mace hurtling towards her head.
The impact moved between barriers, between the mortal coil and the Afterwards, kicking Rebel through it. Falling up, she hurtled through the pain and then the ice-cold water until she was standing again, nausea rolling through her in waves. Pain didn't persist through the sea of the Nightfold, but her body still knew what had happened to it - if what she had could be called a body. She gasped, heaved, but no stomach meant no bile to retch, so she was stuck in this pantomime of life until the rest of her caught up with reality. Color had left her limbs, as had any warmth, but her heartbeat still pounded away, racing, hammering at the walls of her un-ribs frantically. She gasped for air, and in her gulps she could taste salt.
Slowly, an infinitely long second at a time, the panic faded. Her body recognized its nonexistence, and her mind remembered that this was not the first time, and it would not be the last. Panic began to fade, but her color did not return. It wouldn't until she went back.
Rebel forced herself to stand straight. It was always more effort than she thought. The easier thing always would have been to stay down and stay dead. She couldn't find it in herself to do so. She looked around, only to see the colorless sea and endless gray sky pierced by streaks of white like rain slowly falling. Her camp was somewhere else, she didn't know where. Death seemed to take her to one place, and her striding willingly across the waves took her to another. That's how it was with magick; you had to choose it to use it, or it'd just use you.
She didn't know if time moved faster or slower here. She wasn't really keen on checking, either. In her camp, it seemed like time moved as fast as she wanted it to. If she wanted to sleep til dawn, she would retreat to her tent, or the idea of her tent, and pass out on the cushions by the fire. When she came back to Alca, it would be morning, just as she wished. If she wanted only to rest for a moment, then return, she would catch her breath for a bell or three - she had to rely on her own sense of time for that, for no sun meant no sundial - and then return with only minutes having passed on the physical plane. Again, though, those were things she had chosen. Ripped out here, to the space beyond life, it was anyone's game. Maybe it was no one's at all, a simple throw of the dice. All she could assume is that one second was one second, one minute was one minute. All she could do was plan.
There had been a runestone not far from where they had fought. In other circumstances, she could snap her fingers, and Grandfa's sparrow would find her body and breathe back into it life, but she had the odd feeling that they were waiting for her. Really, it felt like someone was walking on her grave, goosebumps rolling up and down her non-body. So, the stone it would be. She thought of her weapons, and they were at her hip, as if they had always been there. She moved, and they were in her hands. Rebel took one long, slow breath, then stepped forward - through -- down.
He stood over the Gruul's body, breath shaking. He hadn't expected her to slip like that. More fortune for him; it was hard to keep secret what she did to Sinecure, how few bodies were left when a patrol ran afoul of this damnable planet's "protector."
"Did you see that?" One of his comrades asked, disbelief naked in her voice. "Down she went."
"She's just a woman." The sergeant, the one holding the mace stained blue with blood, growled. "Nothing to it."
"Don't try and lie; you were shitting yourself, too." She retorted. "Sidae, I didn't think she'd just go down like that."
He bent down, ignoring the two of them. Somewhere, drifting as ash behind them, was their fourth, the one she had ambushed the quickest with a flash of light and the twisting of every rule that should be. Stars, he hated this damn planet. The sooner it was dried up and gone, thrown into the kiln, the better. Any world would be better than this one. His hand fished backwards to his belt, sliding the falx out of its loop and into his palm. His other hand went out, to grab her arm and lift it at the palm, splaying the fingers out.
The sergeant grunted in disgust. "Truly?"
He looked back at him. "Truly." He brought the knife closer to her cold, stone fingers. Strange how they moved like flesh, but felt quite like the rock he walked upon. Stars. "They're worth something to someone. Probably even Synod hisself."
"Make it quick, then." The man turned about with a growl. "Bloody psychopath," he muttered under his breath.
"Yeah, and a breathing one." He muttered back. Measure twice, cut once. That's what they always said. Why waste time and the trophy hacking away like a fool? Ah. Right here, start with the thumb. He brought the falx to the skin.
Something seemed to shimmer. It was like her body was blurring, somehow, losing coherency, resolution. "What-?" He gasped. Touch became blurry too, the corpse losing physicality as the blurring worsened, then became nothing but thousands of tiny, overlapping wings.
Her body melted into butterflies, a swarm fluttering and dancing and flying away and around him in a flurry of disparate colors. He recoiled, yelling in alarm, and his two comrades turned back. "What did you do?" The sergeant demanded, as if it was a question that he could somehow answer. He scrambled vainly to his feet, tripping on the wet grass and the mud beneath that had claimed her in the first place, his boots kicking up clumps of the stuff as he fumbled about. The swarm moved erratically, this way, then that, but slowly away, to the odd, moss-covered stone that loomed in the near distance.
His sergeant's hands found him and yanked him up, back onto his feet. "I said, what did you do?" He roared, shaking him. He didn't respond, his gaze on the butterflies. They settled on the stone like a canvas, covering every inch of it totally.
Then, they parted like a wave, and through it Rebel charged screaming, weapon raised, magick curling around the steel.