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He woke with dirt in his mouth.
Wet soil clogged his throat, packed beneath his tongue and into the delicate spaces between his teeth. When he inhaled, the earth inhaled with him. Cold mud slid down into lungs that should not have been breathing at all.
The first thing he felt was hunger. Vast and red and ancient, opening inside him like a second grave.
For one endless moment, he did not move.
The dark was too complete to understand. It pressed against his eyes like velvet soaked in grave water. He could not tell where his body ended and the coffin began. There was only pressure. Suffocating, intimate pressure. The whole weight of the world laid gently across his chest.
Then instinct struck him all at once. He jerked upward with a soundless cry.
Rot-softened wood slammed against his forehead. Pain burst white across his vision. The movement disturbed something beneath his skin, things writhing lazily through the ruin of him. He felt them scatter.
His hands flew upward.
Splintered wood gave beneath his fingers with a sound like brittle ribs. He pushed through layers of soaked velvet and fungus and collapsing timber until his hands struck compact earth. Panic hollowed him out. He clawed harder. Fingernails bent backward, peeled away. Cold soil crammed beneath the torn beds of his fingers.
The hunger gnawed deeper.
It spread through him in pulses, as though something behind his ribs had awakened, starving and furious. His veins felt hollow. He could almost hear blood somewhere overhead, distant and rushing beneath warm skin.
The earth grew thinner. Mud filled his sleeves. Worms burst slick and cold against his palms, mingling with the pale, sightless things still spilling from the open seams of his own flesh. Once, his hand brushed his face and he startled at the texture of it—skin chilled and soft, like soaked paper left too long in the rain.
His heart did not beat.
The silence of that realization nearly drove him mad.
No pulse thundered in his ears. No frantic rhythm answered his terror. There was only the sound of soil shifting around him and the sharp, splintering breaths he somehow continued to drag into dead lungs.
His memories came apart in pieces. Silk gloves. The smell of wine. A room lit red as an open wound. Fangs against his throat. Then nothing.
The hunger unfolded inside him after that.
The suffocating stench of his own rot suddenly warped, turning sweet. Suddenly the grave smelled rich. Overwhelmingly rich. Damp roots. Decay. Fungal bloom. The sweet copper tang buried deep beneath the soil where old things had dissolved into the earth. It was the scent of a banquet. His mouth filled with saliva.
He gagged, horrified by his own appetite.
“No,” he croaked, though his voice sounded wrong now. Frayed thin, as though unused for years. The grave gave no answer. He dug harder.
Time lost meaning beneath the earth. Minutes or hours passed in ragged bursts of effort. Sometimes he thought he heard whispering overhead: wind moving through dead grass, perhaps, or the shifting of branches. Sometimes he imagined the entire world had already ended while he rotted beneath it.
Still, he clawed upward.
Roots tangled through his curls. Stones tore strips from his knuckles. Dirt packed into his ears until he could hear nothing but the wet crust of his own movements.
Then, all at once, cold air.
A crack no wider than a wound split above him. Thin moonlight spilled through it in a pale silver line.
He nearly sobbed.
With a violent lurch, he drove himself upward. The earth collapsed around his shoulders as he burst through the surface, dragging himself from the grave inch by agonizing inch like something being born wrong.
He lay gasping on the wet grass, staring up at a sky he could now see perfectly in the dark. Wind brushed his cold skin, carrying the sharp, dizzying scent of living things moving in the valley below.
Night swallowed him whole.