Chapter Text
Death really was cold.
The air around Seth was cold, dark, and lonely.
They felt drunk. Drunk? No, they had never been drunk, right? Weird. They could barely remember their own name, let alone their memories, so why did they know they had never been drunk? Wait, no, their parents never allowed them to go to bars with the laws around drinks starting to tighten, along with the fact they were even a bit more androgynous than normal. At least, if their memory wasn’t lying. It was a hard and painful life, but it was at least less boring than an eternity of darkness, laying down in a hard, cramped—wait…
Why did everything feel so… cold? For all intents and purposes, they shouldn’t be feeling anything. Hell! How were they even thinking? They had been… They’d been impaled. Yet, they didn’t feel any pain.
Absent-mindedly, they raised their head, trying to look at their stomach, only for it to conk into the ceiling of whatever they were in. They yelped in surprise, quickly realizing they hadn’t felt any pain from the collision. Even stranger, they could’ve sworn the ceiling had moved.
Gathering their strength, they began to push at the potential opening. At first, they managed to budge it enough to see the faint reflection of light. But that was it, faint. They pushed more. It didn’t budge. Had it got stuck on something?
They pushed, but nothing happened.
They yelled into oblivion, but nobody came.
They strained until their muscles exhausted, and yet no angel came to their mercy.
They were gonna die here, and there was nothing they could do about it…
…
and yet…
as they began to accept their miserable fate, they remembered something:
They had been given another chance.
Something or someone had given them another chance, and they were gonna immediately squander it by giving up cause their muscles were sore? NO! They just needed to approach things from a different angle. Quite literally!
Adjusting the chamber’s lid slightly back to its original placement, they quickly pushed its other side up, opening it like a door just enough for them to use their legs to push it to the left in a massive thud.
And when the light hit their eyes, they realized what happened.
They had died. The 6 other coffins made that evident. What was stranger was their hands. They looked old, bony, and wrinkled, yet not in the way their grandma’s were. Against the dull but still prevalent light of the tomb, their skin was pale and splotchy.
How long had they been gone? While they somehow weren’t fully decomposing, it was still clear they had some decay. Along with their lack of a skincare routine, a plethora of rotten bandages made it clear whoever applied them wasn’t very good at mummification…
…
And was their hand always that far aw-
A thump from a coffin to their right brought them back to their surroundings. A couple seconds later was another, accompanied by the muffled sound of… crying? laughing maybe? It was hard to tell.
“Hey, don’t worry! I’ll be over there in a sec! Just don’t panic.”
Well, they were one to talk, considering what brought them into this hellhole in the first place, but that didn’t matter now. It was clear they weren’t alone.
Stumbling around, they started standing out of the coffin they were in, only to be met with one of the worst designed rooms ever. Sure, the creator probably hadn’t thought that some zombies would start crawling out of their caskets, but the room, or rather glorified corpse closet, didn’t even have a walkway.
Great.
Whoever made this was an idiot.
Slowly stepping over the first coffin, the muffled flailing quickly began again from the one now in front of Seth. As annoying as the sound was already getting, it at least prevented them from feeling alone.
They began to squat, putting their hands of the edge of the casket’s lid
“I’m right here. You push up as much as you can, and I’ll help move it to the side. On the count of—“
The prisoner immediately began pushing up with all their might, forcing Seth to immediately brace against the weight of the seal.
“I-I said on three idiot—“
The only response they got was a squeaky grunt.
—CRCHHNNNK—
“Do… do you just not listen to instructions—“
Before Seth sat a young girl, likely between eight and nine years old, covered in the rotten remains of what looked to be a mix of a Victorian dress and a Japanese kimono. Where her eyes should have been were a trio of perfectly-spaced holes, each surrounded by a mess of charred skin and flesh, the bare suggestions of wraps barely clinging on for dear life. Her mouth had two fangs covered in the same pale skin as the majority of her body. For all intents and purposes, she looked like she had crawled straight out of hell, the bat-wing-like clumps of hair not helping with the image in the slightest.
Seth began to vomit, a salty mix of what they guessed to be blood and acid splashing against the back of their throat. Luckily, they managed to swallow it back down before they ruined any of the strangely pristine coffins.
“Why is everything still so dark? It’s scaring me.”
…
How were they gonna deal with this?
“Why are you so quiet now? Hello? Please tell me it’s a quiet game and you’re still alive.”
“Um, yea, I-I’m fine…”
“Then what’s wrong? Something’s clearly wrong!”
Great, the zombie child didn’t know when to mind her own business OR when to shut up.
“Well, uh, a tactician never reveals their secrets! I saved you because the potential reward outweighed the risk!”
“Uuu! You’re good at playing pretend!” Ow. “It’s so dark here though! We should play somewhere else.”
“While we should probably move to the doorway, I don’t think we should go very far, considering… what happened to both of us.”
“Who’s a what now?” the strange child queried, a small centipede crawling out of the charred deformity.
“Well, um,” Seth once again had to hold back the remains of their stomach. “The whole, y’know, being dead thing?”
The girl suddenly went quiet, fidgeting with her pale but burned hands.
She turned her head away.
“I… I was hoping it was just a bad dream. It was all real, wasn’t it?”
…
“Y-yea.” As much as Seth wanted to say how much of an idiot the child was for believing in some dream-based bullshit, how she had obviously never lived in the real world, they could easily understand it, considering how they still felt like they had just woken up from a century-long-nap. Come to think of it, they probably had.
“Well, what matters right now is staying safe, and considering that you’re also ‘alive,’ I’m guessing that the people in these other coffins might start waking up too—”
“More friends? More friends!” she babbled, clapping her oversized sleeves together.
“Can you please—“ Seth sighed sharply, pinching the bridge of their nose. “Can… Can you just tell me your name? Mine’s Seth.”
“Uuu! I like Seth! Can I be also Seth?—“
“No.”
“Fine. My name’s Lucy then. Now can we play a game? This is sad and dark and boring!”
“Again, someone needs to keep an eye on these coffins so we can stay together. Trust me, I tried to be strong alone, and while I did manage to get into Waterfall, I don’t think you’d be a match for the literal king of monsters.”
Lucy once again visibly tensed up.
“Him? I hate him. I hate him so much. We played all day. I beat him so many times! I won! But he decided to not let me win! I was grabbing something, felt something cut into my head, and woke up here!” She let out a moaning sigh. “I hope the rest of this place is brighter. This isn’t fun at all.”
…
God…
And Seth thought they had it bad.
Sure, physically, their death was likely slower and more drawn out than Lucy’s, but the poor girl got impaled through the skull and didn’t even realize the ramifications. Should they tell her? Should they tell her that she’ll never see again? That she would have to live like this? Well, it might hurt, but that’d be better than lying about it, right?
“Seth? You alive?”
“Lucy, I know this might not be easy to hear, but—”
THWAK!!!
The pair turned towards the sudden crash, the lid of one of the furthest coffins shaking in place. Several seconds passed, the faint sound of wind echoing through the stone hall.
THWAK!!!
“Uuu! Who’s there—” Lucy carelessly blabbered.
THWAK!!!
“Lucy, now’s not the time for games!”
THWAK!!!
“But there’s always time for games!” the child replied as Seth quickly began climbing over the other coffins in the room.
THWAK!!!
THWAK!!!
THWAK!!!
“I’LL BE OVER THERE IN A MOMENT!!! CAN ANYONE HERE HAVE A LICK PATIENCE!?!” they yelled over the incessant sound. Even if they could understand panic, whoever was trying to get out was not making them feel safe helping. Making it to the rambunctious casket, Seth positioned themselves at its bottom corner, prying their fingers under the lid
“Ok, listen, on the count of three, you push up, I’ll drag it back—”
Seth was then promptly hit in the face with a large stone tablet.
Unsurprisingly, it was very effective.