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.
Serafina quickly twisted around inside the coffin that surrounded her, pressing her hands against the cold, hard wood.
Her palms were sweating. Her breaths were getting shorter. Her lungs tightened, making it more and more difficult to breathe. A surge of panic poured through her. Her soul had reunited with her body. She was alive! But now she was going to run out of air and die!
She kicked her feet against the end of the coffin. She pounded her fists. She scratched and she scurried, she twisted and she pried, but she could not escape. Just as before, the boards surrounded her on all sides, close and narrow and low.
She hissed with frustration. After all she’d been through, she was going to suffocate in a black coffin buried six feet under the ground! It wasn’t right! It wasn’t fair! She wanted to scream and cry!
“Quit your mewling, girl, and get on with makin’ yourself useful!” she imagined her pa telling her. “Figure out what needs to be done and do it!”
Gritting her teeth, she tore off her dress and wrapped it around her head to protect her nose and mouth. Then she spun around onto her stomach, put her shoulder to the center of the coffin’s lid and pushed. She pushed and she kept pushing, over and over again, hammering her shoulder against the center board, bang, bang, bang.
When she finally felt the board cracking, she spun around and pulled at the edge of it with her fingers. A massive heap of dirt poured on top of her, crushing her down.
She shoved the dirt into the corners of the coffin until she had packed away as much of it as she could. Then she pushed her head up into the hole and started digging, scraping frantically with her bare hands. The loose earth poured down around her head and shoulders, collapsing onto her faster than she could dig it away.
She felt the pressing, suffocating weight of it all around her, closing in on her, crushing her chest, trapping her legs, but she kept clawing, kicking, squirming her way blindly up through the darkness, desperately trying to breathe.
She dug frantically toward the surface, but she knew she wasn’t going to make it. She was too small, too weak, too frail, too dull. Her puny, soft, skin-covered fingers were nothing against the dirt. She was going to die.
“No! No! No!” she growled deep in her throat, until she was making one continuous growl.
She had one moment, and the moment was now. She could stop moving, stop breathing, let the earth win. Or she could envision what she wanted to be and become it.
She growled and she kept growling, the anger building inside her. She felt it coming now. She felt her whole body beginning to change. It was unstoppable now.
She envisioned her mountain lion mother and her black panther father. She was a catamount through and through. She was the Black One, the warrior-leader of the forest. It came like a great volcano, exploding from deep within her.
Suddenly, the earth around her expanded with a great heave, giving way to her newly muscled girth. She felt her tail twisting, her four feet clenching and clawing against the dirt. She began digging anew, filled with panther strength and power.
Her claws tore into the earth, ripping it away with lion ferocity. Her powerful legs pushed her upward toward the surface, toward air, toward life.
Her face and whiskers pushed against the dirt, her panther ears pressed back against her head as she shoved herself upward. Her powerful chest filled with a deep, dark, throbbing growl, like the roll of thunder through the ancient mountains where she’d been born into the darkened world.
As she dug, she heard a frenzy of scratching noises, digging down toward her.
Her upstretched claws clacked with the claws of another catamount. It was Waysa, digging frantically, and Gidean digging at his side!
“You’re almost there!” Braeden shouted as he dug toward her.
“Come on, cat, dig!” Rowena urged as she pulled handfuls of dirt away.
Finally, Serafina thrust her panther head up into the air and took in a long, deep, desperately needed breath. She felt the warm night air pouring into her mouth and down her throat and into her lungs. She felt her lungs filling with blessed air, expanding like a great bellows, her chest heaving, pushing easily against the loose dirt still around her. She felt her heart pumping, her bones pushing, and every muscle in her body at her beck and call.
“You made it!” Braeden shouted, as she clambered the rest of the way out. “You made it!”
Standing on four feet now, she threw the dirt from her black coat with a mighty shake. The entire world loomed large. She saw the angel’s glade and the forest, and the stars above the trees. Her lungs could finally breathe! She was alive in the world, whole and complete! She was alive! She lifted her yellow panther eyes, and gazed at the smiling faces of her friends all around her.
Serafina shifted into human form and looked around her at the angel’s glade, trying to understand what had happened.