The place she finds herself in doesn't look much different from the one she left.  

It's not quite as hard to see- in places, it's lit by an eerie, grey-ish glow. But it's utterly black, so black that, even though she feels ground beneath her feet, it looks like she's hanging over an endless pit. And it's still cold- like an echo of the cold she just passed through. It's not that it's any warmer here, it's that she's immune to its chill. Or numb.    

Whichever it is, it amounts to the same: she's not dead. Not yet.

There's a flickering light so far in the distance that she might just be imagining it- warm and orange.

A light in the dark.    

...

Well.

She starts walking. Orangeward, since that seems to be the only marked direction available.

The light grows as she walks towards it.

It's the embers of a fire burning in a heap of bones, with something that might be a poker or a sword sticking out of it. 

Um?

She wants to approach slowly, cautious of strange new things - but everything about this place is strange and new, and the fire might at least be warm.

The fire is warm! 

It crackles as she approaches, turning from embers to flame. It feels solid, in a way that most things in this place don't.

She sits as near to it as she can get without setting herself on fire.

That's pretty close. 

For a moment, she feels safe. Something about this bonfire feels like home. 

"...no," she says aloud. Her voice sounds horrible. She clears her throat and shakes her head. "I don't know what's going on but that's not—you can't—"

She is talking to a pile of bones with a sword in it. It may be time to reevaluate her life choices.

She sighs and looks around again, trying to see what the light of the fire might reveal to her about the terrain. Her half-numb feet were mostly able to tell her that it's cold and hard but with a better grip than ice.

The fire doesn't respond; it just crackles warmly, as fires do. 

Around her, well... there doesn't seem to be much at all, just void as far as the eye can see. It's approximately like a very big cave-  only the ceiling stretches up forever, and the floor goes on forever, and any sound she makes doesn't echo. So not very much at all like a cave, then. 

There's a soft sound somewhere right at the edge of what she can hear....

She listens hard, trying to figure out what it is and where it's coming from.

The sound of metal clanking, and then- something stepping out of the darkness. A person- if you can call it that- with a skull for a face and dark, banded armour. 

It approaches her slowly, as if not quite sure what to make of her- but then it draws its sword, and raises one hand. 

"Hello," she says to the apparition.

Well, what else is she going to do? Try to fight it? Yes, that'll end well.

It raises one hand. A greeting?

Hah, of course not. Some kind of dark energy comes from its hand. When it hits, it's cold and dark, tugging at her insides, ripping something deep in her apart.. 

She cries out in pain and surprise, nearly falling into the fire.

Well, if fighting the apparition is unavoidable—that may not be a sword stuck in that pile of bones, but even if it's just a very fancy poker it's still the best weapon available to her. She reaches to pull it from the fire.

It comes out with a good tug. The handle's warm to the touch, but not so hot it burns.

The apparition takes a step back. Then another. 

Bad terrain, bad lighting, bad weapon, nonexistent armour, but she doesn't want to find out what's next on the skullface agenda after the horrible painful magic. She goes after it with the sword-poker.

Captain Hargrave would probably find this an easy fight; a pity Captain Hargrave isn't here to fight it. Lark will just have to do her best.

The bad news for Lark is that the Darkwraith is keeping its distance. 

The good news is that it seems cautious. It's not flinging out dark magic again- it's circling her, looking for a hole in her defenses.

And can she get around its defenses, with a quick arm and a sharp eye?

(Is the light fading, the fire dying without its sword-poker—? It had better not be.)

With a quick arm, a sharp eye, and sufficient dodging? Yes. The wraith has some tells- notably, it keeps trying to kick her to put her off balance, and she can see that coming from a mile away.

The fire is fading back to embers- but it's not going out, not completely.

Acceptable. The wraith can get stabbed in any vulnerable-looking places that present themselves. Face, maybe, most things are severely inconvenienced if you stab them in the face, but under conditions like these she's hardly about to limit herself.

It turns out even a skeleton's vulnerable if you stab it in the face enough. 

The thing's a sponge for damage, but soon enough, it crumples.

She prods it with the sword-poker a few times. When it doesn't move, she returns to the bone pile and carefully sticks the poker back where it belongs, then goes back to the fallen skullface and starts separating it from its weapons and armour. Stealing from a dead apparition: probably a better idea than continuing to walk around naked in the dark.

Some of it- notably the face, which looked like a helmet- seems to be fused to its skin. It'd take some cutting to get  off.

That being said, most of it comes off easily. The thing underneath is basically a skeleton, with shriveled, withered limbs. 

The armour fits decently, though, and it is better than being naked. It takes the edge off the cold.

She sits by the fire in her stolen armour and holds her stolen sword and contemplates her options.

Whatever the skullface did to her, it still feels terrible. She may be dying of it. If she's still capable of dying, which is an open question.

Okay. From the beginning.

She needs, first of all, to figure out what's going on, because in her current state of ignorance she can't even rely on such basic previous certainties as 'food, water, and shelter are necessary for survival'.

Her only material resources are a dead skull-faced apparition and a magic fire. Neither of these seems especially applicable to the question.

She turns away from the fire and stares out into the blackness, trying to wait for her eyes to adjust so she can see any visible things that might be out there. Logically, the skull-faced apparition has to have come from somewhere. Maybe there are more of it there. If she remembered the direction it came from - well, what then? Start walking that way and... fight some more apparitions, this time in the dark? Seems unlikely to help. But everything seems unlikely to help.

Something moves in the darkness. Something long and black, thick as a sewer pipe, but sinuous as a serpent. 

It's approaching her.