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She's picking her way along the path, paying close attention to her footing, so she sees the exact moment when a spitting lashing wave of shadow reaches out of the ground to swallow her.
It looks the way she imagines the underworld would look, and feels the way she imagines the underworld would feel. A cold beyond cold, a darkness beyond darkness, sinking into her bones, numbing her to all other sensation. To say that it hurts would be beside the point. It destroys. She is being peeled apart and eaten away.
Helpless, hopeless, confused and terrified, she fights. She doesn't know what's happening but she knows that she refuses to die like this, snapped up and digested by some creature out of hell.
And - she can feel it slowing down, reponding to her will. So she focuses harder. She is going to live. Intact in mind and body. She is going to come out of this with every thought, every memory, every limb and organ, every eyelash she started with. The cold cannot have her. The dark cannot have her. Death cannot have her. She demands to survive.
She falls, if falling is what this is, for a long, long time. Long enough for the chill of the grave to soak her through. Long enough for her to worry that the persistent nibbles of the void have taken all her skin off in strips. Long enough that she starts to forget what light and air are like.
But nothing can last forever. If the devouring void thought it could outwait her stubbornness, she proves it wrong.
When she finally emerges out the other side, unclothed and unarmed but intact in every particular, it takes her a long moment to remember how to work her lungs to draw breath. She coughs and wheezes, curling in on herself instinctively, and only then begins to comprehend her senses again.
