She jolts forward, as though awaking from a bad dream, except for all the ways that this is nothing like that. 

She's...pretty sure that if you die in one of the afterlives* you're just gone. She should be just gone. But she--has limbs again; hands, legs, fingers--she raises them into her field of vision and flexes them just to be sure--

Maybe she was...not killed, somehow. Removed from the jaws of the presumably-a-demon that had her before the life, such as it was, could be snuffed out of her--that someone had made a mistake in sending her to the Abyss in the first place and snatched her out of it to re-sort properly. 

Her surroundings...aren't, as far as she can tell. The space around her goes on indefinitely, with no visible horizon, no ability to distinguish between firmament and fundament. It's...white, sort of, but not the white of things that are white, more like an opposite of the blackness of impenetrable darkness, except you would expect that to be blinding and this isn't.

There is one other person in this space with her.

"You're not Pharasma."

*as a petitioner. Plane Shifts don't count.

"I'm not," the woman says sympathetically. 

Not only is Seshka's companion not the Lady of Graves, she doesn't appear to even be any psychopomp; in point of fact, she appears to be an angel.

"--Did you rescue me from the Abyss?" 

Wince. "I'm afraid not. You see, the ineffable Will of the Multiverse selects people who have just died--truly, completely died, not the ordinary kind of dying you're used to where you get shuffled off to an afterlife--to reincarnate in other worlds under certain conditions." 

"...Is the Will of the Multiverse Pharasma," Seshka asks suspiciously. 

Headshake. "No. I'm afraid we're outside of Pharasma's Creation as you know it." 

"--Are we in the Dark Tapestry!?"

Firmly: "No. The Dark Tapestry, as you know it, is, if not part of Pharasma's Creation exactly, attached to it in a way that this place is not. This place is both farther from anything you've known than you previously believed possible, and more comprehensible than you ever would have guessed something so far away could be." 

"I guess that demon did get me. Or whatever it was."

"I'm afraid so. I'm sorry." 

Deep breaths. 

"You said, reincarnated into other worlds. In circumstances. What does that mean?"

"Basically, we're going to make up a fictional narrative, and then instantiate you into a new universe, designed from the ground up based on that narrative."

"Wh...why???"

"The Will of the Multiverse," the angel says, "is ineffable." 

She doesn't say it as though imparting some great wisdom or even expositing some fact of reality. She says it through narrow, pressed-together lips, while looking off to the side as though some person she despised and also were personally unimpressed with were three meters to her right. 

Oh no. 

"How fucked am I?"

"...Not that fucked, in the grand scheme of things. Certainly less fucked than you would have been if we hadn't scooped you up. The 'Will of the Multiverse' has a certain predilection for, shall we say, finding narratives more immersive with real people in them, but they aren't, as far as I'm aware, especially into narratives where things are completely hopeless. You have a certain amount of control over the circumstances you'll find yourself in, and I have a lot of experience guiding people through the process in ways that get them as much of what they want as they can." 

"...Are there any options that will let me go home, to my mother." 

"So there are actually a couple of things we can do there--the first and most obvious is that we can set your new world on a time-delay, so that it doesn't start until certain conditions are met, and we can wait until your mother also dies permanently enough that we can scoop her up, and then instantiate her as your mother again in your new universe. The other thing..." The angel looks slightly to her left, and pokes at something invisible in the air with her finger. "...Normally, I could set you up with a magic system that would let you travel back to your home universe fairly easily once the designated 'plot' of the narrative was over, but unfortunately Pharasma's Creation has...barriers to entry, so to speak. I can set you up with a magic system that will do dimensional travel, I can apply to make it possible for you to go home, but actually making that possible will be up to the External Relations department and whoever they send to negotiate with Pharasma. I can advise you on things that will make it more likely for them to succeed, but even if you ruthlessly optimize for it I can't absolutely guarantee that it will be possible." 

...Seshka frowns, twiddling her fingers thoughtfully. 

The thing is, she really doesn't expect her mother to perma-die anytime soon. She'll be incredibly upset that Seshka is gone, of course, but--frankly she expects that to result in horrible things happening to witch hunters, not to Mom. Even if she is killed, if she happens to get unlucky in a different way from Seshka, she could be turned into an outsider and forget herself and live for eons and eons more. 

And even if she knew for sure that Mom was going to die eventually, she would still be condemning her to her grief until the end of her arbitrarily prolonged lifespan, when she could instead fix it--perhaps not immediately, but still--by coming back. 

Or at least try to. 

"Is there any way to...try that, and then, if it doesn't work, whenever she dies you scoop her up and put her in this new world not as my mother...?"

"That should be possible, yes. There have been cases where clients of mine set up their new universes to automatically scoop up everyone who permanently died in their old one, but I can guarantee you that if you did that, you wouldn't be able to connect back to Pharasma's domain. But a conditional where a specific scoop happens only if that's already not happening is the sort of relatively if/then situation I can set up easily." 

Hell exists; "people who are permanently dead" isn't even the most critical class of people who need rescue, really. And, like, Geb exists; it has to be theoretically possible to retrieve even people who were killed in afterlives. So not worth cutting off the possibility of getting back. 

"If I picked the other option, where I asked to wait until Mom died, would that also cut me off?"

"No. A state of ongoingly receiving the dead would be an obstruction; raising the finite number of dead collected for the initial deployment of the world from one isn't nearly as big of an issue." 

"...Does that mean I can ask for people not my mother? Without fucking anything up?"

"Yep." 

"I am...guessing but not assuming that I can't get Arazni."