When she first died, she had panicked, not knowing what had happened to her. It was entirely dark, and she hadn't known at first that she was somewhere else at all, and not still in the abandoned manor with the vampire, having fallen down the stairs or been shut up in some room. Then she had supposed she was in hell. Then she remembered that all souls were purified in purgatory before moving on to heaven, and had hoped that that was where she found herself.

Then she had encountered the first demon. She didn't think there were demons in purgatory. She killed it with her bare hands, unable to see, and tasted its raw innards to see whether they were anything like food, and ran her hands along the outside of its shell to see what it might look like if she could see more. It was hard-shelled and close to the ground, with many legs, like a large crab. Every part of it tasted spoiled. She didn't eat the first one. Later on she risked it. She was not sure whether illness or starvation was worse for the dead, but at some point she grew tired of starvation and supposed she might at least try the other option.

She thought a lot, the first few days, about all the things she had done wrong to get here, but it wasn't very appealing to go through them again, now that she had no hope of redemption. But she did pray, even here, before she slept and after she woke up, as she had every day for more than a decade, because for whatever reason being in hell did not seem like enough of a reason to stop.

She supposed, later on, that she must have seen the light from a very long way off. It seemed unlikely that she would have ended up near it by accident, and she might have noticed one portion of the endless dark sky being lighter than another without realizing it. Eventually it had grown bright enough for her to realize that she was beginning to see the shapes of things, the barest outlines, and she realized that she could see other shapes in the darkness flowing past her, towards the source of the light.

Eventually she found the tear, letting enough light through to see the situation: a river of demons all flowing through some gap in the land and the sky, into some other place.

She stalks the edges of the area in the muck, slathering herself in it until she supposes she might not even look like a person anymore. She waits until she finds what appears to be an opening, a path through the river if not through the gap itself, and then charges through with the crowd as quickly as she can.

The other side has a sky that is blue, or at least gray, or at least possessing clouds. It is utterly overrun by demons. But it looks like a place where people might live, maybe, if the demons weren't in the way. It has light. It's also much colder than the last place. She hadn't thought much about being naked, before, having been occupied with other problems, but she thinks about it now.

She pauses a moment too long, at the edge, and gets attacked, either for being in the way or for still being identifiably human, under all the muck. But her attacker has the bad sense to use a sword, which she manages to wrest away from him, and then after she's dispatched him she herself has a sword.

She runs, with more demons on her heels. She doesn't know what direction she's running in. She just knows that, dead or not, her instinct is to find warmth or shelter before she freezes or something else runs her through.