Labyrinth

Weak to temptation as she is, she follows descending until her body touches nothing- No, until she loses her grip on anything solid. Like being plunged into liquid the same temperature as her skin.

Sensory deprivation, then falling. A shooting star? Is that what she is now? What a quaint idea, but she knows it isn't true. Whatever is to become of her-- 

It feels good. It feels right. She was made to fall into this, to descend down this-

Falling is air and sound and wind. Being lost in blackness is shards of images that aren't seen. Patterns dancing kaleidoscope across her eyes. In a cave, without light, you can see your hand move in front of your face in the darkness. It's just the brain being self aware. Guessing. You can't see anything at all. She doesn't try it now.

It's rational, Alfheim knows. That she had been only falling for- less than an hour. Less than a minute. She wasn't at terminal velocity. Her hair was hardly shifting. (Strands of gold she can barely feel, much less see.) It's the best she can do to breathe deep, to calm herself. Stop panicking. 

So, in truth, it was the air and ground and everything else was moving around her. It made her sick. (Motion sickness? No... No, that didn't make sense.) She closes her eyes and can't tell the difference. A breath.

... She should apologize. To those who she brushed off. She is dead, now- she is in hell, now. Sharing how she truly felt was missed and she regrets it- stop panicking. It gets you no-where, and accomplishes nothing. She breathes again, shuddering. Enough of this. She was just- she was simply- it was just a fever, of course, a fever dream, haha. A fever dream for a nightmare-

And then there's the string. Around her neck and claiming her air. Thick, red rope. The feeling of the darkness shifting- she can see it, she could always see it- the darkness on the inside of her eyelids. The hand moving in front of her face. She knows she can't see it, that her brain is simply filling in the gaps.

A leviathan. The leviathan. Her breath is stinging coal and burning wire in her chest. Her bones ache as it speaks. Tears down her face. The rope swings side to side, lurching her.

It's dangling her. It attracted her with pretty lights like a deep sea fish, roped her in, and holds her by a thread. The feeling of abject horror is greater than the feeling of anger. (Good, because she would not be able to fight this. She would not be able to fight something that she's not sure is real.)

She opens her mouth.

Before she can reply, that rope around her neck snaps. (Thank dreams and nightmares, her breath comes in as she starts to fall.)

Instead of response, she plummets.

Hair rushing past her. Eyes wide open, watching the rope snap about in the wind. This time, she knows she falls forever.