Like a fish tossed on a shore, Rhiannon wordlessly moved her lips in a grabbing-gulping motion. Her body remembered not being able to breathe, just like it had remembered being skewered two minutes ago. It lasted for a few seconds before her first sigh in this life happened and...

Slap! Rhia covered her mouth with one hand and clenched the throat with another. Her heart started fast, seemingly ready to jump from inside out on notice and take a run on its own.

Suppress the animal! Suppress the animal! She frantically begged herself. Rhia's brain had understood nothing but one thing before it died: if she were to open her eyes again, she had to be quiet, be silent, become a thousand-year rock being washed by a river. Desperately she contained screams and howls inside. She cried without tears, her whole body squirming in place.

Only little-by-little Rhi allowed herself to breathe through her nose, her entire being dreading for the universe to ignore all the efforts and send a bloody skeleton after her regardless.

One minute. Rhianna re-acquired the ability to think and started to desperately find something to distract her brain. Bones came up first, why not count all bones? A human body had 206 of them, each with its own name. She had used to memorize them all in university using various tricks. Besides bones, there were vessels, joints, muscles, plenty of things to count...

Ten minutes. She had been killed twice in less time previously, so it was a sad little triumph. Yet this sadness provided a tiny hope.

Death is not set in stone. The skeletons are not homing on me, they react to noise, maybe not even any noise.

Slowly, the tiny shivers stopped. Her heart calmed down and the howling animal some called human hid away – for a time – and homo sapience took the reins. More carefully than taking her first blood sampling, Rhiannon lifted her hands and quietly laid them along her torso.

The woman stared somewhere into empty space. The coffin lid in the dark was towering far above. It could have been in another dimension, Rhia knew well she wouldn't have the courage to touch it for a while anyway.

What is going on? Imagining a whiteboard, the woman started to consider her options.

Variants.

1) Hallucination.

Not giving it even a half of a thought, Rhi tossed it into a garbage can together with advanced virtual reality and other options with solutions circling to 'wait it out'.

2) The afterlife.

Not a big expert in religion, Rhianna still knew Christianity had a bone against idols and most of the idols the woman had seen out there wouldn't have liked competitors either.

3) Reincarnation.

Considering her new appearance, that was a decent option.

Reincarnation where though? Alternative reality? If it's Earth, the government did a damn good job hiding all this shit. Rules are not consistent with the general concept either, I keep my memories intact.

4) Consciousness transfer?

That one enticed her.

Transfer > Reincarnation > Afterlife. Rhia took another look at her imaginary whiteboard and nodded. Most ideas she briefly considered were either garbage or one of the three plus extra steps.

I must find out the rules if it's the first two or what the Earth patron it is for the third one.

I am also starting to suffocate.

The first rule then. Location.

Rhiannon actually didn't know if it was the same coffin or even cemetery each time. She never gave it a proper second look around – only a spinning one – and in this new life, she was slowly choking to death, but still powerless to open the coffin of Pandora.

"Come on. Come on. A little push," speaking soundlessly and softly like with a child, Rhia lay her palms upwards and gently pushed, then slid the lid to right.

"Okay. Okay."

When she saw a tree and cloudy sky, she stopped for a minute to calm her excited(?) blood. There was no clicking of an incoming skeleton and the local deity patron knew she tried hard to hear one. Rhianna then slid the lid even further and popped her head out.

Buddhas. Greek gods and more. Anubis. The tree attempted to prick out her eyes again.

Location. Checks out. The second rule – time. Impossible to know, so alternative second rule – casualty.

After every death, a Rhia would be spawned in a certain coffin. Would the time reset she didn't know and, frankly, it wasn't important. Did casualty persist was a much more accurate question. For example, her coffin didn't have a single sword scratch. Looking around for skeletons, Rhia gathered a few stones around, formed a 'T' on the ground, and returned into the coffin, feeling empty of strength after this simple act. Her thought roamed randomly,

"These clothes... Grandma would love that I chose the Chinese tradition."

"Work out your legs, Rhi," she ordered while on it and began to move them from toes and upwards, trying to revive the memory of the complicated art of walking.

"Is that robber guy here, too? If all those coffins contain people like me it would have been lively by now..."

"What's with this body? All five senses are intact but it doesn't look... natural. I didn't piss myself thanks to it though."

"I am really loafing here."

Rhiannon wasn't sure what she was waiting for, but she knew she was in no condition to scout the cemetery. At the very least she had to rein in the pair of appendices down there, then play hide and seek with skeletons.

"It will be a long night," she sighed and rubbed her stomach.

She felt hunger.

The world split.

One was a small outside world that Rhiannon watched in horror from a window in her mind. It was a narrow window, showing a patch of the sky, a single tree branch, and a bit of the coffin.

Was screaming for attention was another much larger thing she felt within her body. The thirsty emptiness,  it was growing like a tumor, running through veins and every cell of her manikin body. It was screaming and falling apart – no, it was Rhia falling apart. The emptiness had grown, fed by her indolence, grown and spread like a parasite taking over a new host until it put her in a cage inside her own head.

So Rhiannon could only watch the outside from a small window in her mind. She reached with an arm, saw black cracks running on the manikin's hand. Not caring, she lifted herself out of her death chest, heard its lid falling aside.

The window twitched, turning the outside world into a cacophony of images, momentary snaps of reality. Cowardice was gone. The reason was gone, too. The emptiness was too hungry to let those useless things be and too scary to allow any other fear to exist. Rhi could only run and run and run while her existence was rapidly fading away.

Click-click.

An attentive desire came from the void itself. Like a puppet, Rhiannon complied and tilted the window of her perception until it caught a skeleton with a sword walking from behind a particularly large statue.

Monster nourishment.

The woman rushed at it head-on. The smallest part of her still capable of sensing was begging for a miraculous escape. She ran awkwardly on a pair of broken sticks her legs transformed into while the skeleton was preparing its sword.

With an almost audible slurp, the window was devoured. Another slurp and the last strings connecting Rhiannon to her body were consumed. A tiny dot of light in the sea of darkness, that's what she'd become. For the first time, she properly faced it. Death. Nothingness, just the way her atheist ass had been always imagining. She didn't love it one bit.

I want to live.

Rhiannon chanted.

I want to live.