Pain.
Not the sharp localized kind she had learned to endure, this was total and consuming, burning through her from the inside out with no regard for the fact that she had already surrendered. She had expected death to bring numbness. Silence. The absence of everything.
Instead there was only fire.
At some point it won. She stopped fighting and went under.
---
When she surfaced again there were voices.
Disoriented, overlapping, coming from every direction at once. She couldn't separate them into words and with them came panic, sudden and violent, clamping down on her chest like a fist.
She tried to open her eyes. Nothing.
She tried to move her fingers. Nothing.
Her arms. Her legs. Her head. All of it foreign and unresponsive, and the panic surged higher because she knew this feeling. She had felt it before, lying on a cold stone floor with chains around her wrists while someone stood over her deciding how much more she could take.
