There was no waking. There was only a slow, reluctant return to the agony of existence.
Consciousness was a single, searing point of pain located somewhere on her back. A hot, angry brand that seemed to pulse with a life of its own. From that single point, other pains began to bloom: the sharp, stinging fire of the lashes, the deep, aching emptiness of her veins, the throbbing drumbeat of a headache that threatened to split her skull in two.
She was cold. A deep, profound cold that had nothing to do with the damp stone beneath her and everything to do with the life they had drunk from her.
She tried to open her eyes, but it made no difference. The world was a seamless, absolute black. Not the gentle, familiar dark of a bedroom at night, but a thick, suffocating, and total absence of light.
