Like Air.

Death
Stillness
Inert
Numbing
Silence
Release

There is a sort of hushed peace that can be found in the enclave of one's tomb. It is the ultimate escape from one's thoughts, guilts, feelings and fears that qualm the spirit; a place where a person could escape the enslavements of the mind and experience the true meaning of serenity. The dead don’t know how good they have it.

A cold, rigid corpse stares at the interior of her coffin with listless eyes, the irises a watery, translucent violet. Nothing changes. Nothing has changed for two centuries thence.

There was no one that cared, no one that remembered. She was as forgotten as the fossils far beneath her. Ancient history.

Time seemed void and inexistent. In the grave of Fallen Archangel Mickaela, seconds turned into years and stretches of decades and centuries, passing quick and blurred like the turns of a carousel. Seasons flickered by, days took flight to weeks, and infinity was like a narrow tunnel that showed no signs of ending, claustrophobe-inducing at the immensity of the idea, a tunnel Archangel Mickaela didn’t even know she was walking.

That was, until she awoke.

A spark
A warm current
A pulse
A breath

There was a gasp, a stirring of dust, and Mickaela wheezed. There wasn’t enough air in the coffin fit for the living.

She wasn’t meant to be there.

Fingers twitched. Her body was working distortedly and disembobulated, shaking the kinks out. She was stiff and tired. The coffin was stale and enclosed. The darkness was a deep pitch black.

Once she worked up the effort, she raised her arms an inch or so and felt around to get her bearings. Wearily, she shifted around her weight, managing to move only so far until she reached the boundaries. Whatever she was in seemed to be roughly seven feet long, a few feet wide, and several inches high. It was like being trapped inside a refrigerator crate. She didn’t know where she was. It was scary.

All she remembered was… Fire. Burn. Pain. And blood.

A lot of blood.

Fallen Archangel Mickaela was a legend among the common. She’s been to places that no other current angel had ever been to before. She’s seen things from the inside. Things she never wants to see again. She would be ailed for the rest of her life with clinical schizophrenia. She’d always hear people around her that weren't really there. She’d always be haunted by souls she never could save. This future she condemned herself to seemed daunting, and if she didn’t get out of this box soon, she’d go mad.

With any remaining strength she had, she reached above her and pressed against the lid. Though she heard the coffin groan from the pressure, nothing gave way. She tried again, straining to apply more force before suffocation got to her. She felt weak.
She felt… human.

With a grim smile she realized that she was living one of her small number of fears; being reduced to a quivering, pathetic mass. Feeling diminutive. Ordinary.

With a last burst of effort, Mickaela shoved herself against the lid. The wood, shriveled and disintegrated with time, splintered, and she felt her fist break through it into cold, loosened soil. Mickaela never had a phobia of being buried alive, but now, as she experienced it, she felt a shiver of dread. The dirt started falling through into the compacted space. She coughed as more dust exploded around her and swallowed some of it. In the blinding darkness she started kicking her way through. More slivers of wood fell to pieces, and more earth began to fill her grave. She swabbed at the grime in her eyes. The earth was beginning to collapse in on itself. She choked as there was less oxygen and more soil. Mickaela thought it would never end until suddenly, there was stillness, and the shifting soil began to settle. She wedged her hands through and parted some of it aside. A draft of cool air brushed against her face. She blinked. Scouring the dirt from her eyes, she squinted and peered.

She was looking out to the night sky.

Gratefully, she breathed in and steadied herself. As she sat up in the coffin, the soil sifted through her hair. The grave was centered in a large, lonely meadow of dewy sweet-smelling grass minuscule by the starry sky above. An array of aster and lavender hyssop, the darkness dimming their hues and their scent perfuming the night, dotted the landscape and a thick ring of large fir trees enclosed the area. Mickaela relaxed her shoulders. Though she knew there would be hell waiting for her soon enough, she felt a sudden relief wash over her.

Unsteadily, she hauled herself to her feet, and crawled from her imprisonment. The grass was cold and wet, and particles of it clung to her hands. Mickaela let herself slump to the ground, fatigued, and felt the numbing cold begin to sink into her flesh. As she stared into the black abyss of the late night sky, littered with trillions of distant stars, she felt perturbed and small. When the fear came, it would strike deep and hard. She was weak and vulnerable, no matter how much she would have like to think otherwise. She was half-angel, half-human, now, in a world where demons hung around the bend unobtrusively. To feel any hope at all would be asinine. A black despair swallows her like the numbing chill seeping into her bones.

And yet…

There was always that tiny stubborn shred of hope. Fallen Mickaela was a fighter; a veteran. As insolent as she was, she was wise beyond her four-hundred-twenty-two years and insightful. Along with the new morning, she rose, a phoenix rising from its ashes, fated to be chained in confinement only to prove otherwise.

Only to prove them all wrong.

The phoenix furled back to the flaming horizon, wings outstretched, on the prowl once again and master of the air, of autonomy and rebellion.

The legend was back from the dead.