Murder of Crows

[TIME: ERROR!], [SPATIAL COORDINATES: ERROR!]

REALITY WAS SPLINTERING, a thousand fragments of reality twisting and folding in ways she couldn't grasp. She blinked, but it felt like everything blinked with her. The edges of all her surroundings were soft, like watercolors bleeding into one another, smudged and distorted, each layer of existence growing fainter, more distant.

Her body felt cold, yet she was burning, both within and without, her nerves screaming with each pulse of fire that surged through her veins.

No, no...

She couldn't make sense of it. Her thoughts were fraying, snapping apart like brittle threads unraveling, recoiling, and vanishing altogether. There was no sound, yet the air hummed, filled with a suffocating pressure that seemed to press into her skull from all directions. She lifted her hand, but it wasn't hers anymore. Her fingers were stretched, broken into shapes she didn't understand.

Ahead, the starry space rippled - no, it was more like a canvas, torn open, revealing shapes, jagged lines, words, whispers, and fragments of something - someone - distant, fading, but still calling. Her lips trembled, a desperate attempt to say something, anything, but the syllables were caught in the dark. It was as though her throat had turned to dust, and no sound could pass through.

Trying to keep herself together, figuratively and literally, she frantically focused whatever vestiges of mental fortitude and willpower she had left on one thing: her identity.

A useless and futile attempt it was. After all, her very being was being broken apart. What chance did a mere mortal have in the face of such a situation, where reality itself was shattered, decaying into a cosmic soup of randomness?

Yet somehow, she stubbornly pressed on, determined to endure.

Who am I?

A flash. Faces. Faces that weren't hers, eyes that weren't hers, but somehow familiar. She couldn't remember their names, but their weight pressed against her, heavy, and then gone, slipping away before she could catch hold. Her heartbeat slowed, or maybe it was speeding up - she couldn't tell anymore. Was it even a heartbeat, or something else? The rhythm was wrong. Whatever it was, it didn't belong to her.

The ground was shifting beneath her, but her feet never touched it. She didn't know how she was standing, or if she was. The stars above folded into a dark hole, the edges curling inward like the teeth of a monster.

It's eating me. It's all eating me.

No, it wasn't. It was pulling her. Drawing her in. The weight of the unseen gravity pulling at her chest felt unbearable like she was being crushed from the inside. She couldn't breathe.

Then the shattering became worse. Each thought was obliterated before it could form. The pieces scattered, too many, too fast. No, it wasn't just her thoughts. There were too many pieces of her.

Her mind. Her soul. Every part of her being was splintering apart.

She gasped. Or did she? She couldn't feel her body, only the crushing sensation, like drowning in the void, in an ocean made of nothing. It was a nonsensical paradox. Yet, she couldn't continue on that train of thought; it crashed into a wall of pain as soon as it began moving.

Then finally, reprieve. She began losing all feeling once more. Her mind, her soul, her consciousness, they all flickered one last time, and then - nothing.

She was gone.