The first thing Elias noticed was the silence.
Not the normal kind of silence, but a sealed silence—heavy, compressed, complete. It pressed against his ears like cotton soaked in water. He tried to inhale more deeply and felt his chest scrape against something too close, too solid. That was when the panic arrived fully, like a switch being flipped inside his ribs.
He was lying down.
Not on a bed.
On wood.
Elias lifted his hands, brushing upward until his fingers struck a lid only inches above his face. The sound was dull, final. Wood. Nails. Something that did not move. His breath came faster, fogging the narrow space around him. The air already tasted stale, faintly metallic, like old pennies.
Memory returned in fragments. A gathering. A room too bright. Faces blurred by grief. A drink offered. A handshake. Then nothing cleanly defined after that—only a dragging sensation, like being pulled backward through thick water.
“No,” he whispered, and his voice barely existed.
He struck the lid again, harder. The coffin shuddered but did not yield. Dirt shifted somewhere above him, a distant, muffled avalanche. That sound told him everything: he was not just enclosed. He was buried.
The realization hit with a physical force that made his stomach turn. Soil above him. A layer of earth between him and air, between him and everything that mattered. He could picture it too clearly: the mound, the freshly packed ground, the small ceremony already finished.
Someone had made a mistake. Or worse, someone had not.
Elias began to dig with his bare hands. Wood splintered under his nails. Pain bloomed, sharp and immediate, but it grounded him. He clawed anyway, working at a seam where the lid met the frame. Dust filled his mouth. Every movement felt like borrowing time from a clock that had already stopped.
His lungs tightened. The air was thinning, or maybe fear was stealing it.
He struck again, again, until one nail gave way with a sudden, blessed crack. A sliver of darker darkness appeared above him—no light yet, but possibility.
He screamed then, not in words but in raw sound.
Above, the earth answered with a faint collapse. Soil trickled through the opening. The coffin groaned, protesting years of silence being broken in seconds.
Elias pushed with everything left in him.
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