Catastrophe found herself alone, and in a field.

This was rather unusual as last time she had checked, she had not only been flying, but she had been in the middle of a battle as well.

Which was no longer the case. At any rate, she was in a field full of grass as far as the eye could see. Rather relaxing place, she guessed. The sun was high up in the sky, the clouds were lazily drifting on a light silvery zephyr.

The grass was rather tall, actually. Came up to her beak. She had to part the grass with her beak to get any where in the mess of grass. Verdant, it was a color of green that didn’t seem real, it was purity.

She took a deep breath and tasted the air. The air was sweet, like... honeysuckle... It tasted better than anything she could imagine.

On a hunch, she leaned forward and nibbled on a stalk of the grass that surrounded her. Instantly, a sensation of purity washed through her and seemed to leak into every one of her pores. She shuddered a little, then decided to keep right on walking.

Something was wrong here, and she didn't know what it was. The sky was too blue...

No, that wasn't it, the sky was the right shade.

The grass was too green...

No, that wasn't it. The grass was the right shade.

The air was too-

It hit, her, all of a sudden, that she hadn't had to take a breath until she decided to taste the air.

She blinked a few times, trying to figure out exactly what that actually meant. She didn't need to breath in this beautiful placid paradise. She took a breath, just to be sure that it wasn't her imagination, and found that it was an actual effort to do so. She had to focus on doing it.

She didn't have to breath, and she had no idea what that actually meant.

Catastrophe knew that she was not the smartest griffon in the world. She knew that she wasn't even close, but far more importantly, she knew that when things weren't breathing... they tended...

To be dead.

It was with this, that she realized something else fairly important about not breathing. Without the sound of her own breathing, it brought to her attention that her heart was beating either. The organ that had been the reason she was living, for the most part, was, indeed, to her shock, no longer working.

"-t do you mean the magic isn't working?" She started at the sudden noise, jumping high enough to clear the grass. The grass seemed to stretch on into infinite, without cessation.

"I don't know, dammit, the healing is just sliding off of her!" Canary...

Like a solid cloud, a suddenly deep and compelling revulsion for the noise went deep into her, into her very soul. Bitterness seeped in, now. Who were they trying to save? She was dead, dammit. DEAD. ACCEPT IT, ASSHOLES.

"Then use more magic." Ivan roared, snapping through her thoughts. Catastrophe growled, throwing her wings out with a powerful snap that flattened stalks of grass around her in a fan shaped blast. She snarled louder and louder still, remembering just how... painful...

She remembered the pain of something hitting her in the chest and she had the sudden surge of blind anger that she could only imagine happening from an unjust death. No... She was not....

She was dead, she wasn't breathing now...

"I already used all of our stores, Ivan." Canary yelled out, then let out a yelp after a meaty sounding THWACK echoed out.

"Our stores of life? Then......" Ivan cut off in a harsh explosion.

She narrowed her gaze and took off running through the grass. Nonono... This was all going wrong. She couldn't be dead.

She was dead. She was going to go cold, and she should really be moving on with the rest of her unlife.

"Then I'll use you as a life source!" Ivan startled her again, then a wet cutting noise sounded out.

"Are you mad?"

"No, I'm motivated you fucking bastard. Now hold still so I c-"

Catastrophe bowed her head and kept right on running, ignoring everything. She didn't need to hear this, she needed to move, didn't she? She had to move on, this was what was right, what was supposed to happen, what was happening.

She had to move on...

She kept running through the fields of sweet grass, the sky above calling her name in a way that only griffons can understand, truly.

“Sera Ascent.” A quiet whisper came from almost directly in front of her, once more startling her from her own quiet contemplation of the lack of her own heart beat.

“Sera Ascent.”

A few seconds passed before she started to recognize the name.

It was her own, of course. Before she went by Catastrophe, she was Sera, a...

It didn’t matter who she was. She was dead. She was dead.

“That’s not my name.” Her voice... was rough, like it hadn’t been used. She felt like she needed to breath, so she did, taking in a lung full of what was most certainly the sweetest smelling air in all of existence.

“Sera Ascent, you have died.”

She felt something entirely wrong about that statement, like it wasn’t entirely true. Like... Like an inkling of an idea that the world wasn’t entirely the way she had always thought of it.

“My name isn’t Sera.” She snarled, anger coursing through her. She liked this anger, it was good, it was filling, it was like a raw piece of meat in her beak, blood spewing out in a jet of life’s ichor, like everything she had ever wanted, to be alive, to be remembered, to be alive! To be REMEMBERED! She didn’t want to die, she wasn’t going to die, she was going to live, she could feel the blood dribbling out of her chest like a weak kitten desperately crawling for a taste of mother’s milk, she could feel the pain, she could feel life SHE COULD

But she was dead.

But someone was in front of her with a black cloak and a single rune that glowed with bright azure light.

“Your name is Sera Ascent.”

Catastrophe snarled, another lance of white hot righteous indignation roaring through her head.

“And you are dead.”

She let out a roar of denial now. She wasn’t dead yet, she was still here, in front of someone who could very well be the literal face of death himself.

“FUCK YOU AND DIE!”

“Now... I am willing to cut a deal with you, Sera.” The figure spoke without any lips, the skeletal, bare face not moving an inch from the grinning griffon skull that resided beneath the cloak. “And you must understand that I have been authorized to allow you to dwell here, in the Elysian fields, forever more instead of rotting in the depths of Tartarus like you were destined to.”

“My name is Catastrophe.” She growled in response, the figure shifting and swaying. “And I do not do deals with those I do not know the names of.”

“I am an agent of He-who-in-light-purges. I am willing to offer you redemption at the cost of shaking off the hold that foul He-who-walks-in-Malice has upon your soul, currently.”

Catastrophe blinked at that. She had that goddamn spider on her? “...”

“You cannot truly die until he is removed from you, and if you choose not to do this willingly I assure you that you will reside in the darkest bowels of Tartarus for the rest of eternity.”

She let out a huff and turned away from him, arms crossed.

“I’ll not do business to anyone who talks in tongues, refusing to tell me the real reasons for your actions.” She replied in the same tone and tongue as he, trying to get her point perfectly across.

“You will see your parents again, and all your sins in life shall be forgiven.”

She paused from her grumbling, at that part of the deal, and looked over at the cloaked figure. “I have no parents.”

The figure growled, then lunged at her, the cloak drifting aside to reveal the skeletal frame of a griffon, bright blue azure fires for eyes, a ghostly blue glow surrounding the entire construct. She snarled, then blinked as it sailed over her.

She turned to follow the trajectory of her new foe in the Elysian and watched him drift towards an abstract collection of golden light.

It reminded her of Ivan, oddly enough. Like... the gentle... soul...

FUCK!

She raced after him, taking to the air to try and block him.

“If you will not remove the taint from your immortal soul, THEN I SHALL DO IT FOR YOU!” The skeletal figure almost made it, right before Catastrophe wrapped her hand around one of its long bony legs and tugged him out of the sky.

What followed was probably the most literal example of beating death that anyone could ever expect.

“FUCK!”

Cata slammed her fist into the skull of the thing that was offering her heaven, almost fracturing her dead lifeless arm.

“YOU!”

She slammed her fist again, feeling her wrist buckle now, her arm shattering from the savage fury of her strikes on the one that dared try to reunite her with her long departed family!

“AND!”

She slammed her new stub again and again, ignoring the agony, ignoring the feeling of lifelessness that was starting to set in, she stabbed her jagged shards of arm into the skull, breaking it even more.

A tiny, almost impossible to see crack appeared in the bone surrounding a skeletal blue flame eye.

“BURN!”

She grabbed him in her wings, beating him with her face, feeling her flesh red. Nobody dared to touch her zebra, nobody was going to fucking touch him ever if she had her way with the issue.

“IN!”

She slammed her other fist into his face, trying to widen the crack that was now forming. Blood gushed from her stump and she ignored the exquisite agony, so deep was her rage.

“HELL!”

The crack widened, then split, the skull turning to powder. Gone were her arms that she could use to punch death in the face, they had long become useless.

This was the force at which she mauled death.

“YOU!”

She stuck her beak into the skull and started tearing, desperately trying to protect the only thing that still seemed to brim with life in the perfect Elysian fields that surrounded her.

“FUCKING!”

She mauled and mauled and ground her beak, burning her face in the abomination of fire as she desperately tried to destroy the one thing she knew could possible return her, the one thing that DARED to ever offer Catastrophe, the fallen Sera, the one thing that could possible offer her a return to the light.

“PANSY!”

SHE MAULED AND MAULED AND THE FIELDS STARTED TO BURN!

“BITCH!”

The world seemed to waver, and there was a surge of pure agony, like a lightning bolt striking her. Beneath her, death stopped existing, fading away into powder.

And suddenly, she was on a familiar battlefield, bleeding out through a hole in her heart. She was in pain, and now she smelt burnt, and electricity still shook through the one person on the planet she cared for.

Ivan stood before her, a look of such avid heartbreak that seemed like he was the one with the bullet through his heart, not her.

She barely managed the energy to smile at him, despite all the agony.

“...Fuck you. I’m not dying that easily.”

She gurgled.

She was still bleeding profusely. Fucking Canary better not fuck that part of the healing up.

With that, she collapsed, pretty damn sure she was about to live.