Stephenie Meyer owns all things Twilight. No copyright infringement is intended.

Bella

London, 1837

CHAPTER 1:

Fire. There is fire all around her, licking at her limbs, torturing her skin. Thought becomes difficult as the smoke infiltrates her lungs, clouding her mind as thoroughly as the smoke filled room spinning above her head. Her will to live seeps away, like the tear that slowly flows, dripping first down her nose and cheek, and then into her hairline. She feels...sad? She cannot quite force the feeling to take a definite shape; it hovers over her instead, filling her chest with an ache that is separate and more debilitating than the smoke. Sadness. It dances before her in the shape of the flames, taunting her, but refusing to pause long enough to clarify its purpose or its source. At the edge of her awareness, another emotion takes shape: wonder.

She did not think that death would feel like this. She is surprised by the calm that she feels. She thought she would be terrified. She thought she would struggle. She has been close to death so many times, fought against it like an animal, clawed for one more breath, one more morsel of food, traded her dignity and body for shelter and sustenance, all to live. For what?

The sadness returns. For this? It asks. All those little pieces of yourself for sale, auctioned for pennies. Shattered and broken and hocked on the street. Only to die like this?

The wonder reasserts itself. It could be worse. And even in the haze of her mind, she recognizes the truth in that statement. Burning alive, but it could be worse. The laudanum dulls the pain, fills her mind with a hazy euphoria, keeps the reality at bay, makes her feel at peace with this end.

She coughs. Large, choking coughs that wrack her small frame, shaking the poor cot where she lies, leave her even more lethargic than a moment before. Just be done with it, she thinks. Her vision has narrowed to a small circle. Nothing of interest to rouse her from what should be, but somehow falls short of, an horrific death. Just a dirty ceiling, stained with the grime of the factories and the broken hopes of an endless series of tenants. Pain tickles at the edge of her awareness - but she closes her eyes and cannot be bothered. Her hearing remains acute, and she listens to the crackle of the flames that now climb up the wall and into her field of vision. She feels a moment of panic when she wonders whether the other girls will be safe, will smell the smoke and flee in time. But even that instinct of her nature - to worry for them, care for them, shield them from harm - cannot reach her now. The sadness embraces her, pulls her down into the abyss.

Time stops or time flies by -- either way, Bella Swan floats on, oblivious.

Eventually, she experiences the terror she had been expecting. Why did she think she could hide from it? Avoid it? Outrun it with the heady fumes of laudanum? When has she ever been so fortunate?

Pain laughs at this - that after all she has experienced, she can still have a moment of total naiveté. But even this haughty voice of irony is fleeting - the bitterness burns like everything else that was once Bella. The terror reasserts itself. It consumes her, eating her alive, devouring her every thought, replacing everything it touches with a single word: fire.

There is nothing but pain and fire.