This story was written for Emolichic1. Sorry for the wait, I hope you enjoy this!
"Osiris, keeper of the gate, master of all fate, hear us."
It was dark. Too dark. She couldn't see or remember anything. She waited a moment, but her eyes didn't adjust. She thought someone might have spoken. The voice had sounded familiar, but she couldn't place it or remember what it had said.
"Before time, and after. Before knowing, and nothing."
It was was obviously a woman's voice, and from the sound of the words, she was either spouting nonsense words in an unusually serious tone or performing a spell. She noticed how easily the thought of magic came to mind, and figured that she must have already known that magic was real. She wondered what her own name was.
"Accept our offering. Know our prayer."
Her name didn't matter, and for the moment, she decided that the familiar voice praying to the god of the dead didn't matter either. What mattered was ascertaining where she was, and getting out. She was flat on her back, wearing a dress that was obviously meant for summer wear and too much makeup on her face. She thought she might have fallen from somewhere high.
"Osiris, here lies the warrior of the people. Let her cross over."
She hoped she was wrong. If she could see anything but pitch black, she would probably see her breath rise in a mist in front of her, not breathing but hyperventilating. She couldn't have been. She tried to put her hands up in front of her and to her side, to see how much room she had. It was like something out of a horror movie.
She had been buried alive.
She was wasting oxygen, breathing this quickly. There couldn't be much air left, but the oxygen didn't seem to be reaching her brain. She had to get out. Now would've been a good time for the woman to speak again, but there was only silence.
She wished she knew her own name. It would make it easier to have something to call herself to snap herself out of her panic. Trying to calm down, she put her hands on the lid of the coffin, pressing her back into the cushions.
"Osiris, let her cross over!"
She pushed, hard. An orange-red light suddenly glowed from nowhere, just in time to show her that the inside of her coffin looked deceptively comfortable and that her dress was black and covered quite a lot of her. The force she was pushing with broke the top of the coffin with a snapping noise, and the surreal lighting let her see all of the dirt tumbling in on her. She screamed.
The woman screamed at the same time. "Osiris, release her!"
She pushed her way out, clawing through all of the soil that gravity sent down at her. The lid was completely broken now, being pushed by both sides, and trusted that she knew which way was up as she closed her eyes and started digging a tunnel up.
It seemed like forever, clawing her way back up to the world, but after layers and layers of dirt, her bleeding fingers touched air. Hauling herself up by one arm, her face broke the surface, and she remembered what starlight was. She thought she might have been here a few million times before, but never from this perspective. Now using two hands, she pulled all of herself up and rolled over to lay face-up on the grass.
After she had gotten used to the cold wind and the whisper of trees, she opened her eyes. The stars were out, and there were trees and grey things on the edges of her vision. She turned her head and saw that the grey things were headstones. The nearest one marked the grave she had climbed out of.
Buffy Summers sounded right to her. She was Buffy Anne Summers. She thought a bit about what the stone meant that she saved the world.
She reached over, touched the stone, and it all came back to her with dizzying force. Little sister Dawnie, Wicca friend Willow, funny friend Xander, Watcher Giles, and life as someone born to protect the world. Buffy knew she should feel guilty about not caring about them, but she didn't. At least she remembered them.
She should be home. She would kill for a snack or something to drink. Buffy supposed that she had been dead, but the thought didn't trouble her as much as why she had been woken up. Someone had done a spell to bring her back, calling the god of the dead himself.
Buffy tried to remember. She had been falling, or something like falling... she had jumped. She had so that Dawn could live and the world wouldn't have been in a hell dimension. Looking around the graveyard, which didn't look particularly hell-like, she thought it must've accepted her blood. She tried to pretend that she didn't just contemplate hell dimensions with disappointment.
She rolled herself over again, using her own tombstone to help her stand up. She had to get home.