"Encased in a cocoon of her own flesh and blood, Gabriella Laudicino could feel the heat enveloping her, burning the very fiber of a life that she once knew and now clung to so desperately. She couldn't move. Every time she tried reaching out for something—someone to release the painful embellishments surrounding her body, she sprung back like whiplash. What is this that ensnares me here in what I would most certainly consider hell? Her own thoughts corkscrewed with fear and horror.
She couldn't respire as she tried sucking in a breath of air, feeling her throat fill with a thick, mucus-like substance that began to cut her off just short of death. All she wanted was to die—to let the darkness take over and stop toying with her life as if there was any hope of it left.
The walls of epidermis and fluid membrane began to move, brightening at the very outer edges of its painfully dense casing. Is this it then? Is God finally giving in and taking my soul, releasing me from the depths of misery to which I would so willingly surrender to at this very moment? Her brain felt swollen with empty answers from broken questions that tortured her evaporating soul. Suddenly a loud crackling noise echoed deep within her ears, bouncing off the barriers of her inner brain. The sensation was like having her head bashed into a wall over and over again without even so much as a glint of letting up. With the crackling came more brightness that blazed on the surface of her lids burning through to her irises. She thought the twinge was maddening before, but she was wrong, so very wrong...."
