It didn’t stop.
Twiilight drifted in and out of consciousness, slipping from dreams of being eaten by a tatzl worm back to a confusingly less pleasant reality. The cold had seeped into her well enough to chill her to the bone, false warmth creeping after it to wrap her body in the strangely comforting grip of frostbite.
She sought to channel magic through her horn - just a spark - during that first period of awareness. Fire lanced through her horn and back through her skull, driving a pounding headache into her brain.
It was a mistake she made three times more before the pain managed to get its point through to her.
Every attempt at breath remained little more than dragging grit across her throat, and her bloody hacking grew more so; yet still her lungs worked. She had not drowned, not died of blood loss, nor shock, nor wishing desperately for this experience to end.
Despite all reason, she was not dying.
Her worse-than-useless breathing quickened, dragging claws over her respiratory tract as panic surged through her mind. Not dying. Buried alive. Trapped forever.
A slight spark of hope. Not dying. Her friends would find her. Her friends wouldn’t lose her. She could endure this for them. She had to.
As this started to calm her, she managed to reflect: her breathing was worse than useless. She didn’t need to breathe. If it kept up they’d pull her out in worse shape than she already was.
So she stopped.
The instinct did not give in easily; but she found that her lungs did not cry out for air with overwhelming force, and with the option between holding her breath and drowning continually in sandpaper, the measure was needed relief. She still couldn’t breathe deeply to calm herself … but there was a great deal she couldn’t do right now and a bit of panic was justified. Just. Don’t hyperventilate. No more razors in the throat, that was the goal.
Focus on her friends. Was the cove they dug out enough shelter for them, or did they wind up crushed like her - or worse? No. No, it would have been enough. Could they get out though? Or would they be buried alive, and stuck? Freeze? They had Spike’s flame, but that might use up what air they had … had plenty of body heat though … could pegasi make air, was that how she didn’t need to breathe?
A few sparks of magic, doing little yet and barely noticed, managed to gather on her horn without pain.
Fear mixed with wild speculation, flowing into dream and back into reality, breath held often as she could manage the agency to, for a length of time she was in no state to accurately estimate. Blessedly, her body grew increasingly numb, even sensations other than pain washed away in the heat of freezing.
Until, finally, her surviving ear picked up the most wonderfully horrid sound it had heard in some time: the scraping of claw through rock, and familiar crunch of strong fangs.