There's no way this can be real, right? We can't really have just seen Damon burn Elena's body on The Vampire Diaries because that would be insane and almost too devastating to bear. And yet, there's no denying that we saw her body on fire in the casket. But before we start spiraling into a complete emotional breakdown, let's remember that there are a few possible ways that that this could play out because I refuse to believe that Elena is dead on TVD . It's just something I cannot accept, regardless of what we just all saw.
First of all, Damon is not exactly at the height of his sanity right now, so given that this was all shown from his perspective, it's difficult to know what we can and can't trust. For all we know, he could've hallucinated seeing Elena's face in the coffin just let he hallucinated seeing his old war buddy, Henry. Maybe the Phoenix Stone wants him to believe that she's dead so that he can fully morph into his bad boy self, which makes me think that no one was actually in that casket at all. Or if there was, then the body belonged to a completely random dead person.
If you noticed, Tyler went to grab his gun as soon as he let Damon into that storage bin. It was almost as if he knew that Damon would have a bad reaction upon seeing what was inside. And since he couldn't have known about Damon's Henry hallucinations, I'm thinking that the coffin didn't actually contain Elena's body. He probably knew that Damon would try to force him to see Elena at some point, so he created a "dummy" coffin for this precise purpose. And let's not forget this important piece of information...
As long as Bonnie is alive, I'm pretty sure Elena can't be harmed. So if Damon really did set Elena on fire, it made not have harmed in her any real way. The Phoenix Stone could just be messing with Damon's mind to make him think that it did. Either way, I highly doubt Elena is gone from us for good. If the writers were going to kill her, they would've done it when Nina Dobrev originally departed. Not here. Not in this way. So if I were you, I wouldn't give up hope just yet.
Image: Eli Joshua Adé/The CW
