Rebirth was something that no human being could boast of having experienced. It was not even something that one could confirm with logic, nor deny it, seen from an agnostic point of view. The mechanisms that govern life and death were not something that the mind of people could know beyond what one could dream, imagine or philosophize.
Rebirth was one of those concepts within human psyche that will never be understood; a knowledge that no one was prepared to face.
Tristessa was no exception, and yet, she had just returned to life and she knew it. She remembered the moment of her own death, she remembered the aftermath of it, and now she was taking her first breaths of air, like the newborn she was.
"This is not a dream… Nothing is a dream, all of this is the real deal," the girl was forced to accept, her brain working at a frantic speed so as not to give in to panic. Blood other than her own, from that giant wolf lying dead behind her, was spreading in all directions. The light of the Twin Moons shone so brightly against the night that the blood mixed with water was a crimson mirror on the rocky ground, allowing Tristessa to see her own reflection. "I-It's me…"
Her entire bloody body burned with extreme heat, even though the night wind brought very low temperatures with it. Nothing had changed, nor had her face. Even her hair was intact, although saturated with moisture, blood and hair knots.
Only… There was something strange on her chest.
"W-what the fuck…?" Tristessa quickly lowered her gaze and saw, with growing concern, several vascular spider veins, violet and black, spreading in a small area in the space between her breasts. She put her hand on it and felt the restless beating of her heart, without any other alarming sign. However… "This is not good. It's not normal. Nothing is!"
The frustration was such that she put her hands to her head and screamed, not caring about anything else, not even the pain of her new throat.
"SHIT, FUCKING SHIT!" There was no peace for Tristessa. Truly, fate had given her a monumental slap in the face from the moment she lost her memory. Arriving in another world, dying and reviving. The cosmos was laughing at her and her misfortune. "…why me?"
Dejected, anguished and inconsolable, Tristessa looked around. This was the Red Forest, she had no doubt about it. The massive trees and the perpetual rain of leaves stretched out before her eyes everywhere, illuminated by the light of the Moons. She was in a clearing, an empty space with several parts of the terrain raised by rocky geography, but it was not that cemetery where the thorny rabbits had led her to set a trap for her: she knew it by the absence of all those hundreds of bones scattered everywhere, and more than anything by the absolute absence of predators and their symbiotic allies.
The only inhabitant of that clearing had been that giant she-wolf that lay disemboweled, with its tissues cut irregularly from a common origin, as if from that point it had exploded outwards under an intolerable pressure…
"That corridor… The Infinite Corridor, led me to the interior of this beast. One of the beasts that killed me? What is it doing here alone? Maybe…the pack abandoned her?"
Guessing and without evidence, Tristessa tried to stand up and failed epically: her legs surrendered instantly and she fell on top of that pool of blood and organs, crushing her arm and hip with her own weight.
"Ah! Ah… This is…"
Physical pain. That was her body, her real body, sensitive to the changes of reality and not a 99.99% perfect imitation that her soul had made in that limbo that she was going to define from now on as The In-Between.
Her new body, burning with fresh agony before the thirteen years of experience it had been forced to acquire in a few seconds. Another kind of torment that Tristessa found more tolerable than what she had experienced in the immaterial world.
After all, the torment of dying, and being aware of having died, and being aware of her soul being broken, and being aware of its repair by the Surgeons of Death, and being aware of having been resurrected in such an unholy manner under the guidance of that angel and demon couple… There was no possible torment that could even come close to matching the one of Death and Rebirth.
"Never again… I don't want to…" she thought, trying to stand up again, feeling the tears building up in her eyes just thinking about it. "No…"
Tristessa knew perfectly well that she never wanted to suffer that fate again; that agony that every human being feared to experience from the first moment they understood the concept of Death. That's why it was easier to associate Death with ideas of hell, of eternal punishment, in the effort to try to explain the fateful hour of dying and the aftermath. It was much easier to philosophize for millennia in search for the answer to the incompatibility of the human mind around Death.
That was how it had been, for countless centuries…until Tristessa had the dishonor of being, perhaps, the first living being to break that paradigm and find the answer to Death.
And as a result, her soul was marked with the experience of Death, wounds healed but whose origins she would never be able to shake off. Every time she thought of the death she suffered at the hands of the giant wolves, she was going to remember EVERYTHING. From the agony of being devoured alive to the torment of her soul destroyed and denied total dissolution in the Void.
"And this mark, my…" Unlike her soul, behind the spread of dark veins on her chest, her heart was firm, determined for this new opportunity. Newborn, like an infant receiving the blessing of a life that no one asked for. "…my Baptism in Ruins, it will take care of reminding me of the taste of Death and Rebirth."
Tristessa managed to stand up, the joints of her legs shaking and threatening to make her lose her balance. With a hand on her chest, covering the mark, she let out a sigh from the depths of her soul and looked into the forest, in the opposite direction of her morbid altar of Resurrection.
"I need to find people," she thought, her target, and took several tentative steps forward. She didn't fall, that was a good sign. Several more, and in no time she reached the edge with a darkness that was pathetically mundane but just as dangerous as the one in the In Between. Without further ado, she stepped through. "If I fail to find civilization, I'll fall back into the hands of the giant wolves… Or worse."
***
The hours passed and Tristessa continued to wander through the forest, blind to the path, in the dark and at the mercy of the unforgiving nature of this new world. Her naked, bloodied body trembled without restraint, and hugging herself did not help much against the night wind. The hunger she felt was voracious, twisting her unused stomach and penalizing her with extreme fatigue. She was so hungry that the idea of returning to the clearing and eating the entrails of the dead giant she-wolf did not seem bad at all, but reality dictated that if she turned back, she would surely faint from hunger or worse, die of cold, before even reaching her starting point.
"…hello…?"
"Anybody…?"
And if that were not enough, occasional spiny talking rabbits stalked her, tempting her to follow them to their den. Tristessa gritted her teeth and did her best to ignore the false voices coming from the bushes. The paralyzing anxiety; the fatality of a dark omen, her fate sealed again if she dared to follow them.
"I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die," she repeated inside her head, as many times as necessary, in order to be able to take one more step forward. "This damn forest will end, I know it. And I'll find a medieval fantasy town out of a videogame, eat in a tavern and then worry about what the hell I'm going to do next. Yes, it will be just like that."
Optimism was an interesting placebo in the face of the extremely unfavorable situation Tristessa was going through. She hoped it would come out that way, just as she imagined, but she had no way to stop crying tears of despair. Tears that carried all her fears; tears of loneliness, tears impregnated with the cruel reality: the moment her tired and injured feet stopped dragging her body, she was going to die again.
"I'm not going to die… I don't want to die… I don't want to die! I DON'T WANT TO DIE!"
With her eyes covered by the veil of tears and the darkness of the forest, Tristessa did not notice the beam of light that peeked through the trees. She was so frightened of her own ill fate that it had to be a new sound that broke her from her train of thought manufactured out of pure misery.
"By the Goddess of Order… G-girl, are you alright?!"