Tristessa couldn't remember the last time she had eaten breakfast as voraciously as she had on that occasion, gulping down tea without caring about the burning in the walls of her throat and gobbling down slices of bread and butter as if there was no tomorrow. Ironically, as she finished the sliced apple, she realized that she could remember banal and unimportant things from everyday life, but with no other protagonists than herself. Interactions, conversations, all kinds of exchanges with people had been replaced in her memories like shadows speaking in dialects impossible to understand.
And of course, she couldn't connect her threads of thought. An ocean of disjointed memories, chaotic by mind-breaking turbulence that prevented her from finding any meaning. Dissociation in its purest form.
"It feels like I'm dreaming… But no, I know this is real. It has to be real," Tristessa thought, clenching her fists and then relaxing them. What she could remember perfectly were the wolves' teeth tearing at her body, as well as the instruments of the Death Surgeons reassembling her soul. The memory of the sensations of extreme pain made her tremble, plagued by shivers. "That torture…"
Trying to clear her punished mind, the girl sat on the edge of the bed and arranged the tea set and the dishes on the tray. Her gaze wandered to the side, towards that abandoned photograph. Out of curiosity, she took it and wiped the dust off it with the back the sleeve of her nightgown: a colorless family photo, showing Jin and Tiara dressed in formal clothes and, to Tristessa's surprise, in the company of who were apparently their children: a baby in Tiara's arms, a boy who was not yet a decade old and who was clearly not the one called Lucahn, and a teenage girl, perhaps close to adulthood, with her hair tied in a bun.
"Lucahn must be the baby. And the other two children…?" she wondered, arranging the frame with the photo on the nightstand for anyone to appreciate it. "It's a very nice memory."
It was strange to have left the photo there, dirty and abandoned. Maybe if she asked Tiara, taking advantage of the fact that Jin was out hunting… No, thinking about it better, that idea sounded extremely dangerous seeing it in perspective. Instead of running like a madwoman straight into a wall, Tristessa had to take small steps if she wanted to gain her hostess's trust. Or at least convince her that she was not dangerous, whatever the reason for said suspicion.
She could not ignore the discussion that Jin and Tiara had. There was a vortex of sadness between the words they exchanged, and that most likely had to do with the banishment they suffered.
"First things first, I will take all this to Tiara and help her with the cleaning. It's the least I can do in gratitude," the girl said quietly, determined to stand up. It didn't happen. Her legs wouldn't respond. "…alright. Haha, sure it's difficult."
She wasn't tired. Her stomach was full and she wasn't sleepy. What kept her paralyzed, sitting on the bed and shaking a little, was the astronomical level of anxiety she had been unconsciously feeding with each passing minute. It was a level of vulnerability as great as the one she felt seconds before running for her life and losing it at the mercy of the giant wolves and their small allies, the so-called spinnaraks.
What could she say and what couldn't she? What could she ask and what couldn't she? What to reveal and what not? Clearly, her great ignorance about aspects of that region that were apparently common knowledge had been something strange to Jin Mercer, while Tiara had only needed a quick visual judgment to know that there was something wrong with her.
Something that made her wish for Tristessa's quick departure from her home.
Needless to say, the girl had then taken it upon herself to put her feet deeper into the mud, but it was too late to remedy mistakes.
"Maybe Jin could believe that I have amnesia, but Tiara surely won't," she thought, letting out a sigh that echoed in the silent room. "What can I do to gain their trust?"
She took a deep breath, purging part of the uneasiness, and stood up, knowing that she wasn't going to make any progress sitting there immersed in doubt. With the tray with the tea set in her hands, she was about to go towards the door but a thought suddenly invaded the forefront of her mind.
"If I go out like this, I'll look like a shameless girl." Tristessa looked down at her nightgown, a bit too big in the waist and clearly made for a bustier woman. "Maybe in the wardrobe…?"
Inside the wardrobe were several sets of clothes covered in dust, mostly dresses accompanied by corsets that she had no way of trying on herself.
There was a fantastic and cool black trench-coat, asking her to shake the dust off it and try it on.
"…perhaps it's a bit too much."
The simplest and easiest thing to wear—not to mention that it was perhaps the only articles her size—was a white shirt, black pants, and gray shoes.
After finishing dressing, Tristessa looked at herself in the mirror, which had been damaged by years of constant attack by moisture. With one eye she analyzed her own appearance, but with the other she watched her reflection with a certain paranoia, with the memory of her encounter with her doppelgänger still fresh in her mind.
"Absolutely ordinary. Add a tie and I could pass for an office worker. Or at least that's how it would be on Earth," she thought, stretching her shirt a little further under her pants to remove wrinkles. From her point of view it was nothing outstanding but it was the closest thing to the modern style of her world. "Anyway, there is something more important than what one wears over one's skin."
Smiling, Tristessa took the comb she had found in one of the inner drawers of the wardrobe and began to run it through her hair, now clean and without any trace of blood. The sensation was comforting, relaxing her latent nerves. With each stroke, the nausea she felt vanished and her worries seemed to lose some of the weight they inherently possessed.
Soon, that onyx-colored waterfall that hung from her head was almost perfect, smooth and soft to the touch, only lacking a touch of perfume that unfortunately she was not going to find there.
"I'm ready," she whispered, after leaving the comb in its place and taking the tray with the tea set. She let out a sigh, a last effort to ease her nerves. "…I'm not ready."
Outside she instantly found herself with the stairs that connected to the ground floor. She went down, her footsteps threatening to make the wooden surface of the steps creak. The hall of House Mercer was filled with evidence of the story Jin had told her about the place: stuffed animal heads hanging on the walls, skins used as carpets, and glass-enclosed shelves protecting valuable body parts like claws and small bones, and the occasional archaic weapon such as bows, crossbows, and hunting knives.
The cup and teapot clinked dangerously as the girl's hands began to shake, the moment she passed by the stuffed head of what was clearly a giant wolf. Her feet betrayed her, freezing in place so that she would be subjected to the gaze of the predator that killed her.
"Calm down… Everything is okay…" she whispered quietly, trying to lower her heartbeat. It was impossible not to remember their mouths dripping with warm saliva and fresh blood, those teeth piercing and tearing. The implicit evil in those red eyes, creatures that fed on the flesh and fear of their victims. "…Ugh…Ah…"
"Are you scared of Vargs, Miss?"
By some miracle Tristessa didn't throw the tray into the air in fright. Her eyes were freed from that paralyzing curse called terror and they lowered, finding the chubby face of Lucahn Archeos, looking at her with a friendly and adorable smile. He had inherited his mother's hair color, as well as her curls, and he was wearing a mustard-colored cloth sweater, shorts, and socks that almost reached his knees. He hugged a large book to his chest, with a title engraved against its leather surface and written with symbols that Tristessa had never seen before.
"You are Lucahn, right? Yeah, they scare the hell out of me," she replied, managing to form a nervous smile.
"Vargs are the most dangerous beasts in the Sea of Trees at the End of the World, Miss," he explained, standing next to the glass case that housed the wolf's head and pointing at it with his finger. "Their bite is so strong that it can crush bones with ease."
She knew that much, having experienced it firsthand. Still, Tristessa's fear slowly faded at how adorably cute the boy looked like this, a scholar in the making.
"It is said that vargs used to be ordinary wolves, until the Dark Lady possessed them with her malice and turned them into these beasts. They subdue weaker creatures with fear and force them to hunt for them, such as spinnaraks. Isn't that interesting, Miss?"
It was, a frightening way. But Tristessa had been stuck with a concept that disturbed her, and as she tried to say it out loud, the words refused to come out.
It was as if they were permeated with fear.
"D-Dark Lady?"
Lucahn blinked several times, but his calm composure did not wane one bit as he explained.
"Well, the Shadow Queen, of course," he said, and put his index finger to his lips. "But don't say her name out loud, or she'll come and curse you."