Leaving Tristessa speechless and visibly terrified, the housewife went to the dining room with a mop and a bucket full of water. There was no doubt that her threat had been serious. All the anxiety that the girl carried overflowed like a drop falling into a full glass; she had to hold herself against the counter to keep from losing her balance, breathing deeply and swallowing hard.
"Don't you know what power crystals are, miss? Look, that's how you change them!"
With eyes close to bursting into tears, Tristessa looked sideways at the boy, who had approached the lamp. Crouching down, he opened the small grate at the base and disconnected the small crystal from a metal plate, instantly turning off the artificial light of the lamp but not the faint phosphorescent glow it seemed to have by default.
"We took the spare one, put it in and…done!" he exclaimed, following those steps with another crystal of the same size but a different shape. The metal plate attracted it and the lamp's light came on again, this time with a little more intensity. "Here, look!"
Lucahn approached the silent girl and offered her the almost exhausted crystal: it was cold to the touch, contrary to what one would expect given its function, and it caused a very slight tingling in the tips of the fingers.
"When daddy comes back we will give it to him, so he can put it together with the other used crystals and Mr. Severus will take them to… Miss?"
Tristessa had barely paid attention to the explanation; she had even taken the crystal unconsciously. A new technology, never before seen in her world, but the fear of Death was overwhelming, overcoming even one of the most basic of human instincts, which was curiosity.
"Miss Tristessa?"
Hearing her own name had a major effect on her, causing her to blink several times and tear her frightened gaze away from the threshold that led to the hall. She happened to see the cute face of the child in front of her, his peace waning and manifesting in a worried expression.
"It's okay, Lucahn." She sketched a smile, false and fragile, while repeating in her head over and over that Tiara was a woman who only cared about her son. Nothing more, nothing less. "S-so, crystals, huh? Where I come from, we don't have these. How are they made?"
"The thaumaturges make them in their alchemy temples, but I don't know how," he replied, shrugging. He accepted the crystal from Tristessa, while she absorbed the new concepts presented to her. "Mommy should know, she's a professor and she teaches me everything she knows. I want to be like mommy, a professor!"
"Well, let me just say that you're on the right track." Tristessa encouraged him and reached out a hand to give him a friendly squeeze on the shoulder, but regretted it almost instantly, her mother's harsh words attacking her conscience. Her hand ended up pointing towards the table, in a quick signal of guidance. "Tell me, what were you reading?"
Putting herself together as best she could, Tristessa walked over to the table and sat down next to the boy. Her uneasy gaze drifted to the kitchen entrance, unable to stop thinking of Tiara's dark countenance and the knife she had pocketed.
"It's a storybook. It has The Dark Tower, The Dawnsinger, Endrel, and Margules," Lucahn commented, turning the pages carefully. The paper was a little yellowed, and the edges worn with age. "Do you know any, miss?"
"No... I haven't had a chance to tell your parents yet, but I can't remember much of my life up until the moment Jin found me in the forest," the girl justified herself, half lying. By the confused way the boy looked at her, she laughed in order to calm the atmosphere, as if her amnesia was something unimportant. "I don't know anything about stories, about crystals, about End World. Nothing at all. Not even what this world is called."
"Well... it's called Nekrom. In honor of the Goddess Nekronomika, the first and only one to die," he answered, clearly worried and looking with wide eyes at his companion, not knowing how to treat her now that he knew her condition. "Look, here."
Lucahn turned to the first page of the book, where Nekronomika was illustrated as a female humanoid entity hugging in a dream a sphere of light almost the size of her body, surrounded by the darkness of an empty universe.
"In the time before time, Nekronomika gave birth to the infinite worlds, but they were all empty and cold," the boy recounted, reading the glyph text beneath the drawing that took up half the page. "Tired by her unending birthing, Nekronomika fell into an eternal sleep, and her will split into the fundamental aspects that make up the whole, to finish her work: Order, Balance, and Chaos."
Forming the vertices of an equilateral triangle, three entities surrounded the Goddess: a woman with a staff in one hand and a slab in the other; a man with a scale in his right hand, and another man with a dark vortex in both hands.
"The Goddess of Order, Xiliarra.
The God of Balance, Kantrus.
And the God of Chaos, Vel'Moran.
The Three Aspects sought to lay the foundations of reality under their own laws, opposed to each other and in constant conflict."
Lucahn turned the page, while Tristessa listened, her troubled mind calming down little by little.
"Xiliarra sought to fill the worlds with Life, Light, perpetuity, and perfection; a vision of Order destined to fail.
Kantrus sought to fill the worlds with perpetual stability, without time and without momentum; a vision of Balance where everything was nothing.
Vel'Moran sought to fill the worlds with Death, Darkness, strife and entropy; a vision of Chaos incompatible with any living being."
Finally, Lucahn turned to the last page of that tale, where Nekronomika vanished into the darkness of the cosmos, and her three aspects took their place around her sphere, now filled with an endless play of light, shadows, and colors.
"Nekronomika sensed the conflict of her aspects in her dreams and conveyed to them her last will: to debate each other for all eternity, subjecting the worlds to all fundamental laws. Thus the Goddess died, leaving behind the Three, who to this day and forever will impart their influences upon all things, upon the seas and the lands, upon the day and the night, until the Eternal Conflict is over and with it all."
Lucahn fell silent, leaving Tristessa to meditate in silence on what she had learned and its significance.
Nekrom, that new world, its name finally revealed to her. A first but massive step forward, towards the reasons for her presence there, towards the reason of her amnesia closely related to that world.
And, more than anything, a first step that towards the path that, hopefully, was going to take her back home.
"Would you like to read more to me, Lucahn?" she asked him, smiling at him and earning the boy's enthusiasm.
"Yes!"