That was a déjà vu. Tristessa experienced that strange feeling of emptiness again, while all sound died away around her. The darkness of the hallway grew, spreading like the fall of night, while the emotions captured on Tiara and Jin's faces were erased; anger, hatred, sadness and despair, all falling into nothingness.
"W-what…?" Unconsciously, Tristessa took a step back, watching as the couple stood up, not blinking for a single moment as if they didn't want to break eye contact with her. "What's going on?"
Their clothes disheveled, Tiara's arm covered in blood flowing from her armpit, saliva falling from Jin's half-open mouth. A halo of coldness enveloping everything, reaching the most hidden corners of their spirits. Everything so terrifyingly familiar, a puzzle that sought to put itself together.
It wasn't until Tiara spoke, her voice frozen like the harshest winter that the fundamental piece fell into place, making everything begin to make sense:
"…do you really think that, after causing the death of my dear Lucahn, I'm going to believe a lie as absurd as that? You're a piece of shit, girl."
"N-no…no, no, no, no…," Tristessa whispered, being enveloped by shivers that froze every millimeter of her skin covered in blood and dirt, beneath her totally ruined clothes. She wanted to believe that she was wrong. That the theory whose validation was in front of her was false. That there was another explanation. "It can't be…"
But it was Jin's turn to speak, with an icy serenity unbecoming of the situation he was going through, reaffirming the cruel reality:
"I can't believe you would take refuge in a lie like that, Tristessa. It's my son's death you're dealing with, lying like that is unforgivable..."
Husband and wife, simultaneously, falling into a vortex of madness from which they were not going to be able to escape. Their facial expressions began to fail, suffering micro spasms while the fingers of their hands trembled uncontrollably.
"Do you think I'm so stupid as to believe that you came back from Death?"
"We're not as naïve as you think, Tristessa. It's not possible to return from Death."
"Who do you think you are? The Angel of Rebirth? Such a stupid liar you are!"
"I am sorry that you resort to lies to escape responsibility for your actions."
Tears ran freely down Tristessa's hurt face. She shook her head, unable to believe that this was happening, and continued to take steps back, wanting to stay away from the couple, who began to walk towards her.
"Do you know what lying shitty girls like you deserve?" Tiara asked, the muscles in her jaw tensing and her teeth showing, drawing a macabre smile full of evil intentions. "They deserve to be put in an oven, their blood boiling, their flesh melting and their bones charring!"
"You committed a mortal sin… Inexcusable, blasphemous, unholy, disgusting," Jin hissed, losing control of his right hand for a moment and tearing out a large portion of his bloody beard. "Only dying can atone for the evil in your soul, don't you think?"
"NO, GET AWAY FROM ME!"
Her own scream, manufactured with pure terror, made her come to her senses, she regained the mobility of her legs and ran. She almost jumped down the stairs, by a miracle she did not trip even with the influence of the dizziness that persisted.
She crossed the atrium with her vision spinning, victim of vertigo and a new desire to vomit, but the fear of dying overcame any obstacle, any barrier, whether it was extreme pain or one less finger; it was a perfect motivator, even capable of giving people wings without turning them into angels.
"HELP! PLEASE, HELP!" she screamed as she left the house, opening the door wide and running towards the hills to the north, an arbitrary decision. "THEY WANT TO KILL ME!"
She ran like never before, going further than when the vargs chased her through the Sea of Trees. That was the only difference, since the terror was identical, and so was the sad loneliness. That morning, beautiful, calm, the wind blowing gently and moving the grasslands of the southern lands of the domain of End-World, it was almost impossible to find a compassionate, altruistic soul.
She was alone, wounded and fleeing for her life. No one was coming to her aid. That was the cold, harsh truth.
"HELP, PLEA…!"
Suddenly, a bang echoed across the plain. Tristessa's voice cracked, as did her ribcage as a lead bullet pierced her right side.
"Ah…?"
She stumbled, gasped, but managed to stay on her feet. She looked down, finding a blood stain spreading rapidly across her shirt, at the center of which was the bullet wound that had cleanly pierced her right lung and part of her liver. It felt like a piece of red-hot coal had been shoved into her body; she tried to reach her intact hand into the hole, but for some reason she could no longer move it.
With wide eyes and trembling, the girl turned around and saw Tiara in the distance, limping towards her, the bottom of her dress covered in blood. And further behind, Jin, who was lowering his rifle after having successfully fired his shot.
"Uff….ah… Uhkk!"
With just one breath, the blood that was accumulating inside Tristessa was forced towards her throat, and a crimson spray was thrown out of her mouth. This time, not even fear was able to save her, and her body collapsed under its own weight; her knees gave way and the grass worked as a soft mattress that left her at the mercy of the insane couple.
"…lies, and nothing but lies! You brought lies to my house, and that is why my beloved son is dead! Or will you say that he can also be brought back to life?! Damn you, witch, you and your lies!"
Tiara's voice became clearer and equally deranged as the distances shortened.
Tristessa trembled uncontrollably, from the massive loss of blood, from the absolute fear of seeing that woman drag her legs, marked by her dress that had absorbed blood like a sponge, and brandishing the hunting knife with which she had destroyed her left hand. Her punished body did not respond to any kind of command, and breathing was torture. Breathing was like swallowing fire and feeling her insides turn to cinders.
"I'm going to tear out your tongue and force you to eat it, so you'll know what the taste of your vile lies is like!" the housewife bellowed, standing in front of her victim and looking at her completely out of her mind. Eyes that did not stop shaking, about to come out of their sockets, as if in a constant conflict whose origin lay in the darkest interior of her mind. "No one comes back from Death! Not you, not me, not Lucahn, not Jin, not Mellion, not Daiana, not Severus, not Eramisaptor, not anyone!"
Tiara then lunged at the girl and plunged the knife into her near where Jin had shot her. As quickly as the flesh gave way under the pressure, the hellish and burning pain of followed. Again and again, Tristessa was stabbed—in her belly, between her ribs, in her breasts—and each time Tiara pulled back and pulled the knife, the saw-teeth on the opposite side of the blade tore through everything in its path, exponentially increasing the agony.
"P-ple…see…ee…" she wanted to say, but her mouth was so flooded with blood that only a stammer came out accompanied by infinitesimal drops that stained the impassive face of her attacker. "I-I…don wan…die…"
Deaf ears, when madness was all that was left in the woman's head. Eventually she stopped and looked at herself: her hands covered with her own and Tristessa's blood, and then her belly and below, where the source of her blood loss came from.
"Not even this baby…"
It was an epiphany for Tiara, who raised her hands to the sky and let out a creepy laugh that reached the confines of Tristessa's tormented soul.
"Not even this baby! DO YOU HEAR ME, WITCH!? THIS BABY WILL NOT COME BACK FROM DEATH EITHER!" she screamed, laughing and then focusing her maniacal attention again on the girl whose life hung in the balance. "You want to see how no one can return to the land of the living, huh?! I'll show you! Watch and learn, this is how it's done!"
Without hesitation, Tiara stabbed her own neck from the side with the knife, the blade cutting cleanly through and getting out on the other side. Her face got fixed in an instant expression of anguish and her eyes overflowed with tears, at the same time as jets of blood were expelled under pressure from the self-inflicted laceration on her carotid artery.
"A-Aaahjj…Grr…!" Tiara tried to say something but only spits of blood and gargles came out. "Uhh…Aaaj!"
Tristessa witnessed how the woman, in a demonstration of the inhuman insanity that possessed her, withdrew the knife and stabbed herself again on the same spot. Three more times she did it, three times blood rained down, and when she did the fourth time her eyes rolled upwards and she fell forward, finally dead, crushing the girl and creating a reddish puddle produced by the combination of the continuous bleeding of both that the grass and the cold earth took a long time to absorb.
"Why? Why me? What did I do?" Tristessa thought, as speaking was impossible for her. Her vision was beginning to fail, and the beautiful clear sky with its shining Sun was slowly falling into darkness. Her breathing was weakening very quickly, and her heart was beating slower and slower. "Someone save me… Please… Endrel… Margules… Mom… Someone!"
What she did retain was the ability to cry. The grief had no limits. Everything was death, desolation, and a free fall into the deepest despair. There was no pain anymore, except for the absolute zero cold that she realized belatedly once she felt in her chest, emanating from her Baptism in Ruins like a sign of doom.
She was going to die for the second time, and this time, it was going to be final.
"Oh, what a repulsive stench… The Discord you exude is intoxicating: you are without a doubt a minion of the Dark Lady, just as we suspected," she heard Jin say, his voice devoid of emotion. A voice as cold as the phantasm of doom she felt in her chest. "You are horrible, Tristessa. Such an evil child… How can you even dare to presume to having experienced Rebirth? I have never heard of such a great offense towards the Gods."
In his trench coat and armed with his rifle to which he had added a bayonet, Jin Mercer looked every bit the hunter he was. Had she been more keen-minded, Tristessa would have known that escaping a man with years of experience in search and capture was practically impossible.
But what could a fourteen-year-old girl know about hunting? About tactics, battles, and survival? About extreme pain, about the horror of Death?
"J-ji…," the girl muttered, her eyes half-open and extremely tired. The smell of gunpowder momentarily activated the throbbing burn in the hole left by the bullet, already unrecognizable among the many that Tiara had left in her torso. "M-m…my…"
Silently, Jin took his dead wife by the arm and separated her from Tristessa only to throw her aside as if she were trash, without even looking at her. In that state of insanity, he cared about nothing; neither Tiara, nor his unborn child, also dead. He was only interested in one thing…
"Evil people deserve to die."
With all his experience under his belt, Jin stabbed Tristessa with the bayonet directly in her heart. A perfect puncture that pierced the ventricles but that the girl did not even feel: she could only watch how events unfolded, while waiting for the end. Jin discarded the rifle but pulled his pistol from the holster hanging on his belt. Unlike the old rifle, this firearm was a single-shot weapon with one bullet in the chamber.
"No rest for the wicked, and no exceptions. For having welcomed Evil into my home, my sin can only be atoned for with Death as well," he said, not taking his dark, unfocused gaze from Tristessa's, not even when he brought the end of the pistol to his mouth and fired.
Part of his face and the top of his brains exploded in a cloud of gore. His body fell under the influence of gravity and ended up collapsing in the grass, slowly creating another crimson puddle of its own.
And that was how the Mercer-Archeos family became extinct, leaving Tristessa alone there, in the bloody meadow as with each passing second the claws of Death imprisoned her more and more in its inescapable embrace.
Every second that passed, her soul screamed, begged for mercy, for redemption, before the overwhelming weight of her ignorance, her stupidity, and her mortal sin.
"In the end… Yes, it was my fault. I caused all this. I, and only I… deserve all this pain."
Time stopped, stretching reality towards infinity, exponentially lengthening the girl's torment; it had been frozen by the sheer cold of her Baptism in Ruins, which beat on its own in tandem with her heart that could no longer find more blood to pump.
And it was at the moment in which the flame of life went out, and her shattered soul saw itself in free fall towards the absolute blackness of the Void, when the Darkness grew. Her vision was plunged into a blackness that wasn't the unknown insides of the Dark Room, but an infinite space filled with stars collapsing into a monstrous gravity well in which none other than Endrel, the Angel of Rebirth, stood firm: her rotting wings at the mercy of the cosmic wind, the gears of her body spinning at high speed, and her monstrous visage greeting her with a morbid smile of welcome.
"■ ■ ■ ■"
Endrel's voice boomed like the explosion of a dying star lost in the endless vaults of dark space, absolutely incomprehensible and hollow, but with a meaning that bent both material and spiritual realms to her will.
The Angel of Rebirth raised her arm wrapped in golden chains, and Tristessa's broken soul emitted an echo that spread throughout the cosmos. A catastrophic wave of Discord that her soul harbored within it, spreading everywhere, enveloping existence itself and breaking the fragile balance between Life and Death.
And when the shadows receded…
The world and Tristessa returned to the beginning.