"He's in the stable!" Tiara yelled.
"In the…? Oh, don't tell me…"
The man's sigh of defeat was enough to tell Tristessa that he knew what had happened. But that didn't mean he didn't have any reason to run into the atrium, followed by the girl. They both went outside, passing by a worried Tiara in her nightgown who couldn't move as freely. Getting their shoes dirty with the mud and wet earth left by the rain, the two went straight to the dilapidated stable at the back of the courtyard.
And what they saw in one of the spaces delimited by old fences was something that was expected, although for Tristessa, it was still too soon…
"Uaaaaa! Gaal!" cried Lucahn, on the ground and hugging the lifeless body of the big dog. Eyes closed, mouth slightly open, it seemed that he had died while sleeping on his pile of pillows. Peacefully, and painless. "Don't leave me!"
"Son…" Jin knelt beside him and tried to put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him, but in his desperation, Lucahn quickly stood up and joined both hands together as if he were going to pray, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth very hard. "No, Lucahn!"
Tristessa did not understand the man's exclamation until she saw the manifestation of a golden ghost, flickering and unstable, transposed in the exact place where Gaal's body lay. His projection, the product of the Divinity of Fragmented Reality, showed the dog in a blurry, phantasmal way, broken into pieces, emitting distorted sounds that tried to imitate real barks.
Fragments of the past that Lucahn had no way of consolidating, and therefore receiving the closest thing to a lost soul.
"Stay with me…stay with me, please…" the boy begged, without opening his eyes and beginning to bleed from his nose. Then lines of blood began to seep from the corners of his mouth, evidencing the damage he was inflicting on himself by exceeding his tolerance threshold in the use of his Divinity. "Gaal…!"
His scream was mixed with blood and coughing, extreme fatigue winning the battle, and his exhausted body collapsed into the arms of his father and Tristessa, who reacted quickly and went to his aid seeing him suffer so much.
"Lucahn…," she called him, stroking his head as the boy continued to cry inconsolably. As soon as he felt Tristessa's touch, Lucahn snuggled closer to his dad, and Tristessa noticed a fleeting glance from him towards her, full of fear, before closing them again. That hurt her heart. "I-it's me, Lucahn..."
Not only was the boy shaking from the unbearable pain he felt in his soul, but because he was barely dressed in his pajamas, white and not at all suitable for that cold climate after the storm. Jin realized instantly and picked him up in his arms.
"I'll take him to his room," he said and without wasting a single second he walked away.
Tristessa saw him leave the stable and only silence remained as his company; the loneliness and emptiness in that dilapidated structure were paradoxically intensified by the roar of the winds from above carrying the storm far from the south of the Domain. Her afflicted gaze passed towards the deceased animal, and she timidly placed her hand on the side of its back. Its fur was soft, inviting her to rest her head like the day before… But now, the body was cold. Very cold.
"…it was just one day that I met this little dog and now he's dead," she thought, the dark idea emerging from a twisted logic. Guilt didn't allow her to see that the animal's age and physical condition didn't bode well, and the coincidence of events wasn't going to be enough to appease that vile feeling that lodged in her aching chest. "Why…?"
"WHY EVERYTHING YOU LOVE DIE?"
The voice of a ghost of doom echoed in her mind, coming from the very darkness where the fragments of her memories lived. An unknown voice, terrifying and full of malevolence, which caused tears to rise in the eyes of a confused Tristessa.
"Who…?!" But when Tristessa was about to delve into the turbulent vortex of her repressed memories, she again experienced a dizziness that was unpleasantly familiar. Vertiginous, she senses a focused pain on her temple, going in very deep. And intensifying that sensation of eerie familiarity, her hand that was still on Gaal's back felt movement. A jolt, from the depths of its body. "Shit!"
She broke contact and fell on her ass. Tristessa narrowed her eyes, surprised and still feeling that stabbing pain in her head, her gaze fixed on Gaal's body, which was writhing. Slightly, almost unnoticeable, but it was definitely moving; little spasms triggered randomly by its legs and back, like hundreds of worms moving chaotically under its skin.
"What the…?" she muttered, stunned and paralyzed by a new kind of terror as she saw Gaal open his eyes. White and bloodshot, they then turned upward, showing golden irises and beginning to pour out semi-transparent liquid like a torrent of tears. "It can't be… It's like… like in the forest!"
A repetition of the events, when she touched the dead spinnarak and it came back to life, temporarily. At that time she had no way of understanding what had happened, from the headache to the awakening of that thorny rabbit, but now the context was different and Tristessa was aware of what was happening before her eyes: Gaal raised his head and looked at her with those vacant eyes, which did not stop spilling crystalline liquid from the sides.
"N-no…no…" she sobbed, crawling backwards. The deep growl that came from his snout weighed like a cloud of doom on the girl's mind. Hatred… That look so full of hatred towards her, broke her spirit. "Enough…please, enough…ENOUGH!"
With her last cry, the headache disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and at the same time, Gaal collapsed on the cushions. Dead, once again.
Now the silence of the stable was sombre. Tristessa couldn't stop shaking, fear trapping her soul into its claws, enfolding and squeezing vilely. She couldn't stop staring at the dog, who now looked like he had died a violent and brutal death, with his mouth completely dislocated and his eyes bulging, wide open.
"How is it possible? Can I...reanimate corpses?" Just thinking about it made the girl want to vomit. If she had had breakfast, she surely would have. "It's a Divinity? Like Dark Resurrection? My god... What is happening to me?!"
"What a disgusting gift..."
Tristessa stifled a scream and turned her head so quickly that her neck made a painful, unpleasant noise: Tiara was standing on the other side of the corridor that divided the stable, with her back against the fence; her bare feet were totally muddy, as was the bottom of her nightgown.
"Your Divinity denies rest to the departed. I am not surprised…" the woman hissed, looking at her in disgust. "…coming from a soul that emanates so much Discord, such an evil ability it's almost logical. Ha! Now I understand everything."
The hostility that Tiara displayed made the girl faint to the extreme; she had done everything possible so that at least she was not seen as a threat, and now, all her effort seemed to have been in vain.
"Ah…ah…"
Tristessa could not shake off the horror, and could barely find air that wanted to enter her lungs. She could not erase from her mind Gaal's growls, his hatred that transcended life and death for her having desecrated his body.
Everything was wrong, with each passing second everything was collapsing. What was left? To be judged by a Divinity that she had no way of knowing she possessed in the first place? Was she going to be sentenced to Death from it, drowning in her own blood, suffering until her soul shatters and wait for the light go out in her eyes? Was she going to go back to the beginning, to repeat the same cycle over and over again, with no end in sight?
"Not going to say anything, child?"
With just that question, Tiara managed to break the little stability that Tristessa had left. Her emotions went out of control, mixing the desire to cry, despair and a deep anger that made her heart burn to cinders.
"Shut your mouth…"
A new silence. Disbelief from Tiara, who raised an eyebrow, not very sure about what she had just heard.
"Excuse me?"
And that arrogance was the drop that broke the camel's back; an explosion of a bomb that whose fuse had been burned away for days.
"I SAID SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, YOU DAMN BITCH!" Tristessa bellowed, her voice as destructive as one of the lightning bolts brought by the storm the night before. Liberating, irrational… The most basic expression of human violence in its maximum splendor, without barriers to block the passage of the savages of emotions. "What the hell did I do to make you hate me so much?! I'm not a fucking witch, get that through your skull once and for all!"
The anger was delicious. Tempting, like the mere presence of Margules, the Consort of the Angel of Rebirth, inhabiting the grim dimension known as the In-Between. The exhausted air that came ragged from Tristessa's mouth was scorching hot, having captured all the fury that had erupted within her.
"Finally you show some backbone! I like you better that way, instead of that pathetic little girl who won't stop crying," the woman mocked, arms crossed and, by her smile, not affected in the least by her guest's outburst. She took several steps forward, blocking Tristessa's exit from the corral. "So pathetic… I don't want to die, please, ah, ah! Jin may feel sorry for a child victim of the Coven, but I don't."
"Get out of the way," Tristessa growled. Her mind was too deep in the shadows to make intelligent decisions. She was clenching her fists so tightly that she felt her nails slowly making their way through the layers of her skin.
"Or what? Are you going to kick a pregnant woman's ass? Or bring back Gaal to attack me? You filthy necromancer," Tiara challenged her, still smiling and not moving an inch. "Do it. Show me what you really are: a little bitch servant of Vel'Moran."
Oh, how she wanted to beat that woman's teeth in… Wipe that smile off her face and make her feel the hardness of the muddy floor of that dirty, abandoned stable. See that beautiful walnut-colored hair in ruins; those light brown waterfalls that culminated in a sea of curls, to see them stained, dirty, corrupted…
"Go ahead… Do it," she repeated.
Without reacting, Tristessa had Tiara in front of her, whispering close to her lips. She felt her breath, flowery scent, deadly, embracing her face. And she couldn't help but let the images of that woman, lost in madness and armed with a bloody knife, have their place in the front of her memories.
A second away before the unleashing of an inhuman rampage, the best thing that the woman could have made was to force the girl to pose her right hand in her belly, making her feel the warmth of her baby, and an almost imperceptible kick that they gave to defend their mother in that conflict.
The result was absolutely effective.
"Tch!" Drunk in her pride, Tristessa pushed her host with her shoulder and moved her away from the path, and in the past she said to her: "If you are going to bury Gaal, I want to be there for Lucahn, but then I will leave. I don't want to see your face not even a second more."
And she spoke more than seriously, taking the same path Jin took to get out of the stable, in order to have her back turned on her. With each step, her chest full of fire, her soul enraged, demanded more. The seed of hatred germinated, and the flowers of evil sprout in the dark depths... Making Tristessa, without turning, say what her emotions dictated:
"I will thank Jin forever for his kindness and hospitality. But to you ... I hope you don't lose sight of that child that is about to be born. So that they don't end up like Mellion."
A malice that poured a freezing and unwavering aura in the stable. Triumphant, Tristessa came out, with a smile that received the cold southern wind... A cold that fought against that fire within. It's remains condemned to go out once she reached the door that gave access to the dark atrium; Tristessa had to lean against one of the cabinets, reviewing again and again everything she told Tiara. Thinking every word as if she refused to believe in them
"All that I said... How the hell I dared to? I… ", she said in the confines of her stunned mind.
And from the darkness of the lobby, a familiar voice said:
"You are a piece of shit, Tessa. Nothing more, no less."
Tristessa felt very dizzy. She was forced to kneel and let the shelf full of objects from ancient times of kings and queens resist the weight of her body.
That had been her mother's voice, saying something very horrible about her. In her mind's eye, she could clearly see Selene's vain smile, her lips move and insult her without a second thought.
"Mom...," she murmured, totally convinced that what she remembered was real. It had been real, and just knowing it, Tristessa saw her mere existence in a balance, ready to be judged. "Why?"
She noticed how easy it had been to hate Tiara. Feeling hatred itself, it had been extremely simple. Anger ran deep, boiling the blood inside her veins, ready to explode.
"Who is Tristessa Irandell?" She wondered, looking forward to the darkness of the atrium, hoping to hear her mother's voice again.
No one responded.