"You remember practically nothing?" the blood elf asked for the fourth time, as the other three times clearly hadn't been enough.
He was staring at Tristessa with fascination, like a laboratory specimen, which made more than sense given his profession.
"I've never met anyone with such a severe amnesia condition like yours before. It must be pretty distressing, yes?"
"Yes… It is," she answered, shyly.
The three of them walked through the infinite corridors between trees, with Jin leading the way, following the path the soul-shard showed them: the brighter it shone, the closer it was to its twin. Ever closer to the mercenary and his soon-to-be-discovered destiny.
The fog was relentless, and the cold grew harsher with each step south. If it weren't for the trench coat they'd been given, Tristessa would already be a mess of snot, sneezing, and hesitation. Fortunately, there was no sign of spinnaraks or more vargs eager to forage for food on their own.
"What about your family? Don't you remember them either?" Severus continued interrogating her.
"Only my mother... N-no, actually just her voice, a few things she said to me..." Tristessa's words lost their strength as she replayed in her head the insult her mother, Selene, had said to her in a context she couldn't recall. Her chest ached, and exhaling sharply didn't relieve it. "No, forget what I said. I'm just confused."
"And about End-World? Your home, something about the Empire? Or even the world?"
"Well, Lucahn's been reading me his books, which has been a great help. I didn't even remember the name of the world, you know?" she lied halfway. The upside of honestly knowing nothing about Nekrom made her sound completely convincing. "It's not enough to bring back my memories; it's like learning everything from scratch. About Nekrom, the Gods, their Angels... The Dark Lady. Though I still don't know anything about her. I think it's a sensitive subject that Lucahn isn't very keen to explain to me."
"Understandable for a child like him who grows up fearing the Shadow Queen, like everyone else. There's a reason they call her that, you know? The Shadow Queen, she was so magnificent, so glorious and brilliant that the shadow she cast in return was too dark for this world," Severus explained, his curious smile dying and replaced by cold anger. "The eternal enemy of the Empire. Heck, she's the enemy of the entirety of Nekrom. Did no one explain that to you? Jin, didn't you explain to Tristessa that there is a Dark Lady who has been corrupting and destroying everything in her path for centuries?"
"It is not an easy subject to discuss in our house, Severus. You know that," was all the hunter said, still keeping his back to them, with a clear hidden message between the lines that Tristessa had no way of understanding. "Please be prudent."
"You're not doing a girl with a blank mind any favors by withholding sensitive information… But I understand you," the elf replied, then walked alongside Tristessa and dared to embrace her with his left arm, bringing her closer to him. His gaze was serious, with no intention of joking or playing. "I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you, but you're waking up to a world of terror, Tristessa. It's not the best place to discuss it, but sooner or later someone will have to tell you about the reality we live in. It's… difficult. Very difficult."
"…"
Thinking and reflecting in silence about something that didn't bode well was overwhelming. A simple sentence caused such deep unease that it felt like a knife had been stuck in the pit of her stomach.
"Leaving me in the dark only makes me feel worse, you know?" she murmured, letting out a nervous giggle. "What's happening in Nekrom…?"
"Pay attention, both of you. Come to me, and stay close."
Jin's firm and unyielding command made both the girl and the elf obey, their senses instantly alert, and they stood beside the hunter, who had stopped right on the perimeter of another forest clearing, new to Tristessa and absent of any pack of vargs and spinnaraks that might have used it as a den.
"...!"
The first thing the girl saw, and what made her cover her mouth with both hands, was a kneeling man, head down and with his back to them. He was wearing a dirty traveling jacket with several dark stains. A strong, nauseating smell seemed to be coming from him, but it could also be attributed to nature itself: the trees surrounding the clearing were dead, their bark rotting from the roots to the dizzying heights, and not a single red leaf to fall. Even the ground where the man was kneeling seemed diseased and polluted.
"Viktor… I can't confirm it's him from here, but the soul-shard is vibrating at its highest possible intensity," the elf said, almost in a whisper. "It's cursed ground. Do you think it's a trap, Jin?"
"Of course," he replied, his gaze fixed on the scene, analyzing every aspect of the scene. "Do you sense magic?"
"No, but I'm not going to get cocky. I have an ace up my sleeve, though…" With that, Severus literally rolled up his sleeve and revealed a series of small black chains encircling his forearm and, judging by the burned skin, painfully so. And trapped between the chains and the elf's arm was a creature. "Time to get to work, scum."
With a snap of his fingers that sent supernatural energy flowing in the immediate vicinity, the chains crumbled to dust, and the creature fell limply into the blood elf's hand. Up close, Tristessa saw with morbid fascination that it was some kind of faerie. Male, naked, hairy, and very ugly, with a rodent's face and butterfly wings.
"Don't play dead, you bastard. Move!" Severus shouted, causing the creature to jump and let out a high-pitched squeal of terror. It tried to escape with a flap of its wings, but the elf was more than ahead of its game and caught it between his fingers. "You're not going anywhere. What you're going to do, if you don't want me to tear your limbs off and use your bones as toothpicks, is go after that man you see over there."
"N-no...no...no...no," was the creature's only word, struggling in vain to free itself. When Severus reached out and, with a flick of his wrist, forced it to look in the direction of the mercenary named Viktor, it despaired even more. "No, won't do anything, I won't!"
Tristessa couldn't help but feel sorry for that faerie. She opened her mouth to say something, but Severus, in a terrifying manner, his eyes flashing like a demon's, said to his prisoner:
"You tore out the eyes of a newborn baby to eat them. If you die out there, rejoice, for the justiciar who handed you over to me was going to torture you to insanity for your crime. Now go, and may Kantrus help you if you try to escape your fate."
He released the faerie, and as soon as it steadied itself in the air with the beating of its wings, Severus raised his right hand and positioned his index, middle, and thumb fingers in such a way that he seemed about to snap them: a threat to the faerie to comply with his demands, or suffer at the hands of the blood elf's thaumaturgy.
It received no support or mercy from either Jin or Tristessa—who, knowing of its gruesome crime, could feel nothing but outrage—so the faerie's only option was to turn around and go to where the kneeling man was. It trembled like a leaf, absent in that clearing corrupted by unknown forces, sensing that something was there, waiting for the first unwary who dared to approach.
"No... no... no... no... no!"
With that last cry, the faerie almost touched Viktor's back, and in a split second, a halo of dark red glyphs appeared on the ground, surrounding the man and having already enclosed the faerie within its malicious perimeter.
The magic circle faded into a sea of unnatural shadows, and the faerie fell, convulsing and creaking. Its fur crystallized, taking on a color similar to the glyphs, and hundreds of veins pulsed beneath it. It wasn't long before its stopped moving, its mouth dislocated from how far it'd opened it, and it'd vomited up its own dissolved entrails into a putrid, bloody amalgam.
"W-what happened?" Tristessa asked in a small voice.
"Thaumaturgical magic, engineered for evil... Foul cultists," Severus hissed, spitting on the ground. "Follow me."
The elf took the lead, and both humans followed. Tristessa met Jin's fleeting, warm eyes, conveying the calm she needed for what was to come. It wasn't enough, with the faerie's cursed corpse emanating a noxious miasma of decay, worse than the septic tank at Jin and Tiara's house. And when she edged past the mercenary's lifeless body, she wanted to vomit. She fully intended to, to mitigate the nausea and that wave of chills that attacked her without warning. But the paralyzing horror was too strong, immobilizing her insides in a perpetual time lapse.
The mercenary, Viktor, had no face. He had been cruelly skinned, his nose and lips smashed open, and his gaping mouth was void of all teeth. His eyes had been snatched away, leaving two empty sockets that made Tristessa remember something terrifyingly similar; something she never wanted to remember again. But the grimmest thing was that the top of Viktor's skull had been removed, and inside there was no brain, or what remained of it after it had liquefied post-mortem. What there was was a bloody sac made from the removed facial skin and hair, containing all of his teeth and something else…
"Curse them! Mocking the dead, and our efforts to find them," she heard Severus hiss.
In an act of cold recklessness, he reached inside the skull and took the twin soul-shard, which was hidden between those teeth stained with dried blood. The crystal glowed at full power, having its other pair so close, but with all the blood covering it, the glow was a sinister crimson dark.
"The way his body is so rigid… This was all done in life, or at least until they removed the top of his skull," Jin commented, knelt and observing closely. He slowly shook his head, sighing wearily. "I hope the Goddess has taken him into her bosom."
"This…I-I can't…" Tristessa tried to say, and was forced to hold on to Severus's arm to keep from falling, feeling her legs go limp. Her forehead broke out in cold sweat; she felt very ill, and breathing hurt.
"This, Miss Tristessa, is what worshippers of the Shadow Queen and her Great and Lesser Evils are capable of."
The blood elf didn't hold Tristessa in the comforting embrace she needed. In his unspoken opinion, she needed this, needed to cry like she was doing now, silently; the tears kept falling, and the occasional sob escaped between those pursed, tightly pressed lips.
"Look carefully at what's left of my employee. Imprint it on your mind that everything that comes next will be worse." Tristessa looked at Severus in confusion, as he gripped the crystal tightly between his fingers until it finally shattered into hundreds of shards that instantly crumbled to dust. Then he looked down, and she found herself mesmerized by those beautiful, yet terrifying sapphire colored eyes. "I mean it. If you don't remember anything, you need to know now. If you think this is the worst you'll ever see of what the Dark Lady's followers are capable of… You're not prepared."
"Severus…" they heard Jin say, but with his head bowed, it was clearly a half-hearted attempt to suppress the truth that needed to be said.
"You cannot even imagine what awaits you. You have no idea about the Sea of Corpses, about the Perpetual Siege of New Crywolf, about the Unnumbered Tears of Malakai's Black Garden, about the Valley of Fallen Stars… But you will know, for your own good. Forgetting the past and underestimating the present will result in a doomed futuro."
Tristessa couldn't breathe properly. The crying, the anxiety, the panic gnawing at her spirit, all building up in her chest, ready to burst.
"Let me say it to you one more time, Miss Tristessa."
The elf lowered himself to her level and, with both hands resting on her shoulders, made sure she saw, through the clouds of tears, the overwhelming sincerity in his eyes. Eyes that had seen hell.
And forcefully, to engrave the message in her body and soul forever, he said:
"YOU ARE NOT PREPARED."
Only then, after conveying the doom that ultimately broke Tristessa, did Severus wrap her in a hug. He received all the nervous tremors of that fragile young adolescent body, her tears, and her desperate sobs. And all without blinking, without showing weakness; the perpetual rage of a blood elf, which would not be diminished by anything.
The omen of what was to come had been revealed. A dark future; darker than the present that Nekrom was suffering, and of which Tristessa had only seen the most insignificant tip of the iceberg, submerged in an ocean of dark waters with no bottom, only the face of the abyss...