Tristessa witnessed more than one occurrence that confirmed to her that everything was about to end. She and everyone else were going to die, one way or another.
One was the absolute destruction of the Aegis glyph defenses when the witches managed to force their physical and magical attacks to finally overcome the barriers' resistance. They now had a clear path inside the house, and no matter how many enemies Jin could be able to shoot from inside, there were so many that the few who fell dead from gunshot wounds were nothing more than obstacles in the way for the others.
"Firan!"
Multiple voices screamed the basic thaumaturgical spell of elemental fire. In a few seconds, the house was burning in flames...
"L-Lucahn... Jin..." With tears in her eyes, Tristessa could only pray that the lack of oxygen would end up taking their lives and not the fire, or worse, those invaders who went inside and weren't afraid of burning to death in that hell.
The other situation was the dimensional shift event: the miasma soiling the skies began to descend and shatter the three-dimensional reality, in a similar way like the fire that was spreading all over the house and leaving ashes in its wake that the wind carried away.
The main difference was that for a large-scale event like this, those ashes were from the very canvas on which reality was drawn, and without an Evil-Warding Pillar nearby, as the transcendental message had mentioned, Tristessa knew it was a matter of counting the minutes until that miasma fell upon everything and surely ended in her Death.
Obviously, as long as the Priestess of the Black Eye didn't kill her first.
"Stay close to Tiara, girl!"
That was all Severus managed to command before launching an attack against that lunatic woman, who opened her arms and used her Divinity of the Hand of the Umbral Blade: from the edge of her right arm emerged that ominous, spectral dark blade that she used to behead her own follower.
"Voltis! Plasmos!" the elf shouted, gesturing with the fingers of his undamaged hand, creating a glyph of electricity that forced Daiana to jump to the side. The other glyph, imbued in his skin, summoned all the blood from the surroundings to create a large dark-red sphere floating near his right hand. "FahreusPlasmos… Ugh!"
Another new blood glyph turned the sphere into multiples, all destined to haunt the smiling witch. But each glyph created, each logic imbued with magic, caused Severus's soul to suffer, and through a direct connection to the material plane, his body: the whiteness of his skin increased, and blood began to flow freely from his ears, nose, mouth, and beneath his eyes.
"You're slowly killing yourself… You know I won't allow it, don't you? You're mine, elf, and until I've sunk my teeth into what lies within your skull, you have no right to die," the Priestess warned him, intercepting each of the small spheres of blood with her darksaber, demonstrating great skill and reflexes. "I want to know your past… Your joys and sorrows, your victories and your defeats. I want to know everything about you."
"And you'll get all that by devouring my brain, you madwoman?! Better…ugh, cough! D-Die now…" Severus coughed blood and, almost blinded by all the red tears he was crying, made a circular gesture with his index and middle fingers. "Ein Attractor I…AH…!"
"S-Severus…!" Tristessa moaned as she watched him open his bloody mouth and clutch his chest, only to fall face first into the splatter of mud and the blood of his enemies. From where she stood, she could see him convulsing, blood escaping from his orifices persistently…
"Ladies, stabilize the elf. If you let him die, I will throw you to a den of Vargs."
With that order and warning, Daiana left Severus in the hands of several of her minions, walking past him to where Tristessa lay, her leg completely covered in pain and paralyzed, blood flowing between her fingers, which were uselessly applying pressure to the wound. Nearby, Tiara clutched her stomach and trembled like a leaf, despite the stifling heat coming from the burning house.
"And the day came… The pain that came to stay…" the evil woman sang, standing in front of her mother and using the tip of her wraithlike saber to cut her right cheek. Just hearing the lyrics of that song reminded Tristessa of what she had seen in the house's bathroom in the nonexistent past, causing her to let out sobs of despair that caught Daiana's attention. "What's wrong with you? Does your leg hurt? Let me help you."
"…?" Tristessa blinked several times before reasoning that the Priestess had raised her Divinity-derived weapon and cut her leg just above where Tiara had stabbed her.
"There. No leg, no pain."
The grass quickly began to turn dark red, and in the crimson glow of the night sky and the light from the burning house, she could see in vivid detail the severed femur, shredded veins and nerve connections, and so, so much blood…
"M-my leg…ah…UGH, SHIT!"
The pain came so fast and in massive waves of heat that it set the nerves in her entire body on fire. Writhing, kicking, urinating on herself, screaming at the top of her lungs… Nothing could soothe the agony that had taken hold of her.
"A little fire to cauterize, yes, yes, yes…" One of the witches, with dirty-blond hair and teeth as broken as Tristessa's, drew her wand and pointed it at her severed leg. "Firan."
The red glyph appearing inches from the amalgam of severed muscle and bone, warning of what was to come; with its mere presence, Tristessa felt heat emanating from and stimulating every exposed nerve that was already burning like hell.
"No, no, no, no, no, NOOOOOOOOO! AAAAAHH!"
The fireball was small and precise, enveloping the severed wound in such a way that Tristessa's screams reached the heavens. As she ran out of air to continue screeching and was forced to breathe, she smelled the sickening scent of her own burning flesh. Her consciousness began to drown in that ocean of piercing agony building in her brain, just like when Tiara had broken her fingers.
"No more morals, stagnating our fading souls…"
With her eyes almost closed, the girl saw Daiana's almost blurred silhouette in front of her mother, singing and reveling in all the suffering she was causing.
"Don't touch my baby…don't touch it…don't touch it, don't touch it, don't you dare…"
Tiara implored, covering her belly with a loving embrace worthy of a mother that was about to die. With her head bowed, tears fell onto her hands; with the few seconds of consciousness she had left, Tristessa understood that Tiara was seeing beyond her skin, to the creature that lived inside her and that she would never meet.
"…the tears of the innocent."
And Daiana continued singing and laughing softly at her. She laughed at her hopelessness, at her resignation to Death and all the evil that had ended up destroying their lives. She raised her arm, armed with her Divinity, ready to become the executioner, while Tristessa only managed to uselessly extend her hand in Tiara's direction.
"N-no…," she whispered, her hatred that had been building up towards that woman eclipsed by a bittersweet emotion that grew in her heart among so much negativity, like a rose amidst a field of plagued weeds: pity.
Finally, the miasma of the dimensional shift event reached solid ground, peeling away reality and bringing a new one among its shadows. A darkfall never seen before by Tristessa.
And at the moment when the black-haired girl was unable to keep her eyes open for a second longer and her mind vanished into darkness, she heard the last line of the song of the Priestess of the Black Eye:
"Mother and child, sleep, sleep forever…"