"Ugh…! My… T-the mark!"
Tristessa brought a hand to her chest and dug the nails of her broken fingers into her bloody linen shirt, piercing the fabric and puncturing the skin covered by the marks of her Baptism in Ruins. The black spider veins configuration throbbed, exerting a suffocating pressure against her chest, to the point where her suddenly rapidly beating heart felt like it was about to be crushed.
The cause of this sudden affliction was that she-devil who wept and screamed in pain, generating adverse effects not only on Tristessa but also on that corrupted version of Nekrom, shaking the earth through cataclysms.
And there was no soul that could escape her influence, traversing dimensions and the astral and material planes alike.
"I-it can't be… Are my eyes deceiving me? Did I fall victim to an illusion?"
She heard Daiana sobbing, entranced and weeping openly, while her subjects, one after another, fell to their knees and raised their hands to the heavens in a sign of absolute adoration. Each and every one, like any Nekromian, knew perfectly well what it meant to see two divine women in love, bound together by golden chains.
"Sweet and sanctified Lady Endrel… Angel of Rebirth, crowned with glory and love…" Daiana murmured, her silver, bloodshot eyes wide, and the corners of her lips dripping with saliva and foaming blood. "And your praised and beautiful Consort, the demoness Margules…"
The Priestess hadn't knelt, but she had clasped her hands and interlaced her fingers in prayer, her soul, broken by madness, trembling before such an immeasurable divine presence.
Now Tristessa understood why her Baptism in Ruins had begun to signal that something was approaching, and it certainly wasn't that enigmatic Princess of Sin.
"What are those two monsters doing here...?" she thought, biting down hard with her broken teeth as she clutched her chest, engulfed in a terrifyingly cold pain. "Why now, after bringing me back from Death all this time?"
It had never occurred to her that Vel'Moran's servants could appear outside the In-Between. Their intentions, motives, plans... Everything was a great mystery, from her first Death and Rebirth, to that very moment, when angel and she-devil gave her the great and absolute honor of their unquestioned attention.
"...Are they here to take my life?"
Thoughts of doom and oblivion filled her perturbed mind. It was undeniable that she was on the brink of Death, hanging by a thread that, if cut, would stop her heart and banish her soul from the material plane.
If Endrel and Margules had arrived on Nekrom, breaking into the Evil Dream, it was undoubtedly related to the imminent extinction of Tristessa's life.
"But…" The girl made a great effort to keep her eyes open, so as not to lose sight of the two inhuman women; more than anything, Margules, her face partially hidden by her veil, but which she could imagine, since there was no way to forget that skinless face, rotten teeth, and eyes completely immersed in the abyssal darkness. A face that awakened false love within her. A face filled with suffering. "There's something…"
Something didn't fit. Something she couldn't explain, a feeling that called into question the presence of the dark angel and her consort.
At that moment, Tristessa felt her lungs drained of oxygen, hard-pressed by the transcendental and powerful shriek that Margules let loose again. A new rumble shook the continent, temporarily contaminated by the Shadow Queen's evil; every molecule of air vibrated, causing hot winds to blow with the fury of a storm of legendary proportions, tearing pieces from the bodies of the dead titans and scattering ash everywhere. And the stones that lined the lake's shore trembled with the violent swaying of its waters, in the face of this new cataclysm.
"■ ■ ■ ■ ■… ■ ■ ■ ■."
Now, Endrel's apocalyptic voice filled the minds of every living being in the Forest of Dead Titans. Impossible to understand or interpret, yet communicating infinite messages with infinite meanings. Such a divergence of possibilities that it was almost impossible not to succumb to the implicit madness it instilled in weak and unprepared minds.
Tristessa's sanity, for better or worse, was not compromised by the influence of the Angel of Rebirth's voice. Her shattered wings flapped in the wind; her black crown was the symbol of her greatness among higher beings, and the red-hot runic symbols etched across the visor that covered her eyes transmitted instant madness to those who dared to gaze upon, read, and interpret such forbidden knowledge. Something possible and impossible for Tristessa, simultaneously.
She could see how the angel, her bloody smile fixed and permanent on her nightmarish face, embraced her lover more intimately, placing her pale, long-nailed right hand on the demoness' exposed belly. That belly, a complex clockwork, emanated a torrent of heavy, gaseous Discord through its gears and black-tinged muscle tissue.
"...!"
Witnessing that intimate, morbid gesture of love, and feeling irrational envy, Tristessa understood the reason for the rumbling: it wasn't the agonized voice of Endrel's Consort that was causing those cataclysms that tore through the elements and shook Nekrom to its foundations.
They were contractions. The legendary she-devil Margules was giving birth.
"Ha…ha… What joy, what delight! To be able to hear the voices of the servants of the God of Chaos, to hear their cries, to see their beautiful figures, filled with love! And what is that feeling? The coming of a new angel? I-I feel it in my spirit…and it trembles, my soul trembles with emotion and envy! Why can't I embrace the lady who ascended among mortals?! Oh, forgive my sin, forgive me!"
Daiana, in her mystical delirium, had begun to bleed from her nose and ears due to all the eldritch influence Endrel and Margules transmitted with their mere presence. With every word she uttered, she spat out more blood mixed with stomach fluids. And her eyes were already completely flooded with blood, shedding lines of dark red tears, imitating the grieving Margules.
And her minions were not only not exempt from the same adverse effects, but suffered far worse.
"M-Mistress, those two… Beatified… W-we are not worthy…" Tristessa heard Lorraine utter her last words before bleeding to death, convulsing on the floor while the inside of her body was sabotaged by hemorrhages, and her mind couldn't reconcile that divine image with the monstrosities bound with golden chains to the great mechanical head that split the sky in two.
The rest of the witches also perished in the same way, leaving Daiana and Tristessa alone to witness an unholy miracle.
With a new scream, the loudest of all and capable of shattering the consistency of the intermingled dimensions, Margules raised her head and shed bloodthirsty tears that Endrel licked through her veil.
"AHHHH!" Tristessa also joined the demoness's cry, feeling that the mark on her chest was about to shatter her torso into countless pieces. The painful throbbing of the Baptism in Ruins, in sync with the newborn.
A mass of amorphous darkness that devoured absolutely every particle of light around it, Discord in its purest form, expelled from the demoness's body and falling between her legs and the waterfall of gaseous shadows, with nothing to stop it from falling into the center of the lake and sinking into it.
"■ ■ ■…"
Margules's voice, entering Tristessa's ears for the first time, provoked a full outpouring of tears. Sweet, delicate, and beyond understanding, yet capable of bringing any soul to its knees, gripped by love.
A swan's song. The forced and necessary farewell of a mother who allowed herself to be comforted by her partner, letting the golden chains to compress their bodies more tightly as they were pulled back into the hybrid mouth made from organic and mechanical compounds.
As the mouth closed, the monumental head began to fade into a sea of shadows that devoured the clouds, the vortex, and all traces of its existence. The succubus' natural allure was broken by her departure, allowing Tristessa to shift her attention to the lake, whose waters had begun to bubble as if the caldera of a volcano had awakened in the depths.
And from one second to the next, the waters of the lake rose like a column of proportions that stretched to its entire surface.
"Ah, ah, daughter blessed with love! What an honor, what a joy to be able to witness the birth of the daughter of Holy Endrel and Margules!" Daiana cried, standing weakly and on trembling legs next to Tristessa, who miraculously remained in that position, kneeling and aware that the slightest movement would be fatal. She extended her hands toward the column of water, where an explosion dispersed much of it and opened the way for this new life form. "H-how…majestic!"
What Tristessa saw was a terrifyingly familiar creature. A humanoid figure, wearing impressive black metal armor, feminine, with circular patterns scattered throughout; lines that formed endless loops, the very representation of Death and Resurrection. At the armor's joints, not even the edges of chainmail or light clothing could be seen, only solid darkness that hid the light. On her back, a cloak made of shadows flew in the wind, giving her a ghostly, ethereal quality, as if it would go through everything it touched… Something that would prove to be a mistaken suspicion, given the cold touch of the curved sword she wielded in her right hand against the flesh of living beings.
That knightess rode a black horse, with glowing red eyes and a mane as somber as her mistress's cloak.
But neither the armor, nor her sword, nor her horse was what drowned Tristessa in fear: it was her lack of a head, or rather, the fact that she held it in her right hand: a full helmet with a visor, surrounded by such dark miasma that even the girl felt its heavy influence for the first time.
She was a harbinger of imminent Death, which Tristessa remembered from myths back on Earth.
A Dullahan.
The murky waters receded until they returned to their natural state, with that ghostly knight galloping slowly toward the two women, neither she nor her horse sinking into the dark depths.
"Take me, daughter of Endrel, daughter of Margules! Harvest my soul in commemoration of your arrival in Nekrom!" Daiana opened her arms, so blinded by her madness and by all the blood rapidly clotting around her eyes that she didn't fear the Death approaching the shoreline in the slightest. "I am all yours, Lord Moebius will understand and support my decision! There is no greater honor than giving my life to a divine angel…!"
In a second, the Dullahan's presence became a gravity well seeking absolute submission. Her gallop was swift, straight toward the Priestess, her sword poised for a single action: the blade sliced through the space where her neck had been, and Daiana's head flew through the air, covered in blood and grinning with perpetual madness, to fall into the lake and sink into its depths.
An absolute irony that Tristessa failed to appreciate, and couldn't even if she wanted to, as her time froze at that precise instant: just as she had the Dullahan in front of her, her heart had stopped.
Her Baptism in Ruins had reached the point of critical mass, and not only had her heart stopped beating, but all sound and all internal and external stimulation had been extinguished. The wind no longer existed, nor did the pain, nor her limbs. All that existed for her was listening to the incessant throbbing of the epicenter of the dark mark that could no longer spread across her torso.
"…"
The Dullahan moved her horse forward a little, parallel to the shore, so that she could stand right next to Tristessa and show her her severed head. The distance was perfect for the black-haired girl to see through the visor, amidst all that smoke and shadows, and find, against all odds, ordinary gray eyes.
"Returning from Death comes with a high price. I am your Nemesis, and I will hunt you through space and time until the debt is paid in full," said a dark and sinister female voice from inside the helmet.
Words Tristessa would remember, simultaneously with the end of her life and the collapse of the world around her.
And a second before dying, before leaving the Evil Dream and that lost reality to reset the cycle once again, she managed to hear two last words from the phantom knightess. That Dullahan born out of the essence of Darkness:
"Defeat me."