Dark Resurrection: Shadows of Nekrom

When Tristessa woke up, it took her a long time to regain even the slightest bit of her senses. Everything was a gray cloud, shadows dancing before her eyes and a constant monotonous ringing that had been engraved within her head from the blow that left her unconscious.

"Ugh…Khh… M-my face…"

Continuous and non-stop waves of acute pain, running through her face from front to back. She couldn't hear or see anything, but the fact that she wasn't being attacked was more than a good sign.

She tried to stand up and the world turned upside down, making her fall clumsily on her side against the cold ground. The blows that Lucahn gave her in the face had shattered the synergy between her eyes and ears, and without that teamwork, maintaining balance was almost impossible. Then the nausea came, bringing a reflux of vomit to Tristessa's throat; blood and saliva fell from her half-open mouth in a constant thread, while she crawled like a worm in the sun's rays.

"It hurts… Oh, it hurts so much… Ah, fuck!" Tristessa let out a sob and squeezed the completely pulverized bridge of her nose, wanting to mitigate the widespread pain on her face. Of course, her action only made it worse. "SHIT! AAAARGH, FUCK!"

The damage was much more severe than she had imagined; she had to take a deep breath and hit the floor with her fists to distract herself, to distribute the agony. Along with the pain, her vision gradually cleared, but not without consequences: her right eye had clearly suffered some damage, or in the surrounding area, since she saw partially dark, with red hues typical of blood covering her eyeball.

Nevertheless, she could clearly see that the kitchen was a mess: the chairs were scattered everywhere, the table was overturned and one of the cupboards had fallen, creating a lake of glass and broken porcelain around her. Only the lamp, fixed on the stone floor, had survived the storm that had passed through there.

"Stop it, Lucahn! Please, stop it!"

In the distance, Tristessa heard Tiara's voice, screaming from beyond the ceiling. The second floor.

"L-Lu...Lucahn..."

She crawled as best she could, pushing shards of glass and ceramic out of the way and fighting the urge to vomit from the sensory asynchrony she was suffering. A powerful and focused source of pain suddenly attacked her, in the place where her face had suffered the most damage. Tristessa gritted her teeth, saliva and blood bubbling as she stifled her own screams. Meanwhile, on the upper floor, Lucahn's parents were still immersed in their own chaos, shouting muffled words that Tristessa could no longer differentiate between the continuous ringing in her ears and the beating of her own heart.

Leaning against the glass window full of ancient weapons, the black-haired girl did everything possible to stand up. The world kept spinning and her legs were completely unsteady, so she was forced to continue without moving away from the stained glass windows, stuck together one next to the other until they ended up at the side of the stairs.

The hall of the house had also had its share of disorder, with three hunted spinnaraks on the carpet, Jim's hunting rifle lying near them, and a mobile table with cleaning utensils crashed against the opposite glass cabinets, fragmented and about to give way.

"Ahh, please, no!"

The wave of pain that spread through her head made a new attack without warning, forcing Tristessa to stop and lean her temple against the glass, cold and cruel for offering her the reflection of her face covered in blood: her nose was broken in three places, constantly expelling blood from the holes and cuts that exposed the broken bone; and at the height of the right eyebrow, another deep cut that had swollen the entire perimeter of her eye.

"Tell us what's wrong with you! Please, son!"

That unbearable pain had given Tristessa back the ability to hear a little better, managing to distinguish Jin's voice loaded with desperation, between violent blows and heartbreaking screams that came from that child who had attacked her for telling him her secret.

Her truth about Death and Resurrection, which he had rejected in the worst way imaginable.

"W-why?"

Her anguished question said to her reflection against the glass, weak and with a metallic taste impregnated in every corner of her mouth. The physical suffering and how repulsive her face looked filled her eyes with more tears that soon mixed with dry and fresh blood from her cheeks and chin. New blows coming from the second floor made her jump, accompanied by more roars that even seemed inhuman coming from a child.

"Lucahn...?"

As Tristessa climbed the stairs with extreme care and with both hands tightly gripping the railing, she thought of her new friend, who attacked her in a brutally savage way.

Her emotions about it were in conflict; bitterness and sorrow clashing against the problem that didn't make the slightest sense. That sweet and adorable child had turned into a dangerous lunatic from one second to the next, without any previous signs, without any reason other than a clash of opinions. If he wasn't going to believe her about her Resurrection, he didn't have to attack her in such a deranged way. No one in their right mind could react like that... Tristessa repeated his accusations in her head, and how he told her that she deserved to die for lying.

Illogical. Unjustifiable. Insanity.Something fundamentally wrong had happened with Lucahn. Did it have to do with the use of the Divinity of Fragmented Reality? Or was it really an adverse emotional reaction?

No, it couldn't be either of those two options. Otherwise Jim and Tiara would have already been aware of some precedent, and they wouldn't be there, next to the door of the guest room, victims of absolute restlessness and nerves on edge.

"What are we going to do? By the gods, what are we going to do?!" she heard Tiara lament, crying freely and facing the door that was being unstoppably attacked by Lucahn, locked on the other side. "M-my child…"

"DIE, LIAR! LEAVE THIS WORLD, KILL YOURSELF AT ONCE!"

Tristessa saw from her position on the last step pieces of a decorating urn that had fallen, the carpet that ran through the length of the hallway unaligned, Lucahn's two parents in one of the worst moments of their lives.

What disturbed her the most was the brutal desolation that dominated Tiara. A powerless mother with no ideas about the evil her son was suffering. She saw how she had trouble breathing; her extreme concern was not free having to make double the effort for herself and the life that was growing inside her. That little being that, surely more than ever, she protected with a hand that did not stop caressing the surface of her swollen belly.

"Let's wait for Severus to arrive, he will know what to do. "You'll see," Jin told her, wanting to comfort her by spreading confidence in his words, even though his face expressed the opposite. From some bruises, a cut in the lower lip, and a bit of blood staining part of his beard, it seemed that Lucahn put up a fight before being locked up for his own good.

"If you think I'm going to wait a single second for that blood elf to deign to show up, you're more than wrong, idiot!"

"DIE, PLEASE TRISTESSA, DIE! NO ONE WHO LIES LIKE THAT CAN LIVE, NO ONE!"

The hunter tried to put his hand on his wife shoulder but she rejected it, and in the abrupt movement she made with her upper body, Tiara turned her head furiously and saw Tristessa walking towards them, slowly and leaning against the wall.

"YOU!" Adding inhuman anger to the storm of nerves that was invading her, the woman grabbed her by the nape of the neck and took advantage of her weak position to crush her against that cold brick surface covered by pattern-made fabric. "You damn witch!"

"M-Miss Tiara, wait…!" Tristessa wanted to say, but the woman, watched by her stunned husband, pulled her head away from the wall only to push her back against it with force. "Ahhgg, no!"

"Tiara, stop it! She's just a child!" Jin begged, who was totally ignored.

"What the fuck did you do to my son!?" she asked, screaming over Lucahn's shrieks and the loud banging on the bedroom door. "Make him back to normal! DO IT, RIGHT NOW!"

"I didn't do anything to him! I swear, I don't know what happened!" Her answer was unsatisfactory for Tiara and she hit the black-haired girl again. A trickle of blood began to run down the side of her head, and the dizziness that was slowly beginning to go away returned to stay. "Ahh! Please, Tiara! I want to help Lucahn, tell me what I can do!"

"I'm not letting you get one more damn imperial foot near my son! If you want to help him, get out there and let yourself be eaten by whatever's lurking at the edge of the forest!" Tiara growled as she pulled herself together and threw the girl into the middle of the hallway, towards the stairs. She fell hard onto the carpet, coughing and spitting out her own blood that kept getting into her mouth. "Go on, go die, you fucking bitch! Or I'll kill you myself!"

"DIE! SHE MUST DIE! LET ME KILL HER! DIE, DIE, DIE…!" Lucahn repeated, his heart-rending screams and his small fists pounding the door like a battering ram

At that moment, the hunter passed by his wife and put one knee on the ground, crouching down next to the weak girl. Fearing retaliation, Tristessa slowly raised her gaze to face the man who had saved her, but on his face she found only deep despondency, and tears flowing from his emerald eyes without stopping

"Tristessa, please… Please, I beg you, tell me how to get my Lucahn back," He took both of her hands, squeezing them gently and trying to smile at her, but only managing to create a grimace that carried pure anguish. "I will give you whatever you want, all of our soul-jewels, everything…

"J-Jin, wait… I swear on my life, I was just talking to him. He showed me his Divinity, and I told him that I… I…"

When she was a second away from repeating to that defeated man the same words she said to Lucahn, Tristessa suddenly fell silent and both she and Jin, and also Tiara in the distance, looked in the direction of the guest room door.

There was no more knocking. There were no more screams. Nothing.

"Lucahn!"

Both mother and father rushed against the door, and Jin, with trembling hands, tried to unlock the lock with a brass key he pulled from his jacket pocket. Tristessa also tried to get up as quickly as she could and stumbled as she tried to go to them. Fortunately she didn't fall to the ground again and, ignoring all the avalanche of pain coming from different parts of her head, she saw Jin throw open the door and Tiara enter without waiting.

And then she heard the mother's heartbreaking scream. And she saw the father fall to his knees in the middle of the hallway, his tearful profile gaze fixed and lost inside the room.

And then it was her turn, leaning against the door frame to keep her balance, to see something she would never, ever be able to get out of her mind.

"LUCAHN, NOOOOO!"

Tiara's scream echoed throughout the house, and especially in that room, where Lucahn lay dead, sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. His head was paralyzed and staring at the ceiling, his empty eye sockets empty, from which lines of blood ran down his face. His mouth, half open, giving the corpse an air of irrationality worthy of that which had been born at the precise moment when everything went to hell in the kitchen.

And his eyes, pupils completely dilated by the madness that threw him into the void, lay in his open hands, completely stained with blood and resting on his thighs…