Auron Casimir, now a revenant thanks to the [Divinity of Accursed Existence], emerged from the shadows to join the battle, his dual revolvers in hand and moving with perfect pace.

As if his limbs weren't paralyzed by rigor mortis. As if he weren't dead.

A fallacy that collapsed the moment the fires of the Mercer-Archeos household and the bloodflame of Severus's thaumaturgically crafted sword illuminated his figure. His jacket was stained with dried blood, the skin of his hands covered in black stains from the coagulated and rotten blood beneath. He wasn't wearing his hat, revealing his short black hair, unfazed by the ash-laden wind, but his scarf remained in place, hiding his nose and mouth from everyone's view.

Filling Tristessa with a bottomless guilt that brought her to tears, Auron's eyes were now a deep gold, unblinking and filled with something other than Life.

It was the darkness offered by the Goddess of Order, in direct juxtaposition to the fundamental aspect of Death ruled by her brother, the God of Chaos.

"Auron!?" Severus yelled, staring at the undead gunslinger in amazement as the next burst of armor-piercing bullets passed with surgical precision inches from his face and hit the stunned Dullahan behind him. It was time to counterattack. "RAAAAA!"

Screaming in fury, the blood elf turned around and lunged at his enemy. He brandished his flaming blood sword and managed to land a slash across her right shoulder, shattering part of the armor. The Dullahan defended herself from a predictable attack to the same spot, blocking it with her sword, but at the same time leaving the left side of her body unprotected.

Her left arm, with which held her head covered by miasma. Her weak spot.

"There, Auron! Shoot her in the head!" Tristessa cried, one hand already unconsciously raised to her chest from feeling too cold. "AGHHH!"

A terrible pain ran from front to back through her brain, coming from the depths of her being. As if a dark hand were digging its cold nails into her soul and threatening to tear it into a hundred pieces.

Not because of the order she gave the gunslinger, but because of the use of an unknown Divinity he possessed: he unloaded the bullets from one of the revolvers, took a speedloader with hollow-point bullets from inside his jacket, and loaded the rotating drum with them.

What followed were bursts of bullets of both types, denting the metal that made up the Dullahan's black full-helmet and causing one of the bullets to scatter inside.

A scream of pain from within the helmet echoed across the meadow, spreading concentrated Discord like stale mist. Unaware that fine lines of blood were beginning to escape from beneath her nearly bulging eyes, Tristessa saw this as a one-in-a-million chance.

It was now or never.

"Fall already, Dullahan!" Severus shouted, attacking like the novice he was, with predictable attacks that the dark knightess couldn't block as she focused on gathering magical energy around her wounded head.

"What is…? She's casting a spell!" Tristessa shrieked, dread increasing as she remembered what had happened at the Derelict Outpost. "STOP HER!"

The bloodflame continued to melt her armor, and Auron finished shattering and piercing it. The Dullahan was overwhelmed, the shadows inside her burning or escaping as if mimicking bleeding. It seemed like the spell she was casting was her last card to play…

"It's not enough…" A dark whisper that only Tristessa understood, and it froze her heartbeat. "It's not enough to defeat me, my Nemesis! IT'S NOT ENOUGH!"

Beneath the feet of everyone present, both living and dead, a massive magic circle formed out of shadows. Lines that designed pentagrams and enclosed black glyphs that smoked pure Discord. The magical energy exerted an enormous pressure, like elemental gravity thaumaturgy.

But this wasn't that kind of magic... It was dark thaumaturgy.

"Stijian Kenosis," the Dullahan recited, and everything stopped.

Tristessa felt emptiness. Time died, paralyzed in a strange way, difficult to explain. Blinking, breathing rapidly, and moving were actions that continued uninterrupted, but something was definitely not right. Something trapped by the influence of that dark spell.

It wasn't until she saw Severus that she understood.

His bloodflame had gone out, as if someone had blown out the only lit candle in a room in the middle of the night. Leaving him frozen in shock, his arm exposed, skinless and muscles covered in pustules and severe burns.

No magic. No flow of ethereal energy. All his legendary rage repressed beneath the force of a time-flow that, within that magic circle, had ceased to exist.

"Ah...?" The blood elf didn't even react when the Dullahan stepped forward, casting a massive shadow over him, and pierced his chest with her sword.

"NOOOOOOO!"

Tristessa's scream achieved nothing. It didn't stop Severus from vomiting blood and falling backward as the dark knightess viciously shoved him with her foot. Nor did it stop her from stabbing him again and again, plunging the black metal blade into the ground beneath his back, pulling it up, and then bringing it down again.

"STOP! STOP, LET HIM GO!" Tristessa pleaded, her throat aching and her heart breaking with each stab causing Severus to convulse, shake, and spit blood. Her heart sank as she listened to his screams; his face shattering upon extreme pain, tears, and terror before the approaching Death… "STOP!"

Despair won. Her feelings for that man filled her with naive and senseless courage. Lacking the capacity for reason… Perhaps an unconscious suicidal intention, as she drew the hunting knife tied to the waist of her dress and ran toward Severus and the Dullahan.

Screams, the first buds of that wicked flower called madness. Her eyes filled with tears, blind to the mortal danger.

Without knowing how to use that weapon except to stab in the back. Without knowing how to dodge or deflect the attack of a cutting weapon.

With nothing but affection and love for Severus, she lashed out at that phantom divine with such terrifying armor and a cloak of shadows that devoured all light.

And she was defeated in an instant.

Tristessa saw red covering her vision along with pieces of that knife. With a kick, as if she were garbage, The Dullahan thrown her back where she came from, as a sign of utter humiliation.

"Uhh...!"

The first thing she felt was the stabbing pain in her abdomen from the contact with her Nemesis's armored boot. But soon that pain was nothing as she half-opened her eyes and lifted her head from the ground to understand why she couldn't feel her hand.

"M-my...hand?" she wondered, not understanding why only her ring finger and pinky were intact and the rest of her hand was gone.

In their place were only shreds of lacerated muscle, ruptured veins and exposed nerves, along with jagged, broken bone. And when her consciousness realized what had happened, and she saw her broken and bloody fingers scattered among the charred corpses of the witches, that was when all hell broke loose.

"AHHHH, MY HAND! SHIT, FUCK!!!"

With her cry, agonizing heat erupted in her nervous system. Blood flowed relentlessly, and no matter what she did, the pain persisted and increased with unmerciful pace. Whether she writhed on the ground or squeezed the wound the best she could, the agony wouldn't stop.

And neither would the Dullahan and the plunge of her sword over the blood elf.

Severus was no longer moving. He no longer flinched from the wounds dealt into his torso, his shirt torn to shreds, and dozens of deadly cuts beneath. The earth had completely moistened around him, mixing ash and blood alike.

His blue gaze was empty, directed at the beautiful starry sky. His mouth was half-open, and his chest no longer rose and fell in desperation to breathe, nor did his heart beat, without a drop of blood flowing.

"SEVERUS, NOOOO! SEVERUS, SEV, S-SEV, SEV…!" The girl spat bloody saliva, screaming wildly for the already dead elf. The Dullahan passed over him, attracting both Tristessa's attention and her resentment. Her fury was so great that she even knelt, still pressing on what remained of her hand. "KILL HER, AURON! SHOOT, KILL HER! KILL HER NOW!"

But for some reason, the revenant behind her had stopped firing. It was frozen, and not exactly because of the Dullahan's thaumaturgy.

This was disobedience, and Tristessa hadn't yet realized it. She was so desperate, teetering at the brink of the void, facing the Abyss...

"ARISE, SEVERUS! ARISE AND KEEP FIGHTING!" With her Divinity, she shone the false light toward the elf's corpse, without considering the consequences. Without thinking about anything but the excruciating pain that surged from her severed limb and her broken heart. "SHE MUST FALL! ARISE RIGHT NOW!"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Her [Divinity of Accursed Existence] obeyed…and spiraled out of control.

"…!"

Spreading a miasma of parasitic darkness, invading not only Severus's body but all the charred corpses around it. Dozens of broken souls lost in the void returned, drawn by all that false light, screaming messages of rejection toward Tristessa.

And before she could even think for a second to comprehend what was happening, her soul fractured.

"Ah…!" Tristessa's nails broke when she dug them in hard against her chest, over her black marks of her Baptism in Ruins, intended to go beyond and deeper. Towards the center of her being, shattered and letting immensurable Darkness leaking outside.

The dread that invaded her was so imposing that it could almost rival that when one a second away from dying. No spirit potion could withstand the enormous strain exerted not only by keeping a resurrected body like Auron's upright, but also by the uncontrolled spread of that influence in all directions. Terror moved slowly in their graves of ashes, while Tristessa could do nothing but bleed from every possible orifice in her body and feel her Baptism in Ruins scattering its cold capable of freezing even the hells themselves.

"Kaj…agh…ahh…!" Choking on her own blood, darkness gripping her heart that was about to stop. Her vision flooded with blood, pushing back tears rather than diluting them, but it didn't prevent her from seeing the Dullahan stop in her tracks and make her sword disappear in a cloud of shadows. The way to declare her victory.

"This is the result of your actions, my Nemesis. Everything you did to settle your unresolved score with the Gods," the Dark Knightess -daughter of Endrel and Margules- told her, raising her head to convey her message to Tristessa, even though it was impossible for her to reply or say even a clear word. "You failed."

Broken, shattered, hopeless. Tristessa's arms fell prey to gravity, limp and unable to function. Her legs, too, ignored her —Everything did.

She could only cough and spit out clotted blood. She couldn't blink, forced to see her mortal enemy shrouded in the shadows of her cloak. Wounded, much of her armor broken, she was receiving the light of the Twin Moons so that her black battle scars were exposed.

"And now you will die."

At the height of Night, the Dullahan became one with the darkness and disappeared, allowing a resurrected corpse to pass through the mist of shadows… With the fires of the Mercer-Archeos home regaining ground, the tongues of flames rising high, a crimson-haired revenant walked slowly toward her.

Stepping on the ashen bodies of the Coven witches, the wounds on his now bare chest bleeding steadily, he stared at Tristessa with the same hatred he had only bestowed upon the Dark Lady's servants in life.

"Ahhh...! S-S... S-sev...!" Crying tears of blood, the girl despaired at the knowledge that she would never see the blood elf smile at her. At that same moment, a shadow passed by her, invading her peripheral vision. "A-Aur...?"

The undead gunslinger walked up to meet Severus, united by a single intention. Both of them stared at their summoner with two pairs of yellow eyes, and in silence they understood each other: Auron holstered his revolvers and watched, while Severus pointed his hands -one intact and another carbonized to the bone- at the motionless Tristessa, reciting with all the hatred a piece of a broken and lost soul could express:

"Ur Firan Tinax."

That was a powerful voice, corrupted and filled with evil, one that Tristessa would never have wanted to hear. A voice that conjured a ring of elemental fire glyphs beneath her, heat flowing dangerously from those ethereal symbols.

But Tristessa did not care.

Fighting the indescribable pain of her shattered soul, her life slipping away with every passing second, she wanted those two men to know her feelings.

For them to accept her selfishness once more… For Auron to forgive her for dying in her place, and for Severus to know how much she loves him.

"…"

Fate was cruel. Two soundless messages, as the glyphs beneath her activated, and a pillar of fire rose within the area enclosed by the magic ring, enveloping Tristessa completely.

"I'm sorry, Auron… I love you, Severus…"

Those were her last thoughts, and then she screamed until she couldn't anymore.

The oxygen around her was already burning hot, and inhaling air was equivalent to inhaling fire. Her cries of suffering became inaudible as her lungs seared.

Everything burned. Tiara's torn and dirty dress turned to cinders. Her hair was gone along her scalp in a second, her blistered skin was incinerated, her muscles were charred, her bones too.

Every drop of blood inside her boiled and evaporated, a mess of charred entrails within her foreshadowing the painless end. Because there was no pain at all at that time, when all that remained was the heat turning her eyes into charcoal and evaporating the liquid within, and her brain melting and escaping through her ears, nose and mouth.

The last instant her fading mind retained before the incandescent whiteness of the fire faded into cold darkness, were the undead figures of Severus and Auron, behind the pillar of fire, glaring at her.

No love for her. No forgiveness. Only resentment and hatred.

And in the darkness, what remained was the sound of the [Golden Chains] and the voices of Endrel and Margules, guiding her back in time…

DIVINITY OF THE DARK ROOM

BLACK MIRROR – Stats upon Tristessa's Death - Updates in Yellow

TRISTESSA IRANDELL

MAIN STATS

Strength: 1 out of 100

Dexterity:

3

(+3) out of 100

Endurance: 3 out of 100

Vitality:

4

(+2) out of 100

Intelligence: 6 out of 100

Spirit:

9

out of 100

Willpower: 0 out of 100

Luck: 0 out of 100

SUBSTATS

Hit Points:

20

(+5) out of 10000

Magic Points: 1 out of 5000

Spirit Points:

60

out of 5000

Stamina:

40

out of 5000

Poise:

8

out of 1000

Immunities:

5

out of 500

Physical Resistance:

15

out of 500

Magic Resistance:

10

out of 500

Instant Death Resistance:

3

out of 500

Terror Resistance:

2

out of 500

Madness Resistance:

7

out of 500

Karma:

-25

points between [-100 and 100]

PASSIVES

First Echo of Viktor Enma: +3 Dexterity points. Bonus on daggers and knives.

Second Echo of Viktor Enma: +2 Vitality points. HP bonus.

Curse of the Nemesis (Dullahan): -1 on every main stat and -5 on every substat for each confrontation against the Dullahan. Cumulative.

EQUIPMENT

Casual Trench Coat: No damage negation bonuses

Casual Trousers: No damage negation bonuses

Casual Boots: No damage negation bonuses

Crimson Dress: No damage negation bonuses

Hunting Knife: +D physical damage bonus from Dexterity scaling

DIVINITIES

Death and Resurrection (Dark Resurrection)

–

Divinity of Death, granted by the God of Chaos, Vel'Moran. Banished from Death, there is no end to the abyss on the horizon. Dying is a straight line. Resurrecting is a spiral

.

Baptism in Ruins

–

HIDDEN BY UNNATURAL DARKNESS

Gradient of Madness

–

The forbidden truth emanates from the overlapping of multiple realities. No sentient being can endure it. The logical result is madness

. (Grants +9999 points of Madness-status effect to friends and foes alike after consciously learning about the

[Divinity of Death and Resurrection]

)

Accursed Existence

–

Divinity of Life, granted by the Goddess of Order, Xiliarra. Life is a gift, rejoicing in it is an obligation. Even for those who reopen their eyes and beg for oblivion

.

Arising Capacity

: 1

Soul Strain

1 SP per second for Fading Souls –

5 SP per second to use a Divinity

5 SP per second for Lesser Souls

–

8 SP per second to use a Divinity

Whispers in the Dark

–

Divinity of Po

wer, granted by the God of Balance, Kantrus. It is believed that the dead tell no tales. The reality is that it is a matter of who is willing to listen

.

Harvested Echoes

: 2

Dark Room

–

Divinity of the Mind, granted by the God of Balance, Kantrus. The mind can always be a darker place than one believes. Its corridors can be endless, a labyrinth capable of swallowing its owner alive, and no one will hear their screams.

Room of Knowledge

Room of Phantom Remembrances

Negative Altar

Projector Room

Assistant's Offce

Black Mirror

HIDDEN BY UNNATURAL DARKNESS

TITLE – Scum

"You are weak. Fragile and unwanted. You are nothing. Your allies see you as a burden, they despise you. Your enemies mock you at your attempts at survival. You are destined to fail."

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