"Huh? What the fuck…?"

Tristessa felt something on top of her head with the little sensory capacity left in her oxygen-starved brain. Something small, and then wetness running down the sides, over her temple, and dampening her hair.

An ammoniacal smell, unpleasant… Like concentrated urine.

"Oh, no…" The mercenary let go, allowing Tristessa to fall to her knees and cough hard, eager to fill her lungs with fresh air. "Palkuriae!"

Her vision cleared, and she still felt that strange weight over her head; something moving like a spider, sending shivers down her spine. She saw a shadow looming from the upper left side of her vision: the upside-down head of a small humanoid creature with bare white skin, long violet hair, four small eyes, slits for a nose, and a small mouth. It had two large butterfly wings on its back, black with yellow patterns that gave it the appearance of having two eyes in the center.

It looked almost like a pixie from Earth mythology, with the disturbing difference that its small fingers were long and naturally made to possess sharp, pin-like nails.

"What the...?"

Blinking several times and stopping coughing, Tristessa saw the creature smiling at her. But it wasn't an ordinary smile: its mouth grew unnaturally large, the corners of its lips almost reaching its ears, encompassing almost half its head, and filled with countless teeth filthy with dried blood.

"Ah?!"

The small creature let out a malevolent giggle and took flight as Tristessa crawled along the ground, away from it and away from the tree behind it, which was the source of hundreds more similar laughter.

Unblinking from the sheer terror she felt, she saw the swarm. Hundreds of these creatures clinging to the tree, its trunk and branches, their wings spread so wide that, along with the natural play of light and shadow in the forest, it provided a fairly effective camouflage.

Hundreds and hundreds of eyes, each and every one staring at Tristessa and Melian. Hundreds of diabolical, bloody, saliva-spilling grins...

"Humans!"

Tristessa jumped. She was so focused on this new threat in the tree, sweating profusely and very agitated, that she didn't see the first creature approaching her until it was right in front of her face.

That fairy who had peed on her head—or rather, that palkuria— was gliding, flapping its wings and making a crackling sound.

"S-she can talk..." she whispered, surprised to hear its voice, tiny and high-pitched, almost adorable like a little girl's...

Contradicting her voracious nature in its entirety.

Tristessa remembered that other, similar creature Severus had used as a canary in a coal mine, back in one of the nonexistent pasts.

A subspecies? Or a male counterpart? It wasn't the best time to ask, with all those teeth so close to her face, releasing a noxious smell of rotten flesh...

"Uh... I-I..."

The girl didn't know what to do in that kind of situation, but she had a feeling that trying to run was going to be suicidal.

There was a reason why Melian stood as still as a statue, fear etched on his dirty, gaunt face.

"Humans!" the palkuria repeated, brimming with happiness and enthusiasm. "Delicious! Thanks for coming to us! But hive no need that much food! One is enough!"

Delicious? Food?

Looking further into the picture, Tristessa realized that many of the tree's branches were actually old bones, broken and held together with leaves and strange secretions. Complete skeletons of both animals and humanoid beings; their skulls decorated the hive and served as living quarters for the palkuriae.

"My God..."

Tristessa's soul descended into a vortex of inescapable darkness. It was inevitable to remember her first Death, devoured alive at the mercy of a pack of vargs.

"No... please, no..." she sobbed, hugging herself as she relived within her mind the sensations of her skin and muscles being torn, her organs bursting under pressure, her bones breaking...

The terror of Death enveloping her tortured spirit, all that despair and loneliness, fearing oblivion, caused an aura of Discord to flow from within Tristessa. A miasma of darkness, invisible to untrained eyes, but which every living being in Nekrom could feel.

And the palkuriae were no exception.

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"The female smells bad!"

"Smells disgusting!"

"Must be rotten inside!"

The creatures chattered among themselves, visibly offended by such a spoiled plate of food before them. For that was what they saw in Tristessa's place. If they rejected Discord, then those creatures hadn't been corrupted by the Dark Lady, unlike evil creatures like vargs or ursall.

Or at least, that was how it was with that subspecies of palkuriae that inhabited those forests...

"Then let it be the male!" proposed the faerie-type creature leading the hive, and that caused the others to flap their wings in excitement, filling that part of the forest with unbearable crackling sounds.

"Yes, the male smells good!"

"Blood smells sweet, the way I like it!"

"Want his intestines!"

"The tongue is for me!"

Still frightened, Tristessa shifted her gaze to the mercenary, watching him quickly enter into a state of panic.

"What?! N-No, why?!" he screamed, the palkuriae's flapping increasing along with the chilling screeching sound, driving him to act out of desperation, his right hand pointing at the hive. "Ur Firan Tinax!"

A fire thaumaturgical spell that failed. The glyph didn't appear, and that meant one thing: without a wand or catalyst, Melian had just reached his limit, and Tristessa knew exactly the consequences when that happened, having witnessed it on Severus when he fought Diana Mercer-Archeos.

Melian's nose began to bleed, an intolerable pain coursing through his body at the excess to which he subjected his own soul. He could barely stand, his breathing becoming increasingly labored.

"Ur…ur…u…" His trembling opened hand, very slowly, shifted from pointing at the hive to pointing at Tristessa, who by reflex raised both hands and opened her mouth to beg for mercy. The words didn't come out, frozen before the mercenary's cold gaze filled with hatred and thirst for revenge; if he wasn't going to make it out alive, it was better to take the reason of so much suffering with him. "Escant!"

"NO!" The gray-eyed girl covered herself with both arms and waited for the mortal pain of being pierced by an ice spear propelled at violent speed.

That didn't happen.

Hearing gargling sounds and stifled breathing made her lower her arms and look.

"Melian…"

The man had failed, his thaumaturgy betraying him and leaving a deep scar on his soul; an astral wound that manifested on the physical plane through internal injuries, muscle tearing, and organ contractions. He had brought both hands to his throat, choking on the blood that was trying to escape his body, and his bulging eyes were fixed on the ceiling of branches and leaves, while the veins inside them burst, and soon the whites of his eyeballs turned red.

But his suffering didn't end there: two palkuriae flew like arrows toward Melian, between his legs, and with their claws and teeth, they attacked his heels. Blood was expelled like a mist, chunks of flesh and veins torn by those tiny claws. His legs instantly lost all strength to support his body weight, and he fell, unable to scream, unable to fight for survival as his feet were gnawed to the bone by those creatures.

"...!" Tristessa stifled a scream and covered her mouth.

From the fear of that entire hive taking off from the tree to fly toward Melian. From the nausea caused by the beginning of the massacre.

Soon, everything was flapping wings and madness-inducing crackling. A ferrous atmosphere saturating the very air. The pungent, invasive scent of entrails, nerves, and gastric fluid.

Tristessa couldn't see Melian's body being devoured. The sheer number of palkuriae tearing and chewing countless pieces of him was too much. They fought each other for a place at that atrocious table and threw useless items into the air: pieces of clothing, nails, bones...

Her stomach twisted, and she let out a heartbreaking sob. There was no mercy in that forest; it was pure chance and luck that she was still alive. Her Discord had prevented her from suffering the Death she already knew.

Would it have been more painful than being devoured by vargs? What hurt more, her body being torn into large pieces by several strong jaws or into small pieces by hundreds and hundreds of tiny teeth and needle-shaped claws?

Questions she didn't want to know the answers to, but that would linger morbidly inside her head.

"So delicious!"

Tristessa violently turned her head to the side, hurting herself, as she heard the spokesperson for that palkuriae hive fluttering beside her: her naked body bathed in blood, she was holding a large piece of one of Melian's deflated eyes, covered in a transparent, gelatinous liquid that dripped continuously onto the ground, and she was chewing it with great pleasure.

"Want to eat too?"

That question managed to break something inside Tristessa. Perhaps her soul, perhaps her sanity, it was difficult to know when the two concepts were intrinsically linked.

"No…no, no, no, no…no," she repeated over and over again, taking several steps back. All that overwhelming fear that had kept her still and obedient released her from her bonds. "I want to go. Please…please, let me go…"

"Yes! More for us!" the faerie-type creature celebrated. "Yes, yes, go, quickly. Sisters won't enjoy food if they smell you too."

The creature greeted her by waving its long-clawed hands back and forth and plunged headlong into that tide of blood and palkuriae frantic to eat.

"…"

Silently, Tristessa turned and began walking, none of the creatures interested in chasing her or feeling any regret for letting her go.

Alone, guided by her crystal which pointed its light north, she walked straight toward the road. As if nothing had happened. As if the last survivor of the mercenary group protecting Madame Luchie's caravan hadn't lost his life in a manner as gruesome as the one she'd just witnessed.

Would someone find his remains? And those of the caravan? Would she hear the echoes of the dead, like Viktor Enma's, calling her out for their deaths?

Tristessa didn't know. She only knew that she was still alive in that cycle, even though she was feeling dead inside.

She had run out of tears to cry, although soon she would feel drops running down the sides of her face again: back on the road, she was walking towards Entrana, whose region was being visited by a massive storm, with black clouds that covered the entire sky and seemed to have no end.

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