Before Tristessa could even reason through the words and the cryptic message the elf wanted to convey to her, her Baptism in Ruins reached the point of total intolerance.

She couldn't ignore it any longer, and therefore, she couldn't ignore what was approaching either...

"Oh n-no…! The Dullahan…!"

The cold surrounding her body finished extinguishing the influence of the vitality potion she had taken, and the warmth of some garbage bags Severus had set on fire with his magic.

The mark on her chest hurt like never before, to the point that for the first time it began to subdue Tristessa. Physically, she was recovering thanks to the first aid provided by the elf, but her soul was vulnerable to the attack of that parasitic curse she called Baptism in Ruins. It was as if that supernatural cancer were beginning to spread, infecting every ethereal particle that made up her soul.

Unmatched, unbearable cold that made her wish she could scream until she passed out; a paranormal frostbite flowing through her being, threatening to break her into millions of pieces... Freezing her extremities, her nerves, every pore of her skin, like infinite pins of ice penetrating her inside, from a parallel existential plane. An ethereal pain that attacked her soul and brought her to the brink of absolute destruction.

"T-there…!" was all she could manage, and she pointed a trembling finger in Severus's direction, right behind him, at the mass of darkness that was beginning to block the cistern's exit. "I-t's her!"

The elf turned around right away and saw with his own eyes what tormented Tristessa once night fell. Amidst tongues of pure darkness, the [Dullahan] emerged and invaded the enclosure, the footsteps of her metal boots echoing and spreading Discord in catastrophic quantities, capable of altering the material world and twisting it into a living nightmare.

The Darkness became her cloak, decorating her imposing full black armor. In her right hand she held her curved sword, the dark steel plates covering her fingers clinking as she hardened her grip. In her other hand, she held her severed head, covered by her full-helm and emanating Discord like an unholy censer.

And as she raised her arm to show both elf and human girl her head, her uncanny and malevolent voice emerged from within her:

"My Nemesis… Fight me! Show me your valor in battle and defeat me!"

The dark knightess' bellow was like a shower of thunderbolts razing the earth. Words charged with as much power as thaumaturgical spells capable of bending the reality of the world to their will, or worse, Divinities who subjugated the very laws of the Universe in ways that magic could not even reach.

"What the hell…?" Severus stepped back, in pain and covering one ear with the hand he wasn't using to hold his catalyzed cane, but without taking his shocked gaze from this enemy, whose words he hadn't understood. "Tessa… Let's leave our conversation for later, yes?"

The grey-eyed girl, on the other hand, felt the Dullahan's voice as terrible as a dagger piercing her heart, an indirect attack that hurt her deep within.

She had never experienced that effect before… She had never felt her energies draining as fast as that. It was as if the mark on her chest were sucking her life force and giving it to the Dullahan, who looked even more imposing and dangerous with that evil aura surrounding her and turning the very air around into miasma.

"Baptism in Ruins… This mark reached its peak when the Dullahan appeared," she thought, as she felt the warmth of fresh blood flow from inside her ears and saw her sworn enemy beginning to advance toward them. "We are connected…"

Step by step, the Dullahan was aiming her sword at her. And as the distance shortened, Tristessa felt her very being crumbling into a dark, perpetual pit from which she feared she would never escape.

Her soul was on the verge of being frayed and shattered.

"Tessa!" Severus yelled at her. She hadn't realized it, but he was grabbing her wrist. His hand was shaking, and he was sweating cold. The fear was real. "I-I have some ideas in mind, but my instincts are telling me that perhaps this enemy is beyond my skills. Still, I can try to…"

"Don't you dare fight," she ordered as she tried to suppress the fatigue brought on by her Mark of Death, using the fear enveloping her soul like a shot of adrenaline into her system. If she didn't harness that sudden momentum, she wouldn't make it two steps away before collapsing. "Run!"

It was her turn to grab Severus's hand and run the same way she had when she had first entered the city. But now, their path lay inside a network of cisterns plunged into near-total darkness, treading on an endless carpet of water. No path to follow, no direction leading to safety.

"Do you have any idea where there's another exit?!" the girl asked over the sound of splashing water and the echo it generated.

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"No! I'm blind here!" Severus looked back many times, paranoid, and quite rightly so. Being chased by a hostile tide of gaseous shadows must have been a new experience for him, and one he most likely never wanted to repeat. And that was why he stopped and pointed his cane behind him. "Ein Attractor!"

"What are you doing?!" Tristessa moaned, forced to stop and knowing full well what happened when someone attacked the Dullahan. "If you fight, it'll kill you!"

"Shut up and let me work! I must try!" the elf replied in return, placing the glyphs of elemental gravity in different positions across the cistern they had almost traversed from end to end before entering another.

The waters of the reservoir began to rise in the air, levitating at the mercy of chaos as the shadows carrying the Dullahan mounted on her spectral horse were so close…

"Erd Escant!"

With that spell, Severus conjured elemental water/ice glyphs that, once activated, turned all that water into a wall of ice that covered the entire width of the cistern. Extreme cold embraced Tristessa from that sudden drop in temperature, but it didn't even compare to the absolute zero feeling flowing from her chest…

"That won't stop her!" Tristessa didn't want to waste the elf's efforts, but she'd already seen the results of using ice thaumaturgy against the Dullahan… Resulting in Reiden dead. "Come on, it'll buy us some time!"

"You certainly have little faith in my abilities!" he complained, though he heeded her and resumed their escape with her. "I know I'm the worst thaumaturge in the city, but…!"

At that instant, the ice wall erupted in a shower of sharp, high-speed ice. By miracle, it failed to turn Severus and Tristessa into minced meat, both finding safety behind the stone pillars that held up the cistern's roof.

"Damn it!" Severus groaned, reaching for his opposite arm, which had been hit by ice and was bleeding a lot. "Tessa! That phantom, did she ever attack you in the presence of sunlight?!"

"No! Always at night!" she replied, leaning against the pillar and trying to catch her breath. She didn't like the elf's grimace, which expressed foolish confidence.

"Excellent… Cover your eyes!" The blood elf emerged from his hiding place and raised his cane toward the ceiling. "Ord Lumen!"

A glyph made of blinding light materialized halfway between him and the mass of darkness from which the Dullahan, mounted on her shadowy steed, loomed. It was like a solitary star in the midst of dark space; a particle from the origin of time, seconds before exploding into the everything.

That was almost the same thing the elemental thaumaturgy glyph did when it collapsed in on itself, but on an insignificant scale, of course. It burst into a sphere of sunlight, harmless but intense. It covered every corner of the cistern, leaving not a single blind spot free from its light, to the point where the contained waters seemed crystal clear, fresh and flowing from the top of a mountain.

"You seem to have dwell in the dark for far too long, miss Dullahan!" the elf yelled, a smile of hope plastered on his face. "I hope you don't mind if I show you a bit of light!"

Only the darkness surrounding the Dullahan remained. With the shadows banished and Discord brought into the material world, meeting staunch opposition, both the dark knightess and her steed were the only sources of absolute darkness there, their bodies composed of it and protected by all those layers of armor.

And something both Tristessa and Severus noticed was that their pursuer had lost speed. She didn't seem to be harmed, but she was slower.

"…it's working?" the elf asked Tristessa, in a way that suggested she never had faith in his own success and had other ideas to implement in the face of inevitable failure.

"I don't think you're hurting her… I still feel like she's clutching at my soul, suffocating me, wanting to break me into a thousand pieces…" she moaned, losing more strength with each passing second. "But… ugh! I feel like… I can't keep my eyes open…"

"Wait, wait! You can't start this party and leave me alone with your stalker!" Severus had to stop her fall, taking her arm and passing it over his shoulders. He supported the weight of a body that wanted to give up, and Tristessa found his handsome face stained with fear and anger directed at her. "Can you not be dying, at least for five minutes, woman?!"

Tristessa wanted to laugh. She would have given anything to be able to smile and burst out laughing with that man who did so much for her in every timeline, without exception.

How lovely it would be for the two of them to be sitting on that black stone perimeter surrounding the Evil-Warding Pillar, enjoying a picnic on a sunny day, laughing their asses off and without a single worry in their heads. Without lives at risk, without amnesia, without the fear of Death, and without an unquenchable thirst for revenge…

But reality dictated otherwise, and that was what Tristessa saw beyond the blood elf's furious gaze, in the direction of the passage between reservoirs: the Dullahan had dematerialized her steed in a burst of shadows that the orb's light burned away in an instant, and she was advancing slowly on foot toward them.

Without taking damage, without showing any other weakness. And to increase Tristessa's despair, her sworn enemy spoke:

"Light? You think light can stop our reunion?" the phantom knightess asked, each step she took maintaining her forcefulness and firmness, without wavering in her intentions. "I was conceived among collapsing stars and dead worlds eroded by cosmic winds. Light is but a faint spark, fleeing from the unfathomable will of the Darkness. If light itself cannot escape the dark, then you, my Nemesis, are even less able to escape me."

Her voice was torture. If she could express the terrible torment she felt, Tristessa would have said that listening to the Dullahan was akin to having her soul flayed. She felt unspeakable dread, she felt more than naked, as vulnerable as if her enemy weren't even trying to hunt them down.

As if, if she wanted, she could easily reach them and kill them in the blink of an eye...

"Sev..."

"I told you not to call me that!"

"…leave me here."

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