NOVEL NEXT Prologue - Anteroom for Death and Resurrection
No one was going to survive.
Tristessa could feel it. She could see it without the need for a crystal ball or clairvoyant abilities.
Everything was doomed to fail. There was no hope of a positive outcome when the pieces on the chessboard were cornered, just a few moves away from a checkmate that would dictate the end.
She saw Death falling on everyone. She saw it in the decapitated family on the steel-reinforced platform. Those gallows flooded with blood, and whose necrotic smell was beginning to spread throughout the execution yard.
"N-no…no… S-Sev…"
Trying to call his name and failing, she saw Death on the blood elf. His body splattered against the wall, head crushed and his long, crimson hair hiding part of his shattered mouth, jaw and teeth reduced to a gory and repulsive sight. And his thaumaturgy cane was lying near his broken legs, useless to stop his own doom...
Tristessa's heart, torn and broken beyond repair, ached upon such a gruesome spectacle, forcing her to look away.
She saw Death in that disgraced knightess. She who walked back and forth, without a defined direction and stumbling, taking long drinks from her beer bottle. Without even having unsheathed her sword. She was choking on her own drink, coughing and laughing.
"Hic… Why the long face, girl? Cheer up, hic! No night is too bad to die, you know!
Tristessa also saw Death in the gunslinger's attempts to hit his opponent. Shot after shot from two revolvers broke the stillness of the night; shot after shot that the Lady of the End-World Dominion intercepted with her glaive with great ease, and without stopping her advance towards him.
"I refuse to let it end here! This is my last chance! The only one, lady!"
She followed the light provided by the power crystals that illuminated the courtyard from the black walls.
In the direction from where she heard the gunslinger scream, and with the light, saw his desperation.
She didn't need to see under that handkerchief that covered the lower half of his face to know it: his auburn eyes, bright thanks to the light of the fire, were at the verge of surrendering to oblivion.
"Astoria!" he begged, in vain. "HELP ME!"
His cry was unanswered. In silence, the woman armed with that black metal pole with a dangerous saber at the end, deflected the last fired bullet; the last one that had remained in the chamber of the man's right revolver, leaving him vulnerable.
In the blink of an eye, she propelled herself towards him, breaking the resistance of air like a shock-wave.
The next second, she was in front of him. The blade of her glaive covered in blood, and both gunslinger's hands firmly holding the revolvers, bloody and torn, falling to the ground.
"Fool. You chose your destiny the very moment you set foot in this courtyard. Now die, outlaw."
Tristessa could not react. She could not scream; she could not do anything to try to save the man from his certain doom. She could only see his eyes lost in the blackest void, ignoring both the pain of his lacerated limbs and the presence of his future executioner positioning herself to give him the coup de grace.
"I failed you, Melinda… I couldn't…"
His words, oversaturated with pain and regret, were lost in the night, cut off vilely when the woman hit him with the glaive, having accumulated an inhuman amount of strength and power that tore him to pieces.
His broken body flew through the air, spewing blood everywhere, until it landed near the gallows, followed by his hat that landed softly in the distance.
"A…A-Auron…," The gunslinger's name could barely get out of Tristessa's compressed throat. New tears were allowed to flow freely, from those eyes that painfully turned from the man's corpse to the drunken knightess. "Ast…Astoria…!"
"Oh? It's my turn? Hic… Alright, alright…," she heard that woman growl.
The knightess threw her head back, and finished drinking the contents of the bottle without using her hands, both busy in taking her long, beautiful blonde hair and tying it into a ponytail. She then grabbed the bottle again and threw it aside, shattering it into a sea of crystal shards. She spat on the ground and smiled with drool seeping through her lips; the absolute vulgarity of a woman as beautiful as her, who cared about nothing but her desire.
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A desire that Death trapped it in its invisible cloak of bleakness, alongside her.
"Hehe… Now I'm ready…"
No, she wasn't. It was a lie. Lies from a drunkard who didn't see her opponent coming at high speed. She got hit by the Lady's deadly weapon with tremendous force, so impossibly fast and with such strength that she was thrown backwards, scattering across the ground and rolling while raising dirt in her wake.
"You are pathetic, Blackguard. How is it possible that such a noble and ancient family like yours has fallen so deep from grace? To think that the Silverthorn family has been reduced to this…"
The woman armed with the glaive hissed those words, with a coldness worthy of the harshest winter. The pale light from the crystals made the dark steel plates that adorned her elegant trench coat shine. The wind moved her hair as black as night, free and stained with her victim's blood, just like her impassive and beautiful face adorned with ruthless violet eyes.
"That only a drunken strumpet like you remains makes me feel more apologetic than disgusted."
The fallen knightess, miraculously, could move. Trembling, she managed to get up from the ground, with a deep cut that destroyed the primary protections of her combat trench coat and that went further, quickly dyeing the shirt she wore underneath and the sides of her suit crimson dark.
"B-bitch… That blow sobered me up!" She raised her head and Tristessa saw a face so dark and full of hate, anger and helplessness directed at that woman who stopped in front of her. This time, lines of blood began to come out of her mouth instead of saliva mixed with beer. "Say all that shit again to my face if you have the ladyballs to do it! Come on!"
The other woman not only did not adhere to her demand, but she brought her glaive directly down on the knightess' left shoulder. The blood-stained blade sank in, having broken her collarbone and cut everything in its path. Her arm was rendered useless, and between vomiting clumps of blood, she tried to find the handle of her sword with her other hand, failing completely.
Without her senses functioning properly, losing a lot of blood quickly and with no hope of fighting back, she was also doomed.
"I put you out of your misery, wretch."
The executioner, the lady who ruled the Dominion of End-World, pulled the glaive from the body of the almost unconscious knightess to gather momentum and, growling with fury, unleash it on her again, piercing her torso transversely and splitting her in two.
Her body, now lifeless, slowly fell to the ground, a broken amalgam of blood and guts that flowed freely.
Tears kept falling down Tristessa's cheeks. The entire family was dead, the thaumaturge and those two warriors were dead. And now Death was falling upon her, coming upon the shoulders of that merciless woman who had turned her attention to her.
Standing before the kneeling girl, that Lady was a massive, imposing shadow, a harbinger of destruction and perdition.
"I will repeat what I said earlier, by protocol: in the name of the glorious Empire of the Night's Watch, I condemn you to death, Stranger." With her glaive in position, the woman was ready to finish what she had started. "Do you have any last words, child?"
Tristessa sobbed, frightened at her inevitable fate. A new failure, a new cruel ending where everything went wrong. And the worst of all was…
"I won't die… I can't…" Her murmur made her future killer wait, curious as to what she had to say. Frustration and the courage of a fool made Tristessa look up and face Death, once again. "I cannot die! I will come back again and again! Do you hear me?! I WILL RETURN FROM DEATH!"
Out of nowhere, the execution yard was filled with an unnatural cold. Those words spoken by Tristessa unleashed an invisible influence, a dark providence that violated the laws of reality as they are known.
"Return…from...Death?" the woman whispered, her face that had only shown icy determination until that moment crumbling upon an unavoidable authority that surpassed human understanding.
The taboo had been broken. The curiosity in the woman's eyes disappeared to make way for something horrible.
"Ha…ha ha…. HA HA HA!
The Lady of the Dominion laughed, her unhinged voice getting lost into the night, as her soul fell into a downward spiral that Tristessa knew very well. She had witnessed many others falling into that bottomless abyss called madness.
"Return from Death?! Lies of a stupid girl!" the woman shrieked, her face, which had been a bastion of impassive beauty, corrupted by a dislocated ear-to-ear grin, and bulging eyes flooded with blood that fell like tears. "Servant of the Dark Lady, I will show you Death! And you won't escape it nor return from it!"
The glaive fell with extreme violence on Tristessa's head. Shattered, a cloud of blood, guts and pulverized bone. It was fast, almost painless, and then Darkness enveloped her.
In the dark sea where souls were doomed to disappear, to vanish into nothingness, the [Golden Chains] of her cruel fate dragged her broken soul through the rivers of time and space. Against the current, backwards.
Tristessa Irandell had died. And now she was going to return to life.
To start over, once again.
"Under a veil of stars, is where the darkness grows.
The pressure from the chain that you hold me in.
Ornament of scars, and the darkness rising.
Over the ashen stains that I hold within."
Ashen, by Katatonia (Night is the New Day)