“Ah…!”
Her eyes t the owner of that hand, so black from how rotten it was, standing next to the table: a female humanoid creature, with whitish skin as pale as if it had never seen the light of the sun, except for its totally black and decaying limbs. She wore a black silk dress, open to expose her bare chest, without breasts and almost completely chanized, composed of hundreds of gears of different sizes and turning at different revolutions.
The lower part of her dress covered only her crotch and it fell until reaching the floor; and her naked, ashen legs, also possessed hybrid characteristics between an organic and chanical being, with those gears and tal components that stood out between layers of skin. A veil, also semi-transparent, protected half of her face, devoid of skin and exposing muscle and both lines of teeth, black and rotten, while on the top of her head shone the absence of a nose and the presence of two eyes as dark as the abyss, which perpetually shed thin lines of tears of blood.
“Who… are you?” Tristessa asked, equally frightened and amazed, her interest drawn not only by the fact that it was an entity she could never have even imagined that existed, but by its long, dark, straight hair that was not subject to the influence of gravity and floated chaotically. “What are you?”
Again, there was no answer. Tristessa, without moving from her place at the table, looked more closely at the arms and legs of that chanical she-devil, realizing that the dark color was due to the clockwork pieces protruding from the skin absorbing the miasma from the environnt and recirculating it throughout her body.
“…”
Silently and without saying anything, the creature extended its hand towards the girl, who in her absolute surprise, took it without a second thought.
A very cold contact that Tristessa ignored due to the sudden excitent that was forming inside her.
She stood up from the operating table, with so difficulty due to her trembling legs. They were subject to shivers generated by the conflict unleashed in her mind about having intact legs again, and not eaten away to the bone by giant wolves. She held on tightly to the hand of her creepy companion so as not to fall.
“I-I… could you…?” Tristessa didn’t know what to say, so she let her mouth work on its own. “Can I hug you?”
“…”
The blush on her face was more than the stupefaction at what she said, although the creature didn’t care. She ignored Tristessa and turned around, pulling her hand to guide her through the Soul Operating Room.
“Is she a succubus…?” Tristessa thought, information about religious mythology vibrating in her mind, and still embarrassed by her sudden and unexplained attraction to that creature.
She saw its complex machinery that made up her torso, fueled by the evil miasma of the environnt. Her own stomach twisted, albeit in a pleasurable way, and making her embarrassnt grow even more.
“To think that she has such an effect on …”
She was so enthralled by that horrible, inhuman entity that she realized too late to look around: dozens, no, maybe hundreds of surgeons lived in that room. Just like those eight who had been in charge of repairing her soul, they all looked like mannequins, frozen in ti and waiting for orders, and they were only differentiated by the objects that occupied the place of their hands.
The ceiling was still in constant motion with those pistons, a disgusting spectacle, not far from the grotesque tiled walls, rotten and covered with black stains, as if from humidity, but which strangely moved in coordination with the miasma. Only a few ancient sirens scattered on the walls were saved from the rot, and they were the ones through which the music was played.
“Uh… That music… My head,” she complained, feeling the sting in her temple that was absolutely nothing compared to the infinite pain from which she had just escaped. “My…mories.”
She didn't know where she was or why she was there. Was this hell? Or paradise? Or an eternal limbo? The only irrefutable fact was that she had died in a horrible way.
She had lost her body and her soul was saved from oblivion thanks to...that Darkness.
Discord made real, manifested in those black drops and unnatural mist.
“Why am I still here?” she asked, weakly and trying to touch the miasma with her free hand. Like the mist, that shadowy and constantly expanding presence dispersed at the contact, losing density but not presence. “How cold...and...and terrifying.”
Terror. Thinking about that word made her rember that at the very mont of her own Death, a mory had been unlocked in her mind: that vestibule, the door, the entrance to the [Dark Room], and...
“My mom... [Selene]!”
That word caused a cascading effect throughout that alternate dinsion: the surgeons shuddered, causing the hundreds of utensils to replicate different noises. The music beca even more out of sync, and the miasma intensified violently, becoming a heavy atmosphere that Tristessa felt on her shoulders like weights.
“…”
The succubus stopped dead and turned her head slightly, staring at Tristessa out of the corner of her eye, then putting her index finger to her lips and asking her to be quiet.
“What happened?” she asked herself after nodding wildly, without saying a word. They resud their walk, through the alley made by the surgeons who stepped aside in the presence of the she-devil. “Why did naming my mom have such an effect? Damn it… I don’t rember…”
Even in that post-Death, she was barred from her mories. If when she died she only rembered her mother's na and that terrifying, strange vestibule with the entrance to a room suberged in darkness... What did she have to do to rember everything else? Die a thousand more tis?
Unfortunately, there was only one life and she had lost it very quickly...
But, if she was dead, why was she still there, conscious and pensive? Although that reality did not fit in terms of physics or natural laws to the world -or worlds, better said- that she had experienced firsthand, each fragnt of ti that passed made her believe less in a possibility of a hellish or heavenly afterlife.
The reasoning made Tristessa consider the option that she was dreaming. That option sounded nice: a big, horrible, long and fateful dream.
“Wake up, go back to my room with my... my... ugh, shit! Why can't I rember anything other than my mom's na?”
Thinking about her mother was counterproductive. Her mories tried to reorganize themselves in vain, searching for what she couldn't find without stopping. Hoping for a different answer than the only one that subsisted inside her head.
Cent walls and a steel door A face hidden in the shades of her mind, but with a clear, mocking and haughty voice, repeating that question over and over again:
“…still here, Tristessa?”
For so unknown reason, the girl felt a significant flow of anger running through her veins, heating her blood and squeezing the succubus's hand tightly, who didn't notice it at all and continued to guide the confused Tristessa towards the entrance of that operating room.
Without doors, it was only a door-fra that had an old clock with hands placed on the upper wall, its glass broken and stopped at a ti that Tristessa found terrifyingly familiar.
“7…25…and…45,” she whispered. “Like in my wristwatch: [7:25:45]”
Once again, she found no trace in her broken mories of the significance of those numbers -that hour. But it was her intuition, her survival instinct that was slowly regaining its place within her, those who warned her about what she had forgotten.
It was another mystery to leave for another ti, if she had more ti available in that limbo of the afterlife.
Outside the operating room, she and her inhuman companion began to walk down a long, gloomy hallway, with extrely dirty porcelain walls that dripped dark liquid from so interstices. There were fluorescent lights every few ters offering so illumination from the ceiling, also in decay with leaks through the fissures of small cracks.
And, of course, any trace of liquid that found space to escape inevitably ended up converted into miasma.
“…wait a minute,” Tristessa muttered after several minutes of silent walking, her brow furrowed and unable to do anything to stop the progressive movent of the demoness. “We’re going in circles, aren’t we?”
The hallway was extrely long, uniform, and so similar in every way beyond the random arrangent of cracks through which the precursor of the miasma seeped. She had no real evidence to support that theory, but Tristessa felt it: it was a progression that stretched into infinity, with no beginning or end. A snake eating its own tail.
“Hey, answer , please!”
Even applying all the strength her newly recovered body could summon, she couldn’t stop the succubus even a milliter. Maybe if she exerted violence… No, just thinking about it made her heart threaten to stop, as if an invisible hand had closed around it and toyed with the option of crushing it or not. It wasn’t a terror of dying, but a fear—irrational in that context—of losing a loved one.
“At least tell what you’ll do with …!”
Right then, a new sound made Tristessa fall silent. It echoed in the distance, but progressing down the hall made it louder and louder with each step.
CLING…CLING…CLING…
“…chains?”
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