With the sun rising and checking north with the orientation crystal, Tristessa set off toward the hills, where the surrounding terrain very gently began to rise. She didn't look back toward the Mercer-Archeos house, but she did advance at a hurried pace in case Tiara regretted letting her go and tried to shoot her from the doorway with one of Jin's rifles.
In a moment, the girl realized she had just passed the exact spot where the hunter had shot her in the now-nonexistent past, in her failed attempt to escape her second Death.
Finally, she had crossed that boundary, and Nekrom opened its arms to welcome her into its tens of thousands of kilometers—or rather, imperial vistas.
"Two days on foot to Entrana. Two days..." Tristessa thought, unconsciously forcing her legs to break into a trot. "Two days to go, two days to come back. I only have two days to find help… Severus, and whoever else can help me save the Mercer-Archeos family and defeat the damn Coven."
The premise of racing against time made the upper part of her stomach tingle with nervousness; it led her to improvise and not think clearly about her next steps. Her escape from the house had been a matter of luck, that was something she had to understand: in another context, without the information she had gained after dying several times, and using the wrong words, confinement and torture under suspicion of being an enemy would have been her fate again.
Out there, facing the unknown, one false step was going to be her doom.
Amid the grasslands and the dense undergrowth, Tristessa found the dirt road indicated on the old map. The lack of traffic and the passage of centuries had allowed nature to reclaim much of the land along the route now called the Abandoned Meridion Highway.
It wound through the hills, always on solid ground. A guide that led, according to the map, to the structure that Tristessa couldn't identify on that old canvas with indications written in glyphs.
"I promise that once the Coven is no longer a threat to the Mercer-Archeos family, I'll ask Lucahn to teach me how to read and write," she thought after almost an hour of walking, seeing a rotten wooden sign next to the road, a breath away from falling, but whose primary intention was to point its arrow-like shape south. "Perhaps it says House of Royal Hunters?"
The peaceful, yet sad solitude of the area was unambiguous. The trees that grew around the road and up the hills weren't as abundant, and thousands of times smaller than their southern counterparts, but they were enough to populate the surrounding area for several miles. Not to mention the grasslands, all vegetation left to the elements and without human intervention.
Tristessa knew virtually nothing about the Empire of the Night's Watch, nor about the Dominion of End-World, and she found it curious—interesting, even—that this entire part of the region had lost the interest of the current local power.
If she remembered correctly, Jin had explained that in the Age of Kings, the Meridion Highway not only connected the city now known as Entrana with the Sea of Trees due to the lumber gathering business, but at some point along its path, it split east and west. To the east, it led to the shores of the Bay of Rün, the entrance to the Onyx Sea. This sea was navigable through some imperial vistas before reaching the unforgivable and turbulent Ocean of Violent Waters, but sufficient for the development of a local economy that saw the rise of a fishing village near the bay.
Fishing was almost always a profitable business, and with the rise of salt-preserved food and the use of ice elemental thaumaturgy at that time, it wasn't surprising to think that this road had been an attractive trade route to the east and south.
A golden past. Now, abandoned and forgotten.
Decay abounded too, and not just because of an old sign: the land flattened, the hills receded, and the remains of wooden fences began to appear, delimiting what had once been large fields of crops.
"Some landowner's land? A marquis? Or…a margrave?" Tristessa thought, seeing that whatever crops those fields had once grown, there were now wild plants and foliage fighting for silent supremacy. "Ah…!"
Standing out from the overgrown grass was a herd of creatures the girl had never seen before. They were similar to horses, quadrupeds, and had long, spindly legs, with so little muscle and so much bone that they didn't seem suitable for rapid mobility. Their bodies were small, with chest marked by rib-like bones that protruded and pierced the hairless gray skin. And their heads possessed avian features, such as beaked jaws and dark feathers, but instead of eyes, there were empty sockets, profoundly dark despite the sunlight falling over their faces.
The young were pecking at their mothers' exposed ribs to capture with their tongues a milky liquid seeping between the interstices of fissured bone, while the adults grazed, opening their beaks and exposing two inner mandibles that protruded to the outside to tear vegetation with their front teeth.
All this activity was interrupted by Tristessa's surprised gasp.
"Oh no... What do I do? Do I run away? Do I stay still? Do I slowly move away?"
Many questions quickly popped into her frantic mind, seeing all those vortices of darkness in those avian heads aimed at her.
She was being so cautious of the flock that she didn't notice early on that one of those creatures was approaching her from the north, skirting the fence. It moved slowly and carefully, as if any sudden movement could compromise the fragile structure of its legs.
"Shit... If it's aggressive?! What do I do?!" the girl thought when the creature stopped in front of her and leaned its head over the fence to look at her more closely, with those supposed eyes hidden inside their dark sockets. "...no. You don't seem to want to hurt me."
Her whispering voice didn't elicit any reaction from the animal. Its passivity was a positive thing. She raised a trembling hand and brought it close to the creature's feathered side of its face. When it didn't move in rejection or sniff at her, she touched it gently and then began to pet it.
"That's it. Such soft feathers," she said, smiling slightly as the animal moved its head, content with the petting.
"Squawk!"
The animal's loud shriek startled her, causing her to jump back. She thought the worst, but what the creature did was open its beak and spit something at her feet.
"Huh?" Confused, she watched the animal march toward the herd, then looked down and saw that small, spherical object covered in saliva almost hidden in the grass. "Is this…?"
She bent down and took it between her index finger and thumb: it was a spherical gem that beautifully shone thanks to a tiny speck of divine light in its center. It looked like the black-soul jewel Daiana had given her after killing Severus in the nonexistent past, only the other one had had a dark light shining inside. Tristessa sighed, having remembered something so horrible, but this time she decided to keep that jewel and put it in her backpack.
"Thank you!" she exclaimed, but the flock of creatures didn't even flinch, completely ignoring her. "Goodbye…"