"What a pain!" Tristessa exclaimed, pursing her lips angrily as she entered her room. She slammed the door shut and, after crossing her arms, began to pace in circles. "Is everything going to go wrong? What a piece-of-shit week!"
Her restless eyes scanned every corner of her room as she walked. The white walls lessened the feeling of dizziness, but the static gazes of her countless dolls slowly turned into a shower of bright stars that danced dizzily in front of her. Inside the large bookshelves opposite each other, wearing beautiful dresses of different colors and styles, all stared at Tristessa as she unleashed her tantrum, uncharacteristic of a girl her age.
"Uh… I stained the carpet," she complained as she looked down to mitigate the dizziness and saw a trail of black dirt forming an almost perfect circle as a result of her walk. She quickly took off her shoes and socks, both completely stained with that dirt that smelled of rot and metal, and threw them in the direction of the door. "Wrong, wrong and wrong!"
Tristessa stopped to breathe and not lose her balance even more, standing almost facing her large mirror. Her reflection showed her the face of a thirteen-year-old girl overwhelmed by fatigue, perspiration and exhaustion. Her long black hair, which she took care of with extreme care, was untidy and tangled. She was wearing light blue shorts and a purple wool jacket with a hood, both with some dirt stains. And her eyes, gray like a cloudy day, returned a half-closed look as if her eyelids weighed a ton.
Her forehead, armpits and torso dripped with sweat, as if she had run a marathon and expelled every last drop of water from her body. She was not sleepy, but the fatigue could be felt down to her bones. After all, it had been a very difficult week… Right?
"Of course it was! Nothing went right, it was shit in its purest form!" she thought. Her bed, fluffy and smelling of flowers, was an absolute temptation for her tired body, but first things first, there were other priorities. Tristessa decided take the chair in the corner and drag it in front of the mirror. "Just a little, and then a bath."
On top of her nightstand, there was a night light and the severed head of a stuffed bunny, which Tristessa didn't even notice. She rummaged through the drawer, and among pieces of fabric, pins and a pair of scissors, she found her ever-trusty comb.
She sat down on the chair to begin the arduous task of returning her hair to its former state of grace. That always helped calm her anger.
"I still can't believe all that happened… Damn it," she growled under her breath, her reflection obeying in replying to her anger. "And it's all Mom and Dad's fault! Yeah… Those two… Huh?"
She paused the movement of her comb for a few seconds, frowning thoughtfully.
"That's weird… What happened to them?" Biting her lower lip, Tristessa searched for the answer in the reflection of her gaze in the mirror, but found nothing. Whiteness, emptiness. Nothing at all. "Bah! They did something wrong, I know!"
Was it because Dad kept making that annoying sound with his throat?
"You're so adorable when you're angry, my little princess!" Her dad's goofy smile flashed through her memories, his loud voice accompanied by that creaking sound, like a rope being stretched and tightened. "Okay, okay, I'll stop!"
Or was it because mom was still in that house with giant concrete walls and steel doors?
"Mom…" Tristessa whispered, confused as her right hand started to tremble. Unlike with dad, her mom's face had no place in her mind. It was strange… She only remembered absolute silence. "Mom?"
She involuntarily pressed the comb hard against her scalp, distracting her from that totally fragmented train of thought. She rubbed her head, feeling more and more confused. She began to feel a slight discomfort behind her eyes, like an itch… It was as if there were ants walking aimlessly inside her head.
Feeling mucus wanting to slide out of her nose, the girl searched her pockets and, apart from her handkerchief, found a crumpled piece of paper.
A paper that she did not remember having kept there. No… It was a photo.
"Ah… What?" Tristessa did what she could to return that photo to its original state, and was pleasantly surprised to see five people immortalized in the plastic material. Or at least, that was what she could distinguish since their figures had been totally altered by scratches and dirt, making any kind of recognition impossible. Only she herself was intact, the smallest among the other four people, smiling foolishly. "W-what is… what is going on?"
Now both hands were shaking, and the inside of her head began to hurt.
She instantly realized two things: she was short of breath, and there was a horrible, disgusting smell in her room. Breathing was becoming increasingly difficult; she could taste bile and vomit in her throat, driven by that smell that had spread everywhere.
"Ugh… Ahh…!" Tristessa managed to hold back the contents of her stomach, covering her mouth momentarily as her esophagus burned with pain. "What the…?"
Around her, the dolls' gazes projected an aura of heaviness that spread throughout the room, generating extreme uneasiness in the girl. The silence was disturbing, more than anything because the second hand on the clock on her nightstand had stopped hours ago, dying as it announced the hour 7:25:45.
It wasn't long before Tristessa began to hear her own heartbeat, like drums in her ears, faster and frantic.
"Dad… Mom…" Tristessa muttered, looking around for answers to ease her confusion; answers to questions she hadn't even asked. "Ah… M-my arms. It hurts…it hurts…"
No, it was her forearms that were emitting multiple stabs of discomfort. Constant, annoying, and sharp, coming from beneath her sleeves…
As Tristessa worked up the courage to see what was causing her forearms to hurt, she noticed movement in the periphery of her vision. She quickly looked up, finding herself in front of the mirror again, and saw that her eyes had been shedding tears for quite some time now, leaving wet trails down her cheeks.
But that wasn't even the strangest thing: it was the emptiness that filled her gaze behind the mirror, and an emotionless grimace that did not at all reflect the dread Tristessa was feeling right now, which had just increased exponentially at that moment.
"No…!"
As the girl instantly stood up in panic, her reflection raised her hand and pointed directly at her, freezing her in place. The real Tristessa closed her eyes tightly, refusing to see any more of that entity that appeared to be her; something inherently forbidden, not made for human eyes.
"Impossible! It can't be! There's no way!" she whispered under her breath, over and over again. She kept hearing her heartbeat, so frantically as if it were about to explode. "Why?! What the hell is going on?! Why can't I…?"
Her mind spun uncontrollably, spiraling into an infinity of dark uncertainty. Her conscience had played a trick on her when she realized that there was something wrong there, in that room, and with herself; in a matter of seconds, the order of reality she knew had collapsed, and she could not hold on to anything in that fall, there was no hand manifested in solid memories that could save her.
"Why can't I…remember anything?"
There were no answers. Faced with that inconsiderate silence of the world, in the depths of that river of Lethean waters into which she had fallen, the girl managed to muster her courage and opened her eyes, still scared and confused.
And what welcomed her was not the mirror with its unnatural reflection, or the dolls on the shelves, or the room itself.
When she opened her eyes, Tristessa saw red. Red on the floor, red falling harmoniously before her eyes, and red in the heights of a sky dominated by the sunset. She noticed the soft but cold wind that blew, caressing her face and making her hair stand on end; a wind that made the tops of dozens of titanic trees that surrounded the clearing where Tristessa was, standing specifically at the epicenter formed by a pool of red leaves made up of those that fell incessantly from the trees around her.
"N-no… How?" she muttered, unable to even interpret or understand it. She caught one of those falling leaves between her fingers: it was large, its brittle texture not only sent signals of autumn, but told her that it was real. The cold, the sound of the wind, the trees; everything was real. "It can't be…"
What had happened? Where was she? How had she gotten to that place?
Questions and more questions tormented Tristessa's tired and confused mind; not only could she not locate herself temporally, but now neither spatially.
The cold and fear of the unknown enveloped her soul. Looking around, there were only countless trees, giant and full of infinite red leaves on their countless branches and trunks of various sizes. She didn't remember a forest like that near where she lived… But…
"I… where do I live?" Tristessa muttered, her eyes wide as saucers at how absurd that question sounded in her head, but it was honest: she didn't remember her home, city or town, or even the country where she lived. Everything that could connect her to her home was fragmented into thousands of pieces inside her head. And that made her dig her nails into both sides of her temple, her frustration piling up until it overflowed in a scream that carried a repeated question. "Why can't I remember anything?!"
Her voice echoed in the wall of trees, going beyond and getting lost in the penumbra that abounded inside the forest.
"Why…?" Her question, which was going to be repeated for the third time, stayed in her throat because when she looked up at the sky, as if begging for help, she saw something that took the air out of her lungs. "Ah…"
A beautiful and clear sky, in which two queens ruled that celestial vault; two Moons, one larger than the other due to the distance between them in the direction of the emptiness of space, and much larger than the single, solitary Moon she could remember.
In that lake of red leaves, Tristessa fell to her knees, defeated by the implacability of the current situation, which could be explained with a simple phrase but carried monumental meaning...
She had been sent to another world.