17?; Insight, 0
He was lost.
Drifting, drowning, in a sea of hazy sensations and forgotten... forgotten...?
He couldn't feel a thing. He was aware of his body, of limbs and eyes and a mouth to breathe, but nothing would listen. He couldn't move. Unholy noise struck him from all sides, a cacophony of shrieks and howls, dizzying him. Calling out to him in desperation. They needed his help, but he couldn't remember why. He needed to move, but he couldn't remember how. He was-
"Oh yes... Paleblood..."
Dreaming.
As if that nonsensical realization had given him strength, the young man forced his body to respond, to move, and cracked an eye open. He squinted against a blur of shadows and warm orange light. A lamp?
Someone scoffed, and he settled on an old man at the edge of his vision.
"Well, you've come to the right place," the stranger said, hunching into his tattered cloak and letting his wide top hat tilt forward, obscuring his eyes. He was sitting in a wheelchair, the young man realized. "Yharnam is the home of blood ministration."
The wheelchair rattled and creaked as the stranger coaxed it forward. The young man struggled to move, to speak, but it was all that he could do to keep his eye open.
"You need only unravel its mystery," the stranger continued, smiling wryly. "But, where's an outsider like yourself to begin?" He hummed. "Easy with a bit of Yharnam blood of your own."
The wheelchair heaved one last groan as it stopped beside his... bed? Gurney? The young man wasn't sure.
Then the old stranger leaned over him, and the young man's breath stalled in his throat. One eye had been covered by filthy gray bandages, coiling up into the depths of the top hat, but the other... The other was pure white, something beyond the milky hue of blindness. There was no pupil, but the young man was sure it was looking right back at him.
"But first," the old stranger mused, "you'll need a contract."
He gasped, arching up as feeling returned to him all at once. Memories, precious slivers of insight into the life that had brought him to this man and his moonlit eye, flickered and danced out of his grasp. A troubled childhood, friends, steel and rage and blood. He tried to reach up, to grasp them as they fled his mind one by one, but his arms refused to move.
No, no. He needed that life. He needed those memories, those emotions. They were his, what made him-
What made him...?
"Good. All signed and sealed." He fell back to the bed - gurney? - and tried to speak to the old stranger. To demand his memories back from wherever they'd been taken. He couldn't make a sound.
"Now, let's begin the transfusion. Oh, don't you worry. Whatever happens... You may think it all a mere bad dream."
The old stranger chuckled, a broken, hacking sound, and the young man felt a sharp prick in the crook of his left arm. What followed was liquid heat, a thick, heady warmth that gushed into his arm and didn't stop. His eye quivered, falling shut as the transfusion lulled him to sleep.
Time slowed, prowling around him one feverish heartbeat at a time. What felt like hours but could have been centuries later, he opened his eye to a pool of blood and a snarling beast in place of the strange old man. He watched it approach, watched it reach out to him with claws longer than than the full length of his hand, and wondered why he wasn't more concerned.
Then it burst into flames, bathing him in heat that pulsed in sickly harmony with the alien liquid coursing through his veins.
'Ah. That's why.'
After that came creatures. Little abominations with gaping, fleshy caverns for faces that clawed their way up his bed and latched onto him. Their touch was icy against his fever-hot skin, something he welcomed in his delirium. One after another they came, at least a dozen of them, pawing at him with pale hands and groaning plaintively.
They washed over him, a blessed relief from the oppressive heat of the transfusion and the flames, and the young man felt his eye drift closed again. He accepted their presence with the same resignation he'd accepted the beast, and he felt them quiver and chatter above him as he nodded off.
"Ahh," a smooth, lilting voice breathed. His heart leapt in his chest, threatening to take him with it. Who-? "You've found yourself a Hunter."
The Hunter's eyes snapped open.
It was a gurney after all.
He lurched, his body responding to his urges in fits and starts, and sat up. He braced himself with one hand, readying himself to stand, and felt something cool and sticky. He looked down, and saw a ragged length of cloth laid out across the gurney, covered in faint splotches of red. And on the gurney itself...
Blood. The Hunter pulled his hand back, wiping it clean on baggy orange pants. He took a deep breath, marshaling his strength, and slipped off the gurney.
Sandaled feet fell soundlessly on an old wooden floor, and the Hunter took in the room.
He was alone again. Aside from his quiet breaths, the room he'd found himself in was silent. It was all but pitch black, having only a pair of weak lanterns and four windows nestled high above his reach to break up the shadows. There was one other gurney aside from his own, covered in bloody cloth with a metal dish full of medical tools resting on its surface in place of a patient.
The Hunter shivered and looked away.
The walls were covered in bookshelves, but their books had been removed and piled haphazardly on the floor, making way for medical tools. Medical tools and glass bottles. There were dozens of them, bottles of various shapes and sizes, each one wrapped with a piece of yellowed paper and filled with a dark, murky liquid that the Hunter felt uncomfortably familiar with.
He stepped away from the shelves, the lanterns catching his eye again. There were two, jutting out of the walls on either side of a pair of double doors with windows set in their frames, through which the Hunter could see warm orange light shining. There was another set of doors on the other side of the room, but there was no light in them.
He moved cautiously toward the lit doors, avoiding broken bottles and debris with practiced ease. On the way, a high-backed chair wrapped in leather restraints caught his eyes, along with the slip of paper resting innocently in its seat. He paused, leaning down and squinting at the handwritten scrawl.
Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt.
That word again. Paleblood. What did it mean, and what did it have to do with the old stranger with the moonlit eye? What did it have to do with him?
For that matter, who was he?
He couldn't remember anything past the old stranger. Nothing. He knew of things, but he didn't know them for himself. He knew of names, but not his own. He knew of home, but not where to find it.
And the more he thought of it, the more his head began to pound.
Gritting his teeth, the Hunter shook off the painful thoughts and approached the doors, pressing both hands flat against them and heaving with all his strength. They whined, wooden panels grinding against metal hinges, and swung open to reveal a hall with descending steps and sloping ceilings. A chandelier hung at eye level on the far end of the hall, but it had no light to give. The orange glow was coming from another window, below which, at the bottom of the staircase, was an open doorway to another room.
He trotted down the steps, his sandals slapping against the wood and his tattered orange and black jacket rustling quietly over his mesh undershirt. He passed through the next room, this one empty but for a couple benches and an overturned chair, stepping through another pair of open doors-
And froze.
It was the largest room yet. There were gurneys everywhere, scattered about with as much care as the medical tools left to rust on the floorboards. There were more bookshelves shoved up against the wall, and more murky bottles to fill them. Broken chains and shredded cloth littered the floor, along with overturned benches and chairs. The room was a complete and utter mess, and that wasn't even the worst of it.
The worst of it was the blood. It was everywhere, absolutely everywhere, spread thin across the floor, staining the walls, trailing deeper into the room.
And at the center of it all was a beast.
He didn't know how else to describe it. The word wolf came to mind, but it far too big to be a wolf, its limbs unnaturally long and matted with dark, viscous blood. It snarled, a sound that rippled through the room and made the Hunter's borrowed blood boil, and dipped down. A sound like ripping paper, but wetter, followed the snarl, and the beast jerked its head up with a scrap of flesh in its teeth.
It was eating something- someone, the Hunter realized instinctively. Someone he might have known. Someone he might have loved. If only he could remember. If only he could just see...
He inched forward, eyes squinting at the bloody mess obscured by the beast's dark fur.
And stumbled into a gurney.
The metal bed rocked back beneath his weight, spilling the tools piled on its surface to the floor, and the Hunter was seized with a delirious urge to rush forward, to strike out with a weapon he didn't have. His hands spasmed, grasping for something. But nothing came.
The beast swallowed the strip of flesh and turned murderous eyes on the Hunter.
He barely had time to register its movement before it was upon him, too-long limbs lashing out and tearing a bloody swath through his jacket. He hissed, jerking back from its claws and cradling the new wound in his side. His blood felt hot between his fingers, too hot, hotter than it had ever been.
The beast barreled forward, bloody maw opening wide to tear him apart, and he rolled away with a shout. He came up bleeding and mad, casting around for the nearest weapon, and chose a discarded bottle. He scooped it up with deft fingers while the beast spun around and hurled it at its head.
The bottle broke against its muzzle, a clean shot, peppering its eyes with shards.
The beast paused, snorted once, and charged him again.
He ran.
The Hunter dashed through the room, past the mangled corpse and the countless empty gurneys, into another room speckled with blood and bookshelves that held no books. The beast pounded across the floorboards behind him, too fast for him to outrun- no, he was too slow. Slower than he had ever been, he was sure of it, as if the foreign blood in his veins was weighing him down with every step.
He reached another set of doors, the glass panes set in them broken beyond repair, and shoved them open with the urgency of a man with death on his heels. They protested for a heart-stopping second and then flew open, and he sprinted through them with the beast's breath hot on his back.
He found himself in open air, in a cemetery that had fallen into the same disrepair as the clinic he'd just escaped. Tombstones littered the earth, bunched up in clumps here and there with no rhyme or reason to their organization. He took in the old, gray trees and wrought-iron fences enclosing the space with frenzied eyes, still running, and zeroed in on a pair of gates at the end of the lot.
He all but dove into them, throwing all of his weight and waning strength against them and praying they weren't locked. He needed to get out. He needed to get away from this place, away from the beast until he could find a proper weapon to defend himself. He needed help. He needed his name.
The gates groaned open and the Hunter rushed through.
He found himself in a city of titanic architecture, sheer cliffs of towers and spires as far as the eye could see. In front of him, a short staircase leading down to a dead end overlooking a steep drop that meant nothing good for him. To his left, a broken down carriage and a pair of dead, mangled horses to draw it. And to his right, a cobblestone path.
The Hunter rolled to the right, coming up running while the beast crashed into the ruined carriage behind him, growling and yelping. His legs pumped as fast as he could make them, and were still infuriatingly slow. The foreign blood sloshed and pulsed inside him with every step, slowing him down, yet somehow making him feel lighter with every step. Stronger, almost.
He came to a fork at the end of the road. On the left, the road continued. On the right, another iron gate barred his path from the continuation of the road, as well as what might have been... torchlight?
The Hunter barreled into the gate, eyes trained desperately on that bobbing hint of light, but no matter how much he heaved it wouldn't budge. He wasted precious seconds trying to open it, to get to the people beyond it, before giving it up. He spun, saw the beast was still extracting itself from the carriage, and turned to his last avenue of escape.
And saw a man.
He laughed, shaking with relief as the villager approached. He was slow to move and his clothes were ragged, though the Hunter supposed he had little room to judge, torn and bloodied as he was. He held a torch in one hand and a wickedly curved blade in the other, both of which were trained cautiously on him.
The Hunter's laughter trailed off, and he felt his borrowed blood boil once again. He pushed the feeling away, realizing his hands were still held in loose fists in front of him, ready to lash out at the nearest threat. He forced them to relax, splaying his fingers wide, palms flat, in a gesture of peace.
The villager inched closer, eyes narrow and mistrustful. Behind them, the beast wrenched itself free of the carriage with a victorious snarl, and he stepped toward the man in alarm. They needed to get away, find him a weapon so they could fight together-
The villager lunged forward and opened his throat up with one swift cut.
He staggered and fell to his knees, hands coming up to press uselessly against his new crimson grin. He looked up at the villager in disbelief, and only now did he see the unnatural length of his arms and the madness in his eyes.
"Beast! Foul beast!" The villager howled, bringing his blade back around. The Hunter cried out, a gurgling sound, and shielded his face. Red hot agony lanced through his hand, and three severed fingers joined his blood on the cobblestone.
'I'm not a beast,' he thought, the thoughts thick and fuzzy in his head. The world was starting to dim, and his body was growing cooler by the second. 'The beast is over there. It's coming...'
And then a familiar snarl informed him it was already there. The beast came down on his back with half a ton of murderous claws and teeth, and the Hunter ceased to feel anything at all.
His last thought before the icy chill claimed him was brief.
'What a terrible dream.'
He woke up.
The Hunter winced as soon as he realized he wasn't dead, bracing for a torrent of agony that didn't come. After a handful of frozen seconds, he cracked an eye open.
He was lying on a stone path, overrun with gentle greens and fragile white flowers where the city's streets had been bare. He blinked, vision blurring and crystallizing as he raised his head up to take in the new scenery.
There was so much life.
The clinic he'd fled from and the city he'd died in had been nothing but old blood and jagged architecture. What life he'd seen had been wrong- sickly gray trees, beasts that fed on human beings, and human beings that acted like beasts. But this life was different. This life was pure.
There were tombstones here as well, but they were surrounded by so much life that they almost thrummed with the memory of the dead they were marking. Aside from the flowers and plants sprouting up from cracks in the stone, there were trees. Healthy trees, with brown bark and green-yellow leaves that swayed with the breeze. There were more of the white flowers, so many of them that they overflowed from the patches of land they'd been planted in. And intermixed between it all were countless, countless leaves.
Gods, he loved leaves.
The Hunter pushed himself to his feet, marveling at the lack of pain. Even the discomfort of the foreign blood had vanished, leaving him feeling better than he could ever remember being. Once he found his feet he paused, just drinking in the little paradise he'd woken up to.
Maybe he was dead after all. This seemed as good an afterlife as any.
Craning his neck, he looked up at the sky, so different from the one he'd been killed beneath. Instead of a sullen orange sun he found a bright white moon, larger than it probably should have been. Yet, in spite of its prominence, the skies themselves were a pale, misty blue.
Beyond them, and beyond his little paradise, were obelisks. As far as the eye could see, on all sides of him, the towering pillars of stone rose and pierced the clouds, standing silently foreboding outside of his reach.
He frowned, searching his barren memory for some significance in their placement and coming up empty.
Ah, well. He couldn't answer every question.
'Heh.'
Finally, he noticed the temple.
As soon as he saw it he didn't know how he could have missed it. It was every bit as sharp and eye catching as the city's architecture had been, though not nearly as tall. By his mark, it only had a single floor, though that didn't make it any less impressive to look at.
The path he'd woken up on lead up to it, the stone path continuing on past the Hunter for a few feet before rising up into a short series of winding steps that led directly into the temple's entrance.
Taking a step forward, out of his trance, the Hunter approached the steps and a small alcove set in the hill that the temple sat upon.
The alcove was situated in the shadow of the steps, partially obscured by hanging vines and leaves, and in it was...
A doll.
Propped up against a stone wall, legs straight, hands held primly in its lap, a doll sat. The Hunter looked at it curiously. Its features were lit by a lamp sat at the edge of the alcove, all pale skin and elegant cheek bones. Its lips, once full and red, were faded and chipped with age. Its hair spilled out from beneath a pale gray bonnet, the color of fresh, dusky skies. Its eyes were blank, flatly white, as if the doll's creator had forgotten to paint them. And familiar.
The Hunter stared at them for a moment, and had the unsettling suspicion that they were staring back at him just like the old stranger's moonlit eye had been.
The doll's attire was elegant, a wash of pale grays to match its bonnet and light lavenders to compliment them. A gray cloak hung over its shoulders, heavy and embroidered with immense detail, and beneath that was a lavender dress with white frills. Boots and a scarf that stood out for their color, blacker than the beast's fur, completed the image.
It was, all in all, a beautiful doll. It was a shame it had been abandoned. He wondered who-
He blinked.
The abomination blinked back at him. Or, rather, the fleshy sockets that should have probably been holding eyes blinked.
The creature that he'd seen in his fever dream peeked up at him from beneath the doll's cloak, and the Hunter realized he hadn't just been seeing things after his transfusion. The same abomination that had drowned him in icy touches with the rest of its brethren was hiding beneath the doll's cloak, and once it had secured his notice it threw the heavy white cloth aside, gesturing spiritedly with emaciated hands.
It looked something like a fleshy skeleton, he mused, following its gesturing to another abomination waving frantically to him from the temple's steps. He gave the one by the doll a nod in thanks, and its toothless mouth stretched in a wide, grotesque grin. It did a little dance and promptly sank back into the stone beneath the doll.
'... Huh.'
He walked up the steps, kneeling in front of the beckoning abomination, and watched it reach into the stone steps to pull out a spoke of metal. It heaved, and the spoke sprung free of the steps, along with a long, thick hilt wrapped in bandages, and a blade as broad around as his waist.
The faceless abomination beamed as it offered him up the axe it had pulled from nothing, and after a moment of stunned silence, he took it. When the creature didn't leave, looking up at him expectantly, the Hunter offered it a hesitant smile.
"Thank you," he said, speaking for the first time since he'd woken up. His voice came out low, deeper and more commanding than he'd have expected of it. At the sound of it, the abomination threw its little arms up in jubilation and sank into the steps.
He hefted the broad weapon thoughtfully, transferring it from hand to hand and settling on the right. It was heavy, but not so much as it looked. Swinging it around once, twice, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the axe head was weighted almost perfectly with the hilt, giving him more than enough balance to swing freely. He ran through a full string of swipes and lunges, ending up at the bottom of the steps, and sighed in relief.
He could work with this.
He was just about to continue back up the steps when another abomination made itself known at his feet, popping up from the ground and gesturing for his attention. He raised an eyebrow at it, and the creature made a pantomime with both hands, bringing them together and then snapping them out to its sides. The Hunter repeated the gesture, but the abomination swiped its hand in the negative, groaning reproachfully.
It pointed to him, or, more specifically, his axe, and made the motion again. Hands together, hands out.
The Hunter pondered the gesture for a moment, and then adjusted his grip on the axe, gripping it with two hands near the middle of the hilt. The abomination nodded excitedly, miming with its hands again. In, out. In, out.
He gripped the axe and yanked.
Metal ground against metal, throwing sparks across his vision, and the axe doubled in length all at once. The Hunter blinked, looking at the length of the hilt that had been hidden inside the axe, waiting to be pulled apart and revealed. The abomination clapped, then reversed its pantomime, spreading both hands out wide and jerking them back together.
He moved his hands to either end of the elongated hilt, and jammed them back together in another shower of sparks.
A trick weapon.
'Nice.'
The abomination at his feet disappeared, apparently satisfied, only to be replaced by another chorus of plaintive groans further up the steps. The Hunter sighed, following the trail of abominations with as much good humor as he could muster.
The next one offered him a contraption that he couldn't even begin to identify, as long as his arm and roughly as thick around, made up of countless intricate wooden and metal parts. He took it with another cautious thanks, hefting it in his left hand and finding the weight of it comfortable, though holding it gave him no further insight into its purpose.
He watched the abomination sink into the stone, and supposed he'd find out later.
The last of the little creatures were calling out to him from the steps, three of them in a semicircle. They all raised their arms up to him as he approached, offering him a leather bound book tied shut by a darker leather cord and faintly stained with blood. Setting his weapons down on the stone, he unwound the cord and opened the book.
Nothing but empty pages.
'Is this a... notebook?'
"Seems you've got everything you need."
The Hunter inhaled sharply, dropping the notebook and leaping back, scooping his weapons up in the same motion. Inside the temple, beyond the broken and ruined doorway, an old man in a wheelchair sat and watched him with some amusement.
A different old man in a wheelchair, he realized. Though their features were remarkably similar, framed by long, unkempt hair the same color as the old stranger's moonlit eye, this one was wearing a short black piece in place of a top hat and had a beard to match the hair. He wore a black cloak, but it was in better condition than the old stranger's, and its collar was decorated with six blood red tear drops - or were they commas? - three on either side of his throat.
And his eyes... well. They were what really differentiated the two of them.
The color of fading twilight, an intensely dark purple with no pupils to speak of, they bore into the Hunter with a sense of knowing that made his hair stand on end. In place of the missing pupils, six concentric circles decorated each eye, one for each mark on his cloak.
"Well, don't just stand there," the new stranger croaked, beckoning him with a frail hand. "Come in, come in."
The Hunter hesitated, but only for a moment.
The interior of the temple was less spacious than he'd imagined it would be, walled in by bookcases - filled with actual books, to his relief - and what looked to be trunks and workbenches. A fire was burning merrily in a grate off to one side, illuminating the workshop with an orange glow that was somehow much less threatening than the sunset rays he'd died under. Another two doors had been blown off their hinges, leading to what he assumed to be other parts of this Hunter's paradise.
In the middle of it all, the old man with the twilight eyes sat in his wheelchair and regarded the Hunter with what could only be described as nostalgia.
"You must be the new Hunter," the old man said rhetorically. He answered anyway.
"I am." If nothing else, he knew that much. Could feel it in his bones, in the very pit of his stomach. "And you?"
The old man laughed, a painful sound that almost immediately trailed off into wet, hacking coughs. "No, no," he rasped once he'd recovered. "My hunting days are long over. I'm just a simple guide, now. A... friend, to you Hunters."
A ghost of a smile flickered across his lips. "I believe that's how he'd say it."
"A friend," the Hunter repeated.
"More guide than friend," the old man conceded. "Should you need my assistance, you need only sleep, and you'll find me in this Hunter's Dream. I can't guarantee the quality of my company, however."
The Hunter snorted, a little grin breaking through his cautious facade. "Then what do I call you, old man?"
"Ahh." The old man grimaced, fingers clenching in his lap. "I am... Hagoromo." The word came out more of a curse than a name, as if it pained the old man to acknowledge his relation to it.
"Hagoromo," the Hunter echoed, tasting the word, scouring it for familiarity. Nothing. "Do you... do you know my name?"
Hagoromo frowned, twilit eyes troubled. "Questions of that nature can only be answered on one's own, I'm afraid."
Answered how? He couldn't remember anything at all. Not his name, his home, or even why his newly gifted weapons felt so incredibly right in his hands. Where was he supposed to find his name?
"I think you'll find," Hagoromo said quietly, as if responding to his thoughts, "that insight is not so difficult to acquire as you think it is. It is in something of an abundance tonight."
"What's tonight?"
Hagoromo smiled mirthlessly. "Why, the Hunt, of course."
Of course. What was a Hunter without a hunt?
"You know where I came from," the Hunter said, eyes narrowing. "Where I died. You know about that city."
"Yharnam."
"Yharnam." He scowled. The word was foreign, like the blood the old stranger had forced into his veins, and rolled off the tongue all wrong. An unpleasant name for an unpleasant city. "Then you know about the- the beasts."
"Oh yes," Hagoromo said bitterly. "All Hunters learn, one way or another. You will, too. In time."
"In time?" the Hunter growled. "I just died because I didn't learn fast enough."
"That will happen." Hagoromo waved a hand at one of the shattered doors, through which the full moon shone. "The night of the Hunt, all manner of awful things emerge to haunt the streets. Men, beasts." He eyed the Hunter. "Nightmares. It's a Hunter's duty to deal with them."
Duty. There was a word that struck the Hunter, resonated with him. Not quite a memory, but a feeling, vibrant in his chest. A promise.
The Hunter couldn't remember his own name, but he knew the weight of a promise.
"Why?" he asked quietly. "I don't understand."
"Then hunt," Hagoromo said. "Slaughter your prey and slay your nightmares. Insight is sure to follow."
"Then what? What happens when I'm done hunting? Do I get my memories back? Do I get to go home?" He didn't need to have his memories to know he didn't belong here. Not in this Hunter's Dream, and not in Yharnam, either. These places weren't home.
Hagoromo grit his teeth, biting down on another hacking cough. "We'll get there..." he ground out. "When we get there." The Hunter crossed his arms, unimpressed. Hagoromo sighed.
"Don't think too hard about all this. Just go out and kill a few beasts. It's... for your own good. It's just what Hunters do, you know." He smiled that same mirthless smile. "You'll get used to it."
"And if I don't?"
Hagoromo shrugged. "This was once a safe haven for Hunters. A workshop to enhance weapons and flesh with stones of blood. You're welcome to return to this dream whenever you're in need of respite. We've run low of tools, as you can see, but you may use whatever you find."
The old Hunter leaned forward in his wheelchair, voice dropping to a whisper. "... Even the doll, should it please you."
The Hunter shuddered.
"How do I get back?" he asked, discarding the old man's strange offer. "How did I get here in the first place?"
"You fell asleep, so you'll need to wake up to return to the city proper." Hagoromo smiled again, this time with some semblance of warmth. "I believe your messengers should know the way."
'Messengers?' The Hunter's brow furrowed, but before he could ask, a familiar groan alerted him to the presence of another little abomination in the doorway behind him. It was waving at him, brandishing the notebook he'd dropped in what could only be disapproval.
"It's blank," he told it.
"Of course," Hagoromo said, amused. "How else would you write in it?"
'Ah. Messengers.'
But who would they be delivering his messages to?
The Hunter took the notebook, turning to ask his newfound guide just that, but was interrupted by a surprisingly strong tug on his hand. He looked down at the abomination- messenger, and saw it pointing back down the steps at a tall, unmarked headstone with a little group of messengers huddling around its base.
"We'll meet again soon, I'm sure," Hagoromo called while the messenger dragged him away. "Ah, one last thing!"
The Hunter turned just in time to catch a roll of clean white bandages embossed with blood red symbols, as foreign to him as everything else.
"They go around your wrists," Hagoromo explained, and the messenger at his feet paused in its tugging just long enough to pantomime wrapping a bandage around each of its wrists. "The seals will connect you to this Dream in some small way, so you can ferry excess supplies back and forth. The Hunt is long. You'll need everything you can carry, and everything you cannot, too."
Seals. Why was that word so familiar? Why-
The messenger jerked on his hand, pulling him one stumbling step at a time towards his headstone.
"Happy hunting!"
The old man's cackles followed him all the way down the steps.
The Hunter and his messenger stumbled to a stop in front of his headstone, and he barely had time to realize there were in fact words carved into its surface, small as they were, before the messengers huddled around it seized him. He shouted in alarm, feeling the world fall away as the little abominations dragged him into whatever not-reality they resided in. The last thing he saw before he was swept out of his pleasant dream was the carving in the headstone, jagged and fresh.
1st Floor Sickroom
He awoke to lamp light and the gentle groans of his messengers.
Squinting blearily against the faint purple glow, the Hunter glanced around and found himself in a familiar room decorated with two ornately carved benches and a single overturned chair. He was at the base of the first staircase, which meant the room he'd encountered the beast in was just ahead.
He spent all of a second wondering whether the monstrous wolf-thing had left before he heard a wet tear from the adjoined room.
'Guess not.'
He forced himself to his feet, limbs once again heavy with the weight of the foreign blood, and studied the lamp that hadn't been there before his untimely death. Four of his messengers had formed a ring around it, and each was jabbering up at its light imploringly, clasping emaciated hands together in prayer. The lamp itself hung from a crooked pole jutting out of the floorboards at waist height, a pair of bells and a chain secured at the top of the pole holding it aloft.
Its light flickered and pulsed from a small purple flame, a cool warmth that soothed the Hunter just to look at. Almost as if it were calling out to him, lulling him to sleep...
He blinked rapidly, averting his eyes. Couldn't go back to the Dream yet. He had beasts to hunt. Insight to gain. A life to reclaim.
He left his messengers to their prayers, creeping into the room filled with empty gurneys. The beast had returned to its meal after killing him, it seemed, and was tearing at a strip of meat with mindless ferocity when he Hunter entered the room. The Hunter strode forward, sandals padding silently across the floorboards, and swung the strange wooden and metal contraption onto his back.
He wouldn't be needing it.
His axe's extended hilt came free with a short cry of metal against metal, an unnaturally long weapon to counter an unnaturally long reach, and the Hunter snarled right along with the beast. It jerked its blood-drenched muscle from its meal, swallowing a full limb in a single motion, and turned on him with murder in its eyes.
He came down on it with every ounce of his own strength and the strength of his Yharnam blood, driving his axe head right between its eyes. He slammed it to the floor in a spray of dark blood, and almost lost his weapon in the next instant as the beast started to thrash.
It yelped and howled, and when he yanked his blade from its head it clawed itself to its feet, even more furious than it had been before. It swung out at him, lightning fast, with claws covered in blood that may well have been his own.
The Hunter's axe slammed it to the floorboards once again.
The beast whimpered and squirmed, scrabbling against the floor while he pulled his blade from its head. It started to rise again, hanging on to stubborn life, so he drove his axe into the same spot between its eyes for a third time. Its skull finally caved beneath his blade, and the beast crumpled back to the floor. It didn't rise again.
He stared at the beast's corpse with wide eyes, simply absorbing the reality of it all. Eventually, the foul smell of its blood drove him back to his senses, and he ripped his blade from its skull.
Dark, partially congealed blood sprayed from the head wound, and from it came a stone.
The Hunter was halfway through the door to the next room when he heard it, the tinkling tap tap tap of something bouncing across the floorboards, and looked back to see a dull red stone skitter to a stop at his feet.
It was small, just a shard, and frail beneath his fingers. He spun it around, noting a delicate double helix winding through its center, and rubbed it on his jacket. It was covered in blood.
It took him more than a few seconds of rubbing to realize that the stone shard wasn't just covered in blood. It was made of blood.
What had Hagoromo said about the workshop? Stones and blood? The Hunter pocketed the blood stone shard, vowing to show his guide later.
'Wait.'
He pulled the stone back out, and instead tapped it to one of the blood red symbols wrapped in bandages around his wrists. The stone and the seal pulsed once, and then the shard vanished.
He grinned. 'Cool.'
The room beyond the beast was as barren as it had seemed at a glance while running for his life, save for a single corpse slumped over in a corner that the Hunter didn't disturb. The cemetery just outside the clinic was similarly barren, with its tombstones and sickly, dying trees. He didn't spend much time exploring it.
The city, Yharnam, was incredible. As much as he hated to admit it, the architecture was utterly breathtaking when he had half a second to stop and admire it. It was harsh and jagged, yes, and not at all comforting in the way home was supposed to be, but the sheer scale of it almost made up for that.
Dead ahead, perhaps half a mile out from the dead end with its sheer drop, was the most impressive example of this. A bridge that rose up as tall as the obelisks from his Dream, made entirely of brick and sloping stone. It was enormous. Titanic.
The Hunter knew, somehow, that it meant nothing good.
'Not my problem. Not yet.'
He turned from the bridge and stalked down the cobblestone street.
The villager never saw him coming.
The cylindrical contraption his messenger had given him threw the crazed man off his feet with one swift jab to the back of the head. The man yelped, the sound eerily similar to the noise the wolf beast had made before he killed it. The Hunter took a quick step forward and kicked the man's thinner, rustier axe out of his hand before he could raise it against him.
"Stop," he commanded.
The man forced himself up to one knee, brandishing his torch like a blade.
"I said stop."
"You are not wanted here!" the villager roared, lunging forward and thrusting his torch into the Hunter's face.
The Hunter ducked the flame, dashed around the man, and crushed him against the stone with the same hammer blow that had felled the beast.
The man lay still. This time, it hadn't taken three to kill.
He grit his teeth.
'Damn it. Damn it.'
He swallowed his sorrow, his helplessness, and assessed his situation.
He'd reached another dead end. He jogged down to the end of it, passing four more corpses, just to be sure. Nothing. Beyond the metal spokes that fenced the street was nothing but a steep drop and hundreds of feet of empty air. He might be able to make the jump from the edge to a nearby building, but what then? He'd be no closer to a safe landing, and there wasn't a building in sight with an accessible window.
There had to be some way out of this place. The villager must have gotten in somehow, and the Hunter somehow doubted he'd locked himself into this abandoned side street with no way out. Maybe he had a key to the gate that he'd been unable to open before.
'Or maybe-'
"Die!"
One of the corpses he'd passed by drove a knife into his back. The Hunter screamed.
He rolled away from the corpse that wasn't a corpse, away from the pain, and drove the blade deeper into his back in the attempt. His vision flickered and burst into white light and pain, and he shoved himself to his feet with a strangled grunt. A whistle in the wind was his only warning before another blade, wielded by another corpse that wasn't a corpse, tore a bloody line across his thigh.
He lashed out, still half blind, and struck something with the broad side of his axe. Something that he viciously hoped was a kneecap snapped beneath the blow, and one of his assailants fell back with a yelp.
The Hunter dashed backwards, vision clearing in splotches, and saw one of the men that had been lying motionless on the street hurtle past in a botched tackle. The other was currently staggering towards him, one arm hanging limply at his side, the other brandishing a knife wet with his blood.
He reached back, yanking the blade out of his back with one sharp tug.
He screamed through his teeth at the pain of it, and then he surged forward, striking the crippled villager across the neck with the edge of his blade. The unman staggered back, gurgling, but swiped at him with his blade all the same. He slipped beneath the blow and struck him again, this time across the chest. Another swing, another dash, and the Hunter opened up his functioning arm elbow to armpit with his blade's edge.
Then he rolled away, narrowly avoiding another tackle from the villager who had lost his weapon in his back.
He threw his cylindrical contraption back over his shoulder, non-lethal methods of attack the last thing on his mind, and yanked his axe into its extended form. Then he set his feet against the cobblestone, twisting his body around, ignoring the agony in his back as every muscle in his body coiled up.
The villagers charged, and the Hunter whipped his axe around in a spinning arc.
The blow caught both of them in the chest, throwing them off their feet. The one with the blade didn't move again, and the one with no weapon didn't get a single foot before the Hunter drove his axe into his chest, plowing through ribs and organs to pin the unman to the street.
Silence.
The Hunter panted raggedly, wavering on his feet and leaking blood at an absurd rate. He hocked and spat a mouthful of dark red spit on the villager's corpse, glaring at it with all his might.
'Son of a bitch. That's cheating.'
He wrenched the axe free and, after a few staggering steps, sealed the trick weapon into one of the storage symbols on his right wrist. He forced himself to move, to keep his feet, and make his way back to the clinic and the lantern. He'd go back to the Dream, recoup, and find a way out of this side street when he wasn't rapidly bleeding out.
He made it about ten steps before he stumbled into the lever.
He spent a good long while just staring at the huge device, jutting up out of the street as innocently as could be, before he bit the bullet and pulled it. A low whine of shifting steel was the result, and a moment later something heavy and metallic crashed to the ground beside the lever.
The Hunter looked at the newly descended ladder, at the lever, and then at the ladder again.
'Stupid.'
The climb up the ladder was as exhausting as it was painful, and halfway up he almost fell off when something shrieked in the far distance, a high, piercing sound that set his teeth on edge and made his borrowed blood boil. Whatever it was, like the bridge, he knew it would mean nothing good for him.
He dragged himself up to the top of the ladder and found himself on a ledge, leading into what could only be Yharnam proper. But more importantly than that, he found himself a lunging step away from another flickering purple lamp.
Four of his messengers sprung up around the pole from which it hung while he sat down to bask in its light, and at their pantomiming insistence the Hunter reached a hand into the curiously cool flame and snapped his fingers.
The flame redoubled in size and intensity, and heat washed over him in a soothing wave.
Just before the darkness consumed him, he saw it. A spirit, a shimmering reflection of a man on the other side of the lamp, dressed in the same vague style he was. A Hunter. Someone with only one hand, a head of untamable black hair, and a scowl fit to kill a man.
It was an image he knew better than he knew himself, as familiar to the Hunter as breathing, and he had no idea who it was. All he could pull from the aching chasm in his memory was a single, well-worn word.
"Bastard," he grumbled, closing his eyes.
And so he dreamed again.
AN: To access Ser Serendipity's portion of this story, you'll need to go to his profile and read the version of this story with his POV chapters in it. Make sure to let him know my sections are way better! :b
