Warning(s]: Gore, character deaths, blood, violence]

The turning of the centuries had survived in those eyes, Hunts aplenty and a-many passing as somber dirges to the senses. From the Dream he lived, in surrogacy, to a Presence above and beyond all he might be. Weathered, and grayed, a stone beaten by the tides of time that were relentless in their assault. Presiding above as no longer a reaper, but a craven crow whom perched astride the precipice of unreality and one far deeper still. He craved releases. The Hunter remembered; those nights in wakeless stumbling, standing in a blank reverie of almost helplessness as they heard the First Hunter cry of such an old and forlorn lament. The Dream…they all wished for it to end. For the Hunt to cease. In their toil and shed blood, all seemed to be worsening towards a dark and bitter end. For it could surely not extend into the ends of oblivion.

"Do you remember, Gehrman, the life before this?" The Hunter would ask so suddenly, voice a grim reproach from the mounting blade, upon their knees as the First gaped in a blank shock. "Before the nightmare, before—" A weak, pitless laugh is uttered, remembering—sorrow and blood, blood and sorrow. The beasts were human, Djura had told them. The beasts were people, once. They had loved and felt sorrow. Hues of azure close shut and they look so hapless into the sky, gritting teeth. They can hear the awaiting blade, the tang of metal as breezes ghost over its heaven-forged sharpness.

Knuckles old, fingers, grasping, holding many, curving and reflexive about this sickle; Burial Blade, staline and shining that had cleaved the heavens smote so many enemies, indistinct (they were humans once, his conscience haunts, and you slaughtered them]. The Hunter hears them. In the Dream, the souls of those they had slain when lost to the pitch, to monstrosity, but they were there. Raise it! Raise it, swoop and fell, OFF WITH THEIR HEAD—! The same, it would be the same…

"You want somebody to unshackle you. You want freedom—from all this." The Hunter rises from their kneeling, a weight so profuse that it bows him more than the eternity of a nightmare, than the guilt that has haunted them. They are haunted, he and them and she and he. Gehrman stutters, meaning words and syllables and they are formless and broken, staked into shock. Not to die, to find a beginning anew. To forget. To awake with a dawn and to die in peace and without memory of what was. Features etched and dredged by the passage of time become wrenched and open, eyes so wide and vivid it were as though they stared from a mask. Mouth agape and wet and rimmed with redness, it took something to rein in. The Hunter.

"I-It's been so long, I—I am forgetting their faces. I cannot forget their faces, I cannot…" he blubbered guiltily, something he had tried to suppress. The Hunter's motions encircled, loosely grasping the old man bowed from eternity as he became sightless, seeing nothing but the yawning, interminable dissonance. A broken sob, the succession of apprentices, and he dwells upon them; faces, so many faces. A sea, a lifetime, becoming impossible to truly recall. It is silent. Tears fall, salted, and sluice down the crags and hollows of his cheeks. The Hunter's arms are gripped in a stabilizing vice, the rasp of Gehrman's voice breathing laboriously and strained.

The Hunter hesitates, unable to fully grasp. But there is something that can be done, isn't there? In the gaping and pregnant silence, broken only by the fragments of breath and an occasional pathetic, choking sob. Gehrman was reaching the end. Controlled. Entranced. The spell was breaking and they only had so much time. "Do you…truly wish to rid me of this nightmare?" the First Hunter rasped at last, his voice a collection of stability and the barest modicums of it. The Hunter held fast, searching, scorched by a gathering indecision. They had wanted this, from the first time they had heard Gehrman's night terrors. To help him. To free him. Wasn't this…the only way?

"…We don't have much time." A conspiracy against the Moon Presence. Gehrman's modulation was borne so low it was almost inaudible. His smile was tight, wily—hollow and lacking. Gehrman let his eyes fall with deliberation upon the blade of the Burial Blade, smartly unhooking it as it was and letting those wizened grays study it with an endeared and nostalgic fondness. That was, until he abruptly pressed it into the Hunter's reactive hands, eyes hard and faultless as the silent order and demand was made. "–Do it," he rasped in a sharp, guttural tone. "Do it now…please."

"Good Hunter?"

Emotion was brewing in those fey, doe eyes of crystal. Confusion, something that was beating itself to the surface of the Plain Doll's countenance as mechanisms and means of work were shuddering, shattering, so subtle but it was growing. But it was still trapped by glass and porcelain. "What—are you doing?" she ventured, enunciation long, voice lilting and flattening uncertainly, eyes unblinking as Gehrman avoided her gaze, pleading harder with the Hunter. Hard, cold, flinty and filled with the centuries of grief. End it, Hunter! Do not wait anymore…

A gasp containing generations of life is wrenched, the blood pouring and spurting from the breadth of a mouth agape, the sickle of the Burial Blade a bloodied crescent impaled through ribs, viscera and blood coating it completely. It was a vivid realization as the Hunter did so with eyes so wide and movements so paralyzed that they could not move, beginning to only process what had transpired with blood saturating their features and splattering their clothes, hands beginning to tremble, blanched and boneless beneath the encasing of gloves—

A bloodcurdling caterwaul erupted from her throat as the Plain Doll burst into an inhumanly fast sprint towards Gehrman, even as the dead weight of his body collapsing sounded bodily to the loam below, shoving the Hunter away whom slammed into the stone edifice of the home, they dazed for a long moment as the Doll attempted to double over protectively, only for her to freeze, a minutiae of paralysis seizing her abruptly. If moisture could build in her eyes, they shone. Wide and upon a face contorted into a sob whilst her artifice fought back. She choked loudly, as if on air, as if on tears, before her jointed hands attempted to dig for her throat, gasping—everything was hot, hot, hot! She saw the Hunter in red, in shades of crimson. (Hatred it would be called; the heat was anger—rage, but she did not know this. She was built only to love, love love!]

Her features widened and froze, an asphyxiated gape as she was suspended unnaturally, joints creaking and whining and protesting as loudly as they could, voice stolen and breath stolen as though death's kiss had been the last thing to grace her lips. The Hunter watched on in recuperating horror, a slowness of vision and perception as the Plain Doll buckled and fell so harshly it sounded as though everything within her broke at once. Fragments of porcelain, dashed mercilessly to harsh and grueling stone had shattered half of her visage, an eerie structure of a skull staring, lidless at the Hunter, still with the intensity that had slain her in the first place. Breezes ghosted through the achroma of those locks, eyes still hauntingly wide, but so completely and irreversibly dead.

"D-Doll?"

A meek and helpless stutter, rasped from lips bruised and bleeding, vision swimming in weakness and pressure and heaviness. A hand reached, the Hunter's arm so heavy it felt as though thousands and thousands of pounds weighed it irrevocably down. Straining, motionless, the Hunter's azure vision blurred and felt hot and opaque, liquid searing down their cheeks.

A blink.

The moon was red now.

Blink.

A being drift with unnatural suspension and slowness, descending to blot the moon itself and stain it an inky pitch.

Blink.

Oily black ligaments and the stark and visceral rib cage devoid of entrail came into view, a dull and raucous thud of a weighted form with spindly extrusions and digits heaved upon all fours, an onyx mask staring soulless, thick chords of black tendrils billowing behind in a wind where there was none.

Blink.

That mask was impossibly close now, an enclosure of willowy black tentacles ensnaring, enveloping—the cage of digits pulling the hapless and entranced Hunter into the void of a consumption.

…Blink.

And the last they would see was a single, glassy orb scorch into the memory of their soul…

…Before all faded to black.