The reader must forgive an old man for elaborating on such details ad nauseum.
Lady Maria has not yet told her story; a true shame, since hers is a woeful and worthy tale of the fall from grace of a most graceful woman. There is no story like hers of all the hunter's tales I've collected over the years.
I do so hope that her memory may be preserved in time, and that the judgment of time will show her trespasses to be the noble failings of a determined spirit, and her greatest virtue to be the immense, feeling soul hiding as a secret beneath that pale face.
Early Years Our saint Maria, born of noble Cainhurst blood, came into this world in the winter snows, in the forsaken castle beneath a pale full moon. By all accounts she grew to be a strikingly pale woman, possessing most noticeably a head of silver, flowing hair. How even stoic master Gehrman would pause to behold the exceptional glow surrounding her beneath a starry moon! It fills the heart with longing.
Though she possessed a pale complexion, a rosy hue surrounded her eyes and her lips. A pair of piercing green eyes rested beneath colorless eyebrows.
Those hunters who trained with her loved to tease her about that, for you see, she had a porcelain doll's face. Her eyes stared into you, behind you, beyond you somehow into another world. Though she spoke only a few words at a time, Maria provoked intrigue and curiosity with every reply of hers.
Most unlike those knights and ladies who hailed from Cainhurst, our lady Maria bore no trace of cruelty or vanity in her visage. She dressed simply and fashionably, in the leather fabric of seasoned hunters. She carried two swords, a longsword and short-sword, in the eccentric style of eastern swordsmen, and in defiance of the hallowed traditions of Cainhurst's infamous blood-blades.
As a Young Hunter We cannot know for sure why she chose Yharnam. All we know is that she came to master Gehrman from foreign Cainhurst, seeking noble purpose in her life. One day she knocked on the master's workshop. I imagine the encounter like so: A greying, middle-aged man, our master Gehrman looked up from his workshop table, not meeting her eyes. "You wish to be a hunter, milady?"
"I do swear it," was the curt reply from her. "Have you spent a night in Yharnam during the hunt?" He turned his gaze back to his table. "No," she stared into our master. "Have you faced a beast before?" he asked her. "The finest sort of beast. Three hunters beneath a pale moon."
Gehrman scoffed and asked her to show her skills on a hunt with him. It is said that Maria saved his life that night, and Gehrman could not help but reconsider his skepticism and offered all his knowledge to her after that.
There is an oft-repeated anecdote of Lady Maria's prowess as a young hunter. During the night of the hunt, a new hunter would ask for her help and she would oblige with a nod. But soon the new hunter would notice something odd about her. "You don't use blood vials?" Her hunting partner would ask. "I haven't any thirst," she would reply. As far as we knew, she never had a need to heal, for she danced with beasts and came out unscathed every time.
Her deft skill with those two blades, was, it is true, legendary. She escaped from the clutches of the most vile, defiled and debauched foes without a scratch, covered in shades of red from head to toe.
And yet she hated the sight of blood all the same, a curious quality in a Cainhurst noblewoman. In this she parted ways with her young friend Valtr, who grew more and more bloodthirsty as the hunt progressed, ever fond of his grisly sawing blade and the mist of red flesh it caused to spray forth. Her fellow hunters began to shun her for her curious aversion to blood, and so she preferred to hunt alone as time passed.
Fall from grace
As the long night wore on, Maria could not help but question her role in the hunt. She asked Gehrman to confirm her suspicions one day. "Is the church perpetuating the plague of beasts?" She asked the stoic old hunter.
"I fear the answer may change you for the worse, lady Maria." Gehrman showed his protege a careful consideration. Some might have called it a tender moment. Maria's thought's were not on Gehrman, however, but on the sinister aims of the healing church.
Gehrman doted on her, we all saw plainly, and in his moment of weakness he told her the church's secret. "To cure sickness, one must observe sickness," was his reply.
"It must be so," she agreed and set her steely gaze on this grim task. "for the greater good."
And so time and again she slaughtered in the name of the church. She allied with the dashing, valiant Ludwig whose moonlight sword hummed with power when there was a full moon. She made a name for herself among Yharnamites as the pale saint who protected the pure of heart from corruption. Legends were made in those days, when the Old Hunters roamed the streets of Yharnam as saviors. Lady maria answered Yharnam's prayers time and again with Rakuyo, her twin blades.
When the body of mother Kos washed up ashore a fisherman's village, Maria and her fellow hunters were dispatched to silence the village and capture the corpse of the great one. But when the hunters gathered around the sea coast, she saw something writhe out of the body, and in that instant Ludwig lunged at it. It was too late; Ludwig smashed into the child's frail body and burst its skull wide open. Maria could only stare in horror as the infant tried to get up, its eyes leaking tears and bursting with blue blood.
Valtr laughed and beckoned towards Maria, beckoning her to join in the senseless slaughter. She raised her blades, pausing as though to say, "for the greater good, " before she too lost herself to the mad, murderous dance. After all, they had done this countless times, and no longer thought to call it 'murder' before raising their weapons.
An eternity passed before Ludwig bellowed, "It's finished! Prey slaughtered! "
The Hunter's Curse
Maria looked to the orange sun, blotted out by wild streaking clouds and shuddered. She looked around to her beloved hunters, covered in gore and glory, hooting like madmen in the excitement of the fresh kill.
She began to hear voices clamoring inside of her. She heard a strange ethereal voice, a distortion of her own voice, whispering: "Curse the fiends, their children too. Their children, forever true."
When the sun sets, we will all be beasts before the moon, she must have realized. Though she avoided the use of blood with due diligence and never partook in the savage delights of the hunt, from this day all hunters would share the hunters' curse, the curse of bloodlust placed on them by this orphan child slain.
Where would Ludwig be in the night? Now he was surely cursed to the end of his days for killing a great-one. This was the day Ludwig the holy blade became Ludwig the accursed.
Maria fell to her knees and dropped her blades. An immense feeling of guilt and failure filled her conscience. She could no longer keep track of the passage of time, watching in frozen horror as the church doctors and Choir members arrived and collected the corpses. She knew from her glimpses of what occurred behind church doors, that the healing church would try to revive Kos and her child in the forbidden clocktower. That was where hideous experiments were performed on living human beings, that was where scholarly doctors attempted to mutilate death itself.
The bell tolled. Maria looked up at the clocktower and shook her head in disgust. I should be up there now, with the murdered orphan child. The church has sinned, and all hunters have sinned in turn. What did the bell toll for? perhaps the church had failed to save the infant's life and tolled for its death. In that case, Maria reasoned, the bell tolled also for the start of the hunter's curse and would not stop ringing until the truth of their sin was laid bare and the sin repented.
A local villager clutched at her arm. "Save us from the beasts, milady! In the name of the holy healing church," he begged. Her thoughts began to wander and she did not notice when a fellow hunter came from behind to cut the villager's throat. "Careful, milady. The scourge is everywhere," he bowed.
For every Yharnamite she saved, a hundred more did Valtr, Ludwig, and the powder-kegs maim, disembowel and slaughter. For all her skills in battle, she could never persuade her fellow hunters to stop the hunt. Maria had failed herself the moment she had started her journey as a hunter.
Lady Maria's ghost
Maria carried the burden of failure upon herself, it's true. Vicar Laurence failed to protect the citizens of Yharnam from the plague of beasts, and the hunters?
Gehrman's hunters failed to protect the dignity of Yharnam's humanity from beast-hood. And Maria was the first among Gehrman's finest hunters.
"There is another way", a man (or was it a woman?) spoke to her from the darkness. The hunter stepped out and Maria tilted her head at the odd sight before her. The hunter, clearly from a foreign land, was dressed as a crow, complete with beak mask and feathered garb.
"Come with me and I will show you mercy. Yes, even you, the most weary of hunters," the crow hunter held out a hand to Maria.
Maria unsheathed her beloved Rakuyo with a sharp metallic click. Instantly the crow jumped back and readied both blades.
"Do with me what you will," Maria tossed her blades into the well behind her. "Not even death will redeem what I've done."
The hunter of hunters cackled: "Is there still dignity among the hunters? Then you are not my prey, milady, " and vanished with a swish of that feather cloak.
A ghost of Maria guards the clocktower in some distant hunters' nightmare. There she sits, a broken doll, waiting for foolish hunters to beckon her wrath. But even her ghost would know that the secret she guards is yearning to be found, and her vigilance is futile.
"A skilled adversary, desperate and soul-less," the countless hunters traveling through the nightmare might remark after slaying her ghost. How wrong they would be, and what wrong they do to lady Maria's memory, to slander her soul so.
Great credit must be given an old hunter like her: she gave her life and soul to preserve Yharnam's sense of composure among the beasts. And the orphan child of Kos took pity on her because of her singular devotion to a dignified method of fighting the scourge of beasts.
As the bell tolled, the dying orphan child of Kos felt her sorrow and remorse from the tower of the church, and answered her prayers. This infant great one understood her pleas for a release from the hunt, and obliged by making her semblance the guardian of the clocktower. No more would she slaughter, and no less would her skills be wasted. She would confront those careless hunters who pried into the nightmare's roots and punish them for all the wrongful death they had inflicted on the waking world. Lady Maria's skills would be put to use as the prudent guardian of the hunters' sins.
As for her physical self, Lady Maria preserved her dignity to the end. She drank red wine laced with poison to avoid shedding her own blood, and died in her hunter's attire, legs crossed in repose.
Gehrman was said to be most distraught with himself when he heard the news of Lady Maria's death. Of all the hunters who held the pleasure of her acquaintance, Gehrman valued her company the most, and regretted to the end of his days that he had not surmised her intention to take her own life when she came to visit him one last time in his workshop. He held a token of hers to memorialize her, a small hair ornament of hers. In his old age and mania he is said to have created a likeness of her, but that is a well-known story not worth repeating here.
Her resting place
She rests forevermore with her fellow hunters in a dream far-away from the plague of beasts. Her face adorns the dream but make no mistake, her hunter's spirit is elsewhere, certainly not within an old man's makeshift doll.