(Author's note:

Anon on tumbler asked:

Oh, sorry about that last ask, honestly forgot about fandom asdhyhyd um, same number, but bloodborne and the orphan of kos? weird choice i know

14: Mindless

It is incredibly difficult to come up with something for a boss that exists only as some kind of concept in a nightmare, so I decided to go with an outsider POV for this. So, this might have turned more into a Lady Maria character study, so sorry if that wasn't what you were looking for, anon. It was just the only way I could think about how to make this prompt work.)

Maria had died, but she hadn't found peace.

She had awoken again, in the very clocktower in which she had taken her own life. Around her, the research hall, housing all the patients, the... the experiments. Maria had always refused to call them like this, she always had treated them as humans, regardless of how much the church was dehumanizing them.

Maria had tried to get out of the Research Hall. She needed to see where she was. She was sure that she had died, but the Research Hall looked like an exact copy of what she remembered. She made it through a prison block, one of the Healing Church and once she stepped outside, she knew that she indeed had died.

What laid in front of her, was a nightmarish version of Yharnam, mostly of Cathedral Ward. A fake light shone down on it, a pale, lifeless light and as she wandered through it, hunters and beasts were locked in an eternal battle. This place truly was a nightmare... a nightmare for hunters, and Maria had been a hunter herself.

True, she had quit the job, cast her weapon away and turned to comfort the patients in the Research Hall, but when she looked down at her hip, she could see the very same Rakuyo she had cast away and she was clothed in her garb, right up to the feathered hat.

Maria returned to the clocktower and sat down, waiting. She was dead and wasn't getting hungry or thirsty or tired. Most of the time she did just... think. Think about how her death had affected the ones she left behind. Gehrman, Micolash, Laurence... Adeline, the blood saint in the Research Hall she had taken a liking too. She was here as well, at least a version of her that her mind must have been fabricated. Maria felt that the Research Hall was her own personal hell, like the hunters outside were locked into an endless cycle of the hunt.

Maria could hear it. The sounds behind the big clock. The rushing of waves. The dripping of water. She could smell it, the faint smell of salt and the much more prominent smell of rotten fish.

She knew that behind the door there would lay something that scared her even more than the Research Hall... but one day she couldn't bear it anymore. She needed to know.

So Maria got up from her chair, in which she must have sat for days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years. Time wasn't a concept in this place, so she didn't know, only that it had been a long time.

She faced the structure behind her and held up an item known as the celestial dial, knowing that it would open the way. After the hole had fully opened, Maria took a deep breath, even though she didn't need to breathe anymore and stepped through it.

There was a small cave, but once she traversed it, Maria saw her true nightmare right in front of her eyes.

The Fishing Hamlet...

It felt like ages had passed since she had been sent here alongside Gehrman. Because of their combat prowess they had been chosen to take care of any attacks, so that the scholars could work unhindered. Maria hadn't questioned it back then. She had trusted Master Willem's word, that they were doing the right thing, that the villagers of the Hamlet were in the wrong for keeping the treasure of the stranded Great One for themselves.

That it had been Byrgenwerth and not the Healing Church, made the whole thing even worse. The Healing Church hadn't even existed back then. Laurence had been in the middle of his blood research, having been excluded from the trip, because Master Willem had been against it. Of course the sneaky bastard still had found a way to follow them and harvest the blood of the Great One while everyone else had been distracted. Still, Maria had acted under the order of Byrgenwerth. She had done atrocious things in the name of knowledge... atrocious things she wanted to absolve while serving the Church, only to realize that she had gone from serving one monster to serve another monster. Still, she could have believed it far more if the Healing Church had been the one to attack the Hamlet.

In a sense, the Healing Church started in Byrgenwerth, so she shouldn't be too surprised.

Maria continued walking, the shallow water washing around her boot, cold water dousing her feet. There was a figure limping forward, mumbling something about Byrgenwerth, but when she stayed to listen, she quickly realized that they didn't notice her, forever caught in their ramblings.

Approaching the village, Maria's hands encompassed her Rakuyo. She couldn't preclude the possibility that the nightmare had conjured the villagers, the one Willem had let cut open to search for eyes in their brain, to attack anyone approaching their sanctuary.

For some reason, nobody disturbed her. She could cross the village without fail. Sometimes she heard sounds, the splashing of water, the shuffling of feet, the creaking of wood... along with the prominent smell of fish, that had dried on land for a little too long, but nobody ever stood in her way.

Maria stopped when she came upon a certain well. She knew this well. That had been the well she had tossed her Rakuyo in. Once again, her grip around her Rakuyo tightened. She knew that her gear wasn't real, and was a fabrication of the dream, but she asked herself if she still would find a Rakuyo in there... her Rakuyo...

Maria had to wrest herself free from her thoughts. This wasn't why she had come here. She had another goal.

So, she continued walking, each step filling her boots with more water, until her feet were freezing and her whole body shivered, even though she knew that she wasn't alive anymore. Her body still made her believe that she was alive...

Maria stepped out of the cave, approaching the corpse on the shore. Kos, the Great One they had come here for. The Great One which Laurence had harvested the blood from. The Great One which Willem had cut open to take a piece of her unborn child...

All Great Ones lose their children and long for a surrogate. The thought was predominant in Maria's head. Did they really lose their children or did humans take them? A question that she would never get an answer too...

She didn't even know why she had come here. To make up for her crimes? To get answers? That was something she could never make up for. Maybe she had simply come to apologize.

So, Maria kneeled down in front of Kos and folded her hands in prayer, when something stirred inside the dead body.

Maria was on her feet immediately, her Rakuyo on the ready, her eyes fixated on Kos' stomach.

Something... crawled out of Kos, no... it looked... looked like she gave birth. But that couldn't be. She knew that the child had been dead. She had been a part of killing it. Maria gasped as the creature was completely "born" and slowly got up. That wasn't... that surely didn't look like a child. It was large, with grey skin, managed to step up on two feet and... actually still was connected to the placenta of its mother.

It looked like the most nightmarish thing she had seen and she was currently stuck in a nightmare.

Still, the way it stood there, the way it seemed to wail, that was nothing but a lost, confused and scared child.

Maria lowered her Rakuyo and took a step closer.

"Hey.", she said. "I am not here to-"

Before she could even finish her sentence the child approached her with a blood-curdling scream. Maria gasped in shock and surprise and stepped out of the way, to not be crushed by this giant placenta, that the creature used like a mace.

"I am not here to fight!", she screamed, trying to drown out their screams. "I want to talk!"

She didn't have any luck. The creature continued to attack her and with Maria refusing to fight back, she quickly became overwhelmed and felt how her body got crushed under the "club" of the creature.

When she awoke, she was back in the Astral Clocktower. She let out a deep sigh, of course she wouldn't be able to escape this nightmare by dying in it. She was forced to come back again and again, just like the hunters and the beasts.

She very well remembered what had happened. The creature... the child... They had attacked her. Did they think she was responsible for the death of their mother? While Maria wasn't responsible for Kos' death, the Great One had been dead when they found her, she was responsible for the death of the child.

The child couldn't know that. It got born, saw a dead mother and attacked the first person they thought responsible. In their sense, they were an orphan and upset about it. There were so many things Maria didn't know about the Great Ones, but she was sure that they wouldn't differ in wanting to have the comfort of their parents.

Maria decided to meet the orphan another time and see if she could help. They didn't want to listen to her. They probably weren't aware of them being in a nightmare and Maria just wanted to help.

So she went to the shore another time. The Orphan of Kos, Maria had decided to call them like that, was still there. As soon as she approached them, they were back at attacking her.

"Stop it!", Maria screamed. "I know you have every right to hate me, but it won't do anything good! We are both stuck in a nightmare!"

Again, Maria was struck down and woke up at the Astral Clocktower. Again, Maria went back to meet the Orphan of Kos.

This time she fought back. If the Orphan didn't want to listen, she would make it listen and if that meant to beat some sense into it, so that it would finally stop attacking her.

Maria had to learn the hard way that the Orphan only got stronger the more it got cornered. She still felt the aftershock of its electric attack when she woke up in her chair again.

Their encounters continued like that. Maria knew that she would be able to just strike the Orphan down if she would get all out, but she despised using her blood powers and she didn't want to strike them down, she wanted to talk. She only fought because the Orphan didn't want to listen.

So they fought each time they met and slowly, Maria mentioned to gain the upper hand, finally having figured out how to best avoid the Orphan's attacks and striking their weak points to make them yield. During this time, she actually cherished not being able to die anymore, that surely gave her infinite tries. Being dead had its merits after all.

Finally, Maria managed to overpower the Orphan, her sword at their throat and her foot on their chest, as they trashed and flailed beneath her.

"Finally.", Maria said. "Will you finally listen? I only wanted to talk. About all this here. The nightmare around us. The fact that it seems to be a cruel warp of the reality I tried to escape. That the Fishing Hamlet is here. Why you stayed in your mother's belly for so many years. I just want to try and help." Or did she? Had she really come here just to help? Wasn't she here to find some answers about her suffering...?

There wasn't an answer, just more thrashing and flailing. Maria had to give her best to not be knocked off. "I just want some answers!", she suddenly cried out, tears welling up in her eyes. Who had decided for her that she should keep living in this nightmare? Who had cursed her for all eternity? Why did she have to relive the things she wanted to forget over and over again.

"Tell me! You are the source of this nightmare, are you not?!"

Maria startled at the sound of her own voice. That wasn't like her. She had always been kind and compassionate, not furious, holding a sword at the throat of what was classified as a toddler.

Wiping the tears out of her eyes, she took a deep breath and looked the Orphan in the eyes... and that is when she noticed it.

"You don't even have a mind...", she said. "You weren't even allowed to be born. This, all of this, it's just a manifestation of my own guilt and shame."

Maria removed her Rakuyo from the Orphan's throat and the next thing she knew was that she was back in the Astral Clocktower.

With a sigh, she sat down on the sole chair there, picking up a photograph to look at. "We should have never come to the Hamlet.", she murmured. "If we had just left Kos alone, nothing of this would have ever happened."

Maria put the photograph to the side and sank down into her chair. There was no escape out of this nightmare, but she knew what her task in it was. Whoever would make it into it from the waking world, she would step up and prevent them from going further. She would keep the secret of the Hamlet, even in her own death.

Because a corpse should be well left alone.

(Author's note: I am not super satisfied with this one, but I hope you enjoy it regardless. Like I said, it was a difficult prompt with a difficult character. Sadly we don't have much lore about Kos and the Orphan of Kos and the Fishing Hamlet is one of the biggest lore messes in the whole world of Bloodborne.)