The faint drip of water was the only thing to disturb the stillness of the tunnel. Mere moments ago, there had been the hiss of escaping breath, the grunts of violent effort, the splash of feet disturbing the water, and the howling squeals of pain, but these things were past. They had faded as quickly as they had come, the sudden burst of frenetic action tearing apart the silence only to recede.

It was the way of the hunt, and the old man knew that way better than most.

Then, another sound broke into the tunnel. It was a single, long, ragged exhalation of breath. It did not so much escape the old man's lips as it was torn from him, wrenched loose from his soul by emotions he could not hope to contain.

He bent and picked up the ribbon from where it lay. It was a long, fine strip of lace, its white color almost shining in the faint light that filtered its way into the tunnel. A pretty thing, cut just to the length that a young girl might use to tie up or adorn her hair. The fabric was fine, perhaps better suited to a child of a well-off family, but a young lady deserved a treat now and again, didn't she?

I love it! I'll wear it every day, Granddad!

Lace shining white…where it was not stained with the splotches of pungent red, its hue still too bright, bright and fresh as the knowledge of what it meant.

What had she been doing there? She, of all people, should have known what it meant to be outside on the night of the hunt.

It was madness, pure and simple. Madness without reason, without purpose. It was every bit the same as a beast, caught up in a foul hunger unshaped by sense, by anything that human minds could conceive.

Henryk sagged, feeling every bit the weight of his years. His free hand lay flush on the tunnel brickwork, supporting himself as his body shook with long, shuddering heaves. His vision blurred, filled with shimmering light as tears flowed.

Madness!

Why?

The moment passed, then, and he straightened. The hunter's instinct would not let his heart cripple him, any more than it would have let the shock of physical injury incapacitate him in battle. There was work to be done still. He needed to find Gascoigne, to let him know what had become of his child.

A parent should never survive long enough to outlive their child, the old saying drifted through his thoughts. Almost reflexively, the fingers of his right hand relaxed, the blood-spattered ribbon slithering between them to fall into the shallow water. There was no point in bringing it with him. The news alone would be cruelty enough. Gascoigne did not need the tangible reminder of the world's brutality to hold in his hands. He would ask no proof of Henryk, need none knowing what the child had meant to the old man.

The wounds he'd have to inflict on a man who was as good as family to him were bad enough, without rubbing a father's face in his grief.

Henryk set off down the tunnel, his feet making only the slightest of splashes in the water, a hunter's steps sure and silent. He knew where he had to go. Like himself, Gascoigne would be roving Central Yharnam in search of beasts, but there was one place he always returned to regularly. He'd been entrusted with the key to the Tomb of Oedon, the gateway that sealed off the cemetery from the basement of Oedon Chapel in the Cathedral Ward above. It was a relic from his days with the Healing Church; Gascoigne still wore their Holy Shawl over his coat just as he still carried the title Father from whatever outlander church he'd belonged to before coming to Yharnam.

Faith left its mark on a man, and one always carried pieces of it, even if they weren't always as overt as Gascoigne's. No one could give so much of their soul to something and not be changed by it.

So Gascoigne had the key, entrusted with it by the canon of the chapel above. Like the hunter captain in the old days, he sealed the gate on the night of the hunt, so no beast could make its way up into the chapel.

No beast—and no man, Henryk thought. These days, the Healing Church was a filthy name in Yharnam, reviled nearly as much as were the beasts themselves. They'd once dominated the city, its politics, its economy, spreading the word of their blood ministration. Now, Henryk suspected that if it hadn't been a hunter from this side of the gate—an outsider, but one who lived and worked among the Yharnam-folk—who held the key, a mob would have stormed the gate by force, then set their saws and torches and hayforks against those who were only beasts by their actions rather than in flesh.

Even so, trust was a fragile thing, easily broken in the madness of the hunt, and so Gascoigne always made sure to check the gate several times a night. More than once he'd been forced to…dissuade Yharnamites who wanted to push the point. When one skated too close to beasthood, it was all too easy to be overcome by emotion, and those who prowled the night were often little more than beasts, indeed.

So it was to the Tomb of Oedon that Henryk would go, and wait for his friend, and fulfill the duty of breaking the man's heart, a heart as great as his towering stature.

Tell him, and pray that it didn't push him over the edge they all clawed along.

Yharnam's layout was a maze, its architecture bewildering to foreigners. It was city piled upon city, building upon building, all the way down to the unspeakably ancient labyrinths deep below that the Church's forebears had dug around in to make their discoveries. Henryk hadn't come to Yharnam yet in those days, but it hadn't been long after, and he'd hunted its twisted streets so many times he knew its every path and turn. If it had once seemed more like a nightmare vision than a city, it was a nightmare that he now knew all too well, a nightmare repeated time and again until every painful detail was anticipated.

I love you so much, Granddad!

The old hunter had many such nightmares. Perhaps he'd now be adding another to their ranks.

Henryk shook his head savagely, as if to scatter the stray thoughts that were gathering. The hunt demanded focus. A distracted hunter was a dead hunter.

This particular tunnel ended in a dead end, a pit that drained the water into the depths, perhaps to an underground river, even one that merged with the labyrinths some called the tomb of the gods. Henryk took a side path, one that led through an arch and out onto a small ledge dangling off the side of the ancient aqueduct. He was thrust at once from the comfort of sheltering stone out beneath the red evening sky, red as the streaks of fresh-spilled blood that stained the ribbon, red like the aftermath of the mortal wound by which the swollen moon had slain the day.

Hunted it.

The night of the hunt was come, come so early that it had not waited for dark to fall, come with all the wild, reckless abandon of a beast.

Henryk's hands moved impulsively towards the saw cleaver and pistol that hung at his belt, even though there was no beast on the ledge, nor clinging to the stonework above, talons dug into the cracks between blocks, ready to let go and drop on unsuspecting prey, nor peering at the ladder that reached up into the heights above.

The hunt beckoned to the old man, as it had for so many years gone.

He shook his head and clenched his fists. Gascoigne first. The hunt…the hunt could wait.

Henryk began climbing the ladder. He was on the Cathedral Ward side of the valley, now, near to the cemetery. Was that what the child had been doing here? Going to see her father? It made no sense. The girl should have been home with her mother, behind locked doors and barred windows, incense burning to ward away the beasts. She knew better—all of Yharnam knew better. The only ones out on the streets were hunters, or beasts, or those too lost in madness to know which side of that line they fell.

A line it's not so easy to know, Henryk admitted to himself. There had been many times when in the heat of the hunt. the hot blood spattering him, carrying the echoing will of those gone before, it had been hard to tell himself where the man ended and the beast began.

He saw two of them, perfect examples as he exited the top of the ladder. A common Yharnamite, carrying a shield and a torch, standing upright, but his body and face covered in thick, coarse fur, his left arm out of proportion. And a brawny, thick-bodied man off immense size and blank face. No sign of the beast about him, but only swollen flesh and the mark of strange treatments upon his body. A common huntsman and his minion, waiting with a trap to crush and burn beasts trying to cross the bridge. And yet Henryk knew that if they caught sight of him they'd have attacked him just as viciously as they'd set upon a beast.

Were they beasts, turning on prey? Or men so maddened that they saw beasts everywhere?

Or both?

Henryk slipped away from them. If they saw him, they'd surely attack, and he would defend himself. Man or beast, they could not stand against a hunter. But they were not his prey.

Not they who had left a bloodstained ribbon in the aqueduct below.

Though perhaps their presence had driven the girl to the lower route? Gascoigne might have told his family of how the area around the Tomb of Oedon was guarded, and surely would have warned them to avoid the Yharnam-folk in the streets.

So she'd gone below.

Scared down there by these men.

These things.

Henryk's boot sent a loose pebble skittering across the cobbles. The two huntsmen flinched in surprise, and so on-edge were they that surprise—any startling moment—caused them to react with the one thought in their rotting brains. The torch-bearer shoved his brand into the mass of pitch-soaked wood in front of him, setting him alight, and the minion struck it with his massive fists, sending it rolling down the stairs, building velocity so it could hurtle the length of the bridge.

That there were several other Yharnamites lurking on the bridge, torches and crude weapons in hand, seemed not to concern them. Maybe they'd forgotten those men were their friends.

Their fate as the blazing sphere crashed into them didn't concern Henryk, either. They'd have been the ones the girl actually saw.

"Beast!" the torch-bearer screamed. "You foul beast!"

Murdering hypocrite!

Henryk growled as he leapt for the Yharnamite. The man carried a rude shield of wooden planks nailed together and he raised it as Henryk rushed him, as if the sheer speed of the hunter's movements had left him no will to do anything other than flinch back and hide behind what protection he had.

The human instinct trumping the beast's for a moment, perhaps. But the old man had seen beasts cower, too, shuddering with a fear that was born not of rational thought nor even emotion, just crude instinct.

Whatever the source, the fear was justified.

Henryk's saw cleaver hammered into the shield. The teeth bit into the wood, dragging slightly. His fingers caught the release lever, snapping the cleaver open into its extended mode as he tore it loose in a spray of splinters; the combined motions yanked the shield to one side. Before the Yharnamite could try to recover his defense or get his torch up, thrust it at Henryk's face, the old man had already whirled the cleaver around, up, and down again. Its broad blade tore through flesh and even bone, ripping open the front of the huntsman's face, his throat, and his upper chest in a single slice. Blood sprayed, splattering the old man's sturdy leather garb.

The beast-man fell, but his distorted, yet paradoxically more human-seeming ally was already in motion, charging at Henryk. The minion didn't even carry a proper weapon, just a foot-long brick wrenched from some wall gripped in one massive hand. No matter; with the man's size and strength the crude bludgeon would be as effective as any trick weapon if it connected.

If.

Henryk was riding the high of his first kill. His reflexes were sharp, and his hunter's knowledge did not fail him. The explosion from his pistol rang in his ears, and he felt the shock of its firing run up his arm.

The minion felt it, too, as the ball slammed into his chest.

Hunter firearms were not like soldiers' guns. A simple lead ball would not harm the unnaturally transformed flesh of beasts. Rather, they fired quicksilver bullets which a hunter infused with their own blood. The quicksilver was a medium, allowing the blood to act, carrying with it the malice of the hunter's bloodtinge against the prey. The shock of the process did not only inflict damage, but more than that bore massive stopping power.

The minion's charge was stopped cold; his rush halted as his massive legs turned to water, threatening to collapse under him. He reeled as Henryk pounced. In a single, practiced move so familiar it was as easy and natural as breathing the old man hooked his saw cleaver onto his belt while his empty hand continued swinging forward and up, fingers outstretched and rigid like a claw. His hand punctured the minion's abdominal wall, thrust inside, and closed around what it found there.

Then he tore the huge man's viscera from his body.

Henryk stood over the corpses for a long moment, breathing heavily into the inside of the mask that kept his mouth and nose free of tainted beast blood. His veins seemed to throb as his own blood rushed through them. It seemed to sing with the lives he had taken, their laments echoing through the vessels. Lives wasted to bestial madness, the futile hope to defend their home against savage encroachment by corrupting outsiders without ever realizing that they'd become the thing they so feared and hated.

Part of him wanted to continue, wanted it desperately. The call of the hunt was upon him, in him, crying out to pursue and slaughter more, to tear apart every one of these wretches.

No.

No, there was more than that. There was a duty owed, to a friend, to a partner on these brutal nights of the hunt.

So he turned, turned his back on the bridge, on the hunt, on the call, the siren singing in his blood.

The route to Oedon Chapel was not long. Just up a short flight of stairs connecting the bridge to a small landing, then up another, longer climb that lifted the path above the level of Central Yharnam across the valley, at least high enough that they were now on an even height with the Great Bridge. He could hear the shuffling of feet all around, whispered words punctuated with snarls that indicated they came from the throats of men and women slipping into beasthood.

Prey.

Henryk's tongue felt dry. His eyes seemed to throb, aching like they did when the old man was over-tired, but this was different. If anything, he felt like he was bursting with energy.

But he went around, up the stairs and through the arch that led into the Tomb of Oedon.

The bloody evening sky drenched the cemetery, printed the black monuments in the color of the hunt. The leafless trees stretched their limbs to that sky, fingers reaching in mute appeal towards the bulk of Oedon Chapel high above, towards the god enshrined there whose nature was never quite explained clearly. Faint wisps of mist wove their way among the graves, twisting and curling in on themselves.

Out of the corner of his eye, Henryk thought he could see fantastical shapes writhing in the mist, serpentine forms extending quivering tentacles, insectoid shapes like the vermin he'd sought when he'd hunted alongside the confederates of the League scuttling over the graves.

It wasn't just the old man's eyes that spoke to him upon entering the cemetery, though. Even beneath the mask he wore that shielded him from the worst of the visceral stench of the hunt, his nostrils flared as that most elemental aroma touched them.

Blood.

Spilled blood. Fresh blood. Life's blood.

Has it been necessary for Gascoigne to offer…lessons…already? To inform the half-mad huntsmen of Central Yharnam that beasts were their prey and whatever differences they had with the Healing Church and Cathedral Ward, that this was not the place and time to pursue them?

Perhaps so. Or perhaps a beast.

Or perhaps Gascoigne had played no part in what had happened here, and another beast lurked beneath the mist, prowled the clustered grave-markers.

His fingers were tight around the grip of his pistol, the handle of his saw cleaver. Henryk could feel the sweat seeping into the leather of his gloves. There could be a beast here, lurking, waiting, and he would hunt it, bring it to bay, bathe in its blood and drink in the echoing will that blood carried. The hunt was eternal.

Stealthily, he prowled forward between the tombstones, his mind focused, alert for any sign: a footfall on the rough ground, a hiss of breath, a flicker in the rays falling from one of the few unbroken lamps, anything…

But there was nothing, nothing at all to break the deathly stillness. The Tomb of Oedon was inhabited by nothing but the dead.

By its long-tenanted habitants, buried years ago, long before the Healing Church had come to Yharnam and co-opted the chapel.

And by the freshly dead, come to violate the stillness of decades with fresh blood and souls.

They lay in a crook in the wall at the cemetery's far side. Fallen bodies, sprawled, the bodies of Yharnamites. Huntsmen. Crude weapons were still clutched in some hands, cleavers and axes stained with blood, indicating that they had found prey, marked or even slain it, before they themselves had come to their end.

What end? Henryk asked himself. These men had been slain by something. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled; the old man imagined the eyes of a beast on him. Perhaps one of their fellows had turned at last, become a beast fully and lost its ability to see the others as anything but meat.

Only, their bodies did not bear the marks of a beast.

The Yharnamites had met a brutal fate, yes, but they had not been savaged by fangs, rent open by claws. The broad slashes that splintered bone and cleaved open flesh had too neat an edge; they had been made by a weapon. Abdomens and skulls were charred with black powder, blown apart with a shotgun.

Axe and blunderbuss were his partner's weapons. Henryk had seen Gascoigne wield them many times to brutal effect. He had no doubt the towering hunter could have dispatched these men despite their superior numbers. But there was something more. These men had not just been struck down. The signs were there: they had been savaged. One body in particular lay in shattered pieces, as if its killer had just kept hacking and hacking and hacking at the corpse after it had fallen, as if merely killing the man had not been enough, that his slayer's rage had kept on, demanding further outlet even after the man had fallen.

If it was Gascoigne, what could have driven him? This kind of rage…it was more like a beast's than a human's. And Gascoigne…

…Well, if Henryk had to be honest, the man had been skating close to the line for some time.

Perhaps…perhaps it would be better to just walk away. The news Henryk had for him was heartbreaking enough. Better to hear it, to face his grief under the sun's light, not the cold touch of the moon. Yes, that would be better, and not just because it would allow him to return to the hunt.

He straightened up from where he had been crouched over the bodies, and started to walk away. Whatever had maddened Gascoigne, he didn't need more bad news tonight.

Then fear, like an ice-cold hand, closed around the old man's heart.

More, he'd thought.

What was it?

What had so maddened Gascoigne in the first place? Was it just the heat of the hunt, the blood's siren call?

(The blood, echoed in Henryk's mind, pulling at him.)

The ribbon slipping through his fingers.

Why wasn't Gascoigne's daughter safe at home with her mother?

Yes, it wasn't quite nightfall yet, but the hunt was in full sway. Viola would know that, would never let the girl out.

It didn't take Henryk long. He found the body sprawled on top of the old gravekeeper's shack, now long untenanted. The only way down was through a broken gap in the rail from the walkway above. Perhaps it had even been her body crashing through that had broken it.

She hadn't been savaged by a beast, either. Her features were intact, as was the dark dress she wore. The wound in her breast was almost gentle in its simplicity, a neat puncture from a single-edged bladed weapon, almost curving in through flesh to strike the heart, like the point of a sickle. In the dim light she might have been taken for a living person, frozen in fear.

Viola.

The old man shuddered. Gascoigne's gentle wife had been almost a daughter to him. A sweet-natured woman, yet firm of spirit. She had been known to retrieve her husband the morning after a hunt, when the stench of beasts had clung too closely to the man for him to put it aside and return to his normal life, to cleanse the cloud from his eyes with a sweet tune.

Henryk had given them the music box as a gift, marking their first child's birth, for it played a sweet lullaby, traditional to Yarnam. It was something to mark the founding of their family. He'd seen it call the towering hunter back to himself when he'd been unable to set the hunt aside. But he didn't see it here, neither intact nor smashed against the roof-tiles.

And besides, whatever powers of memory it held would have no sway over some random Yharnamite feverish with the blood-madness of the scourge.

Yet, if she didn't have it, and yet she was out of her house…here, doubtless looking for Gascoigne just as Henryk had come here for the same reason…did that explain the girl? He'd found only the bloodied ribbon, not the music box, but he hadn't been looking for it, either.

Lightly, despite his age, the old man dropped to the ground. He had a feeling what he would find now. There were only two ways for this story to end, and neither of them was good.

Gods, just let me go back…

But he would not turn aside. He knew in his heart what had become of Father Gascoigne. The frenzied axe-blows, the bodies blown apart, they told the tale.

How could any man bear it? Especially on the night of the hunt, how could he stand the loss? With the blood rushing through his veins, carrying all that rage, that inhuman fury.

Viola would not be there, to sing him back to himself.

A child would not be there, a music-box playing one of her daddy's favorite songs to remind him of hearth and home.

Henryk knew what would come next, what had to happen. And he owed Gascoigne, as a friend, as a hunter, to bring the story to an end.

To hunt…

The pulse throbbed behind his eyes. His vision seemed to be growing blurry. Light bled the edges of things together, the trees and the grave-markers merging into even wilder beast-shapes.

His mask seemed to clutch at his face, his breathing hoarse and raspy.

But…he did not think he would have to hunt (the hunt…) his friend.

The Tomb of Oedon was too still, too silent.

No beast (Gascoigne) lurked here.

Henryk prowled the graveyard. It did not take long. The body was in the corner back behind the hut, almost like a dog laid at its mistress's feet.

The body was swollen immensely, inhuman, with light brown fur and fanged muzzle, with immense clawed fists. The torso had grown every bit as large as that of the hulking minion's, but the tatters of a black coat and a long gray shawl still clung to it.

The marks were unmistakable. No crude tools here; it was a hunter's weapon that had ended (slaughtered) the beast Gascoigne.

The hunt…

A friend lost to beasthood, to the blood, to the scourge.

The hunt…

No wife to mourn. No one to mourn but him.

The hunt…

Tragedy upon tragedy.

Henryk swayed, clutching his head.

Viola had died at the hands of those who would violate the Tomb. Henryk didn't know their reason. Prowling for beasts? Trying to get into the Ward above to settle matters with the Church? He didn't know—didn't care.

Viola.

Gascoigne.

And a white-ribboned child.

Let them come, he thought.

Across the cemetery, at the gate—two figures. Long-limbed, their faces masked by fur. One carrying a torch that let Henryk see the distorted features. Had they been lurking outside? Followed him in when he passed by?

Beneath his mask, a feral smile bared the old man's teeth.

Friends gone, and family.

A faded whisper echoed in his mind.

I love you, Granddad.

Then it was gone, and only the hunt remained.

~X X X~

A/N: While the tragedy of Viola's death occurs before the player ever reaches the Tomb of Oedon, it is worth noting that it isn't Viola's body that we find Gascoigne hacking away at when we enter the room, but the corpses that have fallen in the corner next to the stairs.