Chapter Thirty-Six | Baptism
As far as the eye could see, the pool shimmered. A lake, crisp and clear, untarnished by ripples nor the pondscum of one more mundane.
Atop it sat a cradle - a corpse - harboring within its walls a rocking figure. The girl nestled in its warmth was hunched and ragged, stained in the blood of the stars themselves, her own mingling with the quicksilver current to stain it a pearlescent red.
Quiet utterances echoed into nothing, her eyes, not looking out at the world beyond but within.
Hammer blows. Screaming. The sting and spite of her own haggard mind rallying against horrors unknown to man, yet inescapable.
She had gone searching for the truth, and she had found it.
Found it in the unending gaze of a being far lesser yet far greater than herself, fashioned by the hands of man and even the seed of which that being had been born once flesh and blood. Once just as scared, just as petrified as her.
Whole worlds crumbled and died along her sodden flesh, the spark and cry of the cosmos showered over her with each blow, with each burst of hysterical power ripping from the end of a simple length of wood.
She had bathed in the stars, in the cradle of existence, and they had found her wanting.
With shaking hands she crawled from the empty corpse, fingers closing around the carapace - now still of its dance, its undulations to the heartbeat of the universe - and finding soft purchase as she dragged herself face first into the waiting waters.
Catherine lay there in the filth. The filth of gods. The filth of man.
She lay there, devoid of thought and reasoning, only the primal urge to run, to hide, to go somewhere far from here, a place in which she'd found nothing but pain of the body and soul.
But, a hand reached out, and she looked up unseeingly into the waiting smile of a woman bathed in red, her features sharp and flesh a bluish gray that sent sparks of fear raining down her spine.
Animalistic, she scrambled, back into the corpse and warmth and love that for the first moment in her life lit some memory, deep in the lifeblood of her humanity, that felt like a mother's touch. She hid within the cavern,where she could still feel the ethereal drumbeat of a beast - a god - now dead, pounding in her ears, in her skull, in her soul.
The woman kneeled, patient. Long limbs dotted with naught but corners and edges, every bone sharp and the skin pulled tight along every joint. Her belly, dripping, was carved from rib to thigh, a thin rope hanging along the tresses of her wedding dress.
For an eternity the two sat.
Waiting.
Watching.
Until Catherine eventually reached out, taking those slender fingers in her own and allowing them to pull her into the world beyond, free of her cradle.
Softly, so kind and tender, those fingers trailed down her cheek, brushing the gore and the tears away.
She looked up above, past the woman to see the moon.
It hung in the sky like an omen, red as the blood that ran through her veins and omnipresent. Her throat grew dry, her knees trembled, and her mind shook as she stared out at the Paleblood sky and knew.
The Moon. The Moon. The Moon.
To all beasts she called. To all hunters she sang. To all Dreamers, she guided their way.
Seek Paleblood. Transcend the hunt.
Catherine had, and nothing remained of her mind but fragments and splinters. A piecemeal shadow of all that she had built and created with her own two hands.
A hand blocked her view. The woman.
Touch so gentle, she guided Catherine's gaze to her own, tired eyes. A silent smile on her lips and the crying, baying wails of an infant lashing at her ears.
Mergo.
Catherine blinked, as a dog would it's master. A voice unheard, noises lashed together with such finesse, only to fall on deaf ears.
Free my child. Free Hers.
Slowly, Catherine blinked, before her entire being shuddered and she knew no more.
-::-
Visions of spiders, visions of the great unending dark. Fitful dreams took her and voices wandered in like nightmares in the deep.
"She's lost her mind, you wretched thing. Let me slit her throat and be done with it. There's always more."
Catherine sat on a boat, a tiny thing. Simple, blackened cedar and oars of teak. It bobbed along a river of blood, trees with naked boughs taking up the sky above, a kaleidoscopic lattice of life that splintered into more, into tinier fragments of moon-soaked bark.
No creatures lay witness to her journey, only Catherine and herself.
She looked into her own eyes. Younger, so much brighter with life. Her eyes shone a green that dazzled her, radiant in their intensity. Her hair, not limp, ragged, stained with the bile of dead men, but instead sharp and full.
"You're me," she whispered, gaze dancing out at the river as they floated along, dipping one hand into the thick, cloying red to watch as it dripped from her fingers.
It looked sweet, like wine.
"Once upon a time."
Teeth nipped at the inside of her lip, frown deep as she turned back to herself. "A god."
"Yes."
"I killed it."
A simple nod was her reply, the motion smooth. Unbothered, like she knew she once moved when speaking to her friends.
Now her every twitch of the muscle was a harsh, controlled thing. Intention in every step, every flex of the wrist. Catlike and predatory, she crept through the streets of Yharnam, danced her way through Hogwarts. Only Dumbledore and Snape saw her to be as dangerous as she truly was.
They were the movements of a Hunter.
"What's to come of me now? What's to come of you?"
"Me?" Her reflection asked, expression wry. "I've been dead a long time now, haven't I?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I suppose you have."
The boat rocked, a rotten hand shooting out of the river and slapping uselessly against the hull.
"No. You will not."
Her gaze moved back up to the trees, following the pale red light cast across their starry branches. "And where's that coming from?"
"Outside."
"And where's this?"
"Inside."
She grunted. "The Doll and Gehrman. They're arguing."
"Over whether to kill us."
"Not me?"
"Not you."
"You're dead."
"Yes." Another nod, a quaint smile. "I am. But you are too, aren't you?"
"Am I?"
"In a way." Her mirror turned to the bough, arms resting along the side of the boat. "You're dead just like I am. I once existed, now I don't. Yharnam killed me." Eyes turned, locking onto her own, cold and indifferent. "Our naivety, our hope, our childhood. Gone. Dashed away with the flash of steel and gunpowder."
"Then what am I supposed to be?"
"You'll have to figure that out on your own now, won't you?"
"But you're me."
"Not anymore."
More splashes, a skull patched with hair bobbing into view before disappearing beneath the flood.
"And why shouldn't I send her off? She's done enough, another hunter is what we need."
Lips parted, Catherine peered into the water, her hair hanging around her face and dragging through the crimson muck, plastering itself along the column of her neck. "Who's in there?"
"All you have, and will kill. Impressive, isn't it?"
The river stretched long and wide, a horrid thing filled top to bottom with corpses and the blood of the beasts of Yharnam.
How many had she slaughtered? Villages, full of the damned, all taken by her hand. How many more to come?
"It is."
Light flashed from above, the crack of thunder following in its wake.
"She is not just a hunter, Gehrman. She is my friend."
Huh.
Guess she'd made more of an impression than she'd thought.
"Am I dead, dead?"
"If you were, did you think we'd be here talking?"
Catherine shrugged. "Stranger things have happened."
"Your friend? You're a doll. Made with my own two hands. I've swords with more of a mind than you!"
"How do I go back?"
"Are you sure you want to? After all that? We were torn from our home to kill gods and godlings, and now that you know, you want to go back?"
She studied herself, blank faced and withdrawn. "Yes."
"To what end? The death of Voldemort? To learn why we were brought to Yharnam?"
"To live, I suppose."
"After we tried to kill ourselves. Succeeded, if it wasn't for the curse."
"Can always try again later."
Her reflection barked out a laugh, sharp and tinged with exhaustion. "What's happened to us?"
"Too much. Far too much, if we're sitting in a place like this, having this conversation."
"Then why would you ever want to go back?"
A quiet breath puffed out in front of her, lingering in the air. Her hand lowered back to run trails through the blood, bubbles popping in her wake and the cold touch of the dead below flickering along the pads of her fingers.
"I've got people waiting for me. Friends, family. Emilie."
"You'd put us through hell for a girl you hardly know."
"Already have, haven't I? I didn't need to save her. Didn't need to let her know her parents were dead, and drag her over to the chapel. I could have left her to rot." She looked herself in the eyes. "Would you have done that?"
"Never."
"Then there's your answer."
Snorting, her mirror bit her lip, fingers drumming along the sides of the boat. "We're going to kill ourselves saving these people from themselves."
"Voldemort, the Church… they're one and the same. Tyrants. What's the point in standing by and watching when we can burn it down ourselves?"
"We've already killed a god."
"What makes a cabal of madmen any different?"
In companionable silence, the two relaxed, watching as the waves lapped at the shore and the current took them forward into eternity.
-::-
Time took her in its cold and immaterial embrace, sweeping her along the slipstream of creation. On and on it went, boundless and indomitable, carrying with it the knowledge of all that would and ever was.
Catherine ghosted along its currents for what felt a millenia, shaking, cold, the fear of gods still flowing through her veins and pooling in her eyes. Conversation still slipped into her deafened ears, haunting and untouchable. The soft spoken words of the Doll raised in temper, Gehrman's own warring against those honeyed tones.
The blood of a dead god had touched upon her tongue, and with it came its dreams.
Rom, Rom, Vacuous Rom, those dreams spoke.
Rom her name was, a god made of man - a woman, long ago.
Granted eyes, she was, her memories whispered in the rattle of a thousand dying screams. The cacophony of an imploding sun. O' Rom, Great One and Kin of the Cosmos. Kos listened to her prayers, to those of Byrgenwerth and the scholars within. Eyes, eyes, grant us eyes. Grant us eyes so that we might see.
But those eyes looked out, not in. They looked out and trapped all within their grasp.
She had been made to hide the world, to hide the sky that threatened to consume all.
Oh, little one. Whatever have you done to yourself?
"Am I dead, mother? Is this the end of me?"
Slaughtered her young and slaughtered the Kin above. Not yet Great yet still reduced your mind to rubble. An earthly god.
"I don't think I want to die anymore."
Little spiders, all split down the middle, mashed and crushed and pulped and pressed.
"Why does her blood shine so bright?"
Marked by a Hunter and born unto the stars.
"Why does her flesh taste so sweet?"
Cursed, cursed you are, moulded by blood and consigned only to destruction.
"Am I vile? Am I wrong? Wrong, wrong, wrong-"
You will be their saviour. Cursed, blessed, rent in twain.
"Will I ever be human again?"
Ever and on, and on, anon.
A supernova behind her eyes, scorched into those fleshy walls. Visions of caverns, of crypts, of a world deep beneath the earth and lined with flickering torches. A civilization upon a civilization, making way from stone to dust, to ash and sand, the bare form of a child unborn, swaddled in white with raw flesh carved by the beating sun. Up and up to crystals and flowers so bright, so dazzling, scintillating in their glory. Creatures named it home, all blue and frondlike, walking, bubbling children of the stars.
Above all lay Yharnam, its roots buried in the civilizations below. From great chalices they drank their blood, the sacrament of the divine flitting over their lips to fill their greedy bellies, bloated with excess as their people starved and withered.
World upon world, empire upon empire, they all crumbled beneath the weight of their wants, their avarice and lust for power. To become one with the stars far above their weary shoulders, to look beyond the galaxies to something greater, and call them their brethren.
Catherine came to, a stuttering, bleary mess. Her limbs deadened and eyes still bearing the lingering touch of bloodied tears, wretched, unmoving, and looking all but a corpse if not for the waver of her fingers or the shudders that ran like waves down her hunkered spine.
In, out, her lungs burst and filled again, drinking in the air with desperation. Anxiety boiled in her gut, a deep fear sparked by the unknown. Sparked by her complete and utter lack of comprehension. To see, yet be so blind. To look, and find only mysteries.
Fingers ran through her hair, the whistle of joints so quiet that only a Hunter could hear, even as close as this. She let the warmth of them suffuse her, resignation in her bones. Death on her tongue.
"Wh- where-"
"The Dream. You gave me a fright."
Words did not come easily to her, what with the howls of a dead god still echoing in her mind. It did not make a noise, but expressed itself through pain, horror, a painter's splash of deep, dark red across the canvas of her soul.
"How long?"
"A turn of the moon, perhaps a few days longer."
One month she had been in this place. One month, catatonic and scrambling for the dregs of her being, scattered by her own hubris.
"Thankfully, time in the Dream does not follow the flow of the earthly world beyond."
Yes. Yes, that was true. A month here was but a blink- and where… what? What was it she wanted? Where was it she wished to return?
"You haven't a name," Catherine murmured, voice solemn. Detached. "Have you?"
The Doll was sat beside her, legs crossed tidily and her hand still in Catherine's hair, slowly carding at uneven locks so dry they looked sharp as knives.
"No. Do I have need of one?"
"You're a person. You're my friend. I wonder what to call you, other than 'Doll.'"
"Ah." The Doll hummed a soft tune, porcelain twisting like flesh into a thoughtful frown. "I've heard Gehrman speak of a Maria. His student I believe, when he still lived."
"I… don't know if that suits you."
"And what do you believe would suit me, Catherine?"
Like a nutcracker, her jaw worked up and down, tasting the motion of her bone and muscle with the clumsiness of a newborn. "Melodie."
"Melodie."
"Or Mirjam, or… Noelle."
"Melodie. I like it." Taking her new title and wearing it proudly, she smiled. "Call me Melodie."
"Mmm." Catherine mumbled quietly to herself, absentmindedly pawing at the grass beneath her. "Me-lo-die."
"And I'm… Catherine."
"That you are."
"I heard you. Fighting. I didn't know you could fight."
"Neither did I. You have taught me much since your arrival."
Watching the pillars, the fog that roiled at their waist and the clouds above that hid their peaks, if there were any to speak of, Catherine tried to remember who she was.
She knew she was a student. She knew that her life had been difficult. She knew that a world far more mysterious than her own, quiet life, had been waiting for her with eager arms dripping with poison.
All these things she knew, but now, she didn't know herself from a stranger. Not what made her tick, what she yearned for, hoped against all hope to see and gain in a long and fruitful life.
Never had she been offered the illusion of a life such as that. Always begging for scraps, fighting and fighting and fighting some more just to get her foot on the first stair towards the benediction of peace.
"I'd like to stay here a while. To remember who I am. To remember what I fight for."
"You can stay as long as you'd wish. This is your home as much as it is mine."
"Gehrman won't like that."
"Gehrman dislikes many things, the both of us included. It is only now that I realize the resentment that he holds for me."
"Why?"
"He created me. Made me in the image of his student, one he loved a very long time ago."
Understanding flickered over her in short, staccato waves. "Maria."
"Yes."
Leaning into the Doll's touch - no, Melodie, she had to remind herself. Melodie, and what a perfect name it was for a Doll, a life sized music box ballerina made of porcelain and dreams.
"They'll never understand what happened to me, back home. I don't understand it myself. I thought- gods, that even if they were real, I'd never see one. Never come face to face with- with…"
A shudder ran up her arm, cold and electric. The hammer, buried deep in flesh that could not, would not stay still. Silver blood ran in thick rivers from where the stone had embedded itself in the side of th iͬ nͦ ᶰ g.
It howled in her mind, its children screaming and skittering as meteors rained down from above. Crimson trails ran from her eyes down into the fabric of her mask, eyes burning from the inside out from having her gaze fixed on the anathema for so long.
It was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong- insidious, horrible, enchanting, luminous- white flowers of blistered starlight blooming across its back.
It was everything that should not be.
Catherine choked on her throat and the breath caught in it, a hoarse whine escaping her as she pressed her hands to her face and ground the heels of her palms against her eyes, as if it stamp out the visions - memories - entirely.
Rom had simply stared at her, sobbing and shaking in Her miasmic presence. Until Catherine had risen, fire pouring from her wand and magic shining from her limbs, frenetic as she stabbed Her in one of Her hundred, million, billion - infinite eyes.
Even a blood-drunk hunter would have quaked at the sight of her, maddened, beastial as she threw herself at Rom and shrugged off Her children that came pouring down from the sky.
Man was not made to look upon a being so hideous. Man was not made to bask in the presence of such unnatural beauty.
"Paleblood," was her whisper, the word like velvet, like thorns as it burst into existence and floated along the Dream. "She was hiding it from us all."
And the sky above reflected that, the guise lifted at the death of its protector.
The moon hung high as if the sky itself was on fire, the clouds marked a milky red. It was close, too close, and something in the back of her mind - that child that still lingered, reading books in a library in the suburbs and snatching every scrap of knowledge she could find - wondered if the tides would break the walls of every city that graced the face of this planet.
Was it even a planet? Was she on a disc, spinning through the vast unknown, captured in the grasp of a god far larger and grander than any Yharnam could ever dream of?
Truth, knowledge, a world locked away from beings so small that to look upon it would be to invite death.
Rom fought like a child, bewildered and fearful of the creature that had invaded its home, smoke pouring from its lips and blood pooling in its shattered eyes. She spun and sang, calling for aid from gods that would never answer her pleading cries, detached from the earthly realm and wandering along the very fabric of time.
She never wanted this. To forget herself, to forget the world beyond, to forget all but the Lake and the little ones that budded from her flesh to roost in the cradle of her moonlit love.
Sickly and spent, Catherine slowly detached herself from Melodie and rose to wander to the baths where the messengers rested. She wasn't aware of the magic that still dawdled in her limbs and nerves, or the way her eyes glowed softly with the remnants of godflesh that she had drowned herself in, supped at its veins like an infant at its mothers teat.
The messengers, for once, were nowhere to be found. Not in their tree trunk, nor their bird bath, hidden from her. Perhaps at Melodie's request, or Gehrmans, or out of a sense of self-preservation.
She could see trampled gardens and craters in the earth where her rampage had continued after her return to the Dream. How had she been subdued, if this was the carnage she had wrought in the midst of fugue? Bound? Drugged?
There were some sedatives tucked into the cupboards of this place. Opium, or whatever this realm called the substance.
Did Melodie take her in her arms and force it down her gullet?
Shuddering, Catherine swept her hair back and looked into the pool to see a stranger staring back at her.
Her cheeks were sharp, one eye a dull gray and the other a vibrant, pulsing green - shining with venom. A twisted scar, pale and slightly raised, ran from cheek to cheek, meeting at the corners of her mouth and dragging in a neat circle back to her neck. More scars, faint, speckled her face and arms, the fractal explosion of lightning leaving thin red trails from fingertip to elbow, disappearing beneath her armour.
But where a more familiar lightning mark once rested, now sat the mark of a hunter. A single line, two lines splitting from it towards the bottom to come down in the shape of a diamond, ending in a clean and simple dot.
Catherine's mind trembled as she came to the realization that it had always been there.
Never had the sigil of the skies marked her flesh, only the brand of a hunter given unto another. Was it Voldemort's magic that had cursed her so? Was she to always bear this sign?
It was only now that she had been cleansed by the blood of Rom, so that her scars true nature was revealed to her.
A hunter from birth. A hunter til' death.
"Did you know?" she asked the Voice, words slow with resignation.
Always.
"And who marked him?"
That, you must learn for yourself.
"It was… it was always-"
Always and forever. The language of my Kind, twisted for the feeble minds of humanity's sake. Evermore have you been a hunter. But a babe, her mind screaming out through a sliver in reality, and thus your voice pulled me from the death of my child and into a realm not touched by my own for millenia.
"Where does your kind call home?"
The stars. The black of night. Caverns and crypts trapped deep in wells of broken emptiness so large as to swallow a hundred million worlds in the blink of a mortal eye.
"And… and what does this mean for me?"
It means you are blessed, my child.
"Your name?"
Kos.