Chapter Sixty-Four | Strange Seas and Broken Men
To an empty chapel, Catherine opened her eyes. Daggers pricked behind them, and the strange flood of hysteria she'd felt upon being held by the Amygdala only a dull murmur now that she'd woken - or, come to her senses. She saw no pews, no Elijah tittering in the corner. The usual clamoring of Emilie and Arianna was nowhere to be found, nor the solemn figure of Eileen surveying them as they played. Adella and the old man were the only ones she was thankful not to see, very much so after what the woman had just attempted.
Absolutely mad she was. Catherine would have to have words with her if…
Well, if she was even in the chapel to begin with, and this wasn't a sudden fugue brought on by fel magic.
The most bizarre thing was the sunlight streaming through the windows, sharp rays casting lines across the church that flickered with motes of dust, flowing this way and that in the soft breeze that entered through the open door. Beyond it she could see brightness like that of which she'd never witnessed in Yharnam, as well as a swift wind that carried with it sand - as if off the top of a dune, the desert sun beating down from high above.
Curse the fiends, their children too, came a woman's voice, whispered on the wind. Catherine whirled about, looking for the source of it. And their children, forever, true.
It sounded as if it had come from afar, yet spoken beside her at the very same time. It took her a moment of looking around before deciding better of it and venturing outside.
And god, how the sun felt.
Warm and bright and almost a bit too harsh as it shone down on top of her, beads of sweat springing to her brow as she basked in its glow and looked on, astounded, by the change that had overtaken Yharnam
Great masses of churned stone, like the seas waves, had swallowed up the buildings enough to leave the scene unrecognizable if not for her intimate familiarity with the view. It was etched through with patterns that followed the motion of the rock, as if magma had poured out across the city and frozen over the homes and coffins that lined its many streets. Sand blew from over their smooth peaks, flowing overhead in clouds that broke against further walls of stone and spilled overtop, cresting high before being carried back down again by the eddies of wind.
"Is this…?"
The Nightmare.
Her hands clenched into fists at the sound of Kos' voice. Smooth as the breeze that rolled over her in cool waves, sand bouncing quietly off the steel that guarded her arms and legs.
"And you speak now?"
Better to tell you of what you've become, than leave you to figure out by your own devices a decade from now.
Catherine's jaw set heavy, chin out, and she furrowed her brow. "What am I to expect?"
You've already experienced it. An innate understanding of the magic that flows through you. Talent for the Blood, and the many ways it may be wielded to strike down your foes, or better your allies. There is nary a wound you may not heal, nor a beast you may slay, given the time and effort.
"It's why I can use the magic of the Dream, isn't it?" she asked, a sorrowed breath escaping her. "Am I right?"
You are correct.
"And… and what else?"
I do not know. You are the first of your kind, and most likely the last.
Her foot scraped across the sandy stone, and she kicked a rock away, watching as it bounced against the smooth face of the serpentine wall ahead. "Was it on purpose?" was Catherine's final question, the severity of her words lingering as they flowed across her tongue.
It was not I who cast the mark upon your brow. Nor was I the one to reach out across the stars and ferry you here. That blame you can lay at the feet of the Moon, and the capricious fancies she has oft been struck by. I have listened from afar for all your life, but it was only once she'd taken notice of you that I intervened, lest you had been bound to her Dream for all eternity.
"So it was Her."
Correct.
Her knuckles rubbed against her chin, their scratch deadened by the fabric of her mask that hung around her throat like crimson drapery, a red so dark as to be nearly black. "Better you than her I suppose."
At least Kos didn't pretend, and thus far She had never lied. Twisted the truth, certainly, but something so barefaced and debased as a simple, mundane lie was beneath one such as Her. Nor did it affect Her lies for Her voice to be that of splintered trees and the heavy fall of autumn rain. The absence of words spoken through the meat and muscle of a throat meant that a certain something was carried with them. Lies were not so easily spoken in a tongueless tongue, even for one so old and wise as Her.
The Moon was an entirely different beast. A creature that, as far as Catherine could tell, had been conducting her own clandestine struggle for power ever since the men of Byrgenwerth first happened across Ebrietas and the ancient ritual blood deep beneath a city that had yet to grow. Nearly every wrong of Yharnam could be laid at Her feet, were She to have any - or if She was simply a shapeless mass of amorphous flesh when lingering on the mortal plane. Most of all, the Moon was something she knew very, very little about, and what she did know - Melodie's fearful glances towards the sky and Gehrman, as much as she hated the man, muttering his night terrors and begging for the sweet release of death in some dusty corner of the Dream.
What she did know made her worry.
Catherine began her journey through the Nightmare and joyous though the sun was, it still brought with it the same sense of foreboding that lingered in every crack and crevice of the waking world. She recognized the selfsame beasts as those in Old Yharnam, small furred things more man than beast and wrapped in gauze. They paid her no heed as they shuffled around the corner ahead, Catherine herself climbing the sandy rock slowly, only to see as a hunter walked around the same bend and began to cut them down.
He bellowed as he did so, manic laughter streaming from his covered lips. He wore archaic clothing, even for Yharnam, an odd assortment of straps and belts dotting his arms and thighs, cinching his jacket tight like a tourniquet. A half-rotted mask covered his face, and atop his head was a hat not too different from the one that had baited her to this place, if not for the bend in its tall peak and the tufts of stitching poking out of the fraying sides.
The beasts died from a single swing of his weapon, all cut through the middle and left in pieces along the ground. The sand swallowed up their blood, and she watched as their corpses burst into mist and disappeared in the wind.
"How long have you been here?" she asked him, expecting no reply. Not with his pupils blown wide and surrounded by more red than white, his eyes bloodshot from the curse that ran through his veins and the sand that chipped at his flesh.
More screaming as he flung his weapon about with aimless yet practiced motions. The tell of the blood-drunk and those lost to that foul crimson miasma. Only enough of his mind remained to follow the movements that once dictated his waking self.
His weapon reminded her of the canes she'd seen some hunters wield, or that member of the Choir in Byrgenwerth. A wide sword, a falchion almost, that split into lengths and formed a heavy whip, erratic as it was flung to and fro.
Lazily, Catherine raised her wand and pointed it at him, waiting to see if he would move.
He charged.
The back of the man's head exploded as a conjured spike furrowed into the space between his eyes and blew out the other end, showering the corner of the building behind him with meat and bone. He collapsed instantly, the gore-sodden mess of his face grinding against the stone until he too disappeared in a misty cloud.
Forever must they fight.
"Forever?" she echoed, stepping over the hill to see the Cathedral courtyard, empty of any giants and instead populated by the same beasts of Old Yharnam that had just been cut down.
Forever.
Another hunter walked into the courtyard, this one wielding a hammer that spat fire from the gaps beneath its head. Even from here she could hear something click - a fuse - before he brought it down on the head of one of the quailing beasts and scattered its body in every direction. The force of the explosion was impressive, and Catherine wondered if Djura once used a weapon such as that.
"How did they get here?"
A curse upon all hunters, their children, anon.
"Emilie. Eileen. Arianna too?" she spoke with dread, hardly paying attention as the hunter continued to wreak his havoc, the crashes his hammer made simply flowing over her still form.
Yes. Unless the curse is ended.
"How?"
My child, rent from my belly and tortured by the vermin that call themselves learned men. It is he that sustains the Nightmare, and it is he whose cries still echo across those blood-stained sands.
"What Yharnam asked of me… what you said would cost me. Your child must die. Hers as well?"
A Dream is a Nightmare, and a Nightmare is but a Dream. Torment made manifest, creation of which all mine are capable of.
"You said you're not gods," Catherine rebuked as she stepped down into the courtyard, cutting the hunter's legs out from under him as he charged towards another beast. He collapsed, still swinging his hammer even as he bled from two ragged stumps. Another spell and he fell limp, the wind carrying him away.
We are not.
"Yet you can create." She turned her head to the Cathedral, still standing high and proud in this unhallowed place, almost serene in the light of day. Not the indomitable thing it once was, shrouded by the clouds and the moon's solemn rays, sinister in its approach.
We can fashion our own realms, our own domain never to touch the mortal world. Imitations of the lands we once knew.
"So the Dream, the Nightmare… Nightmares I guess, all of them were made by something like yourself? Then this one is… what? Your child's?"
And my own.
"Your own."
An endless hell of the hunters own making. To die and then wake in this place, forever to fight, was the curse I spoke with my dying breath.
Her grip tightened on her hammer, and Catherine spoke her next quietly. "You did this?"
As they tore my child from my belly, notions of torture and godhood flitting through their vile minds, a hamlet of which I shared my boon massacred at their hands - I cursed them. Cursed them all. Fel, foul, fetid creatures that they were. Cursed them to a life evermore, their greatest wish answered. It is here that they bay and frolic among the reeds of bone, the flowers of their gutted brethren. This land wherein they and their descendants shall enjoy their hubris in its purest form.
Her insides spun, and Catherine realized what fear led Voldemort to his flight from death. He had come here, witnessed the hell that awaited him, and the very sight of it had left him broken.
"Why?"
They wished to become gods with my death, the slaughter of the unborn, the rape and torture of simplefolk. I gave them that and more.
"Was it worth it?" she asked, looking over the waste of blood and dust that surrounded her with daunting horror. To see what, if she had not come here - if she fails - what shall become of her. An eternity in the wastes. Meandering aimlessly until her mind is all but sludge, until nothing but bestial cries flit from a raw throat to echo alongside the chorus of thousands like her.
Catherine received no reply but the harrowed screams of men sundered by the unending fight. A Valhalla of their very own, fashioned from the desert that would become of their city.
-::-
The Nightmare was a disparate place, so alike Yharnam yet so different in its own way. Crooked buildings that put the Tower of Pisa to shame, and strange pillars in the distance that reached into the sky, breaching the horizon itself and carrying so far up that they could no longer be seen, no matter the lack of clouds. They were the very same pillars she had grown so familiar with in the Dream.
Perhaps all these places were somehow connected. Whatever reality the Great Ones inhabited drawn together like strings and pins across a wide, uncharted map that would leave one dizzy to even attempt to understand it.
The first place she had visited was the Cathedral, a giant of a thing stepping through its doors and warping the fabric of reality around it. Limbs sprung out from beneath its hood, appearing from nowhere or perhaps a slip in the air from which whatever possessed the hulking corpse poured forth. It must have been a corpse what with the stench that followed it, sickly sweet with something electric that danced overtop those vile notes.
But it bled, and thus, it died.
Within the Cathedral she happened across a sight that left her breathless, for she knew who it once was. A massive thing like that of the beast she'd fought on the bridge what felt like years ago. Antlers reached up from its brow and its body was wreathed in flame. It lay across the altar in repose, the faint of a martyr - and within its hand it held a pendant.
She had stood for a moment surveying what she knew to be Laurence, the First Vicar. The shape of his skull, now bearing flesh and fur and bright with the embers that burned beneath - was something she could not forget. But it was the magic that cloaked his bestial form she recognized first, identical to the macabre chunk of half-rotted bone the Church kept atop their altar.
He did not stir, even as she crept closer. Closer and closer still, until she snatched the pendant from his grasp and all but scurried away with it. A large thing with an eye - preserved - and held in the middle of it. Along its edges were protrusions of brass, shaped like the teeth of a key.
It would get her somewhere, that she was sure of. Yharnam loved her eccentricities, even her reflection, and a key the size of her fist emblazoned with a living eye was not the strangest thing she had seen.
So Catherine had stowed it away and carried on, leaving the torched Vicar behind her as she journeyed under a cavernous mass of stone. The tunnel led down until she found herself no longer in an approximation of the Cathedral ward - envisioned through the mind of a madman - but central Yharnam, where she had made her first burgeoning steps in this new world.
More hunters, and even townsfolk.
They'd set up barricades and traps, stationary guns that looked like ancient cameras, with accordioned leather along their sides and little wheels to ferry them about.
She'd walked through the torrent of gunfire, stepping idly around the plates of metal that littered the ground with strings attached to them that led to bouquets of explosives, clacking slightly and ready to fall at a moment's notice.
Misty bodies and swallowed screams were left behind her as she looked over what should be a yawning canyon, the entirety of Yharnam below, only to see a shallow creek barely a few feet down from where she stood. A creek which bore no trickling water, instead a winding stream of blood.
The ticks of Cainhurst puddled about the brook, swollen with excess, and her gaze followed the trail of blood to her right to see it leading into a serpentine hill. A cave, marked by a toppled carriage, and something in her found its attention captured.
A river of blood, the end of its travels...
Certainly she'd find some stones worthy of whetting her hammer and the sword within. Beasts the likes of which she'd never seen, an infant god… she'd a lot to expect, and a more tempered weapon would be a far sight better than one less so.
So she leapt down into the creek and carved her way through the massive ticks that bore the faces of men, the things hardly able to move let alone fight with their swollen bellies and fattened limbs. Catherine wove around the carriage, spattered in blood from head to toe, and cast a light into the mouth of the cave.
A miniature ball of magic hurtled forward and hung from the cave like a chandelier, revealing within a mound of rock ten feet tall which cut the entrance in half. A chokepoint, one of which she knew she should take seriously.
Invisible, her footsteps were silenced, even the shuffle of her leathers indiscernible through the haze of magic. Only the ripples left in the blood marked her presence as she poked her head around the corner to see a hunter staring at the light above, a clunky machine held in his right hand. She raised her wand, but right before she could aim it towards him he sensed something, leaping out of the way and letting loose a torrent of gunfire.
Christ, he had a bloody gatling gun strapped to his wrist.
Thinking quickly, Catherine jabbed her wand towards the ceiling and flicked it once, heavy spikes of earth lancing down from overhead and filling the space the man stood within. She heard as the whir of the gun slowed to a crawl, and the squelch and crack of bone and meat as the stalactite impaled the man.
She looked back around the corner to see him somehow still breathing, just barely judging by the frail twitching of his chest. One of the spikes had run him through from shoulder to groin before burrowing through the ground beneath him, trapping him there like some sort of twisted carousel animal.
Another spell knocked the gun from his hands, followed by an explosion - clearing out the spikes and peppering the wall with chunks of gore and stone. Catherine strolled through the entryway she had fashioned, the footing awkward as she ducked underneath the remains of the stalactites she had created. More beasts were to be found further in, one of them leaping out from the darkness with a scream.
Its chest opened like a flower before it could reach her, disappearing into a fine mist and not even touching the ground, already scattered across the cave. She danced her way through the rest, hammer spinning and wand flashing as she tore the beasts to pieces in the span of a minute.
Still, she could hear something, yet deeper into the cave. She cast another light, eyebrows raising when she spotted what may well be the very same beast she had fought at the bottom of Old Yharnam, its hide flayed and hanging down its sides in wet strips that glistened in the glow of her spell.
It seemed to recognize her as well, chuffing loudly and charging across the narrow space between them, kicking up waves of blood along the way. She nimbly dodged its stampede, smiling to herself when it collided with the opposite wall.
Ah, she noted, another step taking her just out of the way of its hurried swipe, claws whistling through the air. You're not even a challenge anymore.
Her entire body twisted as she leaned to the side, and were she not wearing a mask her hair would trail through the pool of red that swayed around her ankles. It took a single movement, her back parallel to the floor as she thrust one hand forward and jabbed her wand into the beast's belly. A flash, and its torso exploded, ropes of viscera spraying out its back and dragging the length of its shattered spine with it. Bits and pieces of the beast bounced off the ceiling, falling back to the ground with dull splashes as it collapsed beneath its own weight.
She surveyed the beast with pity, not to mention her past self for being overwhelmed by such a thing.
It had been so, so long, that now this wretched thing was but another pebble to be forgotten.
Magic ebbed from somewhere at the far wall, the silhouette of a dead hunter just scarcely visible beneath a shadowed crag. A corpse, and if she were to guess, one of a hunter who had traveled to this place on their own, and not been tossed into it after their unseemly death. Did they now roam the streets of this strange Yharnam? Trudging over the stones that rolled over themselves as if water left to boil, the houses upside down and beasts still roaming no matter the shine of the sun?
Calm footsteps took her to the corpse, blood splashing around her feet and the stench of copper in her nose, and Catherine noted the strange weapon left at its side. It looked as if a hammer made of meat and bone, the point of a claw - wide around as her forearm - curling past the handle like a guard. She reached down and picked it up, her arm shaking as she realized the weapon was... it felt as though it were alive.
This was no hammer. No blade. This was the limb of a Great One.
Her mind spun as she looked it over, a knotted mess of bone and sinew that seemed to pulse alongside her heartbeat. It felt…
It felt right.
She swung it, the hardest, widest chunk of gnarled bone smashing into the side of the cavern wall. It kicked up a whorl of rubble and dust, the impact absorbed entirely by the blackened muscle that lined the length of the hammer. Catherine swung it again, reaching out with her magic to touch at the life that still lingered within the thing. Something clicked, the claw unlatched from whatever held it, and the entire limb extended into a twin jointed arm, flailing and sloughing through the air at a speed she could just barely discern.
Her magic retracted, and so too did the claw, swinging back towards the rest of itself and curling back into place, the boulder sized knuckles shuffling and slotting back together until she held a hammer once more.
When she left the cave she abandoned her Kirkhammer to the messengers, instead carrying with her the arm of an Amygdala. The power that still lay curdled within the rotten flesh was unmistakable, same with the immaterial sheen that lay across it in lengths of taut wire, coiled tight and ready to spring to life if she so much as twitched. It fit in her hand far more comfortably than her old weapon ever did, the contours of the bone almost made for her grip.
Not to mention the lengths it could reach when uncoiled, tearing through the ticks that barred her way as she strode towards the bridge ahead and baked in the heat of the sun, sweat trickling down her spine. Another barricade had been fashioned atop the bridge, that same one she had crossed in an attempt to reach the Cathedral ward only to find her way back home through a fitful sleep.
She cut through the hunters guarding it like the first she had witnessed here mowing his way through beasts, the claw whipping through the air and carving them into thin chunks. Her new weapon almost sought out the warmth of nearby flesh, chasing after the blood it knew to pulse beneath it. A living blade, one she could conduct as if her own orchestra.
Out of curiosity, she followed the bridge towards what she realized - were the door not locked back in the real Yharnam - would be another entrance to Oedon Chapel. Or, perhaps it wasn't, her trek down to this realm's imitation of the city far shorter, yet somehow far longer than it should have been. She didn't know exactly, as the paths here seemed to wind, lead back unto themselves, or stop in a dead end that - once she'd turned around and taken a second glance - now stood open. No map could guide her here, no landmarks would stay long enough to remind her of the path she had already traveled. It was a maze eating itself and, at the same time, devouring the hapless beasts within.
And at the end of the bridge, past the open door and through a dimly lit corridor, only a single torch and the remnant shine of the sun bouncing out towards the far end, stood a man. He leaned against the wall ahead and gave off an almost lackadaisical aura, but he inclined his head towards her as she walked over to meet him, wand held tightly in her grasp - to greet what may be the only sane person in this Nightmare apart from herself.
His arms were crossed, and he wore leathers similar to her own. Not a jacket that ran down to his calves, but the lapels of it extended out towards his shoulders like wings, the entirety of his outfit ragged and fraying at the edges. Like the hood that covered his head, and when he lifted it to look at her she saw his eyes were covered as Gascoigne's once were, ragged strips of gauze pulled tight across his face, nor could she ignore the black goatee that sprung from his lips and chin. A distant relative, perhaps?
"Hello there," he drawled, and Catherine realized he was not morose, but very nearly bored by the world around him. She lowered her arm, and could feel as his gaze tracked the path of her wand until it was pointed at the floor. "A rare sight in a place like this, eh? A hunter with her sanity still about her."
"And you?"
"I'd say we're alike." His lips curled into a smirk. "More alike than you'd think."
"You came here, then? Of your own will?"
He tutted, shoulders raising slightly. "Yes and no. I've my own reasons to be here, sure as you've got your own. Though, unless you've an interest in nightmares, I'd turn back before it's too late."
"Who said I wasn't interested in them?"
That garnered a chuckle out of him, yellow teeth bared in a grin. "Seeking secrets, then? As if from Byrgenwerth itself. Let me warn you… some do not wish to allow those secrets to be uncovered. Keep your wits about you, and you may find your way."
Catherine nodded her head, leaning her new hammer against the wall and extending her hand. "I'm Catherine," she said, wondering if she'd made an ally in this place, at the very least a temporary one.
The man hesitated before reaching over and taking hers, shaking it once. "You can call me… Simon."