Chapter Sixty-Five | A Man, a Martyr
Simon, it seemed, was a man of few words. She'd spoken with him in the corridor a short while, an attempt to glean what she could from the man about the kaleidoscopic world she'd landed herself in.
Much like Gehrman, bar the vitriolic way in which that man always spoke, he'd directed her quite simply down the road. To follow the river of blood to its source and from there, uncover the secrets within.
She didn't tell him that she already knew those secrets. That she'd visited the tombs beneath Yharnam and uncovered the flight of the Great Ones, once living side by side with the Pthumerians until they all but disappeared, a few remaining - either abandoned or of the will to anchor themselves to earthly soil.
She didn't tell him that one of his Gods spoke to her in Her own grating tongue, and she spoke back much the same. That, now that Kos had told her of her circumstances, the scar upon her brow read as smooth as any written English, even such a clumsy approximation of Her speech. A talent that had not made itself known until the final confirmation that she was no simple human had been breathed across her soul.
Catherine told him nothing. Nothing but her name, and that she wished to unravel the Church in its entirety. Yet, she already had.
Destroyed the seat of their power. Killed their puppet leader. Lead the mourning God they kept trapped beneath their spires to the home whence She had come a century or more ago.
The Church had been stripped of its magnificence so thoroughly that were there any beggars or fiends to fill the void and scrabble for power, it would take them decades to reach a fraction of the heights their predecessor had soared to. Certainly clerics, apostles and such would make their bid, but it was doubtful that many of those who knew the true reason for the Church's existence still lived. Not with their fortress in ruins and even their most hidden places and brilliant devotees - an orphanage shielded by wards drawn in blood, filled with their most fat and noble - had been reduced to slavering beasts and no more than a mound of blood-soaked rubble.
All that this man fought for, journeyed to this hellish place to uncover, had already been burnt to cinders.
She didn't have the heart to tell him so.
Who knew how long he had been here? In a place detached from time and the earthly flow of life. Threaded between one heart beat and the next, the first still swollen with blood and the other yet to fall, waiting until his feet once more touched soil of a realm not made by the immaterial limbs of a creature beyond his and her comprehension.
That second heartbeat would never sound so long as he lingered in this place. Preserved, much like the Dream, pickled and jarred the same as those bulbous masses of heaving flesh Yharnamites were so fond of lining their shelves with.
Yet he could die. Had yet to, which spoke of his propensity for survival, to live however long he had in the Nightmare and come out of it sounding as though he'd found the entire experience wanting.
Heeding his advice - go out and kill a few beasts - Catherine took to the red river and began to follow it to its end. Towards the neighbouring mountains of Yharnam, their tops far too wicked and marked by man made structures that simply poked out of the rock face with no respect to gravity or the foundation on which they were built.
Within her grasp she held the sundered limb of a God riddled with the taint of its deathly magic. Its claw was quick, sharp beyond reckoning - the mottled bone which she used to crush the beasts just as dangerous - and the ease with which she slew the ticks and ponderous, tentacled giants that lumbered about the bloodied reflection of Yharnam surprised even her. She'd expected more from this place, and while the blood-drunk hunters that wailed their way through the rippled streets were a challenge unfamiliar to her, with their minds long gone that 'challenge' was barely so.
Magic in one hand and the twitching arm of an Amygdala in the other, she wondered if many things in this place could make her falter.
That didn't change the surety she felt that this was only a taste of what to expect, a feeling that grew as the blood splashed around her ankles and stung her nose with the deep stench of iron. Hideous, emaciated corpses - muscle bare and bodies flayed - crawled their way through the muck as she grew closer to the source. They fled on broken limbs, trapped beneath one another in roiling masses of heaving flesh, arms and heads poking out of the knotted mess and moaning pitifully as they tried to pry themselves from the embrace of their comrades.
Some cried out to her, reached for her only to dissolve into a thin mist, or to have the scrambling hand of another flayed shell drag them back into the pile.
The blood came from them. These bodies stacked against the mountainside of the wide, yet shallow river she found herself walking. Strange protrusions of Yharnam spires or homesteads jutted out of the ground along the rim of the river, and further ahead towards an opening in the cliff wall. From there she could hear the most wailing, and a large gate stood out in the middle of it all that she could simply walk around, ensconced in two short hills.
No castle for it to guard nor great bridge to look over. Simply a gate, marked by corpses, and standing crooked along a crimson river.
It was no surprise to see skinned men scrabbling at the gate, and she squinted past them to look over yet more bodies piled up high around the mouth of the cave. Enough that the blood that poured from their writhing bodies was fast enough to churn over her boots, to bubble and froth as it broke against the thin iron rails of the gate and then surge past them in a hissing stream.
The lot of it rankled at her senses, overloaded by the gleaming sun and the sharp smell of iron burning deep inside her throat. Her ears twitched at each and every feeble moan that eked out of the shuddering bodies, their skin unraveled and every fiber of muscle laid bare to the dire heat that shone down from above, leaving them to cook in the sun and mix their sweet stench of something uncomfortably close to a slab of fattened pork belly with that of the blood they drowned within.
Her steps took her towards the cave, keeping her distance from the skinned palms that reached out to her, the sinew across their knuckles twitching and bright white against the red cords beneath. The blood grew thicker, reaching up to her calves and leaving her sloshing through it with heavy boots, drops of it spraying across the walls of the cave as they changed to the familiar stonework of Yharnam. A narrow corridor lit by some invisible source, something magic ebbing and flowing in the wide room she could see ahead.
As soon as she stepped into the room, a cavernous chamber marked by false arcades each of which bearing a flickering torch, piles and piles of bodies stacked against the walls reaching far higher than she could ever hope to leap. They were pulverized, slashed and stabbed and laid out in pieces - each one twitching in its death throes or laying still beneath the heaving mass of indiscernible limbs that made the room into a living thing, as if the walls were reaching out to her - pulsing with an erratic heartbeat.
One corpse crawled towards her, empty eye sockets raised towards her splashing feet.
"Oh, help us. Please- help us," the man begged, his throat stripped and burbling as blood poured out from between his lips like a drowned man dragged from the sea, a foot pressed to his chest and forcing the currents from his brine-addled tongue. "An unsightly beast… a great terror looms."
"What terror?" she sniped, eyes casting through the room, seeing nothing but a door at the far end, the floor before it raised and a small staircase leading to the next level.
"Ludwig the Accursed is coming. Have mercy, o' Gods, have mercy upon us."
The man began to laugh, a low thing full of defeat and madness. His brows, naught but slick red, raised high as he began to claw at her feet. As he laughed his lips split into a grin, cheeks flayed and opened far too wide, all of his teeth revealed - cracked things embedded in his jaw or floating in the morass of blood that still swayed in his gullet.
Then she heard it. Heavy breaths, limbs snapping into place, and Catherine looked up just in time as a wild shriek tore throughout the room and a massive form fell from the ceiling, once shrouded in darkness and now cast in the torchlight. A painter's silhouette, edged in flickering neon.
It looked a man made equine, a hideous chimera of startling proportions swaddled in the white of the church. The fabric across its back was torn wide, only held together by threads, the bottom of its robes dripping with blood as it shuddered, head raised towards the sky as if in prayer. Its face was human, its eyes were human, stretched until the bones had sheared its flesh, a mass of mismatched teeth poking out of the left of its jaw and running up to its throat, a broken fence of white cradled together and terribly sharp.
Her breath stuttered as she noticed a growth running out of its throat; a gulping, quaking disc of flesh lined with lamprey's teeth. Limbs protruded from its body in every which way, two long, crooked arms supporting its weight until it whined with something akin to joy, standing on a knot of hooves and clawed feet - its legs bent and triple jointed, coiled springs of broken bone lined with matted fur.
The phantasm at her wrist warmed as she reached forward and lashed out with a mess of writhing limbs - the incandescent tentacles of Ebrietas whipping at the beasts hide.
All it did was take a single step back, head twisting until it was almost upside down as it studied her, the heavy stench of decay forced from its throat with every steaming breath.
It screamed in her face, spit and shining pus spraying in every direction. Her eyes widened and she uttered a curse as it lurched towards her, a maddened swipe of its arm nearly taking her head from her shoulders as she crouched beneath the swing. Her crouch shifted to a roll, pulling away to the side as the creature swiped with its other arm, body twisting comically as it turned its back to her and kicked out with its hooves.
One caught her in the chin, and it was only the shock of adrenaline at seeing the blood-caked bone that kept her from journeying to the Dream. A distant feeling of confusion settled through her as she felt herself rising, only to realize her head had been detached from her body and was now sailing through the air - before the magic of the Dream answered her call with a spray of viscera. Thick ropes of flesh launched out of her throat to attach to the stump of her neck, her head dragged back into place with a grating squelch and leaving her dizzy.
Choking on her own blood, Catherine did her best to jump away from the next kick, the feathers along her coat ruffling in the wind as a reeking leg just barely missed her, her nose wrinkling. Body working faster than her mind, her arm raised and she cast a spell, the red of a cutting curse sloughing through the limb and carrying forward, leaving a furrow in the far wall.
The beast screamed as it turned its head back to face her, the growth along its throat reaching forward as if an eel and opening wide. Glimmering white acid shot out of the lamprey throat with staggering force, a quick shield shimmering into place and shining bright as it held back the sudden torrent. The pool of blood hissed and sputtered as the acid landed on its surface, steam rising along the length of her shield and blocking her view.
Swearing, Catherine let the shield go and ran forward as soon as the spray finished, arm raised high to bring a heavy hammer blow down on the beast's neck. Bone met flesh and she heard something crack - heavy and low - as the impact shuddered down her arm.
Her ribs were next to break, as a hand lashed out of the smoke and crashed into her chest. Thrown backwards, Catherine sailed through the air, a trail of blood skimming out of her lips and hovering in her wake for a split second until gravity once more took hold.
She was drowning in it, the heady warmth of so much blood, the cloth of her mask slick against her face as she clawed her way back out of the muck, ripping it off and throwing it towards the only spot of dry land - the little platform towards the back of the room. It landed with a wet thud, and she readjusted the grip on her wand as she raised her head and surveyed the beast with wild eyes.
Catherine swallowed a mouthful of blood - a cornucopia of flavours swimming across her tongue - bitter and sweet and spicy and rich beyond belief. The blood of a thousand men distilled into one foul poison. Work it did, her ribs knitting back into place with the quiet crackling of a highway of osseous threads twining together.
A shriek, Catherine blinked, and the beast had disappeared. A shock made its way down the back of her neck and she just barely dodged out of the way as the thing came crashing down from above, leaping across the room in an instant and rebounding back off the ceiling to crush her.
Rubble fell down from above as Catherine bared her teeth in a snarl, letting her hammer unlatch and sprinting through the crimson tide and swinging her arm with furious intent. The scythe of a claw spun through the air, carving a long and bloodied line through the beast's flank and cutting something loose, the dull clatter of metal meeting stone echoing out of the blood as it fell.
Clumsily, the beast reached down and took up whatever had fallen, revealing a greatsword held within an intricate scabbard, the etchings along its surface slick with shining red. She raised her arm to swing again just as it unsheathed the sword with a deft flourish, the blade of which shone a bright teal, markings like seafoam rippling across its surface in a slow waltz, spotted with bright stars.
She stumbled at the sudden joy that echoed across its twisted face, yet more gnarled teeth revealed as it wore the mockery of a smile.
"Ah…" its voice - his voice - echoed across the room. The beast's shoulders straightened, and it no longer stood on rickety legs, a level of assurance embodied in the way it now held itself. "You were at my side all along… my true mentor." His smile grew. "My guiding moonlight."
How, was her only thought, unable to tear her eyes away as the beast suddenly reclaimed its mind. Ludwig, this thing was, once resplendent hunter of the Church. She had heard his name echoed by Gehrman when he attempted to rest, alongside that of Laurence. Willem. Begging, pleading for release from the nightmare he had consigned himself to.
What an interesting man he must be, to slink back from the clawing underbelly of beasthood.
"Ludwig?" she asked, hammer still hanging in the air, the claw swinging beneath it. "You got your wits about you?"
He did not answer, instead raising his sword up in front of him and staring into its immaterial surface, awash with lights and that softly shining cerulean beneath. The blade began to glow and her knees bent in response, watching warily as he raised it higher before bringing it down with a thunderous crash.
She was vaporized in an instant, whatever magic made up the blade carving through her like the flames of the sun, reappearing a few moments later in a cloud of mist and with every nerve in her body screaming at the sudden pain.
Catherine had never been turned into a cloud of burnt meat before. That was new.
Her blade all but danced as it answered to her magical call, swinging it about as if it were another extension of her - every movement crisp as it sloughed through flesh and bone, blood spraying from Ludwig's flank. He stumbled back, another burst from the phantasm catching hold of the torn strips of his flesh and yanking them back. The sound it made was terrible - satisfying - as leather was torn away to reveal the muscle underneath.
Another flayed beast to add to the room's collection.
A sword swipe nearly tore off her head once more, her spine cracking as she bent to the side and curled her wand towards Ludwig's open chest. The spark and flash of conjuration, and a spike had burrowed its way into his ribs, the end of it protruding from his body like a bolt in the throat of Frankenstein's monster.
His shriek all but tore through her, teeth chattering in her skull as she watched him flip his sword so the blade pointed towards the floor. Her entire body kicked into motion as he slammed it into the ground, a wave of blood cascading in every direction and the blinding glow of the blade's magic consecrating the ground around him. Pure white flames - tinged with blue - burst upward, and one of Catherine's legs was just barely caught in the blast as she leapt backwards.
It simply disappeared, leaving her with nothing but a singed stump in its place. Gritting her teeth, she took control of the blood around her, fist clenching as she fashioned it into a foot and threaded it into the flesh of her burnt leg. Her wand danced as she forced the blood to answer her whims, the pool rising into a colossal wave that peaked over Ludwig's back and cloaked all but his neck and head.
She drew her wand down in a sharp line, solidifying the rust tide and shackling him for a short time. Yet more blood ran across the length of her weapon, and with a single thought - borne of Yharnam's century of magic, once devoured by Catherine beneath the city that took her name - the blood that rippled across her eldritch arm burst into flame, startling white and immediately bringing sweat to her brow.
Ludwig struggled against the crystalline bonds that held him, bewilderment in his eyes - pupils still burst, still beastlike - as her weapon hissed through the air and carved through his throat. The blade hitched for a brief moment along the column of his spine before carrying through the other side, the blade crashing into the ground and throwing up heavy splashes of red just as his head fell, rolling along the mound of corpses he had left lined along the walls until it rested at its foot.
His body disappeared, nothing left but a glittering cast of hardened gore in the shape of it.
Catherine's own sagged with exhaustion and she kneeled in the muck, looking down at the disembodied head of Ludwig, the thing still nearly the size of her entire body, and frowned. It took her a moment to catch her breath, still burdened with the tension of the Dream's magic and the rush of fire in her veins that begged her to continue fighting, to leave this place and take up her blade against the hundreds of maddened hunters cavorting around the Nightmare.
Instead she panted, the fire gone from her blade and the claw latched back into place, holding herself up on it like a walking stick. "Now… why haven't you disappeared with the rest of yourself?" she wondered, asking the beast as if he would answer her.
And somehow, he did.
A sharp whinny tore from a throat with no lungs, whatever fel magic lingered in the blood carrying his voice across ragged lips. "Ah. Are you…? You, I fought you, didn't I?"
Startled, Catherine gaped for a few moments before nodding her head. His gaze met her own, a startling amount of perception held within it. "You did."
"I do hope it was a glorious battle, one unfit for this terrible nightmare I find myself in." His eyes shut harshly, as if he was attempting to blink away the view before him. All blood and shuddering corpses. "To be felled by a hunter, one so young, must speak highly of the Church's growth. My Hunters, all Spartan and brave, how they must shine in my absence."
He looked back to her, gaze shimmering with something untold. "Tell me Good Hunter, have you seen that thread of light? That… fleeting thing, just a hair - but so bright it was that I clung to it - steeped in the stench of blood and beasts. Long have I laboured in this nightmare, and yet… I never wanted to know what it really was. That light. I didn't want to know…"
"You're one of Her's, aren't you?" she interrupted, glancing over to study the blade that still shimmered softly, the smell of something sweet - something familiar - wafting off it.
Ludwig shook, somehow, and looked away. "She has ever been my Guiding Moonlight. Before my untimely death, and even here in this fallow place - forever at my side."
"I know Her. Intimately. Gehrman too," she lied, canting her head with curiosity. How would he reply, she wondered? "He lingers at Her side, the patron of Her Dream."
"Ah… what a strange fate that must be. Would he come to my side were he to know of my own? The forebear of my stalwart Hunters, I owe much to him." He whinnied again, beastial and full of grief. "Tell me, please, Good Hunter of the Church… answer me this. Are my Hunters the honorable men I'd hoped they would be? Do they fight for the sake of every man, woman, and child that calls our city their home?"
Pity struck her like a knife in the ribs, to see the animalistic remains of a man used by the Church and still so utterly blind with faith that he could not reconcile the Nightmare he was cursed with, and the pain his Church had wrought.
In a way he reminded her of Gascoigne. Not a faithful man, surely not in comparison to the zealotry with which Ludwig still spoke, but succumbed to the blood he did. Gehrman had changed in his death, seeing the true end of his faith, but… how many like him had been consigned to this place? Would she happen across Gascoigne, Djura, or one of the many others she had slain deeper into this Nightmare?
"Some are, and some are not. A good friend of mine was a noble man-" As much as one could be in Yharnam "-and fought for the sake of his children and wife. He helped me, a stranger in his city at the dawn of a long night."
Ludwig hummed deep in his throat, the strings of charred viscera that hung from it vibrating with the noise. "Good. That is all I can ask and… what you tell me brings relief to my weary bones. To know I did not suffer this curse for nothing, the denigration of a beast. Thank you kindly, dear Hunter." He no longer shirked his gaze, returning it to her own, hideous lips pulled back into another smile. "Now I may rest and, even in this darkest of nights, I see moonlight."
"May you find peace, Ludwig. Your watch has ended."
His eyes shuttered closed and with a heavy sigh, he breathed his last. The wind sucked through his throat and gusted across the nest of gore swept out across the bodies he had buried, fluttering those strands of blistered red like flowers in a spring breeze. He did not disappear, did not return to the Nightmare. Instead, with finality, he died a peaceful death.
Absolution.
With that, Catherine allowed the exhaustion to take her, raising her clawed fist and dragging one hooked finger across her throat. She stilled quietly as the blood streamed down her chest, so soaked in it that it did nothing to shift the colour nor pallor of her skin and leathers. Catherine had bathed in that ichor and now allowed her own to mingle with the river, let it get carried down to that cave at the other end of the Nightmare and feed the ticks that puttered along its length.
Her breath caught in her throat, wet and bubbling, and she collapsed next to Ludwig's corpse. Her vision grew hazy, frosting at the edges and losing all colour, until the magic of the Dream took her and ferried her to the waiting arms of Melodie.