Chapter Sixty-Eight | Ether
Ludwig's grave was still a haven of blood and misery when Catherine set foot on its crimson shores, the heaving masses of corpses that lined the wall now stilled, as if they knew their tormentor had passed on and they too could wander into the everafter.
It was linked to a prison, walls of hewn stone that were marred by a century's worth of maddened scratching. Shredded fingernails hung from the heavy bricks, bloodstains as old as Gehrman himself painted onto their surface, thick and moulding, like a crimson sap.
Muttering could be heard all about, hunters locked away behind heavy doors and a malevolence in the air that hung on her shoulders with a terrible weight. Simon had been there to meet her at the lantern, and to the prison he had accompanied her, offering gently spoken thoughts on the demise of the once famed Ludwig and the companionship of his bow-blade on her journey forward.
Catherine did not thank him, only inclining her head in recognition once she'd set eyes on the man. She did find his weapon curious, getting to see the strange thing in action. Odd, even for the warlike engineering she'd already witnessed and wielded over the last year, but efficient nonetheless.
A sword that, with a flick, could be cloven in twain and used to fling arrows as quick and vicious as any longbow. A mechanical marvel if anything, even compared to the whirling saws and explosive hammers the early hunters of the Nightmare preferred to wield.
Still, she did not turn her back to him, no matter her immortality. Trust was no easy thing to come by in Yharnam, and a fighter does not an easy companion make, two a penny as they are.
But when she tried to turn down a long corridor leading deeper into the prison he had grabbed her arm, nearly losing his own in the process as she whirled on him with bared teeth.
"Do not tread there," was his whisper, thick with gravel and unlike his normal, sibilant tone. "Not unless you must."
"What's down there?"
"Nothing good. Nothing you need know."
Her jaw had set stubbornly, brow pinched until Catherine let out a sudden breath and nodded. "Alright."
She'd already uncovered enough secrets of Yharnam and they had gotten her nothing but more questions and the stain of bloodthirst on her teeth.
Yet she had stumbled on a secret she never sought to find. That of Melodie.
Catherine's steps were easy and light as she prowled the prison with Simon at her side, the two working in companionable silence, him leading the way forward and explaining that this prison was nearly as far as he'd ever made it in the Nightmare.
But his words hardly met her ears, instead her true companions remained the hammer blow of adrenaline and the memories, pleasant ones, of her few weeks spent in the Dream learning Melodie of all the magic she could.
Not that that was all they'd done, no. She wanted to know her, and Melodie in turn wanted to know herself, the two of them puzzling out the mystery of what made her through quiet conversation and gentle touch. Catherine was almost afraid of her, in the way that one who'd only ever been taught to break could feel when presented with something they did not wish to shatter.
It was all so new. Exhilarating. A candle burning bright yet so very soft.
Catherine was content to be. To sit along the side of the stream and watch as it trickled by, letting it meander at its own pace as it slowly but surely carved out new paths along the rocky shores.
One day that stream would turn a river, glorious and capped with white crests that would ferry whatever it wished along its current. A day she would not see, but one she was happy to know would come.
It was with a quaint smile on her face that she rent a churchman in two, Simon chuckling at her side, as if he could feel the happiness billowing off her catlike form.
"Where are we headed?" she asked, swinging her hammer in a wide arc and crushing the chest of a corpse that refused to die, strapped to a wheelchair and spraying bullets from the contraption chained to his waist.
"To the Research Hall."
Her eyes tracked the prison walls, noting as they began to melt into something more refined, the stone twisting in mesmerizing patterns and - if she looked away - shifted upon returning her gaze. "Does it still exist in the real world?"
"That, I do not know. It's been many a year since I set foot in Yharnam. It was the last time I'd been, but… I imagine much has changed since."
"Where was it?"
"Behind the Great Cathedral." He gestured up, miming a spire. "Near the top of the clocktower, at its rear."
"Ah. Well, it's all gone now."
Simon grunted in confusion, cocking his head.
"I tore it all down."
"You…"
The man paused, his jaw working slowly, before he opened his mouth wide and roared with laughter. Simon's chest heaved as he bent over to catch his breath, one hand pressed to his thigh and the other groping blindly at the air.
"You destroyed it?" he rasped, looking up at her through his gauze blindfold. "All of it?"
"Aye."
His grin was vicious, and somehow frighteningly familiar, though Catherine could not place how.
"You've given me the greatest gift I could ever ask for, yet it's only now I've met you." Simon stuck out his hand, clasping her arm when Catherine did the same and shaking it firmly. "Thank you, for doing what I could not."
"Is that why you're here? Alive, and already stepping into this hell?"
Lips thinning into a line, Simon gave her a jerky nod, before they once more widened into his usual, easy going smile. A strange sight in a place where the walls bled and Yharnam jutted out of the mountainside as if remembered from a dying man's dream, swallowed up by the molten earth or peeking down at them from the clouds above, gravity having no hold over the familiar turrets.
"I intend to end this Nightmare."
"Exciting," she drawled, a shimmer of humour alighting at the back of her mind. Kos, watching through her eyes.
"You mock me?"
"No. I intend to do the same."
Adjusting his grip on his blade, Simon jerked his head towards the end of the corridor. "Fortuitous then, that we find one another in a river of blood."
As he spoke they stepped from the prison and into a small cathedral. Still quite grand, all in all, but it was marred by the array of sickbeds that stretched from one end of the room to the other. Two figures at the end of the hall whirled around at the sound of their footsteps, women of the Church, one clad in Choir white.
The Choir woman snapped her cane against the floor, the heavy clack of metal echoing out across the opulent hall.
"I think you may be the last," Catherine taunted, spreading her arms wide as she walked towards them, the claw of her hammer screeching as it was dragged across the stones. "Nothing remains of your Choir. Your Church. Leave, or die like the rest of them."
"Lies," the other woman growled, dressed in black and wielding a mighty blade, nearly as tall as Catherine and shining black.
Cocking her head, Catherine raised her wand, pointing it at the Choir woman. "Actually-"
A bright light, a shout of pain, and the sudden, wet crack of someone's skull exploding. It was like rain, the pieces pattering down across the cathedral as the white robed woman fell to the ground, strings cut. Her cane rolled across the floor and what looked like an eye spilled out of her limp hand, landing next to it.
"-I changed my mind," Catherine finished, her arm twitching as she aimed it at the now cowering figure, her eyes blown wide with fright.
"How? How did you-?"
"I've seen what you and your friends had gotten up to at the very top of the Church. Not this, mind you," she interrupted, gesturing at the walls around them. "But your Orphanage? That thing you kept locked up beneath it all? You make Hemwick look a pleasant place. At least they killed their victims quickly."
"Is it really gone?"
"Nothing left but a crater."
The woman slumped over, blade planted in the ground. She leaned against it, jaw working slowly and her gaze distant. "It's all… it's all gone, then."
"Yes."
She shuddered once before slipping a pistol from her sleeve, aiming it towards Catherine.
Her head popped, and Catherine sighed at the sight of yet more gore rocketing across a nearby altar, one that the two women had been guarding, their bodies now splayed out before it in mock prayer.
"You remind me of myself."
She glanced at Simon, the man leaning against one of the bedposts with crossed arms. "How?"
"I was prone to drama the same as you when I was younger."
"Was that an insult? How bad were you?"
"You've no idea."
A light chuckle slipped from Catherine. "I'm getting better about it."
"Are you?"
"At least I didn't pull them apart."
"I don't believe one would describe that as dramatic."
"What then?" Catherine asked, walking up to the altar to study it. "How would you describe it?"
Three scholars, all men, stood over a dessicated corpse - all sculpted of marble. The corpse itself bore a cloth over its face, hiding it from view, though the top of its head was cracked open much the same as the women behind her.
"I don't rightly know. Fitting, for a place such as this?"
Her gaze tilted up, following chains that were latched to the altar and drew up above it to dizzying heights, disappearing into shadow. "This is a lift, isn't it?"
"Yes. This is the furthest I've gotten in the Nightmare. I'm not a Dreamer like yourself, and find myself unable to wander into the most perilous haunts as you would."
"And up is…"
"The Research Hall. A terrible place, from what I can remember. At the top of it you'll find Lady Maria-"
"Maria?" Catherine shot, her head whipping about as she faced him. "Gehrman's Maria?"
"I believe she'd resent that."
"She's…"
Melodie.
In an instant her gut was swimming with all manner of horror, a creeping sense of nausea beginning to work its way up her throat.
Can I kill someone who wears her face?
"She's what?"
"She's… the twin of a very close friend."
"The Doll."
"You know her?"
"I've heard tales," Simon explained, striding up to the altar and planting his hands on top of it. He bent to the side, studying the swaddled marble corpse, one hand reaching over and rummaging around inside of its empty skull. "There's a keyhole here."
"I think I know what fits it."
Taking the strange key she had nicked beneath the burning corpse of Laurence, Catherine gently pushed Simon aside and thrust her hand into the sculpture's head.
It fit like a charm, locking into place and then turning of its own accord, a sudden grinding echoing out from beneath their feet and the chains that flanked the altar rattling as they began to move. Up they went, a magelight guiding their way towards the upper levels and wherever else the Nightmare led.
Perhaps there would be solid ground up above. Perhaps they would find themselves looking out over clouds that spilled blood from their billowing underbelly. Perhaps the stars would shine below their feet, for all she knew, nothing of the Nightmare was beholden to the laws of the lands where mortals tread.
Instead they were faced with a simple staircase, beyond which she could see a room that was far too large to bear the simple name of 'Hall.'
Simon's voice carried out from beside her. "This is where I must leave you."
"Why?"
"I do not wish to die. Not knowing that this is what waits for me."
"Yet you cannot come back?"
He laughed. "Those of the Nightmare cannot kill each other. Death does not hold them. Not forever. Not unless they're slain by one like us. Someone from beyond the veil, who still bears the warmth of the living. And, only if they have the mind remaining to wish for death."
"Sisyphus."
A pause. "Who?"
Catherine shook her head, glancing at Simon's confused expression from the corner of her eye. "Just an expression. It would be futile."
"Yes… I shall walk gladly into the embrace of death once I'm certain this prison will not become my grave."
Studying him, she tried to imagine his expression behind the bandages that covered his eyes. What would they look like? Did he wear a frown, hidden beneath ragged white? Was there a gleam beneath it all that begged for death as she had a short few weeks ago?
What are you? Catherine couldn't help but ask.
A hardened man, but a kind man, she thought. Not many of Yharnam would pull her from the fire, offer their help in the city - let alone this damnable hell. In the corridor he had stopped her, and she wondered what it was that he feared to instead encourage the death of a God, rather than whatever fel thing lay hidden at the bottom of those stairs.
If she pictured it she could hear the tinkling of a bell echoing off those prison walls. Maybe it was a hallucination, the ringing in her ears as her blood thundered and her heart drummed a steady beat - bathed in the red of those who dared to hinder her quest.
It wasn't even sporting anymore, these fights. Slaughter, the ease of which she danced through even the hardened of the Church no longer frightening to Catherine, but instead something that moved her. It made her want to be better, to lay down her arms at the end of this long journey and forget what it feels to have a man's blood splash across her face.
She hoped she'd forget one day.
"What are you thinking about?"
Catherine blinked, frowning at him from behind her mask. "Peace."
"Something we may all hope for. May you find it."
"May you as well."
Offering him a clipped wave, Catherine journeyed up the stairs to look upon the Research Hall, her gaze carrying up the length of a spiral staircase that reminded her much of Hogwarts with its wide, branching paths. It rose towards the top of the building - up, up to dizzying heights, the rafters shrouded in darkness and low, keening moans trickling out from among the many rooms and levels that lined its walls. Occasionally a shriek would echo across the heavy wood banisters, met after by the clanging of metal and the tell-tale squelch of something pounding against meat and bone.
Strange creatures - men and women - puddled about in a thin pool that stretched along the bottom of the staircase and surrounded a rigid pillar, five men across, that sat in the centre of the room and held it all together. Their heads were nowhere to be found, murmuring things wearing hospital rags stained in their own filth. Instead what could be found atop their necks were writhing blobs of flesh. A stretched, pus-soaked mass that burbled and sloshed as they pawed at the scum around their ankles.
What made her heart sting was the sight of more of those sluglike monsters she knew to have once been children. Small, gnawing things that squirmed curiously, sightless stalks atop their fleshy heads that swayed left and right, their vertical mouths widening to reveal a line of glittering teeth that stretched from forehead to navel.
"This is where it all started then," she murmured, looking it over with distaste, walking over to one of the creatures that she could hear speaking, a man by the sound of it and docile as she approached. "Can you speak?"
He hummed quietly, scratching at the bottom of the pool. Catherine scented at the air and recoiled, coughing once at the fumes she had inhaled. Poison.
No matter.
"Speak."
"Have you seen my eyes?"
"What?"
"Has someone, anyone, seen my eyes?" he continued, rolling onto his side and splashing around in the filthy water. "I'm afraid I've dropped them in a puddle. Everything is pale, now…"
She sighed as he trailed off, looking away from the man and wandering towards a closed door, a thin trail of blood warming the top of her lip. The poison would not kill her, but it would slow her, and for a second she considered lopping her own head off before deciding better of it. It wasn't as if she'd find any trouble with the patients. Not any substantial trouble, at least.
Catherine opened the door with a wave of her wand and looked into the room to see another patient, this one strapped to a chair, her arms and legs bound as if she was scheduled for execution and the gelatinous mass atop her shoulders bubbling quietly. She was not the only thing there, another patient, this one dead, bound to an operating table. Their shapeless skull was skewered through with scalpels, scissors, and all manner of tools, a pool of dried blood surrounding the bottom of the table.
"Is that you, my Lady?"
"I am not Maria."
Her shoulders fell. "Ah. No, you must be someone else. It's been so long since we've had a visitor. Are you with the Church?"
"I'm a Hunter."
"A Hunter, here? How strange. May you do a kindness for me, Madame Hunter? I need Brain Fluid. Murky, mushy Brain Fluid."
Gut churning, Catherine shook her head. "No."
"Please! I need it. Don't you hear it? That sticky sound, it's all that guides me. Without it I'll be sent back, please, you can have as much of my blood as you'd like."
The woman shouted as Catherine turned around and walked out of the room.
"You must, please! They whisper to me, I need it! I need it!" she screamed, rattling at her bindings. "Bring it to me! Bring to me my baptism!"
Ignoring her maddened shrieks Catherine carried on, walking past the staircase to another door she had spotted. Her hand twitched as one of the patients tried to claw at her leg, its chest bursting wide and scattering its innards across the floor, another nearby patient whooping and crawling over to the mess, a proboscis sliding out from beneath its head and slurping up the blood.
She killed that one too, a spell making quick work of the door and revealing-
"Ah."
The Garden.
Catherine looked to her left to see the heavy windows that had led her to Ebrietas, patients below tending the gardens - though she knew they had no mind about them. Just the memory of a corpse, working through the motions it had known so well in life. At the dais she spotted yet another bound patient, a solitary chair left at the foot of the wilting garden and a body slumped against it. But she could feel magic from it, even this far away, something raw.
Something like that bone she'd found beneath the Workshop.
She hopped down, landing on the stone with a rattle as her greaves clanged together. The patients looked up from their work, or would have if they'd had eyes in those fleshy blobs they called heads. Sightless, they stumbled in her direction, a low murmur flowing across the garden from their hidden lips.
One shrieked, brandishing a flower as if a weapon and stampeding up the stairs towards her. A swipe of the claw at the end of her hammer cut it in half before it had even come within ten feet of her, its torso sliding across the floor and its legs collapsing in place, strings cut. It continued to claw across the landing, trailing its insides behind it.
Another twist of the arm and it was silenced, the rest of the patients quickly falling beneath a hail of spellfire.
She brushed the heavy, bloodstained stalks out of the way as she pushed through the garden. The Lumenflowers swayed like jungle plants, and for a second Catherine imagined herself an explorer charting some faraway place, the sun beating down overhead and drowning her in its warmth.
It was cold, and she looked up to see the sun gone and instead a white moon shining above, not the terrible rust she had become so used to in Yharnam. The sky was clear, no buildings jutting from clouds or strange creatures flying overhead, but the sky, starless, swallowed up the world in an endless void.
The burgeoning shine of magic tickled at her mind as she approached the corpse, arms hanging off the rests but in one hand she could see it held something.
A quick spell fired a conjured spike through its head, and Catherine breathed a sigh of relief. The dead could still kill, and she wasn't interested in any manner of fright, the poison now burning at her lungs and leaving her arms heavy. A quick sip of the blood took the edge off that burn, and she kneeled to pry the corpse's fingers apart.
One cracked, then the next, locked in an eternal rigor mortis, and as she pulled away the last finger into her hand dropped an eye. She held her breath, waiting for the imminent rush of magic, yet nothing found her. Instead it was contained in the offal now lying in her palm, still fresh as if it had been plucked from someone's skull but a moment ago.
She rolled it over, studying the ripples on its surface.
It was imperfect, the same tell-tale signs of a phantasm contained within the pearlescent flesh as the one that warmed her wrist. At that thought she could feel the both of them pulse, the eye glowing from the inside for a brief moment and casting the shadow of whatever it contained, a slug-like mass with tentacles that wrapped around the eye like veins.
Cocking her head to the side, Catherine pondered the strange thing.
A parasite, Kos spoke. Byrgenwerth took the worms and pests that plague greater beings and made more of themselves.
"They did this to themselves?" Catherine wondered, remembering the insect scholars she had come across at the school, ferocious, chittering beasts. "That's not surprising."
It likes you.
And it did.
It felt as though the relic had a mind of its own, pulsing at her touch. It was a hum of contentedness conveyed solely through magic, echoing the feelings of the curious beast she had taken from Ebrietas' foyer.
"You'd like me to keep you, eh?"
Another hum, somehow warm and cold at the same time, a shiver running down her arm.
"I think I know where I can keep you. You'll find it nice up there."
Setting down her hammer, Catherine pried off her mask, dropping it on the ground next to her, alongside her glasses. Unflinchingly, she brought her clawed thumb up to her eye, all but blind and drifting off in the wrong direction.
She'd seen herself in a mirror recently, gaunt and bound with muscle. Her eye had turned gray, sparse with green flecks, fogged over and dilated whether light shone or not. It was useless to her, and… perhaps this would work.
Only a quiet grunt left her throat as she hooked her thumb into the socket and pried her eye out with one quick jerk of the wrist. It flew from its home with a wet pop, dropping across her cheek and rolling over the side of her face, leaving a streak in its wake.
Her fingers pinched the stem that held it, the sinew twanging dully as it was cut, and the eye she had been born with dropped to the ground like so much trash. Quickly, she took the stem and planted it against the base of the rippling one she'd found, and to her shock the eye grafted itself of its own accord, joy emanating from it as it pulled itself into her head in an instant, leaving her dizzy as the world came into focus.
Blinking and unsteady on her feet, Catherine sat down, shaking her head as she tried to take in the new sensations that blasted away in her mind like fireworks.
It did not look on the world as a mortal thing would, she noticed, closing one eye and taking it all in. The shadows were bright and the light dull, an oxymoronic tilt to the simple stonework that left her quizzical. It seemed cast in starlight, a glint to every edge and the darkness swift, a living thing that coursed and churned beneath her gaze. Slowly, she realized she was seeing colours not known to man, shades of which she could not describe, their alienness unsettling yet majestic in their presence. They glowed, a rainbow of a rainbow and glittering fiercely as she looked on a brand new world, all hazy shapes until she placed her glasses upon her nose and gasped.
"Beautiful," was her whisper as she looked up at the stars above. Now bright, coming out from hiding to dance lazily across the night sky. A meteor storm, endless and so terribly glorious in its intensity that she thought herself soaring alongside those flightful comets. The cold suffused her, mingling with the warmth that was cast across her arm and settling in her gut. A waltz of two opposing magics, both simply happy to exist, to be carried in her heart alongside one another.
The cosmos burned inside her, and for the very first time in her life Catherine looked at the world and saw.