Chapter Sixty-Nine | Mine Sister, of Blood and Flesh
Hemwick. The Orphanage.
Neither could compare to the sullen, shadowy bloodbath that was the Research Hall.
Misery was around every corner. Things that were once man but now no longer screeched and shuddered as they trudged down the halls, bathed in the viscera of their bedmates and screaming wordlessly at the barest flicker of light. Their skulls were mash, viscous masses of bubbling pus that gleamed in the dancing glow of a candle, spilling like molasses as they crashed to the ground.
Some were tall, lumbering beasts, their writhing heads scraping the ceiling and bare feet leaving a trail of blood in their wake. One had crushed her with an intravenous pole, the wheels stuck between her broken ribs and Catherine fully aware as she was pounded into jelly. It had caught her unawares, blending in with the deepest of shadows, so black were they that even her unhallowed eye could spy no crumb of detail nor jerky footstep.
She now saw the world through a macabre lens. A beautiful lens. Even the blood that fell glittered so bright as to be a cosmos of itself, a world within a world that was trapped inside a steaming pool that shone like starlight. The taint of fel-magic could be seen, not simply felt. It billowed off the beasts in immaterial waves, lingering on their flesh as a visible miasma.
Catherine could watch as it worked through their veins with every beat of the heart. Could see the twisted nothingness that made up the floor she walked upon, the walls that breathed with their own incomprehensible life.
It was fire. A burning effigy contained in all things, be they living, dead, or a construct shackled within a false world. It was the drumming pulse of the universe contained in a mountain that was not real, no matter the fact that she could touch it and feel the rough grains spill across her callused palms, smell the grit and bitter low of shale. It was a galaxy, writhing and shuddering inside the ribs of a dead man - a dead man borne within the mind of a god who had not yet realized it had been butchered a century ago.
Through it all the eye she had stolen hummed in plain delight. Joyous to now find a home cozy and warm, one that wished to see as it did. One that wished to see at all.
How strange it was for her to shutter that eye closed and then view from the lens of the mundane, missing the colours and waves that tore across the air in mesmerizing patterns.
Catherine wondered if she had made a mistake upon taking it, to see as the Gods do with her mortal mind. But she was born for it, fashioned from the age of one to have a body built for the cascade of fireworks that now fired across that highway of sinew and synapse sheltered within a prison of bone.
She did not wish to be a God, would not take it even if the Nightmare was the only place she'd ever know, but now that she saw - she understood.
How easy it would be to become distant. To forget the whims she herself still held, the burgeoning love that burned quietly in her chest. She could watch the stars for a hundred years and never grow bored, drifting endlessly in a great, cold dark, if only for the perfection she would witness in that vast nothingness.
But her heart still beat steady, still pumped blood through swollen veins. Within that was humanity, tried and true, found in the sweat on her brow and the grit of her teeth. Through song, dance, the grind of flesh and pounding of some furious, prehistoric rhythm written in her soul. Now she understood how she danced between the lines. To be so painfully human, and find in that her own lacking.
It is frightening, no? To suddenly see, when one has only ever known the dark.
"It is," she replied, foot curling under the ankle of a patient and taking their legs out from under them, her hammer quickly caving in their chest as they crashed to the ground. "But… it's beautiful, isn't it? I don't feel any less human. I feel more."
A pang of worry tripped her heartstrings, and Catherine wondered if she'd already teetered over the edge.
It takes more than that to become a god, my Child.
"Ritual?"
In a fashion.
"Have I undertaken it already, without knowing?"
No, Kos spoke softly. You have not. Nor shall I force you to become one of mine own people. I shall warn you if you ever take those first steps to Godhood. You have naught to fear.
Truth.
At those words she felt a strange sense of thankfulness for Kos.
For all the misery She had wrought, she did not do it with malice. This Nightmare, yes. But Catherine? To her She was saviour of sorts, a prison of a different breed. One that did not wish her ill, for all the faults she could find in Kos' detachment. Kos saw, Kos heard, and Kos reached out across the ether to pry Catherine from the leering presence of the Moon.
And perhaps with Catherine journeying to the Nightmare with clear intention of relieving Kos' child from a prison of His own making, she had earned Her thanks.
Bodies were piled against the walls as she meandered through the clockwork tower. The Research Hall was a cavalcade of gears and surgery implements rammed every which way into twitching corpses strapped to operating tables. Jars packed to the brim with viscera and long-rotted phantasms torn from the belly of the mourning Ebrietas so that they may conduct their experiments.
She had learned that those odd, pale beasts with an array of tentacles beneath their mouths were victims of this surgery. Their skulls were cloven open and a phantasm wrapped around their brain until naught remained but a mindless, hovering drone that only wished to sup on the brains of passersby. Catherine had realized this once its head had split open at the back and a fleshy proboscis flung itself towards her, aiming to burrow into her ear and drag out whatever sweet juices it could find inside.
One had succeeded, and Melodie had found her stuttering uselessly in the Dream, mind foggy and a glaze behind her eyes thicker than tar. It had taken the woman shaking Catherine into sanity for her to blink away the haze and ask her how she'd gotten there, forgetting for a moment who was before her - a woman she could love if given the chance - stolen from her thoughts until a vial of blood had been poured down her throat.
It was with utmost viciousness that she killed the beast upon returning, prying it apart with her bare hands and thinking all the while that if given the chance, it would have stolen her entire life from her. Visions of Lockhart plagued her for a short while, images of a doddering man soaked in his own piss and scribbling useless on a sheet of parchment.
To forget herself. To forget all she had done. All she had lived, loved, and yearned for.
It was a hell unimaginable.
But after maneuvering through the grotesque halls, littered with gore and all manner of those wronged in the worst of ways by the Church, forced into a wicked form of undeath and indefinite servitude to Kos' malice, Catherine had found her way to the top.
The body of the man she had just slain lay crumpled at her side, her gaze tracking over the set of massive doors that dominated the wall a little over halfway up the tower. It had taken puzzling over the sets of gears and levers to figure out that the staircase that ran from top to bottom of the building could move, though she had spent a good portion of her time simply jamming her fingers into the wood and using it as a handhold. Far easier to climb the walls themselves than to solve whatever strange puzzle the engineers and architects had concocted.
Offering one final glance to the corpse before it was washed away in a cloud of dust, Catherine pushed wide the doors and stepped out to see a bridge.
It was awash in greenery, more Lumenflowers standing tall in the sudden sun. She knew if she walked back down the stairs, to that little door leading to the first Lumenflower garden she had ever laid eyes on, the sky would be black. Each doorway of this place led to another world, another time trapped in amber. This one, it seemed, held the first failures of the Church.
Much like the celestial child she had seen below, before Ebrietas, stood naked blue figures. They were pale, unlike the luminous emissary that had shone from the inside out, only the barest glimmer of starlight on their flesh. Atop their necks were the same, misshapen globes of wrinkled flesh that the patients below bore on their shoulders.
Half a dozen of them stood, hands raised in worship and palms facing a twisted knot of Lumenflowers that rose to form a tree, bowing over them with wide petals and reminiscent of something tropical. Catherine half expected them to reach up and pluck fruit from the foot-thick stems and offer it to her. They turned to her, and as they did the sky opened up above.
It was as if the bridge they stood upon had been cast out into space, soaring along a vast expanse of inky black, punctuated by the swirling glow of supernovas and sharp, cutting light of a distant sun. Their hands were still raised as meteors began to soar down from above, hurtling towards her and bleeding an incandescent teal.
Catherine's wrist twirled as she danced out of the way, raising her wand to redirect the meteor as it fell and crush one of the offending creatures. Its top half was all but erased, ground against the grass and staining it with thick chunks of grayish pulp. Still, they kept their hands raised, only one shuffling towards her. It lurched like a child, arms outstretched, and it did not stumble as she tore through its midsection with her claw. Phantasms poured from its belly to land in a gelatinous pile, bursting as it continued its march unflinchingly.
A strike to both knees toppled the creature, another furious smash reducing its head to a puddle. As it twitched in its death throes, the sky washed away, replaced once more by the burning Yharnam sun.
Pity leapt into Catherine's throat as the remaining beasts stumbled towards her, clumsily smashing at the earth or kicking blindly as she stepped out of the way. "A mercy killing," were her whispered words as she raised her wand and executed another, a cannonball blowing wide its chest and throwing it over the bridge railing.
Three remained.
One died quickly, falling to the whipping scythe at the end of her hammer, its head detached from its body. The next did not, managing to grab the length of bone and sinew as it flicked towards it, yanking Catherine off of her feet and punching her in the flank.
Blood burst from her open mouth, her ribs and hips shattered beneath the heavy blow. She let go of her weapon, rolling as soon as she hit the ground and wincing at the sound of grinding bone. A vial was already at her lips, cowl thrown back as she stepped away, a wordless accio tearing her weapon from the creature's hands. Her wand danced as the hammer flew towards her waiting grip, maneuvering the blade and dragging it through the creature's shoulder, waist, thigh, and cutting it in two.
She snatched the weapon out of the air and leapt, the claw clicking back into place and wind whipping at her mask as she soared through the air. Catherine brought it down with all her might on the last failure, the hammer smashing into its head, which bulged for a moment before it popped, showering her in glistening brain fluid. Her feet dragged against its torso, the pointed toes digging deep and offering her a hold as she brought the weapon down again, shattered bone poking out of its mangled shoulder like shrapnel.
Again, and it fell, taking her with it. Catherine braced herself, kicking off the massive corpse as it struck the ground and landing nimbly a few feet away from it.
She sighed as she looked them over, watching with trepidation until she found their corpses did not wash away in the wind, instead lying where they had fallen, motionless.
Peaceful.
A frown crept across her features as she thought she caught a glimpse of… something beyond the open door that had led her here. Squinting, she tried to make out the flicker of movement, the bright shine of magic visible for a fraction of a second before it disappeared.
"Odd."
It was hard to tell when her eyes were playing tricks on her when one was strung through with godly parasites, so she shrugged and turned around to face the next door, just as grand as the other and covered in scars. The wood had been chipped at, scratched, slashed, and there were punctures in its heavy surface stained in ancient blood.
The door opened with nary a whistle nor creak, gliding across the hardwood inside and revealing a wide open room. It had been a dining hall, or perhaps a proper church once upon a time, reminding her of the Great Hall with its wide tables and soft, candlelit expanse. The floor was scarred, planks missing here and there or otherwise marred with the clear cut of a very sharp sword. At the end of it all, lit by the dying rays of the sun as they cut through the intricate clockwork, stood a chair. Resting in its embrace was the slumped form of a woman, tall even from this distance and cloaked in fine clothing more befitting an English colonial general than even the proudest of Yharnamites, albeit stained with blood and held together by patchwork.
Maria.
Slowly, Catherine closed the distance between herself and the prone corpse, one she knew to not be as dead as it seemed. Her heels clicked softly against the hardwood, the echoes it made swallowed up in an instant and only just barely meeting her ears.
She kneeled before Maria's corpse and felt her heart seize. To see Melodie's face locked in repose, the cold chill of death washed over her features… it almost destroyed her on the spot.
Maria's face was choked in blue, and Catherine knew that were she to peel back the cravat that ran round her throat she would see the marks of a noose branded upon that sallow flesh. Hints of those marks peeked up behind her jaw, her ears, and she wondered what could have happened to have led this woman to the path of utmost self-destruction.
It wasn't as if Catherine herself was a stranger to such feelings, but to see the inevitable conclusion of them up close, on the face of one she very nearly loved - it turned her blood to ice.
She was so young. Hardly thirty, yet to go this far…
Still, she could feel anger insurmountable burning deep inside her. The rage of Kos made manifest. It lashed out around her, ragged lines of magic that whipped at the floorboards and cracked them beneath her knees, the very presence of it anathema.
Kos knew this woman, had felt and watched as she tore Her child from Her belly.
Choking on the tangible fury, Catherine's hand wandered without her knowing, reaching over to cup Maria's cheek, so lost in visions of an unmoving Melodie, never to laugh again, that she hardly noticed that Maria had shifted until it was too late. A startled gasp left her as a strong hand took her by the wrist, and Catherine blinked away tears as she looked into Maria's open eyes.
"A corpse should be left well enough alone," came her whisper, Catherine's wrist cracking as it was bent backwards. "Oh, I know well how the secrets beckon so sweetly. Only an honest death shall cure you now."
"I'm sorry."
Maria stilled at Catherine's gentle tone, before she pried her hand off and tossed it across the room. Still, Catherine did not move. Not even as a blade was run through her gut and dragged from hip to throat, spilling her insides across the floor. She held Maria's gaze, brow furrowed and an apology written on her lips.
Holding tight to the Dream, Catherine stumbled to her feet, hand outstretched. "Please, we need not fight."
She lost her hand, two clean stumps spurting blood in the place of them. "Maria. I know."
The blade found her throat, cutting her spine clean in two. She slumped over the blade, suspended like a puppet whilst eldritch magic kept her alive at her own behest. Much like the woman who had carved her open, with swollen lips and bloodshot eyes. "I know," Catherine gurgled, blood spilling across her chin.
Like a puppet, she maneuvered her arms through the strength of magic alone, prying off her mask so that Maria may look into her own eyes, and see the pain therein. "She brought me here. Kos."
With that, Maria took her head.
-::-
Many times she had returned to that darkened room, lit only by the creeping light of the setting sun, forever frozen as it hung just barely over the horizon.
"What ails you, hunter?" Maria had asked her upon her third return. "Don't you hear the hunt calling? What more do you wish to tease from the depths of mine Nightmare?"
"Peace," Catherine had answered.
She had been killed a hundred different ways. Her heart, crushed in the steely grasp of a woman nearly twice her height. Ribs cracked, plunged into her throat and ripped out the other side. Impaled. Thrown out the waiting doors and over the bridge that linked this place to the Research Hall.
Catherine had died. Not once had she fought.
Now she lay slumped against the door, Maria studying her curiously. Catherine gasped through her own blood, a hand pressed to her chest to stem the flow, her efforts useless as it soaked her leathers. "Maria."
"Hunter."
She laughed. A wet, hideous sound. The laugh of a woman dancing on the edge of death and insanity. "Catherine. Catherine is my name."
"Why?"
Blinking through the haze, she shrugged, the gesture weak. "I don't want to kill you."
"All who have come to mine grave have wished to slay me. To see what lays beyond these walls and uncover the final secret of the Church." She strode towards Catherine, prodding her with her blade. "Yet… you do not. I find it curious."
"Because I already know. But… you knew that, didn't you? You knew it the first time I walked in."
"Yet still you march ever forward to your death. Why?"
"I think you know."
Maria readjusted her grip, never sheathing her blade. "I'd like to hear it for myself."
"I can't…" she coughed, a choked laugh creeping from her lungs. "I can't find it in me to kill you. And- and Kos Herself is right up here," she added, tapping the side of her head. "Watching, listening, speaking. She's always there. She's why I came here. I didn't have to. Didn't need to. I already know what unhallowed thing waits for me at the end of it all. Her Child."
"Then why, when you know, would you ever dare to journey through such an awful dream?"
"Because this Nightmare is wrong. You know it's wrong, yet… you stay here in- in penance, for what you did. You killed yourself because of it. Took your own life, and… for what end? What do you hope to gain from this? Retribution?"
Maria's voice was thunderous, her countenance of the most hardened steel when she spoke. "Do not question what you do not understand."
"What I don't understand? I have a God living inside of my head, Maria. You share the same face as the woman I… the woman I'm growing to love. Did you know Gehrman turned you into a Doll? That he remade you and placed your doppelganger in the Dream?" Catherine laughed some more, wiping the blood from her chin, yet only serving to smear it across her cheek. "I'm not even from Yharnam. I'm not even from this dimension. Another world. I've seen the wrongs of the Church and Gods both, and I intend to right those wrongs."
"You don't understand!" Maria roared, stomping on Catherine's ankle and grinding it into a paste. She did not flinch, did not whimper, instead only holding her deadened stare, a wry smirk painted on her face.
"Then tell me." She gestured at herself, bloodied and crippled. "I'm not going anywhere. You have my full attention."
"We swept in there as beasts would soon sweep through our cities, tore our way into the Hamlet and cracked their skulls open so that we might find secrets within." Panting, Maria grit her teeth, spitting on the ground. "We needed them, Willem said. Gehrman agreed. The scholars, Byrgenwerth… I have spent every minute, dead or alive, repenting for what we did to those people. To Kos. To Her Child."
"They wanted more."
"They wanted everything! Gods, they said. Gods we shall become, if only we look hard enough. If only we try."
"And then you killed them."
"I- I didn't want to… I didn't… you don't know. You couldn't possibly know what it's like."
"Look into my eyes, Maria, and tell me I can't know."
"I should kill you. Again and again until you wander mindless through the poison we have wrought."
"Look, Maria."
Once more, she took her head.
-::-
Two days.
Two days of slaughter, of butchering, of walking into Maria's tomb with her hands raised and a gentle smile on her face, and Catherine did not falter in her steps.
"Must we keep doing this?"
Maria had fallen into silence after the first day, wearing an expression of quiet contempt and something haggard, something haunted deep beneath the pale silver of her eyes. She did not speak, did not stop in her effort to cut down Catherine before she could open her mouth. Venom fashioned of kindness, of respect, of an understanding that only she could share with a woman long-dead yet still suffering needlessly for her own peace of mind.
"Please, Maria. I just want to talk."
"You've spoken enough. May I go a thousand years more without the curse of listening to your voice."
"Maria."
"Enough. Gods, have I not repented?" the woman muttered, throwing away her weapon and advancing on Catherine with open arms. "Have I not kept my vigil?"
She wrapped her fingers around Catherine's throat, squeezing until she felt her trachea pop, collapsing beneath her steely grip. Catherine kept on smiling, raising one hand to cup the woman's cheek.
"Please," she choked, her voice distorted and thick with gravel. "She wants to speak with you."
Maria froze, blood trickling down from where her nails had dug into Catherine's flesh. "What?"
"Kos. She wishes to speak with you."
"No. You lie. This is… this is all the Nightmare, a hallucination of my own design."
"Don't you want to know what She wants to say?"
"No-" she gasped, jaw set stubbornly. "I don't-"
"She sees you. She sees your plight, and She forgives you."
It was not a lie.
The fury that at first had blazed with a fierceness only magnified by the thousand, thousand stars of the cosmos had now dwindled. In its place lay confusion, lay contempt, lay grief. Yet, most of all, there was forgiveness.
Kos had seen Maria's penance, a century's worth of damnation, of a tireless vigil kept over the remains of Her Child. In it, Catherine believed she had found closure. The final dot to mark the page, and new ink to write a story unshackled from the chains that had once fettered Her.
"Lies."
"I speak truth."
"Lies!"
"Truth."
Her grip tightened, choked breaths squeezed from Catherine's lungs. She felt her vision growing foggy, stars alighting at the shadowed edges of her gaze, until suddenly, it stopped.
She fell backwards, gasping, and slowly slipped a vial from her jacket, uncorking it and drinking greedily. Catherine shook her head as her throat knit back together, the muscles tying back into place and hardened sinew solidifying once more. Her gaze carried to Maria. The woman stood still, looking down at her open palms with… with something implacable, her brow knit and lips drawn into a tight, unmoving line.
"Lies," she whispered. "Do you see it? Do you see the blood that stains these hands? It's more than I can bear. Never can it be washed away."
"Must you bear it? Haven't you spent enough time trying to right those wrongs?" Catherine stumbled forward, taking Maria's hands and looking up into her solemn eyes. "I will right it. I will free Him of His grave, Kos' child and Yharnam's. The Curse will end. Is that not what you want?"
"I need more time, don't I? For what I've done… a year for every life. A century, for every life… a thousand years I could spend holding the line, and still I'd find my heart aching. His screams… they haunt me."
"Maria, look at me."
Slowly, as if a scolded child, Maria's gaze dragged away from her hands towards Catherine's own eyes. "You've fought enough."
"Never enough."
"You've fought. You've tried, all your life and death to seek recompense for what you'd done. Do you think the others have?"
"That doesn't mean I should not try."
"That's not what I'm saying. Look… I've met Willem. Do you know what became of him?"
She shook her head, lips still pursed.
"He turned himself into something vile, turned others into far worse. The Research Hall behind us… it was just the beginning. He packed his head full of eyes and is now nothing more than a drooling, rocking shell of a man. A husk, forever bound to watch the lake behind his vaunted university. Laurence is here in the Nightmare, a beast cloaked in flame. Ludwig has been laid to rest. And Gehrman? Your mentor?"
"What of him?"
"He has become an even worse monster. A man who allows others to take and plunder, for a false God to wage war on Her own blood if only so he can hold onto the scraps of life that still remain. He sold his soul, perhaps for penance, at first, but it's been twisted into something horrid. Yharnam suffers under his and this foul God's thumb, forever trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth, of beasthood and men drunk on a plague of their own making." She sighed, biting her lip. Maria's jaw clenched, gaze distant. "He is the reason Yharnam still suffers, and until Mergo and Kos' Child are also laid to rest, the cycle will continue. It will arise for a time, yes, once another civilization builds itself on top of the ashes of the Church, but that too will end. Yharnam's time has come, and it seems up to me to swing the blade, if only you'd allow me."
"And why do you believe yourself to be the one to carry out this task? Why not another?"
"Because it's what Kos wishes for, and I wish for the same. I have seen pain unimaginable, nightmares made by man, not Gods, and I have found them more hideous, more repugnant than even this Nightmare. Though Kos constructed this Nightmare, it was man who stoked the fire, who fed it and watched it burn. It seems fitting that we also be the ones to end it."
"What becomes of me?"
Her voice was so quiet that Catherine hardly heard her, ears twitching and her greaves clanking as she rolled onto her toes.
"You rest."
"Can I, though? Can I really, after all that I have done? When it was my hands that created this world you speak of?"
"We all must rest, someday. All you need do is accept that. Unless you wish to live, to make something of this Nightmare. Perhaps it can change, once He slumbers. Perhaps it can be something good, something free of pain and the rivers of blood that Yharnam has spilled in its own holy name. No more will it be tied to His suffering, yet… it will latch onto something else, one who holds as tight to the Nightmare as He has."
"Myself."
"Yes. You," Catherine beseeched Maria, slowly drawing her palms up to her face, to look down at them. "Do you know what I see? What I don't see?"
"Don't…"
"Blood. Your hands are free of stains, Maria. You do not bear this sin alone, this Nightmare is proof of that. Take that sin, do not let yourself suffer. Fight instead. Fight for what you know is good, fight for what you know is right. Fight for something better, so that these people, those still trapped here, may perhaps regain their minds some day. May cease their warring and find honest peace. And if not… carve out a peaceful corner of this Nightmare and offer safe harbour to those who cannot fight."
"Why, hunter?"
"Catherine."
Maria laughed, the sound so unlike, yet so alike Melodie's that Catherine grinned. It was hoarse, an unfamiliar noise, yet within it she could hear the same lust for life that Melodie herself held. A childlike joy, hidden behind years of heavily layered walls and prison bars.
"Tell me, Catherine. Why?"
"Because I won't kill you, not when you've already suffered enough. I know what it's like to wish for death, to hate yourself for the things you've done. I still feel it, here," she tapped her chest. "Deep inside me. It's quiet, but it's there. I'll spend the next century or more questioning the lives I have taken, whether the choices I made were correct, the people I hurt… whether it was all worth it. I see the person I could become in you, and I cry for that woman. I cry for her, because she's dealt with enough misery to fill a hundred lifetimes, and still holds onto it in comfort."
Catherine raised Maria's hands, hesitating, before placing a kiss on her knuckles. "I see you, and I understand."
"I… do not know what to say."
"You need not speak. Not now. All I hope is that you find joy in peace, be it alive or dead. Do what you wish, but do not slink back into the dark and hide away from all the good that still exists, even in this awful place."
"Catherine."
"Yes?"
Maria smiled. "Thank you."
"Think nothing of it."
This time, she did not take her head. Instead Maria brought Catherine into her arms and embraced her, wordless gratitude pouring from her lips.
Dormammu, I have come to bargain.