Chapter Seventy-One | The Nightmare
"Why won't you just die, Tom?"
He hacked out a facsimile of a laugh, some twisted interpretation of it as he writhed beneath Catherine's grip, her fingers wrapped tight around his throat and his bottom half held together only by a thick coil of intestine.
"Where would the fun in that be? Don't you miss me?" He intoned gleefully, cowl torn off in their struggle and Maria watching from the wayside. "I miss being up in that head of yours. Oh, it was so cozy in there, with those frightening little thoughts you have floating about." Grinning, he spat at her, a thick glob of bloody phlegm sliding across her mask. "Tell me, Cat. Do you still dream of the astronomy tower? How tall it is, ooh, it gives me the shivers."
"I don't dream at all."
Tom threw his head back against the rotten planks. "The anger! Gods, I'd almost forgotten," he crowed. "It's been so long. So very, very long."
"Years, I imagine."
"Nigh a century, Cat. Twiddling my thumbs, waiting for you to catch up. When was the last I saw you, before hurtling through the dark? That wolf, wasn't it? Scraping at your insides. What sweet release that first death must have been, why, I thought it was my own."
"Enough, Catherine," Maria intoned. "We must be moving on."
"He won't die."
"Then leave him. The longer it takes for him to fade away, the more time we have to-"
"End it all?" Tom cackled. "End the Nightmare? That's what you're here for, isn't it? Why-"
He let out a croak as Catherine snapped his neck, pupils thinning for just a second before his body disappeared beneath her, taken by the wind.
She and Maria stood in the middle of the hamlet, atop one of the roofs of the many shacks. Rickety things that made the Burrow look sturdy, half-rotted and thick with seascum. As Catherine raised her head she looked out across the sea, drenched in fog and roiling gray.
It was impassable, an insurmountable wall of endless ocean that dared to swallow up the horizon and all with it, the toppled masts of ships rearing out of the water as though the heads of great serpents. Up they climbed, ever forward to the clouds above. Pillars they were, and she thought them the very same as those that flanked the misty shores of the Dream.
Perhaps these places were one and the same. One massive playground for creatures far beyond her ken to pick apart the things that made the world and then twist them to fit their own imagination, incomprehensible as it was.
Great beasts in the distance threw their limbs through the sea waves. Things that made her eyes itch and a cold shiver work its way down her spine. Gods, she knew, swimming through the infinite cosmos.
If she closed one eye she would not see the ocean but the stars, refulgent in their glory.
Catherine did not dare to look, instead drowning out that eldritch vision with the mortal gaze of the one she had been born wearing.
"Where to?"
"The caves."
And to the caves they went, crushing and slicing the beastmen that barred their way. Shamans of the hamlet that called lightning down upon them with the wave of a driftwood staff. Dogs, red gills pulsing along the column of their throats and the light of an angler dragging from their brow.
The further they got, the deeper of the sea became the hamlet's denizens. Heads packed full of eyes, slimy, unblinking things that twitched as they fell to the muddy ground.
That cold in her own eye, unending and so terribly frightful, throbbed to the beat of her heart. Catherine couldn't place it until she had whirled about, face to face with a hound that's mouth was full to the brim with the teeth of a great white, when a hole in the world opened up before her.
From it came a meteor burning with ice that crushed the beast from head to tail, leaving a bloody streak in its wake. Frigid steam trickled upwards from the stain, all that remained of the beast, and she was left - for a moment - picturing a scene from primary when her teacher had brought dry ice to class.
So startled was she that Catherine hardly heard Maria's query.
"What did you do to yourself?"
"Hmm?"
"I don't see-"
"An eye." Catherine adjusted the grip on her club. "I needed an eye, so I took one."
"How are you not dead?"
A frown settled over her face as she looked over the dimly lit caverns, only torchlight and the effervescent glow of strange mushrooms to guide their way. Just enough to not need a magelight, though it lent the caves a far more sinister air.
"What?"
"How are you not dead?" Maria repeated, clear confusion in her tone. "To take godflesh and not just hold it, but take it into yourself… hundreds died in the Research Hall attempting the same."
"Ah. I'm not human."
"You are a witch."
"Yes - let's just say that," Catherine muttered, getting back to her feet and brushing away a shimmering worm that had been crawling along her leg. A godly parasite, no doubt, with the way its white flesh seemed to glow from the inside out.
The caverns were littered with the tiny beasts, so many of them crawling along the stone that it looked as though the walls were moving and the cave floor was a living, breathing thing. Dripping crags and creeping things, screams in the dark and the overwhelming stench of rotten fish were all to be found down there.
Poking her head out over the nearby drop, Catherine squinted at the heaving floor far below. "What's below?"
"The maidens, if I recall correctly."
"Maidens."
"Yes. Children of Kos, in a manner of speaking. Kin to Her, and Kin to the sea."
'How do you feel about that?' Catherine asked, the God in the back of her head shivering at her question.
You have come all this way to slay my Child, was Her reply. To relieve him of his suffering. What ill will should I bear for one who would wish to undo the prison we cursed ourselves with?
'A mercy killing.'
Retribution, my dear.
"Broodmares?" She asked aloud, venturing a curious glance towards Maria, who shrugged.
"That, I do not know. Egg-bearers, perhaps. A clutch or some other manner of beastly breeding. I'm certain no new life can be made in this cold world, especially so near to the eye of the storm."
"Then down we go."
Through deeper, darker caverns. To the crowded rocks that lay huddled beneath ravines crowded with gnawing mussels and the steady pitter patter of cave water from above. Shells and broken things churned beneath their feet, cracking beneath heavy steps and spilling out yet more writhing sea-worms across the floor.
Catherine knew Tom was somewhere. Waiting. Watching. Somehow immaterial though no magic flowed through his veins.
They had all been turned to squibs, each and every horcrux destroyed and then those souls scattered across the length of Yharnam, through time and space. Simon seemed the tamest of them all. The youngest. The one least corrupted by the future bevy of dark magic that Voldemort had so happily bathed himself in.
He was not a kind man, certainly. No such thing existed in Yharnam. Perhaps he was the closest Tom had ever come to becoming a person like that, the grandest and most wise of them all, even in his blindness. Vengeful.
So they had all been forced back. The Dream's hold heavy, and in turn the Nightmare's ironclad.
She couldn't help but giggle at the thought that all he had done had been for naught, and that to reveal the existence of his horcruxes, his final rally against the cold dark, had failed? Catherine couldn't imagine the expression Voldemort would wear to hear of such a thing and then know, once and for all, that all he had done had been for nought.
Never before had she seen the man afraid. Angry, yes, that fury he wielded as if another limb had been with him since his earliest days. Always and forever would Voldemort bear that ire, his hatred for the world and the loneliness buried deep within. Maybe everything he did was because of anger, as opposed to fear. Maybe he was just that mad, and there had never been any real motive behind what he had done, instead only clever words and justifications for the avalanche of misery he had caught himself in.
Curiosity too.
In his escapades as Simon he had traveled to the source, signed up with the scholars of Byrgenwerth just so he may witness the beginning of the end and the source of his eternal damnation.
What could have become of such a man if he had turned his lack of scruples towards something better? A ruthless politician perhaps, sowing misery through pen and paper and never personally spilling the blood of those they distaste. Or maybe a teacher, if Dumbledore had been taken by a fit of pique and decided to chance leaving Tom Riddle around a bunch of impressionable young Hogwarts students? He would have certainly been an effective professor, Catherine imagined, though no less frightening.
Her club was a whirlwind no matter the torrent of her thoughts, and the lazed expression she wore - though covered by her mask - was no less severe no matter the blood she spilled as they trawled deeper into the cavern depths.
And maidens there were, much to her disgust.
Thin, sluglike women with flesh as white as egg, their serpentine bodies curled into shells, conches, or even holes in the wall. Shrieking things that were wet with slime and so piteously frail that she could dispatch them with a stomp of her foot.
Maria too looked ill at ease with their work, the shimmer of long forgotten horror all but glowing upon her gooseflecked skin, as if Catherine could reach out and grasp it.
No matter how deft they may be, the ichor of the beasts, mingled with excrement, made for slick footing. The two occasionally stumbled as they trudged over hills of rotten fish, piled against the cave walls. Slime for scales, the thin shine of bone, and a glassiness to their eyes that resembled the slavering gaze of a beast too close for comfort.
Maria began to sing, a windy whisper.
Let all mortals bid welcome
Great Kos, O' Kos, our trembling God;
O' brine and squalid sea she bless
Our yearning hearts, our broken lands
Of yonder ocean, O' Queen of Queens
O' scale and slime, the faithful 'tween
Ranks of we the endless tide
Trawl and muck through waters fine
Bless us God, O' Kos, O' Queen
Bless us dear, so we might see
Eyes to look on bounty high
Our ceaseless voice we sing and die
Her words were light and danced along the rocky walls, juxtaposed by the occasional squelch as she drove her blade into some shuddering creature beneath her feet. It met Catherine's ears as a dirge, the funeral call of a people.
"Did they sing that?"
"Yes. Even as we slaughtered them."
"And Kos? Her Child?"
Maria's arm hung in the air, her butchering stilled. She did not turn to Catherine, eyes still locked with the mass of gore beneath her. "She was near to death when we found Her. Weakened by the birthing. He was all but comatose, still unformed. A shapeless, faceless thing made of tooth and hair." Slowly, her gaze raised to meet Catherine's. "A living cancer. Packed with eyes. And it screamed, Gods, how it screamed."
"So you don't know what waits for us."
"No. No I do not."
"Maria… have you ever faced a living God?"
She shook her head.
"You need to be prepared. Even looking upon it can lead you to ruin."
"I have laid eyes on one before. Kos. She was anathema, and I feared my eyes would bleed had I looked at her for too long. I feared my very heart would stop."
"So you know."
"I looked, and I saw."
Catherine nodded her own assent as they wandered into the dark, the cave dripping overhead and the faint echo of distant screams bubbling beneath the water. She was ready for a tolling, the mark of the bell and Tom's announcement of his entrance into the waking world.
The man was weak, and somehow it frightened her.
To see the terror of her times, the one who had inflicted so much pain and suffering on an incalcuable number of people, laid completely to waste. The one who had lived inside her head, that broken facet of a dying man's soul forced to bare its ribs to the beating sun. Tom Riddle. Voldemort. Destroyed by the Nightmare.
He was nothing but a mad dog, now. Some rabid thing puttering around a swamp of blood and holding true to whatever doctrines the Church had instilled in his second life. Because he was a Church Hunter, no doubt about it. Beneath those beast-hides he wore a clergyman's shirt and trousers, the same kind one would find on Alfred - may he find no recompense in this Nightmare - or Gehrman. In fact, they were the exact same as Gehrman's, those ragged, blood-stained trousers identical to the ones the crippled man wore in the Dream.
The uniform of the Workshop.
So he had been beholden to the Church, began to spout their scripture as his own. And this… this unhallowed thing was all that remained of the once most fearsome figure in Magical Britain.
As the thought came to her, distantly, she heard the bell toll, club already working in her grip and trailing atop the pool the two of them waded through, leaving ripples in its wake. Her ears twitched, and she knew Maria's were doing the same.
Catherine intended to put Tom to rest the next time he showed. Tear him apart like she did the rest of his horcruxes. Not that he'd been there to witness such a thing, having already been taken the moment she left Iosefka's clinic and had her spine shredded.
God, that was a long time ago, she mused, gaze trailing across the stalactites overhead. Her thumb cracked quietly as she flexed it, wondering how long she'd spent in Yharnam. How long the last six months truly were, spread out across time and space. Must have been over a year, with all her time in the Dream and inbetween, lost to herself as much as the outside world.
A year spent almost entirely awake, every second burning behind her eyes with the fury of the blood in tow. It had aged her, made her more bitter - more kind, she hoped. In the face of it all, in the face of Albus and Sirius' distaste, Catherine prayed that the person that would next walk from the Dream would be one they could be proud of.
If not…
If not, she had nobody to blame but herself. To be better, or die trying. That was Catherine's greatest want.
Her lips curled into a scowl as Tom came flying out of the dark, one of the branching pathways mired in shadow. Not that she hadn't heard him, no magic to cloak his watery steps.
Wrist twitching, he shouted with manic joy as she directed him towards the far wall, smashing him against it without a flick of her wand, only her mind to contort the magic and twist it to her will. Maria watched in abject fascination as he hovered there, pressed face first against the rock with his entire body shuddering as he pushed against it. The stone crumbled beneath his arms, his legs, but it wasn't enough to pry him from the craggy wall.
"Why do you try, Tom?"
Giggling madly, his neck cricked as he tried to turn to face her, only the slight shine of his eye eking out from beneath the ragged fur hood he wore. "Try, try, try again. I'm always trying, aren't I?"
"I'll be happy to show you my memory of this, before I kill you for good."
"Ha! I was always doomed. Always. Look at me now," he spat through a bloodied grin, his teeth red from where he'd bitten his own lip, mashed his cheek against the stone until it tore. "All muddied up, aren't I? Ooh, I was always destined for this, girlie. And when the rest of me gets here, once they arrive in this Nightmare… I'll have my fun with him too."
"You won't."
"Won't I?" Tom cackled, his neck shuddering as he forced against her magic, muscles straining in sharp relief, straining against the thin flesh above. "Or will you find me? Find me down below, where the beasts are kept hidden. The worst of us, the worst of this lovely Dream."
She reached out, pressing two fingers against his neck, feeling as his pulse thrummed beneath them. "I'll kill you here."
His grin slackened as he felt her tugging at the few drops of magic that still remained within him. Tentative at first, fleeting, just a brush of the strings. Soon enough she sunk her feelers in, digging deep into his soul and taking hold of the shackles of the Nightmare that kept his tattered being knitted together. It was cold to the touch, a hideous amalgamation of all those he had devoured, driven mad in his little corner of hell.
Tom could still feast on their echoes and the blood within, some dormant blessing of the Doll lingering.
She tore him apart.
It began as a low growl, the animalistic whine of a cornered beast. Growing, growing into something more feral, something truly conscious of the death she wore on her shoulders as though the cloak of a kinder woman, an ill-disguised figure feigning warmth. Her magic burrowed deep, its roots stoking out every crevice in his armour and bending it wider so it may sink deeper yet.
Tom's screams were unworldly, and still Catherine could not find it in herself to pity such a man. Not even as he experienced the most unhallowed of pain, his entire being rent and twisted by her gnarled claws. A howl the likes of which no beast had ever made echoed into the caves, and if she listened she'd find that the half-rotted fishmen and other miasmic creatures that littered the caverns had gone silent.
Scream he did, until all that was left mashed against the wall was a shell of a man, yet somehow more whole than anything Tom had ever hoped to be. With withered lips open in rictus, flecked with red from his torn throat. Eyes wide, unseeing, streaked with a thousand forked crackles of bloody lightning.
Her fist opened and he slumped to the water below, bobbing in the murky filth.
A strange sound worked its way from Maria's throat, who looked at the carnage Catherine had wrought with a bug-eyed expression, all the blood gone from her face and her lips tinged a strange blue, even more grotesque than her usual, choked expression.
The noose had not done her any favours in death.
"He won't bother us anymore," Catherine uttered, offering Tom's corpse one final look of disdain before directing her attention towards the cavern path they had been following.
She could feel something further down the way, hidden in the dark. Something young, yet so terribly, terribly old. Something powerful.
"I am… glad we did not fight," came Maria's choked whisper eyes flicking back up to meet Catherine's. "I don't believe I would have stood a chance."
"You would have been fine. I mean… I can't die, so- eventually, you know." Her shoulders worked in an awkward shrug, not terribly comfortable about discussing murdering someone who wasn't quite an acquaintance, nor a friend. "But you would have been my greatest challenge yet, certainly."
"Truly?"
"I've hardly seen you break a sweat with us fighting these things. Even the giant, whatever that was, you just pirouetted over."
"Thank you then, truly, from one hunter to another."
"Don't sweat it," Catherine chuckled, standing on her toes to pat Maria on the shoulder. "C'mon, He should be up ahead. And…" her breath strained, jaw clenching. "Be safe. I don't-"
"I will fight Him. I must."
She searched Maria's eyes, frowning, and then nodded once. "I understand."
They continued on, and as they grew closer to the source of magic the maidens grew docile. Prostrated in prayer, backs bent and hands clenched above their bowed heads, they lined the caverns. Faces buried in silt and their naked bodies shimmering in the effervescent glow of tangled kelp and the few mushrooms that lined the walls, low prayers trickled from their barnacle-strewn lips. The same chant that Maria had made, strung through with a thick accent or whatever mutations they had undergone, the words choked and grating, rough as the roiling sea.
The maidens did not attack, so neither did they, wandering past a gaping hole in the earth that at second glance was a-
"Is there a fucking lift everywhere in this damnable city?" Catherine blared, throwing her hands up in disgust. "Everywhere I look, there's a fucking lift. Even here. Here. There's a lift."
"How else were they to find their way to Kos? Through the caverns?" Maria gestured back behind them. "Look how crude it is."
And it was. Catherine studied it as it lowered, swinging the lever into position. The chains were nearly pig iron, the body of the lift itself looked as though it had been summarily hewn from stone before shackled to the chains and roughly pushed into place. It tilted and creaked as it lowered, grinding against the open pit that was its bottom as it made home.
"I still think it's mad," she groused, shaking her head at the thing. "Absolutely mad."
They wandered back to the maidens, following them down the path. All of them were faced towards where she knew Kos' child to be, the winding cavern drudging deeper and deeper into the earth until…
"I know this beach," Catherine whispered as the cave opened up to reveal high reaching walls, craggy, wicked knots of stone that climbed up in a sheer face. Down those walls looked. Impassive, imposing, as if judging their worth. A palpable sense of dread clung to the air, and the low sobs of a grown man echoed along with it.
The moon hung low in the distance, cloudy tendrils wrapped around its face as though the knots of a tree. It shone gold, cutting inky swathes through the hundreds of ships masts that jutted out of a calm sea that stretched into the distance, ever on. Black as night those waves were, peaked with flecks of golden moonlight as it softly rolled forward, backward, and forward again.
Upon the beach, bowed over the broken rocks and heaps of stinking kelp lay Kos.
Catherine's mind shuddered as she looked over the corpse that now rested in her mind, curled against it and whispering words in her ear.
Little spines twined along Her back, laying flat against rent flesh that was marked with shimmering white scales. The flesh seemed to ripple, and occasionally a worm would poke its head out of a rotten hole in Her hide, tentacles swaying before its face, frond-like and curious, before retreating into the cold and dark. Catherine's tongue flicked out of her mouth and pulled back as though the worm, tasting the salt in the air.
That low sobbing grew louder and louder still, something heaving within the impossible corpse of Kos - look away, look away - and working its way forward. Steam broke the quiet air, drifting upwards as the flesh tore and something crawled from Her belly. On and on the sobbing went, wretched moans forced out of the throat of a dying man. A hand clutched at the edge of Kos' sordid flesh, with fingers thin, pocked with sores. Another, clawing, dragging lines and pulling scales up with them.
Slowly, the shape of a man became visible as it stumbled to its feet, his skin gray, white, marbled as though the stones and Kos' fish-like hide had been molded into one. Staggering, it dragged a length of gore behind it, chin raised as it looked towards the moon and fell silent.
My Boy. My Child.
Catherine's eyes burned, her shoulders shook as she tried to avoid every urge, every screaming nerve in her body that told her to look away, do not look upon the mighty. And glorious in the rot was He, that Orphan that crawled from Kos' belly and gazed upon the fel moon. He turned, and the both of them flinched to see Gehrman's visage, marred with teeth, a hundred - a thousand more - all littering His skeletal jaw.
His bones shifted and melted back together, running like waves across His sunken chest. Ribs twisted inward, belly empty, only a knotted mass of leathery tissue that pulsed with a phantom heartbeat. The Heartbeat of the Cosmos, Catherine knew. The same tune that Rom had danced to, that Ebrietas mourned, that she herself had witnessed in the stars and the trail of a comet as it screamed overhead.
And scream He did, a noise so frail, so earth shattering and full of grief that her ears bled, that Maria fell to her knees beside her and shrieked in chorus.
And then He leapt.
Catherine could hardly blink, hardly think, as the Godling soared overhead, a ribbon of gore in His wake that ended in a massive pulsing bludgeon. Yet more innards, packed and writhing, the placenta of the unborn and held to His arm by a long strip of viscera. A length of hardened flesh ran along the bottom of it, glinting softly in the moonlight. A scythe. Gehrman's scythe.
The first and last thing He had ever seen.
She barely avoided the swipe, a hurried spell launching Maria out of the way as she sobbed, clawing at her own face, weapon forgotten. "Maria!" Catherine roared, a fiery whip extending from her wand and lashing at the Orphan. "Maria!"
Still she wept, unaware of the battle taking place just a dozen feet away from her.
Already panting, Catherine jumped to the side as the Orphan brought His bludgeon down, churning up rocks and digging into the packed silt beneath, dust flying through the air. Her arm swept out, dashing the cloud away, and a furious shout escaped her as the Orphan's flail came screaming out of the fog, cutting her hand off at the wrist.
"Maria!" she screamed again, eyes wide as she tried to bat away a sudden flurry of attacks, barely able to keep her eyes on the massive lump of meat as it was thrown this way and that.
She blinked, and He disappeared.
Catherine barely had the time to grunt as she felt the weapon pass through her middle, latching onto the magic of the Dream and holding tight. Ribbons of red flesh tore from her distended belly, latching onto her fallen legs and dragging her back towards them. Her vision had already gone gray, gaze foggy as she tried desperately not to pass out from the sudden shock.
Distantly, Catherine could hear a pounding. Mashing. A heavy thud, thud, thud, that echoed in her ears and beat against her ribs. Blood poured from her mouth, one hand clumsily stuffing her innards back into her chest as her body closed back together.
She looked up to see Maria just barely holding onto the Orphan as He flailed, bucking against her, tears flying in an arc as she was tossed about.
"Let go!"
Wide eyes looked up as Catherine fired off a shot, Maria just barely avoiding the massive spike as it carved its way through the Orphan's chest and shot out the other side, spraying the rocky beach with silver blood. Clumsily, Maria took up her blade, scampering out of the way as his bludgeon impacted the beach next to her.
Silver whistled through the air, clanging dully as it crashed against the wicked scythe, sparks flying as they ground together. Catherine jumped to meet her, to back her up, when she found herself flying in the other direction. Dazed, she looked up and saw the night sky just before her head was buried in her own chest, pushing against her heart, her ribs, as she smashed into the wall of the cove.
Spine broken, Catherine choked on her own blood, willing the Dream to fix her, to fix me, damnit!
Slowly her head pushed itself back into place, bones righting, spine uncurling as her head was forced from her chest with a pop. Still dizzy, Catherine braced herself against the rock and looked up to see Maria's sword split into two, blades buried in her chest before she tore them out and lashing at the Orphan with her own fiery blood, strings of it curling through the air as though a whip.
Without thought she summoned her hand, her wand, from across the beach, slapping it against her stump wrist and clamping it there between her legs. Throwing her mask to the side, Catherine quaffed a blood vial, smashing it against the rocks at her feet before running off to meet Maria.
Her club rose to meet the Orphan's lazy swat, His face - so alike Gehrman's - twisting around to face her, chin brushing against sunken shoulder blades. He screamed at her as she took His legs out from under Him, a twitch of her lip tearing away the bloody tears that dripped down her cheeks, and a familiar cold rushing down her spine.
The sky opened up before her, Maria leaping away as a meteor burst through the fabric of reality and smashed into the Orphan's back, shooting up a cloud of rubble that hid Him from view.
Catherine twisted out of the way just as a ribbon of patchy flesh, almost translucent, curled out of the smoke and tore through the air where she had just been standing. A scream carried from the smog, broken and wretched, and the world around her exploded.
The two of them were thrown away, ears ringing, and Catherine glanced up to see the Orphan striding out of the smoke with great wings splayed out behind Him. All of a sudden He towered over them, flesh all but liquid as his form contorted and rippled like sea waves. Boils broke out across his arms, his chest, his legs, bursting only to leak steaming brine that dripped across the rocks.
Meeting him head on, Catherine's bones creaked as she held against his attack, Maria skirting in from the corner of her eye and roaring with shock as one of the wings - like the liquid flesh of a jellyfish - tossed her away.
Again he screamed, Catherine pushing through the pain to just unlatch the hook on her club and-
His weapon broke through the arm of an infant God as if it were paper, splintering the weapon and leaving her with nothing but a twisted haft, congealed silver marrow dripping from the shattered end. Desperate, she stabbed at Him with the thing, yet once more He disappeared from view, and Catherine turned to see Maria leap far overhead.
But the wings, "The wings!" Catherine howled as one came up to meet her, wrapping around Maria's ankle and throwing her to the ground.
A pained shout erupted from the woman's lips, a harrowed thing, as she was brought up once more only to have her face ground against the stones. Spellfire the likes of which Catherine had never wielded came bursting from her wand. A torrent of lights that shone against the walls of the cove like a thousand suns.
They did nothing.
The God, the God - the God, she wept, had made its plaything of Maria, tossing her about as a child would a ragdoll.
Bracing the broken bone against her chest like a spear, Catherine sprinted towards the Orphan, a wordless scream on her lips. It was like meeting a mountain, crashing into the raging sea. The remains of the Arm pushed through its flesh and out the other side, pulling an ear splitting shriek from the Orphan as its blood sprayed out of its chest.
Ducking beneath its swing, Catherine plunged her pointed hand into its belly, grabbing it by the spine and throwing it as far as she could, nearly a dozen feet of godflesh summarily tossed across the cove as it had thrown her but a moment before.
Apologies pouring from her lips, she scrabbled at a vial and jabbed it into Maria's thigh, rolling her body over to see a broken, bloodied face, jaw cloven in two and haggard breaths bubbling from her twisted throat. "C'mon, c'mon," Catherine stammered, pressing her hands to the hideous wounds and willing with all her might for her magic to fix her, damnit, please fix her.
A thousand memories rushed force from Albus' blood, and she held Maria's slick face and began to pour everything she could into the woman below her, hands shining as the magic began to work.
"Yes, yes, yes!" was her victorious shout, flesh knitting back together before her very eyes, blood pooling and drawing back into the open wounds, colour returning to her face, bone twisting back into place. "Just a bit more, c'mon, just a bit-"
She smelled, more than felt, as her chest was rent in two. The sting of iron as hands gripped at her spine and began to pry her apart, until the blood poured from her open chest onto Maria's shivering body. Catherine gritted her teeth as the Orphan dug His hands into her ribs, trying with all her might to put it back together, to hold on for just one more second so Maria could move.
"Get away," she hacked, Maria's cloudy eyes finally visible, no longer hidden beneath a knot of bloodied scrap. "Run from here. Hide. Don't fight Him."
The scowl that Maria wore was beautiful, a snarl ripping from her lips as she wormed her way out from under Catherine's body. "No."
"Maria, we can't- you can't- He's too strong. Don't die-" Catherine coughed out a mouthful of blood, reaching down and holding the Orphan's hand from where it'd broken through her belly, fingers together and pointed as her own. As a Hunter's, fishing for stone in the heart of some sordid beast. "I'll kill Him. Get away from here. I'll be back-"
Her throat boiled over, a river of blood streaming down her chin as Catherine held those twisted fingers, bending and breaking them in her grasp. Behind her the Orphan screamed, trying to draw His hand from her belly, but she held tight, drawing Him further forward. Clawed fingers worked their way between the bones of his arm, gripping, twisting, pulling it apart as Maria continued to crawl away from them.
A shadow opened up above Catherine, and her eyes flicked up to see the scythe - the blade - the guillotine dropping from overhead. Directly towards Maria.
"No!"
She ripped the Orphan's arm off with a fierce cry, forcing herself to her feet and batting away the bludgeon with His disembodied limb. The crack the two made as they collided was that of thunder, of crashing lightning as it lanced to the earth from an angry sky. Fury was written across the Orphan's features as He stumbled, the whip of viscera tying the scythe to his arm yanking it back away from Maria.
Catherine placed herself between the two of them, holding the gnarled arm of yet another infant Godling before her and pointing it at Him. "Go, Maria!"
"No!"
"Fucking go!"
"I won't-"
"I'm a witch! I have Kos' blood in my veins, you don't stand a chance!"
"No!"
Whipping the arm at the Orphan, Catherine leapt towards it and grabbed at the viscera - the umbilical cord - that still tied it to its weapon. Curling in the air, she snatched at its other arm and held onto it like a tree branch, climbing down the twisting length of it to yank the cord closer, to pull it to her mouth. She opened wide, teeth crunching into the ribbon of gore and tearing at it with every ounce of strength she could bear. Her teeth cracked as she gnawed at the rope, stomach lurching as she was thrown this way and that, the Orphan screaming as He tried to throw her off, batting at Catherine's back with His stump arm.
Yet she held, a burst of something sickly staining her lips as she broke through the knotted flesh and worked deeper, rotten pus pouring down her throat. Catherine's fangs worked against the ragged thing, gnawing, chewing, grating, until she heard it snap.
She let go in an instant, clawing at the rocks and snatching up the weapon as quickly as she could, throwing it over her back and away from the Orphan as she whirled to face Him. Spittle flew from His mouth, and down His throat she could see the night sky, burbling in His guts.
"Go!"
This time Maria inclined her head, kicking at the beach. Whipping at the Orphan's feet, Catherine's heart lurched as He made to step around her, beady black eyes locked onto Maria's retreating form. "No you do-"
Like a train He blasted through her, limbs flying every which way and her body all but melting beneath His stampede. In a far off sense, Catherine could see as her head rocketed through the air, blood streaming from her neck in thick ribbons. Detached, as she fought for consciousness, grappled with the Dream and begged it to keep her rooted.
Foggy, as Maria exploded into a shower of gore, the Orphan's elbow driving through her side and only the faintest gasp of shock eking out of her flattened ribs as, in an instant, she was reduced to a reddish paste, scattered against the cove wall.
Sinew snapped into place, ropes of gore drawing Catherine's body back together, and as she gazed upon the mass of blood and bone strewn through with familiar finery, her lungs flexed - and she howled her rage.
Oops.