A/N: This story is similar to my previous fic, "Do the Gods Love Their Creations?" In fact, it takes place during and around the events of that story. As those who have read it know, "Do the Gods...?" is not as much a story as it is a series of vignettes from the point of view of Tera, the Hunter of that world, as she proceeds through the events of Bloodborne, with a focus on those sequences that build character, lore, or her developing romance with the Doll (not a spoiler; the genre and relationship are right there in the tags), while omitting sequences that are fine in a video game but really had little part to play in the story (nobody needed to read about her exploration of Central Pthumeru).

This story follows the same pattern, only focusing on events that center around a different ongoing theme and series of relationships. Technically, these scenes interlock with those in "Do the Gods...?" It is a complete...interquel, I think would be the word...but it's not a complete retelling of the story of Bloodborne. Which is probably good, because if you want to experience the events of Bloodborne in their totality, there's a really good video game you could play to see them!

With regard to interpretations of lore, the theories used in this fic are of course consistent with those set forth in the previous one. I won't be revisiting my Author's Note discussions there, though there are a couple of points that I may raise that are new to this story. Thus, yes, even the Author's Notes are treated as a sequel!

~X X X~

Someone, maybe several someones, had called her "the Byrgenwerth spider." The hunter Tera had found one such reference on a note left in the library below Oedon Chapel, a cosy little nook that belied what lay above and below in Yharnam. She'd found another scribbled on a page left on a couch here in Byrgenwerth, as if that member of the Choir she'd had to get past had been unable to repress her scholar's instincts, taking notes while she waited for intruders. The name fit; this was Byrgenwerth, after all, and while Rom resembled a different kind of creature rather than a true spider, her many children did seem spider-like and Tera could see where, if Rom sprouted legs from orifices that seemed meant to extrude them, she too would resemble an arachnid.

To Tera, though, she would always be the Vacuous Spider. Was Rom truly idiotic, she wondered, barely able to perceive what was happening around her? She had taken no notice of Tera plunging into her domain until Tera had struck the first blow, and even then there had been no strategy or thought to her response, merely projecting arcane energies at the hunter depending rigidly on how near or far the fight took Tera. Or was it that Rom's myriad of eyes were turned wholly on the depths of the abyssal cosmos that she sought, and the physical mundanity around her was of no interest, an atrophied sense worthless to the understanding of this ascended being?

For whatever reason, defeating her seemed like less of a hunt and more of an execution, cold and methodical rather than furious and violent. Blood rained down as Tera sagged in relief that it was done, a task accomplished rather than a victory won.

The metaphor bothered her, then. She'd had two purposes in coming to Byrgenwerth. On the one hand, the mysterious word "paleblood" still beckoned to her as it had ever since her awakening. Seek Paleblood to transcend the Hunt. Gilbert had not known of Paleblood, but he had pointed her towards the Healing Church, and the Church as it proved certainly were the masters of many kinds of strange and unusual blood. "Communion" seemed to lie at the heart of their strange religion, a religion that was so intertwined with medical practices that it sometimes appeared to her that it was no religion at all but rather some kind of alchemical research society dressed up in godly language. Old Yharnam and the Forbidden Woods alike had born the Church's mark, and the School of Mensis was certainly up to something foul. But the Church had seemingly become lost within its own story, even its vicar succumbed to beasthood, and most of what she'd seen of its members were Pthumerians belled like pets and dressed up in Holy Shawls like thuggish guards. But the Church had its roots in Byrgenwerth and so to Byrgenwerth she'd come, only to find one lone guardian standing over monstrosities and a madman.

On the other, the only hint she'd been left as to her greater task, her reason for being in the Dream, had been brought to her by the Messengers, to seek the source of the spreading scourge of beasts. Gehrman had said nothing of this, another reason to distrust the one who claimed to be her friend. And Byrgenwerth had been at the root of it all: the blood, the Church, the Hunters. Surely there would be some clue to be found here? But no, there she found merely a plundered library and tiny, ominous scraps, the dregs left behind by scholars long gone. Even Provost Willem, who had warned Laurence away from starting the Church, was lost in his own mind, as vacuous in his own way as Rom.

There had been nothing in Byrgenwerth to give her answers, only an empty shell, the broken dreams of its past and the ruins of whatever hopes it had once promised.

And then the lake. Plunging within it as if falling through the reflection of the moon to plunge not underwater but to land solidly beneath a brilliant white sky, the water flowing beneath her feet even as she stood upon it like a great glass mirror, as if she stood, somehow, within that reflected moon.

Great volumes of water serve as a bulwark guarding sleep. Where had she read that? Or was it one of those whispers that had crept into her mind, insights that flashed into being when the truth of the world was forced upon her, madness and monstrosities forcing her to see, to hear, to understand the eldritch Truth that lay just beneath the skin of the world, be that Truth as horrific as a monstrous spider whose skull was so full of eyes there was no room left for a mind to correlate all it saw…

…or as kind as a gentle, beautiful Doll who loved as tenderly and purely as one could imagine.

Don't think of her; she is not for you, Tera stifled the thought with another Truth. The Doll was made to love the Hunters; it was natural for her, as much a part of her purpose as to transform the echoing will of the blood that clung to Tera from her hunts and transform it, so that it did not fill her maddeningly and beckon her to the blood-drunkenness that had claimed Gascoigne and Henryk. There would be no easy madness for the dreaming one; the One that had marked Tera would not be done until she had fulfilled Her purpose, whatever that purpose might be.

What Tera felt, by contrast, had no greater purpose; it was that emotion wholly spawned within herself for her own perhaps selfish cause. A thing that if she were to force it upon the Doll would make her no better than those past hunters who had forced other forms of violence upon her, or than Gehrman who denigrated her as nothing but one more tool of the Workshop to use, no different than the storage box or the workbench. She had nothing left but to swallow it, let it stay an unspoken longing within her heart, and perhaps one day it would be nothing but a soft, sweet echo of a memory.

A tear glittered in her eye, a tear spent for the Doll as once the Doll had shed one for her, but as it slipped from Tera's vision there was a flicker of white caught within it, a moment's refraction, and the hunter spun to her side to find that she was not alone on the lake.

It was a woman. There was no sign of how she'd come to be there, no sound to mark her arrival, but she was there. Though the featureless expanse of the lakebed (surface?) offered no clues, Tera nonetheless got the impression of great height, that this woman towered a head or more above her like the Doll. She wore an incredibly elaborate dress in stark white, the white that had caught her eye, more pristine and bright than even the pale light and pale sky. The full skirt, the sleeves, even the ruff around her neck made Tera think of something more than even the most elaborate noble fashion; this spoke to her of ceremony. Perhaps, even a wedding gown.

As if pulled by instinct, she began to move towards the woman, one slow step at a time. She did not seem to have noticed Tera, or at least did not turn towards her or do something else to acknowledge her approach. Instead, she looked up at the sky, hands folded as if prayerfully in front of her, seeking the attention of some deity.

Then, she half-turned, and Tera saw what had been hidden. Her wrists were clamped together by a restraining shackle and, gruesomely, bright scarlet blood stood out against the belly and upper skirts of the bridal dress, speaking of some ghastly horror. Her face was long and thin, almost emaciated, and in a way that Tera had seen before, both on the streets of the Cathedral Ward and in the dream-like worlds of the labyrinths unlocked by the Holy Chalices. This woman was, almost certainly, a Pthumerian. Her clothing spoke of great majesty, but her shackled wrists, the blood, these called forth different images indeed.

Then came a baby's cry.

It did not emanate from her. No, it echoed down from the sky, cascading everywhere across the surface of the lake, a plaintive, haunting wail of a child desperately seeking succor. Even though her memory was a fragmented, mist-clouded thing, Tera had never associated herself with the idea of being maternal, but this wail reached within her, touched some hidden part of her soul and coiled against it with an utter sense of sorrow and loss and desperate need. An agony beyond human that brought tears to Tera's eyes.

Nightmarish rituals crave a newborn. Find one, and silence its harrowing cry.

Words scrawled on a scrap of paper left in a chapel in Yahar'gul.

But that cry had the opposite effect on the woman in white. Where it nearly broke Tera to hear, she could see something entirely different take shape on the Pthumerian's face. She lifted her head to the sky, as if drinking in the sound, and a fierce exultation broke across her inhuman features. This, this was what she had waited to hear.

And then, as if the child's cry was a sounding herald, it came. The moon, impossibly huge, bled, as if a titanic force was somehow pressing it downward, wounding it so that reddish-orange spilled out, a film staining the orb's pristine paleness as blood had stained the Pthumerian's dress, as if the sky was nought but an immense body that bled out across the moon, its color darkening, changing, taking on the appearance of a form that was drained dry.

Paleblood.

The word echoed in Tera's mind, a dull drumbeat in her thoughts that pulsed and shimmered.

The air was water, rushing over her, swallowing her up, even as the moon came down, down, down to thicken the lake in a rising tide.

Madmen toil surreptitiously in rituals to beckon the moon. Uncover their secrets.

The water beneath her feet seemed to rise, now, pushing her upwards as she was drawn to the moon, which fell with even greater speed, this sliver of reflection being swallowed up from both sides around her, and the blood-red drumbeat played across her vision, the fabric of reality unmade as two things that should never have come together nevertheless met and blended and swallowed the world entirely, made of it something new. Water and air and crimson light all came together as one, and Tera's lungs and her mind and her eyes were all filled and all of her senses dissolved into red, red, red.

Behold, a paleblood sky!