The Messengers released her into madness.
Yharnam's architecture was already a nightmare. It built vertically, starting with the old city in the valley depths below and crawling up both sides of the cliffs, Central Yharnam in the west and Cathedral Ward in the east, but that had not been enough for the builders of this place and they'd piled city atop city, a ladder that rose up from the street below onto the top of a building, past a small clock tower, only to find fresh buildings built atop there. But the quiet little street had always been a bit of a haven, the lamp with its soft glow that none who was not attuned to the eldritch could even see but which beckoned her back to the Dream, her haven, and to the one who waited for her there.
She could have reasonably expected that this wouldn't necessarily be the case. The Blood Moon was out now, and with it all manner of monstrosities that had remained veiled until then. Yahar'gul was but one such place, twisted beyond all imagining by the death of its inhabitants and the necromancy of the Pthumerian bell-ringing maidens. The Messengers had brought her before, at her request, to places of chaos, danger, and unreality, to the far side of maddening dreams.
Never before had they brought her beneath claws.
Reflexes that she hadn't known she had—that she hadn't had but hours ago, before the Doll had touched her soul and given shape to the seething, echoing wills found in the blood of her prey, made of them something that served her—sent her hurtling out of the way so that the talons barely brushed against her hair. She wondered if it would grow back the next time she returned to the Dream, even as her body renewed itself of wounds and fatigue and her clothing shed off the filth and gore of the Hunt.
She pivoted, stepping back, a near-leap so fast that it reminded her of hunter legends she'd heard of Quickening, a hunter's art that made their steps literally invisible to the naked eye, as though they stepped from one spot to the next without needing to cover the space in between. Her pistol and saw came up in a defensive posture as she took in the threat and prepared to respond. The rushing blood in her veins was already crying out that this was fresh prey to take down, a beast.
And a beast it was, but not the sort of beast that she'd fought here in Central Yharnam before, not a towering exaggeration of a huntsman gone bad, or a wolflike beast that crept on all fours in a mix of man and animal. No, this was the type of smaller beast she'd encountered in Old Yharnam, feral yet almost timid, the kind of thing that the patients of the Ashen Blood plague had eventually become.
Patients, she thought scornfully. As if one could call something a "disease" or "plague" when it was nothing but an experiment gone out of control. It took no great leap of insight to see the hand of the so-called Healing Church there.
Tera had no idea what had brought this beast here, now. Had it somehow crawled up all the way from the valley below through some passage yet unknown to her? Djura had been certain that the beast patients were no threat to those above, and yet Djura was so ridden by his own guilt that she could never truly trust his words. A man who stopped seeing his victims as deserving their fate too easily tripped over the line to seeing naught but innocence instead. And the paleblood sky, too, changed everything.
The beast was not interested in Tera's self-searching and questions. It scented flesh and blood, and it leapt at her. Reflexively, she flicked her left hand out, her finger brushing the hair-trigger of the hunter's pistol. The sharp crack of powder exploding heralded the quicksilver bullet plunging into the beast's chest. Beasts could not be easily harmed by conventional weapons; it was the infusion of Tera's own blood in the bullet which lent it force that stunned and staggered the creature mid-leap. She stepped forward, drove her hand into the thing's torso, and ripped, savagely tearing out viscera in a shower of blood, innards caught on curled, stiffened fingers little different than the beast's claw for all they were sheathed in black kid-leather.
This is you, a voice seemed to whisper, not in her mind but in her blood, not in words but in images, in sensations. This is what lurks within you. The beast.
Claws rending through flesh.
Blood on the tongue.
Reason falling away, leaving naught but emotions, urges, sensations. Giving in to hunger, to rapacious yearning.
Tera dropped to her knees with the force of it, then lurched forward, palms slamming to the blood-slicked cobbles. She shuddered before it, arching her back as she let out a roaring snarl that ricocheted, echoing among the crazy-quilt buildings. Why this endless hunt? This pain, this suffering? To kill and kill and kill again things that she knew had once been human, to bear witness to tragedy after tragedy? Why not just give way? Wasn't it better to indulge what lay within her?
It was the scent of moonlight that pulled her free. The bloody red in the sky heralded madness for most, but...she was the Hunter, and the moon was her strength, her guide. It touched her here, beneath the paleblood sky, in a way that she'd only felt it before in the Dream, like an ocean of moonflower blossoms. And then, she saw a gentle face in porcelain, a hand delicately carved from wood, articulated in wire extend towards her, and Tera knew there was at least one who would shed tears for the beast she might have become.
She opened her eyes, not even realizing that she'd closed them, and pushed herself back to her feet. In the depths of her mind, she felt the shape etched there like a claw, all those sensations that beckoned to her distilled into a single image that somehow spoke what could not be expressed in words.
From where they were clustered around the base of the lamp, the cluster of Messengers looked at her with concern. Their strange, distorted faces, and the silly top hats she'd given them, made them look comical, but their emotion was real.
"I...I think I'm all right," she assured them, brushing fingertips against a tiny hand extended to her, and rose back to her feet.
And then she was very much not all right.
Not from the blood, or the beast, or anything that threatened to corrupt her. No, this was entirely because Tera was herself, her mind clear and unmarred. For the first time, she got the chance to really see her surroundings, and what she saw was the incense-lamp outside Gilbert's window broken and extinguished, and the iron grillwork that had covered the window gaping open. No, not just gaping, broken, the stubs that remained bent outwards, not in the way it would have been if it had been seized by titanic force and torn from its moorings, but rather in the way that marked that the force had come from within.
Their strange blood bought me time...I can even die human.
"Oh, Gilbert," she sighed aloud, looking down at the corpse of the friend she'd been forced to kill.