Oedon Chapel was cold and quiet, and Tera didn't like it. Its high, narrow windows prevented too much of the pale sky outside from piercing the chapel, leaving it to the interior lamps and candles to keep things visible. That wasn't new, but there was an eerie stillness to the place, punctuated only by soft sobs and whimpers. She hadn't been back here since her meeting with Eileen, and things had changed.
Not for the better.
The old lady was still sitting, her back ramrod-straight, in her chair. Her eyes were glassy, and she seemed as lost as ever in the visions of the past that had plagued her since nightfall. Tera didn't approach her; frankly, she didn't want to do anything that might force the woman to have to confront more of the horrors around her and thus make her mind retreat even further into delusion to protect itself from completely breaking down. The Chapel Dweller had shrunk in on himself, his spindly form quivering, as he moaned softly about how the town was doomed. The man had found hope for a moment, some hours ago, but as the flow of survivors petered out and the progressing night clawed away at the mental state of those already there, that hope was withering away, like it had only been a rotting fruit with a glossy skin hiding the corruption beneath.
Her heart ached for the poor man; made worse because she knew that she herself bore some responsibility for the madness. Yharnam had already been suffering; the degradation spreading as the night advanced and the terrible pressure of the Mensis ritual built up, but Tera had been the one to break the final hole in the dam when she'd killed Rom.
There was no other way, she told herself silently, but was that truly the case? Was there no better way than to tear down the bulwark separating worlds, to let the waking Yharnam be overwritten by the Nightmare? The door opened two ways, and had given her access to pursue Micolash and his mad, mind-dead followers, but was there another path she could have walked? She'd been able to step into the Lecture Building before then, venture into the frontier of the great Nightmare and see the castle towers in the distance. Had there been some route she could have traced, or were the two places permanently separated by some twist of dream-logic, some eldritch rule that made simple travel impossible?
She couldn't say, and there was no time for regrets. Her work was unfinished, still, somehow, so she could not stand still and weep.
And yet...
Missing.
Arianna wasn't there.
Her chair on the raised platform was empty.
She'd been sick before, fallen ill with the coming of the Blood Moon, but now she simply wasn't there. Tera turned back to the Dweller, to ask where the woman had gone, but there was no answer to be found there. The poor man was so caught up in his own lamentations that he wouldn't have noticed if she'd been dragged out by a beast. And honestly, the others might not, either. The old woman was lost in her own fantasies, and as for Adella, the nun...
Earlier that evening, Tera might have been worried that Adella would have harmed Arianna. She'd seemed oddly interested whenever Tera had talked with the prostitute, peeking around the pillar that sheltered her preferred spot in the Chapel. And the look on her face when Tera had taken Arianna's blood had been...unwholesome, to say the least. Which was to say nothing of the sickening truths that Tera had come to learn about the Healing Church throughout the night. While she'd never known Adella to do more than be a bit rude to the Dweller, the phrase "guilt by association" loomed large in Tera's thoughts.
But since Rom's death and the emergence of the paleblood moon, Adella had done nothing more than rock back and forth in place, clutching at her head while laughing softly yet wildly. The terrifying psychic pressure caused by the very essence of reality merging with the eldritch had been too much for the nun's fragile mind to bear, and like so many people in Yharnam, she'd snapped. Tera was faintly surprised that her madness hadn't driven her to metamorphosis, but for now it seemed content to remain in the mind alone.
What was certain, though, is that she hadn't harmed Arianna.
"Then where did she go?" Tera asked aloud. Her voice was soft, but it still seemed to echo among the statues of eerily cloaked and hooded figures. No answer came, though, not from the statues and not from the other three living residents, each of them lost in their own madness.
It bothered her. Arianna had been one of the few people she'd met with a sane, stable mind. Even after the Blood Moon, she'd still been herself, for all that she'd been physically ailing. That particular Yharnam madness seemed to touch and despoil every corner of the dreaming city, and those few things and people free of it were in Tera's mind priceless treasures, especially when she knew that she herself was not free of it.
After all, she loved a Doll and was bound in service to walk among dreams as a Hunter, even as her own memories of herself and her reasons to come to Yharnam had vanished into mist.
Perhaps it was that thought, that reminder of what she was that made her nostrils flare, that made a scent that had been threading its way through the heady aroma of the incense known in her consciousness. Doubtless it had been this which had been feeding into her unease, not merely Arianna's absence but all the ways in which blood could be part of the story. Fresh-spilled blood, not an hour gone.
She turned, letting her instincts and her acute senses, that touch of the beast, guide her where she would go. It was not, she was surprised, taking her towards either outside door of the chapel, nor even to the elevator chamber that led up to the Healing Church Workshop and the madness of the Choir. Rather, it came from the fourth exit, the cellar door that led to the chapel's basement library. There it was, the spill and splatter among the shadows.
The narrow confines of the library were not ideal for the great sword she'd inherited from Ludwig, so Tera left it sheathed and instead took her saw cleaver in hand, then flicked on the hand lantern that she wore at her belt and headed down into the curving staircase.
She'd run into enemies before in places like this. In Yahar'gul, there had been one of Mensis's vile kidnappers, a hunter in name only, lurking or perhaps cowering as his city went to madness beneath the Blood Moon. And in the crumbling castle in the Nightmare, she'd pursued Micolash up a winding spiral where strange masked automata waited with crossbow and flail. So even though she'd traveled this particular staircase before without incident Tera did not relax her guard as she crept down, her boots silent on the stone steps.
The stairs were empty, though, as was the library below. She did not need her lantern here, as the lamps still burned, illuminating books and worktables as they had hours past, before the sun had set and the world still seemed sane, even the Hunt only a dance of men and beasts. Yet one thing had changed; the bloodsmell was stronger here, unmasked, and she followed it quickly to the trapdoor and the iron-runged ladder that led below.
The lowest level of Oedon Chapel's basement was dark and dank, less for storage than some kind of drainage chamber for the rainwater that fell in the Cathedral Ward above and sluiced down through piping before falling away towards Old Yharnam and the river far beneath. It was here the bloodsmell led, and here that she found Arianna and her captor.
The woman of pleasure was seated, hunched over, sobbing soft whispers into her palms. There was blood speckling her dress, though the standing water in the room would have carried it away from the floor. But the thing that had brought her here, taken possession of her body for its own left even Tera, who had stood face to face with literal gods, and with the foulest things humanity could do, abominations that dwarfed cosmic blasphemies in their cruel vileness, stunned and bewildered.
It was tiny, she thought. It lay in the water, slug-like, its body and tail wriggling and curling. Its flesh was a bright pinkish-white, streaked with the fresh-spilled blood she had scented. Two tiny forelimbs groped blindly towards something, anything. It had a discernable head, despite its slug-like body, round like a human's, but with a single vertical slit like a mouth running the length of its front. The only other features were four cup-like pustules at the corners of the "face," like stalks to hold blind eyes that saw in images entirely different than what Tera could make sense of.
Slowly, Tera advanced, her feet making tiny splashes in the water. The wriggling pink thing turned as if to "look" at her with its sightless face, but the sound of her steps did nothing to rouse Arianna. Only when Tera gently laid a black-gloved hand on her shoulder did Arianna flinch and raise her face. Her complexion was ashen, her eyes wild.
"It can't be!" she wailed, not really seeing Tera. "This is a nightmare!"
Tera's mind reeled. She didn't want to accept the natural conclusions of what she was looking at. In its way, it was as awful as anything she had seen since awakening to this nightmare, a violation as horrific as any she'd seen in the Healing Church's research hall.
It was a child. Arianna's child, a child that had grown from conception to birth in a single night, a child that clearly was no human baby but something else. Its general shape matched that of the celestial children she had seen in the Upper Cathedral Ward and the maddening depths of Isz. She'd thought of them as transformed humans, made kin to the Great Ones and taking their first, mindless steps in the direction of enlightenment, but this, this was no human. This thing had slipped, slick with blood, from its mother's womb here in this dank cellar.
How? How had this thing come about? How had the red moon led to a "womb being blessed with child," as someone had scrawled at Byrgenwerth? Why Arianna? Why not the old lady? Or Adella the nun? Or Tera? Hunter she might be, but she was still a young woman. Was it because she was a hunter that she had escaped this fate? Not that everyone she'd met would even have considered it a dire fate. Annalise of Cainhurst would have called it a blessing, to conceive a child (a second child, the moonlight whispered) of blood...
...Child of Blood.
Tera remembered the bordeaux dress she'd found at Cainhurst, of the portraits of Cainhurst's pale-skinned, pale-haired nobility. It was, for all intents and purposes, the same dress Arianna wore, the courtesan clad in the exotic wear of nobility. And her blood...Tera had accepted that blood once, seen how different it was from that of the Blood Saints. Tainted. Forbidden.
The slaughter at Cainhurst had been thorough, but it had not been absolute. Maria had been from there, yet had passed beyond. The crow-clad madman from the chapel had partaken in the rite of Blood Rapture with the queen, once, even though without the summons to beckon through the cracks in reality to her, without the Messengers to step through the world of dreams, he had been denied Annalise's blood and gone mad. Why not another survivor, a young woman, perhaps even a child, of the noble bloodline gone to Yharnam and so not there to be broken beneath the wheels, beheaded by the executioner's scythes?
A bearer of the forbidden blood.
Both Oedon, and his inadvertent worshippers, surreptitiously seek the precious blood.
Tera had brought Arianna here, to Oedon Chapel, the place that bore the formless one's name and where his voice spoke loudest. A bearer of the forbidden blood of the Cainhurst line, a womb that was not tainted by the rituals and experiments of the Healing Church, or belonging to one who had been first claimed by Another (or so the moonlight whispered), but one blessed and ready. And when the bulwark between reality and dream fractured and the red moon hung low in the paleblood sky, so too could the voice be heard in the blood and that womb quickened with the child of a Great One.
Her fingers tightened on the haft of her cleaver, even took a step towards the thing that had been forced upon her friend. It seemed to sense her intent; the tiny growths shrank in on themselves, and the mouth opened slightly, enough for her to see a barbed needle within, a pathetic little defense for a helpless creature. She could expunge this violation from the world with a sweep of her blade and—
What am I thinking?
The force of the thought hit her like a revelation, actually sent her reeling back a step as it overcame her. What was she doing? What kind of madness was this?
She thought of the Third Cords she'd found, and of the horrors that had sprung from them. She thought of the Orphan of Kos, harvested unborn from its dead mother's womb and of the curse that had wrought upon the Hunters, until she had at last lain the pitiful soul to rest. She thought of the slaughter at Cainhurst, of how the Church had brought the forbidden blood to the Queen to reawaken her ancient bloodline, only to turn on the castle and brutally expunge them once they'd taken what they wanted. They'd looked at something like what lay before her and saw only experimental materials. Were they here, the madmen of the Choir and Mensis would have surely fallen upon the terrifyingly fragile infant and torn it to bits, with bare hands if need be, ripping free the organ of transformation by which it might, perhaps, grow to Greatness.
"No," she whispered aloud. "No, I will not do this."
Every Great One loses its child.
Perhaps that was only a metaphor, a phrase that spoke of the arcane difficulty of conception and for the infinite fragility of birth. Perhaps it was a literal truth, that this child was doomed, its body incapable of ever growing to take its place by its father's side.
But not tonight. The red moon's madness would not touch her. Whatever awfulness had brought this inhuman child into the world, it was nothing but an infant. And from what Tera had seen thus far in Yharnam, the eldritch beings that brushed against what she thought of as "reality" were, for all their alienness, no worse and in many cases considerably better people than the humans they interacted with.
She might have had something...pointed...to express to Oedon if she could somehow come face-to-face with something that had no form, but she would not murder this child for the crime of existing.
"I'm sorry," she told Arianna. She gave her shoulder a light squeeze, knowing there was little else she could do. The madness of the Hunt left no space for compassion, no way to bring the woman and the child to care. All she could do now was to try to bring the Hunt to a close, to end the ritual that had not died with Micolash. Then, these two could find whatever fate awaited them beneath the new dawn.
~X X X~
The Hunter's footsteps faded. She'd gone out through the far door, rather than the way she'd come, taking the path down towards the gate that led to the Tomb of Oedon. Arianna could hear the soft splashes, then the near-silent steps of boots on the flagstones. The scent of moonlight trailed after her, lingering in Arianna's nostrils for long minutes, lying to her with hope that Tera had not truly gone.
Had not abandoned her.
Had not left her with this thing that had taken root within her body, swelled and grown and crawled forth from her in blood and in pain. She could feel it; there was a link there as it looked to her for strength, for shelter, a tie as strong and deep as the physical cord that bound a mother to a developing infant for all that it was unseen.
Laughter, mad and wild slipped from her lips. No one was coming. No one was going to free her from this fleshy shackle that had been forced upon her. From this thing that had taken her, used her to give itself life, a hideous invasion that had taken shape within her, without her will or consent. This abomination of flesh, taken root in her very blood, then issuing from her body to wriggle and writhe with unholy glee.
And she was damned to it.
No one was coming.
No one except...
She slid from the chair. Arianna was weak, so weak. The birthing had taken much of her strength, the conception and unnatural growth leaving her sick and wasted even before the final, bloody trauma. It would take time to recover, if she ever could. But she managed to get down onto her knees, the cold water seeping through her dress, dampening her lower legs.
The thing twitched one of its forelimbs in her direction, batting at the air.
No one was coming.
No one would help her.
No one but herself.
Arianna's hands twisted into claws, fingers tensed. She could sense how weak the thing was. Easy it seize it, dash the life out of its tiny body against the stone and set herself free of this violation. Its head twitched back, eye-like stalks shrinking up against the skull as she reached for it. Could it see her gestures, or the wild rage in her face? Or could it, too, somehow sense what she felt, the horror, the fury, the sheer, sick helplessness of it all? Her hands closed on it, tightened.
Then stopped.
It twitched, soft, unready flesh pulsing beneath her hands. She'd sensed it when Tera had looked at it in anger before, that reflexive preparation to defend itself, as negligible and pathetic as such a defense would have been. But it made no such move now; maybe it couldn't, or maybe the revulsion that gripped Arianna at everything that had been done to her poured into it, drowning its infant will beneath the tide of that emotion. Her hands vibrated with the sheer force of warring emotion, and she lifted the tiny form from the water.
And clutched it to her breast, hunching herself over it as the sobs began to come.
She couldn't make herself do it. Not to a child. Not to her child. Not even when that child was a monstrosity, its conception unwilling and its birth a nightmare. It hadn't asked for any of this. It hadn't tried to harm her, to use her.
She held the infant close, one arm around its body, the other cupping the back of its head, her cheek against its, and together they wept.