The silence at Iosefka's door bothered her.
She'd already been worried about the people of Central Yharnam, of the way so many doors had fallen silent after nightfall, but the Blood Moon was something else entirely. The example of Gilbert was a bitter example for Tera, of how the madness pervaded the city beneath the paleblood sky in all new ways.
But then, she'd been worried for a while about the clinic. It had nagged at the back of her mind for hours now, an unfinished thought that had never quite taken shape. Iosefka hadn't been willing to open up, had only passed a vial of her special blood formulation through the broken pane. But then, as twilight approached, she'd changed. She'd gone from concerned about her existing patients above all, to wanting to seek out and help those in the city. How? Why? What had turned?
And there was something about her voice, as well, something not quite right. Tera had been new to Yharnam, then, and her own amnesia made whatever life experience she'd carried with her into incomplete fragments. But the sensation had grown on her, gotten worse with every person she'd sent there. She'd directed Gascoigne's daughter to the clinic because she'd been afraid that she would never survive the hazards of the aqueduct to reach Oedon Chapel.
Now, even after what she'd found there—the spreading madness that had taken Adella and the old woman, the physical illness that gripped Arianna—Tera worried that she'd made the wrong choice.
Smashing the door was not an option. Or at least, it wasn't a good option. Not only would the violence of it rouse any guards and perhaps attract beasts, that door was the security the patients depended on to protect them from what roamed the street. Tera remembered when she'd first awakened in the clinic only to find a beast feasting downstairs; whether it had been a patient being ministered in the lower room who succumbed to the scourge or one who'd invaded from outside it nonetheless illustrated the risks. If there was nothing wrong and Tera's hasty action led to more innocent victims being exposed to the beasts...
No, she needed another way inside.
She'd found the gate to the old graveyard from the most unexpected of directions: from within one of the graves. She'd found a great poisonous, worm-infested pool, filled with monuments that might have been part of the ancient Pthumerian labyrinth, in a cave near the village in the Forbidden Woods, and had found a ladder that led up, up through ancient tombs torn out of the rock into a stone cellar, or perhaps mausoleum chamber, strewn with corpses, and then up another ladder which emerged from a grave into the tiny cemetery abutting the clinic. The gate had been locked—on the cemetery side, preventing access from the clinic courtyard. Tera had been glad to escape, after poison and parasites and giants had nearly finished her while she explored the nooks and crannies of the cavern, but she recalled a second gate.
If the cemetery was just a cemetery, then that gate might not lead anywhere, but perhaps it had been, once, the private burying-ground of the clinic's owners. The clinic had most likely been a family mansion once; it seemed shoehorned into its present use. If so, then the second gate might well lead to a back door.
Idly, Tera wondered if the ladders between the cavern and the cemetery had been excavated down, or if, rather, someone had burrowed up from beneath. There were definite signs of Healing Church experimentation in the village—Church-garbed corpses, blue elixirs used in their experiments, pellets of beast blood the Church was known to surreptitiously spread while loudly banning them in public. And yet the Church named the Woods forbidden and barred passage to even their own rank and file.
There was a mystery there, but Tera doubted she'd ever have the time to plumb it thoroughly. Yharnam's secrets were not going to be laid open in one night, especially a night that very well might end as the last red moon had, in a scouring conflagration.
She needed to do what she could, and at that time what she could do was to find a way into the clinic and see if there was anything still left within for her to save.
The second gate led to a winding passage, broken by short stairs along its way. It led Tera to a small garden with a well, and waiting there, too...
...the Kin.
She'd seen these creatures before. Basically human-shaped, though with blue skin, and even clad in robes like they might have been clerics or scholars. Their faces, though, were a distorted parody of humanity, with a writhing nest of tentacles around the orifice where a mouth would have been.
She'd learned the hard way that these things were not beasts, that their flesh did not flense beneath the teeth of her saw. Fire was called for here, fire or the crackling electricity that lurked within darkbeasts, or impalement, puncturing the rubbery flesh like a rot-filled balloon.
She made her choice in an instant, holstering her pistol while she hurled a pot of oil. It struck the thing, bursting open to bathe it in flammable liquid. In the next moment her left hand was thrusting forward with a complex weapon of canisters and levers. She squeezed the trigger, and the brain-sucking Kin was bathed in a cloud of fire. The oil caught alight at once, and the monstrosity roasted in place, even as it continued to try to grab at her with outstretched arms.
The corpse collapsed, and the flame died against the damp grass. The Kin seemed to shrivel up on itself, like with the ebbing of its life force its body no longer was able to hold itself together.
With that problem dealt with, Tera got the chance to look around properly. The small garden looked to be a dead end. But there was a ladder fixed to the wall in front of her which led up to the rooftops. But which rooftops? There was only one way to find out, so she tugged on the ladder, testing its stability, and then upon finding it solid began to climb.
The crows came at her almost at once, with their hopping attempts at the "flight" their oversized bodies could not manage and their growling, barking vocalizations. She'd seen normal crows in and around Yharnam as well, such as in Hemwick, so there had to be some reason why these carrion-feeders had grown so obscenely huge. Perhaps it was a side effect of feeding on corpses bloated with beast blood.
With half a dozen or so of the birds nesting on this rooftop, Tera nearly found herself becoming such a corpse herself. Their talons tore at the sturdy material of her Hunter's coat; a beak raked her face as it tried to peck at her eyes. They were fast and vicious, and coming at her in a cluster kept her off-balance, but they were still merely monstrous birds the size of dogs, and Tera had only recently slaughtered a thing that was not far off from a god. Blood and feathers littered the slate shingles around her as her saw tore through their bodies and left them nothing but piles of raw meat.
She wondered what would feed on the carrion-feasters in turn.
Her cheek stung as she staggered forward across the roof, and she took an ampoule of blood out from her coat. Yharnam blood, the same as had been transfused into her body here at the building she was trying to slip into, back when the sun was still in the sky and none of this nightmare had begun. She wondered, now, where it had come from. Was this blood taken from beasts? From humans like the Church's Blood Saints? From something else, as it was hinted the original Old Blood found by Byrgenwerth was drawn from? What processes of refinement had it undergone in laboratories like this clinic to take on its particular properties? Was she damned to the same fate as Gilbert, now that she'd taken this blood into herself? Or was there something about the Dream that brushed it aside, even as death itself would not take hold of her now?
In any case, it was far too late to ask these questions now. She fit the vial into the needle and rammed it into the meat of her upper thigh, feeling the blood pump into her leg, coursing from there throughout her body. Her flesh answered at once, tiredness washing away, minor wounds knitting themselves back together, everything but the spatters of blood vanishing from her clothing. All of it wiped away, just as it had been how many dozens of times before throughout the night. Healed, prepared, fit to proceed.
Orienting herself, Tera realized that she was indeed moving from roof to roof on top of the clinic building, but not behind it. Rather, she'd ended up climbing up somehow in front of it, Yharman's twisted architecture fooling her yet again. The rooms she knew, the treatment room she'd awakened in, the small antechamber downstairs, the large patient room where she'd encountered her first beast of the Hunt, before she even knew she was a hunter, they were all off to her right, which was how she'd gotten disoriented at first. She was now roughly at the same height as the room where she'd first received her transfusion…and she was staring at a broken window.
Saw in hand, she advanced cautiously. The window had been full-length, as big as a door, and it had clearly been smashed in from the outside, as glass shards and bits of the wood frame holding the small panes that had once made it up lay scattered on the floorboards within. The hallway was dark, any wall-sconces left unlit, so Tera lit her hand-lantern, sending a small pool of warmth spilling out around her.
She glanced to her left and right. The corridor seemed to be U-shaped. To her right would bend around towards the rooms she knew from the afternoon, the chamber where she'd been ministered Yharnam blood. She'd knocked on that door before and received no answer; there seemed little point in going there from the other side. Instead, Tera went left, towards unknown precincts.
The implication that someone had broken into the clinic wasn't contradicted by the things she found along the way. Medical equipment, bottles, basins, syringes, bandages, lay here and there, some dropped or discarded, others set aside, but none of it implying any kind of proper order. The clinic itself was disordered enough merely by its layout-its interior verified the external impression that it had once been a luxurious mansion repurposed into its present use—but this was something else entirely. Violence had occurred here, but also a disordered kind of activity, a madness as if people had been using these instruments and objects and just cast them down when finished in a fever of obsession.
It was a bad place, and Tera didn't know if the wrongness had come with the night or if it had been there all along, lurking beneath the surface. It was, after all, the blood she had received here that had set her on the path to becoming a Hunter. If only she could remember how she had come to Yharnam in the first place, and what had brought her to this clinic, the word "Paleblood" on her lips. But that was all lost to her now, and wishes wouldn't bring it back.
Then, the past was gone, replaced in an instant by the urgency of the present, by the soft burbling sound and the unnatural glow, radiant beneath rubbery blue flesh. She'd seen the things before, with their bulbous heads and near-skeletal bodies, in the Forbidden Woods, and Tera wondered for a moment if these were who had broken in, come up from the Woods.
She'd learned from painful lessons that, like the creature outside, these strange beings, alien even to beasthood, were resistant to her cleaver's teeth, so it was once more out with the flamesprayer, a gout of fire engulfing the monstrosity, leaving it twitching, falling, then finally still. Something rattled as it fell, dropping from its hand, perhaps, or from somewhere else, some pouch in its flesh. She all but pounced, but found nothing but a bottle—and not a bottle of some strange, alien substance, either. The liquid within was the deep red of wine, but thicker, more viscous—a cocktail of blood and alcohol, the favored drink of Yharnam's locals.
This alien creature was carrying a very ordinary blood cocktail, like it had been any common huntsman on the street.
Why?
It didn't make any sense. There had been nothing like this when she'd fought these kind of enemies before in the Woods. Maybe that was the difference: people didn't leave things just lying around in a forest, but here in the clinic there were any number of objects that a creature could just pick up. It had hands, after all—with the wrong number of fingers, yes, but still hands—and could have happened to pick up almost anything that was available, from books to surgical equipment to general bric-a-brac…to blood. Perhaps they were even drawn to the blood in the same way that beasts were; Tera had never drunk one of the cocktails, but she had found a use for them in hunting nonetheless, as bait to distract beasts. They would pounce on a shattered bottle, obsessively lapping up the spilled blood; perhaps these blue creatures were the same.
Still, the encounter had left her wary and confused, and she proceeded steadily down the corridor. She passed a side hall to her right, noting that it lead to closed double doors, and instead proceeded through an open door before her into what had to be, from the treatment beds scattered through it, another patient room for ministration.
In fact, there was a patient lying on one of the beds.
At first, she'd seen only a form, the dull oblong shape of a body stretched out on the metal table. As Tera drew closer, though, and the light of her hand-lantern fell across the figure, she jerked back in shock and raised her weapon. It was another one of the strange, blue-skilled beings. There was, she realized a moment later, no faint glow nor any sign of animation; it wasn't just lying down or resting, but already dead.
She approached cautiously, wondering what could have possibly brought the creature to its end. She hadn't seen any beasts in the halls that might have attacked it. Could the blue creatures fight each other? Or was there someone else about, perhaps a hunter? She hoped that the body might give her some clues, but her examination was cut short almost at once when she caught sight of the creature's left hand and let out an audible gasp.
It was human.
The flesh was decidedly pink, if pale with a corpse's bloodlessness. It had five fingers rather than the six these arcane beings generally held—and which a quick glance revealed that the corpse's right hand did indeed have. The conclusion was obvious and inescapable: these humanoid beings had, at one time in their lives, been human beings. They'd been changed into these things, perhaps by methods little different than the way in which people turned into beasts. But these weren't beasts. They were something else entirely, something eldritch and alien to humanity. If beasts were a degradation of humanity, the surfacing of the very basest instincts, hungers, even emotions that lay within the species, then this was different. This was something like…like Rom, perhaps, like the pearlescent slugs called "phantasms" or even, in some way, the brain-sucking aberrations like the one she'd killed by the well.
It was as if "humanity" was merely a point on a continuum, with beasthood lying in one direction, and these things in the other, like they were some kind of emissary, of humanity reaching out towards…what? The cosmos? The Great Ones? Did they even know?
Tera had spent enough time in Yharnam, though, to understand the fundamental drive so many of its researchers had: to ascend. To seek evolution, revelation, to share in the eldritch Truth that lurked behind the veil of reality. Byrgenwerth and the Healing Church alike had been driven, even possessed, by that desire from the moment they had had their first revelation within the Pthumerian tombs.
Rom, she was coming to believe, had once been human, and now in front of Tera was proof that such a transformation was possible. These emissaries were beings that had once been human.
Which meant that the one she had just killed, in the hall outside, had also once been a human.
This was, of course, true of beasts as well. But beasts were beasts. Despite their human origin, despite what was very likely shreds of human feeling, even thought remaining to them, they were nonetheless beasts, feral and violent and impossibly dangerous. The tragedy of Gilbert's death weighed on her, but her killing of him had, in the end, been an act of self-defense. Had she not fought back, he would have killed her, and gone on to attack and perhaps kill others, others who did not have a dreamer's stubborn resistance to remaining dead.
The emissaries she'd encountered in the woods had attacked her as well, sometimes even with deadly arcane power. The brain-sucking monstrosities that seemed to share their blood likewise had sought her life. For all practical purposes they might as well have been beasts even though metaphysically they seemed to be their exact opposites.
In the corridor outside, though, the emissary hadn't attacked. Tera had been the one to see it and strike first, with all of a hunter's lethal efficiency.
And she had killed someone. Someone who, like the corpse on the table, had almost certainly been a human being earlier that day. Someone who might still have possessed a human mind, or at least some form of soul, some form of intelligence that made it life worth protecting.
Gods, Tera was in love with a doll, for the sake of all that was holy. Of all people, who was she to say that the inhuman weren't worthy of life? It was one thing to kill ravenous, predatory beasts, or to fight in self-defense, but to kill simply because it was an alien thing and she was surprised, afraid?
She wanted to be sick. That thing had been just another victim, and she had murdered it.
And then she realized: she'd sent Gascoigne's daughter here. She didn't think the emissary had been the girl; the bottled cocktails it had been carrying suggested someone else. The bloody liquor made her think of the cantankerous drunk that lived near Arianna, in fact; the way he'd insisted that Tera was a liar and Arianna was no better than she ought to be suggested the kind of mentality that would decide to seek shelter anywhere other than the place told him simply because someone had told it to him. But the point was, it just as easily could have been the girl. If the child had made it here, and been transformed, Tera might have cut her down without thinking.
For some reason, of everything that she'd seen in Yharnam, all the bloody brutality, the bestial horrors, the "inhuman" cruelty that was in fact entirely the product of humans, and at the end the eldritch revelations that reality was in no way as solid and sane as she believed it was, that was somehow worse than all of it, the thought that she had been that close to killing a child she'd tried to help.
"No more," she whispered.
There was a true villain here. The clinic's patients had been transformed into these emissaries, used as guinea pigs in some wretched experiment. It all made horrible sense now: the way Iosefka had at first refused to allow anyone from outside to come into the clinic, but then later asked for Tera to send people there. The change in her tone of voice and her manner of speaking. The shattered window, broken in from the roof outside.
She wondered how many of the emissaries there were. How many patients and staff had been at the clinic? The intruder must have come up from the graveyard, through the poison cave in the woods, just as Tera had first found her way there. Were the emissaries Tera had fought in the woods been earlier examples of the intruder's work, prior victims? Had they been taken from that ramshackle village, perhaps under the guise of treating the snake-parasites that had infested a number of them just as the intruder, the impostor, had used the ruse of treating beasthood with Tera?
It had to stop, and Tera was not going to leave this place before she put an end to the impostor and rescued anyone who was still in any state to be rescued. And if there were any more victims who had been turned, well, if they didn't force the issue, then Tera had no intention of harming them.
Frankly, at this point, not being human in Yharnam was starting to seem like a better recommendation of good character.
~X X X~
A/N: Tera's ruminations on the architecture of the clinic here are accurate; sometimes looking at the game maps and seeing how things actually fit together results in some interesting surprises.
Also, given Bloodborne's rather direct focus on the desire for children and family, I can't help but imagine Celestial Emissary Iosefka adopting Celestial Emissary Gascoigne's Daughter and making a little eldritch found family if the Hunter doesn't kill them.