As it always did, the fire in the Workshop fireplace crackled cheerily, bright orange flames dancing behind the grate, promising comforting warmth in the small brick building on what felt like a cool (at least to judge by the falling leaves that occasionally drifted by) autumn evening.

One would have to watch for a long time, or to have a hunter's keen eye for detail as she visited the room several times over the course of several hours, to realize that the logs never seemed to be consumed or replaced. They were exactly the same as they had been when Tera had first entered the building and spoken to Gehrman when she'd first arrived in this dream. They were part of the fabric of this crafted world, of a place shaped by a greater will that day when it had been made so that it would mirror a fragment of Yharnam.

The day when a Doll had come to life.

"Is something wrong, Tera?"

She turned away from the fire as the sweetly accented voice beckoned. She did not often enter the building, did this imitation of humanity given life; it was the sanctum of Gehrman and the Hunters.

Tera's feelings towards the Doll were…complex. Or perhaps they only felt that way to her. After all, things like infatuation, desire…love…were part and parcel of the most elemental human existence. The yearning for family, companionship, a partner of the flesh and of one's life. They existed on the most basic, defining level of what made people human. Indeed, it could be argued that even the beasts had the same yearnings.

She wondered if those kind of feelings were part of what Byrgenwerth, the Healing Church, the impostor doctor, had sought to leave behind in seeking ascension to a level beyond humanity. Could the Great Ones even feel love? Did they see it as some incomprehensible component of humanity's beastly idiocy? Or did they know of it, too?

Every Great One loses its child, and yearns for a surrogate.

She reached for the Doll's hand, and curled her gloved fingers around it. The leather of her black hunter's gloves was so thin that she could feel the outline of each meticulously-crafted digit, each rounded joint and ever-so-slightly curved finger segment. The Doll seemed to recognize her need and squeezed gently, somehow managing to convey supportive warmth despite her hand not being made from living flesh.

"I had to kill a man that I knew, a man who'd been kind to me, who helped me when he didn't need to. The blood and the madness turned him into a beast, and he tried to take my throat out, and I had to kill him. And now I wish I could have found some other way to save him. Took him alive, dragged him down to Old Yharnam, I don't know."

She gave a short, bitter laugh.

"And now I'm agreeing with Djura. I know that all the beasts used to be people. Gilbert was just the first one that meant something to me. But didn't all of them mean something to someone? Most of us have loved ones, even one or two. Or friends, or acquaintances. It's only because Gilbert was someone I knew that I can think about it now."

She looked up at the Doll, finding sympathy there in painted eyes and immobile features. Somehow, she always managed a way to convey her emotions even if there was no external change to explain how she was doing it.

"The Hunt may be useful. It might even be necessary; I don't see how beasts and humans can possibly live together. Some of them seem to have some capacity for co-existence with each other—in Old Yharnam there even seems to be something resembling remnants of society—but even there they came after me with crazed bloodlust the instant they saw me, and many beasts are nothing but animals. No," she corrected herself, "worse than animals, more like the foullest distillation of humanity's worst instincts with none of our elevated instincts. But those beasts were still people, once. Each one I slay is just writing 'Finis' to another small tragedy that became of a person's life, and it wasn't until I came face-to-face with Gilbert that I realized it.

"And then I met a person whom I had no regrets about killing. They weren't a beast at all, just a woman, a learned doctor who like so many other people in Yharnam wanted to cure humans of being human."

"If you had no regrets, Tera, then why are you disturbed by it?"

She gave the Doll a sardonic grin.

"You noticed the conflict there, did you? Well…the point is, I'm not sorry that I killed her, but the way I felt about her, when I saw what it is that she'd been doing…and how she made me complicit in her sins, when I thought that I was helping people. I don't know if I've ever hated someone like that. Oh, I may not have sprouted fur and fangs, but when I cut her down, I knew, truly understood, what it meant to be a beast.

"And it terrifies me."

"You are not a beast, Tera."

No hesitation at all, Tera thought. The Doll had said it at once, without even a pause for thought.

"I wish that I had your confidence."

"I am not human myself," she began, "so I do not understand what it means to be one in the same way that you do, but I have seen many hunters come and go from this Dream over the years that I have existed. I have seen those who were kind, and those who were cruel, and those who seemed to be full of rage, but none at all were beasts. When you became a hunter, I felt…we all felt…your own bestial instincts reach up to claim you, when the Blood opened the way to a potential metamorphosis. And then I saw you destroy that beast with the fire of your own will.

"You are many things, Tera. But to be a beast is to be a slave to, as you said, your own worst instincts, and that is not who you chose to be."