Balyn found Cainhurst Castle to be an oddly reassuring place.

It wasn't the lack of danger. On the contrary, he had been pounced upon, stabbed, hit with blowgun darts, and imprisoned by the supernatural force of ghostly wails more times than he could conveniently count, to say nothing of crawling over icy ledges on the outside of the precipice-like walls of the castle keep's exterior.

Rather, it was the familiarity. Apart from the serious flea problem in the courtyard (really, the Healing Church should have sent exterminators instead of Executioners), Cainhurst was basically what he would have expected from an ancient castle reached by riding a ghastly, driverless carriage across a bridge long-before broken. There was the winter scene, everything draped in snow and hoar-frost even though when seen from Hemwick the castle was clearly in the same season as the rest of Yharnam. There were the hunchbacked, mute servants, their elaborate livery a parody of elegant noble dress. There were the screeching ghosts of murdered women, bound to the site of their horrific deaths.

Balyn wasn't even sure what the Lost Children of Antiquity that roosted on the battlements were. The way they blended in with the statuary while perched reminded him of gargoyles come to life. Then again, they could have been some kind of beast, twisted to bat-like form by the unique properties of "forbidden" Cainhurst blood. But in either case, they were the sort of monstrosity he would expect to haunt the rafters of a haunted castle. Particularly one belonging to the Vile Cainhurst blood-kin.

After a night filled with the increasingly alien and eldritch cosmic entities, nightmare beings that blurred the very lines between reality and fever-dream, it was strangely comforting to be in the kind of environment that seemed spawned from the pages of three-volume novels.

Probably they had a few of those novels in the castle library, a ridiculously huge structure that filled three floors of this wing, each story itself far larger than an ordinary room with shelves stretching to the ceiling. Its construction was ridiculously fanciful: the first floor had two hidden chambers reachable only by side routes, the second floor had many open floors crisscrossed by narrow bridge-spans, and you couldn't even get to the third floor without opening a secret ladder.

It was, in short, the kind of library where one expected a chivalric romance for a lady's genteel enjoyment to be shelved next to an accursed book of arcane lore of which only a handful of copies had escaped inquisitorial flames.

(Though in all fairness, Yharnam's primary religion would have suppressed unholy books of arcane lore by buying up the entire print run for their own use.)

Curious, Balyn reached for the nearest shelf, hooked a gloved fingertip over the top of a leather-bound tome with brass fittings, and took it down. The title was faded, the gilt script having nearly flaked off in its entirety, so he flipped the cover open.

Ghostly hands, glowing blue, burst from the pages, clutching at the hunter from the end of long, spindly arms. Balyn flung himself back away from their cursed grasp just in time to avoid being seized.

Unfortunately, he had neglected to consider the width of the gallery in his reflexive action.

The back of Balyn's thighs connected with the balustrade, and the force of his leap sent him toppling over, plummeting down, down through the open second floor to crash full-force into a broad scholar's table. His last thought before darkness consumed him was that the ghost he'd nearly landed on looked very startled to see him.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter. Did you have a pleasant time in Castle Cainhurst?" the Doll asked.

"Hmm…I'll have to think about that a bit."

She looked at him curiously. Probably, she would have raised her eyebrows if they hadn't just been painted ridges on her porcelain face.

"I mean, I got killed again." Balyn was amazed at just how blasé he was starting to become about that. But then again, maybe other people would be equally casual about the process; it was just hard to get their opinions after the fact.

"That does not sound particularly promising."

"Well, I suppose not…but this time, I was killed by an eldritch book in the castle library."

"I don't believe I've ever heard you mention anything about such a thing before."

"Nope! So at the very least, you can say that I've had a novel experience!"

~X X X~

A/N: While some may consider this story cheating in order to justify a book pun, I will point out that it's perfectly plausible that the books in Cainhurst's library are filled with cursed attack hands like those in Dark Souls III's Grand Archives, and that's why actual player characters are bright enough to not mess with them. Unlike Balyn.