A/N: A bit different in tone, this one.

~X X X~

The fog cleared, like the transition between sleep and waking—though who could say in which direction? Especially when Balyn had begun his journey within what was already a dream, sinking into the ritual of a Holy Chalice to unseal a buried tomb, or perhaps the nightmare of one. He had done it many times now, strengthening himself with the relics of the ancient Pthumerians, and was already anticipating his next hunt in the depths…

"Wait, what?"

He blinked twice. This was not what he had expected to find. He was not in a cramped chamber of ancient stone. Rather, he stood on a platform in a great black gulf. There was no ceiling, no walls…and most disturbingly of all, no ghostly lamp to serve as a beacon for the Messengers to bear him back to the Hunter's Dream.

Balyn's hand tightened around the handle of his saw cleaver.

In front of him were double doors, a high, arched thing like the portals of a cathedral, even down to the rose window above the arch's point that shone with hints of light beyond even though chunk of wall in which the doorway stood was surrounded by the same black void as was above and below. Swirling nightmare fog covered the twin portals, making it hard for Balyn to see the elaborate carvings.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he decided, and stepped forward. He did not know what he'd find on the opposite side of the doorway, but he had a feeling he wouldn't like it.

As it turned out, what was on the opposite side of the door came and found him. Massive, rubbery tentacles thicker than Balyn's body reached out of the fog, slamming into the ground, smashing into him and knocking him sprawling. He only barely rolled away from another assault, falling back out of range of the writhing limbs.

Balyn shivered, gritting his teeth behind the cloth of his hunter's mask. He had seen many strange and unnatural things since waking in Yharnam, but the way the flailing tentacles, possessed of very substantial physical reality according to the testimony of his new bruises, were able to move up and down, in and out, passing through the doors without meeting any apparent resistance was somehow one of the most uncanny of all. It was as if the doors were not there at all, like a reflection on the surface of the water.

The hunter was nothing if not curious. Complete strangers had mentioned it before, comparing his need to uncover secrets to the spirit of Byrgenwerth, or offering him to liberate him from that wild curiosity at sword's-point. The truth was more simple: though awful as the answers tended to be, the not knowing was often worse. Balyn was possessed of an annoyingly good imagination.

Gripping his cleaver tightly, Balyn watched the movement of the tentacles closely, following them until he saw his chance. He charged forward, whipping the saw-toothed weapon around in an arc above him as he ducked beneath a swipe. The saw bit into the tentacle, drawing blood—it was real, indeed, not just some arcane projection—and the thing jerked back in pain, opening a path for Balyn to hurl himself against the doors.

Which he did, in quite literal fashion.

"Ow!"

The doors were doors, solid and unyielding as any other matter. They weren't some kind of illusion. And yet at close range, it was even more obvious that the tentacles passed through them like they weren't even there.

Without hesitation, without even a pause for conscious thought, Balyn threw his weight against the doors, pushing the twin gates open.

And he screamed.

It was not that he found himself face-to-face with the thing the tentacles belonged to. That was a little bit startling, but, well, he'd been expecting something to be there. Nor was it the inhuman nature of the shambling horror, its roughly oblong body from which the five (the one at the back apparently having been unable to reach around to get to the doors) great tentacles sprouted. Yes, the thing was grotesque, but nowhere near so awful in his opinion as the corpse-mass of the One Reborn, the eye-studded Brain of Mensis, or the poison-weeping, flayed body of the Blood-Starved Beast. Yharnam was full of horrors, and Balyn had faced most without flinching.

No, what terrified him about this creature was not the details of its appearance, but rather the lack of them. The thing's body was unnaturally smooth, its skin lacking texture. Looking at it, Balyn had the sensation that if he put a slice of the thing's flesh under a magnifying lens, or one of the microscopes he'd seen at Byrgenwerth, he'd see nothing more than his naked eyes showed him now, as if the very atoms that made up this monstrosity were swelled to visible size. It was as if Nature had begin to put this horror together, then stopped halfway, shrugged, and left its work undone.

Past the creature he thought he got a glimpse of a vast shore, of a great dark lake beneath a cloud-swept sky, and it might have been just possible to dodge past the creature, to fight it under the impossible moon that he could only see through the doorway, not around it, but it was too late for that. Balyn's hesitation had cost him, and he would not now be able to see how it was that the other side of a free-standing bit of wall could be outdoors while this side was not.

The blow caught him flatfooted, and he was sent hurtling back, not even touching the short flight of steps but hitting the platform on which he'd arrived and skidding across the flagstones. He realized that he'd never actually turned all the way around even as he slid through an open arch and off the ragged edge of the stone. He flailed for purchase, his fingertips just brushing the rough side of a block, and then he was falling.

But it was not through open space that he fell.

Rather, he realized at once, he was plummeting into an endless gray void. Below him, to all sides, there was nothing at all, an endless gray sameness that stretched unchanging in all directions. Above, rapidly receding, he could see the arch he'd fallen through, the underside of the platform, but nothing of the black void—only the eternal gray. Just as how on the other side of the doors there had been that eldritch shore, here on this side of the arch there was only this gray nothingness, no, a void more pure than even the empty vastness of the cosmos. It was as if he fell through the absolute absence of reality, what was there even before the gods defined "emptiness." Somehow, he'd intruded into a realm where even the concept of "nothing" had yet to come into existence, and he wondered if he would indeed fall endlessly, until there was a terrific wrenching within him, as if life itself was too complex an idea to exist in this plane of undefined reality…

…and he found himself sprawled on his back in the Hunter's Dream, the ephemeral reality of the dreamscape so blessedly tangible by comparison. Convulsively, he lashed out, and the sole of his boot struck the chalice and knocked it from its stone perch. He scrambled away, half crawling, half trying to stand, only to crash into the legs of the Doll.

"Good hunter, what is it. What ails you so?"

"I…there was…" he stammered, clutching at her dress. Try as he might, the words would not come. She seemed to sense the nature of his distress, though, for she put one arm around him to hold him close and gently stroked the back of his head with articulated fingers.

"Shh…All will be well, good hunter. You need not force yourself to put words to the unspeakable. For are there not, even among the haunted seekers after eldritch truth and the whispers of the Great Ones as they dream, things that man was never meant to know?"

~X X X~

A/N: Shout-out to Zullie the Witch for data-mining the unfinished content and dev rooms and for setting up glyphs where players could get to experience it for themselves!

And hey, what better time than when dealing with things that are not meant to be for letting the Doll have the finishing joke?