The scream should have been Balyn's first clue. He'd heard it before, way back when he was making his first, tentative explorations of Central Yharnam, climbing up the ladder to where he'd first met Gilbert.

Come to think of it, wasn't this Gilbert's fault in the first place? He'd been the one to suggest that the Healing Church might know something about "Paleblood," the word that was a closest thing to a clue that Balyn had to what was happening. He'd been the one to tell him that the Cathedral Ward was across the Great Bridge from Central Yharnam.

So really, when the screaming horror, its bestial head crowned by antlers, standing at least thirty feet tall even with its legs bowed, hurled itself from the overlook to slam onto the bridge in front of Balyn, Gilbert was entirely to blame for that situation.

When the Cleric Beast launched itself through the air to cover half the length of the bridge to slam Balyn onto the cobbles, he definitely considered it Gilbert['s fault.

And when the beast scooped Balyn up in its massive right hand, squeezed the hunter with bone-cracking force, and then slammed him down with a power that could (and did) pulp organs, Balyn had some definite questions to ask.

~X X X~

"Welcome home, good hunter. Is there anything you desire?"

"Yeah. I thought I saw some paper and a pen in the workshop, but it might help me organize my thoughts better if there was maybe some kind of board I could pin notes up onto. You know, to kind of see them all at once? Oooh, and maybe some yarn or string that I could use to show connections between different things. Maybe red string, for warnings and alerts. Because I'm getting pretty suspicious right now. I first heard that Cleric Beast screaming outside Gilbert's house, and then it's Gilbert's information that made me walk right into it? That seems more than just coincidental from where I'm sitting, let me tell you! How do I know he's really an outsider like me, huh? Heck, with that barred window and frosted glass, for all I know he might be just another beast!"

It was at that point that Balyn caught on to the fact that he was talking to someone. Moreover, that the someone hadn't greeted him with Gehrman's cracked and worn voice, weathered from decades upon decades of use, but with tones that were young, light, and feminine, delicately accented in a way that none of the Yharnamites he'd yet met had shown.

He hadn't seen any women on his previous visits to the Hunter's Dream, only old Gehrman and the voiceless Messengers. In fact the only things even vaguely feminine that he'd seen were that one statue behind the ritual altar and—

"Ahhh!" he yelped, pointing. "You're that doll!"

She bowed elegantly to him.

"I am a doll, here in this dream to look after you," she agreed.

"But…but how!? You're a doll! You're walking! You're talking!"

She tipped her head to one side, regarding him with an apparent air of curiosity. Her face did not actually move to change expression, since it was apparently made of porcelain, but the emotion somehow came across clearly.

That was probably the least strange part of the situation.

"Yes," she said. "How else would I be able to help you?"

Balyn supposed that she had a point there, but even so…

"You weren't before," he accused. "Every other time I've been here, you were just lying over there on that little ledge, not moving or talking or anything else, just looking like somebody had abandoned you there."

"Ah, I see. I believe it was because your mind had not yet been opened to greater possibilities."

Balyn blinked.

"My mind? You mean, like, I was too stupid to notice?"

She did not respond immediately, perhaps out of a sense of tact.

"I believe that it is not precisely a matter of intelligence, but rather, insight? The subconscious imagination to perceive matters which are beyond ordinary comprehension."

"Hm." He thought that over. In all fairness, it was as close to a straight answer as he'd gotten from anyone since coming to Yharnam, even if he didn't quite understand it. "You mean like, once I've seen something crazy like a cleric turned into a humongous beast the size of a building, a little thing like a talking doll doesn't seem like such a big deal?"

"That sounds appropriate."

Balyn shrugged.

"Well, at least it makes as much sense as anything else around here. And I have to say, the fact that you can walk and talk and do stuff makes what Gehrman said about using the doll if it pleased me sound a lot less creepy."

The doll blinked at him. Balyn was surprised to learn that her eyelids were articulated.

He also got the idea that Gehrman might be well advised to be unseen in this world as well as the waking one for a while, because the Doll did not look amused. Actually, she looked like she wouldn't need a saw cleaver to shred and fillet the subject of her ire; her glare was entirely capable of doing it all by itself.

"Um," Balyn considered it politic to change the topic, just in case animated dolls did not subscribe to the theory that one shouldn't shoot the messenger as it was his words that had started it. "Out of curiosity, just what can you do to help me?"

"Hunter, pursue the echoes of blood, and I will channel them into your strength."

"Huh, really?" He rubbed his chin, thinking about it. He had felt something strange when defeating beasts, some influx of weirdly nostalgic sensations, but he'd written it off as having something to do with his amnesia. That it was the echoing will of the blood would not have been his first guess. Maybe his seventeenth, right after the echo of an extra serving of beans at dinner. "That sounds useful."

"Most hunters do find that they could use extra strength, to embolden their sickly spirits."

"Well, count me among them, because facing the Cleric Beast the way I am now, I don't have a prayer."

The Doll stared at him, once again giving that impression that she was blinking in disbelief.

"…Your extremely sickly spirit," she concluded.