I awoke in a new place, immediately jerking up in fright. The last time this had happened, a sack-man had kidnapped me to Yahar'gul. This time I was fully-clothed and still had my equipment. Phantom pain lingered in my body where that abomination had squeezed me… Four fingers had wrapped around my torso to crush my arms, ribcage and hips. Two thumbs, one on the top and bottom of the hand, had broken my legs and collarbone.
My eyes quickly adapted to the darkness. This was some little room, my first thought was "Lady and the Tramp." I'd seen this Edwardian-Victorian style many times in Yharnam, but it was always eroded, wallpaper faded or torn. This little cabinet was perfectly preserved, reminding me of something out of that movie more than anything. The room was only a few feet square, not even big enough for two of me to stand side-by-side. There was nothing of note, except a lantern in the ground – absent the little ones, which was what took me so long to notice it.
I stooped down and snapped my fingers to light it, noticing that it turned the blue of the chalice-dungeon lanterns rather than the purplish of Yharnam. I tried to use it to travel back to the Dream, but no dice. I couldn't feel the instinctive etheric tethers that normally led to the Hunter's Dream. Well, that was how the lanterns in the chalice dungeon: the little ones only congregated around certain ones, which still glowed purple. So apparently purple meant I could travel to other locations? Good to know for the future.
The door was unlocked, a pretty checkerboard pattern of frosted glass filling what should have been visible windows. I opened it and stepped into a quiet hallway. Gaslamps lit the corridor, and it seemed that the wainscoting was oddly high. The chair-rail was almost at my shoulder height. I noticed that the door on the opposite side of the hall had a broken window, and I spied movement on the other side. I drew Evelyn and stacked up on the door. "Who's there?" I asked sharply, finger hovering on the trigger.
"What a joy it is," spoke a familiar voice, "to behold the divine." Patches, the man from the Forbidden Woods, who'd given me the stone and sent me to that little shrine to be crushed by that thing… He was laughing softly, joyously. "It must be such a pleasure. You're in my debt, you know. Nigh on a beast of the field, but here you are, treading a measure with the gods."
I whirled to face him directly, gazing through the broken window, arm poised to lash up and fire. I beheld a deathly-pale face, dark eyes set in a doughy visage. But behind that, my sharp senses perceived that his head wasn't attached to a neck and shoulders, but something different. "What the hell are you?" I bit out.
"I am Patches, and there's not another like me out there," he smirked, chuckling. "But are there more like you? Are all hunters' feet as fat as their wits?"
I bristled, lining up a shot through the glass.
"Oh, cease this dithering," he chided. "Take the plunge! Throw yourself to the wolves!" He pulled away just as I fired, but I needn't have bothered. Like with the Byrgenwerth fence, something supernatural blocked the penetration and the bullet tinked to the ground. "Don't dally, you lucky scamp! The gift of the godhead awaits!" His voice rose up to my ears even as he vanished back into cloying shadows. I could barely make out his shape before he disappeared: the man's head was attached to the body of a colossal spider, larger than most dogs at the very least.
"What in God's name is this place?" I muttered to myself as I stepped back. Fresh horrors of spindly multi-armed nightmare monsters and spider-headed madmen… I checked down several halls and most simply terminated in dead-ends, and the last hall led to a pair of double-doors that felt ominous: I didn't want to head through them until I'd checked everything else.
I found two doors on one side that were locked and wouldn't open no matter what I did. The door on the other side (because it's always the last one you check) opened to what seemed like some kind of office. Reminded me of Victorian police stations, how they'd have regimented desks in those period pieces. I checked them over and there was nothing. No letters, no belongings, no papers of any kind. Other than the blotters on each desk, they were completely barren. This whole place felt dead. Or, not dead, more like a museum: preserved in time, empty and frozen.
I passed through the next door into a lecture room, the sweeping rounded triangle of a classic amphitheater focused down to the teacher's desk, upon which I saw something glint.
Splap.
Something splattered beside my right foot. Instinct told me to look up rather than down, and I saw a mass of shiny gray and matte black falling down onto me! It spread out like a watery blanket and, though I juked out of the way, it still caught onto me. The texture was sickening, like cold tar. It clung and oozed up me, and soon I felt two deformed hands clutching my shoulders. The monster looked at me, its head barely resembling anything human. It was twisted sideways, like its neck was broken, and the face itself was more a combination of dark hollows resembling human features. What passed for a mouth opened wide and it tried to swallow my head!
Doll had told me that the more unnatural a creature is, the more it might be vulnerable to the symbolism of a thrusting weapon. While one hand wrestled with the gelatinous face to keep it from eating me, the other unholstered my saw spear. I flicked it open, positioning the spear tip, and with the most strength I could muster from the awkward angle I drove the weapon up.
It made a distressed splashing noise and pulled away, the spear carving through its semi-solid body. As I got some distance, I was able to get a better look at the creature. It seemed to be wearing the robes and mortarboard of a college graduate, though its body was all this shiny-gray slime. It's upper body was mostly solid, but the rest dissolved into a mound of slime. The slime-man lashed out with stretchy limbs but I smoothly dodged to the side. Hacking through the arms did little, as they oozed back together.
I closed the distance again and thrust the spear, feeling the thrust break through the thing. When I was younger, I saw a show about glass-blowers and popping the bubbles didn't make them burst like soap bubbles, but they spilled out and down. This was what happened with the slime creature: the thrust seemed to destabilize it and made it fall apart. I shook off the spear as the thing dissolved.
Double-checking the ceiling and the rows of chairs for more of those things, I made my way down to the desk and plucked a heavy silver key from its conspicuous resting place. Exiting the room, I found myself closer to the double-doors. Directly before me was a rounded protrusion, the walls curving inward and connecting at a closed door. I suspected this was some kind of staircase, as I'd seen those before, but never one with a door. I checked the handle and it opened, revealing some kind of conference room. At the far end was a chalkboard, and in the center was an enormous circular table with more than a dozen chairs.
I spied another slime-man clinging to the ceiling at the far end of the room. Not wanting to be ambushed, I mantled the table and rushed it, shooting it with Evelyn to knock it down. One good strike destroyed it.
Next was the small room on the other side of the double-doors. I wish I hadn't thought to check it. The door opened easily enough, and I found a collection of what looked like chemistry equipment, as well as two glass containers on the desk. They looked rather like cloches, and I came closer to examine what was inside.
They were babies! Not quite human, red and gelatinous with no clear bones, but still clearly stillborn children humanoid in shape, folded and mashed to fit into these cylinders. Like with the slime men, these poor dead children dissolved into slime toward the bottom.
Tears spilled from my eyes and I staggered to the side, yanking my face-covering down to retch noisily on the hardwood floor. "Oh god," I gasped, heaving and sobbing, "why?" I finally managed to flee that horrible room, slamming the door behind me. I slumped down to the floor, breathing heavily. It took me a little while to get moving again. What kind of monster would do something like that? It's like they were being kept as trophies, or some other resource, rather than as children. Even if they were to be used for medical research, surely they could be stored more respectfully than in some side room… I couldn't bring myself to go back and touch them, however.
Once I'd passably composed myself, I checked the doors I'd been unable to open before. The first one, leading presumably to the larger room, fit the key I'd obtained in the other lecture room. Stepping through, I saw nearly every seat occupied by one of those slime things. They all turned almost in unison to look at me.
"...Shit." I unslung my cannon and opened fire into the greatest concentration of the slimes. I was already moving, drawing the silver sword from my back. The greatsword remained as a metal sheath: I simply needed a thrusting blade that I could maneuver more easily than my saw spear. The slimes flowed out of their chairs as the supposed teacher at the desk pointed hatefully at me with a too-long arm.
Another cannon shot to the new biggest concentration as they oozed up into a bottleneck, and I leapt into the fray. Their reach was their strength: in melee, they were fragile. Able to put my full weight and force into the thrusts, I killed nearly all of them with a single strike. Furniture was destroyed by their lashing limbs, reminding me of just how hard they could hit. I kept mobile, juking in circles around the crowds, running them ragged. Thrust, move, dodge; thrust, dodge, move; move, dodge, thrust. Slowly I whittled their numbers down. Empty faces opened too-large mouths in silent screams of rage, extended limbs crashed all around me, slathering me in shiny gray slime as I ruptured them.
By the time I was done, several minutes had passed and I looked like I'd attended the world's weirdest rave. My clothes squelched as I moved, shimmering from all the slime that clung to me. With the heavy splats of weighted clothes, I headed to check the side door attached to this room, the one I'd been unable to open from the outside.
It seemed that this was a storage room, junk piled everywhere: animal cages, some of them broken; a shattered desk; extra chairs. And in one corner was a massive chest. Remembering some of the other things I'd found in chests, I opened it up. I found… I didn't know what I'd found. It was some sort of petrified, crystal slug. "What are you?" I asked softly, reaching down to pick it up.
Phantasms, the invertebrates known to be augurs of the Great Ones, can be used to partially summon abandoned Ebrietas. The initial encounter marked the start of an inquiry into the cosmos from within the old labyrinth, and led to the establishment of the Choir. The scholars of Byrgenwerth reached out to grasp the eldritch Truth…
I jerked back to consciousness, the crystal slug crumbling to dust. I knew, or thought I knew, some tiny sliver of the truth. I gestured with my left hand to one of the already-broken cages and began to enunciate in that alien tongue. "I call upon the memory, Firstborn of the Formless, the Holy Medium. Ebrietas!" I felt my hand distend and deform, unspooling to form some new creation. Energy roiled and crackled within the rift formed, and a cluster of pearl-white tentacles erupted outward to shatter the metal! When they receded, the energy winked out and my hand returned to what it had been.
Had this place been part of Byrgenwerth before it was swallowed by the lake? Or at least was this a reflection of Byrgenwerth?
I approached the double doors, satisfied that I'd found everything in this place, and wishing I hadn't found some of it. Pushing them open, I found myself lifted off my feet and sucked through a purple fog. I tumbled through this vortex until I crashed onto hard stone. Once again in the dark, this time a dank cave, with the orange light of dusk glowing from its mouth. "I'm really getting fed up with this," I muttered as I righted myself. Another lantern was nearby, this time with little ones holding it up! I eagerly lit it, satisfied at the purple glow. "Hey little guys. How've you been?"
They looked oddly stressed, an unfamiliar look on their normally innocent, cutely-ugly faces. "Let's get out of here," I said as I reached for the lantern, ready to spiral in on myself.
A bell chimed, the little ones flinched, and my concentration was disrupted. "...What?" I tried a second time, and the same thing happened. This time I was certain that the bell wasn't in my head: whatever was stopping my departure was nearby, outside of this cave.
There wasn't an easy way up the cliffside, so it looked as if I'd have to take the long, practical way around. The sloping slate-gray land was dotted with hexagonal stone pillars, reminding me of the Giant's Causeway in the UK. Other, stranger stone formations looked more like coral, most of it a depressing ash-gray. Making it to the top of the slope, I was rewarded with even more confusion. The world seemed cleaved in half, a sudden precipitous drop and then smooth cliffs in the distance. Clusters of tombstones dotted the land, and some sort of beast rested in the middle of a cluster of tombstones and strange coral formations. It was a ragged creature, and I couldn't in good conscience say it was covered in silver-white fur. It had this fur, of course, but most stuck out in ragged strips, like leather pulling up and away from the liner: I could see the muscle tissue and raw pink flesh, and lengths of fur hung loose except where they were anchored at joints. Shaggy fur served as the thing's hair. The most disarming thing, and what gave me pause, was that it held a torch in its right hand. The beast seemed not at all frightened of the flame.
I drew the saw spear. This was likely a terrible idea, but I had to know. "Excuse me?" spoke up. Perhaps this creature was actually rational.
It perked up, then stood. The elongated monster rose up and kept going, towering easily eight or even ten feet in height at full extension. It turned, and I could see its ribcage bursting from its chest like long spindly claws. Its head was possibly the worst thing. Stripped of all fur, pink and raw, the head was twisted violently sideways where its enormous maw split vertically and its two enormous bugged eyes were on its left side. Multiple rows of jagged teeth stuck out from its rounded, snubbed face.
The creature inhaled, bringing its torch toward its mouth, and then blew out a stream of fire! I leapt to its right, hopefully better out of its eyesight, and aimed at the broken ribcage, the biggest part of its narrow torso. This creature was a confusing mess of horrific sights, but it almost seemed as though its body was in the process of reshaping into a canine one – shrinking and narrowing itself to be more like a greyhound.
Whatever else it might do, I wouldn't find out this time. "I call upon the memory, Firstborn of the Formless, the Holy Medium. Ebrietas!" The tentacles erupted from my hand, impacting the ragged beast with enough force to launch it off the cliff! It let out a ragged scream as it plummeted out of sight.
I breathed heavily, ears perking up when I once again heard the bell chime in the distance. I needed to deal with whatever was disrupting my escape. I still had no idea what this place was, but I knew I didn't want to be there.