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Chapter 2: Stars Beyond Reach
Finally, after an endless march of failures, the truth of the cosmos was at hand. The Choir scholar who "replaced" Iosefka never before made such strides in her research. Not in her own halls nor in the Choir's orphanage. The clinic, filled with those afflicted by all manner of disease, proved a perfect testbed for the imposter's experiments. In fact, as a scholar of medicine she believed herself a far better proprietor of the clinic than the previous woman. That poor excuse for a nurse could scarcely set a broken bone let alone unlock the secrets of human ascension! So, why not become Iosefka? Yes, she was a better, more enlightened Iosefka.
The old Iosefka hadn't wanted to relinquish ownership of the clinic and its patients, but the new Iosefka demonstrated the error of her ways. It took a little bit of persuasion, most of which the Choir scholar administered via syringe, but it all worked out for the best. The old Iosefka, for all her lack of vision and ambition, still managed to make a worthy contribution toward humanity's best interests; a sacrifice of mere flesh for a noble cause.
With the arrival of the Blood Moon, all became clear; and none too soon! Iosefka ran out of patients upon which to test her theories and make adjustments. The Blood Moon provided the missing piece of the equation, so obvious once the crimson light awakened her sleeping mind to the secrets beyond the veil. Iosefka turned the needles, vials, and various rites on her own flesh and exulted in the pain. She succeeded where her peers failed. She would ascend.
A power greater than any born of humankind stirred inside her, a seed of the Great Ones planted in the garden of her womb to grow and thrive. Iosefka felt it writhing in her stomach, stretching the muscles and making a nest of her innards. If she could overcome the final trial, Iosefka knew that she would be rewarded. She would take her place among the stars, an empowered consciousness as vast and endless as the heavens.
As the unborn child of the Great Ones, her child, swelled and stirred inside her, Iosefka crawled onto the surgical table in search of a more comfortable position. Down on all fours, the Choir scholar felt like a beast in the wild. Rather than feeling repulsed by the heretical thought, it intoxicated her. All humans were but beasts compared to the glory of the Great Ones, and soon she would leave her primitive fellows behind. A beautiful agony wracked her body, and whispers of the eldritch Truth circled around in her mind. The rapturous ecstasy of her changing body numbed Iosefka to the discomfort of her holy labor.
The door to the hallway creaked open, the hinges in dire need of oiling. In a haze of pain and pleasure, Iosefka looked up. At first she could not understand what she was looking at. It almost looked like the silhouette of some hulking bird staring at her from the doorway. Iosefka reached up and wiped the sweat from her eyes with the back of one sleeve. The figure stepped into the room.
"Your clinic has seen better days," said the oversized bird. No, not a bird. The Choir scholar recognized the voice.
She squinted at the not-bird as it closed the door behind it. After a brief struggle with the sensory assault of labor, Iosefka started to make out the details, It was just a human, a hunter clad in a crowfeather cloak. The candlelight gleamed off of his unmistakable silver helm, serpentine shadows running along the ridges of its ornate embellishments. Only one hunter prowling around Yharnam wore the old Cainhurst heirloom and that feather garb.
"You," Iosefka said, stifling a moan. "You never sent anyone to safety." Her words came out labored and breathy, some of them through clenched teeth. The scholar's hips waggled back and forth like a clock pendulum as she tried to focus.
"I never sent them here, you mean," the hunter said, raising a finger like a professor correcting his student. "Given the pitiful creatures stalking the clinic halls, I'm fairly certain I made a good choice in guiding them elsewhere."
"It matters not." Iosefka laughed in a fit of hitching spasms as a tremor ran through her. "My work is complete. The Stars are within my grasp!"
"Maybe," said the Crowfeather Hunter.
"Maybe? Maybe?" Iosefka scoffed, then winced as her abdomen clenched painfully. "Ascension is at hand! I am blessed with a seed of the Great Old Ones!" The Choir scholar moaned as the whispers spilled through her mind again and the thing in her belly writhed. Intoxicated by pain and pleasure, for a moment she forgot where she was. A hard thunk and the squeal of distressed metal snapped her back to her senses.
"Yes, maybe," said the hunter, hand resting atop the glittering siderite blade he drove through the surgical table a mere hairsbreadth from Iosefka's face. The arcane-fortified weapon pierced through the mundane metal of the table's surface with ease. Her heart skipped a beat, then two. Adrenaline traced a web of flames through her already burning blood.
Iosefka scowled, indignation sparking to life in her eyes as she looked up at the hunter. He wouldn't dare do anything so rash. Even a brute such as he should be able to recognize the salvation of all humanity when standing witness to it! Even so, the Choir scholar wished she hadn't left her weapons sitting on a desk across the room.
"But enough waxing philosophical," said the hunter with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Let's make this simple. I ask you a question, and you tell me what I want to know. If you refuse, lie, or otherwise fail to give me a viable answer, I will hurt you." The operating table squalled again as the hunter drew his blade from its surface. He ran a thumb along the weapon's edge, which didn't appear to have been dulled in the slightest.
"You wouldn't dare!" Iosefka hissed at him through clenched teeth, another contraction seizing her. She arched her back as the thing inside her gesticulated and pressed against the confines of her womb.
A thud and screech as the hunter's blade pierced the table. The sound reached her ears a full second before her addled mind registered the white hot pain blooming in her left hand. Her first thought had been a peculiar sense of wonder at the sharpness of the weapon's edge, the bones in her hand cut clean rather than shattered. Then came the agony, a pain steeped in fear and loathing that hollowed out the rapturous languishing of her labor. Iosefka screamed, more from rage than pain, and bared her teeth at the hunter.
"That's a bold assumption to make of someone you know little about," said the hunter. He sounded casual, not at all like someone who'd just impaled a woman's hand. "We're not off to a good start," the hunter admonished. "I didn't even ask you a question yet, and you're already getting hurt."
"I am a holy vessel of the Cosmos!" Iosefka howled her fury at the hunter. "Through me humanity will be saved from certain doom! We will reach the stars and become something far greater than we could ever hope to imagine!"
The hunter bent at the waist, lowering himself until his face came eye-level with Iosefka.
"And I don't give a market bargain fuck who or what you are." He said it without a trace of malice, the same way someone would state an undeniable fact. Water was wet, fire was hot, the wind blew, and The Last Crow of Yharnam did not give a fuck. "Now, at the risk of you further running your mouth, answer me this: where is Lady Maria's grave?"
The question threw the Choir scholar for a loop. Of all the questions she might have expected, that had not been one of them. Nothing about the Choir's secrets. Not a question about her research.
"What?" She asked, momentarily struck dumb by the peculiarity of it. Another mistake; the hunter struck like a pit viper, drawing his fang from her bitten hand and plunging it into the other. The table screamed again. Iosefka screamed with it.
"That is not a helpful response," said the hunter. He drummed his fingers on the pommel of the blade and the vibrations sent tremors of black pain up her arm. It strummed an echoing chord across her frayed nerves and caused the edges of her vision to dim. Iosefka must have looked as if she might pass out, because the hunter raised a hand and slapped her across the face.
The metal gauntlet lent weight to the blow and snapped the Choir scholar's head back. She dropped hard to her elbows, hips still up in the air like a bitch waiting to be mounted. Fresh blood ran down her chin from where a sharp edge opened her cheek, and she felt her lip starting to swell. The thing inside her started thrashing, threatening to stir up her innards. Either it sensed the danger to its mother or it drank in a dose of the adrenaline spiking her blood.
"Please try to stay conscious," the hunter said in a soothing voice. It was almost as if he pitied her, the foolish child unable to stay awake to help with the household chores. "If you pass out, I'll have to resort to drastic measures. So, with that in mind, let's try this again: where is Lady Maria's grave?"
"She has a mausoleum in the yard of Healing Church Saints!" Iosefka gasped the words, breath hitching as she struggled against the warring sensations of labor and injury. The pain in her pinned hand flowered a second time when the hunter extracted his blade. Iosefka watched him flick his wrist to shake the blood, her blood, from the weapon. The Crowfeather hunter started around the table.
He was leaving? A wave of relief overtook her. The barbaric hunter wasn't going to kill her. She would still ascend and bring humanity to the next stage of evolution! Iosefka dipped her head and pressed her battered cheek to the cold metal of the operating table. It would all turn out as it should.
Another thunk and squeal. Pain shot up her leg in molten streaks she felt all the way up in her teeth. She tried to squirm away from the pain but couldn't. The hunter's blade nailed her right foot to the table. An incomprehensible jumble of curses and prayers spilled from Iosefka's lips as she pounded her blood-slick palms on the tabletop. The wet slaps painted Rorschach spatters of crimson across the front of her robes. Iosefka bit down on the inside of her cheek until the metallic tang of blood filled her mouth. She willed herself to keep breathing and not to faint. It was a struggle.
"We both know she isn't there," the hunter said, impatience coloring his tone for the first time. "The tomb bears her name, but she is not interred there. It was sealed until I paid a visit." Iosefka had known the mausoleum would be empty, but she gambled on whether or not the hunter knew that. Truthfully, she had no idea where Lady Maria was buried, but she thought that an unwise answer to his question. "So, where is she buried?"
"I don't know! It-" Another explosion of agony as the hunter plunged the blade through her other foot. Iosefka screamed so hard it felt like her throat might split from the strain. Hot tears squirted out the corners of her eyes as she clenched them shut against the unrelenting pain. Pain in her hands, pain in her feet, pain in her stomach, pain in her head and her mind. For a moment she thought she might die simply because she couldn't handle any more pain.
"This is your last chance," the Hunter cooed, his words thick with mock regret. "If you can't give me anything useful, I'm going to cut that thing out of your stomach and crush it under my boot."
"No!" Iosefka hated the pleading sound of her own voice, but she did not come so far only to have some sadistic savage throw it all away in search of some long dead hunter's grave! If she could just get him to leave without hurting the child of the Stars, her wounds would amount to nothing more than an unpleasant memory on the road to ascension. The Choir scholar wracked her brain trying to come up with something, anything, to satisfy the hunter's need for answers.
Iosefka jerked her head up, a stray lock of blonde hair coming free from her ponytail and sticking to the blood on her cheek. She considered what she knew of Maria before her work in the Choir's Research Hall. Maria had been one of the revered Old Hunters and part of the original Hunter's Workshop. She was also the direct protégé of Gehrman.
Wait, that was it! Rumor had it that Gehrman had been obsessed with Maria, as if she were the daughter he never had. When Maria died, the old man never recovered. Iosefka knew of several Old Hunters buried at or near the abandoned workshop that had been Gehrman's! It would make sense if he had her laid to rest there.
"Gehrman's old workshop," Iosefka said, talking fast. "The Hunter's Workshop he founded in the earliest days of the Hunt!"
"That workshop exists only in the Dream," the hunter said, his patience slipping. "Speak sense."
"Wait, this is the truth!" Iosefka said, panic rising like bile at the back of her throat. "It may exist in a dream now, but the original is here in Yharnam tucked in one of the lower layers of the city. The old workshop can be found beneath the Church Workshop in the old spire below. It's abandoned and difficult to reach, but it is there! I swear it by the Cosmos! I swear on all of my life's holy work!"
The hunter started to pace around the table, a massive bird of prey circling its injured quarry. Watching him as he stalked around her, Iosefka lamented the helm which hid his features from her. She wouldn't know his intentions until it was too late, until he plunged the blade into her stomach and carved the divine blessing from inside her. Though, even if she could see it in his eyes, what could she do to stop it?
"Well, then," he said, stopping in front of her and nodding to himself. "That is something useful."
Iosefka breathed a heavy, shuddering sigh of relief and rested her forehead against the table. She gave the answer he wanted, surely the hunter would leave her in peace. A powerful hand at the nape of her neck shattered Iosefka's delusion. The hunter pushed her down flat onto the operating table. Her face pressed painfully into the hard surface causing a hoarse cry to squeak through her lips.
A second hand gripped Iosefka by the shoulder and flipped her onto her back. Pain wracked her body in jerky convulsions as another contraction clenched her lower stomach. The thing inside her flipped and rolled like a panicked animal. Fresh agony lanced through her like a knife to the gut. Had something ruptured inside her?
"You cannot do this!" Iosefka shrieked and thrashed, spittle flying from her swollen lips. The hunter pinned her back down by the throat and loomed over the Choir scholar, his face hovering just a few centimeters from hers.
"I never said I would let you go free," the hunter said, his pretense of calm collapsing altogether. "After all the horror you and your ilk have imposed upon the people of this city. After all the lies and poison the Healing Church has pedaled to its unwitting congregation. After all the unfathomable atrocities the Choir has collected through its experiments, did you expect I would let you go unpunished?"
The palpable hatred in the hunter's words fell on her with physical weight squeezing the air from her lungs. Iosefka struggled against his hold as she looked around for something, anything, to help her escape. This couldn't be how it ended, mere moments from the fruition of her life's work. Try as she might, the Crowfeather hunter held firm.
"The stars are beyond your reach," the hunter said. The tip of his blade pressed into the flesh of her stomach just above the pregnant bump her divine gift.
"No!" Iosefka screamed. She started to thrash again, but it only drove the weapon's tip deeper. "No! Noooooooo!"
Through the fat and muscle tissue, the hunter drew a long incision up and over the squirming bump of her stomach. Then, sheathing the blade on his hip, he worked both hands into the incision and pulled it open wide. Unbelievable pain sent Iosefka's head jerking, eyes rolling in their sockets, as her overloaded nerves struggled to keep up with the sensory overload.
Pushing his hands deeper into her abdomen, Iosefka continued to scream as he rooted around for the premature Great One inside her womb. She felt the presence thrash and roil as the hunter seized it, and a single thought, clear as glass, slipped through the whirlwind of chaos in her mind. "This is not simple punishment. He's relishing this, reveling in it." Whether the thought was her own or a gift of the Great One connected to her, Iosefka couldn't be sure.
At last, the hunter pulled his hand from her stomach. In it he held not the infant deity, but its lifeline, the umbilical cord. Iosefka's swollen, tear-laden eyes widened as she understood the final cruelty he intended for her.
"The vile bastard!" She thought, lamenting the cosmic unfairness of it all. "He will deny it birth, not even birth by cesarean, not even birth for but a heartbeat!" Iosefka clenched her teeth so hard she thought they might shatter. The hunter gave the umbilical cord a sharp yank, and she felt something tear inside her. He yanked again, and one end came free. The ragged stump of flesh spurted like a hose gushing blood all over Iosefka and the hunter. Droplets ran down the grooves and runnels of the hunter's helmet and gauntlets, glimmering in the lantern light like carmine gemstones. One last yank ripped the cord free. It dangled like a dead serpent from his fingers.
Darkness continued to gather at the edges of her vision. It felt like she was looking at the world down a long, dark corridor. All sound drained away from her notice except the sick rattle of her own breathing. Even the whispers of the Great Ones started to slip away from her, growing first difficult to understand and then far away.
"Please, all I have done was done to bring me close to you," she thought, suddenly too tired to feel anything but a hollow sadness at being left behind. "Don't leave me alone." The vast presences of the Great Ones did not return, however. The Choir scholar failed to bear their child unto life, thus they would go on to sire another. Iosefka's senses slipped away one after the next. In her final moments, shivering and scared of the endless dark, she understood that she had been as disposable and cosmically inconsequential as everybody else.
The last light faded; infinity swallowed her.
*oOo*
Garvan, the Last Crow of Yharnam, stood on the stoop outside Iosefka's Clinic trying to convince himself that his actions had been both reasonable and rational. He held the Blade of Mercy in one hand while he ran a soft cloth along its side with the other. The absorbent fabric, once a pale blue, had turned such a deep red it almost appeared black.
Iosefka, like the Healing Church, needed to be punished. Given the state of Yharnam, who better suited to the task than a Hunter of Hunters? All those poor people, sickly and in need of a safe place to wait out the Hunt, had been used as fodder for the fanatic's experiments. How many corpses did he find there in the caves beneath the clinic? How many of those blue-skinned abominations did he cut down as they wandered the halls of her building? She deserved to die, right? She deserved to suffer, too. Didn't she? Besides, Garvan needed answers. She would never have cooperated with him without some sort of threat, and bargaining with such a monster was out of the question.
His mind trailed back to those final moments in the clinic; such an intoxicating power, and he held it in his hands. Life and death, blood and arcana, secrets of the Great Ones, and he had stood there with the choice to nurture or smother it. No, that wasn't quite it. He stood there with the choice to take it for himself or leave it for another. In fact, he could still have it if he wanted it. He could have it right now. All he needed to do was reach into his pouch and take the umbilical cord and…
Garvan shook his head. No, he did what he did to punish a wicked woman and move closer to finding Maria. The thought of her trapped in Yharnam's madness without being able to dream turned his stomach. If he failed to find her, if she died out there somewhere, she would be lost forever.
The Hunter of Hunters stopped cleaning his weapon and cast the cloth aside, his sense of urgency renewed by the constant anxiety. Garvan couldn't stop and question himself, not when the weight of the answers might slow him down. He would carve up as many crazed hunters and fanatical scholars as it took to make it back to her. Only Maria mattered. Only Maria.
Wind swept through the courtyard outside Iosefka's defunct clinic. Garvan's crowfeather cloak fluttered around him as he crossed the yard and slipped out through the wrought iron gate. The Church Hunter Workshop awaited.