Chapter Two: London Bridge Is Falling Down
...
The stench is so thick in the air, that it makes Enid forget herself enough to take a gray scarf off a funeral-black carriage, the overturned one beside the mass of corpses.
Corpses for certain now, ones that look like more savage cousins of hers, fur and matted hair overflowing out from bandages soaked with some kind of incense. The soaked bandages are nearly taken too, if Enid isn't so afraid to find what's behind them, yeah. She'd rather risk getting burned, please.
Getting that close to the Yharnamites also means noticing certain features. Their elongated limbs, like someone had pulled and pulled and
pulled until their bones shaped to fit. And what came after is just a party to the ride. Skin, hair, clothing. How sharp their pitchforks are. How
used they are. Dull at the tips and corroded flanges.
Enid does not see much hay around.
She wraps her ill-gotten scarf ever closer. The charcoal gray of ash fabric, her stolen scarf tightening like a stolen mantle pulls and stretches until tattered. It's a good enough shield against the elements. Unfamiliar and cool against her skin.
Like stolen moonlight stained and peered through a blurry looking glass.
She tries to take a gun, but it burns her hand when she tries to take it. The heat must be getting to the metal. She ignores how she isn't even sweating. And how shiny the gunmetal is. She's good at that, ignoring things that she probably shouldn't. It's the only way she's keeping herself sane.
Elegant Victorian-style glass doors are splintered into pieces, hanging limply off their hinges and then crunched under Enid's shoes. Ashfall and clouds darkened with tainted smoke blot out the stars, the moon. From the horizon line to the zenith of the atmosphere, only an obscuring fog is visible over the skyline. It's impossible to tell the time.
It is early morning. It is the midnight hour. It's the sun at the highest point in the sun. It's all of the times of day, and it is none of them. It faintly feels a dream, but one where no matter how hard you pinch, the only reward will be the reddened skin.
Perfect, Enid loves a slice of unreality to go with her looming cataclysm of epic proportions. This surely won't leave Marina trench-deep grooves into her psyche, nope. Nope, definitely not. She'll come out of this no worse for wear, smelling of rose and pushing up daises.
Not even for all her contrived causality and all the power her teenage hyper-analysis of her own mental state can Enid shake off Yharnam's enormousness.
Every street paved, cobbled in stone laid in intricate patterns, runic and foreign to Enid. Imagery unknown and elaborate in such a way that suggests the sculptor poured out every scrap of devotion they could when modeling soft marble into cracked stone. The architecture appears monolithic, grand, as if every basilica, buttress and balustrade are to be their own over-decorated and overly designed work in some contemporary museum. Rising over each corner, buildings carve themselves out of the dark slate, thick with grim and of soot's creaks and crackles. But no less tall in the sight of the mind. Even before the fire, it would have made for an hauntingly beautiful city with endless ghosts.
Tonight, you can see them all dancing through the fire.
The insides of most buildings are made of wood, and so are the rafters, and so too are a large number of the roofings and so on and so on— and so you can imagine what great kindling it all makes, but as if the foundations are a little wet… they burn slower. Green firewood, high smoke. Just without the green, something else must be soaking the infrastructure. The overall effect makes it seem as if each house is lively with candlelight. Some with licks of orange-red soft serve on top. Some with that same flaming soft serve pouring out.
That metaphor has run away from Enid, to be honest.
The smoke steaming from every orifice also doesn't really fit the ice cream metaphor.
She walks through the shiny wet rivers between bodies piled high into makeshift charnel houses, through the endless gentle snow of their remains. It's not so grisly, as it is desensitizing. There's horror sure, but after the hundredth or so similar sights, it's a distant kind of horror. The kind of horror that sits with you long after and imprints itself onto your vision as a constant,
where am I? Am I gone, or am I still there? Can I ever leave?
The bridge to the
Cathedral Ward challenges any thought of escape. Here, it says, here is your absolution. Crawl through the abattoir and present yourself to your hook
. The fisherman is waiting.
It's also where Enid catches her first true glimpse of what Hunters hunt.
A furry thing-not wolf, because not even the therianthropic werewolves of the Old World (distant cousins that only ever came once on Enid's 10th birthday and were immediately sent away as soon as someone scented them… Which became an awfully long time, her great uncle Elijah claimed that he had to scent for the
absence of smells) have the kind of transformations that visibly
hurt.
Limbs so long that the joints have jutted out and forced the shoulders far and high into the wolven torso. Their claws are long and yellowed, but sharp like fangs, Enid slowly unsheathes her claws, compares— they're not even in the same family. Theirs are forced deep into the hands, finger bones and keratin fused together in a curling sort of mutation. Nails gnarled into themselves sharpened on their own cracking and separation.
These terrible, powerful, savage beasts lie dead, sprawled across the bridge, some falling off its edges, and
one impaled on the statues lining the bridge.
Enid has to press her hands tightly to her mouth, tightly enough to choke. Something rancid on her tongue, bitter like steel and sweet like pork.
Its hands are clutched together, fingers intertangling, elbows out. It's
praying. It's praying and it's impaled through a hooded mother shielding her babe. Someone, it has to be someone, there's no room to drop it out from the fucking sky, somehow forced the sweetly curved head of the mother statue through the torso of the beast.
Enid goes numb. There's no metaphor there, just plain truth.
They're people,
oh gods, they were always people. No, worse… They
remember being human. Pray because they're afraid, pray to whatever gods are listening to save them.
Pray so that they may die quick.
The bridge is rife with corpse piles rising into ash, so thick that a constant drip, drip, drip
drops off the sides. She doesn't hear it's impact below. Her shoes stick. Her steps splish and splash and splish and
crush. Bone, in brilliant white grin up at her from the sole of her shoes. In the fire's light, nothing is hidden. This can only be a portrait of madness painted in merry flames.
This is what they must call Yharnam's Hunt. The Long Night.
She passes under a gate marking the first third, and the smoke clears enough from the bridge's gap all the way to what must be the great centrality of Yharnam and then to its Cathedral ward. All the smoke and ash clears and clears in a great sweeping of wind and heat, until she sees something distantly not red or gray or graying into black at the other end of the bridge.
Something moving.
Pale green shines like a beacon. No, not just a mere beacon but something other. What surely is the core of a star hurls light through Enid's eyes, through her optical nerves and spears against the soft of her brain.
Plip, plop. Pop. Wetness leaks from her eye, but she doesn't notice. And the scent of sickly sweet iron is so thick she won't be able to even tell if one more drop is added.
Her claws unsheathe without her input. Enid glances down, eyes wide. They won't retract. She pushes one, and it nearly splits her palm in resistance.
"Hello there? Will whomever is there speak their name?" The voice originates where that pale light is moving,
moving with purpose. Despite the polite gentlemanly nature of the ordinary questions, the source moves towards Enid in a directed line that makes no mistake as to who is the target.
A person, in the midst of all this slaughter? Clang, clang.
Absolution calling, clear as a bell.
"Oh, are you too lost to even speak? Your teeth too full for your mouth? The light in your eyes unseeing and
spilling?" Every word grows louder. Grows until the man is nearly shrieking by the end. "Speak beast! SPEAK YOUR NAME!"
Enid steps backwards, backpedaling in her haste, nearly tripping over herself. She's too late.
The first shotgun blast hits her in the right leg. Shin splint, shin rupture. Something liquid rips through her veins. Traces a path of ruined cells in its path through her. Self hemorrhaging cells expand explosively from the point of origin. Bursting cell membranes burst the liquid deeper into her muscles fibers and bone.
Silver.
She goes spinning into the railing of the bridge, and somehow scrambles off it, stumbling, ears ringing. Heart trying to both rip out of her chest and stop cold, blood on fire and
digging at her flesh, she barely manages to fall behind one of the statues as a second shot splits rubble over her.
The air splits, and her instincts force Enid to somehow jump onto the statue, (her wounded leg makes a
tearing noise, like a wet paper towel ripping off a dirty plate) climbing over the impaled werewolf without a single care for its humanity or relation. Hands scrabbling, scratching, gripping chunks of hair and flesh that come away bloody-black.
A soundless noise passes just under her, Enid can't
even see it, but the blood pooling ripples like under the force of a great wind. And the statue crumbles over, fortunately falling into the bridge and throwing Enid just past its destruction. Unfortunately, her head cracks on the railing of the other side of the bridge. Hard.
Blind animal panic dies.
The smoke is gone. The air clear, and so her sight is perfectly able to take in the source of the terrible pale light. The bloom of color dispersed through the smoke has left with it, and the beacon is pure. Undiluted. A sword-swo—sword— Enid's brain breaks.
Stops. Restarts and crashes anew.
Her brain grinds back up semi-functioning to somehow staring at the ground, the man's feet entering her field of view. Unseeing eyes go up, up avoiding the thing on the shoulder.
Ivory garments billow in the vacuum made by the unseen, ornate and obviously significant, but the face. The face! Flayed skin wraps under broken pupils, inky black bleeding into the iris. Ropey scar tissue pockmarked with patches of fur and gray hair approximate the vague shape of a nose and mouth. Layers of flesh pull themselves apart to show teeth. Mouth like a wound. Damaged skin pulling itself apart in deep red-black. "There you are, Beast. I had hoped to find… but hope's a foolish thing. Only the mad would come here. Only beasts."
Ludwig, scream the tiny hoarse voices under the corpse piles.
Ludwig, Ludwig the Denigrate! Beast, beasts!
Ludwig of the Healing Church, Denigrated Beast
(▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓)
Enid still cannot look at the
thing in his hand.
But she doesn't need sight to slash. For instincts to rule. To run. Claws rake against the
thing without sound, but it rings in Enid's ears like chalk on black— quick defensive swipe and run away, chance, only choice, chance, run, run, run—
Crack!
Explosion, ripping flesh, burning liquid, impossible cold and unbearable heat.
Silver.
Her last good knee finally blows out and the barrel of his rifle, absurdly held in one hand, goes onto further absurdity by flipping up too quickly for her eyes to track. It fires again. Her left arm flies backwards— flopping uselessly like it's in the wind from the sheer force.
She didn't even see!
Enid falls to one ragged knee in the span of a breath.
It… it happened so
fast.
She doesn't even register she's about to die, her mind is still stuck two steps back trying to reconcile her intended actions and what occurred. The pain hasn't even hit yet. There's no fanfare, no pithy speech. No great swell of sorrowful horns, no abrupt record scratch. No terrible silence.
It almost feels like a joke, a sickening ugly joke. Death treated with this causality, this
indifference. And the punchlines is thus:
The pale light falls.
…
The stinger, is she returns.
"P-please! I need to get to the Cathedral ward! It's burning, It's all
burning, just let me help!"
The pale light falls.
…
A good joke is funny once, a bad one can be done over and over and over, ad nauseum.
"Why won't you let me help you?! Fucking why?! The city is on
fire. Why, wh-!"
The pale light falls.
…
"Th-there's, there's a person back there. G-Gilbert, you know, Gilbert right? Gilbert! People are still alive you— just look!"
…
"I-I'm not even a
real werewolf. Totally fake, hahahhahahaah.. Hah. See baby claws, oh. Well, maybe you can't, can't. can't. can'tcan't…"
…
"Beast, beast! You wa-want a beast, right? Want to ki, kil, kill, kill them right? I… I can show you to them, I have a good nose— But not like a wolf, not like a beas—!"
…
The feeling carves itself in her bones, in every cell of her inhuman body, the etchings in her soul. Her mind forgets, but Enid is not human, even if she herself hardly believes that.
She tries pleading.
She tries begging.
She tries praying— her head falls off that time instead of being smashed through the middle.
Rude.
She gives up her feeble morality.
For a wolf, when it encounters another predator it can do, let's say, three things. Fight, fawn, flee. And when her throat is in the other's jaws, she stops. Let's herself die.
The pale light falls.
…
But letting herself die and actually dying are two very different things.
Enid's actually not quite sure what she's doing.
Her steps are light, purposeful and yet heavy in a way they've never been. Steps click on the bloodied stone. Heel first, eighth note clipped in the wings, then the ball of the foot, minor key note down the ladder, final. Her claws are already unsheathed, and held loosely at her side. Odd, she usually has them up like boxer mitts. Mimicking the way her brothers do, and they from staring at the TV for hours burning punches like suns into their eyes, and her to them watching, wanting… It doesn't feel odd, so she puts that thought aside.
Maybe she's growing up, down. Down. Sideways.
Her hair is nearly to her chest. Thick enough to be a cloak of liquid flax lanced through with pink and bright blue. She lifts a strand in her hand, and sees it spool out, growing visibly before her eyes. Like cancer cells through a microscope, only infinitely faster. The stolen ashen scarf taken off a
corpse billows off her shoulder. As comfortable as a second skin.
She ties hair with hair, another old trick she learned from wanting. Long hair is a symbol in werewolves. Their very own kind of status for the wolves thought of as blessed by the moon. They call it mirroring, Yoko calling her out on some sun-shot day. She calls it hope and delusion, two sides of a coin.
"A beast that moves like a Hunter? Ah… So my nightmare has followed me even to here. Inglorious blooddrunks and hollow mockeries never cease." Ludwig follows suit, his steps ringing off the brickwork in tandem. Speeding up and slowing down until hers and his match the beat of the drum. They ring out like a pendulum counting down. Closer and closer until the weight stops in the middle.
"I'm just, Enid. Not beast. Not Hunter." She blinks slowly, one eye lidding at a time. "I think," The words are sludge and the thoughts are thick in her cracking brain. A mess tumbles out. "You have to get out of my way." That is not what comes out and yet that is what she hears, believes. (I think I have to kill you.)
"
Know." He corrects, none so harshly. "Know you must kill so, in order to cling onto whatever facsimile of humanity you have left. Know you must return and return again, shedding more and more of that fragile skin until the beast all but
spills. Was the Nightmare once not enough?"
She's early, they've actually nearly met in the bridge's middle where it widens into a circular makeshift arena. For the first time, they're equal. Almost.
Ludwig smiles, a real crooked sort of crescent in red. "Do you know…"
Enid listens despite herself. Hangs onto every word, because beyond all the terror, all the merciless lethality, there is only a man. A man of the church-is the Church of its hymns and its psalms and songs. A man possessed of the terrible sort of beauty that only faith can bare, that revolting charisma of religious fervor. One whose words are nearly gospel cannot be ignored lightly. Blasphemy, after all, is not a blameless crime.
"The only things that do not return on these long, awful nights…" Enid sees herself reflected in the shine of blood on Ludwig's marred face, "are
Humans."
The first shot just grazes her shoulder, her body already low and pushing forward at Ludwig moves into a spin with her claws. Red and silver confetti erupts out of the wound, and something like golden thread bursts out before any more blood can. An alien manifestation of the supernatural. Enid doesn't see any of that, so focused on Ludwig. Her vision condenses into a tunneling vignette, edges blurring into dark. Nails elongated to something like eagle talons gather up force against the ground, an ungodly shriek neither of them flinch at.
What he does flinch at though, is her hooked fist trying to bury itself under his ribcage.
The force sends Ludwig skidding back, but not before another shot sprays rubble and blood up in the air—
He shot at the ground— a distraction (Move). Enid ducks to the side, as a wave of unseen force slashes through it. It further throws the bullet's splinters of metal still falling in the air like shrapnel. Tiny silver particulates shred the air, one opening a perfectly circular void in her hair.
But her body shields behind a statue before it can do the same to her body.
"There is no hiding in a hunt, beast!"
He's right, so she kicks the statue down. Predictably it's smashed to pieces by that strange invisible force again before it can do anything.
Dashing to the other side, Enid's claws come out to—
Crack! Silver pellets shatter her carefully painted nails into a riot of atomic blue glitter.
Hey! She
liked those! (Fingers snap back into place, something worms underneath her skin.)
Ludwig dashes forward, but fresh nails emerge instantly to shred that flayed face into ribbons of crimson. He
screams. The
thing-sword in his other hand cleaves through her shoulder, crushing bone and bursting open major blood vessels. Enid doesn't scream in return. A little busy dying for that.
Golden fur sprouts over the gaping wound before Enid can even really really understand she nearly died. Filling in the void with tawny wheat, stitching back together the deathblow with the ease of a nurse on fifty years, overworked and efficient beyond belief.
Ludwig's eyes widen. And widen some more, when she sweeps him from standing to crawl. Her upper torso proves too unbalanced in its
freshness, so she simply uses the rest of her body, to devastating effect.
He throws himself into a backwards roll, and immediately another blast of silver forces Enid to swing over the railing, swinging on her dug-in claws— just for moment, it's only burning Yharnam far beneath her— and comes back up to propel herself into Ludwig. He blocks with his sword. It doesn't help.
Monstrous strength pushes Ludwig all the way into the other side of the bridge,
sharp against the railing. A sickening snap rings out clear as a bell. Not yet the final bell, only the call for it's coming.
He pushes himself up as rubble crumbles from beneath his impact, his torso hanging oddly, just so slanting to the left.
She leaps at him again, and the barrel of his rifle comes up, but somehow they both know it's empty. All that pretty silver used up on killing things that won't die. The gun falls, as his fist rises to catch Enid's temple. Ring. She stumbles, and his knee breaks her chin. Ring.
Her head snaps back. Up.
There, the boundless crimson sky streaked through with dark clouds. She can't see the moon. But she knows, she
knows… The pale light is about to come down. It
falls— just as her claws punch out Ludwig's chest. Visceral and beating, she can
feel his heart rending on her claws, massive and beating inhumanely quick, and she
pulls.
Blood practically erupts out of his body in rivers and lakes, Enid is bathed in it.
Ludwig doesn't seem to even notice for a moment. Staring at his s-sword with unseeing eyes. His hand pat at his chest, feels the hole. Crimson spurts against the pressure of his fingers.
"Oh…" He staggers, has to stab the pale light into the bridge's back. Holding himself upright through sheer musculature rather than any of its shattered bone structure. He finally finds Enid's eyes. Blue.
"As always…" He breathes out.
"As always the beast-possessed denigrate was I." The man almost looks like he wants to laugh, a wheeze is all he has instead. "Is this proven true yet again? What's the use of eyes to
see if I only continue and continue to turn them away?"
The fight's over, the bells rung and rung over and over, and now is curtain call. This is only the closing act to a long farce of a life. This comedy's finally over, someone's taken it out back and shot it in the head.
Enid hobbles over to the rubble of a statue, blinks dumbly for too long on how she might sit on jagged stone, decides to just fall over it. Her head is heavy. That's probably the snapped spine and shattered skull. It lolls to the side and can't get back up. "I don't know. I can't even spell denigrate. You might as well be speaking another language to me."
"... what?"
"Denigrate, I mean. Just saying… sounds like a made-up word. And not to brag, but I'm number two in English. Made-up words are kind of our spe-cia-lty." Fucking Wednesday, stole the one thing she had over Bianca. Can't she be first in just one thing? "Someone using denigrate is compensating for something and it's soooo not working."
"... They were correct though. I became the most hideous of beasts." He murmurs to himself as if reciting something, "As Clerics are wont to do… I became a fusion of horse, wolf, and man in what should not be. Ridden so with blood I could not even see what was at my side all along." His grip on the sword tightens, Enid should probably take that as a threat but her bruised brain really doesn't want to.
Besides… Humans don't get to come back. Only the monsters return.
Enid eyes him as her head lilts to the side. "You don't look like a horse to me. What kind of drugs were you on? I don't think even Ajax has ever got that high." Oops, she wasn't supposed to say it like
that. Unfiltered Enid is not okay. She meant. Y'know. Okay, maybe she said it exactly as she meant to. And really, if he was a horse then, he isn't one now.
"Hahah…" He answers, "Hubris. A more addictive substance there never was."
"Well, damn. Literally me." Though in Enid's case, she merely attempted to coup Bianca Barclay for Queen Bee in a petty high school drama. Still a comparison, if not a fair one. Got her heart smashed too, actually. Bianca can be
ruthless.
"You speak strange words fair-haired unbeast. Would I be correct in naming you a foreigner to our holy city?"
It's called being younger than sin, not
for-eig-ner… She's also a foreigner but that's unrelated.
Enid is not even going to analyze whatever the fuck he just called her. "Absolutely. What gave me away? My shirt? You guys don't have Taylor Swift here?" The said shirt is utterly drenched in blood. And half torn asunder down the celebrity's neck. RIP. Tay Tay. "I, uh, know she doesn't look too great here, but that's on you."
She can see his non computation and really, Enid should be nicer to dying people. Later. She resolves, later.
"You were saying I was totes a foreigner? Lovely place you got here, Tourist destination for the ages."
"Indeed, Yharnam truly will go down in the ages. Sooner rather than later it seems." Ludwig stares off into the distance, into the flames that have reached into the sky on towering spires, on monuments dedicated to reaching into the cosmos. And hunting those unseen rulers. He shakes himself as if out a trance. Or perhaps a dream. "Then questioning you on my Church Hunters is pointless… Our burning city really does say more than I ever needed to hear."
That makes Enid lurch up, something hollow and boney on her head knocking against the shorn torso of gothic statue number 12. Fuck. "Burning! Yharnam is burning, that's right!" Her entire reason for going on this god-forsaken twice damned, motherfucking bridge. "We gotta get the Healing Church or whatever 'Authority to authorize' to put it out!"
That's why she's here, right! How could she forget?
Ludwig stares at her, says very delicately for a man with a hole still pumping his organs out into the street. "A purge of this magnitude. Of this severity cannot be undone. Nor is it the work of those alone. The past… with all its foolish youthful violations has repeated itself."
Enid cants her head like a golden retriever. "You're gonna have to be less cryptic my dude. I'm pretty sure you concussed the hell out of me and I have zero idea on what's the what of Yharnam. Foreigner, remember?" And she highly doubts burning an entire city down can be chalked up to 'youthful' indiscretions.
"I will be plain."
Finally, finally! Enid would cheer. If y'know… not for the mood. So not the time.
Ludwig's voice solemn, final. "The Healing Church will not help, cannot help. Yharnam is fallen, and we are both the architects of its creation and its ruin. Ah-!" a cough rips through him, a wet wracking expulsion of more fluid than air. "Ahahah! Lady Maria would have laughed her heart out, this,
this— Out of all her curses,
this is the one that finally spells the end of our reckless ambition!"
Who the fuck is Lady Maria.
But it seems that last laugh hollows the man out more than even Enid's fist. He has no more to inform, no more plain truths to doom.
Ludwig fiddles along his hip. Takes out a murky syringe. Considers it for a moment. The glass reflects the flames, magnifies the city's silhouette against the sky and blurs, twists, warps smoke-ridden areas into shadow figures dancing out stories from some time lost to antiquity. Dark liquid drips viscously inside as he flips it, and the liquid seems to forget gravity exists for a moment until it eventually remembers to slide down.
Enid watches blankly.
Watches as Ludwig tosses it right over his shoulder and over the bridge.
"What was that about?"
He smiles, something serene even in the wrapping scar tissue and cysts of fur and hair. "Just merely excising hubris."
He lifts himself up, pulling away his hand that was keeping pressure on his wound. Dark and wet fall from the hole. It's too thick to be only blood. He steps over his intestines without a care. The pale green block of metal drags behind him. "Now, you said that you wished to go to Cathedral Ward, yes?"
"Um, Kinda pointless now, isn't it?" She's so lost. "You said it, we're all fucked. Yharnam's a goner."
"There are still things left for you to do, are there not? You still cling onto that light, that fragile skin,
Do you not?" Enid jumps to attention, like he's pulling her up by the shoulders and looking her right in the eye. "Then seek the tomb hidden beneath, into the charred corpse of what we built upon— I believe there still lies an exit in our buried crime, there. This nightmare need not be your end too, unbeast."
Ludwig strains with the effort, pulling the enormous greatsword— and Enid
sees it grow and grow until it's fit for a giant, a monstrous thing fit for a monster's hands.
In the reflection, it's not a man, but the broken calcified face of a horse with a man's eye staring back. "Just a hair, just a fleeting thing. Dim and rotted through and surrounded by depravity. But it is there."
His back faces towards her, every sign of weakness and his fall hidden behind that resplendent cloak.
Enid can only just make out his whisper, his prayer. "My true mentor, my guiding moonlight. One final dream, please. One
final dream, please."
Ludwig brings the sword up to the sky, and the pale light falls.
There it is. The moon.
…
