The Wolf and the Dog (Wednesday x Bloodborne)

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Eleven: Just a Normal Girl to Girl Chat

…​

Are you kind to me, Enid wants to ask, because I want you to be so? Or am I finally seeing the truth of things here in the unflinching darkness.

Neither answer would satisfy her in truth, because the only reply would come from herself.

Wednesday, or the conjuration of her, the ghost of her, the apparition that exists in Enid's lonely traumatized degenerating mind walks alongside her in the ship's hull. While Enid traces over the floral designs charred into the wood, Wednesday examines the silver metallurgy cast into the shape of eyes and of the bottomless sea.

"A silly question either way, Enid. Who I am, remains the same." The phantom is never kind enough to dispel the illusion in full, only hint at it, poke at it with a heated rod. Imply and insinuate, prod the shape of her fragile barrier between self-immolation and crushing despair. So that at the least, is accurate to the image's muse. Sadist, feels like affection even in her mind's voice. "You must be quite relaxed to ponder over meaningless things and conversing with delusions. I'm impressed."

The grim little light in Wednesday's eyes begs to differ, and so does Enid. "Shush you." It's too weak to be a command with any heat, but her mind listens anyway.

A mimed sewing of the lips. Up and down, puncturing pallid skin in sour sting, from where Enid stands Wednesday looks to have taken in a particularly strong lemondrop into her mouth. She misses her, terribly so even in that flash of a moment. Misses the voice, cool and smooth in the iron-ribbed wood without it's echo— the shape of her feels unwhole. Enid is not enough, not anymore, not here. But to lean on the unreal is a curse unlike any other.

It's a little odd to be mourning someone who's still alive. Why, anyone would ask, would she? Can she not simply walk, shout and shout until she's weak in the head and light on her knees and realize the thing she's buried is already in front of her? Exercise your right for self-flagellation all you must, but this… this is simply unexplainable.

She's stupid so she mourns it all anyway. What could have been, if Enid had been… a little less herself and maybe Wednesday a littles(lot) less… well, Wednesday.

The difference is, when the ghost in Enid's head insults her, mocks her, it's playful, teasing. There is a guarantee.

With Wednesday there is never a guarantee. The insults verge on the degrading, the mocks designed to hurt, the threats all the more tangible. They dig into the soft parts of her, and in their aching absence they leave the strewn apart ugliness inside of Enid to be exposed and leaves her to gather it all up again and force it down back into herself. Rope, shovel, hole.

But at the very least, Enid thinks, Wednesday isn't so pathetic to imagine an image of herself and manipulate it into comfort.

Black pigtails trail like a banner in front of her eyes, flowing on their own wind. It makes Enid think of dark green weeds floating in the sea. "Are you done with your self-flagellation?"

Enid smiles a little lopsided, half of her doesn't really want to but is too weak to try. "Probably not."

The ship's hull rocks back and forth, gently, softly. The construction's so thick, Enid can't hear the roar and drop of waves. But she can see them, Yharnam's architect having taken a fancy to designing mile-length galleons apparently, after their punishment on the gantry. Stained glass windows built into the hull show only a murky moving black. What's the point of building windows into something you can't see? What a maniac. Why color the unseen world?

Or perhaps, she realizes, the architect is not painting the sea rose gold and rubies in silver constellations but them. The observer from a wholly different perspective. What must they look like to thalassic watchers, wretched in their sublime beauty? The visitors from the divide above. Their own very wall of air and light. Surely, surely, they must be angels.

Enid avoids looking into them. Wednesday is kind enough to plant herself on the left anyways, forcing her to glance at those lightless depths every so often simply in order to speak to her.

"Are you afraid?"

"No," Enid lies.

"Liar." It's fond, and Enid can spy the slight curve of her mouth.

There's no sound except the click of her shoes on wood, and the creak of old things greeting the new. Enid almost imagines someone singing out there, a siren in the dark. A lantern of noise in the cold shadows.

"Have you noticed, Enid? The lycanthropes here are so very different to those thoughtless mutts in the lupine cages. Larger, more anthropomorphic. More human. Their limbs fail to become digitigrade." Enid glances at Wednesday.

The questions force Enid from her imminent dissociation and wholly back into the present, unwelcome and overwhelming. Re-examining her past is alien. Disgusting. She's been there already, why must they continue to circle back to her? Leave her alone. Stay. "... I guess. Why are you bringing this up now?"

She can't catch Wednesday's eyes, not even in the reflection of the glass. "It makes you wonder. Just what are they(you) turning into?"

Enid knows. "A beast."

Wednesday smiles. Her cheeks, Enid stares, are smooth.

Somewhere, a brass horn squeals out, loud and unstoppable. So very loud that Enid's body rings with the distortion. Twin squeals hiss out behind it, and somewhere, something begins to turn over and over. The ship churns the placid reflection of the sky into chaotic wake.

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Twelve: Lenore

…​

(why, why are you back again? This terrible homecoming, this frightful trapped in between the two. Let her go. Let her stay.)

Something she learned a long, long ago, it's important to test what you know.

Werewolves and the others of their ilk, shapeshifting monsters to whom the human form is merely another set of clothes to wear; all who don monstrous skins must all know this: the face of what you see is hardly an indication to what you should believe. Oftentimes, the strongest and largest wolves come from bodies that are like frail weeds. Weak, sickly. It, hardly, seems rational to believe that such staggeringly strong Lycans can emerge from stick-thin emancipated hosts, yet reality shows it true. Glacial moonlight, a sword from the heavens gifted. Strong, indomitable, beautiful.

Nature seems to delight in its fantastical deceptions. That is why… you have to know.

Enid opens her eyes. It's the day of the Poe Cup.

The sky smiles a healthy light blue, the clouds over Vermont are airy and fluffy stretched like long taffy over the sun. The temperature is brisk but clean. Pine, and just-beginning to fall leaves paint the lake's edge in warm fire.

Thing waves at her, with a distinctly confused air for a disembodied hand. His half-and-half of ASL is beginning to click for Enid, so she signs and speaks to him easily. Reading the body language of a single hand is oddly familiar as well. For a moment, Enid is confused as well but then… ah, it's similar to the tendons tightening when Ludwig pulled the trigger of that thundering shotgun. That won't haunt her for years to come, nope. Her knees make a popping noise as they bounce restlessly.

Wednesday is nowhere to be seen, but that's normal. She's never been around for any of their morning rituals. Probably off terrifying poor Nevermore students or extracting poison, goth behavior really, but that's fine. Having someone else in here, well, it'd make these mornings wrong. It wouldn't be theirs' anymore. Thing and Enid. Enid and Thing.

Enid answers, "Just felt like it was time for a change." She's pinned her short hair back, so it falls in meticulous curls to frame her face. She isn't quite as gaunt, but her restless sleep certainly has stolen a number of pounds off her. A fleeting idle thought, how long till she and Gilbert are mistaken as siblings? By her guess, not far off. "Don't I look like a devilishly pretty androgynous lead in a gothic horror? Ready to blow the socks off some repressed romantic archetype?" She winks.

Curls for horns…truly the heathen iron rod twisting and glowing infernal red would be a true witch's focus.

Agreement comes in the shape of a thumbs up followed by a rocker's greeting.

Almost absentmindedly, Enid plucks a pale flower out of her desk drawer, loops it once round her finger and pins it through the hole into her collar. A prick on the skin, but no red on the stark white of her shirt.

However Thing 'sees', he makes no mention of the oddly colorless sunflower.

Thing flashes a series of signs in quick succession. His nails gleam in the light attracting the eye, cute little patterns Enid had painted on last night, still wet, still before they set just right. Electric blue across thunder-black nights. They match his sassy words perfectly.

Enid blanches. "I don't look like Wednesday. Blegh! This is a white shirt, a white shirt! I'm Preppy, she's Dark Academia!" At the hand's continuous snappy snarky remarks about her newfound fashion, she harrumphs. "No, seriously. She doesn't own a genre of clothing. And besides…"

Enid pulls her mouth into a curve. It has all the motions of an Enid Sinclair sunny smile, but it still feels fake. The light shining off her eyes seems to have lost its glimmer. Her eye crinkles aren't as deep, cheeks not as bright. But it's gone too quickly in the halcyon, giddy excitement of the school's tournament before any, not even Thing's Addams-keen perception, can really look.

"Haven't you heard of going out with style?"

…

"I'm going with you."

Enid wonders if Wednesday had been looking for her. She never seemed to give anything away, so Enid can never tell if she put any effort in. If anything she did was, at all, genuine and impassioned. From the heart, however dead and blackened it must surely be…

Or is this simply one among the multitude of hills Wednesday chooses to die on? There, on her mountain of molehills, every choice must seem like a general choosing their next conquest. Nothing but the cold calculus of a girl with only one thing on her mind. Homicide.

Either way, Enid mulls it over. Or pretends to at least, tapping an idle finger against her temple. "To, like, the Poe Cup? That's sweet of you, but you don't have to push yourself. No one is going to care if you don't show up."

Wednesday is scowling for some reason.

Last year, half of the school showed up. The year before, about three quarters— she's not a Byrgenwerth scholar, but as for how many will show up to see the Scales steamroll the competition again this year. Well, Enid's placing her bets on no one. "Most people are flaking, at least," Even the rest of the Black Cat messaged her only one word in the group chat, No, before she even had a chance to tell them the same. She corrects herself. "The people who don't have to show up are flaking at least… Isn't this a good chance for you to snoop? Don't let me keep you."

Wednesday lets Enid keep her anyway, probably just to be contrary. A very Wednesday thing to do, but Enid probably should stop thinking of the other girl so familiarly. It's weird. Not as weird as talking to her trauma-induced hallucination of the other girl, but still. Relativity is a slippery slope. "Have you finished speaking for me?" She hasn't even nodded in agreement yet, when, "Good. Don't be obtuse, Sinclair. You know very well—"

"I do?" Enid stretches her neck, to peer past Wednesday. Naturally the other girl has cornered her in a shadowed alcove just before the path to the lakeside. The sight of lazily waved flags in Outcast colors seem a little funny against Wednesday's all black silhouette. They just, don't fit.

"You do know very well." Wednesday shifts into her view again. Insistent. Determined in the way she's always determined, from the very moment starched black stepped into k-pop kaleidoscope. Enid can't imagine Wednesday anything other but a precious terror of stubborn finality her entire life. "... Wiping the smug smile off Bianca's face, I'd say we're in agreement there, are we not?"

There is a break, a pause, as Enid feels the words bounce around in her skull. Feels them enter her ears and shout their meaning. There is the wind and the sunshine and the quiet swell and spill of words and people in the background. No indication rises that they are suddenly separate, somehow more than two girls talking, but for a moment, it seems the world holds its breath. But it doesn't. The world goes on, the noises don't fade into the background, and the sun is just as bright, just as omnipresent.

"...huh," She's never been on this side before. Enid, surprised at herself, doesn't find it as enjoyable as people made it out to be. "This is awkward. I… don't… agree?"

Wednesday looks as shocked as Enid is as herself.

Rejecting people, denying them really really does not sit well with her. Is this what growing up feels like? It sucks. "Sorry, Wednesday." But it's not like they're. Friends or anything… After all, Wednesday Addams doesn't need anyone. "I want to lose on my own terms, m'kay?"

"You're being patently ignorant, by your own admission as well," announces Wednesday like she might a death sentence. Choosing to educate her foolish roommate, she states, "Losing is for those who are too weak to do what's necessary for victory."

Is that true? Enid, struck by a realization, thrums with the root of it.

Wednesday doesn't get it. Just as she names Enid ignorant, so too does Enid find her in turn ignorant. Wednesday moves like she might move the world with her every step, every certainty. The way she pushes against people, demanding and cold yet fully believing that she will grasp their fate and all their futures by the throat as if she alone was their arbiter. Cassandra reborn. Pounding the walls of the trojan horse, pounding at the rules that defy her escaping, defy her from investigating prophecy.

"Then I guess I'll be weak."

Wednesday in all the shades of black and white she has arranged the world for herself, and Enid in all the colors she's drowning her vision… not so much a truth demanding to be seen, but one that's simply forgotten to be articulated.

She can see it now, how they might've once placed themselves in each other's orbits and smashed each other into smithereens. Where after the calamitous impact, Wednesday would emerge, scarred but whole and Enid would slowly force herself back into some semblance of herself revolving around the other girl, a distant moon around its world. The Nobody of her Cassandra.

But like a thread snaps, the gilded intangible linkage between them simply severs itself as one might with a pair of scissors. Easily.

Enid neatly sidesteps her roommate, and strides one sure step at a time towards the sun shining off the waves. "See you later, Wednesday."

She doesn't say it back, but that's perfectly fine.

Enid wasn't really talking to her anyway.

…

It's a beautiful day. The sun is out. The very last vestiges of summer's warmth are fading, and autumnal flowers are pushing past the dying forest floor to peak out.

Enid's supposed to put on their theme, Black Cats, for the Poe Cup, but considering the rest of her team is currently stuck playing Pokemon in the infirmary. Well, and that they were technically poisoned 'allegedly' by Bianca because wowsers did high school drama go hard and no one cares, Enid doesn't feel particularly inclined to follow the apparently very easily ignored rules(guidelines).

Bianca's probably making some snarky remark, but as Enid checks her little canoe— Unfinished black paint, one eye missing, the whiskers with the consistency of scars at all— she doesn't really find it in herself to listen to. Hey Sinclair? Forget something? Someone else, Yeah the grace to back out. A high five, flesh slapping on flesh. Principal Weems gives her side eye, but Enid just blinks innocently at the woman until she looks away a little shamefaced.

Enid is terribly, awfully glad that Bianca will not say what the others say. She'll call out piercing remarks that snag against her skin and stick. Barbs and snide insults that will leave her crying and furiously plotting a vicious rumor against the Queen Bee, but never will Bianca retaliate with what the Furs say.

She's extra mean like that.

Gunshot. Off to the water.

Enid rows smoothly, lupine strength matching the other teams accumulated practice and natural skill at navigating water fast enough. She's not lagging too far behind most of the pack, about… below average for the total group of canoes.

A shout, a yelp really, and one of the canoes goes down. Some fairly inventive curses ring out.

Middle of the pack now. A Stoner attempts to flash their snakes, before everybody mobs that boat and overcrowds it until that particular team goes overboard. No one wants to be stuck as stone, why, they might sink all the way to the bottom of the lake.

Enid ducks under another Fur's wild oar swing, holds up one outstretched hand and neatly catches the end of it with her claw. Cracks it neatly in two. Plop, one end in the water. Shouts, furious growling, blah, blah, disappointment, fake werewolf. Normal stuff.

Bianca's Siren friend under the water has nearly flipped half of the other boats.

It's almost time. A swift dark shape rushes past her little ditty in the water, and Enid feels it shake and rumble. She feigns at poking her oar into the water, a fishline poking until caught. There's a tiny, not-even-a-second, moment where Enid recognizes she can simply pull the Siren out of the water entirely and throw them onto her boat. Split this overlong stick in two and impale her catch whole. Sup on the draining blood and bite at the communion of sea and man.

She can.

She doesn't.

Noise. Then just the water rushing everywhere around her and she's plunged into the chilly Autumn lake.

The other thing about their costumes is that they act as wetsuits with a cat headband and whiskers attached. Allowing for the students to not freeze out there. And every canoe comes with an inflatable you can easily attach, so even the worst swimmer can get to land. It's why Bianca's 'cheating' with her Siren friend is just that. 'Cheating'. Not attempted murder. Enid had punctured those safety inflatables herself around the time Bianca had been snarking at her. Just a tiny poke with her claws.

In the flailing, splashing, cursing of the mass of students who had been capsized and desperately trying to flip their boats, no one would notice the one singular student who didn't come back up. Not even the siren rushing to and fro from the remaining canoes.

It's a beautiful day. She can see the sun dappling over the water, see its cascades through the waving and splashing.

She has to know. Everything else can be explained away by her latent therianthropic abilities. Madness and bloodlust are fairly common, though being weeded out as Outcasts adapt to the modern age. Regeneration like a cancer, and shrugging off mortal wounds, well, Enid supposes werewolves have always been more than just the surface of skin and bones.

But the only things that come back from dying, really and truly dying. those... Can't be called monsters at all.

Survival instinct struggles in the cold, dark water. Her heavy formal clothes have already sunken deep into the murk of the lake, kicking up obscuring muck and dirt off the bottom of it. Anyone looking down would only see the writhing of aquatic life. Her lungs demand air, and instinct forces her mouth open, her nose to burn on water. Her center a blackhole demanding, demanding, air, relief of its burden, something anything.

It receives no answer it wishes to hear.

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Thirteen: Friday's Child is Loving and Giving

…​

The Poe Cup is over.

From west to east, the flaming ball in the sky has only just begun its revolution on the other side of the world. The stars look kindly down onto the quiet lake, the day's breeze having fallen away as the shadows grew into night. The still lake's surface, like a mirror, reflects them back though not quite as bright.

A ripple.

Two. Dark, murky, grotesque bubbling. And then, ripping itself free from the once-placid surface, like some forgotten monster among the mud, a melted half-real arm bursts, grasping into the air. In the nightfall, it's little more than a shadow among shadows, but through the noise and splashing, it returns to reality, becomes seen.

It forces itself through onto the sand of the beachside, where abandoned banners dull in the twilight. Half wrecked and broken canoes lay unclaimed and unwanted, waiting for when they'll be repurposed for an importune bonfire by stressed academics, leftovers become cover for the outpouring of water pushing itself onto the land.

Spluttering, shaking, trembling— but not from the cold, Enid drags herself onto the grey-hued sand. Crawls until there's more water sloughing off of her than clinging. A stomach of liquid mess empties from her mouth, all the rot and dying things gathered from the lake's bottom. None of it is clean, vomit and stomach acid running back down onto herself. Her lips are blue. Her fingers are worse. Before her blurry eyes, they refocus to see cherry-red working under its way from her too-pale skin to the blue-black. Like those multicolored popsicles, frostbite melts away as easily as a bad dream in the daytime.

The pain of regrowing nerves only to burn them again in the cold of a dead body need not ever be mentioned.

Enid looks up at the sky. It's a new moon. A bad moon. Not even nocturnal creatures come out on nights like this, all the Furs, Fangs and all the things that go bump in the night will be instead safely nestled inside, warm and happy.

So it is that no one notices a drowned thing amble up across unlit sands, onto crumbling earth, into the concrete pretending as real stone, and into the storied halls of Nevermore. Wet, sodden, drowned footsteps leave into fading remnants.

Somehow, eventually, she makes it back here.

Enid stares frozen at the entry of her, their, room. Just before the door, the clicks and clacks of an antique typewriter pause. Waiting. Enid takes a hitching breath, gathers herself with that intake of air. Her lungs bruise with it, but the onrush of pain threads heat into the intricately fragile construction of her resuscitating organs. She opens the door.

Immediately greeted by the dead-end voice of, "Do you want to know something?"

Wednesday is stiff as a corpse in her chair. Perfect posture being only a happenstance of who she is, not something to be earnt. The benefits of raising a girl synonymous with death's woe, it only makes the thought appear in Enid's head more clear, Angry.

Enid says tiredly, but hears it come out flat and cold, "What." Her eyes alight over the room, Thing's glow in the dark nail polish is nowhere to be seen. No electric blue in this lightless place.

"...Woken up on the wrong side of your frilly dishevelment you call a bed? Or," Wednesday's words are oddly delicate, like she's waiting for something. Her eyes catch on Enid's as she turns like she's a megalomaniac villain only missing a scarred white cat to pet. "Is it raining? You look like a drowned rat." Despite her words, Wednesday hardly seems to even look at Enid's damp clothing.

Wednesday doesn't insinuate, she's as honest as they come. Like an axe straight through the skull. This cute dance around the subject— have you seen a cat settle back on its haunches and watch its cornered prey? Wednesday hates cats. Too similar.

Naturally, there's only one option left to do.

Enid lies as easily as she breathes. "Why, thanks." Plaster on a smile, inhale and lift your chest, close your eyes. Don't look, don't look back. "Bianca's dumb friend knocked my brooch into the water." She shakes her head. "Didn't even have the decency to help me look for it. Wolves and water so do not mix."

Missing a beat is for normal girls. As ever, Wednesday proves she is decidedly not a normal girl, she questions, "In heavy starched formal wear? You're starting to resemble one of my great great aunts. They always enjoyed wearing clothes fit for their funeral. Burying them in those impeccable suits was torturous."

Of course, Wednesday's chair creaks despite being old as a fetus, as she crosses her legs. "Stiff, you see. The clothing. Restrictive and impossible to move in really… In the end," A shrug with full eye contact, "their dress-up killed them as sure as a bullet."

Enid stares her down, but somehow she feels she's the one looking up. "Fashion's a bitch."

"In any case," Wednesday stands upright. She's a little shorter, but her glower is twice that of Enid's still blue-pale face. "Since you neglected to answer my first question, I will take your non-answer as an affirmative…" They whisper around it, shout over the din of it. But to say the truth of it, what Enid chose to do, is sin on the tongue. "On the lengthy nights of my imprisonment here, I have oftentimes taken to looking over to sear my retinas on the colorful cornucopia on your side of the divide."

"That's not creepy at all."

'It isn't? Shame…" She really does look disappointed at that, a slight downturn to her jaw. "Those long silences gave me plenty of time to think of ways to rid myself of you. Arrange so it becomes only an accident in everyone's eyes— but not their hearts. It brings me no shame to admit that, I don't care to understand the pathetic mediocrity I'm forced to exist besides."

There's no light to shine through their decapitated circle of a window, Wednesday writes in the dark, and Enid's the only Outcast with a creature inheritance here. And still. Still it's as if Wednesday can see her, perfectly. Better than Enid can see her.

Wednesday is sure to drawl every word out, take her time and run with it. "Drowning, however, was altogether too cruel for my petty irritations."

It hangs there, the unspoken, spoken admission of it all. Even in the soft dark, the gentle cadence and the soft blurriness so taken in the lateness of the day; What Enid has done brings their room into stark discomfort. Accusation cannot be borne so easily, not without its own damages. Some things once lost, don't ever come back. But the things that do… they leave a crack. A split in its hearth, in the shape of loss.

Enid finally smiles. "I wouldn't know." In a smooth motion, she picks out the bulge on her front pocket. "Oh. The water washed out its color, though. My brooch, I mean."

A lumenflower sits pretty in her palm.

Wednesday presses her lips together until they disappear into a tight line.

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Fourteen: Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe

…​

There probably must have been a plan for all this. Here and there, a bit of devilish posturing. Put on a delicious performance of being unbothered and utterly unruffled… and while her victim still shakes at her mercy— god forbid her the sinful pleasure, but Wednesday Addams is no priest— Monologuing, as one does.

A good plan, a strong and classic maneuver that has proved its worth in spades and dirt of over half the lovely graves in the Addams' cemetery.

The best laid plans are always hinged to the amusement of mice and men.

Expectations, the bane of any dastardly plot.

Enid calmly, not-so-calmly balances the silver dagger steered at her swan-like neck and Wednesday's fullness above her with remarkable ease. Somehow she hardly even looks surprised. Even bemused, amused never. A slight shift in the precarious balance, and the razor-line of the dagger nicks a decaying devastation across a wide swath of Enid's hand. It resembles nothing more than a roaring bloody flame slashing wheat. Slash and burn agriculture and like wheat from some chthonic god of the harvest, yet… already the 'burn' has been isolated into a fading split of fresh pink.

Perhaps werewolves would prove more interesting than the brooding, chest-puffing, witless fleabags called Furs would suggest. After all, all conversation is a duel and doing battle with an un-armed man is only fun the first time. But if that man reveals another arm from his sleeve?

A wince is all Wednesday receives for her part in that chthonic culling cycle.

"So…" An unfitting smirk, "Do you do this to all the girls you know, or am I special?" The quip, likewise, ill suits the were-thing below Wednesday's weight. The girl she faintly recalls from a mere month earlier in this maddeningly madless institution would have surely hyperventilated and fallen victim to her weakness, requiring a round of smelling salts to merely enforce the threat. And perhaps immediate medical attention, Wednesday does not make idle threats after all. A different methodology is called for, Wednesday thinks in this instance.

Overlaid over each other in her mind's sepulcher, the ghost of who Enid Sinclair was and to her killer, one Enid Sinclair of today, twin in the mask of comedy and tragedy, are impossible to separate. Bound by being the same artifice of metal, faces of the same silver coin.

However, the question remains: Which is the fool and which is the lament? The blurry past or the shadowed present?

"Undeniably." Wednesday studies the reaction to her response.

This close to the full breadth of Enid's features, little can be hidden, especially not from Wednesday. She has who sought tombs and brought up the dead so their facial features may remind her of the living. Or in other words, an ordinary scholar of human anatomy. Collegial courses are so easily fooled by the barest tingles from Uncle Fester's fingers.

A slight widening of the eyes, a faint rise of blood to the cheeks— like most neglected, shunned pups, praise is a hot knife through their mewling defenses. Press forward. "Most girls after being drowned become Rusalki but death seems far away from you now. Special would be doing you a disservice."

True to careful calculation, the heaves of her bosom and her hot breath fanning against the chill of pallid skin make themselves known as minor details onto the evidence table sat in Wednesday's mind. That abominable rush of life that seems to wreath Enid in all the colors of the morn is no more slain by the night's hush then the sun proves each miserable rise.

Enid narrows her gaze, glancing down at the deadly instrument hovering over her soft jugular. "There is a literal silver knife — and we're so going to talk about that later — aimed at my throat. I've never been closer to death."

Lie, intuition whispers in a believer's fervency but Wednesday is nothing but confident in herself. The only god she worships is the one who moves her body, directs her mind, unmakes the world she is burdened on.

"And yet you hardly seem worried. Why," She wonders why they would need to discuss her choice in weaponry. It hasn't changed from the very start, being of fine quality and excellent use. "Do I seem the incapable sort?" She pushes down another slight increment.

Enid's face erupts into terrible panic as her grip, slick with sweat, slackens on Wednesday's hands. Now, the dagger rests gently at her throat. To warn with every breath you take, it may be the last. "No, no! You seem very capable!"

"Thank you," Wednesday graciously accepts. Compliments given in earnest should never be discarded.

"That wasn't a compliment, Wednesday!"

Really? Yet Enid sounds so afraid, instilled with much panic, and though doubts on the efficacy of silver loom large in Wednesday's mind. What greater compliment than the reminder of pain, of life's fleeting? "I will take it as one."

But the time for mirth has ended. The truth awaits. "I'm afraid our fun is over—" "Fun?!" "—Spill the truth. Your restless sleeps, your increasingly varying behavior. The lake." Wednesday bores her gaze into Enid's own. Blue dilates into wide black. It, oddly enough, reminds her of a shallow pool falling into one where your feet cannot find the bottom. Hardly sensible, but miserably creative.

Enid looks increasingly frenzied. Her eyes flicker from side to side, searching for an escape that will never arrive. A line in her jaw tenses and unspools. "Hahaa. Very funny, Wednesday. Not. I told you what happened at the lake, I don't know why you don't believe me." Her voice even, her eyes wide open in trust and heartfelt sincerity.

The evidence board: brilliant white, strung in the manner of pagan rituals on the dying of autumn with scarlet threads, and damning points clad in dirks fit only for the highest of bluebloods. The irrefutable truth seen in that spider's roost…

Enid Sinclair is an excellent liar.

Pity then, that Wednesday has yet more evidence. "Your scheme was admirable, cunning even…" She pauses, letting the creeping doubt settle in. An exquisite sort of agony common to homespun detectives, but one she dispels as easily as she might flick her wrist. And here the terrible hand she must play, here the calling card of fate, "Thing was present in the event. He went diving for you as soon as you did not show to be mocked by Bianca's meaningless victory but found little luck. A hand can only do so much."

"Probably because I wasn't in the lake." Enid explains it all so very neatly. Unfazed. Impossible, Wednesday is the 'Fazer' here! "I was still trying to win, you know. I got stuck on the island, where Crackstone has his crypt thingy. Decided to sleep off the cold there. Woke up too late. There, you satisfied?"

She is not. While the Poe Cup's arrangement did indeed not take their search for students seriously, content on taking a larger boat to gather all the shouting, visible students— Enid's explanation is too thorough. Too crisp. The taste bleeds wrong, sweet and chemical instead of rich and bitter. It has all the tells of a liar knowing well to shield all their lies in ironclad anonymity.

"There is no point to this. You know as well as I do that I will never believe you. Say your peace, Sinclair. Before I resort to uglier methods."

Wednesday bluffs.

Violence without a acceptable justification, torture without it's vindication sours quickly. Mystery is one thing, to escalate to unforgivable offenses? Well, it's not that she's adverse. It's only… looking upon Enid, hair fanning out like rays of gold, skin increasingly flushed with the exertion of keeping a knife perceptively getting more and more slippery, the fine edge close to piercing that fragile neck. Her eyes wild, her heart surely attempting to crack open her ribcage and flutter away…

Wait. This is sounding far too much of one of the matriarch and patriarch of the Addams family's sordid storied tales.

Enid believes it. Wednesday has the queer feeling of being slightly disappointed in that. Irrational. "You're awful."

"I am."

"Terrible." Enid sighs.

Wednesday feels the slightest curve to her lips. "I am."

A long drawn out blow of air through her mouth, a once minute relaxation of her features, until they steel themselves. Somehow, somewhere in the waiting dark something wicked this way comes. Determination. Resolve… What dangerous things. That nearly-there curve vanishes into the nothingness.

Enid says simply, "I'm sorry."

No. No, Wednesday refuses the apology immediately. To do so: It is not an intuition borne of logic, but one borne of deep-seated knowing in the root of herself. She feels it thus, she is losing something that cannot be replaced. Something is slipping through her sibylline grasp. This apology, those beautiful sentiments, they are only placating truths meant to obscure, shield! She absolutely, with all her being, cannot allow this!

"Then tell me." She implores.

"I'm sorry."

Wednesday wants to strike Enid. Wants to lean back, ball her fist, and embed the full force of her into the hollow of Enid's oft-bitten cheek. Wants to hit this stubborn, fatuous fool until all the thoughts tumble out of her crowned skull so much it wells up in her chest like a living thing. The violence is not unexpected, but the urgency, the almost-need of it shocks Wednesday before she can follow that well-trodden thought.

"You would rather be tortured than tell me?" Is she so unworthy of trust in those disgustingly determined eyes? Enid goes to part those deceptive lips once again. "Do not." Her voice goes shrill, the lightest breathlessness attaching itself, "Dare say your meaningless apologies again."

A pause, a gathering of some more of disquieting resolution to speak beyond the glen of warnings, but then the thought to better valleys, to alternatives— Fleeing. Somehow, it only incenses Wednesday further.

Enid looks tired. "I think, this isn't working out anymore."

What, Wednesday wants to scream, wants to shake this girl till all her mysteries spill and present themselves before her feet begging, pleading clemency, what isn't working out anymore! If only she could reach into the werewolf's throat and empty it out of all those sickening words, and replace them with… what? What does Wednesday want from Enid?

And then lightning strikes, not in reality, but in the mind. Realization being a god's wrathful pleasure judged upon the mundane.

The horror, Wednesday realizes with a beautiful sort of inevitability, is not that Wednesday wants something from the other girl. But that Enid does not extend the courtesy. Somewhere, somehow. She has held in her palm Enid's desires of Wednesday… and like one might misplace a slip of paper, a jangle of keys, a coin, Wednesday has lost them inevitably. She has not felt something slipping before, but only just— like a mind too slow to receive nervous signals— learned of its absence and, in panic, thought she could return that shattered thing she once held from the abyss. The truth: She cannot.

In its place, lies a cyst. Hard and jagged. But she is Wednesday Addams and her heart is formed of such cysts and calcifications.

Horror is hers and much she is its.

The situation remains the same; Wednesday with knife at the throat of Enid Sinclair and Enid with all the incentive to speak but without the voice to name her depths.

Enid smiles. A pleasant one without teeth. "I'm done."

Somehow, Wednesday knows she is not referring to her silence. The disquieting feeling of being disarmed with a weapon in hand comes to her. Yet, is the dagger not pushed to the point of just so teasing the sensitive flesh? Is she not armed with both wit and silver? She is in her element, poised to thrust down and with all the control and power the threat of violence gives. Heady and intoxicating— but what use is a threat when challenged? What threat can there be without the promise of its better parent?

Despite herself, Wednesday cannot seem to follow through like she has so many times before. It's the lack of satisfaction, she admits. Like puncturing a bag of straw, ultimately wasteful.

Is it so surprising then, to realize her grip has slackened? Reality making known the disturbance in her mind. A weakening of the pressure, both metaphorical and very much real?

One slip, one push, and the forces precariously balancing the glint of argent between them spirals rapidly out of control, like introducing a third factor in between the lovely inevitability of a starspun galaxy into its center, the great vacuity of nihility.

Feathers explode around them.

A dear and loved plush once again sacrificing themselves to the danger that is Enid's fatal flaw. Whether by claw, by unintended stain by unremovable dyes, or simply by an overdose of affection, one and all brave soldiers.

Absurdly, Wednesday has the thought she is caught in the midst of ravaging a maiden in downy feathers. Her very own swan stolen from gilded palaces, tricked and beguiled into prismatic sheets. She reflects she should cease in gathering her prose's inspiration from untouched mentally unwell men from wherein even in their backwards periods they were considered mad.

Enid blinks and in a slightly wounded tone asks, "Mr. Fluffykins?"

Nevermind, Wednesday has no regrets. "Dead."

For a moment, just a slight sliver cut into time's merciless march. Wednesday is fully exposed to the rawness of Enid's emotions. She, in which surely must be the delirious nature of late-night threats of unspeakable violence, looks fond. For her, Wednesday. The murderer of her treasured plastic companion. Somehow… soft. Tender, if one is being maudlin.

"You really are the worst."

Dizzying relief and blinding hope are two of reality's worst con-men. Wednesday, damnable fool, cannot but fall. Smile dragging her mouth into corners unused.

Enid stares.

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Fifteen: Ave Maria

…​

(when she wakes and when she sleeps have become altogether different things, all-together, is she both? in a dream and not?)

Enid opens her eyes. Welcome home, says the crash of waves against the hull. The weight of the mass of tangling ropes and masts placed into the sky as though asking for its insatiable fall, seems to wave hello. Welcome back, sings the tang of metal and the sting of salt is like a kiss to her eyes.

She stands in the open air ontop of a leviathan of metal, marble and wood and can only see Yharnam's desperate indulgence. As if, having clawed itself out of the shithole stinking festering wound of a diseased rat, they wanted…. No, needed with a wretched hunger to escape it in all the idols of gold and purity they can pretend to be now.

If Cathedral Ward was to be the cake they shared merrily with the rest of Yharnam, where they could convince all those who flocked for blood and grew fat off miracles, that they and they alone were that miracle's arbiters by right of being divinely given and not simply because by first found. Was it not fair. Was it reasonable that this uniquely suited elixir of life was a gift from the stars? Did it not make logic smile? They had plucked wonders out of graves and in their courage swallowed that graveflower whole.

Then as for this ark, this bewildering large, garishly ostentatious and painfully opulent vessel… it can only be where they convinced themselves of their worthiness.

"You know… this isn't the first occasion a—" Wednesday runs her teeth over the word, whets its edge to a fine point. "—Misbegotten soul has discovered Yharnam. It's the cycle of callous humor in history. Discovery." Images of unearthing lost cities entombed by earth or by sea, and whether by chance of by some grand design being once found; are the only things Enid can think of. Wednesday does not help. "The long revel. The even longer loss. Ignorance. Discovery. Repeat argumentum ad infinitum until our star finally decides our end."

Enid surprises herself. "What's the argument?"

Wednesday blinks at her, seemingly surprised that the other girl has not figured it out yet. Her eyebrow raises, as if asking, chiding, teasing, haven't you figured it out yet? Though she answers all the same, "Purpose."

Enid ignores the philosophizing. "Then… what's the use of that?" She brushes the rusty metal, flits her eyes over the grinding wheels the size of whales on either side of the ship. Recalls, the overwhelming smell of sweet meat, overturned carriages with a lack of equine servants. She can see it in her mind, etched into there as sure as fire scores the bricks. But in the distance, the frankly ridiculous depressing gray and restless sea is all she can see. As if the entire world is drowning. "Yharnam's already dead, isn't it?"

"What do you think?" A smile is playing at Wednesday's voice again, Enid dare not look.

Enid props her elbows onto the railing. The metal is a shock of cold against her skin. "What a terrible dream." She whispers it, for no reason besides it being quieter making it somehow less real. She says it for much the same reason, like an old hand describing the weather for no other reason to use his air.

"Isn't it?"

Enid languidly looks over. As expected, the 'Wednesday' she still, still stupidly hopes/despairs to see there has once again failed to fade away as smoke over the water should. Pale, bloodless eyes and hair matching the pallor of her skin stare back.

When, Enid think, did she start talking to Wednesday like she was real? And better yet… when did 'Wednesday' stop knowing my mind? No, the real question. Who has she been talking to all this time?

Who has come when she calls for another?

The illusion does not fade easy. Slowly, she slides her hands over her face, as if to drag them down once again and pull along the skin underneath her sclera there. The mirage is not really centered around her eyes though, is it? It's her dumb, stupid brain stuck like a record skipping over the revelatory chorus. It's her animal hindbrain working overtime so that she might survive. No, what she needs now is to face reality.

Wednesday has dimples. The 'Wednesday' besides her in Yharnam does not, naturally this information she failed to possess before— so if she simply looks now and sees dimples, it's only a misfired synapse creating hallucinations, it probably is still that regardless. But if not… If not…

Enid looks.

She's not surprised. Not really. This is expected…. Known. There had to have been consequences. Her head's been split open, stitched back together, and cracked like egg yolk on the streets. A little piece of her coming back bad isn't so bad.

The Pale Lady offers a gloved hand, still darkly wet on the shaded part of the glove disappearing into her arm. Gently, "You're shaking."

Instead of taking the hand, Enid barks out a laugh. It comes out more like a broken teakettle's whistle instead. "No wonder you were so kind. A quiet. Kind Hunter." But not kind enough to stay, and not kind enough to reveal… what? Enid's crawling, skittering insanity?

The gloved hand retracts, accompanied by the sound of a heavy drop of liquid splashing. "You've recovered your wits then." The accent, the towering height.

"Yeah, sure, let's call it that." Privately, not a single part of her believes that. What wit? Enid can't even separate her pathetic loneliness from Yharnam.

"It is customary…" Halting unpracticed and unfamiliar words, this tall hunter is too used to cradling the hand of the mad and infirm. But the greeting is earnest. Honest. The Lady lifts herself into an elegant, sweeping bow, one arm pressed to the chest and the other arm showing her honor in its lack of a weapon. "When two hunters meet, to greet each other in this manner."

Whatever is to come. Whatever barbarity of blood and beastly or the insensate indifference of erudition that will come. At least, here and now. A hunter can remind themselves they were that thing called a human.

Pale, impassive eyes watch as Enid doesn't return the gesture.

And the Lady smiles, says offhand "I was once known as Lady Maria, Lady Maria with a sillily long title home to my nightmare attached after. But." She shrugs, at once, utterly at odds with her regal, stately bearing and oddly fitting for the streak of practicality and pragmatism through her attire. "My nightmare has long been slain. And there is hardly anything left for anyone to be a lady of. So Maria will suffice."

"Enid," after half a beat too long, like she forgot she had a name that belonged to something bigger, "... Sinclair… Not a hunter, also a foreigner. I don't have any fancy titles that aren't fancy anymore, so. It's just Enid. Just. Me." Her and all the little mad things that wriggle and snake through her skull.

"Enid then." Maria doesn't look enthused, or particularly happy. Her severe gaze is only matched by the maudlin, exhausted mien of someone denied rest for a very long long time. "Would you care to end this dream we've found ourselves in?"

Enid says, instead, "You should probably ask anyone else."

If anything, amusement is not what Enid would expect. "There's no one else."

"... Yeah. I guess there isn't." The splashing on the ground is impossible not to notice now. Enid chooses to believe in the impossible anyway. Her hand, limp, reaches out. "Sorry in advance."

Lady Maria clasps Enid's hand in hers, slashed wrists and all. "I accept your apology… If you'll accept mine in return, for deceiving you by omission or not." Kind words are often just that. Kind. Sincerity is altogether another story.

"Apology not accepted."

"That is fair."

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Sixteen: Cyclical Nightmare

...​

This isn't the first time, Maria explains.

"Ludwig, Laurance, A Father, Hunters and Hunters, Choir members and all the filth of the Church, all the damned townfolk and all the accursed slain come to reawaken into this dream— It's the nature of this reality. There is a Hunt. And there must be a Hunter," Her mouth twists as if she bit into a sour rotten fruit. Maggots squirming in bruised flesh.

"I guess that's you, The Hunter, this time." Enid is decidedly unimpressed. That's a whole lotta fancy words to describe some weird ass psychic pulling people into their fucked-up head. "... So, you're trying to complete this time's Hunt then?" What's at the end of that cycle for you? All the piles of dead, all the corpses on corpses until the funeral pyre is heavy enough to crack this dream in two. Doesn't seem so effective, but maybe she's missing a few two, three eyes.

Maria's voice sharp, her pace swift, and her reply all the more swift. "There is no completing the Hunt. The city has been torn to the ground, it's every forgotten sin wrenched up and strangled. Once, even sundered into a crater upon the earth by some mad Powder Keg… Nothing but it all to fade into place come the next… You cannot slay a corpse, after all."

"But burning one is okay?" Enid barely keeps up with Maria's long strides into the belly of the ship.

"... It was an admittedly relaxing pastime." Maria simply says.

The passages into the ship thin, and twist and dance through each other like spaghetti through intestines. Sound putters through with the regality of a king. Echoes on echoes. Enid has not bothered to ask where they're going. Fails to even really care. She feels wrung out. Emotions exhausted, fallen somewhere between the cracks.

"So you need me." Smug satisfaction feels inappropriate which is excellent as mustering it would kill Enid with the effort. She settles for grim sort of schadenfreude. "A wrench in the cogs, something to break the cycle or whatever." That's great. Enid's a pro at fucking up. Just tell her the exact opposite of what you want done, and she'll disappoint you before she's even born.

Maria glances back at Enid like she can sense the self-pity party throwing up sad little poppers in silent glittery streamers. "No."

She does not elaborate further.

Enid really fucking hates it here.

…

Eventually, the spaghetti-maze of solid oak caged by metal passages deciding to become pipes halfway through and then a moment later remember that they were actually a nice hallway lit by depth-glass lanterns filled with dark water. Ends.

Somehow, nestled into the stomach of this behemoth of a sea-faring vessel, a field of white pale wildthings rests under the shade of a great tree. This is the only place where any resemblance to life exists. Anywhere where you can see something other than the godforsaken gray sky and the grayer sea like it's unruly twin. Lit only by the faint glow of white field, the idea of a great withered tree stretches high into the unlit cavern above like a living god. Dark, unknown, but sheltering all the same under its shadow. Ropes tethered to it lanced throughout the field, thin lines waiting for but the chance to trip, stabbed into the ground and staking the dead thing upright.

It doesn't make any sense being here. It fits like a stone lodged into your shoe. A splinter digging its way through the nails. A hornet trapped in the shell of your ear, biting, buzzing, stinging.

But it is still here, undeniable in its greatness, its size. And without challengers in the mindless numbing fog of the overly long metal boxes called the ship's innards.

At its very base, a violet lantern rattles softly at their approach. Maria treads calmly through the field as the little lights shy away from her as if remembering a distant star that shattered the earth once. Terrifying, yes, but impossible to flee from without watching. Enid falls in line, her eyes in awe as the pale wild-things— Not flowers, and not yet animals, seem to sway towards her.

She brushes her hands against them. They shiver.

"Do you see it, the lantern?" Maria asks, stopping at a half-strides distance from the thing in question.

Enid nods.

"Light it… snap your fingers once near it." Maria's words are cool, calm. Inflectionless.

Still, Enid hesitates. "Why?"

The question lingers in the stale air of this field in the stomach of a metal whale, weaves through the crooked grasping branches of the dark tree above, waits in the air between them, caught in the distance them.

Slowly, Maria smiles. It's a transformative thing. Her cold, empty face softens into something, if it only had a smidge of color, human. Pretty even. In its absence, it takes on a marble's beauty. Aesthetic, fine features shaped into a stripped-bare statue's loneliness. Her eyes curve into open crescents, and a sweet openness is present in her ashen eyes. It's oddly familiar. "To end this awful dream, of course… Please."

Enid steps forward. Her legs are cold, they've been cold for a long time. Her hand trembles as she brings it forward, fingers poised to crack against each other.. It's never stopped. How long has this night gone on? How much longer will it continue?

The answer lies before her. And she, desperate, believes.

Enid snaps her fingers. Flame blooms in the little hanging lantern. The sound in the air perfectly eclipses its following noise from just behind her. But it does not hide the long curved blade impaling through her chest. The wet thunk as hilt meets her spineflesh. The thick spray of blood and the reemergence of heavy meat stink.

She coughs. A ragged, wet thing, that bubbles more and froths. Enid manages to leave a, "Liar."

That's… right. Craning her neck, her eyes search for hallucination, for reason. The face, she's seen that expression before.

Maria wears the same face she's always worn with Enid. The hollow smile of a caretaker holding her hand and saying nothing as the babbling believe another in her place.

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Seventeen: Gamer Girls

…​

Yharnam is enamored with eyes. As though still the babes rolling their own orbs back in fragile soft skulls, they search and hope with every tempestuous thought that they may find their likeness in the silver stars. Wishing to put on a crown of eyes on their heads and call themselves something more.

Enid understands their fervent need just a little now. She shouldn't be surprised, not really. Violence is common, necessary, vaunted like its own little god on their pantheon of ugliness and sipped on blood. Carved into every bone and every line of stone rolling over Yharnam's grotesque beauty. She still is.

The vomit dredged up by Maria's boot is familiar. It calls to the first full moon after the eleventh summer— where Enid first learned what it meant to break something so thoroughly it wouldn't heal. Couldn't. Puckered like a weeping sore and bleeding pus and stinking, even on the brightest of days. Unsettled her stomach again for days when all the pop-drunk, shots of color would only dull the smell of it hidden just below.

With that many eyes, seeing that same self in the mirror-shine of Maria's sabre wouldn't be so painful. Enid hates the thing in the polish. The reflection spotted. Shocked, stupid look on that face still, still after the first decapitation after reawakening at that stupid fucking lantern.

Maria bats away her claws without even a mild interest, clear headed and all the more terrifying than all the lopsided skill of Ludwig's contempt and the undying Vicar's desperation. It is the difference between besting a wild savage creature in the sun-drowned savanna and all the world's width between that to man's intellect.

The difference, Enid only need overwhelm beasts in raw bloodshed. Tear at them, endure their bites in her, until there is no more them to kill.

… A human is an altogether different story.

Enid tries a taunt. "Oh this is rich! What, what? Got more screws loose than sense rattling in your head? Killing, killing, and killing some more— Is it fun?!" Halfway through, the taunt spirals out of her control. Her mouth babbling, whispering, singing like a river's melt in spring. "It doesn't sound like you're having fun. But you are. Only a rotten, sick pup… Tall Wolf-spider likes to kill someone who can't die." It doesn't come out fully coherent, it barely even tries to, but Enid's mouth and spine are still tingling from when Maria ran her short dagger-sword thingy up through her jaw. And she's fairly sure she saw gaunt, emaciated ghostly tiny things at the base of the lantern just before. Phantom pains, phantom joys, hallucinations, terrible realizations., confusion, confusion— there's too much to focus on. There's too little to think about, and cotton in her brainblood. Skullcandy, bonefloss.

This is not the beginning of the end. This is the spoiled fruit hidden in the bottom of the fridge.

"Insanity is not the question, it is the solution." Enid flinches at the words, which is embarrassing because they came from her own mouth.

Maria's jaw is a steel line. To crack it would split the entire thing in two, and oh how badly does Enid want. Sparks spiral widely off into the dancing pale life below, as she brings her sword and dagger as one to bear down to split Enid in much the same fashion.

Crisscrossed claws do their very best to stop that, and flick a little bit of those fiery red dots into Maria's face. Irritated, the pale lady blinks, and smoothly steps forward. At the same time, the pressure on Enid's claws lessen and in her slowness to react, Maria's foot snaps out at shown ankle.

A crack, and a yelp.

Enid feels all her breath softly leave her in a weak gasp. Maria's dagger has found her chest. Scrabbling at thick lapels of her killer, bloody spit wells up as Enid tries to breathe. It, ironically, feels like drowning.

In an easy motion, Maria unsheathes her dagger out of Enid and back into the hilt of her sword because, of course, it's Yharnam. Twin sided swords are a thing. Enid can't help but be drawn to the glide of red as she falls to her knees, gasping. Her eyes catch on anything, anything as her fists curl uselessly as her body refuses to do anything but cry disbelief it's own wound. Thoughts of gnarled wood in the darkness, great cracks of black in blacker black in the cavernous emptiness.

She lifts herself up. She doesn't know how to do anything else. Or is it that she can't bring herself to remember anything else?

Crack.

Maria's pistol crowns her in red. Enid wonders if her brain looks like a nebula spread out against the silver lights swaying below.

…

"You know, this is fucking pointless, right?" It's her greatest terror. Enid will wake up again, Not that she won't. And everytime that terror is made real. She's afraid of it coming, she's afraid of it not too. That would be a kindness, wouldn't it? Dying? Wouldn't it? It'd be too easy if she would simply die in this dre-dream nightmare. It'll bring her back and back and forward, and wrong, and ugly and… She'll come back. An immovable fact, a facet of reality as sure as the apple falling to earth. Unknowable in the sense you cannot know something which is simply there. This is destiny. No, this is the past talking to the future. This is her nightmare she cannot bring herself to wake up from.

Maria simply angles her body to the side as Enid's lunge throws her barreling past. An easy cut on her leg sends her stumbling. A light stab follows through her achilles tendon, just before Enid's claws rake out screaming their wordless No—!, and Maria finally brings her writhing down in the ground. She gets up before Maria has time to sweep her head off her shoulders again, a sure kill.

A soft, hoarse voice. Enid startles, it's the only thing that prevents the unseen swipe from Maria's other hand to catch her from neck to eye. "There were. Others like you. Undying, Moon-claimed visitors. By quirk of fate or by lark— as if contract bound Hunters— they would rise without death's kindness."

Enid's head latches onto 'there were' like a prayer. "Were? You mean, this can end?"

"They hoped so." Enid's head whips back as the butt of a hilt smashes teeth into teeth. Ringing fills her ears, but Enid's well accustomed to Maria's preference of disabling strikes before her final mercy. She roars mostly because. fuck it, it still hurts like hell and tries to bury her claws into that pale face. Maria's pistol whips her right back into place. She can almost hear, really? Do worse. Roaring sounds a lot like whimpering as it turns out.

She dodges a shot, once again mimicking that old thievery learnt at the pale light's fall. Maria fires lazily again, and again. It's an exercise in futility. No matter her intuition, her lupine strength propelling her at ankle-breaking dashes, a gun is a gun.

Enid notes, distantly, the bullets don't hurt as Ludwig's did.

That's the thing about Maria. Everything done with inexhaustible swiftness and calm. Mercy, Enid finds, is unbearable at the hands of your better. She doesn't hit as hard as Ludwig, and definitely not with the bone-liquefying rabidness as the Vicar, but she hits far more often. Each blow lacks the brutal beasthood behind the other's bulging masses of muscle, flesh, and weight, but each strike threatens to kindly cut her strings. It's the song to their drums. The violin playing alone in an empty hall. Snap the muscle structure, slow the running, deafen the senses, fall. Befall. Befall.

She can't.

"Why…" Maria is careful to not thrust her hand through the bullet hole and drag out as much as she can. She has learned the error in that, just as she sees now, patiently examining the threads of woven gold spin together the facade of pink flesh. Enid sneers, "Why can no one in this place just TELL ME!"

There's a lot to say about screaming at the top of your lungs while trying to rip apart your enemy's face from their bones, much of it being not to. But no one can deny how damn good it feels.

Enid furiously advances, swipes and slashes so viscous they tear at the earth below and shake the dead tree above. "Everyone has to be cryptic as fucking possible— fuck being anything close to being open and understandable!" Volume rises like burning smoke, eventually it cannot go up anymore and goes outwards. "Oh, because it's such a crime to be actually communicative? You still wondering why you're shitbag diseased cockrag of a city shit all over everyone and trapped you all in the closest thing to hell?" Ding dong ding dong! "I can guess! The basic fucking skills of any human being and welp, you dropped the ball on that one, throw up the banners of pity-ugly as fuck losers! You're it!"

Maria looks more stricken at the absolute vulgarity of Enid's words more than her effortless deflects of Enid's well-telegraphed attacks. And Enid latches onto that like a bloodhound.

"What? Did God not personally come to thank you for being alive? Need to fuck more eyes into your squishy skulls so you can personally cry to goddaddy about it? Go on and pretend to be discount vampires you crybabies, maybe you'll be able to pretend you're actually not inbred backwards MUTTS!"

The viscous terror of pent-up mockery from online chatrooms lost years ago spills like oil into Enid's tongue and she balls it up in her mouth and spits. Years of frustration come out to play, ugliness like a professional failure with the maturity to piss in sandboxes.

Growing up, no, Enid is growing down. Regressing and dying, and falling back, and crying, choking— here, all the shattered parts of her desperately trying to glue themselves together in stringy red.

Maria smoothly glides her sword over Enid's furious thrust, disappearing the original force to grab that arm and cleave steel from shoulder to hip. The crimson flower that only appears from slitting flesh so deeply it is its own ending— vividly blooms on the torso. Pretty and dark.

She disengages before Enid can retaliate, vanishing in mist and bonedust. Enid is left with slippery, purplish soft bodies sliding out from her large wound. Her skin feels so terribly cold. It's missing something. Warmth, life.

She's scratching at her own skin before she realizes what it is. Blood.

Oh, she's slipped. Ice spinning over the cracked rest of her head directly off into the horror that is her. She's standing taller than she ever has. She's falling down and there's no bottom.

Maria shoots a hole into Enid's stomach and when that doesn't bring her down, shoots higher.

Enid stops. Stumbles a little, brings up a hand to the right side of her head, it feels wet. A wobble. She staggers, tripping on her feet while only standing. How can this be standing tall? How can she be standing if her hands are on the ground, knees wet with the runoff? Her headache is back.

"Where are they Where are they— how do it get out how do I get out how do I get it out of me. How do I be me." The talking, the muttering doesn't help. God, she needs them to shut up. Shut up, shut up and die. Enid distantly realizes she's clawing at her own skin again when the warm liquid covers her palms.

Maria finally says, "... Look down."

Stupidly, as if traps can only come in steel jaws and spring-loaded pressure, Enid does. The pale not-flowers fill her lopsided vision. But in the destruction wreaked across the field, torn earth and dragged up wet dirt, it's more chunks of that once flowing field that exist. Chunks and the underneath.

A sliver of silver looks back.

A human eye, glassy and empty, stares back at Enid without seeing her at all. Thoughtlessly, mindlessly, Enid brushes more of that gravedirt away.

Like a puppet with all its strings cut, a boy no younger than her but infinitely older by the lack of age in his gaze faces up at the darkness above. And out of his stomach, his limbs and all his extremities, the pretty pale-lifes swim in the air. Phantasms writhing inside their flesh. Enid's own flesh lifts in sympathy, gooseflesh beading on her skin in poor imitation.

Soon.

Maria's voice is quiet, but impossible not to hear. "To know is to bear the burden of that weight… And some things are best left alone."

…

She's not sure if she's seeing this, living this, or she's living it in her head. She's not sure it matters.

They must look like particles accelerating too fast to see, too dark to glimpse before the collision shunts off a bright snapshot before it's snuffed out. Running, quick pitter patter of feet, the leap… the silence, the overwhelming violence of noise. Enid straining against the lightning-like flashes of Maria's steel, expression painted in tight jagged strokes, Enid expecting her wounded legs to heal, dragging out translucent parasites clogging the wounds instead, her babbling grows and grows until it's a babbling brook in the first melt after winter, quiet and soft— lyrical even.

"They say phantasms are the familiars of the Great Ones. Invertebrates that become the augurs reaching across the planes of existence." Maria says, almost conversationally. "Do you feel divine, yet?"

Enid sneers, face twisted into a gargoyle's threat. "No. I've felt like shit since the very fucking beginning."

A ghost of a smile haunts Maria's face, in the powder flash of the next thundering across the killing fields. She walks forward into the chaff of falling white, snow, soft cotton, shining pale-lifes. Always slow, always unhurried, waiting for Enid's next desperate attack. It'd be insulting if it didn't set Enid's spine into an anxious stiffness. The way these long dead Hunters walk, you imagine them free, free of death's line in the sand. Enid can only see the fast approach of it now, parasites blooming out of her living corpse.

And still Maria walks in the maddening slow, quick, slow, quick quick slow. "Others in the throes of their own tribulations have reminded me, spoken to me of Moon-scented Hunters and their wretched mockery of life. I, myself have experienced it. That oh, so rude stranger who would knock and knock and knock again onto my door. No matter how much I dissuaded them. By blade, or by hand, by pistol or by fire… There could be no end to their Hunt."

"Let me guess," says Enid, more out of intention to distract than insatiable curiosity, "they killed you."

Maria inclines her hat. "That they did. But they were an adept Hunter, tested and tried and strengthened over and over on the glut of Yharnam's coming end. Cut with blood and already having slain legends."

Legends. What sort of Legends can there be in a briar of bleeding stone so named Yharnam? Who is so worthy?

Little pieces form together, rearrange themselves and smash apart previous realizations into glass shards. Enid's head aches and pounds with renewed ferocity. Branches and limbs above twist and splinter into brambles of thorns in the dark.

"You didn't free Ludwig of the nightmare. And that fucking Vicar, Amelia. Someone else… Someone else did it, everything." All this time, spent and dying on the yawning shadows of another's. Enid has walked in the footsteps of others until she's forgotten what her own traces in the sand look like. To know those footsteps go on so long their owner is lost in the myriad of their victims', is a haunting thing.

"The thread which binds us all here. Their very own purgatory of all beasts and beasts of men slain." Maria fails to adopt an expression of anger, only tired, empty acceptance. "Have you profited from having divested a dead woman of her graces?"

Immediately, a fire back. "If you're dead, then sit still in your grave."

"But then, where would you be, my Hunter?" She chides soft and gentle. It lands closer to a gunshot. Enid flinches. Wandering around talking to ghosts of people still walking. Echoing herself against herself in her own mind. "Let me end this awful dream. For if not myself, then at least for you."

Neither of them war with claw and fang, sword and firearm. Too caught up in their own duel with blades fashioned out of words.

Enid spits out the ugly truth, "Your 'end' would be to lie me in a hole surrounded by all the other's you've damned with the same mercy. You mean 'End' by way of living like I'm dead, numbed and consciousness screaming in my own mind as my body sprouts more flowers for your fucking garden."

As if they were waiting to be mentioned, more of those invertebrate parasites tangle over the weeping gashes in Enid's arm from Maria's thousand cuts. They feel like touching nothing, like reaching into the ether and tasting silence, even as Enid rips them free from her wound. A flush of golden hair bursts with it, only to drag itself back into the red until it smooths into pink lines disappearing into silver.

Maria watches dispassionately. "What other solution would you suggest? You, who, so easily decry and condemn me, yet you fail to prudence any viable cure for this. Would you perhaps enjoy being dragged further through this riot of blood and savagery we descend into? Until those," She sweeps her hand over the ashen grassland. "All the hundreds who have been dragged into here, until they all descended into broken servitors mimicking the act of humanity?" She does not say it. Enid wonders if she can even think it, but the unsaid words follow her spoken as flies to carrion. Hungry things begging for, what other choice did I have? What else could I have done?

Enid finds she cannot answer in return.

"Your own affliction," starts Maria. "Its acceleration is uncommon, but not so rare that I might not have seen its ilk before. Heir to Flora's dread cult, just as your creature inside sustains you with the same surety once provided of blood ministration... So too does it damn you in equal measure. The seed of kinship has been planted in you through mere proximity to this ghost of a memory. Taken root, flourishing in the fertile ground that cannot wither.

"The 'End' which you deny is already present, immediate and irrefutable by virtue of your own blood. You call for me to 'sit still in my grave', but how can I with a neighbor so lively?"

In this battle, she is no more Maria's equal as she is in physical skill. Scant existence measured in years, cannot weather the weight of endlessness.

"So then what was all this for!?" Enid can't tell who is more surprised at her outburst, Maria or herself. "I'm just supposed to accept, what?, I'm unlucky again? Guess what, fuck you just cause? What the fuck is the reason! Miss me with that shit, I'm no one special—"

"Are you quite done?"

Her mouth flaps uselessly, a little longer. But the words no longer push themselves from her throat and spill, caustic and pulped onto anything and everything that can hear her. In its place, just a terrifying void ringing with finality.

Enid stares across the killing field, across the blood and the shakings, of the feeling of her claws bisecting flesh and bone, of her own laughter nearer to crying, far far away from the promise of damnation. The light she was promised, the dim and fleeting hope Ludwig had so shown her in the pale moonlight— where is it? What is the point of her carrying Gilbert's memories into a grave?

Crack.

Her body still moves, her feet still push and leap away from the sound of gunfire. Enid can still feel her claws slide against the sharp of Maria's sword and dagger. She is still fighting, she is still fighting. Still trying. Her mind has given up, sung its last songs, wreathed itself in white and taken to mourning a life untaken. But why, why.

Why can't she stop?

"Look at you… that glint in your eyes." Maria kicks her, hard. Hurls Enid into the base of the dead tree so that it trembles. The sword runs through the shoulder, through the bone and finally sinks to a stop into the hollow wood. Mostly by virtue of the hilt having made its rest in the divot between collarbone and arm socket. She twists. Cartilage makes the most interesting noise when grinded on a razor edge against osseous structures. "You're determined then. Our corpses still know no rest, but very well. If you've forgotten how to die…"

The blade is dragged out, cutting all the while. "I will kindly remind you."

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Eighteen: Passive, Aggressive

…​

(back.)

Parent's day, D-Day. Disorganization, disarray and disaster on the scale of lives being fed through the meat grinder and still the butcher's work is yet done. Though, in this case the dead bodies are to the analogy of soul-crushing vulnerability, disappointment and the rank stench of stress only families can pull off. Nature of being known, knowing your name before you are even born and not knowing your favorite color.

Esther Sinclair is a good person. Everyone knows that, but being a good person doesn't preclude you from being a bad one either. That's not how it works. It's charity work and smiling brightly enough at the homeless that they see the sun, it', Enid, honey. She always says honey, like the sweetness of it can take the sting off words. A bee smelling of wax and home— too sweet, tang curling on the back of the tongue— a stinger so light you'll hardly feel its bite. Only later, only when the moon hangs low and for all the sheets in the world, Enid can't seem to get warm. Only then does, Enid, honey, why are you raising your voice at me? I can wolf out perfectly fine, on her chest, on her chest she can't breathe. Enid remembers curling around it like some abused pup mewling at the slap.

"So are you going to make me ask?" Salt-and-pepper hair, crow lines crinkled around the mouth in such a way the only thing Enid can think of is how old her Mom is.

Her fingers are tapping out a nervous jingle onto the tables they've set out for Parent's Day, tracing grooves made a year, two, five, decades into centuries ago. Enid doesn't look at her mom's face. Reconciling the image of her mother, and the woman who modeled all the ways she's been warped and bent into might actually kill her.

"What?" Honest, genuine. She has no idea what question hangs so painfully on Esther Sinclair's tongue. She doesn't even have the imagination to imagine a question of herself for herself. The sensation of watching this play out from the thick lens of a camera nestles under her skin. Separation, dissociation. Enid is not by the phone right now, beep. Don't leave a message, it won't find a home.

"Don't take that tone with me, Enid."

Have you heard this story? A witch curses an unlucky fellow, and when he wakes, everything he knows is gone. Time has moved on without him, and his home has forgotten him. Enid feels very small. She swallows, goes to explain.

She doesn't get a chance to.

Mom puts words in her mouth as easily as she might've taken her daughter's jaw in hand and twisted it back and forth. "I don't know what I expected, really I don't know." Words wash over Enid, pulling and taking— cold. They steal the little warmth left in autumn's brisk sunlight and leave it dying, bleeding out, and pissing itself. "—why we came all the way here, across the country, we bought tickets."

Enid wonders when tickets to Nevermore became only for her, and not shared between a menagerie of brothers. "... I know, Mom."

Dad smiles helplessly at Enid, like he's sharing in discomfort with her. Like he gets it. The thought comes unbidden but sharp. Impossible to ignore. She hates him. It can't be taken back. Traced in her synapses, for a tiny moment. A snapshot in her life.

Enid, really, truly hates her dad. The shame meant to come afterwards that thought is weak, hardly the equal of flaring contempt.

He does to his credit, get it. Murray Sinclair has weathered decades besides his wife with the cool surety of her loyal second. Has endured the prickly edges of what makes Esther Sinclair, Esther Sinclair with the patience of a saint. The calm befitting a monk. But they're not winning awards, claiming accolades on the staircase to heaven. You don't get to look better next to your shitty partner and think that makes you actually better. And Enid has never needed a saint.

Mom sighs, a big one that communicates quite effectively what she really thinks, "It's fine. But, Enid, you know what I'm going to ask… Have you wolfed out?"

"No."

"Well, that's disappointing."

Enid thinks, only once in the span of indefinable hold-your-breath that follows, to simply respond in kind. That is what she would've done, what she should do— certainly not what her Mom wants her to do, but what keeps this fucked up dysfunction functioning.

The forest behind says nothing to their little family problems, their myriad of idiosyncrasies that bend, grind, until they snap. Yellow is the last color on the trees, but even its tenure as king among the fallen is ending.

"Yeah, imagine how I feel about you."

It never would have worked, Enid feels in a punch to her gut. Watching the words hit her Mom's face, bloom in terrible comprehension. The instance of shock freezing all the ridiculous stop-motion in place, and the stunned silence of take it back take it back now, take it back before its too late. Too late.

Dad looks as if he's been shot, Enid knows the feeling.

But you can't re-pack the gunpowder into shattered casings, blown out and flowering. You can pretend the words never left her lips, pretend to not have heard them. But the hurt, the weightless moment of realization… that lasts forever.

Pain is immortal.

…

(here.)

Sword on bone, metal grinding on skeleton and flesh wetting, jamming the process, all her corded arterial veins and all of her muscles, shredded alveoli gumming up the intricate machinery… Maria's sword breaks.

The first hitch is in when she goes to snap-click-crack separate her twinblade into its unlucky children. The catch release system hisses, twists even, but simply does not separate. It fails and seeing its keeper look at it with such confusion, it keens out a harsh shrieking noise.

Naturally, when Enid goes to take advantage of the instant of shock, Maria smoothly draws out her pistol to divest her of extremities, the legs and then as the girl's face slides, scrapes against the ground. Crack. An easy execution while facedown puts the end to that momentary hope. Not her most humiliating death, but certainly up there.

The second, Enid's claws razor sharp and more than capable of treating metal as paper, catch onto the curved sword. A nick in bloodstone-treated steel. Maria's eyes widen.

Attrition really, whilst Enid's body fades into soft transmutational mist as her body returns from beyond the grave at the foot of light's cage— her soul for a lantern which doesn't allow Maria the easy chance to snip her neck before it even contracts for a breath— whilst Enid dies and dies, Maria does not receive such grace. Neither her weapons nor her self. It seems, treated castle steel breaks before Maria's vitality.

But grace, heavenly favor, the quirk of fate, call it what you believe in, that mysterious thing which allows Enid her Sisyphean journey, is only grace. Lovely and fine and good yet ultimately cruel. Irrational in the most rational way.

So to say, Maria tosses her beloved weapon away. Just like that, easily and almost cavalier about the affair.

The sound of it registers first, the sort of bewildered noise so loud it becomes only that noise. Unable to be processed by her reeling head, Enid sways side to side. Everything hot fire, pain on her face. Too hot, burning. Her arm sluggishly goes to swipe back, only to be caught and have her head pulled forward— Crack. Teeth split under sudden, near-instantaneous force. Enid tries, bravely, to run. To leap back and flee but her arm is still caught. Another noise so loud that it kills any thought, her neck twists, strains. Stupid-stupid dumb, slept wrong on my neck again. Whirring synapses and neurons fire nonsense signals. Stupid stupid, something pops on the left brutalized side of her face, her sockets pop pop.

Her back hits, something, and her legs splay out, unbalanced and down there she goes. One bleary spinning eye slides open, a film of red opening to show brown-black and crushed white. The boot slams her face into the center tree, deadwood splinters before her skull does, but the slight relief of absorbed impact doesn't stop the stream of blood from her nose nor the distinct jagged edges of the ruined bits of her nose sinking into her brain.

"St-Stop."

Maria doesn't. Her fist rises high, sinks into the gloom above the ambient light of the grave-flower-things, and sudden sharp yellow bile blooms on the other side of her face. Enid makes the connection; conscious feelings of pain have degenerated into vague ideas of noise, light, color.

Enid, still conscious by only the brokenness of her brain preventing her cerebrum from knocking itself out, somehow pushes herself out of the hollow of the tree. Her claws slip, slide out, and before she registers it, she's balled her fist as the nails hook into her palm. The surprise of her rise must get Maria for once, because the punch lands enough so that nails stab deeper, itch on the jingling bones.

It lands as a snowball packed with air onto a firm shoulder.

"Go-gonna kill you." her voice cracks on 'kill', like a child's, and the rest of it rises in high reeds, slugged by blood and cheeks full of shattered teeth.

Easily ducking over the wide swings of Enid, Maria drops low and uses her fists with startling familiarity. It almost seems incongruous, the elegant and aloof woman degrading herself into using her bare hands to carefully dismantle her opponent into meat. Whatever nobility, whatever high station she has held herself in, does not hold back her… efficiency. The trappings of her speech do not extend to her physical exertions. Strength is demonstrated on the body, mastery is shown on your enemy's.

Enid wheezes, chest crinkling and caving in itself in a way that she knows, she knows better than she knows anything, knows in an intrinsic way that is wrong. Bad. The hot, floating feeling inside her head does notice the recent additions of sharp bits gently scraping her bronchioles every time she tries to take a breath. But are otherwise preoccupied with misfired signals and constant errors as her body fails.

The pistol comes up.

Enid whips to the side. Bang. Her ear rings out into pitch white noise, a spike into of instant void into the head. Crunch. Maria's leg rams through her side, stopping somewhere in the spinal area after crushing anything in its way and only because of inertia.

Enid is forcefully changed direction mid-dash to crumbling ball, curling it on itself. An almost comical bounce, the second impact on the ground approaches the thin line of a rope in the dark.

She forces herself to uncurl, and that is the only reason why the second boot doesn't smash her fingers to pieces. It only tries to do the same to her stomach, but air is no brace to smash flesh to a pulp against.

She flies. Enid letting physics do its job, finds one of the ropes staked into the ground into her back for her trouble. She desperately grabs onto it anyway. Ten rounds in, sweat pouring the face, but red, soreness and aches and jagged raw creaking, she holds onto it like a boxer feeling his muscles fail him but needing the reminder. This is it, this is the cage. Win or lose, Live or die, Die or die.

The ringing in her one usable ear finally clears for something to make its displeasure known.

Someone is screaming, Enid currently has a throat full of her own teeth and Maria would have to be actually dead for it to be her, so that only leaves… Hanging onto that line, Enid leans her head over, a dead person looks back, screaming. Transparent lumenwoods dance with the wail out of the nostrils out of any orifice and even through the soft parts of the face: cheek, eye, the tectonic lines in the skull.

Enid swings back over to avoid looking at that sight, just as the fist sends her right back along with the rest of her toppling over. The impact allows her quick flailing grip around the rope, to spin her underneath, and Enid remembers she has legs. Undamaged besides some minor bruising, legs. They kick out Maria's. Too slow to dodge, the Hunter falls— Enid sees a flash of surprised Lady, before she ignores it to lift her leg back and plant her shoe in that face.

Naturally, Maria catches the foot, and drags Enid under the line. Her elbow crushes the stomach underneath into the soft damp earth impacting into hard brick. Her pistol draws out again, shining like the reaper's scythe. From her stunned position, Enid sees the wrist-blood from pale arms flow into the gun's filigreed handle. Then the dark barrel at the end of existence spiraling into certain death— No!

Enid wildly slaps it away, but Maria simply pulls the handgun back. She slaps it again with claws out. Maria frowns.

Carefully with the surety of a surgeon, she grips one rainbow saturation-ended limb, presses the barrel to the delicate, fluttering tendons of the wrist, and pulls the trigger.

Nails shrink back with the spray of pink-red Enid confetti.

The repeat on the other limb is worse, Enid struggles all the harder, but with the taller woman's weight on her stomach, and terrifyingly sure grip, her wrist shatters, explodes out in a flurry of blood.

Finally the heated barrel lines up with her head. This close, Enid can see Maria's own wrists, dark with her own sin, and the strong cord-like tendons about to contract. Kind enough to not press the burn into her head, but not kind enough to not kill. The angle however… the distance.

At the penultimate moment, Enid lunges her head forward, bullet grazing the side of her temple into purple, yellow, green of a concussion, and bites.

The taste of rich, sweet —a thousand different vintages on her tongue— heat, heat melting her head; She takes advantage of Maria's tiny momentary inability to pull the trigger again, and rips out a chunk of her wrist in the flinch away.

Mouth red, teeth like cut glass, "Hahhahah! Two for me, one for you, two of me, none of you!"

It's the concussion. Or the blood. Pick your poison.

Of all things, Maria sighs. "What does salt sound like, Lady Maria. Kos, the Mother, We, the Child's toys. I want to be a circle. Why does the Moon taste like flowers? If it is made of blood, Lady Maria?" The cadence of a radio, guttering over skipped songs from decades ago. "Do you even recall your own name? Mine? Who you are in the dark?" The last question punctuates with the holstering of her pistol, transferred to the small of the back.

Then the left hand rises, aligned neatly with the turn of her body, pulling back and resting there, heavy and fat with laden purpose. The little lights, the little lights look like the glacial light of the moon shining upwards, it's as if the sky is upside down… Then (up)down. The glove's overwhelming scent of silver and leather punches into Enid's nose.

Just so healing fractures split apart onto the advance, blood liquefying, steaming, shot off like a spray out of a pressurized container. Down again. The spray leaves messy on the other side. Enid thinks, together they must look as red wings crowning the king's head. Divine Mandate. It makes her laugh. The hilarity of it, the idea there is anything so holy of this place lost in the darkness and entombed in the sea. The world sways around them, curling around the edges like vines over tombs. She's swimming in her own head-blood, the howl of water pulling her under.

Maria slams down again, compacting the earth below into a dense mud. Again and again and again. It's as if she's attempting to force Enid's head into the ground for her grave. The ruby crown disappears into a pool of red. A spiked halo.

And, suddenly, she stops and it's like breathing. Maria steps back, away.

Enid gasps, just simply pants like a dog there, half a foot deeper from whence they began. Wrists slowly winding themselves together in knitted bone and sticky flesh, stomach writhing painfully as plant-like parasites and fresh lupine biological structure compete to grow into the space of her ruined organs. Eye stuck closed, opens to blinking in too-bright dark. Ears return to their blown-out eardrums, and re-skin the fleshy barrier again. And teeth build themselves out of cut glass.

An utterly inhuman expression of insatiable life, not even of lupine sympathy. Only the mangled sort of thing stitching itself together by the deft of it's own hand, threads of golden thread so bright to be invisible and strings of muscle pulling bones against each other until they snap back into place. They'll call it divine, a miracle. They'll call it unnatural, the soul of a witch and the entreaty beyond the firmament gathering dead things that do lie into where they do.

"Once, long ago. I hesitated. My mind spoke, pleaded. This was only a child, not yet even ten winters. See how she whines, cries? No beast would shed tears, no beast would cry Mother." Maria examines her wrist calmly, as if pain, too, was a thing behind her. "For my selfish, desperate wish that I may not have to slay a jewel of Yharnam, the width between shoulder and nape were nearly bitten in twain. Then, I only felt the pain crack across my face as my Master shouted, blood slick on his scythe. The wound and the carcass."

Slowly, Enid pushes herself up, one knee, two, on her hands now too, lift. Standing like she's a person again. But no rope is at her back, somehow ripped free of the ground and now slack somewhere in the un-flowers.

Maria lets her wounded arm hang loose, and the other to take up its burden. Silver glints, as the silvered swords of long ago knights once did. It rings in its glacial brightness, visceral somehow the way the weapons can be. Radiant in purpose if not execution. But, but, is the blare of heaven's trumpets not loud like thunder, the light of the stars as blinding and as fast as the flash of gunpowder? "The Hunt was composed of similar such moments, testing and dreading and exciting all the worst of one. I may have left the Hunt… but I still remember it, the hesitation."

There is a script here, but neither of them can read each other's pages. Enid drags in a breath anyway. Coughs out her line in the taste of violence. "Then why are you still talking, little red riding hood?"

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Nineteen: What Lies at the Beginning of the Road

…​

(back again.)

Away from the viscous delight of flesh crushing flesh, the heaviness of head and the sharp punch of color of every strike; dandelion yellow against the temple, vomit green acting over her stomach, aurora ghostfire across the shattered bridge of button nose, punch-drunk blue like a drunk's prayer to god on cheek. Separate from all the senseless give and take, hurt and hurt in return, the silence leaves its own kind of wounds.

She's not wholly here or there, is she?

Everything is yellow, everything is cast in soft gold and nostalgia ready moth-bitten memories to be pieced together by the haze of words, sharp unforgettable feeling of something breaking, and the damaged look on her parent's faces.

Enid looks away first, unable to bear the weight of their stunned gaze. She comforts herself in the thought, this was inevitable. Status quo is a funny thing, they bemoan it, curse it's passivity and damn their own complacency for the continuance of it. But when it shatters, comes apart like the many parts of a mirror— she wants it back so badly it slices her palms apart in her haste.

"What," Her mouth is dry, is wet with the weight of it, heavy and filled with the sluggish size of what she's kept locked in her chest. Stolen and pounding at the cellar door of her heart. "Would you do if I never wolfed out? If I was only this, only me."

Perhaps, like Yoko said, Enid's mom is so unknowingly cruel to her because she sees herself in pop-pink, dyed hair and triangles lodged in circles. No. You only see your past self in something that looks like you, Enid is no copy of her mother. Like everything she is a mix of her father and mother's blood. And in the truth of that, she can only see pieces of herself, cut up and mangled and warped, into the fabric of her parents. The rest of the tapestry swirls and upends and to Enid can only observe shadowy scribbles writ for another's knowing.

She can't tell a single thought running through the blankness of her Mom's face. Dad, somehow, has made himself an afterthought even in this. Automatic, quick as a bolt, her mother scoffs. "Don't be silly, you will, wolf out." It's said with the same certainty as, the moon will be a full moon tonight. That is, it was a gibbous the last, and will be a gibbous again. As sure as the world will turn.

Enid pretends she is the adult of this conversation and once again with the onus to break this barrier of unsaid, unwanted worries. "Silly? There is nothing silly about this. I won't wolf out. Maybe, I can't," She stares into a mirror and it whispers to her, after everything, it's only you. "Maybe, I'm not your daughter, the one who could fake I could in that desperate want of everything to be fixed by a wolf dancing in the moonlight."

Yharnam, like a curse, like a crucible that's melted its own young, distilled the bitter boldness into Enid.

"Are you high?" Enid closes her eyes against the sheer everything about that statement. Oedeon above, what sort of question is that? Apparently a serious concern of one Esther Sinclair. "Drunk? Where is this coming from, honey?" She reaches out and presses the back of a cold hand against Enid's forehead.

Weakly batting away her Mom's hand and all the nostalgia-gilded memories they try to muster. But decades ago is too late, the age old question. Theseus' ship, how much of yourself can you kill before it becomes a kind of murder? Or is it when it is broken, when the ship is killed, does it die for the first and last? And the aftermath, the repair and the replacement only window dressings on a coffin?

The deflection is an obvious one, well-used and loved by Mom. Classic, really. Divert attention from unwanted questions by poking hard into another question, a new gloss on an unwanted antique. Enid can't help but notice she doesn't even acknowledge the question, doesn't even really look at her— Mom is communicating with Dad in their silent language Enid used to whine and bemoan not knowing. Though, Dad hardly seems to recognize it either, looking at the two of them like strangers.

"I think," Enid says in the delicate sort of way that brings shoulders up and cinches the neck, "you should know me better than that."

"You're a teenager, bad friends can make you do anything, that Ajax boy, your roommate, you never talk to us anymore—" Enid hasn't even talked to Ajax, only mentioned him the once.

"We're talking now, aren't we? Do I look drunk or high to you?"

Esther Sinclair actually looks, scanning from foot to heart and apparently unsatisfied with what she sees, lets out a not-so-quiet huff of defeat. Apparently, Enid can find ways to disappoint her Mom even by not slamming back drinks until her head slams into a bar counter, or bleeding cannabis into the white of her eyes.

"It must be something."

Enid wants to politely scream, why can't that something be you, Mom?

Suddenly, and while she has the temptation to call it a 'bolt across the blue', she won't. This is only the closing act to a shitty masquerade gone on too long and the actors are sweating their makeup onto the stage and really it's been hidden all along in the blinding heat of the spotlight. She can see it all play out over and over and over until the bulb explodes and the stage goes up in flame.

Esther Sinclair cannot, cannot even think of— it's impossible for her in every capacity to believe her daughter won't be the consummate wolf. She can slide her eyes over the pastel colors turning into chemical dye dripping from blonde strands, tut and honeysuckle sweet poison every choice Enid makes for being different from that broken image.

Calling it tolerance would be a disservice. You tolerate something you hate because you have to. Mom neatly snips it from her assumed reality. Tolerance is the bitter clench of your teeth as you hold back the spew of disgust, this isn't even that. Indifferent eyes, seeing someone as nothing else— not even a person. Just a thing , just a dirty filthy thing waiting to be removed on the street.

Pictures with people cutouts.

In the lonely sublime beauty of a forest draped in dying gold, the isolating spread of that bright yellow for miles, and miles. The salt-iron taste— she's sucked on her teeth too hard again, tore the skin apart in her mouth again— it lingers on her tongue like the very opposite to fairy magic. Only tired, banal reality filled with little indignities to endure until suddenly she just can't. But that's life. No one is exempt. Not Enid, not Wednesday Addams, not even Esther Sinclair. Suck it up, buttercup, and spit it out.

Something in Enid simply… snaps. Shame, the ingrained habit of hers preventing her from speaking to her parents like equals, memories of her entire life, anything and everything; it snaps.

She lunges forward, fast too fast for her parents to react in anything but alarm, and grips her Mother's chin in a tight grip. Not crushing, perfectly able to speak, but unable to escape. The flickering desperate movement of Mom's eyes look like the skittering of insects, like Enid's just lifted her very first pretty rock and glimpsed the crawling, worming things underneath.
"No, we're not doing this anymore." Shock prevents her Mom from slapping her hand away, and then lupine strength honed and cut in the bloody samsara of Yharnam ensures Esther's incarceration and her imprisonment: looking her daughter directly in the eye and seeing a stranger. "No more passive aggressive bullshit, no more dodging the question like you've been doing ever since I was eleven."

Do you remember that feeling when you first beat your dad in say, basketball? The terrifying enormity of growing up and seeing the once-hero of childhood in the high of triumph for what they are, really are, only human? Enid experiences that feeling whenever her Dad does jackshit, so this? Stopping him from stopping her with only an arm, is only a sad coda to the swan song.

Esther Sinclair struggles under the pressure, slapping against Enid's grip on her chin, but her awkward position on the picnic table, her fear of attracting attention keeps her quiet from the rest of the families doing their own rituals of disappointment and excitement. "Stop this! …You really are on something!" She latches onto that with the desperation of a drowning bird. Her eyes glint with relieved fury.

"Sure, sure, I can be more of a disappointment to you." Enid says sweetly. "I'm drunk, high off a kite. Whatever you want."

Esther resembles her husband now, shot. Wounded irreparably. Enid forges on past the instinctive desire of a child to do anything to wipe that look of her Mom's face. Kicks that stupid, childish thing in the corner of her mind and kicks it's sorry ass back into the nothingness. Time to be an adult. Time to fucking grow up.

Enid deliberately tilts her head. Like she's surprised at the look on her Mom's face. "Sorry, but cowing me with implied cruelty and the promise of your disappointment isn't working anymore. There's only so much I can disappoint you, so why not go all out? I can't really take back manhandling my mom in public, embarrassing you and everything… so hit me. Answer the question. What happens when I don't wolf out? Hmm?"

"You—"

"Ah, ah ah. Let's use sentences beginning with 'I', please. I don't really care what happens to me, what happens to you? What do you do?" Call it a bit like family therapy, call it a bit like redemption. Call it the end, in whatever form that takes. She doesn't squeeze, doesn't even bruise the aging crow's feet of her mom's mouth— crow's feet noticeably absent around her eyes.

Esther Sinclair sets her mouth into a line and refuses. She plainly fucking refuses!

"Are you a child? " Enid can barely believe what's coming from her mouth. "Communicate! COMMUNICATE! What's the fuck's even stopping you now? There's nothing after this! It's all over, everything can't be pretended away! So fucking speak!"

Whatever facade of normalcy around them breaks, people start to look over. Eyes watch, mouths whisper. Enid knows this will never be forgotten. A line of people stop at some invisible barrier just before reaching them, enough to listen in but not enough to do anything. Bystanders, gossip hungry assholes. She can't bring herself to care over the anger clawing at her throat.

Mom closes her eyes, she looks like she's preparing herself to be hit. Enid can't breathe. Apparently they do have something in common. Sheer stupid stubbornness.

"For god's sake Esther! Just… just say it. Say something." Both mother and daughter look surprised at, of all things of all people, Murray. Murray Sinclair, Dad. Enid hasn't even realized he stopped fighting her and trying to separate her from his wife.

Esther Sinclair is a good person. She has made sure everyone knows it. But being a good mother has never been as easy to make of oneself. Still keeping her eyes closed, she speaks, "If, when—, no, no, If… if you never wolfed out. We would support you, no matter what, you're our daughter—"

Enid cuts her off. "I said you. What you will do. Not what Dad will try." The truth of it rings clear as a bell, no one enjoys it. Everyone has a miserable cast on their face. Everyone doesn't want to be here. Even the useless bystanders wince.

"... You're not my daughter." Esther can't say it. She can only say around it. "My daughter is a wolf, a beautifully strong pup. But the moon took her from me when she was only a girl... and, and I don't know who you are. You're a stranger."

Enid lets go of Esther Sinclair's chin, she remembers the saying well enough to finish this broken little fairy tale. The sweet phrase, spoken everytime little Enid asked the same stupid question. "And we don't have enough to let strangers into our house. Their own families will take care of them, right? That's what families do. They always, always, take care of their own."

And in that nuclear bubble of family, the little girl beamed up with gap-toothed fangs.

The girl grown bites down hard enough to pretend the tears aren't hers.

…

Enid doesn't bother flicking on the lights, vampire rooms come pre-uninstalled for that particular quality of life feature.

Rerouted electricity buzzes around dimly lit fridges, seal slightly aged evidenced by dust-bitten holes leaking light. Both Yoko and her roommate— vampires usually pair themselves with each other, working their more nocturnal schedules with fellow twilight enjoyers was simply easier or so she had claimed. Enid thought it was so they could stay up downing bags of red like fermented carpi-suns.

She taps her phone, the blue glow of a clipped text conversation halfway abandoned on delivered stare back at her, accusingly. She taps it again as if she can change the contents on the screen. The pain of living in two places at once, you can't be enough for one for both.

Is she here, trapped in gloom and blood-dens? Enid wonders, am I here, in Yharnam talking to Gilbert again. Or are the scars reopening on my skin from Maria killing me over and over and I'm lost in blood-loss memory?

"Hey, it's your girl. Enid Sinc…well, just Enid."

No one answers her, of course.

Enid doesn't let a boring fact like that stop her continuing mental degradation. "If I call my name, who answers? Is there anyone who will care for my grave, anyone who will wash the sun off the stone, plant flowers?"

Maria stares at her.

Enid looks back, slowly turns her head. Yoko's room hardly even has the decency to flash once like a fleeting waking dream. Only the dark and the snowlight, moonlight, plantlight, deadlights look back on her. Her own voice echoes back to her against the unheard fall of the dead tree. Jagged branches and maggoted wood crunch underfoot, and if she lifts her head to sky and exposes her neck. Dead lumenwood will drift onto her face like the drift of dying whales onto the ocean floor.

In their race towards death, Maria and Enid have brought down the very avatar of rebellion against it, otherworldly flora standing in haunting defiance of death's equality.

That's right… they've been killing this whole time, haven't they? Enid looks at her hands, sees in the caked velvet over them all the ways she has cheated death. Bright spots of clear skin like the finger of the reaper beckoning over and over. Bullet wounds, bullet shots, grazes, that one time where Maria's hand formed in the shape of a spear and neatly ripped through the tissue between her floating rib and its superior.

Said killer turned almost-killer says, fondly almost, "Byrgenwerth scholars oft asked similar probing questions. Drunk off moonlit passions and sick of fevers burnt into retinas. Though, their melancholy was more in the despondency of death and the uncaring finality of it all. Their failure in the face of evolution. Not so much on their own loneliness, already expected— wanted even. God, does not tolerate others."

Enid maneuvers herself across a branch cleaving their field into a gated park of living snow. "So from the beginning, this whole thing was what… some kind of an experiment to steal their way into the heavens? You were all mad from the start then?"

They have these little talks so often, perhaps Maria gets tired of killing her, maybe Enid wishes for something other than bloodletting. Odd, isn't it? To speak so frankly and so cordially to the one who breaks your bones and the one who chews your neck? Enid thinks it not so strange, is that not the nature of vulnerability? To peel apart your flesh and show the ugliness that hardly can be contained within prison of personality? There is a knowing in having sunk one's hands into the cavity of the chest, and like a crowbar, wrenching it open. And a knowing in having bitten the blood of those silver-white people hailing from the ice-sheathed north but with greedy flames lingering in their hearts. At times, Enid cannot deny, Maria feels like the most real relationship she's ever had. One, hideous and fraught with a violence that makes the stomach turn, but true in all its fear-soaked heart.

The raw truth, lest that of a man's, can never be beautiful. Only sincere in its terrible selfishness.

Maria agrees, while sharply swinging her arm across a dead limb of the tree cutting off another section of the field, "Of a kind to both matters. Yharnam, the grand experiment, you say? Nothing so lofty. It was simply… seeing the kindness of the blood, we could not help but share, but uplift the sprawling plague-ridden, wading in its own filth. How could we not? Keeping such a terrible miracle in our hands while letting those merely a forest edge apart swell in agony and misery, it would be inaction of the kind that massacres a people."

She pauses, muses, "Perhaps they convinced themselves later it borne out of financial obligation, genuine scientific onus, another stepping stool in their great game of outwitting evolution. But they cannot convince the dead. Aspirations of godhood are really not so uncommon among scholarly types. Only their scope. Only their fascination with it."

Enid listens. It's not so much a conversation but a retelling, a confession spilling out from haunted lips to one where there is no right to judge, no meaning. Just tears washed away in the rain long ago.

"Evolution, as you may well know, is of a population. Not an individual." Maria lifts both hands, attempting to demonstrate the totality of that by spreading her fingers. Only one hand does, the other twitches in abject failure which she hardly seems to notice. "But the Healing Church, myself, the Research Hall even in its infancy were willing to bet. Wager against the rules, pound at the scales of Ascension and ask, how many? How many constitutes a population? A million? A thousand? A hundred? Two?"

She lifts a single finger. One. "How many could we save, and how many would it cost?"

Already, Enid knows the answers, sees it everytime she closes her eyes. Yharnam burning, its street piled high with corpses, only the howling wind echoing through the labyrinth once called a home.

"... I have heard previous hunters mention an adage made common in the eveningtide of Yharnam's age. 'Evolution without courage will be the death of our race'," Maria's face contorts into a frown while her mouth twists into a cruel cold smile. The disconcertion unnerves Enid. "I expect Provost Willem said such a thing. But look, feast your eyes on what our endless repository of courage has so wrought onto us? Call us craven, call our endeavor a coward's flight from death— No. This, no matter what came after, has always been an attempt against death's conquest of life. The only fight which has meaning."

In Maria's words, in her convictions still aflame alone in these endlessly lonely wanderings, her resolution persisting beyond even her own grave, Enid can see. Perhaps only a dull glimmer at the very end of a road taken so long ago at the very end of memory, only a slight glimpse of the bright future wanted and hoped.

But it is a candle's brilliance gone out, a sun's last sparks before it's guttering, the flame's closeness at the last quiet snuffing out.

Enid quietly, softly says, "But the fight's over. Yharnam is dead on so many years. No one is left to remember you. No one will light the candles at your grave. Your home is forgotten and with all of its triumphs, its failures and its peoples. Everything, everyone here… are only bloodstained echoes of a song lost to wind and rain."

"... There, you have erred." Maria begins advancing. The flag of her cape flaps after her shoulder like a faithful hound. A banner of another time continues to drag itself against the sky even in this lightless place. Something like flame lingers at her limply hanging wrist. "You know, you remember. Stolen and borrowed memories half rotten, all decayed, however many times over, but still taken by yourself. It may only be only a dream, but you have taken Yharnam into your eyes and it will not let go of you… If we are but a dream of a dead god, then you have become its Host."

There it is! The ugly, disgusting truth. The secret lying behind the sword of the pale lady.

All the dead living buried here… are they the same? The same, host of hosts living for only the sake of this Dream to persist on and on? Can it really be so? Then the questions arise, who began this neverending reanimation? Who is the Dreamer? Who needs to die.

Enid drags another smile out. "Why don't we make another wager? Are you the Host of the Nightmare… or am I?"

…

 

[ArtemisAvant]

Chapter Twenty: Wolf and Dog

...
​

It arrives, as ships are wont to do eventually. Their story is one with a definite beginning and end, they must depart and brave a lonely sea onto itself with only what they may lift upon the water's back. The end, either one of lost at sea or the continued journey into the starspun horizon.

The great artifice of humanity's wanderlust, the very image of their crest into the unknown— it sets its great wheels onto the last harbor. Somewhere along the way, and who can truly tell when, the dark sightless sea they rode upon has fallen away to a plane of stone spikes and iron gates. Their vessel crossing some unknown barrier between the ocean and the world, stops its voyage where it all has began.

Steam, smoke, acrid and foul pours out from plated channels. Pumps and red liquid leak out of the marvel of a seafaring vessel. But in its infirm, stationary state, it can only look like the body of some monstrous beast, the size of which can not belong in the world's oceans. The noise is tremendous, overwhelming in both decibel and mass. A screeching, howling, roaring, popping quantity of ever more pure noise joins it. Brass horns bleat out their triumphant return, but the ship creaks and squeals in mechanical misery. Looking closer, the watertight hull shows fit to bursting, the inverted glass windows like the fishbowl eyes of a some blind creature are glowing with red intent. Someone has forgotten to demand the steel-blooded, wood-breathing engine to stop at port.

And so it does not.

Yharnam, the disgusting, indelible city more alive than it has any right to be. Merry flame still setting the sky ablaze— all of its splendor and horror, that inexhaustible lively thing meets the advance of the ship. Wheels like the demented cheat of arthropod leg's constant press, crush and crawl over stone spires and slate-roofed husks of flame. The infernal engine pours out whatever arcane power forces it afloat on water and demands it to do the same for earth. Stone grinds away, unable to bear the burden of uncountable tonnes. Marble and stained glass soaring into ceilings carved high with Pthumerian majesty soon fall victim to the same unbearable weight.

Like riding the crest of some torrential wave taller than mountains, the voyager of the seas steps onto land and says that this too, is its domain. It lifts itself onto the squalor and splendor of Yharnam and inextricably, unimaginably pulls itself up, higher, higher. It is not pretty, it cannot be even mentioned in the same breath as beautiful— but it pukes, bursts pustules of steam over itself, spits and vomits its way forward.

All the way to the Choir's vaunted, alien gardens.

All the way to the top of the Astral Clocktower, piercing through its runed face and slamming further still, all the way through into the burning clouds.

The nightmare rests above. Here, all along, resting above and hidden by smoke, flame, and cloud. The long unspoken question, where is the Moon? Answered in soft-spoken destiny. The truth of it all, locked in the very physical place where desires coalesce into their ruinous ambition. There, lo, a new sea awaits, a salt-streaked gray beach and the sight of what lies beyond the bloody horizon.

The bow of the ship launches itself into the scarlet sky, burning and tracing a wake of ash and stone, and at the end of it, the longest furthest point stabs heavenward. The sky ripples, like a great placid lake of water sitting ontop of the water. And the ship drags itself into the bottom of the impossible sea stacked onto land.

A light shines at the breach point, burning blue bright enough to outshine even the burning world below. Bright enough to eclipse even that sword stuck in the bridge. Greater, greater until it begins to paint the world in white-blue blindness. Noise disappears, the awful terrible crash of stone and roaring engines gone, the crackle and hiss of flames, even the drip drip drop of water like the rhythm of a pulse vanishes into the terrible light.

It is as if the center of a star is exposed at the every point of meeting, eldritch luminaries washing over everything. Everything in the gentle rays disappearing, shooing away this illusory world.

…

Knock, knock, knock.

The house is a rather ordinary, full and weathered to be sure, house. Homely all the same. Bright blue paint peeling off and revealing the eroded planks below. The doormat is uncleaned, crinkled and littered with falling leaves. A big blue-lit moon, cartoonish and simple, welcomes in guests to a heavy oaken door colored black. The windows are lit, and if you crane the ear a lack of insulation makes known the delight and roughhousing of overly energetic boys and the crackle of some advertisement smiling through the TV.

But look. Homely does not make a home. The door is sealed to the point where light does not leak warmly from its edges, the windows seem to be burning with yellow, rather than warmly radiating. The paneling painted blue chips and molds with some virulent fungus, writhing uncontrollably in the sunset like a frightened child. Faux golden handles and metal bits gleam cold. Silver. Behind the rowdy house, a miserable wretched wailing is heard, shrinking away at times, and at others silent with loaded purpose. If you care to look, some strange buried things lay there, wrapped in swaddling clothes of a mourner underneath the primary color plastic slide set.

It is not the one crying. The advertisement is still repeating, and the smack of a flesh against flesh cannot be ignored. Overly large features warped into something near monstrous parades around in cartoonish bodies. Smack. Crack. A woman's scream. A man's terribly loud shout. Smack.

The door swings open.

"I suppose… an explanation is in order."

Enid lets her fist fall. Knuckles shiny and wet.

…

They serve tea in the living room. It tastes like nothing, like the pretend plastic princess parties with dolls and stolen action figures from her brothers. The table is set, the overly bright and synthetic treats arranged on gleaming silver trays, and her host wrings their hands nervously.

"It's been quite, quite a long while since I've hosted. Please, do not hesitate to inform me if I err."

Enid stirs the colorless water in her teacup. "...Where do you want to start? Yharnam? The endless cycle? Why? Why any of it?"

Her damnation is pages long and she's unafraid to nail it into their featureless face, covered only by the sort of standard Hunter wear paling in comparison to Ludwig's, Maria's. The bottom half of her face aches, and she finds herself terribly envious of their mask wrapped tight around an indefinable nose. Fine, aquiline, roman, squat, hooked— a thousand or so descriptions come to mind but none seem to fit. It's… as if someone has placed the ideal of a nose onto a face, shown in all its forms all at once. She looks away before they start to blur into something dark, smooth.

"I'm afraid," they say with painful delicacy. "That there is simply too much even if I were to begin from what you know." They look to the light slanting in from a window, casting everything in orange. "Do you know? That this is not even the first audience I have been summoned to? The incident in Prague, where the avatar of a dread god nearly was birthed, the return of antediluvian vampires only slightly younger than myself, the Cult of Bliss, the Heirs Apparent. So many have attempted to pry the secret of ascension from myself… But, this, This is quite the surprise."

Enid doesn't know what any of the events mentioned are, and she really doesn't care. "Surprise. I don't care."

They nod. "I expect you wouldn't." Still, the tea bubbles and whirls into eddies, calmly. But the rotation of water in unequal to the amount poured in, bottomless. "But I do. They have made it my business to care. Have you heard of the idea, Evolution is of a population?"

"Painfully so."

They spread their arms wide. "There you have it. The secret so many have salivated over since the world's turning. Now too, it is something you must care about."

Enid attempts to not immediately resort to violence, the shaking of the teacup in her hand and boiling water splashing onto her legs makes very clear the difficulty of that task. "That literally tells me nothing."

"So goes the labour of Insight." Grandiose, sweeping, great declarations like the kind spoken over a rich vintage and savored with the fine taste of political gambles, the sort that end careers with nooses. "Snatching, stealing and savaging one's way into enlightenment at the end of a red cleaver. You must be well-acquainted with the practice, having wandered your way through my eternal echo of Yharnam."

They speak fondly, as if recalling some bittersweet memory. Still sipping on that vintage. "To kill, to bleed, to drag yourself though the closest approximation of hell on earth so you might bring heaven to its knees. Cryptic wiseman, monologuing figures who simply fail to hear your questions no matter how much you scream, beasts. Beasts at every corner, kin not far beyond. Beast in the mirror, moonscent all around."

"... Yharnam wasn't like that for me."

They glance at her, unsettling the weight of that gaze. A sight that pierces through all illusions, that demands the truth and nothing but. Enid feels wholly, utterly seen. "Wasn't it?"

Enid sets the teacup downs, and in the reflection of the water she catches glimpses of her own face. She looks away. "Maria burnt it all down, you know. Not a lot left to know in the ashes."

She looks back, they're just sitting there. A faint curve to their eyes, as if softly asking her, really? Really? They widen, as if relaying something. "Ah… so that is the half of it. No Doll, no Dream in another, you simply must carry them all on your back." They clear their throat. "Let me explain it to you proper then. What you have seen, as you very well know. Can hardly be called Yharnam. Can only be the shadow of a memory of it. Perhaps… even I have not seen the genuine city with mine own eyes. It is… ah," They struggle with the words. "How unpleasant. Revealing it all, unraveling myself like this is much, very much an unpleasant thing, and yet… My debt should be paid. It is what you are owed."

She feels like she's won the shittiest lottery in the world. The taste of it, sour and astringent nearly making her retch, bile fills her mouth.

"Simply put," The way they wave around their hands and gesticulate wildly makes it sound anything but simple, but after enough motions and flexibility to blush the deaf, they give up and just say it. "You entered into the literal blood echo of Yharnam, and there, fought blood echoes of beasts and men I once slaughtered, and by your final victory against the shadow of Lady Maria, who I assume began the task of collecting the rest you did not imagine of."

It leaves them in a rush, and Enid knows every word. Hears them ring in her head. Bloodstained echoes of a song lost to wind and rain.

"...So to say, by the end you inherited it all."

Inherited what?

They clap cheerily, gloved hands somehow ringing like flesh. "Congratulations, truly. You have stolen the seat of my being, my populace, and all without making it your own. Though… if we must be specific, the latter was more a matter of impossibility rather than choice."

Enid must be losing her mind. "I didn't choose any of this, I didn't want any of thi–"

"But you did." They correct her, gently but much in the way steel wrapped in silk is gentle. "You declared so passionately to yourself amongst beasts, kin and ghosts, that you would carry that memory."

Gilbert. The weight of it hits her.

Softly, kindly, the Good Hunter says, "Is it no wonder then? That, this is what you have wrought with your own hands? You have taken my path, followed in my footsteps, been killed and killed as I have. Yes, it may be different, burnt and ashen and in all the wrong order, but you have…. Mantled me. Taken my cloak— my scarf once upon another life, taken Yharnam upon yourself in a way that cannot be undone."

Her fingers touch the battered, weathered old scarf from so long ago it feels like her own past life, another ago. The mindless, reactionary choice she made at the very beginning to reduce smoke inhalation… it sounds like some sick joke. But at the same time, if everything in her Yharnam is only an echo in a dream. Then of course, of course this stupid little thing matters.

"...So it is true, I have become the Host of this Dream." Her obsession, her want to live, Enid's desperation, it continued this horror show. This is all her fault, will be all her fault— no, yes, no, yes.

"No," the Good Hunter denies, "the Dream is ending. You never were the host of my dream, only this one…" Something human rises on their face, exhaustion, something like shame. "Yourself, the children Maria buried, and the others below that sanctum you fought in, and the others below that. They were never hosts to anything so devastating as a dream. They, hapless children, are the cruel want of the Great Ones manifest in myself. My surrogates."

The Great Ones lose their child, and yearn for a surrogate. The Great Ones hunger for a child of their own… are we not… their children?

Enid stares.

They cannot hold her gaze, staring back at the unmoving slant of sunlight. Their hands flutter, gripping and releasing unseen weapons no longer at their side. "If there is merely one wrong I have done unto you that I must apologize for… this sin must be one I should repent for all eternity for."

She…. She stops. Just, bare necessity, robotic breathing.

They stand, the Good Hunter drawing themselves in a regal, stately bearing. They look akin to a poor copy of Maria's innate bearing. "From here, there are two avenues laid out before you. They may come in different fashions, different methods, but they are the same, two paths leading onto wholly different walks among the stars." A heavy clunk of a heavy, serrated, and worn in old butcher's tape cleaver with saw teeth drops on the thick teak table. She does not see it deposited, nor see it appear, it is simply as if it has always been there and now she has noticed it for the first time, it shouts for her to heed it.

The Good Hunter declares simply, "You may savage me, and walk as I have walked. Transforming yourself from the limits of man and beast, enact evolution onto yourself, a populace condensed into a singular. Become a Great One, and finally understand all that which hides and sneaks. Watch as the cosmos falls through space as the blue marble called Earth turns till it's last. Kill me— do not worry, I will not resist your just dues— and take my divinity, as it is so named by man. A power well beyond even the glut of Yharnam's bloodstained feast. From star-clad beasts in the dark of the universe, solar radiance of near-gods in everything but multiple planes, the unending Hunt streaked through the constellations and all that I have absorbed in a journey begun in the tumult of the Great Flood; all the uncountable, unknowable experiences and strengths of each can be made yours. Or…

The other path speaks itself, "Or you do not. And return to your world as unrealized divinity. The kind that begets monsters and troubles to cling onto you like a worrying cough. Yharnam will haunt you, madness will streak your brow in sweat and your tongue will swell with secrets never to be spoken— but you will remain as you are. Changed, yes, but still the being whose name is writ in the stars. Enid Sinclair. You will continue the terrible, wonderful, equally priceless and accordingly worthless existence known as being human on the world named Earth until your life's thread cuts short."

For a terrifying, timeless moment. In the endless fall, Enid imagines it. Her claws torn through stellar flesh, stars left like juice from fruit on her hands, becoming the orbit of a lightless star greater than any before it— but none of it compares to finally, finally knowing the real, unmistakable, truth. The end of a long road reaching for answers. The end of madness. No more secrets. No more mysteries left. Finally, finally. She will know. She won't be blindsided by the truth anymore. All the lies and the unsaid things will speak out for her and she will claim them.

The dream dissolves around them, as the Good Hunter patiently waits. Neither scared nor anxious, only accepting. Awfully, cruelly, accepting. Unwilling to weigh her choice.

The sound of the advertisement blaring through the house snaps shut, no more raucous, ringing laughter fills empty rooms. Only the wailing, only the sunset's light remain.

She picks up the saw cleaver, recognizes it as it recognizes her. What a bloody path they will wreak, how many corpses will lift up their rise. It is no lie to say this humble, rugged thing has slain gods.

There is a beatific smile on the Good Hunter's face.

Enid lifts, feels the heft of it. Knows it true, wields it with surety and finds comfort at the pull of its arc.

And she swings.

That smile disappears in a spray of not-red and as they topple over and under, sprawling onto the carpeted floor and soaking it in paleblood. The pool where shoulder meets triceps meets severance ripples. An arm flops weakly as if it could return to its body given enough time, before she kicks it roughly to a corner to die in.

"If I killed you," She hisses onto their prone, divested form. The torn off arm still writhes like something dark and liquid, the color of bruised organs in the periphery of her eye. "The bloody echo of Yharnam would condense into me, wouldn't it? Those other children, those people, they would exist in me forever, trapped and screaming."

They answer in proud silence. No impassivity can disguise the curl of a lip, the softening of a brow. Why ask, it says, when you already know.

"And if I let you live, you would only go on to steal more. Searching for that dead kid, that fucking surrogate even knowing, even knowing what you have done!" They close their eyes, nod sharply, once. "You cannot stop, you will never stop!" She cries, lifting the saw cleaver up again.

"...Can an insect cease the flap of its wing? Can a storm end its path of disaster before landfall? I can no more change my nature than a black hole can stop its hunger." They apologize again, in the stygian, incomprehensible, perfectly totality tongue of gods.

They stare up at her. Wondering at her final choice. Nothing has changed, the paths are still the same, as they have said.

Enid bites down her teeth. It's the thing of growing up, you only have bad choices. Something will always hurt, something will go wrong, not everyone can win. There will always be a negative, there will always be another regret. This, they say, is adulthood. Making painful decisions with no one to give care, comfort you.

She already knows the answer, doesn't she? The moon took her when she was only a girl. The saw cleaver comes down.

The wailing outside comes to an abrupt stop, and the sunlight floods the room, spilling over into the living room.

The Good Hunter breathes evenly even with the puncture of their hand by the teeth of the cleaver and the ever-deepening pool. Enid lifts again, but the butcher's blade does not come down once again. Her claws elongate, and with a pained breath, Enid grits her teeth. A kaleidoscope of nail polish emerges from the back of her other hand, spasming and twitching as tendons are severed.

They look on curiously, then alarmed as Enid places her own ragged palm to theirs. Blood mixes.

"Take this is a promise. Engrave it onto your fucking soul, you pathetic disgrace of a God. A Great One, whatever you are." Enid spits out every word, attempting to burn her hatred into the Good Hunter with her eyes. "You're looking for a kid, I don't have parents. This is a covenant, a sacred vow. We share in blood. Mine in yours, and yours in mine."

They, for the first time in this house, look genuinely surprised. "Do you know what you are asking of yourself? Of me?"

"Yeah, not a damn clue." Enid says easily, a flash of shock crosses the eldritch being's sham of a face. "But," She smiles sourly, ugly. She can almost feel the universe hanging onto her every word, but that is only imagination, only falsehood. The universe is not at liberty to care.

It is up to her to care. "What's another shitty parent?"

Laughter breaks out, bright and a mite hysterical from the Good Hunter. "As you say, Enid Sinclair— No, Enid of the Moon, as you say!"

Enid laughs too, crying laughter where her face twists and burns in the irony of it all.

The dream dissolves around them to the sound of terrible mirth. And the universe watches on, without a word.

…

Where the forest met the grazing hills, the wolf saw the dog beside the sheep and so called out, "Cousin, what a fine feast you have there."

The dog said in response, "There is no feast here, only my charges."

Perplexed, the wolf crept closer, lingering in the shadows beyond the moonlight. And recoiled, seeing the dog guarding the sheep, cried out, "You are no cousin of mine! I do not know the face you wear!"

"Cousin," called the dog. "Do we not share fang, claw, tooth? But, you are feared and I am loved. You go hungry while I feast in return for this simple duty. I am warm and you shiver."

Jealous, the wolf leapt onto the fence as if it may take the dog's duty for its own.

Later, as the dog gnawed on the wolf's neck, it howled. "Cousin, cousin! If this is how you treat your family, then no one will trust you with the sheep."

"Did you not say it first? We are no cousins." the dog said.

…