Work Text:
On the beach, there is a saline tang left upon the tongue, the pelagic scent of fish and mollusk; the citrus-likeness of rotted seagrass and seafoam, churned by unending waves. The raucous cry of a gull; the deep below of a finned beast in the distance. An endless sky of azure, like a jewel she tries to capture between her deft fingers as she lifts her hand to shield from the sun.
That is how she remembers the sea, now a transient figment of the past.
It is nothing like this. Beneath the faint rumble of thunder in the skies - swirling shades of dim grey and slate and ebony, an uneasy cacophony of an ever-present storm - the chatter of the scholars is nearly drowned by the angry murmur of the sea. Outraged thrashing, as if in a mournful, bitter cry melted into a discordant song. An animosity of man.The sea was always a cold place, but the chill that seeps into her bones is near agonizing, wind threatening to tear the flesh from her bones.
No longer can she taste salt on her tongue; only something foul, something that makes bile rise into her throat. It comes from the scent of offal and brackish ichor, of slippery entrails that ooze from the creature’s split flesh, coagulating in the silt beneath its limp body.
And yet to call it merely a creature seems something near tantamount to sin. For the rotted, dead thing on the beach is a god, a Great One as they call them. Kosm, the philologists murmur amongst themselves, ink-tipped quills whittling down beige parchment. Holy, yet not quite sacrosanct enough to leave be.
To them, the massacre is nothing more than an auric development, just one more stone piled on the stairs being built to a new place, a new divinity just within reach. They stand like hawks over prey, gimlet-eyed and eager, yet staying a reasonable enough distance away so as to not sully their fine silk robes. The job of extraction is left to the ones scurrying about the carcass with their thick gloves, boots caked with sand and gore. One of them retches into the sand, pale-faced with arms clutching their stomach.
From her spot against the rough, chalky cliffside Maria watches as the scholars flit about the carcass like fish nibbling on the dead, bloated remains of a sunken whale on the seafloor. With practiced, surgical precision do they slice into the rubbery hide of the creature, stuffing rubbery intestines, torn sinew, and pearlescent scales into wax-topped jars, filled with thick, murky liquid. Neatly stacked and labeled, with all the callous devoutness of a hungry mind eager for knowledge. And what a feast have they stumbled upon, she thinks bitterly.
Parsing through the guts of a god to find its promise of divinity. She isn't sure she believes in that divine elation anymore. Perhaps that promise was only a pale facsimile; perhaps man was not meant to reach their hands up into the gooey ocean of the cosmos.
She sees Laurence - the Provost Willem's promising protegé, an eager man with a head of flaxen hair pulled back into a messy ponytail - kneeled beside Kos' head. She watches as he brings gloved hands down cup a face far too human - closed eyes and plump lips beneath sinuous tendrils, peacefully still as if only in rest. But she knows this to be truth vacant, and feels something sickly stir within her as she watches fingers peel back an eyelid to peer into a flat, dead eye; pale and filmed over with something like gossamer. The pad of thumb gently presses into the sightless optic, and with enough pressure, the flesh gives. With an eased precision, he gently scoops each eye out, placing them gently in tiny jars and sealing them shut.
She wonders if those eyes ever peered upon the very bottom of the sea, if such a thing existed. Now, they will only look at their own dead reflection in a sterile jar.
She watches as he lifts his head, lips parted ever-so slightly in soft gasps of breath. She wonders if he can taste the salt, or just the gushing images of blasphemy from Kos' blubbery, desecrated flesh. He wipes a thin sheet of sweat from his brow despite the chilling ocean wind, and here he meets her gaze from across the beach. His eyes do not hold the same unparalleled glee that the rest of his scholarly folk share, but there is something aglow in them all the same. He offers her a thin smile. She does not offer one back. He shrugs, and his attention returns to his task at hand.
The waves dance in their uneasy waltz behind him. She wonders if those waves will pass the shoreline, wrap around his ankles, and drag him into their depths. Fill his lungs with the punishment of repentance.
Perhaps the sea will swallow them all, no cliff high enough to escape its wrath. She shivers as the wind screams past her ears, cold and unforgiving.
She is lost to her own thoughts, so much so that she misses the approach of Gehrman, who ambles his way up the beach towards her. He leans back against the rough wall beside her, and brings out a pipe. She can barely smell the familiar bitter scent of tobacco, laced with something saccharine over the overwhelming smells from the beach. He settles the pipe between his lips and indulges, silent.
Maria is the first one to break the silence that had settled over them like a grim blanket.
"Any new developments on how long we'll be here?" A topic easy enough, casual bordering on formality. Oftentimes as of late, there had been a thin veil between them, a diaphanous border that shielded away from their years of companionship. Maria did not know what fed that growing divide, but she did not allow herself time to ponder it. She did not have the time to muse over such, and Gehrman was far too stubborn for any talk of the sort.
Gehrman takes another sip before answering. "Laurence reckons we'll be here another week, give or take." He grumbles, and adds, "He's got me bloody patrolling the perimeters. Like there'll be any damn pilferers." His grey eyes are dark as he watches Laurence, now speaking to one of the scholars whittling away in a notebook.
Maria casts a long glance at the beach in its entirety. Once, it may have been filled with the laughter of children, tiptoeing through the tide, mothers berating them from atop the cliffs. Fisherfolk casting nets into the waters, smiling after a day of hearty catchings. Now, only the bloodied corpse of a god will fill it.
She held no pride for her actions, no sense of enlightenment and satisfaction. She knew well of her own bitter nature, that classic Cainhurst froideur that she would always possess - but she was no monster.
She found no pleasure in murder, nor in the bloody hunts of the night. She knew men whose pride had made them greedy serpents, curling around their own self-deference, so proud that they swallowed themselves whole. Found themselves consumed in the rapture of the hunt, drowned in throes of ichor. Blood-drunk, little different than the beasts themselves.
She hunted because it was her duty. She hunted to keep Yharnam safe. And yet…. she had to wonder: how duty-bound was she to that massacre in that seaside hamlet?
She remembers the answer Micolash - a rather eccentric associate of Laurence - had offered when she'd wondered this aloud: "Why, it's your duty to help humanity, is it not? There is only so much one human can do. To achieve enlightenment for all, we must turn to the cosmos."
"I am no scholar."
He'd laughed at her, a rather grating sound that erupted from chapped lips. "Perhaps not, but we are all human."
Perhaps those hamlet residents watch her from the cosmos now. She wonders if they are angry, screaming in silent wrath.
Maria is silent. She knows there will be nobody coming to the beach.
-------
Later, the rabble of scholars and scientists crowd around the corpse at a respectable distance as Laurence beckons Gehrman over to his side. She sees their mouths move in unheard speech, and sees Gehrman grimace. Laurence leans closer to him for a moment, and then she sees him sigh, but nod.
Gehrman raises the sharp blade of his scythe and - with a brief murmur of assent from Laurence - swings down. In a swift motion, siderite meets pale, blubbery flesh, and the soft abdomen of Kos comes undone. Intestinal entrails and fatty guts spill out into the damp sand. There is a moment of rapt silence, of awe and horror and uncontained curiosity. Maria finds herself horrifying entranced, unable to bring herself to tear her eyes away. Like a freshly cracked gull's egg, a small something encased in a thick, liquidus sac comes tumbling out - an awful, bony lump that makes her stomach roil.
"Dieu," she mutters, in the Cainhurst tongue, and hears as Laurence sucks in a breath. He quickly dons a new pair of leathery gloves, and then he is wrist-deep in it all, gooey entrails slipping through his fingers as he scoops the shape into his hands. And for the first time, Maria sees something like uncertainty and unease flit across his face.
You’d bleed a mother dry if it meant her insides bore scripture from the gods, she thinks as a grim sort of finality carves a pit into the depths of her belly. I only hope you know what you’re doing.
Laurence, ever the collected fellow, composes himself not a moment later and begins to issue out commands. Maria looks to Gehrman from across the beach, and he is frowning, brow low and lips pursed. He must sense Maria's gaze upon him, and he looks up at her, grey eyes troubled.
Maria makes her way down the beach towards Laurence. A passing scholar grumbles as they bump into her, then mumbles out an apology as they realize who she is. She pays them no mind, and approaches Laurence.
He speaks with one of his scholars, but waves them off with a flick of his wrist once he catches eye of her. He turns to her with an eased smile, lips pleasantly turned upwards. He brings a hand up to tuck a stray pale strand of hair from his face, the motion almost dainty.
Not for the first time in such a grim scenario, she thinks, He does not belong here.
"Lady Maria," he greets, voice smooth, "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Her hands tighten around her rakuyo, the familiar feel of cool metal a comfort - when she shifts her grip, she finds it has become clammy with cold sweat beneath her hands.
"I withdraw from my contact."
From the corner of her eye, she sees Gehrman tense. Laurence raises an eyebrow at her, confusion flitting across his face. "Pardon?"
She does not bother to hide her frown now. "I am done with this, Laurence. I no longer wish to be of service here." She turns, then pauses for just a moment. "I do hope you find what you are looking for. But I will not be the one who might just find it.”
Laurence opens his mouth, perhaps to object, but she does not care. She does not wait to hear a response before she stalks back towards the cliffs, jaw set to a near painful degree. She feels as a hand grabs her arm, and turns with a glare that would make most go pale with fear - but it is only Gehrman, expression morose.
"Where are you going?" He asks, and she shakes off his grip.
"Home. You aren't deaf Gehrman."
"Home?" He blinks. "Why? We are nearly done here, Maria. I don't know what's with you these past few days," he mutters, half to himself, and she grits her teeth. She does not have the mental bandwidth to deal with his petulant umbrage.
“I’ve no interest in what this has become.”
Disbelief blooms across Gehrman’s face. “I have seen you gut far worse than this,” he dissents, “Why is this so different?”
She finds herself overcome with exhaustion for a dizzying moment. She blinks tiredly at him, and does not feel obliged to give Gehrman the answers he wishes for. She isn’t so sure she knows herself.
"Goodbye, Gehrman.” Is all she offers, “I will see you upon your return."
He doesn't try to stop her.
-------
When Gehrman returns to the workshop two weeks later, it is raining.
His blonde hair is caked with briny sea salt, eyes sunken and dark. He doesn't greet Maria, he simply looks at her with something like bitterness as he slips unspoken into his room.
From her spot against the windowsill, Maria gazes out into the garden that lines the front lawn. Outside, the rain upsurges into a pour. She lets her fingertips glide over the smooth mahogany of the window, watching as cathedral tops in the distance become obscured by the harsh veil the rain casts over the sky. The rain reminds her of the ocean, and for a moment she is overwhelmed by the taste of salt, then gore. Nausea rolls through her stomach.
She turns away from the window, but the din of pattering rain does not leave until the next day. When she falls asleep that night, she swears she can feel seawater fill her lungs as she slips into oblivion, an abyss opened up to swallow her whole.
-------
Another round of seasons pass before Maria finally breaks.
Yharnam continues to smell of death, and continues to further rot. It grows more pungent by the day.
It smells of caskets piled high along the streets with little care for those who mind, malodorous scents of decomposing flesh and disease wafting through cracks in wet, rotted wood - those not shoved within the cramped confines of a box are tossed atop stinking piles of garbage and rotted corpses, burned away by torchflame and barely distinguishable as once human.
Stagnant, grey waters that churn in the sewers underfoot and through the city’s canals become nigh undrinkable, as mud-choked sludge and gods-knows-what pulsate out of rusty pipes and into the drainage system. Disease-ridden beasts that are more flea than animal, panting and glaze-eyed, snapping their decayed maws at whatever poor soul happened to pass by. Smokestacks belch out black smoke as if it were from the awful maw of a flame-breathed dragon, ash making its home in the dreary skies.
Hunting the beasts had been no such issue - they were nothing but awful things, some of them stinking piles of viscera and gore dragging themselves along the crumbling streets. But the Hunt had become a drunken frenzy, the rusted scent of flayed flesh and ichor intoxicating. Maria does not miss it. She had never hunted out of desire, but duty. Upon her quiet leave of service, thus the unavoidable fate of a Hunter, of being lost in the ire and throes of blood, became a worry dissipated. By taking the path of early retirement, she had thwarted a grim fate - but had led herself down another all the same.
Nights began to stretch on far past what should have been the dawn, the moon hung low and fat over Yharnam like a silvery omen of ruination.
And yet life in the sepulchral city continues, and Maria has never felt more like death. She knows the disappointing appearance she takes on despite her noble heritage, her accursed blood writhing beneath her skin and the blockades she had put up to never let it consume her as it did her. Never would she embrace it as her kin did. One look into the mirror confirms her suspicions - sunken eyes, silvery hair frayed at the ends. More than a little thin, face taunt. She turns away from the mirror.
She is exhausted from the chewy gnaw of guilt, weary of the blood that stained her hands. How many patients had she held the hand of as they faded, the feel of her own hand being crushed beneath a skeletal grip nothing compared to the crushed feel of her heart? How many calming murmurs, placating words that had tumbled from her mouth, nothing more than facades of comfort? Promises, broken before they are even uttered.
The memory of her sweet Adeline flashes through her mind as it oft does - laying amongst the sickly, smiling sadly at her from a thin face. Soft, warm eyes the colour of fresh chestnuts, slowly greying as they film over. Her laughter, soft like a warm breeze in the summer months, turned to watery gurgling, her thin hands grasping at the hem of her overcoat.
I cannot see you, my Lady. Oh, my Lady, my Maria... Please, don't leave me…
The blood had never quite been washed clean from the leather. Perhaps it is a cruel imitation of a libation, another plea into the empty pit for remission.
Even then, she had made a promise to her that she would return. And yet she knew as the door clicked shut, Adeline humming a watery, foreign tune mutedly from behind it, that she would not.
She kneels now, on the dewey grass atop the cliffs, and places down the lumenflower she'd brought to place at the makeshift grave. Small it may be, but she hopes someone out there will find peace within the notion. She lifts her head to cast a final look at Kos' desecrated corpse on the beach far below, shrouded by a low fog that had never seemed to lift since that bloodied day. The grey expanse of sky melts into the sea, and the two are indistinguishable. She is not sure which she would fall into should she plummet from the cliffs.
She is exhausted from the awful visions that wrack her brain and crawl beneath her eyelids in the latest of hours; Gehrman, reaching out to her as his lungs spilled water, eyes pale and pleading; Laurence, that fixed smile upon his face, two bleeding sockets where his eyes once were, gouged out like he had once done to Her; Maria herself, chained to the bottom of the sea, each bone in her body being crushed beneath agonising pressure. A spiralling expanse of abyss, pitch-black. Her lungs burning as if flooded with seawater, and the taste of congealed ichor settled bitterly on her tongue like a coat of valerian.
When she awakens in the morning, she’s never quite sure if it’s her own blood or Her’s.
The wind is silent, and yet she thinks, for the briefest of moments, that she hears something like wailing on the breeze that does little to cool her feverish skin. Quietly, she slips away from the grassy slope with a heavy heart. She closes her eyes, and swears she can see the swirl of waves. A pale, nacre gaze in the distance, the vicious hatred of a resentful mother. Kos will never leave her be, something she conceded some time ago.
She imagines a spectre of Death, reaching out to her behind her back - and it does not have dark claws, but pale, webbed hands. She imagines them wrapping around her throat, chokingly frigid, sinking into her flesh, wringing her dry of all her sin.
This was her punishment. Drowning in Kos' wrath, from whatever other side existed.
The sound of seawater follows her, and she suspects it will fill her grave one day.