Chapter Text
The ward feels wrong, a negative of what she is used to seeing, like an acid-etched plate instead of the paper it has printed upon. When she blinks it is as if all the color has to rush back into place and fill in the outlines of each wall, shelf, and chair. As she wanders down the hall the beds repopulate themselves—her patients, of course, and some of them are ones she knows have been dead for months.
She feels compelled to walk. Sometimes her neck opens and spills like a wine glass knocked over. She can ignore the spattered trail she makes on the marble floor because her patients never seem to notice. They’re just happy that she’s there to comfort them yet again.
The day is unending, the sun never finishes setting, and the patients are endlessly in need, waiting for a new morning that will never come. When they no longer bring her comfort, and vice versa, she finds herself in the clock tower. Here, her blood is old and dark. She paces aimlessly. The etched astral dial tilts and turns sometimes, and she can smell salt and hear the sea.
When this happens, she veers back into the research hall. She feels a twinge of fear in her gut. The patients loll and laugh. Their heads look like spoiled plums after a hot summer week. Some clutch at her desperately as they complain of drowning.
In the research hall, she doesn’t have to dispense mercy. She can cradle a patient’s head and wait for their cries to calm, for them to return to vapid, sloshing happiness. She doesn’t have to see any blood but her own.
“I’m dead,” she says to herself. She is alone in the clocktower. No one tells her if she is correct.
Maybe she is dead, but she still itches with some of the desires of the living. Boredom tears at her like a riptide. She isn’t hungry, but she tires of tasting her own mouth.
When the astral dial tilts and opens up, she decides to walk through.
Kos isn’t dead here, but she is dying. Her body, sprawled out along the length of the beach, is a perfect rendition of how she was originally found. Certainly nothing of her remains in the waking world—nothing that hasn’t been dissected or pickled in formaldehyde and stored in jars.
But here she is again, bountiful with infection. Her gauzy, slippery skin lifts and lowers with slow breaths.
Maria presses a bare hand against her flank.
In the waking world, there had been the church’s need for knowledge making each person a specimen, the erasing of a tiny town from the map, the piercing cries of a child that should not have been, and Gehrman, damn him, telling her that it would all end well.
She hadn’t asked many questions because she had suspected that she already knew the answers. The people in the fishing hamlet were not beasts. Yet the church decided it was so, and she allowed herself to be convinced.
She realizes that she had gripped tightly at the rubbery flesh. She isn’t crying but feels dangerously close. She is cognizant of being watched.
Kos hadn’t moved, but there is the sensation of awareness prickling up the back of Maria’s spine.
She fights the urge to run and kneels instead. She leans forward and presses her forehead against the slippery skin.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
The tide laps up against the sand. Clouds drift overhead. Kos does not move.
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
The nightmare was homogenous in its drudgery and violence. It was the carceral revenge of an infant god. The blood-drunk cut into the same beasts again and again, were hunted down by other hunters, and then returned and repeated the cycle. They were driven only by their lack of purpose.
Maria knows she is dead. Having nothing to do makes her feel like she is dead twice over.
Kos is also dead, but she had tied herself to existence as an echo by a few gossamer threads. Her child—alive, dead, somewhere else—would soon nestle within her, seeking comfort from a corpse.
Maria approaches the pale, beatific face that is tucked behind loose tendrils. She lies down on the sand. The alien awareness squirms against the surface of her thoughts.
Maria reaches out and places her hand on a bleached-white cheek.
She feels the awareness slide into her like a pebble dropping into a pond. Her blood grows hot. Her heart might even beat.
The dying creature’s skin is soft and cool against her forehead.
Here is something she could do.
Kos’s lips are cold but yielding.
From Kos she can see the ideas of—a bird’s nest. A calcified egg. A caterpillar’s cocoon, and the fleshy slurry inside. The beach and the surrounding tide, silent and empty, save for Kos and her child. And beyond that, the fishing hamlet, glistening oily and wet. Villagers crawling with parasites.
The Church couldn’t hold back the tide of corruption forever. People would come looking for the truth. While the blood-drunk had their charnel river to torture them, the echoed minds of the fishing hamlet were just... existing. Neutral. Reverent of the corpse on the beach that had both blessed and cursed them. If Maria had damned them in the waking world, she could be their protector here.
Maria can tell that Kos is waning, her thoughts diminishing in ripples. Maria waits silently, her own body pressed up close against her flank. Eventually, the loosely tethered mind fades away to nothing.
For the first time since entering the dream, Maria feels at peace.