Chapter Text
The ward is wrong. It is a negative of what she is accustomed to seeing; it is the silvery acid-etched printing plate instead of the paper that it has impressed itself upon. When she blinks, it is as if all the color must rush back into place and perfuse the outlines of each wall, shelf, and chair. She walks down the hall, and the beds repopulate themselves with her plaintive patients, their limbs outstretched like tangled, tugging boughs, and with heads like spoiled plums. She knows that some of them have been dead for months. But she is compelled to keep walking, and their thorn nails only briefly snag her coat.
Sometimes, her neck opens and spills like an upturned wineglass. She can ignore the spattered trail she leaves stained upon the sterile white marble because it does not seem to disturb the patients. They treat her fleeting shadow like sunlight, and they pay no mind to the frozen ruby dribble, harking only the ailments of their own.
The daylight smears, diluted to yellow plasma, and the patients are endlessly in need. When they no longer bring her even the memory of comfort, and vice versa, she instead finds herself in the clock tower. Here, her blood is old and dark, but she still paces aimlessly. The etched astral dial, just as restive, tilts and turns; through the golden apertures, she can smell salt and hear the sea. Still, the path through is blocked by a cloud bank, is blinded by the milky lens of some great eye, a gaze she cares not to meet, and so she veers back to the research hall. The patients loll and laugh, grasping her with sap-sticky fingers, and they confess their complaints of drowning. One wriggles wormlike and helpless into her lap, and she has no mercy left to dispense. That plum-head swells, and pulses, and leaks whitish fluid against her cradling sleeves, but the patient returns to a vapid, sloshing neutrality wholly of his own accord, having spent all of his tears.
Here, she does not have to see any blood but her own. Outside, the lumenflowers still turn to meet something other than the sun.
“I am dead,” she instructs herself within the clock tower, both professor and pupil alone, and there is no one to tell her if she is correct.
Perhaps she is dead, but the gut itch unique to the living does sometimes rise in her, an old twin wheel-rut of sin that gleams, puddled wetly: boredom, and curiosity. Dangerous bedfellows. She tires of tasting her own mouth.
When the astral dial again aligns, she presses through that membrane. It’s as thick as amnion, and as easy as smoke.
Kos is, at once, dead and dying, and her body, a tumbling white tablecloth, spreads out a junket of decay. It is an ideal rendition of how she was originally found, before the glut of dissections, before the formaldehyde marination and the wax-topped canning— leathery organs sawed out through tough blubber, creamy cortical matter scooped out with a spoon. Here she is again, bountiful with infection. Here she is again, with her gauzy ribcage breathing as slow as the tide. Here she is again, and Maria presses a bare hand against her pristine flank.
In the waking world, there had been specimens, and scull-scouring extractions, and the blurring of faces, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand— how easily boredom could strike, once she had done it so many times. She remembers when she stopped taking note of the barnacles beetling over the eyes, and how they broke into sharp flakes when grated during surgery, the sockets yielding as reluctantly as clams beneath plier gulls. She remembers herself, a perfect pupil, moving in parallel to a more practiced hand. His fingers, oiling a scythe hinge, guarding it against the bite of sea salt. Her fingers, pulling out pearls, and all the skull winking.
She had discovered, through that obliterating dullness, men— things gaping shark’s-jaws, with regiments of snapping teeth. Women— things thickened with mucous, as hard to grasp as eels. Children— that thing on the beach, as small from her cliffside vantage as a pin perforation, a speck of black against all that white, and yet large enough to remove the name of this humbled settlement from any Yharnam-made map. Her blade had helped to cut it right out of the parchment.
Her hands nudge into the pale surface, and the faint scaling gives easily, gentle under her wave-washed fingers, the tips still pinkish with blood. A milky lens slides to reveal a hadal pupil. Maria meets her gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she says. It feels childish, cheap. It is the only thing she can afford. The tide laps the sand, and the clouds clot the sky. Kos does not move.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. Two obols for those open eyes.
The nightmare is homogenous in its violent drudgery, enacting the carceral vengeance of an infant god. The blood-drunk slice the same beasts again and again. Effluent viscera churns through the river in fecal gouts, is pulled into the bellies of verminous gnats, and then gushes again from split skin, cycling aimlessly, forever.
Maria, dead, wonders which gear in that mechanism she must be. Kos, dead, drifts upon the beach, anchored by mere gossamer threads. Her child, alive, dead, or otherwise, will soon nestle within her, seeking comfort from a corpse.
The beatific face is tucked behind sinuous tendrils. Maria lies on her belly, thinking— wormlike-helpless, held already in her vast cloud-white gullet, and she presses her stained overcoat to the sand. She tucks one deft hand against a bleached cheek.
Something vanishingly small slides into her like a pebble into a pond. The ripples pass through her, precious and dissipating: she can feel the blood roused sluggishly in her ash-caked veins, the single answering pulse of her clenched heart.
The god’s brow is soft and cool against the fleeting hard fever of her own. Kos’s lips yield easily, two parting shells revealing liquid nacre.
She sees: tangled kelp, a bird’s nest, a calcified egg, a tight shell scraped by a blade, a slurry within, the interstitial state between larvae and winged, escaping organism. Then, the beach, and the surrounding tide, silent and empty save for Mother and child— and tangled around them, the hamlet, glistening oily and wet. Villagers crawling with parasites, with scars on their minds that she could trace in exhausted repetition with her stained fingertips.
Curiosity will wax large again, in the waking world, and the Church could not dam the tide for long. The truth would be sought out here. They would plunge into the charnel-river, and further, stamping red footprints through the chapel, through the research hall, pulling the scabs off old indignities— digging about, by scalpel or by spoon, with all the same lofty callousness she had once swallowed before. Here, the encore banquet spreads butter-pale forever, frothed up by the tide.
Maria decides that she will be both first and last at this feast. She will guard it with her exacting bite. The thick bottom lip gives between her teeth, an incision made with practiced, surgical precision. With the same curiosity that has damned her, she savors a perishing welling of blood: it is viscous, arctic, and alive, the last pulse of a god roused to passion and taken in the only way the killer knows how.