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Shouto could feel the deceptive warmth on the breeze like the blood churning in his veins, the dread certainty that something was off. It was the same crutch of cloying anticipation that filled him when he went on the hunt, subjecting beast after beast to the merciless arch of his saw cleaver from deep within the shadows of Yharnam’s seediest alleyways.
His body screamed strike, or run . The placid sway of the lunar-blessed flowers that sprung from overgrowths throughout the winding walkways of the dream continued without pause, as if to dull his senses.
The doll told him to follow this path. She had not led him astray before.
Why were his steps so unsteady? Whenever he chanced a glance upward, the pale-bright view of the moon made his eyes itch, deep within his skull.
He passed between the jaws of the iron-wrought gates, the ones that had always been locked before. More flowers were here, numerous as the lives he’d taken. He’d killed monsters , but mostly only men. Mostly only beasts and gods.
A figure awaited, he could see, lonely atop the crest of the nearest creeping hill. Shouto wondered if this one had ever killed a god.
Coming closer, his vision started to clear. To coalesce into a haggard man confined to a chair, one who smiled as Shouto neared. His teeth were yellow and gnarled, and not nearly so sharp as his eyes. Nor quite so malicious.
Beasts all over the shop.
“Good hunter,” the man said, once Shouto reached earshot. “You’ve done well, the night is near its end.”
There was so much red painted across that smile, it was difficult for Shouto to keep the taste of blood from his mouth. He remembered, now—this one, who had been among the first to greet him within this false dream. The old grizzled hunter, and his tattered cloak that fluttered when he was unnerved like a sparrow’s wings.
The first hunter, so he learned much later, deep within the ugly belly of a dust-addled workshop.
He was none too pleased with Hawks.
The bygone hero widened his grin, like he knew . “Now I will show you mercy. You will die, forget the dream, and awake under the morning sun.”
Before his eyes, the older hunter extended a hand, as if he were asking for Shouto’s permission. As if he were beseeching him to acquiesce. Shouto soon found he could not hold that gaze for long, not without attempting to blink the blaze of it away.
“You will be free.”
Shouto knew a thing or two about freedom. He knew the desperate cries of a mother’s sorrows, the abject horrors of a father’s rage. An older brother long ago gone mad, and forgotten.
He felt his own knees hit the solid earth almost as a secondary sensation, viewed himself bow his head in surrender as if he watched it all unfold from a third party’s perspective. His insides felt numb, and no longer churned with the boiling blood of the umbilical cords he’d consumed just prior.
The rickety old wheelchair creaked with a lonely sound as Hawks rose. It seemed the old hunter wasn’t quite so frail, after all. There was the slick draw of steel unsheathing, a cold shiver that contrasted with the warmth of the soil soaking into the fabric of his trousers.
But Hawks has never slain a god. Has he?
A shadow passed over Shouto’s face, making his heart pound in his chest. It was cast in the shape of a scythe, larger than the multifocal blades of the Wet Nurse. Dulled, with age and use.
The shadow lifted away. Even to Shouto’s well-trained ears, there was naught amiss in the flowered field save for the whispers of the wind wicking across the petals. It was oddly peaceful, though he knew Hawks was only preparing his strike, assessing all angles to see which would prove properly fatal.
Shouto had died before, many times and in many ways. The pain of it would always pass, no matter how long it took. He hardly expected Hawks to draw out the kill, anyway.
No. He feared the aftermath , the forgetting. No more of the doll and her mysterious smile. To bid farewell the quiet solace of this dream, which had served as the only thread of his sanity that refused to snap so many brutal nights.
Scalding water, searing into his skin. Why was he only remembering it now, at the end?
Kos. Or some say, Kosm. .
He didn’t want to end up like her . Snow-white locks, deceptively silken while her eyes were screaming —
His body was responsive again, and he could feel it, now. The churning of the blood, the harsh whistling of breath between his teeth—and of course, of course , the cursed scythe drawing near, as Hawks swung it hard and fast toward his exposed neck.
He’d never be able to dodge in time, not even with quickening. How fortunate, then, that his reflexes were far from the only trick up Shouto’s sleeve.
Outstretched fingertips hit the warm earth, and a cold tingle ran down Shouto’s right arm as he activated his power. It was always painful, resorting to this; as if he were giving himself frostbite.
His mother used to say that to be cold was easier than being warm, for you could always bundle up. You could always light a fire, or find shelter. To be warm was to fester and rot away under the vapid onslaught of too much , and in the end, Shouto watched the same warmth of which she complained burn her heat-sensitive heart to pieces from the inside out.
Hawks’ scythe swung, an unyielding progression of killing intent.
When it connected, it stuck fast in a pillar of solid ice instead of snowy flesh.
Shouto blinked against the backlash that whipped against his face. Tiny specks of cold-deadened crystal landed in his hair, across his cheeks. And yet, this he knew with unexpected clarity—he did not wish to die, after all.
Behind him, a raucous burst of dry-throat laughter beckoned Shouto to stand and turn. The source of the sound was Hawks, for it could be none other. The old hunter looked for all the world like a man at play, his head thrown back and elongated teeth stretched wide to reveal the velvet-red of his mouth.
The handle of the deadly scythe dangled between slackened, arthritic fingers, almost a guard rail for all that the blade was anchored deep within the blue, blue of Shouto’s ice.
Shouto’s eyes narrowed. He would not be fooled twice.
A bottomless curse. A bottomless sea.
Why was he only now remembering? Blood in the hamlet. His father’s voice cutting deep into his soul, shrill over the din of fleeing villagers. The First Hunter demands we scour their skulls, we must find eyes for the scholars. Byrgenwerth is the only hope we yet have.
Shouto gasped, watered-down blood staining his hunting gloves all over again. The dream remained unsettlingly silent, an unforgiving judge.
Hawks’ laughter died abruptly, the echo of it drifting over the scattered flora. His golden eyes were crazed, red-rimmed and glassy with unshed tears, even as a feral grin stretched across lying lips. Even as he retrieved his scythe from the ice, wrenching it backward with a flick of the wrist that hardly seemed to strain his deteriorated muscles.
His voice was cracked, warmth-riddled. Like a building firestorm. “I see you, wizened child. Have you figured it out? What was it, after all?”
Shouto remembered. Oh, sweet mother Kos, he remembered . It was the hunt, the blood—
“—or the horrible dream?” Hawks finished his thought for him, and the crack of his knuckles was audible from where he clenched his fist at his side. The sound seemed to startle the old hunter as much as his target, and Hawks took his time lifting his hand to his face. He examined it with care, and Shouto wondered if the other’s nails had always resembled talons.
“Oh, hell. It doesn’t matter. It always comes down to me to clean up Enji’s messes, doesn’t it?”
Lay the curse of blood upon them, and their children, and their children's children, forevermore. Each wretched birth will plunge each child into a lifetime of misery.
Shouto was going to kill him. He knew it as well as he knew the grip of his cleaver, as well as he could recall the stinging stick of the needle and the faint burn of the Church’s beast-blood rushing through his veins, swirling and steaming like it never belonged there —
The First Hunter met his gaze, all moon-scent and madness. From his lips dripped sick, honied tones. “Tonight, Takami Keigo joins the hunt.”
Breathe in. Out.
Sweet child of Kos, returned to the ocean.
Perhaps this man had slain a god. It changed nothing. Hawks was still mostly a man. Mostly a monster, with the villager’s blood on his hands.
Shouto drew his cleaver with a practiced, fluid motion. He called upon all of the cold in his veins; the roll and rush of the frozen sea. The deep creatures that prowled far below the eddied tides.
The son of Todoroki Rei had his own curse to fulfill. He returned the hunter’s mad grin with all the elegant grace befitting a god. “Far too late for that, old man.”
Atonement for the wretches. Shouto would have his revenge, even if he had to call upon the fire, too.
... a bottomless sea , bottomless...
— accepting of all that there is, and can be .
