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They come with the scent of cinder. Light feet and heavy weaponry. In the old days the brutes carried hunks of iron and stone, before the hunt became a gentleman's sport. Before the church canonized them.
They are wild with the Blood. They slaughter and burn with abandon. They are predator and prey come together, like the first apes that swung down from the trees and armed themselves with stones. The ocean of tooth and fur breaks on the jagged black rock of their flesh. They are the iron spike within yharnam's twisted, gravid belly. They are tacks, swallowed with bread. They wear the ugly truth of the hunt on their warped faces.
There is no hope left for the land that formed them.
The Vicar stands before the altar that will become his catafalque. His vestments are a shroud around him. From his throne the city is as glass. He sees through it, into the pupil black of the abyss. It moves as the tide. It seeps through the roots of the ancient labyrinth into the dark places; the sewers, the aqueducts, the cemeteries, the cellars. It is so near, above his head. He feels its cosmic static in his hairs.
He has achieved the ultimate dream of any minister: in Yharnam every body is touched by the divine. Yet they have forgotten what it means to be holy. Why should they remember, when he has profaned their oldest rite? The city is sick on the Blood, and for it there is no cure.
The Horseman follows the dancing lights to his doom. He is purged of fear, adorned, a purifying beacon amongst the shit and viscera. The city cannibalises itself, an ouroboros of terror and suffering. He wades through it in the wake of his vast sacred sword, unaware that the foundations rot beneath his feet.
There is no rain that could wash away the river of blood he has carved through Yharnam. He will walk in it until the ground falls out from under him and when they tell him to swim, he will swim. He does not feel like a puppet, or a leashed dog in the grasp of its master, but a tool for holy hands. For those that flock to him as he cuts swathes through the city’s rotten crop he is the very image of strength.
In a city drunk on communion wine, he has his private intercourse with the divine. There is clarity to be found in the dazzling light of his seldom-seen blade. Together they are one. It has lifted him from the murky pool of his peers, yet the shadow he casts with it in his hand is long.
The Hunter’s body has already become host to grief. It is compounded: he grieves for both a love unrequited, and that same love forever lost. He is unmoored, a boat drifting irrevocably towards the breaking rocks. He haunts the workshop, unnerving the new recruits.
The greatness that mantled his brothers in arms has eluded him, for he sees nothing holy in the killing. His eyes are distant, his heart not in it. The violence, he performs by rote.
In the low hours he carves with calloused hands, estimating the shape of his love. When he touches the porcelain cheek of his creation he imagines it peach-soft, and giving. The Doll is cold; though it kills him to think it, in this regard she is most accurate. When he sits her on his knee he is equally comforted and repulsed. He knows, deep down, that in this consummation of his love, he has defiled her.