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Still in the air is the scent of cinder. A woollen smog cloaks the valley hamlet, the embers a bruise beneath it. The air here is choking, acrid with the stench of hot stone and scorched flesh. It stings the eyes. In the skeletal shells of the burned-out buildings is the grinning face of death. White eyes watch from a maelstrom of soot and smoke. High atop his tower, a killer watches, self-condemned. He holds his vigil while he waits for the inevitable noose and drop.
This is where they first staked their claim on the inhospitable land. The rocky, barren, black slopes that severed them from the world. That early settlement pulled stones from the gaping undead labyrinth to build their shelter. Who could have accounted for what they would find beneath? Yharnam, spiralling above it in all its intricate grandeur, has never forgotten its roots. They are an insular people, prickly to outsiders. Is it any wonder they turned their gazes inwards? They build their towers tall and their walls thick, layers of brick and stone to protect their humble enclave. Now, in the Old Town, these have become a kiln.
The sickness kindled in Old Yharnam. As the Ashen Blood took hold, the wards filled with patients until the hospitals and churches could contain them no more, until the flood spilled into the homes and the streets. Soon the doorways were marked with crosses and the people took to prayer, while their skin turned dull and pale, their faces drawn and gaunt. A wasting sickness that defied explanation. They withered like fruit on the vine. But even as the surgeons fed them antidote and hoped the poison would abate, something darker kindled in the sickness’ wake.
The early signs baffled the legion of Church doctors that had been deployed in the small old town. The frayed eyes, an aversion to light. Where the skin lacerated and fur emerged, the surgeons bound it with bandage. Wails of pain turned into twisted howls, guttural snarls. Soon though, the patients’ faces distorted; their hands curled into claws, their mouths stuffed with crooked teeth, their resemblance to men tenuous at best. Then the truth of the Church’s benevolence was revealed — the hand that held the scalpel also wielded an axe. Diagnosis gave way to death sentence. For the good of the city, of course. For those gone too far beyond the definition of human.
Meanwhile in the upper echelons of the holy city, the ministers spoke amongst themselves in hushed, worried voices. Would it be enough? Word of the sickness and slaughter had spread even into the Cathedral Ward. If the illness were to pierce the inner sanctum of the Healing Church, all would be lost. The Blood was ineffectual in treating the Ashen Blood. To suggest the two were linked was nothing short of blasphemy.
A tourniquet, then, to staunch the flow of infection to the city. A drastic measure indeed, ordained, perhaps, by those who had lost their heads. Ah, that peculiar Yharnam madness. Slit the throat to stop the wrist bleeding.
There came no evacuation orders. No more bitter pills for the people to swallow. A tide of refugees broke on the barricaded doors. The people were sick, and getting sicker every second. What more was there to be done?
And the Hunters, having tested their mettle in the labyrinth, were champing at the bit to be unleashed on this new ground, to burn and kill with abandon. They proceeded to the Old Town with torches, with guns and steel. There are no humans left, the Vicar ordained. Blood-drunk, numb to pain and fear, there were none among their number to question it.
Crucified, they lit the patients like torches. Their screams evaporated in the flames. How bright they burned, with their stained bandages and lank fur. The Hunters, all too zealous in their pursuit of the turned, broke down doors and smashed through boarded windows.
In the chaos that followed, the maelstrom of screams and howls became a single chorus of terror and suffering. The beasts, still prowling on two legs, huddled beneath their bandages and blankets, shied from the flame. As the vigorous fled the fire those in the wake; the elderly, the young, the infirm, were left to the iron mercy of the Hunters. They became kindling to the cleansing fire. Boiling blood filled the gutters. All that remained was blackened bone.
Those that scurried away to the shadows retreated to the sanctuary of the great church, where still they raise their strangled voices in prayer, awash in the acrid incense of charred flesh and burning hair. The survivors watched, hushed, as their bodies warped, as their flesh sprung fur and fangs filled their twisted mouths, until they could recognise nothing human in themselves or in each other. As the embers cooled and they emerged from their hiding places they spread once again across the abandoned, barred Old Town; decimated, starving, despondent.
He stands above it all as witness, as the accused. His comrades’ bones litter the street with those of their prey. When he closes his eyes they are red with a fire that burns still inside him. He is the god of guilt and grief. He is preserved to suffer. He is hollowed of his humanity.
In the city, beyond the barred gates to the forsaken Old Town, a madness erupts. It comes at first from beneath the ground, like the clear font of a mountain spring. It emerges from the shadows, from the bodies of the sick and the indulgent. A cancer, they seek to cut it out with a night of terror; but even within the homes humanity crumbles. Nothing is gleaned from the ashes of Old Yharnam. Here the rot is entrenched.
Now, Yharnam has become a ward. Coffins line the streets once again. There is no exodus of those who fear the outside world. Once again, they turn their gazes inward. They bar their windows and chain up their dead. Feral mobs prowl the streets in search of their prey and in the absence of mirrors. The word of the Church is silenced. The Hunters are gone. There are no bridges left to burn.