The room was large for this kind of clinic, especially with how far from the city center it was, and was generally furnished in a way that was puzzlingly different from what one might expect from such a place. Thirty meters wide and twenty meters long, by far most of the room was occupied by nothing but rows of simple cots arranged in an obviously deliberate manner, head to foot and side by side, with just enough room between each cot for an attendee to fit through the space. Several small chandeliers hang from the ceiling to assist the sconces mounted on the walls, numerous enough that the room would likely have been quite well-lit normally, yet the room was beginning to dim as candles burned out, leaving some flames flickering and others gone, forming islands of shadow around some of the cots.
On one of the two longest sides of the room, nestled against the wall, was a series of small tables, blackboards and apparatus; clearly the equipment of the blood minister running the clinic. But there was also a couple of wooden barrels standing in the corner that seemed anything but meant for a man of the church, as they were full of instruments of death rather than healing; swords, axes, and spears stuck out of the top of them in a selection that was remarkably mundane considering the clients currently occupying it. Weapons for normal people, not Hunters.
Opposite of the healer's equipment, in the middle of that wall, was the single entrance and exit out of the room: a sturdy wooden door, closed shut against the world outside.

The room was quiet aside from occasional whimpers, as the people lying on the cots – men and women who had been given blood treatment and were undergoing the metamorphosis from human to Hunter – squirmed and thrashed in the throes of the nightmares haunting them, of beasts that could not reach them, and Messengers who eagerly did. But it was not deserted, actually; someone was watching.
From the inky blackness pooling in one corner of the room stepped a lone figure, silent as the darkness itself, and surveyed the room. The figure wore the typical uniform of a Hunter, the so-called Hunter's garb, only with the top of the head wrapped in cloth under their cap, which in combination with their mask completely obfuscated their appearance. Their motions had the fluency of someone both confident and nimble, and one might be tempted to think that the quiet nature of their footfalls came not from effort to make them so, but from habit.
The Hunter turned their head slowly, letting their eyes take in the sight of the many cots and their occupants in front of them. This was... very strange. Since the Night of the Blood Moon the Healing Church had been very protective of their Paleblood Hunters and had turned them all at the upper Cathedral Ward, at the very heart of their domain, yet these Paleblood Hunters were being turned as far away from there as possible without leaving Yharnam. And there were so many of them! The Hunter had never seen anything quite like this.

While examining the people gathered before them, the Hunter abruptly stopped turning their head, fixing their attention on one cot in particular, situated in the far right corner of the room compared to the exit. The room was crawling with Messengers, naturally – how could it not be with so many Paleblood Hunters in one place? – but they were absolutely swarming that particular cot, crowding around it eagerly to have their turn at climbing atop of it, shoving one another as they tried to reach the person hidden underneath the layers of otherworldly creatures. They were pushing, pulling and shaking the person, clearly agitated.
With no other sound than a faint rustle of their coat the Hunter crossed the room with long, steady strides to investigate this phenomenon more closely. They dispersed the swarming Messengers with a wave of a gloved hand, revealing the object of their fascination: a man with a somewhat foreign look, probably hailing from far from Yharnam. The most unusual thing about this man was his complexion, which was white as a ghost but with veins that stood out as black against the white skin, along with black eyelids and -sockets. His lips were light-blue and his cheeks were sunken, making him look incredibly ill.
The Hunter cocked their head curiously, gently running the fingertips of one hand along the man's face. He was dead. He had been given blood treatment, but had still died? But... the thing inside him... it felt like Paleblood. Why had he died?
Carefully brushing the man's hair away from his eyes, the Hunter raised their head to survey the room in its entirety once more, only now looking for something specific. Indeed, randomly distributed across the room were another three cots with Messengers clamoring to get to the people lying on them. Four dead? Very strange indeed.

The Hunter moved slowly towards the center of the room, taking a moment as they went to look at and caress the face of every transforming Paleblood on their way, wanting nothing more than to assure these people that even if the Healing Church saw them as nothing but tools, they had the Hunter's sympathy. Outside, where the sky had was turning crimson with the setting of the sun, howling could be heard in the distance. Somewhere else, much closer to the clinic, more howls answered the first. A Night of the Hunt, as marked by the tolling of the bells... ah, but the Healing Church had no idea. The Hunter could tell, though: this would not be a normal Night of the Hunt. This night could take days, weeks, months or even years. This was going to be a hunt to remember.

At the middle of the room the Hunter was met by four Messengers on the floor, waving their arms to gain their attention. The Hunter paused expectantly, and one of the Messengers held up one of its thin, bony arms high above its head and closed its fingers around something invisible, clearly miming that it was holding up a lamp. The Hunter shook their head and made a shooing gesture with its hand, and the four Messengers sullenly retreated back into the floor, disappearing into wherever Messengers went. The gatekeepers would find a different place to raise their marker. Not here. Having it here would be too easy.
The Hunter turned their head to the door and cocked their head once again, as if staring at it intently. The door was locked, likely in an effort to keep out the beasts that would be coming soon. It was durable... but not indestructible. Getting through would be quite possible, even if it was going to take a little while. And if these Palebloods could not find it in themselves to conquer the door, the beasts outside doubtlessly would.

Shrugging, the Hunter reached their right hand into one of the pockets of their coat and produced a human skull. They held the skull up high over their head before clenching their fingers into a fist, crushing the object in their grasp and unleashing a fine mist of whitish dust, strewn with specks of light that glittered like stars. Then the Hunter themselves abruptly lost opacity, rapidly turning transparent before, in a heartbeat, they were gone. Had it not been for the gently spreading dust of the skull, one might have been tempted to believe that the Hunter had been naught but a dream.

All that remained in the room was the Palebloods, and the host of Messengers doting on their sleeping masters. Howls echoed once more through the city of Yharnam, curdling the blood of many a Yharnamite who could do nothing but huddle closer to their censers, hoping against hope that they had enough incense to make it through the night.
Not Hunters, though, and most certainly not Paleblood Hunters... even false ones. A Hunter must hunt.
It was time to awaken.

Ophelia's mind, stumbling and staggering through an inky abyss of violently vascillating proportions, wheeled and whirred as it struggled to understand the flashes of things it saw--awakening sluggishly from a dark and dreaming slumber whose absence had proven to be an answer in its own right. She had dreamt for what felt like so long, and she had felt the kiss of the transfused blood spreading through her even as her consciousness had absconded away to higher planes of thought--the warmth trickling through her meagre frame, replacing sickly frailty with tendrils of vibrancy and vigour. Every tiniest inch of her body was suffused with something so virile and vicious that it could not be contained, almost-atrophied muscle suddenly snapping and tearing rapidly as it wove itself anew, flush and hale, and the stream of Blood flowed through the rest of her pale body and brought the changes along with it there too. It had been the most curious sensation, to feel the changes happening to her body while simultaneously feeling apart from it; but that is when she noticed them.

The messengers, appearing from some haze betwixt; they clamoured and clambered to get at her, their gaunt and pale fingers reaching out like little spears of bone not unlike those of a skeletal corpse, picked clean by scavengers... they had not the glint of bleached or polished bone, though, and their sunken, hollow eye sockets... Ophelia's mind lurched at that. No eyes? The poor things--and yet, they could still see more than she could, in some ways. She went to reach out her hand to them, her spectral and imaginary self obeying the command of her mind but her body not, trapped beneath the leather belts strapping her to the table and disconnected from her mind as they were. She wanted nothing more than to learn about them, to eagerly study every detail of every one, to find out if they perhaps instead had eyes on the inside that she simply could not see... but it was then that she caught a glimpse of it. The sticky, squelching redness of blood--off to the side, dimly, in the half-light. At first it was simply a trick of the light, she thought, but the slow ripples of movement that cascaded across it and came into her view let her know that something was moving... and then she heard a half-howl half-scream that she was not unfamiliar with. The smell of incense came to her, unbidden, and much more strongly than she ever remembered it--clinging to her, as though veiling her in its gossamer smoke--but the source of it was right there, on the floor, ascending from the ripples.

She opened her mouth to scream but nothing happened, eyes wide and bloodshot as she frantically attempted to clamber away from it, and something in the urgency and physicality of it snapped her wandering mind back into alignment with her body--just in time to see the beast lurking before her. It was huge in comparison to her, and its proportions grotesquely lanky. Mangy curls of blood-matted hair concealed an unnerving wriggling or undulating of the skin and muscle beneath, and the gleam of animalistic and base desire glimmered wetly beneath its too-many eyes. An unfurled claw reached out, extending grotesquely past the length one could consider familiar or sane, and as its tip threatened to slowly pierce into Ophelia's braced but motionless arm its touch erupted in a gout of fire. It began at the claw itself, it seemed, and spread both ways very rapidly--and when Ophelia blinked and looked down she could not tell if what she was seeing was indeed a claw or the needle used for the ministration... but she could feel the fire coursing through her veins, hot and thick and so wild, brimming with not just life but thirst! She could scarcely contain it, and as her unmoored consciousness began to scream she realised that she was not sure if what she could hear was her own voice or that of the beast's, and the realisation caused her heart to pound ever-faster, the seething flames in her artieries quickening in turn. The feeling of it was too much, too much--she squeezed her eyes shut with all her might and willed herself awake with a primal backlash unlocked by only the darkest recesses of fear.

She heard the aberrant noises of her bones cracking and reforming before she felt them, her torso arching sharply upwards as her spine elongated, and as she felt her legs slip downwards in their restraints owing to the extra length she kicked out with a force she never could have imagined that she possessed and felt them simply give beneath the force at her command. Now awake, flushed and feverish, she scrabbled rapidly to get up. The rest of the restraints around her other ankle and wrists burst open effortlessly, and a panting and panicked Ophelia sprung up from the cot, wide-eyed, assessing the room around her with perhaps half her wits about her. She began to settle down over the course of a moment or two, her laborious and wheezing breaths slowing into something more calm and regulated, though her mind remained lost to processing her thoughts until some event from outside her innermost self roused her attention.

He was sitting in a tall tree, on a high, sturdy bough, surrounded by the colors and smells of autumn. He looked down and was assailed by vertigo; he dared not even try to estimate how far below him the ground was. Not only that, but he seemed to be getting further and further away from the ground with each passing second, as if the tree he was sitting in was growing at blazing speeds and carrying him skyward.
He expected to feel fear, but did not. In fact there was part of him that, even though he rationally knew that what he was experiencing conflicted with reality, considered this completely natural.
“Ah yes,” a little voice in his head said – a voice he did not recognize, but might have been his own – with detached fascination. “We are going up. Up is good.”
He did not know why up was good, but somehow he just accepted the words of the voice implicitly.
A moment later he discovered why up was good: below him, at the base of the tree, crowded scores of tiny little monsters. Their sizes and builds were like those of children – infants, almost – only with long, spindly arms and inhuman, eyeless faces. They had no legs, it seemed... or rather, perhaps their legs were under the ground, since these creatures seemed to be sprouting right out of it like so many other random growths in this forest.
It did not even occur to him to look around and check for other trees; somehow, he just knew this was a forest.
The tree suddenly jostled, causing him to start and look around for the cause of the disturbance. And right there beside him, on a neighboring bough, had appeared another monster. It was completely different from the ones below, not even remotely humanoid in shape, but rather akin to a hideously malformed bird. It was as big as he was, snapping its beak at him threateningly, showing off the teeth within the beak. Cold, dead eyes, and plumage of indeterminable color due to the fact that the abomination was entirely drenched in and dripping with crimson.
It was repulsive, yet also somehow mesmerizing. Despite knowing it would likely bite his hand off, he reached out to touch he bird, just as it leaned forward to bring its beak toward him. Though clearly a terrible man-eating beast, it did not feel hostile. It felt familiar, like his favorite pair of boots. He was not afraid.
Just the instant before he would have made contact with it, however, everything turned to white, the bough quaked violently beneath him and a cacophonous boom filled the air as lightning struck, directly into the bird. The thunder should have deafened him, but it did not; he could still hear the bird cry out in agony as its body was enveloped in bright, cleansing flame.
“That is probably for the best,” the voice that might be his own suggested. “We are supposed to hunt beasts, after all.”
There was no time for him to unpack the meaning of those statements, for the flames spread rapidly from the bird, threatening to consume all of the tree, and him along with it.
He dropped off the bough without worry or fear, uncharacteristically dispassionate as he surrendered himself to gravity. The beast above had stilled by then, its body already reduced to nothing but smoke and cinders by the conflagration.
He fell toward the ground, where the little creatures awaited him. Crowded on the ground in a thick, disgusting clump of bodies. Entire crowds of them, reaching up their little hands as if trying to reach him. They soon would; he plummeted directly toward them as a bell tolled in the far distance. Toward them, closer and closer as he fell from the heavens, and

Torquil abruptly jolted into an upright sitting position, letting out a garbled, desperate sound. He barely even felt the resistance of restraints on his arms as he tore himself out of them, swinging his big, calloused fist through the air at nothing in particular. His suntanned skin was drenched in sweat, causing his white shirt to cling uncomfortably to his hefty, muscular frame. His breathing was rapid and panicked... until it was not.
As suddenly as he had awakened to dread and doom, Torquil felt a strange sense of remarkable calm settle over him. A sense of confidence, strength and purpose.
Right, I remember. I became a Hunter.
It was pretty much all he remembered, too; bits and pieces, flashes and images, but nothing concrete... just enough to remind him that it was no great loss. What did it matter if he remembered who he was before, anyway? He had signed the contract of his own free will, and he was now a Hunter. The one he used to be was gone, and the new him had a job to do. He had never needed more than that, he felt, and saw no reason that he would need more now.

He did not even notice the Messengers crowded around his body, reaching out as if to touch him with their long, thin fingers, nor did he notice the numerous cots with other people all around him. Torquil just sat there with a blank expression on his face, absorbing the nothing that was left of himself and assimilating it into the new him. He was a Hunter now... what did that mean, other than he was to hunt beasts?
The contract... was with the Healing Church. They would know. Thinking was hard, it was better to let someone else do it.

It was only then his mind started absorbing what was outside of himself, starting with the Messengers sharing the cot with him. Vile, abhorrent little things they were, unlike any beast he had ever heard of... was he supposed to kill them? They had seemed like such an overwhelming danger in his dream, but now he thought them quite pitiful. He tried to shove a small group of them away, only to find that his hand passed right through it without resistance. The Messengers he had “touched”, meanwhile, seemed to grow agitated, shaking their little fists at him while quietly moaning to themselves. Whatever these creatures were and whatever impression he had gotten of them in his dream, they seemed quite pathetic now. Harmless.
Again his world expanded as he took in the cots around him, rows of cots with people like him strapped to them, all of them crowded by the little fiends. Hundreds of them, everywhere. He should have been terrified, but he was not.

Finally and inevitably, his attention landed on the one person in the room not currently on a cot, but in the process of getting up from one. A tall – a fair bit taller than Torquil himself – woman in rags, with silver hair despite looking to be about his own age. A blood minister? No, that did not seem right. She looked like she had been on the cot beside her... another Hunter?
He started to try to say something, but immediately felt the right hinge of his jaw snag, creak and crack. Instant flashes of his old life returned to him from the experience – memories of him trying and failing to convey words to others clearly, memories of people mocking him and driving him away, memories of watching people from afar through the trees of the forest, memories of apathy and loneliness – and he decided not to say anything. He recalled hating this ruined jaw of his and a hope that the Old Blood would fix it. It seemed it had not. To say he was disappointed would be an understatement.
Instead he just waved at her, offering an awkward, crooked smile – the only smile he was capable of – as he swung his legs off the cot.

“It should've been a blank slate...”

He was blind…or what he imagined being blind was like. Black as pitch, not like being in a dark room or even some enclosed chamber that natural light had never touched…but like he was submerged in ink. In that space he had a sense that he wasn’t alone, but he couldn’t tell who, what, or how many were in the space with him…nor how large the space was.

He took in a breath, or tried to, but couldn’t. Couldn’t breathe. Didn’t need to. Didn’t matter. Farren swallowed, hard, peering sightlessly into the cloying black. He swore he could feel it on his skin…but no, that was impossible, the darkness couldn’t touch you…couldn’t touch him especially, not with how many layers he was…. Farren looked down and though some part of him knew he shouldn’t be able to, he could see himself. Just a shirt and trousers and a pair of threadbare boots. His mouth went dry, lips parting, eyes widening–for what little good it did him. Then there was a sense of sickening motion as if he were being pulled back away from his body, away from himself. His vision lurched backwards and he saw himself, his body reeling in the black, but from this perspective…it wasn’t darkness, but something else–though no less dark.

Inverse Radiance, something perverse had engulfed his body, he’d woken up in it, was submerged by it. Yet, somehow…in that inky substance he could feel something else…something moving. Many somethings…all of them with disjointed silhouettes he couldn’t parse. He tried to call out to his motionless body, bidding it to move, but it didn’t–he didn’t.

With a jerk his vision slingshotted back into his body, submerged in something inky black, a liquid void. He fell forward to his knees and as he did…something blazed through him. Crimson and bright, lively and fiery and…and…–painful.

A scream tore from his throat and he clawed at himself as he felt muscles stretching and tearing…blood burning in his veins. “Fucking…aggh,” he swore, clamping down his jaw as if on the pain. Then…he swore he felt something…clawing, cloying, teasing at his skin. He tried to shift, but it hurt too much to look–though he doubted he would see anything. Wait. Farren raised his eyes and as he did he found that the space around him was illuminated. It was as if veins had shot out like crimson lines of light through the inky black around him. The pain was gone, the strange touch forgotten, but something else loomed, bright eyed and covered in a disgusting mixture of matted fur and sickly wrinkled flesh like a massive diseased dog.

Farren tried to push to his feet, but stumbled instead and went from on his hands and knees, to sitting on his ass, his hands behind him catching him from falling onto his back. The creature seemed to sense him, smell him…see him. Drool slathered down from its too-white teeth…it had gore in its gums at the bases and as it clamped down on something, then released it…he swore he saw the pale white of a human skull shatter into fragments and fall from its maw.

Farren tried to scramble back, but the creature began to clamber and bound rapidly through the once darkened pitch. It lunged over the last few feet, but before it could touch him a bolt of bright gold light struck it like a ray from the sun itself. The beast yowled and was thrown back and as it did its body touched one of the pale veins of light that pulsed through the air all around them. Silently, Farren realized that the bloody light was pulsing inwards as if pumping into him.

The sickly creature lit aflame then in a loud screech and a fwoosh as if its body had been doused in oil prior. Perhaps it had. It was intense enough that the force of the heat and light knocked him onto his back, and he barely caught himself on his elbows. He raised one arm to shield his eyes as the light somehow…grew and grew and grew. The red and orange dimmed and as he squinted at the blinding luminescence where once the burning Beast had been all he could see was a massive golden figure. So large it eclipsed the black, moon-touched sky. Confusion and old unreasoning panic, combined with awe and foolish curiosity joined in his chest and brow.

He shielded his eyes as the light grew brighter still, began to burn and seethe–....

_Farren

suddenly found himself staring at a high wooden ceiling, could smell incense burning, acrid blood, and hear the faint moaning of the sick–or so he thought at first. His mouth was dry, his body felt simultaneously filled with incredible vigor and an intense bone-deep, but fading, ache. “Ugh…” he groaned. Something was tight around his chest, his arms, his ankles and even his waist and legs. ‘Why am I tied–...’ the thought was interrupted as a brief flash of men and women in clerical garb explaining something to him came to mind. He couldn’t hear the words, but he saw himself in that vision, that memory and the man he saw looked…unlike him somehow. Like a stranger in his flesh, skittery, fidgety, with wild terrified eyes. Hunched over, pale, bags under his eyes. ‘Do I look like that?’ he wondered, but realized he knew he didn’t…somehow. He recalled another figure…the prick of a long, large needle into his skin. He turned his head and saw the metal stand at the top of which hung a now empty bag of what Farren knew had been blood. That made sense, somehow.

Another flash of memory…a voice this time….

“Yes Farren, it will heal you and in return you will join the Hunt, not as a hired hand, but as a Hunter….”

The rest was garbled, Farren shook his head, then himself, and that action alone had such surprising force that several of his leather bindings simply snapped. The newborn Hunter’s eyes widened slightly, he wet his lips and, experimentally, he tried to push into a sitting position. He moved far faster than he’d intended and with greater force than he ought to possess. The bindings around his chest and waist tore and fell away. He smiled a bit, but then the pale flesh of the Messengers caught his gaze and he found himself…chuckling lightly. They were cute, in a way, in the same way that some ugly things were so unfortunate looking that they circled back in that direction.

Still, something else in him recoiled, shook them off him. A faint memory from his sleep, his dream(?) came back to him, the sense of things touching him, things coming towards him from the pitch black inky dark. Had it just been these harmless, pitiful looking things? Farren shrugged a bit, what did it matter.

Reaching down, the blue-eyed Hunter undid the leather bindings on his legs before he easily pulled free of the ones at his ankles. So…he was to be a Hunter now. He’d say it was an interesting turn of fate, but he wasn’t sure what other turns fate had given him before now. Though…something about the radiant figure in his nightmare…the bolt of golden light that had struck aside that Beast? The haunted look in his own eyes in that memory.

Surely it was nothing. He shook his head. Now sitting on the edge of his cot, legs hanging off it and touching the ground, Farren stood up and glanced around, noting two others who had risen from their cots. Perhaps not a clinic for the ill, but for those who had imbibed of the Paleblood. He supposed that meant him as well now.

As he paid the two figures, he took in the one with silver hair…tall and lithe, shoulders and hips at width with one another told him she was a woman. She seemed…fragile, though hale now perhaps. Perhaps once, as evidenced by her silver tresses, she had been sick and that was what had driven her to the Blood.

‘Driven her?’ What was so wrong with the Blood? ‘Nothing,’ he decided. It didn’t matter, he’d already received the concoction directly in his veins. What use was worrying after the result? None.

Farren shifted his gaze to the other figure in the room, a man. At the sight of his clothes and the obvious muscle on his frame, Farren felt a strange kinship. Didn’t make much sense, since Farren was pretty sure he’d done work for the church before this…though he supposed it could have been manual labor of a sort. He gave the man a small companionable smile through his own thick beard, and then turned his gaze to the tables across the room. A bell tolled, far away, but loud despite that. The sound of roars and howls…some distant, others closer, reached his senses.

Right…the Hunt. His eyes narrowed slightly and then he gave a solitary “hah,” as if the whole thing were a joke. He felt like he’d conquered something far worse, though he had no idea what that could be. It gave him a sense of invincibility…though some dormant part of him that he could not hear seemed to scream and claw at its cage of forgotten memories within Farren’s mind, trying to warn him. He didn’t notice. Instead, Farren strode across the room, finding each footfall to be…surprisingly quiet despite his bulky boots and heavily muscled form. He frowned slightly, then smiled before he stopped before the table of weapons and placed his palms on the table’s surface. As he looked them over, Farren tried to figure out what called to him.

“Ought to equip ourselves,” he said almost idly, sounding…eager–talking more to himself than the others. It surprised him slightly, but he embraced it. Nights like this were what Hunters lived for…and he was a Hunter now so eagerness felt…well, it felt right.

Ophelia found herself positively brimming with energy--as she felt years of neglect and pain slough off of her like putrescent sludge she could not help but be overcome by the fervour of the raw vitality of the Old Blood. She stood to her full height for the first time ever--joints and ligaments and tendons squelching and crunching beneath the strain of raw life, as well as the need to be used, and she let out a jittery and rapturous laugh as she exhaled. She paused to take in some deep and gulping breaths, turning then to face the source of the sounds of movement she was dimly aware of in the background and finding herself face-to-face with Torquil.

She offered him a too-wide smile back in return, tinged too deeply with the ecstacy of her transformation's afterglow, and her eyes positively sparkled as she gazed into his own mud-brown ones. She reached out a hand awkwardly, flexing her joints and extending them to test her new range of motion, and something about the lankiness of her proportions gave her a mien not unlike that of the little creatures clamouring around them. She blinked a couple of times rapidly, standing to her full height in proper posture and withdrawing her proffered arm, and cleared her throat for a quick moment before speaking:

"Forgive me, dear, I... hah, I haven't ever been able to do this! O, the spark of freedom! Ah... my name is Ophelia, dear, charmed." she spoke, voice soft and musical but almost lurid with a tinge of the mania that seemed to be about her. Though manic, her aura was disarmingly soft and unthreatening--merely an excess of energy, or some other lingering effect of the transfusion... yes, Ophelia could dimly recall it. The memories of her old life seemed so close, behind the most delicate of misty veils, and if only she reached out she could touch them. She snapped herself back to reality before she could pry too deeply, though, hearing the shuffling movements of another rising. Ophelia hadn't really parsed what was going on in the room yet, and she blinked a couple of times in quick succession, brought her hands up to rub her eyes, and peered out across the sea of cots.

One of them had gotten up and said something about equipping himself... ah. He was right, this was a night of the hunt: no longer could she cling to the censer and wait for the worst to pass. She had been given back her body not for her own terms (though that was certainly a pleasant side-effect, to her mind) but to fight. To embrace the spark of that fire within her... and oh, how she ached to--it was a yearning wholly new to her. Some dim reflection of imagery across the mist took on a flash of disdain in Ophelia's mind, but the blood-slick fire was too uproarious for it to even register.

"Yes, you're right..." she began, something in her eyes glazing over as she walked over towards the barrel in long and loping steps. She weaved by the cots and the messengers stumbling around those containing the dead hunters (though she did not look too closely into the cots, nor did she know they were dead) with an instinctive grace that seemed just as unfamiliar to her as the rest of her transformed physical characteristics, her expression shifting to one of surprise as she made her way across the room. "Miraculous..." she whispered to herself, though now certainly in earshot of Farren (and perhaps the others--no doubt a Hunter's senses were keener too, hers certainly felt so). She picked up a spear with one hand, and tested the handle of a simple longsword in the barrel with her other. The grip felt natural enough, and she made a point of lifting it up to test its weight--it was a little heavy for her to wield with one hand and use it, but she could heft this thing around with ease. She made a few idle motions with it, not quite lifting it out of the barrel, acclimatising herself to both the feel of the weight and the movement before putting it back down. She could only carry the one weapon comfortably, anyway, and the spear could double as a walking stick... well, not that she needed one anymore.

"Ophelia." she offered to Farren, giving him a swift nod, before she looked back towards Torquil to see if he'd moved... and then, if nothing else grabbed her immediate attention, she'd begin to move in on one of the cots positively surrounded by the little eyeless creatures she was now keenly aware of, but ignoring for the moment.

The woman – Ophelia, she said her name was – seemed quite happy and friendly. She also said that she had never been able to do... something? Torquil was not entirely sure what she was referring to when she said “this”, but he assumed that she had had some kind of severe physical disability before receiving the blood treatment. That was the point of the blood, right? That was why it was called the Healing Church.
That thought made Torquil wonder what had made him become a Hunter. Had he been disabled somehow, too? No, that did not feel right; not aside from his jaw, anyway, and his gut feeling was that he had lived with that for a very long time. An injury, maybe. Or an illness. Or maybe he had just wanted to become a Hunter for the thrill of it, or because his old life had been nothing but misery? He could not remember... but did it matter? Not really.
Although Torquil thought Ophelia seemed nice he still hesitated to offer his own name in return, and decided to save it entirely for later when she turned her attention away from him. It was not that he did not want to tell her, he was just worried what she would think if she heard him speak.

A few beds over a second one – a man this time, much taller and more intimidating than Torquil – smiled at him, too, which made Torquil smile back. These two were so nice! He felt an elation rising within himself that was entirely disproportionate with how minor the gesture had been, energizing him. These two, these kind Hunters, would surely know what to do.

Torquil followed them toward the barrels that appeared stocked with weapons, visually checking the sleeping bodies on the way, the creepy little Messengers that were everywhere and their surroundings in general. Unlike the two others there was no natural grace in the way Torquil moved; he trudged across the room with complete disregard for whether he stepped on – or through, as the case might be – a few Messengers. He even bumped a cot with his hip in passing, which earned a distressed moan from the sleeper resting on it, and though his footfalls were not necessarily what one would consider loud, they were audible.
His gaze swept across the blackboards in the distance, seeing writing there of some kind but could not read it. He saw various apparatus he did not understand the purpose of on the table, but also what appeared to be empty syringes, scalpels, rolls of thread and bandages; all things you would expect to find in a medical clinic. Or so he assumed. The barrels with weapons felt weird next to the rest.
Since the three of them were in somewhat close proximity at this point, and Ophelia had just offered her name again, he finally decided to do the same:
“Torquil,” he said, surprising himself with how clearly the word came out, though in hindsight he realized it should not. His name was mercifully a word that could be spoken without moving his jaw, so happily it did not come out as a garbled mess. His voice was deep and a little hoarse, with noticeable vocal fry even in that single word.

Instead of getting a weapon from the barrels as had been the stated goal of going here, Torquil ended up following Ophelia with his eyes as she went toward one of the cots being swarmed by Messengers. Though the little creatures seemed desperate to be near the patient on that particular cot, they all pulled back somewhat when she approached. They did not scatter – they did not seem afraid of her or try to get away – but seemed to merely do her the courtesy of letting her see the object of their fascination: a man that was white as a ghost, black eyelids and -sockets and sunken cheeks. He was not breathing.

Ophelia watched the queer little figures part before her presence with a keen interest, and even made a note to perform a little curtsey and thank them for their obliging service, hushed and half-mumbled under her breath. She peered more closely at the corpse, which she could now clearly recognise as a corpse, and her breath caught in her chest for a moment. This poor soul--dead, and after having received the treatment? Something snagged in her mind, but she could not pierce its obfuscation with the minimum of effort and so she left that thought to rattle around in her skull for later--for now, she bent over and peered down to get a closer look at the face.

The eyelids, and sockets too, all black--it struck her as unusual, as her other-self from across the barrier of fog sneered quizzically in that way typically only the most aged of crones may. She was right, of course: this was highly unusual. Ophelia wondered if perhaps she should go diving in the innards of a freshly-failed Hunter, but... well, when had she ever gotten this opportunity before? When would she again? No, no, it would have to be now--she placed the spear down against the cot while she rushed back over to her own, picking up a pair of leather gloves and putting them on almost-absentmindedly. The snug feel of the leather gripping her hands felt cool and familiar, though new sensations of reach and flexibility she'd never had before also rippled through her newly lissom flesh and she shuddered with exhilaration. She wheeled back around to the corpse she'd turned away from and then proceeded to gently pry open its eyelids--she needed to get a better look at its eyes, after all--to see what could possibly have rendered them as black as the night sky.

The Messengers watched Ophelia attentively as she examined the corpse – or so one would assume, though they had no eyes to watch her with – and moaned excitedly as she returned. When she started physically handling the dead man's head the Messengers immediately started copying her, grabbing each other's heads with their spindly little hands, rubbing around their misshapen skulls and even prodding their fingers into each other's empty eye-sockets.

As for the results of the examination itself, Ophelia would find it quite a bit more difficult to pry the corpse's eyelids open than she might have expected. The skin did not feel as one would expect it to; it felt wet and slippery on the outside and would stain her gloves with black, oily grease, while the insides of the eyelids felt weirdly sticky and almost adhered to the surfaces they touched.
But though it was more challenging than it would be to open the eyes of a corpse normally, it still was not too difficult to achieve. The eyelids soon slid back to reveal eyes with misshapen pupils where the surrounding irises almost seemed to have dissolved, whereas the scleras had turned a sickly shade of yellow. The eyeballs bulged abnormally as if they were a little too big for the sockets.
Ophelia was no stranger to handling and studying eyes, so she would be quite familiar with at least one of these symptoms: the deterioration of the pupil was commonly one of the first physical signs of the onset of the scourge of beasts and a sign of waning humanity. She had never known this to be accompanied by the other symptoms, however, nor had she known the scourge of beasts to outright kill the infected... though given that she and everyone else had been sleeping until now, it was probably better that this man had died than become a beast.

_Farren

stood before the barrels of weapons and the table of ministration instruments, his eyes shifting between the various implements as the other two–mostly the woman–shared words.Idly he noted that the woman had actually listened–responded even–to his suggestion. Drumming his fingers across the surface of the table, Farren took a breath and then–having no idea if they were the right decisions–snatched up a pair of curved blades. Unable to find sheaths for them–there weren’t any in the room, surprisingly–he was surprised and gladdened to find that he was at least equipped to slip them into treated leather loops which were part of harness-belt around his waist. “Huh…” he exhaled, wondering if perhaps he’d wielded such weapons before. He swung one–not towards anything in particular, but in a direction that surely would not strike anything–and didn’t feel anything in particular. The weight of the weapons felt…comfortable, but there was no familiar twinge and he reckoned that perhaps he’d never trained with such a weapon. Farren shrugged and slipped each blade into the sheaths at his waist and then eyed one of the spears. It would likely suit for some range, but…it felt wrong somehow as he took a step closer to the barrel and wrapped his fingers around it. Farren shook his head and let it go. However, he did grab one of the axes, carrying it just below the blade in his left hand so he could easily ensure he didn't accidentally cut anything. He didn’t prefer them–the newborn hunter felt–but an axe was a practical tool with many uses.

Turning away from the barrels and tools, Farren cast his gaze back across the room. He noted the woman–Ophelia, if he’d heard right–digging her delicate fingers into the eye socket of what must have been a corpse. His eyes narrowed fractionally and he tilted his head, wondering whatever could possess someone to–

Curiosity

Farren paused, blinked, shifted his eyes to the other figure in the room–Torquil, he’d heard. Still, as he tried to banish that almost intrusive word from his mind, he found himself wondering if it had been his own internal voice, a memory, or something else entirely.

Farren frowned slightly, but the expression faded as he took in Torquil’s appearance from where he stood nearby. Nothing too strange, he supposed. “Farren,” he offered to the room, his bright piercing, intense azure gaze shifting away from his fellow man as he stopped being idle and moved between cots. He gave each nascent, sleeping, Hunter a slight glance, as for the failures…he pitied them. What a shame to go through the trouble of blood ministration, to come all this way, or to take such a risk, and to die as a result. Such a rarity as well, as he understood it. As he passed one or two of said corpses, Farren dragged his fingertips down their eyelids, closing their eyes. It was the least he could do.

Then, Farren turned his gaze to the sole exit. He strode to it, placed a hand on the wood and turned his ear towards it, listening. He’d heard the cry of beasts–near and far–earlier, along with the Toll of the Hunt…the great bell the church rang on such nights. Farren wondered what lay on the other side of that door, but he resolved not to find out alone. He was a Hunter now, certainly, but he had nothing but civilian tools…he frowned. That was odd.

Farren glanced down at his sheathed blades, one corner of his mouth twitching slightly. He felt…disdain for the weapons…but why? Had he been familiar with the tools of the Hunter’s trade? Hmm, something to consider later, he supposed.

Though Torquil followed Ophelia with his eyes at first, he averted his gaze uncomfortably the moment she returned after putting on gloves and went to examine the corpse's eyes. He winced, trying to hold back the bile he felt rising up his throat... and was surprised to find that as the nausea passed, it left him feeling strangely hungry.

Puzzled by this but lacking the desire to try to explore this sensation, Torquil instead decided to distract himself by following the two others' example and getting a weapon from the barrels. Looking at them, his first inclination was to grab a longsword; those were the weapons of knights, after all, and knights were respected and admired. Knights rode in parades and participated in tournaments to the cheering adoration of the crowds. Torquil liked the idea of himself as a knight in shining armor, valiantly rushing to the rescue of the innocent, slaying evil beasts and being showered in praise and gifts. A sword was a nice symbol. He liked that symbol.
Even just picking up the sword felt weird, though. He tried holding it with one and two hands, trying switching the positions of his hands, adjusted his grip this way and that... but no matter how he tried, wielding a sword like this felt wrong. It felt much too light, fragile and tiny in his big, rough hands. Even giving it a couple of experimental swings sent shudders of bizarre wrongness up his spine, prompting him to quickly toss it back into the barrel it had come from.
He hesitated. The spear, maybe? That was also a sort of knightly weapon, right? But even as he started reaching out for a spear, he felt his eyes being drawn to the jutting wooden handle of one of the axes right next to it. He paused, staring at the axe-handle. At its curvature and heft. Even just looking at it, he instinctively knew exactly how it would feel in his hands; the comfortable weight and balance, the grain of the wood against his calloused skin. He knew how it would feel to swing it, what movements to make to generate the greatest possible amount of force and strike precisely.
Torquil took the axe, held it, and instantly felt as though he had come home. A knight's weapon or not, an axe was the weapon for him.

Somewhere in the far distance, in the direction of the back wall of the room they were currently in, a long, shrill, inhuman wail cut through the relative silence of the night. It was a sound that would be vaguely familiar to Ophelia in particular, who had lived in Yharnam for most of her life; a sound produced not by just any beast, but one of the most dangerous and terrible ones in existence. She would have never seen one herself, but stories of these frenzied behemoths were common, especially in the years after the Night of the Blood Moon. The sound seemed to agitate the Messengers in the room somewhat, but they calmed back down as soon as it ceased.

Listening at the door, Farren found the other side to be mostly silent... though as the echoes of the bestial shriek slowly faded, he could faintly hear the voices of several men. Agitated voices... that were coming closer.

Ophelia observed the eye with utterly rapt fascination, to the point even of ignoring any replies directed at her from the others--she peered ever-closer at the eye within the corpse, studying every detail about it with a hunger and curiosity that felt almost visceral. She noted the deterioration of its pupil and its iris most keenly, for it was a sure sign of the scourge of beasts--and she'd hauled many a corpse with eyes not dissimilar to this one after a night of the hunt, when those too blood-drunk to realise they'd crossed a line got mowed down by some hunter or another. Her other-self across the mist looked pensive, appraising even, as she studied her new self with a Hunter's body. A part of her had always wondered what it was like, producing the corpses rather than clearing them away, but...

Ophelia's attention was snapped back to reality by a bone-chilling howl. It was one that she'd heard a handful of times, for there was a certain almost-familiarity to its timbre, but she could not quite place what it was. Her new instincts, however, responded in kind--her spine straightened, the hairs at the nape of her neck stood up, and something indelible in her focus shifted from the perspective of prey to one of fellow predator. The urge felt hot and sticky within her, and as she peered into the eye of this deceased almost-Hunter she took a sharp intake of breath that cleared some of the heady urges. This was what she was reckoning with, now--and her other-self whispered oft-repeated terms into the back of Ophelia's skull: Fear the Old Blood.

Straightening herself up, Ophelia rose to her uncanny natural height and peered over her surroundings one more time, musing aloud while she did so:

"The eyes... This almost-Hunter here was turning into a beast. The iris and pupil begin to split as the beast grows within; we need to pay attention to things like that now, don't we? It's our job to... to..." she began, before realising that she did not, in fact, have any particular knowledge about what it was they were supposed to be doing. Why they were here specifically, why there wasn't someone from the Church to... arm them? Garb them? Instruct them? What was she hoping from them, really? She picked her spear up, its rigidity comfortable in her long and slender fingers, before looking around the room--she could use it as a walking stick, yes, but something to carry the ungainly thing in would be necessary. There wasn't anything that'd suffice to hand, but she could make do: she quickly jaunted over to a disused medical station, ripping apart cloths and bandages as necessary to create a holster for the spear about her back. It was a quick job, her hands nimble and surprisingly easy to put exactly where in her mind she wanted them to go--and after maybe a moment's work she turned back to the pale corpse and, in a swift and practiced motion, went to pluck out one of its eyes as intact as it would vacate the skull--she was confident she would not burst it, but it might already have been structurally compromised. Even if it reduced itself to just fluid, there was another eye--Ophelia looked around for a glass container of some kind, perhaps a vial or test tube, that she might be able to somewhat preserve the fluid of the eye if it could not be removed whole.

She also went to pick up a needle as she went, intending to procure a sample of this black and viscous blood too; knowledge of the church's activities and proof of things beyond her ken might be valuable bargaining tools... and these two, Torquil and Farren... they seemed nice. She'd have to get a closer look at their eyes before she really decided anything, but... well, that could wait.

Torquil did not react to the cry of the beast with more than a slightly raised eyebrow and a curious look around. He realized that something that made that sound was probably very dangerous, even more so than most of the scourge, but it sounded like it was a fair distance away. It was unlikely that this monster would come here and seek him out, and he was sure that he, as a fresh novice Hunter, would not be expected to contend with such things. He did send a sympathetic thought to whatever unfortunate Hunters would have to fight it, but for most part he was just happy that it was someone else and not him.

In sharp contrast to his restrained reaction to the wail, Torquil actually recoiled strongly enough to stumble into the cot behind him, knocking it over and sending the sleeping almost-Hunter sprawling on the floor when Ophelia announced her findings. He felt his heart sink, his face turned pale and he gripped the handle of his axe so tightly that the wood creaked under his fingers.
“Arh?!” he vocalized, trying to exclaim an incredulous “What?!” but failing due to the state of his jaw. He looked around with a haunted expression, eyes darting from sleeping form to sleeping form, as if expecting any of them to spontaneously wake up and assault him. “Eachth?!” was his miserable attempt at saying “Beast?!”
Ophelia's words were, of course, deeply shocking to him. The almost-Hunter was turning into a beast? What madness was that? Who had ever heard of a person turning into a beast? And a Hunter, of all things? And for Ophelia to conclude that was what had been happening... had she seen something like this before, a person turning into a beast? How frequent an occurrence was that? And the way she mentioned having to pay attention to “things like that now”? What did she mean?!
There were a lot of things that Torquil wanted to know about what Ophelia had just said – it was far from common knowledge that the scourge of beasts was a plague, after all, nor that many beasts used to be human – but not only could he not speak well enough to formulate the questions, he was also soon distracted by her harvesting an eye from the corpse.
This time there was no time for him to fight back the bile; as the eyeball wetly and noisily was dislodged from its socket, revealing the optical nerve dangling from behind it, Torquil turned away, doubled over and promptly vomited on the floor.

Outside, the sound of the voices continued to get louder as they approached.

_Farren

winced ever-so-slightly at the distant shriek that reached him, a sound that the others had surely heard as well. He pondered at what it might be, brief flashes touched his mind, speaking of knowledge that he’d perhaps lost…but it all felt faint and murky–vague even. Like he hadn’t known much about whatever the memories had entailed. The feeling faded and his mind was soon occupied by other matters as the agitated sound of men’s voices reached him through the door…gradually approaching. Farren pulled away from the door, but before he could say anything further, this ‘Ophelia’ spoke and said something altogether strange. ‘Men turned to beasts?’

Farren’s eyes narrowed and then a loud stumbling clatter and thud echoed behind him. Before he’d even thought about it, Farren turned on his heel, one of his blades already drawn–as if by reflex. He stared across the distance, seeing that Torquil had backed–stumbled, startled maybe–straight into one of the many cots and toppled it quite soundly to the ground. He frowned, his fingers tight on the handle of the curved blade, the axe in his other hand gripped just as tightly…then he relaxed slightly. A small smile tugged at the edge of his lips and amusement entered his gaze. Farren navigated back towards the other two. Something in him spoke of whisperings, of experience, if not outright knowledge or understanding. What Ophelia said made a perverse sort of sense to him. Why else keep the knowledge about Beasts so tightly leashed? How else might they understand how to create Hunters?

Farren spoke as he laid a hand on Torquil's shoulder, “Steady there, can’t be caught all flat footed by knowledge of all things, no matter how shocking.” He gave the man a small smile, his bright blue eyes amused.

After a moment, Farren's hand fell away and he glanced to Ophelia–who to him seemed to be the more steady-minded of the two, if this had been anything to go by. “Voices beyond the door, several men…getting closer,” he said, expression more series, his smile gone. Then he turned to stripping the shirts from some of the corpses in the room, gathering thread, and rigging up a sort of sling holster. It took him only a few minutes and he was surprised at how steady his hand was at it. He’d only wanted to give it a try to see if he could give himself somewhere better to hang the axe…he had not at all expected that he’d be good at this sort of thing. Odd…he couldn’t remember even a shred of why he had the skills either. Ah well…it was useful to know at least.

Torquil smiled back at Farren awkwardly, still recovering more from having just vomited and less from hearing Ophelia talk about men becoming beasts, but while Torquil's smile seemed genuine and his posture relaxed, his eyes got just a little bit wider as Farren spoke and approached. He looked at Farren and saw his amusement. Heard his words and, though he knew the other was joking, read what was being said as condescending humor.
A flash of something went through Torquil's mind; just a rapid series of images, voices and emotions, scattered and without any discernible connection to each other or his past as a whole.
Torquil sitting alone in a small hut, staring into the fire. Torquil tripping over a root. Torquil guarding his face with his arms while being pelted with pebbles.
“Stupid Torquil.” “Clumsy Torquil.” “Slow Torquil.” “Weird Torquil who lives in the woods by himself.” “Ugly Torquil.” “Torquil, who can't even talk properly.”
Shame. Fear. Remorse. Hope. Joy. Disappointment. Despair. Vindictiveness. Acceptance. Loneliness... such overwhelming, soul-crushing loneliness.
But the thing that came last, rising from somewhere deep and unknown inside of him, so powerful that it burned away all the other scattered fragments of who he used to be, was rage. A blazing anger flared inside of him for reasons he did not fully understand. And once again, just like in his nightmare before finding himself here, Torquil heard the voice he thought might be his own:
“You are not puny, helpless little Torquil anymore. You are a Hunter now; you are powerful. They will have to respect you now. They will have to fear you. No one will dare to ridicule you anymore... and if they do...
Torquil nodded his head in appreciation just before Farren turned away, and once again became very conscious of the gnawing hunger that still haunted him, even stronger now that he had divested the old contents of his stomach. A strange, restless energy sent tremors through his muscles... and a moment later, when his gaze passed over the corpse Ophelia was harvesting again, Torquil no longer felt nauseous or repulsed at the sight. Instead he saw the blood leaking from the corpse, staining skin, clothes and the cot it was lying on, and felt strangely attracted to it. He imagined the metallic taste of it in his mouth, and shivered with delight.
And perhaps most weirdly at all, it did not seem strange to him at all. It felt natural, like it was just what he was supposed to feel.

Barely had Farren started assembling his makeshift holster for his axe before they all heard the muffled sound of a door slamming somewhere beyond the door blocking their path, followed by the voices of several men, their words mostly unintelligible but some sounding angry, and all of it bizarrely accompanied by the gentle, steady sound of a small bell being rhythmically jostled; a sound Ophelia would naturally associate with afflicted church servants.
The voices grew louder and closer – at least five different voices could be identified – and within seconds a loud noise of shattering glass could be heard, followed by the sound of something wooden being smashed and small pieces of metal, like cutlery, clattering on a wooden surface. Every sound in the next room seemed overtly violent and aggressive, and judging by the noise, someone was in the process of destroying anything breakable in there.
“...teach the damn church!” a man growled just before the sound of something particularly big and heavy crashed into the ground.
“...Harold, and his plague-ridden...”
“...some blood somewhere...”

The voices were getting closer to the door as the destruction continued unabated, but throughout it all the ringing of the solitary bell continued calmly, getting steadily closer to the door and the room with the Hunters. When it was almost there they could actually hear footfalls: two sets of them, one somewhat normal-sounding, the other unusually heavy and producing little clicking noises with each step as the feet hit the floor. There was also loud, grunting breathing. The bell fell silent.
The door handle rattled a little, wiggling up and down several times as if someone was trying to open the door.
“Open door,” someone demanded from right on the other side of the door, their voice hoarse and dry, and it sounded as though the speaker had difficulty speaking. The quick, grunting breath did not pause on the words. “Open door.”

Ophelia continued her morbid work rapidly and efficiently, quickly locating a suitable glass vessel nearby to store the plucked eyeball within--she looked around, at the little Messengers, at the scrawled text on the chalkboard, at the door. That bell... she turned away from the door back to the chalkboard, focusing for a second on the words before the gentle peal of the bell drew her gaze away again. A church bell... and what sounded like townsfolk. There was a gruffness to their accent, a hoarseness of the throat that sent a gentle shiver down her spine. It made her think back to the nights of the hunt in he past, and in her mind's eye she could almost hear the tearing of flesh and the gurgling of freshly spilled viscera. The corpses the Hunters left behind... they were often mangled in ways she could only describe as visceral, entire holes through the torso and...



Ophelia took a moment to pause, suddenly panting, as her mind whirred and wheeled in too many directions at once. That damn bell kept ringing, and each of its notes struck her thoughts like a peal of thunder. How could she concentrate like this? How could she parse just what was going on here? She sucked air in through her teeth, inhaled sharply, and slammed her spear into the ground to make a loud enough noise to get everyone's attention. Rather than speak directly to Torquil and Farren she walked up to the closed doors whose handles indicated an attempt to gain ingress, and slammed her fist on the door proper in response to the outside demand.

"Oh, dearie, I don't think that's such a good idea... You see, the door's all that stands between us. If I open it, and you have the scourge..." she began, her voice becoming deeper and more guttural as she spoke. Her hairs begun to stand on end, her senses magnified, and she felt her blood course within her hot and vicious and angry. The fire threatened to sear her very mind from within, if she did not release the pressure, and she felt her hand instinctively prepare the spear for its intended purpose. She swore she could feel the wood groaning and protesting against the fiery strength of her grip, the vibrations rattling through her bones, as the world contracted to this pinprick of heat.

"I'll have to kill you, love. Do you still want me to open the door?" Ophelia asked, her head tilting slightly to the side as a little drool escaped her lips subconsciously. She wanted them to say yes, she realised, to give her the excuse... but that in and of itself was enough of a shock to her that she snorted and began to question it--but the fire within would not be denied for long. She had barely considered what Farren and Torquil would do, and she blinked quickly as she remembered, but it was too late now. They would make their moves, and if all went well...

The Hunters would Hunt.

_Farren

finished his preparations, slipping the axe into its new holster at his back once it was on. As he heard the rattling of the door and the repeated request, Farren found his eyes narrowing. Then the loud sharp sound of the butt of her spear hitting the ground forced his gaze over to her. Farren winced slightly at the volume and sharpness of the noise, but he understood her intent—at least somewhat—as he watched her travel to the door and slam a fist against it in reply. He couldn’t help but smirk as he heard the choice words she gave the likely church forces on the other side of the door. As an unveiled threat rolled from Ophelia’s lips, Farren found himself smirking, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. He realized that one of his hands—his left—had wrapped tightly around the grip of his curved blade. His mouth was watering slightly and though he wouldn’t realize it right away, his eyes were slightly manic.

Farren gritted his teeth as he stared at the paltry barrier of wood between them and the interlopers. Some shred of empathy in him said he ought to try and protect the remaining potential hunters in the room from those outside. Another part of him said that was foolish, idiotic even…if they couldn’t defend themselves then fuck ‘em…that voice felt more familiar, more deeply ingrained. His past self perhaps? However…there were two louder voices, one sang in his mind, its voice somewhere between true music and a bestial howling. It was the loudest amongst the two voices, it sang for carnage…that was what was making his skin itch.

“Be ready,” the blue-eyed hunter said, his voice low and filled with a subtle danger that almost sounded like a growl. Slowly, he drew one of his two swords, flipping it from reverse to normal grip.

Torquil did not know how to react or feel when he heard someone enter the room beyond the one they were currently in, when they started destroying things in there or when the hoarse man on the other side of the door spoke. And he certainly did not know how to react or feel when Ophelia slammed the butt of her spear into the floor, marched right up to the door and readily started antagonizing the one on the other side.
Part of him was horrified, of course; it sounded as though there were quite a few people out there – at least half a dozen by the sound of it, counting the normal speakers, the hoarse guy and the grunty-breathy one – , they sounded hostile toward the Healing Church, and at least one of them sounded big and heavy. Torquil, Ophelia and Farren were outnumbered two to one or more, and all they had to defend themselves were the meager arms stowed away for unknown purposes. And Ophelia just immediately started threatening these potentially dangerous entities, sounding almost eager at the prospect of fighting them; a fight he and Farren would get dragged into whether they wanted to or not.
But another part of him applauded Ophelia's actions and sympathized with her fervor. The tremors through his muscles, the rage in his chest and the hunger in his belly all came to the forefront of his consciousness, and a foreign lust for violence possessed him. Though it did not negate the dread that still gripped him, it felt like the fear almost sweet and alluring. The adrenaline he felt through his terror was intoxicating.
He nodded his head again at Farren, and gripped his axe tightly with both hands, ready to use it.

A pause followed Ophelia's words during which all that could be heard from the other side were the muffled sounds of angry voices and furniture being smashed, along with the constant presence of the deep, ragged, grunting – now almost growling – breath. The speaker muttered something in a language none of them could understand, but which felt oddly familiar to Ophelia.
“Brave Hunter. Good,” the hoarse man finally said, his words accompanied by a faint rustle of cloth and a jostling of the servant's bell. “Need Hunters. Need brave. Open door. Come. If no open door, we open door. No fight, no hurt. If Hunter fight... very hurt. Need brave, not stupid.”

Ophelia turned back to look at the other two as she heard them heeding her summons, her breaths deep and ragged. Then... something, she heard the words but couldn't understand what they meant--but something about it rang true to her, like a sense memory that she could not quite access beyond the veil of mist. Her other-self looked back, equally pensive, before shrugging. It didn't matter, she supposed - words she could understand were next. It... wasn't the reaction she expected. Nor the one she'd hoped for--it seemed... She didn't know. She struggled to think, struggled not to leap into action--but she breathed, and let the rhythm steady her mind just enough to regain some of her forfeited wits. The bell; it was the sure sign of someone from the Church... but some of the others around them were very clearly against the Church... and the growling, well. There was nothing for it, she supposed, but to take a look at their eyes. Voices, words, smells--these things could all lie... but the eyes never did, not once. She'd yet to get a proper look at Farren and Torquil's, she remembered, but that would have to wait--she could assume, for now, they were fine. They certainly seemed it.

Ophelia mouthed to the two men behind her: "Ready?" as she moved to unbar the door and open it, spear ready--but as soon as she tried to open it she felt the handle stubbornly resist her attempts. The door was locked, it seemed. She took a step back to be out of its reach, and her spear would be held ready in battle position, pointed directly outward. She knew that things would happen very quickly as soon as they did, and her eyes were very firmly trained forward toward the growling individual who'd bade her open the door. She spoke out to the stranger, her free hand motioning to beckon Torquil and Farren: "Ah, the door's locked... Forgive me, I'll just need to find the key..."

She turned quickly to give the both of them a quick look, indicating with her eyes and free hand that they should help look for a key, or... Well, get the door open however was necessary. Beyond that, every fibre of her body was clenched and ready to pounce--she'd never felt so viscerally alive, so in tune with her body--she'd always relied on her mind, and she could not tell if her other-self felt relieved to be taking the back seat for once, or worried for what would happen to her. The thought of death did not even cross her mind--she was so filled with vigour that she could scarcely even consider what it would mean to lose... and they were Hunters, for pity's sake! To take apart common Yharnamites was like a hot knife cleaving through butter, or the beaks of the shrikes picking apart the corpses strung up on their crosses in her home--and especially these, that seemed violent and out of touch with reality.

Something crossed her other-self's mind too; the notes on the chalkboard. They indicated that the person to inform about the results was the First Hunter, and that this was all very secretive... so was it coincidence that these people had found them here, or something deeper? Ophelia did not like all of the potential answers to those questions, did not like how thinking about them took away from savouring the high of the blood. She couldn't remember the last time she was blood-drunk, not like this--but the thoughts threatened to overtake her and soon she was back in her body again, heart racing as she waited for the grand reveal that would determine what happened here.

“Locked? No open door?” the hoarse man said, followed by several soft footsteps and a faint jostling of the bell moving away from the door. “We open door. Break door.”

Something next to the hoarse man, right on the other side of the door to their room full of cots, let out a furious, inhuman snarl just a second before something slammed into the door with tremendous force, shaking it visibly in its frame, but failing to break it.
A voice that sounded more canine than human let out a guttural roar as something struck the door a second time; far from as hard as the first blow, but accompanied by the sound of cracking wood and followed by a terrible sound of wood being continuously rent by something sharp, moving from top to bottom of the door. It repeated another time: a strike followed by something raking down the other side of the door, ripping the wooden obstacle apart. There was a faint sound of small pieces of wood hitting the floorboards on the other side. The canine voice growled.

The fourth blow striking the door proved more than it could handle, and suddenly a left hand – easily three times as large as a human hand should be, with long fingers each tipped by a black two-inch claw and the back of the hand clad in thick gray hair – penetrated the door all the way through, palm downturned. It curled up its fingers, preparing to sink its claws into the wood of the door immediately below the hand, clearly intending to rip a hole straight through it.

_Farren

listened to the exchange…to the sounds beyond the door. His eyes narrowed slightly, he almost relaxed, but as the voice spoke and something bestial began to beat upon–and claw at–the gateway he found his grip tightening upon his weapon. The way it breathed, the thudded movements…its growls. It sounded like a beast and as its hand punched through the door Farren found that he was baring his teeth.

Some part of him wished to lurch into action, to dart forth, draw his second blade, and use the two to lop off its foul, hairy arm. Farren found himself suppressing a growl that had been building in his throat, and as he did so, he felt tension build in his head…and in his chest.

The newborn hunter gritted his teeth hard enough that it was very nearly painful, then he forced himself to relax. “I don’t much like this,” Farren said aloud–if quietly. He salivated, had to wipe his mouth on his sleeve and swallow hard. His whole body felt tense and though he tried to force himself to relax, it hardly worked at all.

He swallowed again and schooled his breathing…a technique drifting into his mind…one for remaining calm, he thought, but it felt less like his own mind and more like that of his past self stepping in to help him. He needed answers…but his body craved something else.