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Lildear18While Nigel, Ludolf and Arcturus finished up their business in the back room, Victor marched ahead through the broken door into the room that, though smaller than the other, functionally made up the other half of this clinic of blood ministration, back into the reception area. Stepping across the threshold was enough to trigger a tic in Victor, forcing his eyes to shift and focus off to the severely blood-splattered left side of the room, the sight of which give him a sinking feeling in his stomach and a clenching feeling in his chest. The copious amounts of blood did not bother him in the slightest, nor did the two corpses sprawled over there: a normal-looking Yharnamite carved diagonally almost halfway through the torso from clavicle towards his hip, and a Phumerian that had been bisected at the waist, the two halves several feet apart. Rather than any kind of conscientious struggle with what he had done or the brutality that had transpired, Victor's only reservation was with being reminded of how close he had been to being killed himself. Would he have survived without these other Hunters' intervention? Who knew... but whether he would have wanted to was another matter entirely; being so close to death could do terrible things to a Hunter.
Without even realizing he was doing it, the Hunter once again ran his tongue over his canines, feeling how long and sharp they were. It was strangely comforting, somehow... but also reminded him how hungry he was still feeling.
He quickly tore his gaze from the spot where he had fallen, quickly scanning the rest of the room to confirm that nothing of note had transpired in his absence. It remained in a genuinely terrible state, with overturned cabinets and smashed furniture scattered about the place, wooden splinters, shards of glass and scattered metal and ceramic implements littering the floor in the wake of the ravaging ruffians that had come here intending to target the still-turning Hunters. Adelicia remained by the door to the outside, so pretty, so fragile, so precious, the blood saint... so very defenseless...
Shaking his head as if to physically cast off these distracting inclinations, Victor instead refocused on a particular pile of debris (E2) that he had been rummaging through when Ludolf and Nigel had awakened. He went there directly, intent on further examining the box he had uncovered earlier.
Behind him, shuffling along with less confidence and more general curiosity, was Torquil, who also scanned the reception as he entered, to a quite different sight than had met Victor. Granted, Torquil did see the same things Victor had, but also things beyond Victor's sight. Messengers were scattered about the room, less numerous than in the back room – where they still crowded around each sleeping and dead Hunter – but still a fairly widespread presence, curiously examining everything and anything in the room for a few seconds before retracting back into the floor, only to reemerge somewhere else an instant later.
The only constant presences among these were three groups of Messengers, two of which had already been examined to some degree. The skeletal arm was still irrationally sticking out of the floor directly in front of the door at the center of the room, its bony fingers clutching the handle of the now-lit lantern giving off its otherworldly blue light, though the large crowd of Messengers that had originally clumped at its base had now dwindled to a mere four, who seemed much more intent on Torquil than they did the lantern.
A bit off to the left from the lantern was another duo of Messengers, holding a rolled-up piece of parchment between them. Torquil recalled that they had already read what had been written there:
“Glance calmly upon the lanterns pale gleam,
and find safe haven within the Hunter's Dream.”
The third and last constant among the Messengers, then, was another pair holding another letter between them, a mere couple of steps from the doorway Torquil had just traversed. Hesitating for a second, Torquil eventually went to them and crouched down so that they could show him their message. He frowned.
Standing back up, Torquil turned back toward the door to the back room and, once the first of his three fellow “special” Hunters joined him in the reception, he would point at those two Messengers and greet them with his first comparatively intelligible articulation:
“Read.”