Dark Jack

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Back room, Hunter's Clinic, somewhere in Yharnam

“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.

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Back room, Hunter's Clinic, somewhere in Yharnam

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.”

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Back room, Hunter's Clinic, somewhere in Yharnam

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.”

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Back room, Hunter's Clinic, somewhere in Yharnam

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.

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Back room, Hunter's Clinic, somewhere in Yharnam

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.

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Back room, Hunter's Clinic, somewhere in Yharnam

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.

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Back room, Hunter's Clinic, somewhere in Yharnam

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.

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

Torquil

Name: Torquil
Race: Paleblood Hunter?
Faction: Unaffiliated
Age: Around thirty
Appearance: Short but sturdy, Torquil's skin is tough, calloused and deeply tanned from hard physical outdoor work, with clearly defined musculature through his skin all across his brawny frame. He has plain brown eyes surrounded by early wrinkles, thick eyebrows and disheveled hair on head, cheeks and chin around five centimeters (two inches) long, all of which is entirely black. His jaw is perpetually crooked, possibly from having been broken once, and tends to waggle from side to side when he speaks from the right jaw hinge not working right. He bears various small scars that seem to have likely been earned through labor rather than combat, including a long, jagged scar across his right cheek.
Height: 1.68 m (5'6”)
Weight: 95 kg (210 lb)
Clothes: Wears plain gray canvas trousers, a white short-sleeved linen shirt, and a pair of cheap brown leather shoes. His shirt is ripped, mainly at the seams but also outside them, along the sleeves, back and chest. There is a small bloodstain on the right side of his shirt at the lower part of his chest, trailing from a small hole.
Hunter gear: None.
Biography: Torquil remembers very little of his past beyond flashes of dense forests, the interior of a small cluttered cottage, and a sense of measured indifference and loneliness. This also means that Torquil does not particularly care about his past, however, and is quite content to embrace his new role in life without complaint.
He remembers signing his contract with the Healing Church and receiving the blood treatment, however, and knew from his first waking moment that he had agreed to become a Hunter, though he does not recall why he made this decision. Shrugging off such concerns, Torquil is already well on his way to simply accept that he is now a Hunter and will adopted the task of slaughtering beasts as his new purpose in life.

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

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.

Night of the Hunt - Paleblood

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.