Chapter Text
The hunter smiled as he entered the little library, and he looked so warm and happy to see her that she smiled back, recalling his strange episodes of fond kindness, in between his panic and stern fear.
“Is it safe to go back?”
The hunter looked at the dweller sadly, and Ifeye could read in his face how he felt to hear the dweller ask such a thing. He looked regretful, like it truly pained him to tell the dweller that he could not return yet. “I will go back perhaps to find more incense, to bide us time,” the hunter said. “Until then, I do not think it is safe to return there. I have surrounded the door with incense for the moment, but even then—Even here it is not safe.”
“The trapdoor,” Ifeye realized, remembering the hunter’s reasoning when he had forbidden her from returning to the library. “It’s unsecured.”
“Exactly,” he said with a sigh. “I cannot even guarantee your safety here, Ifeye.”
“What shall we do?” Adella said, a dark look creeping onto her face. Ifeye reached out to hold the nun’s gloved hand tightly, but in return all she received was a look of deep distrust.
“We will find a way to keep safe,” Ifeye said as kindly as she could. “There’s always a way.”
The hunter left them there for what felt like hours, but strange things happened during that time. The dweller’s gaze became affixed to the trapdoor, and so did Adella’s. Ifeye felt like the world had been swapped over when the new moon rose. It had been her duty before to look longingly at doors she could not pass through safely, but now she held them back and watched them suspiciously when they gazed at the trapdoor too closely.
“What do you see? What is so fascinating about that?” she asked. The dweller did not answer, but in the silence something became clear. They were intent. Adella was leaning forward minutely, as though anticipating something, so Ifeye listened and watched too. She heard it, when she thought to hear it, and soon she was gazing at the trapdoor with single-minded focus too.
“There’s the sound of weeping,” she gasped.
“You hear it too?” Adella clenched a single fist into her robes. “I thought I had gone mad.”
“I do,” Ifeye whispered. “Shall we—Shall I go?”
“No,” Adella said. “No, I shall. I believe—” She shook her head. “Stay here,” she said firmly, instead. She left them there.
Ifeye thought to protest, truly, but something caught her attention now that she was not staring at her two companions in confusion and horror. The trail of water that she had noticed before; it was here. She followed it. It went down the stairs, into the library, and then it lead to the trapdoor that Adella had disappeared into just moments ago.
Suddenly realizing who was sure to be down there, weeping, she stood. “Stay here,” she told the dweller, who moaned and began to pray. She followed Adella down into the darkness, the light of the library disappearing from above her as she descended. “Adella,” she whispered into the darkness and the still water of the basement. But there was no answer. She continued down the ladder, nervous, cursing herself for not bringing something that could be used as a weapon.
“Oh, oh—” A sound came from below, and it sounded like it echoed.
She went down, further, into the dark. “Adella?” And it truly was Adella, standing over a prone figure slumped over in a chair.
“Oh,” Adella said again, but calmly. “Ifeye. I did not wish for you to see this. I had suspected, you see, that she was cursed so.”
“Cursed—Adella, what is going on? Is that Arianna? What has happened to her?”
“You don’t understand, and that’s only to be expected. Unopened are your eyes,” Adella said. “I had to save her this way."
Ifeye pressed forward slowly, the water on the ground up to her ankles. She shuddered when she realized that the water was becoming steadily darker and more cloudy as she neared Arianna's body and Adella herself. “What have you done?”
“What needed to be done. Now, to kill the beast as well.” Ifeye gasped at this proclamation, looking around in horror and backing up to the ladder again, waiting for a beast to show itself. But none did. Her eyes drifted to Adella, then followed her gaze to the ground. In the water there was—
“A child?”
“Look closely, may your eyes be opened. That is no child!”
“It’s—” Ifeye looked more closely, trying to see what Adella meant, but it was a child. Adella raised her knife high, and Ifeye screamed, running forwards, knocking her over. The knife flew into the air, glinting in the weak light, and fell somewhere beyond them into the water. “That is a child!”
“I wish, almost, that I had not been chosen, that I could look upon that beast and see what you see. Give me the knife.”
She thought Ifeye had the knife. Good, she thought wildly. “No,” Ifeye gasped. She darted forward and gathered the child in her arms. It hurt. Oh—
“See?” Adella laughed, pulling herself up against the wall. “Put the beast down, Ifeye. Come away from there. Let me help you.”
“No,” Ifeye fought to keep her eyes open, fighting pain as she held the child in her arms. With Arianna’s corpse lying still and solid between them, the two women stared each other down as best they could. Adella fighting to see in the dark, and Ifeye fighting to stay strong against the pain. She held the child closer to her chest, and then something changed.
First, it sank teeth into her neck, with too many teeth and mouths, more than she had seen in its little face. Then, as she slapped her hand onto her neck with a cry of pain and looked down at it in shock, she saw.
“Ifeye—” There was someone calling her name. She opened her eyes and realized her arms were empty.
“The child--!”
“Forget the child.” The hunter frowned, his gaze on hers and his mask pulled down. His frown looked much more intense that way, but now that she saw his scars, somehow familiar. He’s very worried, she thought. A good man. But a rude one.
“I will not forget the child,” she hissed, and turned her head to look around for the little thing. Her gaze landed first on the dweller, slumbering peacefully in his chair, mumbling a little in his sleep, before moving away and down to the ground. The memory of the child’s face returned, just as her gaze landed upon it in the corner of the libary. “Oh.”
“Yes.”
“You let it live,” she said, hushed. “I thought—”
“You would never have forgiven me.”
She nodded. It was true, it would have been an unforgivable thing to kill it, just because it bit her, just because it looked like that. For it looked more clearly wrong now. It had no legs, no human eyes, no soft baby skin; it looked like a grub. Like something she’d have dug out of the garden, clinging to an unearthed carrot or root. Something at the bottom of a log, under the soil. Something in the stomach of a fish gutted for dinner. It wasn’t that terrifying, the more she looked at it. The more it fumbled about on the ground, unaware of where to turn next, almost running into a table’s leg, the more it looked and seemed like a child. She rose from the chair the hunter had deposited her into and redirected the thing so that it did not bump its little head. It looked up at her with four, strange, moon-like eyes. “How ugly,” she whispered in hushed reverence, reaching out to touch a strange tendril on its head. It looked familiar; where had she seen something so inky black and snake-like before?
“It’s an infant Great One,” the hunter said, and she did not understand what that meant. “I did not so much let it live as I did go through hell to save it. Adella was intent on killing the thing.”
Oh, Adella. Adella was still out there. She looked at the massive trapdoor, shut over the ladder that had been there, shut like it had been when she first stepped into the library. “Where is she?”
“Down there,” he said. “Hopefully when the night is over, her sense will return to her. But she might not be able to face what she’s done; she killed Arianna in cold blood tonight.”
Ifeye shut her eyes as the memory of Arianna's body overwhelmed her. “She was not herself.”
“It was a long time coming. I knew Adella hated her, but not this much.”
Ifeye thought of the way Adella would watch Arianna sometimes, when she thought no one could see. Was that hatred? It had looked like an obsession to Ifeye’s eyes. “No," she said. "I think something’s happening.” She looked at the little thing on the ground, finding its way back to the table leg with purpose. “I think things have been changing since the moon changed. I've changed too,” she said.
The hunter did not respond, but he realigned the creature with his foot, hissing as something seemed to happen to him when he did. He shook his foot out with a deep frown visible below his hat and stared at the little thing. “It didn’t do that to you?”
She looked between the little child and the hunter. “Do what?”
“It did not shock you? Or... It did not hurt you to touch it?”
“It did at first.” She thought back to when she had redirected it away from the table without a moment's fear for her body or what touching it might do to her. It had hurt her before, down in the flooded tombs, but now— “Not anymore,” she said simply. “Though it looked like an ordinary baby before, to me. How did you get it up here?”
“You wouldn’t let go of it," the hunter said in a voice that sounded like he was smiling, so she looked up from the child to see that he was. "I simply carried you, and then when I brought you to rest in the chair, it crawled down to the floor.”
“You did not touch it at all?”
“Didn’t want to, frankly. Now that you see it, you can understand why, I’m sure.”
“But it bit me!” She lifted a hand to her neck, looking for the wound. “You did not feel that you ought to protect me?” His eyes grew worried and drawn, like what she had said genuinely hurt him, and he shook his head rapidly.
“I did not know; I didn’t see—If I had known—”
Ifeye took her hand from her neck, looking at her palm to see if anything showed. There was nothing there. Her head felt strange, and her neck was stiff, but there was no sign it had bitten her. “Why did I—What made me faint, then?”
“I thought it was simply that Adella had frightened you. Or that the thing had—That seeing overwhelmed you. Although… You have never been so easy to faint, before.”
“Before?”
The Hunter nodded absently and leaned down to inspect the thing. The child, she supposed. It really looks and acts like a little child, and it is just a baby. And I nearly forgot in all the madness: he remembers me, from another time.
“How do we know that it was not this thing that killed Arianna?” she asked. The Hunter looked up at her from his place beside the child, and then he moved to bring something out of his coat. It was… a strange thing, long and twisting. “What is that?”
“The thing’s umbilical cord. Arianna gave birth to this.”
The horror of the realization took a moment to settle in; it was almost unthinkable. But then, after the horror, it seemed… entirely ordinary. “How—?” she began to ask, but then she remembered the sickness that had come over Arianna, her weakness, the way that she seemed to grow more and more ill as the moon rose. “Oh, no. How could she beget such a child? It can't be possible.”
“It’s possible, because it has happened. Adella knew what had happened immediately; I have no doubt that the Healing Church never wasted a moment, instructing her on how to dispatch monsters.”
“Arianna was no monster. How could this have happened? How is it possible?”
“She wasn’t a monster, but her blood, when I did receive it, was unmistakably powerful. And she was never a blood saint.” He put the cord away and patted the spot it took in his coat. “I have encountered these cords before, and blood like hers too.”
“I can’t help but wonder if I could have saved her,” Ifeye muttered. “If I had gone down first, before Adella.”
“You had no way of knowing," the hunter said quietly. "Adella has her own hardships to face, and you have yours.”
Ifeye looked at the little child, now crawling over to a book and tugging on the cover in glee. “I suppose I do. My memories are returning, just like you said.”
“But not all of them,” he said. “We should go.”
“Where to?”
“I know of a place that is safe, safer even than this chapel. It’s hidden away, not far from here. I will clear the path for us, but I need you to stay here until I return, safe in this room. I don’t think we should wake our friend here yet.”
Ifeye’s eyes drifted to the sleeping form of the dweller. “Adella is still in the tomb.”
“She would not hurt you,” the hunter said, but he eyed the trapdoor warily.
“She might not want to,” Ifeye conceded, “but I don’t trust whatever it is the Church does to its nuns.”
The hunter seemed to hesitate, but after a moment it was clear that he had come to a decision. He walked over to one of the bookshelves and pulled it until it slid over the trapdoor. “There,” he muttered, satisfied with his work. “Stay here, out of sight, and do not wander off.”
“I won’t. Couldn't you have done that before?”
"That bookshelf'll keep no beast out," he said solemnly. "But it may dissuade a nun. Do I have your word that you will remain here?"
"You do," Ifeye promised. "I swear I'll stay."
He pulled the mask up, hiding the scars and his familiar face. By the time the mask was up, he was familiar only in the way the hunter always seemed to be. Because she knew him from the chapel. “You have wandered off at every opportunity thus far," he said in a voice like dry stone. "You have not once, not even once, stayed in one place.”
Ifeye shrugged, unable and unwilling to argue that point. “I will stay here to protect the child,” she said. “I’ll stay with the dweller and the child until you return.” His eyes narrowed in that familiar way over his mask, but in the end he relented.
“Remember what I told you,” he said.
“Stay here, out of sight, and do not wander off. I have understood.”
“If you die,” he came to stand in front of her, towering and intense, “it will be you who is responsible for what happens to this city. The fate of it rests in your hands. Do you understand?”
“You’ve said that before,” she said, looking up at him. His eyes were still unreadable, but she saw his eyebrows drawn together in the way she understood, a familiar expression. Not anger; worry.
“I meant it. If you die out there, because of some pointless insatiable curiosity, I am going to go back there—” he pointed vaguely towards the door to the chapel “—and I am not coming back. This night will carry on forever.”
“You have duties to attend to as a hunter,” she reminded him, "regardless of what a lady’s maid you’ve known one night does or does not do. Your duties are the same.”
“I’m no hunter,” the hunter said. “I’m a husband and a fisherman.”
Ifeye blinked, the memory of the ocean rising briefly like a wave to her eyes. “How did a fisherman end up a hunter?”
“Incurable illness. Misfortune. Poor judgment.” He gave one last glance to the trapdoor, covered by the bookshelf, and the little creature now entertaining itself with the books that had fallen off the shelves. “I would do it again. But I am no true hunter.” He left, the door to the library shutting behind him. Then, it was just Ifeye, the dweller, and the child in the room, and somewhere below there was Adella, alone with Arianna’s corpse.
The dweller slumbered fitfully, crying out on occasion, and the great clock above the city chimed. She could hear it, even here, and she could hear footsteps in the water below. Everything echoed, everything reverberated in the walls and in the stone floor. The books seemed to vibrate too, and she remembered the way the letters had seemed to run from her eyes as she tried to read them. She had not the heart to try again, terrified of what she might not be able to read, so she watched the child crawl clumsily about the floor, and rubbed at her neck absently.
The hunter returned, after the not-silence grew to be almost unbearable, and he gathered the sleeping dweller up in his arms. “The way is clear,” he said, jerking his head towards the door. “Can you take the child?”
She picked up the little thing, now squirming fitfully, and felt a dull throbbing in her neck. There was no true pain, however, so she followed him without pause. The door shut behind them, and they went into the sudden dark of the chapel. The dweller stirred as they went, his mumbling starting up again, but he did not wake. Not even when the elevator clunked and whirred as it lifted them up towards that tower, where there were no loud, rude men awaiting them. She remembered the last time she had thought to come here, she had wanted a better view of the thing on the roof of the chapel. Turning, ignoring the empty tower that had been crowded and loud before, she looked to the sky and saw, for the first time, something clinging to the spire.
"The snakeskin," she said to herself, entranced by the monster she saw, "it's still in its hand. It's so much bigger now."
"What?" The hunter looked back and, following her gaze, saw the monster. "You can see the Amygdala? Snakeskin?"
"Shouldn't I? I saw it snatch up the snakeskin that came off your back."
"When-- What?"
Ifeye cradled the child closer to her chest, the creature called the Amygdala creating nothing but discomfort and placeless fear in her guts, and wondered how to answer. It had been so foggy when it happened, and so hectic in her mind. It had hurt, too, to touch it and see.
"I think there was a snakeskin on your back," she said, unsure how else to say what she saw.
"There are snakes in the forest," the hunter conceded, "but I don't understand what the Amygdala would want with a snakeskin. It usually snatches people up."
"Oh," she realized. "You did not want me to go outside for fear of the Amygdala. The safest place in Yharnam is guarded by that monster."
"Don't be fooled into assigning it any reason or purpose," the hunter told her forebodingly. "It's a mindless amalgamation of terror and fear. That is all."
"It still has the snakeskin in its hand."
At this, the hunter did look at the thing more closely. He broke his intense, familiar stare into her eyes to turn his own towards the creature atop the spire. He looked for a long time, and then, he took out a simple lens on a chain. A monocular, she noticed. She wanted to see through the strange device too, she realized, but the hunter looked to be studying the creature.
"That's no snakeskin," he said. "It's writhing, like a tentacle on an octopus."
"I suppose it isn't; it did come to life when I held it."
The hunter tore his gaze away from the lens and stared at her in what was becoming a way as familiar as his eyes. "What?" This was becoming a familiar word from him.
Ifeye gestured to the tower. "Shall we go?" The hunter followed her hand, but he seemed reluctant to leave. She was tired of the monster on the spire, and she wanted to leave it. The sight of it hurt her head, and it frightened her in a deep, steady way that she did not like.
"I don't think it was a snake, nor a snakeskin," he said again. "You said it was on my back? Did it glow?"
"No, it was inky black."
The hunter stared into the device, watching the Amygdala until it turned, slowly, to face them. Her head began to ache to see its eyes, swirling about, it did not see them, but it sensed something.
"The scholar," the hunter said, finally, unfazed by the Amygdala's movement. "That scholar in the college. She summoned these."
"I do not know what you mean," Ifeye said honestly, a little confused about his worry.
"You held it?"
"Yes."
"And it came alive?"
"Yes."
"She summoned things. They did not grow from her; she summoned them from beyond. Damn it. And you held it?"
"I did," Ifeye said. "Who was she?"
"A scholar. A monster. I'm not sure. You've touched something from the Great Ones," he said dully. "And you survived it with your sanity intact. All that work to keep you safe, to keep you inside, and you went and did this." The hunter stood without moving for a moment, watching her with something unreadable in his gaze, then, finally, he passed her. The tower was empty, the spire was far away, and she did not care to ask what it was that she had held, briefly, in the chapel that night. They moved on, passing around the entrance and following the ridge-like path around the tower towards the back.
The hunter’s back looked broader than before, somehow, as he walked ahead of her. They continued to follow the curve of the tower until they reached a sudden break in the smooth stone. He leapt down, balancing the dweller in one arm, and then stretched out his hand to help her down too. She took it.
“Where did all those men from before go?”
He did not answer.
He left her at the top of the drop into blackness. “Wait only a moment, and I will come back for you,” he said. She had no idea how he could, since she saw no ladder, no rope, nothing that would aid this, but she did not say anything. He leapt down, the dweller in his grip still, and left her atop the tower’s sheer drop into empty space. She held the child, now squirming more than ever, in her arms and tried to find a place to stroke it, to pet it gently, to calm it down. It seemed to respond well to a light stroke on its forehead. She did this until its cries became little whimpers that echoed in the emptiness, the only sounds until footsteps came behind her. She did not turn around, used to the ways of the hunter now. “Hunter,” she greeted him.
The hunter chuckled. “I suppose I can’t shock you anymore, can I?” he asked.
“You’ve always had a quiet step,” she said, in a strange moment of intimate knowing. She did not know how it came out of her, but it did, easily. He took her in his arms and dropped down, the cool air hit her cheeks as they fell, he with practiced ease, her with only a slight terror, and the child with glee.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a door opening, the hunter stepping through, and flowers. Fields of flowers, a scent that was peculiar but familiar, and a house with peeling paint and a beautiful strength to its shape; she looked upon someone’s home.
“What is this?” she asked, hushed and awed.
“The old workshop,” he said. “It’s long abandoned, but it’s the safest place in Yharnam. The truly safest place in Yharnam.”
“I—” she shook her head, shaking off the doubt, “thank you for bringing us here.” He took her hand in hers again, gently, and simply held it for a moment.
“I have to ask you to do something you will not appreciate,” he said. “I need to ask you to remain here, safe, until I return. You must not leave until the sun rises. I have something I must do, but when I return—I will return here, to you.”
She looked at his hand, part of her shocked at the forwardness of the action and of his words, but another part of her knew him and did not fear it. “I’ll wait as long as I can,” she said honestly. “Sir, you clearly know me, but do I know you?”
“You will,” he said with clear relief and hope. “I swear you will, when the night is over. You’ll remember me, and you’ll remember our life before this hell.”
She held the child closely to her chest, and felt its eyes blinking against her bare collar. “What will happen to me? To the child?”
“Nothing,” he said after a long silence. “I will help you clean, and we will wake the dweller,” he assured her, “but after that I have to be gone.”
“I understand,” she replied, though she did not. “Is there a kitchen?”
“Should be,” he murmured, lost somewhere else, though his eyes were on her.
There was not a kitchen, she discovered. But she made one. She needed to, after the hunter did not return. The hunt was over within what felt like an hour; the sun rose, or at least that was what she remembered. The child grew hungry in the early hours of dawn, so she was forced to find a way out. She could not leave through the door the hunter had brought her, not at first, but with some loose wood she built a serviceable ladder, and found a way down to the paths far, far below, and from there found a way into the Ward. She brought the child with her, wrapped up in her shawl again, because the dweller still slept.
When she came back burdened with fruits, vegetables, meats, and supplies, and lighter for gold, he awoke and wept. They wept together, at first, but then the sun pooled into the little house and she decided a fire would be in order, if they wanted to cook the meat. This order of work allowed her to forget the way her mind cleared, the way her memories came out of their caves—
The creature atop the spire was still there, but ask though she might of the straggling remnants of the night, there would be no answer to her inquiry. Each person she questioned looked up to the spire, moaned slightly, and then carried about on their way.
The snakeskin, she was sure now, was not a snakeskin. She had time alone with nothing to do but think, and she had books to read that made clear sense. She looked through each tome, and found frighteningly little on the Amygdala or snake-like beasts. The books simply did not account for them, and this was a hunter's workshop, so this should be the place where the information would have to be, if it were to be anywhere. There was no explanation for her headaches, though there was a hastily scrawled note in a margin on the Church's litanies that eyes on the inside hurt so much.
Eyes on the inside.
The holes in her head and the pain she'd felt were connected, and her mind rather likened the phrase she read here to the sensation she had felt, but there was no ready explanation for the thing she had come into contact with. She assumed, however, that it was not from the forest. No, there was another place the hunter might have brought it in from. She did not know what it was, nor what it looked like, but she had a feeling it was connected to the glowing lantern she had seen in his wake.
This was how time went, now that the sun had risen and the house needed menial tasks to run. Her mind could only sift through the sand and look for things that did not fall through the holes inside, the things that would remain at the surface, demanding answers.
Mina had been killed for being an outsider, just like Ifeye was an outsider, just like Ifeye’s husband was an outsider. They had come from far away, all the way here, looking for a cure for his strange illness. She had kissed him goodbye at the clinic, had sworn to come see him when she was able, and then she had gone to work at the manor, barely on time and ready to face the wrath of her employer.
But that night Mina had been thrown out with Ifeye, into the streets, to keep the little ones safe from the evil they brought in from the outside. To Mina's death, they left the manor and walked the streets. Outsiders brought the beast plague, the men said, before they fired their guns with mismatched arms and bleeding eyes. Mina had died because the beasts did not know they were beasts.
These were the difficult parts of the new life. She did not return to work, but she found gold in the house, and so she did not want to; even if they had not thrown her and Mina out to die, she would not have worked in Yharnam if she could help it. She would have left, but the dweller deserved better, and the child— She loved the child. But more than that, she knew the hunter would come back. He'd kept every promise so far. She had survived, the hunt ended, she remembered him, and he was truly cured now. Gone were his glassy, far-off gazes, the labored breaths, the fits of coughing; he was like she remembered him before.
So, she waited.
Yharnam was in flames, but that did not concern her. Mina's death hung heavy over her still, and her husband's hands in the Yharnam man's chest still filled her with grief. How scared he must have been, to think she would die a stranger. How strange the night was--
She knew, now, how strangely twisted Yharnam was. How it twisted her with it, how quickly her mind had fallen apart when it wanted her to fall softly out of the way. But she hadn't fallen away. And she did not plan to. So, the spire she left to the far recesses of her mind, the strange snake-like tendril of memory she'd found on the hunter she forgot, and the beasthood of the child... She accepted it without fear.
On the third day they found the ladder that allowed access to the upper level, where beds and bathrooms were. But the dweller decided to return to the chapel, to help who he could with his knowledge, and bid her visit whenever she could. He followed the makeshift path she'd made, and then she'd helped him the way the hunter had, on her back the rest of the way. She tried to visit him after that, and she often brought him things she thought he might like from her forays into the sluggish, ruined markets. He asked after the hunter often, and each time she swore that the moment he returned, the dweller would know of it. She never saw Adella again, and she never returned to the little library at the foot of the stairs, but she stood before the dweller when she could and she remembered with him the night of the hunt.
She found a cellar to store the food, and a serviceable well in the flowers that brought forth good, fresh water, and she dug a hole in the earth to create a small, crude oven. Breakfast was hasty, and so was every other meal at first, but when the sun rose and set thirty times, she had managed to make a hut and a little kitchen—external and detached from the main house, yes, but it worked. The child followed her outside easily, growing quickly now that it knew how to, and it spoke in a wordless, symbolic way, directly into her mind. She knew when it was hungry, tired, sad, and when it wanted her to touch it. She knew when it missed the hunter, when it missed the dweller. She could not take it outside, not yet, for she did not know what others would see. So they sat together in the quiet, cooking and reading, and speaking in silence.
It loved touch, and it could not touch any other, so it loved to touch her. She suspected it had something to do with the bite in her neck, which did leave a mark, though it broke no skin. She pet its sweet face every morning to wake it, and then one day she realized that it had grown. Steadily, so she did not completely notice, it had grown.
It was covered in the long, strange tendrils she had seen the night of the hunt; like snakeskin at first, but solid, like-- She stroked its little forehead in the gentle way it liked and it awoke after a long stretch, which was the way it yawned. She wondered how many others like it were out there, in the night; and how many others had been killed so ruthlessly.
"It's time for breakfast," she said.
The workshop began to resemble a home after one hundred nights, and a few of the people of the chapel began to know her as a strange woman who waited, breathlessly, with the fervor of the faithful, for nights of the hunt.
A night did come, finally, that answered her prayers. On that night, a red moon shone on the statue of the Saint, and the moon flowers shone red in its light too. She looked up that night, as the moon stood still for what felt like weeks, and waited as the thing descended, its presence weighing on her like her own shawl. The child stood behind her, its head lifted to the skies in imitation of her, its mind in her own, and a new presence—deep in her memory. They watched him come home.
The hunter never did return, not as she knew him at least, but her husband did. A great beast descended from the place the moon made, and it landed like a ray of moonlight in the flowers. Its hands came up to gently pull her closer, and she reached out her arms, weeping into its inky skin. It gripped her with a strength that should have been terrifying, that should have snapped her out of her relief, but it could not. It only sealed her happiness, and she kissed her husband's head sweetly as the child crooned curiosity into her mind.
Another voice joined in, familiar and dry. "Ifeye," was all it said for a long time.