Chapter Text
“You found your way here yourself, and that’s just… Well, it’s a miracle,” the strange person said. His crimson, tattered robe shifted as he moved and spoke. It was unsettling, almost as if the cloth was part of his body. Ifeye tucked her skirt beneath her and knelt to answer him, her voice still scratchy and rough from screaming and crying. It hurt, but she wanted to be kind to this strange creature who welcomed her so warmly into his haven. She was also a little frightened of him. He looked revolting, wrong.
“I don’t know what would have happened if that gate hadn’t been already open,” she whispered. It was dumb luck. It was stupid, senseless luck that she had taken that path to Oedon Chapel and not the sewers. If she had taken the sewers, she was certain that whatever haunted them now would have made quick work of her. “It’s lucky, but I don’t know about miracles.”
“No, it is. I believe in fate, you know. I think you’re specially meant to be here.”
Ifeye smiled at him, grateful for his kindness, even if he was a little frightening. She put that smile on, the one her friends said was deadly. “Thank you. That makes you twice as special, if I found my way to you.” He stuttered nonsensically for a moment and seemed to genuinely melt at the praise. He looked… liquid, to her eyes. He seemed to melt into his red robes and then his robes seemed to melt into the stone of the chapel underneath him.
The strange being now taken care of and thoroughly vetted for any threat (there was none), she stood and wandered back over to the little door she had come through. Through that door was a library. It wasn’t safe, not by any means. It was a little trove of strange volumes and scattered tomes, covered roof to floor in bookshelves and ladders and littered with the maddened notes of some crazed scholar. It was cozy, calming, eerie, and entirely exposed. Just a ladder away was a little gutter that lead right to the horrible square where—
She’d wandered over to it several times over the course of the hour, and each time some haunting fear manifested in her heart. It paralyzed her, but still Ifeye couldn’t keep away. She ransacked the books she’d brought with her from that little library like a woman starved, ignoring the cooing, strange protests of the little dweller and her own terror as the ones she took pulled her back there.
“It’s so dangerous. Please,” he pleaded as she walked away from him, his voice floating through some fog in her mind as the door opened before her. “The hunter can’t save everyone if he’s not here,” he said.
And she asked, like a girl dreaming, outside herself: Who is the hunter? And the little dweller looked at her with those strange, hollow eyes and frowned. That frown woke her up. The door felt farther away, suddenly.
“He saved all the others. It’s so strange that you haven’t met him, you’re the only one who found this place on your own. He’s the nicest fellow I’ve ever met. A real hero. A little frightening,” and she’d bit back a harsh laugh at that, “but he’s good through and though.”
The others. He’d saved the others. He’d saved the woman in red who sat across from them in silence, doubled over sometimes, weakly moaning at other times. He’d saved the ill-tempered old woman that grumbled at her and called her terrible names when she’d tried to greet her, and he’d saved that mean man who watched her like a hawk and refused to speak to her directly. He’d saved that blood saint, the nun, who sometimes stared at the little dais where the chapel dweller resided with something that looked like hatred in her eyes.
“I wonder if I’ll meet your hunter before the sun rises,” she said, settling into the little nook she’d made by the lanterns. She pulled out one of those terrible books and began to read, struggling with the script. It was strange. She’d only been here a few hours, but everything in her mind treated the time like years. No matter how many times—she’d only tried to lock the trapdoor once, just an hour ago, but no matter how many times she tried to, it would be unlocked when she went into the library. Had she been to the library since she’d fallen out of it and into the chapel, weeping?
This was her first time reading these words, but she traced the strange lettering with her finger and felt like she’d read them a thousand times. Her mind followed them in shape and form, but her mind emptied when she read more than a line. She went back to the top of the page, and again her mind emptied by the bottom.
Sometimes, she felt like crying.
And sometimes she watched the chapel dweller murmur and the lady in red groan. No. This was the first time she had felt like crying. The tears came, unbidden, but familiarly. She bit her lips to silence herself, out of fear that the chapel dweller would hear. Something in her knew he would be deeply distressed at her pain and knew that she did not like it. He didn’t deserve it.
The hunter was there, sometime between one page and the next— Suddenly. There was a strange glow about him, but it must have been the moonlight overhead, filtering down to lend him some otherworldly radiance. He came right to her, without hesitation, and seemed unsurprised to see her seated in his safe haven. His shoulders blocked the light and obscured every word that was already blurred from her tears, he loomed over her like an immovable statue, his gaze cold and hard.
“You’re crying again." His voice was a dark rumble; he felt and sounded like a great stone. Enormous, imposing, not human. His eyes were rocks of granite in his covered face, his brows were stark and drawn together. They were connected, slightly, like the wings of a bird in flight. He was frightening, but eerily human. She wiped the tears from her face and shook her head resolutely.
“I’m not,” she lied outrageously. Then she paused. Again?
“Do you remember me?” he asked.
“No,” she replied honestly, unsure which of them had a memory that failed. “But the dweller speaks of you often.”
“How did you come to be here?”
“Sheer luck,” she said, easily, like he had reached down her throat and pulled the words out on a string from her chest. She couldn’t control the bitterness. “I was beset by maddened men. Hunters they call themselves. They killed my companion, but I ran through endless carnage to reach this place.”
“A terrible ordeal,” the hunter said with a strange, intense face.
She shrugged, eager to move on from the subject of her companion’s face buried in muck and mud and water; like a common stray put down. She felt nauseous just nearing the memory, so she held the book up for him to see. “I have found these books. I wish to read them, but it’s so strange.” She laughed without reason. “I can’t read a single word of this strange script.”
He did not answer for a long moment, but then he leaned down and took the book from her and shut it firmly. “Do not read this,” he said. “It’s better for you to remain shut inside for now.” There was something terrifyingly flat in his voice. She nodded, numb from shock and unease, and bit her lip.
“You always do that,” he said, gesturing with the book at her face. He stared at her for a moment, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say to him. He turned away from her, tossing the book aside like it was naught but trash, and went down the stairs. He spared the woman in red a glance and disappeared through a doorway. “Don’t follow me.” His voice rang through the cathedral as his footsteps carried him further away, stirring the slumbering old woman by the arched doorway. “It’s not safe.”
She wondered how he knew she had wanted to follow him. She tiptoed down when she was certain he was gone and passed the slumbering woman. The nun watched her from the far corner of the chapel. There was something horrible in her eyes, peeking out from the dark to watch the other inhabitants of the chapel, but Ifeye ignored it and peeked outside tentatively. There were bodies in the graveyard. The hunter stood there, among them, watching her with a cold gaze.
“I told you,” he said, and it carried all the way to her in the doorway, “to stay shut inside. Do not leave. If you die, you’ll be the one responsible for the fate of every human in this city.”
Confused, frightened, and now nonsensically chastised, Ifeye turned and ran back up the steps to the dweller. She sat beside him, ignoring his flustered mutterings and shakes, and watched the moonlight filter into the stone world of the chapel.
“He’s good, a bit gruff, but he’s good. He likes you, seems like. I haven’t got a clue what he meant by the fate of every human.”
Then silence.
Hours seemed to pass before the dweller spoke again.
“You found your way here yourself, and that’s just… Well, it’s just impressive.” The dweller turned to her kindly. She stared at him, but he simply smiled back, vaguely terrifying and intensely gentle, soothing, and kind, and he waited for her to answer.
He seemed to chalk up her silence to discomfort, or shyness, for he smiled wider and spoke with renewed vigor. “We’re all sorts around here,” he said kindly. “You and that funny, chuckling man are our newest additions. Maybe you could introduce yourself? Your story is just so fascinating... He might like to hear it.”
Like a music box wound up, uncaring what she was responding to, Ifeye spoke. “I’d have died if fortune hadn’t favored me,” she said in a voice like a doll's; empty. She turned from him, towards the door beyond, away from the people in the chamber with her. “May I pay a visit to the library in the tomb, now that I am safe?”
“It might be dangerous,” he fussed, clearly reluctant to deny her what she wanted. “I don’t know how safe things are immediately outside the chapel here. Take incense with you, but it is not usually enough in small quantities. The hunter can’t protect us when he’s not here.”
She went, into the little library, wondering about that hunter, and sighed with happiness to see the familiar sight of books. She took one from the shelves, it was golden and a mundane, but calming brown, and the pages within were withered in a fond, ordinary way. She opened to the first page and read. She read three pages, then realized she had not read anything, and went back to the beginning. She stared at the book before shutting it, her head suddenly ringing. She felt a sharp pain within, all over her body, and then finally in her stomach. Ifeye lowered herself carefully to the ground, her vision going black and her breath shallow, and she pressed her head to the cool stone.
There were footsteps behind her, but she could not bear to lift her head. She felt arms around her, she felt the nausea and pain ebb away. Something terrible filled her lungs and her nose, and she coughed at the stench of it. Blood, but all wrong. Someone had lifted her from the floor, and she lay propped up against their arm, their hand pulling the scarf about her neck loose so that she could breathe. She opened her eyes. A man knelt at her side, his fingers digging into her arm and his arm around her, holding her upright.
“Why are you here?” he demanded, his voice enraged for some inconceivable reason. “Ifeye, I told you to stay inside. Has the night not progressed?”
She looked at him, at the flecks of blood on what skin she could see, and she shrugged. “Who have you been killing?”
He ignored her question, and when she sat up, he let her go with a strange hesitation. “You need to go back inside. Leave these books; they mean nothing. They’re madness itself.”
“I wish to read them. I’m bored.”
“I don’t care. I said you should not.”
“Who are you to me that you can tell me what I should or should not do?” She jerked out of his grip and grabbed at the book on the floor, clutching it to her chest. “I don’t even know who you are. How do you know my name, and what makes you think you can speak to me this way?”
“Go back to the chapel. Leave this place.” He stood and offered her a hand, but she refused it and stood up alone. She owed him nothing; he didn’t save her, if anything she owed the dweller more respect than this arrogant hunter. His eyes did not leave her as she passed him. He was watching her like… She snorted.
“What occupies you, my lady?”
“I am not a lady; I am a maid. I am a chimney sweep in a dress.”
The hunter was watching her like a wild beast watching its prey, and she fled like prey. She reentered the chapel and went back to the kind dweller, who watched her too, but much less intensely. She smoothed out her skirts and sat beside him, carefully avoiding the candles lit around them.
“That hunter is meddlesome,” she said to him. “And his manner is rude.”
The dweller fretted over that for a time, trying to defend his friend to her. The lady in red, now feeling better apparently, vouched for the hunter in her own way. “He’s a strange, imposing man,” she said. “But he’s done us all good. We owe him our lives.”
Ifeye looked around, at the disagreeable man, at the bandaged man and the women of the place, all people the hunter guided here himself. “I don’t,” Ifeye said firmly. “I owe the dweller and the incense, maybe, my life. Why does he presume to order me around?”
The lady in red shrugged her shoulders and suddenly looked bored. “He’s strange,” she said again. “He knows more than I tell him, and he remembers more than I remember saying. He must know something we do not.”
“And you’ve simply accepted that?”
“I have greater worries,” the lady muttered, her face darkening. “My body is so weak suddenly.” She said nothing more, and the silence began again.
Ifeye sat there in the growing calm, listening to the dweller murmur prayers and the lady groan as her strange pain beset her once more. There was an unusual feeling in her skin as she sat and waited, and after a while she stood and made to return to her place by the lanterns. But something caught her eye. She turned to the strange new thing and realized that the door that had always been locked before, the one just down the steps and to the right, was open wide.
She made her way to it.
“That’s not for you,” the dweller called out. Ifeye ignored him, making her way forward. There was a wide room inside, stone walls and floors, and there, a strange device stood. She went to it and pulled, but nothing happened. She looked at the little rounded platform ahead and took a single step forward. Someone pulled her back. "Again?" she cried out, her outrage overtaking her.
She spun around, barely swallowing her scream. It was a large, imposing man, dressed all in black with his face covered and his tri-cornered hat pulled low. A hunter. The hunter himself?
“Again?” he asked, his voice low. "What do you mean when you say again? Do you remember?"
“Sir,” she gasped, pulling herself out of his grip and right over a ledge in the floor. She fell back, onto the platform, and a loud, mechanical noise rang out as her body pushed something down beneath her. She froze, staring at him as the platform began to rise, staring even as he broke into a run towards her.
Several things happened very quickly. First, he leapt onto the platform and screamed as his leg became caught in the crush of the platform into the wall. There was a horrible, ripping noise, but his cry of pain was muffled as he bit into the cloth at his mouth. Ifeye, horrified and disgusted, began to weep and scream as he reached behind him to grab at something. She covered her mouth with her hands tightly as the wind ruffled her hair and her skirts, and she watched him in frozen horror as he lifted a gun to his head.
No, was her last thought.
She blinked against the light of the candles and sat with her legs tucked neatly beneath her, observing in silence the peaceful serenity of the chapel. The night was long; she had never thought it would be this long. They had warned her, of course, when she first came here with--
When she first came here, they warned her about nights of the hunt. But the promise of treatment was too powerful, and it lured them here, to this world of long nights and strange candles, burning incense, and men slowly losing their minds in the streets.