Chapter Text
It's been so long since I've managed to take a moment to really recollect what I guess we've all been through. Myself especially. It doesn't matter much to the grand scheme of the world, but. I think putting it all down into words could help us. My memory of my life's been failing me. I think I recall a few movies and games that had immortal characters, ones that recall everything they've ever done with eidetic precision, but. Not me. The longer I stray from my old life, the more nostalgic it begins to feel.
I guess I should just put it all down on the table. No gambling with it. Just recall what I can. Run through it step-by-step to try and get my thoughts in a row about who I was. Who I am. Who I want to be. Death is patient with others, because it always comes around to a new meeting and a new beginning for them, right? So… shouldn't I be patient with myself? I should just take a deep breath and ease into it. Maybe if I walk through it all. Maybe then, we'll have a good grasp on things.
She couldn’t breathe.
Her mind raced. Her body ached in ways she never thought she could endure, a quiet ringing piercing through her ears. Her heart slammed in her chest, pushing through to her head and thrumming hard enough to make the many thoughts coursing through her brain sound even more incoherent.
She was trying to breathe. She couldn’t.
Chained up and tore into a new reality. Skin screaming almost as loudly in agony as her voice portrayed it, soft brown hair tore into fur the same hue. Her spine cracked and extended into a tail. Her ears slowly ripped up her head, stretching along with her own jaws jutting out. A wolf’s visage met her as she was thrown into a nearby puddle to await her “turn”, blue eyes curling into red streaks across them from the pain and stress.
She gasped for breaths that refused to give her an inch more life.
All she got were sobs forcing her voice to die in her throat and the air she desperately needed to stay aware nearly failing to reach her burning lungs.
She was human. She wasn’t anymore. The person who lazed quietly in the living room of their shared apartment with her father was quickly and violently upended into an entirely new world. A new land. Something about Faith. Something regarding her destiny, a prophecy or something. It wasn’t Earth. Earth couldn’t just cause an entirely new body to erupt from beneath your skin.
She heard his voice first. Her father’s. He said something. Something she didn’t quite catch as her body quaked from watching it happen. His voice was stifled. Somewhere between saying something would be alright and that she just needed to find… something. Someone? She didn’t know. She couldn’t parse it. Her body quaked with equal terror and grief when she saw what cut his voice short. Along with his own form, his body being kicked off of a block soon after she heard something heavy and wet drop on the other side of it.
She wanted to scream. Her body didn’t have the power to give that pain a voice. Dizziness sapped her body as she attempted to stare out at the horror of seeing her father’s limp corpse being dragged off of the ritual circle without its head. The physical pain wasn’t enough. The beings in front of her couldn’t be bothered to care.
“Finally.”
The voice was hoarse. Deep. Raspy and strained, but coming from a powerful source. A set of four eyes, sickeningly yellow stars staring down from a red visage. A fifth eye stared down, unblinking. Unmerciful. “The last of the hounds. Centuries of searching for you pathetic whelps, and I can finally taste the sensation of victory…” Teeth upon an amphibious jawline curled upwards in an almost voracious smile.
Hounds. The being called her a hound. Was that all she was to them? Was that all her father was? The man she could see the head of being scraped into a bag and flung off into the woods for whatever wildlife would make use of it? She didn’t understand! She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t cry out, she couldn’t even breathe! Who were they?!
“This sickness can finally be purged from our Lands… With this final sacrifice, the prophecy will be impossible to fulfill!” A higher pitched voice. Two blue eyes, split apart by a mouth and overseen by a third eye just above the head. Both of them, wearing Crowns with eyes. Her father told her of them. It was starting to make sense the longer she laid here, head placed firmly upon the chopping block by an executioner’s gloved grip.
A third voice, screeching and piercing, snapped out a laugh. “The heretic below has failed! The night will continue unabated for eons under our rule!” Only one eye met hers from above a gnarled head of twigs and overgrowth. A third Crown. Green in its hue and profanely impure. It seemed curled up as eyes would from a grin.
“And the Old Faith preserved. The Knowledge kept. The Bishops left.” A practical whisper of words, a separate set of four, purplish eyes slitted and unbreakably focused upon the woman’s dire fate. Another Crown, looking down with a disdain she never knew she could feel from anyone.
That final set of words made it all fall into place as she felt the grip of the executioner shift. Her mind was finally processing it all as her eyes closed in terror.
She was a part of a family with its own particular ‘myth’. A faith that she was brought up to believe in her entire life. How Five laid out the laws of the land across two worlds, one laying quietly underneath of the surface of the other but dictating reality across them both. One, Shamura, held the Knowledge of the world, dictating War through their mind. Two, Heket, held Abundance in her jaws, swallowing it to spread Famine upon those she found distasteful. Three, Kallamar, studied Purity in his life, finding ways to spread Pestilence to make it rarer than ever. Four, Leshy, claimed to see true Freedom with his own eyes, though spread Chaos to muddle its message to keep the masses compliant.
And Five. The Fifth of the Bishops of the Old Faith. The nameless one. The One Who Waits. He was struck from the history of that world. Whispers still existed, of course. No Bishop ever went quietly into the night. And he could not be purged entirely, as no world could stay alive without Death to provide the balance. Five had become Four through treachery of their bonds of family. With a prophecy that Four would become Three, then Two, then One, then None.
And that a Wolf in Lamb's clothing from the Abyss would be the one to drag each and every last of them down into the pit it had crawled out from in a glorious Hunt, a flock of sheep backing them to assist in this crusade.
As the axe of the executioner tore through the air, breaking through it entirely before it followed suit with skin, muscle and bone… she couldn’t help but pray. A silent prayer that Death be there to await her. That Death be gentle. That Death not forsake her family. The same family she watched go through this as everything blinked into a white abyss of nothingness the second axe met stone.
The Bishops watched as her head tumbled upon the ground. And as the executioner reached to grasp at it, the overgrown one spoke. Leshy’s voice was a jagged knife in the open air of the night, cutting sharply and harshly. “Leave it. This hound doesn’t deserve to even have a burial. To think it had the gall to exist in our presence! I almost admire the spunk the first one had, but that one was pathetic.”
Heket, the red-skinned frog, almost grunted out a chuckle. “Leave it as a reminder. This place was stained by its disgusting blood, this temple deserves to rot regardless.” The executioner nodded and began to gradually stamp its way off of the platform with the two having spoken vanishing into the shadows of the ground beneath them. This left Shamura and Kallamar to stare down upon the lifeless corpse of the young woman. The spider’s eyes seemed to glimmer as they stared.
“Five becomes Four. Four becomes… Four Eternal. It has been done. It has to have been done.” Still a whisper, their eyes never blinked. Never left the body of the dead wolf in front of them. The hound. As if waiting for something. Seeing if this truly was the end or if they had just ushered in their own.
“C-come, Shamura.” Kallamar’s voice, almost as warbling as the squid typically was outside of his territory, was paired with a light nod towards the spider. “It’s done. It’s dead. It can’t do anything, much less lead HIM to us… we’re safe.”
Silence reigned. An uncomfortable quiet despite the faintest of breezes through the dead temple’s grounds. But Shamura's eyes did finally close. And they slumped away into the darkness with Kallamar following soon afterwards. It was done. The hounds were dead. Death could not reach them from where he was…
But the hound could reach Death. The wolf’s entire world had gone white. She was once a human. Then she was a wolf. And now she was dead, right? Her breathing was… it had returned. She didn’t feel calm, that was for sure, but her voice was at least back in her throat. Her… throat.
Her hand grasped at her neck quietly, tapping and rubbing along it in shock. There was no cut there. There was no fur there. No sign that she had just lost her head, nor herself. Her mind was intact, her form, human. In the void of white nothingness, her thoughts were a locust swarm of chaotic pain, confusion, agony, anger, and yet they were all distinct. Clear and concise, buzzing about in her head with the cacophony of negativity the thought of death could bring.
A metallic sound cut through it all. Her regret, her longing, her fury, it snapped her out of her state when chains clinked harshly among themselves. She rose her head, brown bangs gently draped in front of her eyes and being forced to be brushed away. Her eyes gradually began to adjust, the blue hue cutting through the white of the area to begin noticing wooden crosses of a sort, clean and pristine, waiting for something to be tied upon them. Massive links of chains surrounding the area clinked idly by in the lifeless void of white, but they seemed to shift upwards as that much louder sound echoed through the area, vanishing into the ether abound.
She stepped forward towards the sound. A black figure seemed to be shifting and tugging away at the chains binding them to this realm in the distance, too far to make out with any clarity. Her eyes widened as she stumbled forward, collapsing as she lost her footing. A resounding splash rang out in the hollowness of the afterlife, her eyes going back to look at the platform she had been on. It was… the ritual circle. The one her father had died upon. The one she had died upon. A glance forward, and silence sank into the wrist-deep water she was now settled on. She looked down at it… and saw that wolfish gaze staring back at her. A soft gasp followed, the woman leaning back onto her feet with a few steps back, only to land right back on the ritual circle. She grunted, her eyes shutting in the pain of landing so roughly upon it. But when she opened her eyes…
That figure was no longer in the distance. She was now directly in front of them. A monstrously large being, as large as the Bishops loomed before her untimely banishment here. A cat, his fur a void of darkness in the lifeless white around them all. He stood with a white cloak covering all but his head and arms, the latter being almost nothing but bone, dripping with ichor just as black as his fur. And yet most strikingly was that, below his veiled expression, blood red eyes pierced straight through it, the color seemingly flowing down below his chin in a perfect, bloody trail along the closed cloak’s seam.
His teeth showed almost by apparition along his jaws, and a deep, rumbling chuckle escaped his jagged maw. Slowly, with a creaking that could only be from bones that hadn’t moved in such a way in eons, he leaned forward. “Aaaah. Aym. Baal. They finally arrive.”
Flanking the behemoth of a cat were two much more reasonably-statured beings. Wearing the same veils as their master, the two of them sat quietly, watching critically of the newcomer’s appearance here. One, robed white. They looked almost bored of this the moment they laid eyes upon her. The other, robed black. One eye cleaved blind, this one squinted their eyes in scrutiny. But not the one front and center. All four eyes, deeply red and wide in wondrously mad desire, looked down upon the human in front of them. Three upon his head. One upon his Crown.
The Fifth Bishop. The One Who Waits. The woman fell utterly silent, panting slowly as they looked up in clear terror. Which only got an even wider smile to form upon his muzzle, fangs shimmering in the bright light as he did so. “Oooh, do not be afraid, little pup. Despite your recent passing into my realm… I dare not let someone I still need slip by unnoticed.”
“Wh-…” She cleared her throat, trying to stay calm. Her neck felt stiff. She didn’t have to wonder why. “What…? Where am I?”
“My realm. Though it is more closely considered my prison.” His bones creaked as he leaned back, looking down with a more calm expression. His arm waved gently along towards the open expanse before them both, nothing but a skeletal visage of the limb. “I oversee the vast ocean of the Abyss, and it is beneath its waves I have been kept trapped. The bridge between what lies beyond both the world you lived within… and the realm of the gods just beside that.”
“The Lands o-of—” Another clearing of her throat. That stiffness hurt. “The Lands of the Old Faith… I-I thought it was just some tale. Something to… to scare me into submission, keep me locked down t-to listen as a kid.” She knew how absurd that sounded the moment she said it aloud. She could see and feel how real it was even now, and the god before her’s laugh was an even sharper dagger than she could have imagined feeling.
“And yet here you are, right in front of me thanks to the folly of the Bishops! Torn into their realm, only to be thrown into mine! Silly little humans that believe they stand above us when we still hold their lives in our own palms…” His grin grew devilish. “You have quite a bit of luck. The one who died before you just so happened to know exactly what to say to catch my attention.”
“My… my father? D-did he pray?”
“Not to me. To you. He prayed that you would find your way to me. I’d find it laughable if the prophecy didn’t seem to think it held credence. And I’m just curious enough to follow through with what it says to the letter.” She coughed a bit as this was said to her, a hoarse sound that wracked her body while she slowly stood herself up. “I need a Hound of Hell to let my power become known once more. A Shepherd for a flock of the mindlessly devoted masses in these lands. Faith is power, and I have little thanks to what the Bishops have done to me… but Death cannot be so easily circumvented.”
“What… wh-what do you need me for?” Her eyes turned up, terrified. She felt sick. Like a wetness was forming in the back of her throat. “I-I feel… I just lost everything, s-… sir.” She almost didn't say that final word.
The lack of deference was intriguing. But not unwelcome. He almost smirked at the strange way she attempted to show it, chuckling deeply with an airy boom of a voice. “Only one thing. A cult in my name. You have nothing, but true to form of a fate such as that… this means you stand to gain everything.” Her eyes blinked gently, another cough causing a small splatter to form along her hand as she covered her mouth.
It was crimson. “I’d answer fast if I were you, little Hound. I can give you life once more, but my power is not limitless. I merely need confirmation... or a reason to let you collapse without a head once more. I can allow you the power of the Red Crown, mastery over Death itself. And all you need to do is dedicate yourself to me and gain power within that Crown to take your fate by its own neck! A Vessel of Death. The Hound of the Abyss!” His grin was almost manic, claws beginning to clink about as he curled his fingers in eagerly. The ultimatum had been set.
In exchange for not following her family, her very father and likely many before themselves to the grave? She’d have to become a god. Or rather, a god’s vessel. Someone making use of gifted power to ensure she did not simply let her head roll off of her shoulders. Her hand gripped her neck as she felt her fear dip back into terror. Desperately, she choked out her answer.
“Yes! Absolutely, y-yes!” Tears streaked from her eyes as she cried this out, and a laugh that crackled about the air bellowed outwards, echoing into the open nothingness surrounding them all. Aym and Baal quietly withheld their personal comments about this display, closing their eyes as The One Who Waits plucked his Crown off of his own head. And with a flourish of his finger, settled it upon hers.
Her breathing stabilized instantly. Her eyes flashed red across the entirety of the pupils and sclera, and she took a deep, long breath. The kind she had been aching for all this time. Her chest heaved up, and she leaned forward, panting out with each burst of air she took in. Life was returning to her form, her fingers tingling with feeling once more as oxygen gradually pulsed through her body. A cloak, as red as the blood that had spilled from her neck just moments before, draped across her arms and shoulders. With a slow look up, she took a moment longer to pant before closing her lips and sighing through her nostrils. A beat of silence followed until she broke it. “A Cult for you. For the Abyss.”
“Correct, Hound. And a word of advice.” He tilted his head back, looking down at her almost… pridefully. “Hold your tongue on your true name. The one given to you by your own soul. Simply go by what I have already called you, and you will find what territory you pick out for yourself will stay safer than you’d ever expect.”
Hound. That was her name now. Given to her by the god of Death himself… She glanced down at the water below the ritual circle, noting that wolfish gaze staring back at her. “Go. Take the plunge. Dive back into the Lands of the Old Faith… and show them just how pathetically their efforts to cleave you from the strands of life have turned out!”
She obeyed without a second thought, diving straight into the water. Into her reflection to return to the world that had torn it all away from her with it as her form.
It was time for some very bloody retribution.