Chapter Text
“ 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐝; 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐨𝐝 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬. „
— 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝟏:𝟐
𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦.
⊱༺༒︎༻⊰
The sky overhead was painted with stars, but the scholar’s eyes were fixed on the mud at her feet.
Tressa Bowen perched at the lakeshore, watching a small creature as it crawled through the muck, tracing the line that divided earth and water. Squelching, mud-soaked little thing.
She had been watching it for twenty minutes, perhaps longer. Time had a way of softening at the water's edge, especially at this hour, and especially at this lake, which had always seemed to Tressa to be less a body of water and more of an absence—a hole in the world that had filled with something that merely resembled water but was something else entirely.
All things nearby the College of Byrgenwerth had a way of being tilted off-kilter, as though what they studied, taught, and investigated were capable of shifting everything around them into the realm of wrongness simply by proximity.
This creature was wrong in the way that only a biologist would notice immediately and a layperson might notice eventually. It looked and moved like a tadpole but had too many legs, and the way its legs were arranged was altogether incorrect. She watched it with keen and unblinking interest.
Her quill moved in short, twitching strokes as she committed its memory to parchment. If only her ink were three shades lighter and cooler in temperature. Teal, perhaps. The colour of deep water, or the space between stars. Black ink seemed unsuitable, and she found herself crinkling her nose in dissatisfaction as she reviewed her sketch and notes.
A gust moved across the lake and raised the hair on her neck. The chill in the air was rare for September, out of calendar, and out of place. A light dusting of snow had swept over the college ground days earlier before being lost with the rain. No doubt frost would soon spread on the windowpanes like icy veins.
The little creature paused at the waterline as though it had heard something she hadn't. It turned its whole body to look up at Tressa. No eyes—at least none that she could see—and a smooth featureless face that looked as though it’d been washed away by the lake.
‘What are you?’ Tressa murmured, tilting her head as she regarded the creature.
‘Speaking to the lake, Miss Bowen?’
She jolted, hard enough to smear the sketch. The creature vanished into the shallows with shocking speed, leaving small ripples in the dark water.
Tressa frowned. ‘You scared it away,’ she said irritably as she looked over her shoulder, ‘Micolash.’
Micolash, her peer and fellow educator at Byrgenwerth, stood at the path's edge where the grass thinned to mud. She had not heard him approach. That was the thing about Micolash; he arrived the way a sudden thought did, quick and without warning.
He was tall and angular, built like something that had been stretched, and he held himself with the stillness of a man whose mind was always moving faster than his body cared to. The dark rings beneath his eyes were not from sleeplessness alone. In the years that Tressa had known him, she’d come to realise that they were tangible proof that Micolash often looked at things too long, too hard, and he couldn't stop pulling at threads even when the fabric had begun to unravel between his fingers.
Tressa sighed in resignation as she rose. Micolash, his arms crossed, looked just as joyless standing there as the cold breeze battered his slender frame.
They had been competitive classmates in their younger years, running in the same circles despite studying different fields of science and thought, and now shared lives as faculty at Byrgenwerth. She had sat in on his lectures a handful of times. Once by accident, the rest not. Their forums had overlapped for a time; Tressa’s biology lab preceded Micolash’s lectures, and more than once, she found herself lingering whilst tidying her stations as Micolash began his lecture on the nature of matter and the forces that govern what cannot be seen.
He had the gift—or the curse—of making every idea feel like a threshold with no point of return. Students left with a special kind of vertigo in the mind that would stick with them long after the lecture ended. Tressa had taken notes on each occasion and found them disturbing upon review; not because his theorems were wrong, but because they were almost certainly right, and the implications of his teachings sat in her stomach like swallowed glass.
It had kept her up at night more than once.
‘Rom said I might find you here,’ Micolash said, making no acknowledgement of her initial displeasure. ‘I have something you may find interesting.’
‘I already had something I found interesting before you frightened it.’
‘I guarantee this will surpass your expectations.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘And if it doesn't?’
‘Then I suppose I'll owe you a wine.’
Tressa held his gaze a moment longer than was necessary. Then she closed her sketchbook, brushed the drying mire from the hem of her cloak, and did not look back at the place in the water where the creature had disappeared, though some part of her wanted to, very badly.
The path up to Byrgenwerth was long enough that it demanded thought, and Tressa had long since learned to let her mind run wild.
The school had been built two hundred years ago by a generation of scholars who believed, like all brilliant men who had never been seriously wrong about anything in their lives, that the advance of human knowledge was a straight line—always upward, always forward, always toward the light. They had constructed Byrgenwerth as a monument to that belief; the spires, the libraries stacked four floors high, the lecture halls with their vaulted ceilings that were all designed to make ideas feel appropriately enormous.
Those men, Tressa had always thought, had never once considered to look down.
To the south, just visible where the valley dipped between the hills, the lights of the city of Yharnam burned amber in the dark. Beneath its streets and its cellars, beneath the foundations of its oldest buildings, ran a system of catacombs so vast and so deep that no expedition had yet found the bottom.
But it never stopped the new generation of scholars from searching, no matter how many people they lost down in the labyrinthian tombs built by the mysterious civilisation of Pthumeru. And it seemed that, for every life lost, something new and wonderful had been found.
A missing tomb prospector earned them an ancient Pthumerian text.
A handful of dead scholars traded their lives for a vial of what would come to be known as the Old Blood.
And the Old Blood would change the world.
Every loss, every setback, all in the name of progress.
Enoch Bowen believed this more than most, and impressed it upon his children from a very young age.
Her father had come to Yharnam the way all the most interesting people came to the city: fleeing something. Providence in the New World had not been kind to his research. The university of his employment had used the word heretical in a formal letter, and implied his arrest was forthcoming. Enoch had gathered his family—Tressa's mother, already diminished by then, her brother, Cain, at twelve, already serious, Tressa at seven, already watching everything—and had come east across the sea to the one institution that had written back to him without branding him a heretic, that had in fact expressed significant interest in his findings.
Byrgenwerth had kept every promise it made to Enoch Bowen, and he had kept every promise he made to it. When he died two years ago, he had been buried in the small cemetery behind the east wing among a dozen other scholars whose names appeared in the school's official histories only in footnotes, which was how Byrgenwerth usually honoured the people who had given it the most.
Tressa had attended the funeral in the morning and taught her biology seminar in the afternoon. Her father would have wanted it that way.
‘What exactly is it that you need my help with?’ She asked as she quickened her pace to fall in-step beside Micolash.
‘You’ll see.’
She glanced at him sidelong. ‘An organism?’
‘Patience, Bowen.’ He replied, eyes forward on the path.
'A text, then. Something requiring translation.' She watched his profile for any flicker of confirmation. 'Micolash.'
‘Mm.’
Insufferable.
‘You could simply tell me what I’m walking into,’ she murmured, holding her cloak tight against her body.
‘I could.’ He replied mildly.
Tressa exhaled slowly through her nose.
He glanced at her then, just briefly, and something in the set of his expression suggested he found her silence amusing. What irritated her the most was that she knew him well enough to know this whole thing wasn’t out of malice. He wanted her to see whatever it was fresh and uninfluenced, her own first impression untouched by his conclusions.
It was, if she was being entirely fair, a form of respect, but she was not feeling fair this evening.
The school stood on the hill above them, its candlelit spires burning against the dark. The institution wore the language of academia the way a large thing wears a small coat, strained at every stitch and seam.
She had grown up inside those walls, had run its corridors with her brother while her father graded essays until late, and had learned its architecture the way other children learned the streets of neighbourhoods that they would always call home.
The school was the longest relationship of her life, and like all long relationships it had stopped being something she chose and had become simply the condition of her existence.
Even so, Tressa loved it for what it was, which was everything, and never would have chosen differently. The people she’d met, the minds that had helped shape her, and the things she’d learned from those around her, including the man beside her, made it impossible to consider any alternative to the life she’d been given.
She thought, briefly, about Cain.
About the day she’d stood at the docks while he boarded a ship bound for the south. He had left on his expedition with the confidence of a man who believed the worst outcomes were things that happened to other people.
He’d been missing for fourteen months now.
Her friends and colleagues had stopped giving her pitying looks, and the false words of reassurance that he was alive and well were no longer worth uttering, so Tressa had decided to continue the work, and move along as the world proceeded to spin since it stopped for nothing and no one.
Her brother would have wanted it that way.
⊱༺༒︎༻⊰
‘What exactly am I looking at?’
The specimen on the table was no larger than her palm and looked, at first, like a slug. Tressa leaned closer, her biology training kicking in like a reflex.
Not a slug. The mantle was elongated, the foot structure absent entirely. And slugs didn't have translucent blue skin. There was an odd luminescence to its visible insides and to the thick mucus that covered the length of its body from tip to tail. The creature evoked an odd feeling of profound displacement, as if it were very far from home.
She and Micolash had prepared the workstation in the privacy of her office, gurney, cabinet, glass vials clean and waiting. They stood hip to hip over the table, the lamp between them throwing their shadows long against her desk and bookshelves.
‘I was hoping you'd be able to enlighten me,’ Micolash said, arms crossed. ‘A slug, but not a slug. Extraordinary, isn’t it?’
'Give me a moment,' she said, not looking away from the specimen.
She circled the table slowly, examining it from every angle. Its body seemed too long, as she’d established, with what appeared to be bilateral symmetry, suggesting an intricacy of the nervous system beyond what a simple gastropod would possess. No visible eyes, not unlike the thing she’d seen in the lake. No obvious respiratory structures, though there were tiny pores along what she assumed was the dorsal surface that could possibly serve that function.
‘Its skin…’ Tressa muttered.
‘What about it?’
She frowned, leaning so close, she could feel cool air wafting from its surface. She gestured with the edge of her scalpel. ‘Light refracting, see? As though it were crystalline in structure, but the texture is wrong.’
Micolash adjusted his stance, leaning closer just as she had. ‘And the luminescence?’
'Bioluminescence, presumably,’ she replied, tilting her head to catch other angles. ‘Though, I’ll need to determine whether it’s reacting to the light here, storing the light from a different source, or producing it by itself. I’ll need to take tissue samples, of course. Then, we can go deeper.’
Tressa was well aware that she was speaking faster than normal, that the excitement of encountering something genuinely new was overriding her usual measured cadence.
She didn't care.
This was why she'd become a biologist in the first place.
She selected a fresh scalpel from the tray and made a small, precise slice along the creature's mantle, just deep enough to collect a sample without penetrating to the organs below. The tissue came away cleanly, and she transferred it to a glass slide with forceps, setting it aside for later examination under the microscope.
‘Remarkable.’ Micolash squinted at the tissue on the slide. ‘And the mucus?’
‘Protective, surely,’ she answered slowly, taking the edge of the scalpel and scraping it along the creature’s length. The fluid did not separate easily, and clung to the specimen’s body as though it did not wish to be parted from it. ‘Fascinating.’
Another sample. When Tressa had collected enough of the sticky mucus to satisfy her, she let out a sharp exhale. ‘I’m going deeper.’
Micolash said nothing, and simply watched her every movement with unblinking focus.
She made a small, careful incision in the creature's mantle. Silvery liquid trickled from the opening as if it were a punctured star. The fluid dripped lazily from the scalpel's edge as Tressa lifted it to her eyeline, gathering on the tool like a teardrop.
A scalpel crying. What an odd thought.
Every particle of the fluid was visible, magnified beyond the capacity of any external light, as though the substance was generating its own illumination from within. She could see the architecture of it. And the architecture was thick, complex, and dewy like—
'Blood,' Micolash said.
'Yes,' she breathed. 'But not like any blood I've seen.'
She should collect a sample. She should transfer it to a vial, label it properly, set it aside for analysis. She should follow protocol.
‘Where did you say you found this?’ Tressa asked quietly.
‘I didn't,’ Micolash replied, just as quietly. ‘It came from the tombs.’
Her heart skipped a beat.
Everything that had made Byrgenwerth what it was today had come from the tombs, and they had barely scratched the surface.
Whatever irritation she had felt with Micolash earlier this evening suddenly evaporated.
‘You were right,’ Tressa began, staring down at the specimen, eyes shining, ‘This is more interesting. I suppose you won't owe me that wine after all.’
Something crossed his face; fleeting, gone almost before she registered it. If she hadn't been in the particular state of hyperfocus that novel organisms induced in her, she might have missed it entirely. A small shift in his expression, the corners of his mouth moving fractionally downward before resetting to neutral.
Disappointment.
The observation landed sharply in her mind with clinical precision like a stray piece of data, but before she knew it, she was already drawn back to the specimen and its leaking fissure.
'Indeed.' Micolash cleared his throat. 'I suppose I won't.'
She gazed at the way the pale silver wept from the incision, practically salivating at the mere sight of it. Her entire body felt frozen, as though she were in a trance as she watched the dewy fluid sparkle in the light.
Micolash was staring at her now. ‘Bowen?’
She hardly heard it, though. All she could hear was every slight, squelching movement of the silver serum as it creeped along the length of the tool, beckoning for someone, anyone, to—
Before Micolash or anyone, including herself, could stop her, Tressa swept the liquid from the scalpel onto the pad of her finger, and licked it clean.
The world tilted.
The fluid trickled down her throat, pulsing against the muscles and ligaments. Warmth followed, spreading from her sternum outward, as thick and slow as heated honey, and then folded itself into something that existed in no kind of ordinary sensation.
'Bowen,' Micolash repeated, but his voice arrived from very far away, or perhaps from very close by—distance had become difficult to determine. Sound had texture now, colour, his voice wrapped in something velvety and blindingly bright blue. Like lightning.
She snapped her head to face him, though the motion took longer than it should have, as though she were moving through something denser than air, and for a brief moment, a multitude of shapes with impossible geometry bloomed in her vision before she was able to comprehend that the shapes were, in fact, Micolash.
‘Are you,’ he paused, straightening up slightly to regard her carefully. He blinked at her. ‘Are you all right?’
His eyes were the rich colour of umber; how had she never noticed that before? The longer she allowed herself to bore into them, the more fragrant they became. Like petrichor. Mossy. Decaying leaves that crunched under her oxfords.
‘What?’ He asked.
‘Hmm?’ Tressa hummed dreamily.
‘You said “mossy”—what is mossy?’
Had she? She didn’t remember speaking. She reached for some words to string together that might make sense, but suddenly everything about language was only theoretical.
The Old Blood hadn’t been like this.
'Your eyes,' she managed, which wasn't what she'd meant to say at all, though it was the truth. 'They're...' She lost the rest of it. The words scattered like startled birds.
'Tressa,' he said, and the use of her given name cut through the haze for just a moment, acute and clear and wrong because he never called her that, had never called her that, had always maintained the careful professional distance of 'Bowen' or 'Miss Bowen' or occasionally 'Dr. Bowen' when he was feeling especially formal.
The wrongness of it should have alarmed her. Instead it felt like something else entirely, something warm and slightly devastating that she didn't have the capacity to name. It also brought her back down, ever so slightly, as though she had been floating away on a tether, and he’d pulled her gently back to the earth.
‘Micolash,’ she enunciated slowly, grinning at the warmth bubbling up inside her, every syllable of his name thick and lush on her tongue as she gained the faculty of language again. ‘It’s… I… I’m okay. But… Y-you should try it.’
He held her gaze for a long time. She watched him want to.
‘Next time, perhaps,’ said Micolash.
'You're no fun,' she heard herself say, though she wasn't certain she'd made the conscious choice to reply.
She looked back at the creature. Silver still seeped from the incision, patient and endless, and her breathing had become a deliberate act, each breath taken with focus. If she didn’t do something else now, she might pick up the slug and begin lapping at the slit.
‘What are you doing?’ Micolash asked as she reached for her needle and forceps.
‘Stitching,’ replied Tressa, her mouth growing dry and wanting as she focused on the task before her through fuzzy vision. ‘W-we should get this to Master Willem.’
Her fingers shook, erratic and continuous, wholly outside her physical will. She watched them as if from a slight distance, disconnected from her body. The tools felt impossibly heavy in her grip, and soon they were cold, so cold they were burning.
The forceps fell. She watched them hit the table in what looked like slow motion, bouncing once, twice, the small metallic sound they made expanding in concentric circles, spreading out through the room like ripples on water.
She could taste the lamp oil burning, taste Micolash's cologne, something woody and clean. Could taste the salt from the mucous on the specimen, still in the air so long after they'd begun.
‘Tressa.' Micolash's hand closed over hers, warm, solid, real in a way that nothing else in the room was real anymore. The contact grounded her, pulled her back from wherever the Blood had been pulling her, though she could feel the effect already fading, feel herself slipping back into that other place where everything was too much and not enough simultaneously.
Tressa tried to speak again and found she couldn't remember how to begin. Her tongue was thick and fleshy in her mouth. Her teeth felt too sharp.
'Let me,' Micolash continued, gently removing the tools from her grip, and she let him, dropping her hands to her sides where they continued their small continuous trembling.
'You know how?' She heard herself ask.
'I've sat in on enough of your lectures,' Micolash replied, and there was something new in his voice—concern, maybe. 'You're a fine instructor.'
She wanted to respond to that. Wanted to say something appropriate, something that acknowledged the care in his voice and the fact that he was finishing her work because she had made herself useless.
‘Thank you,’ she said, feeling how small and insufficient it sounded, but it was all she had to give.
Micolash straightened. He didn't look at her immediately, his eyes still on the specimen, and she had the distinct impression that he was giving her a moment she hadn't asked for but apparently needed.
'You would have managed,' he said quietly.
'I wouldn't have.'
He turned to her then, appraising her carefully as if she were the creature on the table.
'No,' he agreed. 'Perhaps not tonight.'
As the minutes passed, she continued to watch him work as if in a daze, her eyes flicking between his hands and his face, where she had been afraid at one point that she’d lingered for too long. If Micolash noticed, he said nothing.
They stored the sutured body in an airtight container and cleaned the workstation in silence broken only by the wind against the glass and the small sounds of steel and vials clinking. When the laboratory was finally in order, Micolash gathered his coat and turned toward the door, then paused with his hand on the frame.
'I can walk you back,' he said, not quite looking at her. 'To your cottage. It's late.'
The offer landed in the space between them as though it weighed a hundred tons.
Tressa's first instinct was immediate refusal; she had just made a spectacular fool of herself and wanted nothing more than to be alone with her mortification. She had licked unknown substances off a scalpel in front of him, and had become incoherent.
Had stared at him and said his eyes were mossy and he had been kind enough not to ask what that meant.
The thought of walking beside him for fifteen minutes in the dark, still half-altered, still fighting the wanting in her gut, still tasting silver on her tongue—
'I'm fine,' she said, too quickly. 'It's not far.'
He looked at her then. The way he assessed her was tangible; she could barely stand five minutes ago, and likely shouldn’t be walking anywhere alone.
‘Are you certain?’
‘Completely.’ She lied.
Part of her wanted him to ignore her refusal, for him to simply fall into step beside her and walk her home anyway.
'Very well,' he said finally. 'But if you—' He stopped. Started again. 'Get home safely, Bowen.'
The return to her surname sobered her; whatever warmth had still been trickling through her insides had suddenly cooled.
'I will,' she replied. 'Thank you. For...' She gestured vaguely at the room, at the cleaned workspace, at everything he'd done after she’d been consumed by her vices. 'For finishing.'
'Of course,' he said.
They stood there for another moment, neither quite leaving, and the silence stretched long enough to become uncomfortable before Micolash finally nodded swiftly and stepped out into the corridor.
Tressa stood there sheepishly, listening to the sound of his footsteps receding. When she couldn’t hear them anymore, she gathered her things, extinguished the lamps, and locked the door behind her.
The walk home to her cottage felt like the longest it had ever been. It was cold and dark, and she became painfully aware of just how alone she was. She shoved her hands in her pockets so she wouldn’t see them shaking.
After the agonising minute it took her to unlock the front door with her trembling fingers, she went inside, sat on the floor in front of the hearth that had gone cold hours ago, not bothering to relight it, and stared at the pile of charred wood.
When Tressa Bowen dreamt that night, it was not a dream but a nightmare.
When she thirsted, it was not for water but for pale Blood.