Archive of Our Own ^beta

The plague comes to Loran on bright and clear moonlit night, when the light of delusively close stars hurts eyes like needles. It rages in the blood, sings on the verge of hearing, covers the sight with the red sands of the great deserts. It sneaks into dreams as a crimson shadow and gently embraces peacefully sleeping children of Pthumeru. The touch burns, scorches the pale skin like a hot brand, grows with the shreds of a shabby beast fur. It dries up, besots and makes one lick parched lips while half-asleep.

The plague comes to Loran at night, and in the morning the air above the city is buzzing with screams and saturated with the stench of freshly shed infected blood.

From the heights of the central cathedral, Amygdala watches over his city, and the city burns. The plagued blood boils in the veins, as do minds and souls, trapped in despair, as do the wild, fearsome hunt in the streets. Somewhere above and behind Amygdala, the titanic red moon hangs in the skies, like a halo crowning the god-lord’s head. This celestial body does not belong to him and it never will, poisoned by the same toxin as the dying city below. Poisoned by the symbol of those who are great even to the Great Ones.

The formless cannot be seen or touched, but the Gatekeeper of Nightmare can hear Oedon in the anguishing and rough screams of Loran’s people even before his daughter descends from the moon. Young Flora, disgusting and elegant like a slaughterhouse stink mixed with the lily scent, comes on the third day, and at that moment Amygdala finally realizes that his kingdom is doomed. The plague dances through the squares and streets with the twisted frame of an immature goddess when Amygdala holds his golden swords to her throat… and then pulls them out, feeling his own cosmic blood betrays him.

Later on, when all the days, sunsets and sunrises merge into one endless, abysmal night, Amygdala walks around the city and watches his people die. The hands – the paws and claws – are reached out to him, his name is sung – growled – by thousand of voices. He walks and closes the eyes of the dead so that they stop looking into the bleeding skies with such pain, with such desperate hope.

In the end, he remains alone in the ruins of Loran, after a dozen, a hundred, a thousand nights. The moon is waning, losing its fearful color, and quiet moans from the dark corners turn into bestial howls – but with the first rays of sunlight, the silence falls on the shards of a small shattered world. The powerless god looks around and does not see anything neither in reality, nor in a dream, nor in a nightmare. An eye-scorching sandstorm hits by noon – from where did it come, did Loran have any sand before? – and Amygdala stops looking.

After that, he will sit in the huge, dark and empty halls of the former cathedral and watch the sands bury his land. He will hear his name in the beasts’ wails and see a dancing grotesque silhouette against the backdrop of the pale moon while sliding like a shadow through the fever of the others’ red-painted dreams.

Later still Ebrietas will come, cold and swift, like the flash of a falling star. She will look at him with a fury that forces planets to leave their orbits, and speak softer than the water murmuring in underground springs. And Amygdala will leave with her without thought or hesitation as she gently holds his hand and takes a broken golden sword from his fingers.

The river of stars flows slowly under the arches of Isz’s endless caves and Amygdala once again, as if for the last time, watches Ebrietas laugh in the light of tiny luminaries. Her laughter echoes silver, ice and vastness of long abandoned distant galaxies that they almost dared to forget, peering into the dreams of Pthumeru’s children over the millennia. She takes his hand and pulls him down the wide white steps to the immaculate pools of deep black water. The water reflects stars, reflects pale, glowing Isz, it reflects fragile Kos, almost ethereal in her weightless robes.

Kos bears a child of foreign, unknown blood, presses hands to her stomach in a gesture between the bravery and the fear. She came to ask for help – to bid farewell, if the help would be denied. She says that she wants to the surface, to the far seas that are too deep for moonlight to reach their bottom. To the places where blood makes no sound, where it does not flow or sing, where everything has form and flesh and the world does not lie down at the feet in a pile of fragments when the sun rises.

And Ebrietas’ icy laughter freezes under the star vaults as Amygdala offers his hand to the Mother of Water. If there are any skies without a moon and seas without a bottom, he says, I’ll find them for you in the world dreaming or waking. He speaks, the carmine sand of dead Loran creaking on his teeth, and Ebrietas, desperate, wise Ebrietas accepts their shared unspoken fate.

Soon the indescribable lord of them all will grant a child to the queen of Pthumeru. Soon there will be a revolt against the lord. Amygdala takes Kos away even before this, through the dunes and ruins of his country, through bestial howl and desperate cry, through his own dreams of the judgement night – up to the surface. There they search for the seas by the stars, from which they once came into the world and from which they brought the ruination. Kos is drawn to the water, so one bleak and cloudy morning they part on some dirty-grey coastline, when the great Mother takes her only unborn child into the cold earthly oceans. The Gatekeeper of the Nightmare watches the white silhouette fade into the pale sea mist as his heart accepts that he will never meet her again.

And somewhere underground, deep below the ceilings of granite caves, the witching moon sheds fresh blood on Pthumeru Ihyll. The wrath of Ebrietas sweeps through the streets of the capital like a shock wave of a supernova explosion, while insidious, power-hungry Flora dances behind her back. They enter the royal palace like starlight, but this light is quickly extinguished by the swirling purple darkness. The lady-goddess of Isz fights against the keeper of not yet born heir, with her weapon clawing out her freedom, her future, her – her and Amygdala’s – children. In their battle they merge until undistinguishable, the light and the dark, and none of them sees how pale-blooded Flora lifts the queen by the throat. How she smirks – grins – victoriously in the queen’s face, ripping open her belly with a clawed hand.

Everyone sees when the moon explodes. Scarlet rain is pouring down upon the city from rocky skies, and ancient caverns that have stood motionless since the beginning of time now crackle with the fury of almighty Oedon. Flora throws the dying queen aside and runs without looking back, not seeing how the stone buries the old dungeons behind her. Not hearing the last scream of abandoned Ebrietas.

On the surface, Amygdala howls in the dawn sky like a Loran’s beast.

The plague comes to Yharnam on a cold and sunny winter day, when the air itself freezes on lips. It ripens in clinics and homes, sprouts in the city like a poisonous weed. Amygdala watches.

The view from the top of the Grand Cathedral is breathtaking, but the Gatekeeper does not take his eyes off the short man with a cane standing near the balustrade, as if it were an edge of the abyss. Under the blinding sun, his church clothes look like fresh snow, white as his sickly narrow face or the early grey in his blond hair.

“Tell me honestly, the Great One, do we still have hope?”

Amygdala keeps silent. And does not look the vicar in the eyes.