Derek had been in the basement for what he estimated was three days.
He had no way to confirm this. The Dream didn't have clocks—it didn't have a sun, for God's sake; time here was measured in vibes and the general luminosity of the sky, which shifted between "melancholy twilight" and "slightly less melancholy twilight" with no discernible pattern. The messengers didn't seem to have a concept of time at all. They existed in a state of perpetual present tense, equally willing to hold a book for five minutes or five hours, requiring neither food nor rest nor bathroom breaks.
Derek envied them. He envied them with every fiber of his cosmic, tentacled, increasingly exhausted being.
Because Derek did need rest—or at least, his mind did. His worm body seemed capable of operating indefinitely on a diet of Dream-essence and sheer stubbornness, but his consciousness—his human consciousness, the Derek part, the part that was still, stubbornly, irrevocably him—needed downtime. Needed processing time. Needed moments of not-thinking to absorb the frankly insane volume of information he'd been cramming into his brain for seventy-two-ish hours.
He had not taken those moments.
He had, instead, read like a man possessed.
Which, in a sense, he was. Possessed by the ghost of a curiosity that had haunted him for years—the unanswered questions of Bloodborne, the mysteries left dangling, the lore threads that ended in maddeningly cryptic ellipses. And now those threads were HERE, woven into Gehrman's meticulous notes, and Derek was pulling on every single one of them with the desperate enthusiasm of a cat unraveling a sweater.
He'd learned about the Pthumerians—really learned, not just the fragments the game had offered. The Pthumerians hadn't been a single civilization but a network of underground cities spanning an entire continent, connected by the labyrinths that the game's Chalice Dungeons had only scratched the surface of. They'd been the first humans to make contact with the Great Ones, the first to discover the properties of the old blood, and the first to destroy themselves with it. Their queen—Queen Yharnam, the spectral woman who appeared throughout the game weeping tears of blood—had been the focal point of the catastrophe, her pregnancy with Mergo serving as both the pinnacle and the downfall of Pthumerian civilization.
He'd learned about the Choir—the upper echelon of the Healing Church, whose experiments with communion had produced Ebrietas and the Celestial Emissaries and the entire Orphanage ward. Gehrman's notes on the Choir were particularly detailed and particularly angry, written in a hand that pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the page. The old hunter had despised them—not for their ambitions, which he grudgingly acknowledged as understandable, but for their methods, which he described as "the intellectual equivalent of a child pulling the wings off butterflies to see how they scream."
He'd learned about the nature of Insight—the substance/concept/cosmic measurement that the game had used as both a currency and a sanity mechanic. In the game, Insight was a number. A counter. More Insight meant you could see more eldritch things, buy more items from the creepy fountain shop, and occasionally notice that the world had changed around you in subtle, horrifying ways.
In reality—in Gehrman's reality—Insight was something far more complex. It was a measure of how permeable the boundary between a person's mind and the cosmos had become. A human with zero Insight was fully sealed—their consciousness closed off from the Great Ones, from the Dream, from the frequencies and dimensions that existed alongside the waking world. A human with high Insight was... leaky. Their mind was riddled with holes—holes through which cosmic knowledge seeped in, yes, but also holes through which their own sanity seeped out.
The game had been a simplification. Reality, as always, was messier.
He'd learned about blood echoes—the game's currency, the glowing souls that enemies dropped when killed. Not just a gameplay mechanic. Blood echoes were memories. Fragments of consciousness, shed by living things at the moment of death, crystallized by the properties of the old blood that saturated everything in Yharnam. When a hunter collected blood echoes, they weren't just gathering currency—they were absorbing the dying thoughts, the final fears, the last desperate clinging-to-life of every creature they killed.
This explained, Derek thought, quite a lot about why hunters tended to go insane.
He'd learned all of this, and more—page after page, scroll after scroll, Gehrman's centuries of accumulated wisdom flowing into his baby Great One brain like water into a sponge—and he was still not done. The library was vast. Gehrman had been thorough. There were entire sections Derek hadn't even opened yet, shelves he hadn't reached, texts in languages that even his Great One translation ability struggled with.
But the most important thing he'd learned—the thing that sat in his mind like a stone in a shoe, impossible to ignore, impossible to forget—was the thing he'd felt on his first day. The presence beyond Yharnam. The vast, dark, patient something that was stirring in the deep places of reality.
Gehrman had felt it too.
The old hunter's later notes—the ones written in the final decades of his captivity, when his handwriting had deteriorated from precise to shaky to barely legible—returned to it again and again. He called it by several names, none of them definitive: the Dreamer Below, the Blind Tide, the Sound Beyond the Sea. He described it in fragments, pieces of sensation assembled from his reluctant communion with the Moon Presence:
"It is old. Older than the Great Ones. Older than the cosmos that birthed them. It existed before existence, in the space where nothing was, and it has been sleeping since the first star opened its eye."
"The Moon Presence fears it. This is the only thing I have ever known the Presence to fear. It does not fear hunters, or death, or the other Great Ones. It fears THIS, and its fear tastes of a color I cannot name."
"It stirs. Not waking—not yet—but turning in its sleep, and in its turning, the fabric of things stretches thin. Yharnam bleeds because the world bleeds. The beasts rise because the boundary falls. Everything that is wrong, everything that has gone wrong since the blood was first drawn from the earth—it is all a symptom. The cause lies deeper. The cause lies below."
"And I am trapped here, in this Dream, unable to warn anyone, unable to DO anything, an old man in a wheelchair with a scythe and a doll and a library full of knowledge that no one will ever read."
That last entry had been written in what appeared to be the final pages of Gehrman's personal journal. The handwriting was almost illegible, the ink smudged in places by what Derek's cosmic senses told him were tears.
Derek had stared at that page for a long time.
Then he'd asked the messengers to close the book, and he'd lain on the library floor in silence, and he'd thought about an old man who had spent centuries screaming into the void and believing no one would ever hear.
I hear you, Gehrman, Derek had thought. I'm here. I found your library. I read your words. And I'm going to do what you couldn't.
I'm going to figure out what's down there.
And I'm going to stop it.
Somehow.
With my worm body and my seventeen eyes and my zero arms.
...Eventually.
It was on the—third day? Fourth?—that the Doll came down to the library with something in her hands.
Derek heard her on the stairs—that familiar click of shoes, the whisper of fabric, the slight adjustment she made at the narrow doorway (which he had STOPPED NOTICING, he had TRAINED himself to stop noticing, he was a SCHOLAR now and scholars did not notice the way impossibly proportioned doll-women navigated tight spaces)—and looked up from the text he was studying.
"You have been down here too long," the Doll said, with a gentleness that was also, unmistakably, a scolding. "You have not eaten in—"
She paused, calculating.
"—a concerning amount of time."
I'm fine, Derek projected. I'm on a roll. I just got to the section about the Choir's communion experiments and—
"You are not fine. Your coloring has gone from healthy violet to a grey that I associate with the workshop walls. You are dehydrated—or whatever the Great One equivalent of dehydrated is. And you have been lying in the same position for so long that the messengers built a small fort around you."
Derek looked down. She was right. At some point during his reading marathon, the messengers had constructed an elaborate structure around him using books, scrolls, and what appeared to be a tiny curtain made from a scrap of hunter's garb. It had walls, a roof, and a small flag fashioned from a page torn out of something that Derek desperately hoped wasn't important.
Captain was standing guard at the entrance with a toothpick-sized spear.
...Okay, maybe I got a little absorbed.
"You are coming upstairs," the Doll said, in a tone that brooked no argument. "You are going to eat. You are going to rest. And—"
She held up the thing she'd been carrying.
Derek's seventeen eyes focused on it.
It was small. Tiny, in fact—barely larger than the Doll's palm. Made of dark leather and grey fabric, stitched with a precision that bordered on mechanical perfection. Miniature buckles gleamed in the library's dim light. Tiny buttons, each no bigger than a pinhead, lined a collar that was—
Derek's brain stalled.
It was a coat.
A tiny coat.
A tiny hunter's coat.
The Hunter's garb—the iconic, tattered, leather-and-fabric longcoat that was the default outfit of every Bloodborne player character. The coat that had graced a thousand screenshots, a million fan arts, that had become synonymous with the game itself. Derek had worn it for his entire forty-hour playthrough. He'd never switched to anything else, even when he found objectively better armor, because nothing else felt right.
And the Doll had made a version of it sized for his worm body.
It was perfect. Impossibly, heartbreakingly perfect. Every detail was there—the high collar, the layered cape, the asymmetrical buckles, the slightly frayed edges. She'd even included tiny versions of the side straps and the interior lining, rendered in a fabric so fine it was almost translucent.
Derek stared at it.
His tentacles trembled.
His seventeen eyes went very, very wet.
"I thought," the Doll said, and for the first time since he'd known her, she sounded uncertain—almost shy, her silver-gold eyes dropping to the tiny garment in her hands, "that you might like something familiar. You were a hunter once, before you became... this. I thought—perhaps—a reminder of what you were might help you as you become what you are meant to be."
She held it out toward him.
Derek looked at the coat. He looked at the Doll. He looked at the coat again.
And then he cried.
Not the dignified, single-tear-rolling-down-the-cheek crying that cosmic deities probably did. Not the restrained, noble weeping of a being of immense power and wisdom. Full-on, ugly, hiccupping, snot-would-be-involved-if-he-had-a-nose crying, the kind that came from a place so deep and so raw that it bypassed all pretense of composure and went straight for the jugular of the soul.
His tentacles flailed. His body shook. His many eyes leaked a luminescent, silver-tinted fluid that the messengers immediately began collecting in tiny vials, because of COURSE they did, because Great One tears were probably a crafting material or something.
The Doll knelt beside him—her descent creating a cascade of fabric adjustment that Derek was too emotionally devastated to even register—and gathered him into her arms. She held him against her chest, which was warm and soft and smelled like moonflowers, and she didn't say anything. She just held him.
And Derek cried.
He cried because the coat was beautiful and he was a worm and he missed having a body and he missed his shitty apartment and his shitty job and his cat who never acknowledged him. He cried because he was scared—scared of the thing in the deep, scared of his responsibility, scared of being a god when he couldn't even be a competent human. He cried because a doll had made him a tiny coat and it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him, in either life, and that fact was so pathetic and so beautiful that it broke something in him that had needed breaking for a very long time.
Thank you, he projected, the thought watery and trembling and raw. Thank you thank you thank you.
"You are welcome, Good Hunter," the Doll whispered, and pressed what might have been a kiss to the top of his worm-head, and Derek's hearts almost gave out for the second time in his existence.
The coat fit perfectly.
This should not have been possible. Derek's body was, to put it charitably, non-standard. He was a roughly slug-shaped cosmic entity with an inconsistent number of tentacles, seventeen eyes distributed seemingly at random, and a surface texture that alternated between "damp velvet" and "sentient jelly." He did not have shoulders. He did not have a torso in any meaningful sense. He did not have a waist, a neck, or any of the other anatomical landmarks that clothing traditionally relied upon.
And yet the coat fit.
It settled over his upper body—the section that was vaguely more "head-ish" than the rest—like it had been designed for him by a tailor with an advanced degree in eldritch anatomy. The collar framed his cluster of primary eyes in a way that was, he had to admit, deeply cool. The cape draped over his back tendrils with a dramatic flair that made him look less like a slug and more like a slug who was about to investigate a murder. The buckles fastened around his midsection, giving his otherwise formless body a suggestion of structure.
He looked, in short, like a baby Great One wearing a tiny trenchcoat.
It was the most adorable thing the Dream had ever contained, and the messengers responded accordingly.
They lost their minds.
The chattering reached a pitch that Derek's cosmic ears classified as "critical." Messengers poured out of every surface—the floor, the walls, the gaps between stones—to get a look at their tiny, coat-wearing god. They crowded around him, reaching out with their little hands to touch the fabric, to stroke the leather, to feel the buckles. Captain climbed onto his back—its favorite perch—and posed dramatically on the cape like a general surveying the battlefield.
Three messengers produced what appeared to be a hand mirror—carved from bone, naturally—and angled it so Derek could see himself.
He looked.
The creature in the mirror was... not what he expected.
He'd been imagining himself as the slug from the game's ending—dark, featureless, vaguely unpleasant. But the reality was different. His body was a deep, shifting violet that caught the Dream-light and refracted it into colors he couldn't name. His eyes—all seventeen of them—were bright and alert, each one a slightly different shade of luminous gold, arranged in clusters that gave his face (such as it was) an expression of perpetual wide-eyed wonder. His tentacles, which he'd been thinking of as pathetic, were actually elegant—long and tapering, tipped with structures that looked almost like fingers.
And with the coat on—the collar turned up, the cape draping behind him, the buckles gleaming—he looked like something out of a storybook. A tiny cosmic detective. A miniature eldritch gentleman. A very small thing trying very hard to be something larger than itself.
I look like a goddamn protagonist, Derek thought, and for the first time since waking up in this reality, he felt something that wasn't fear or confusion or inappropriate attraction to furniture.
He felt cool.
I look COOL. I look like a cool worm. I didn't even know that was POSSIBLE. The Doll made me look cool. She took my pathetic slug body and she—
He turned to the Doll, who was watching him with an expression of quiet satisfaction, her hands clasped at her waist, her head tilted slightly, her silver-gold eyes soft with something that looked a lot like pride.
I look cool, right? he projected, with an eagerness that was deeply embarrassing for a cosmic deity but deeply on-brand for Derek.
"You look," the Doll said carefully, "like a proper master of the Dream."
HELL YEAH I DO.
He squirmed in a circle—his version of a victory lap—and the coat's cape swirled behind him and the messengers cheered and for one brief, shining, glorious moment, everything was perfect.
Then he tried to Dream-shape, and everything went to hell.
It started innocently enough.
Derek had been reading about Dream-shaping for the better part of a day—one of Gehrman's most detailed treatises, written in the careful, methodical prose of a man who had spent decades experimenting with the boundaries of his prison. The concept was straightforward: the Dream was a malleable reality, shaped by the will of its master. The Moon Presence had shaped the Dream into the landscape Derek knew from the game—the hillside, the workshop, the tombstones. But it could be anything. The Dream was clay, and the Great One was the sculptor.
Gehrman's notes included exercises. Baby steps—no pun intended—for a new Dream-master to develop their shaping abilities. Start small. Visualize a simple object. Project your will into the Dream's fabric. Let the Dream respond.
"Start with something you know well," the text advised. "Something you have seen many times, something whose shape and texture and weight are embedded in your memory. The Dream reads your mind. Give it something clear to read."
Something I know well, Derek thought. Something I've seen many times.
He was sitting on the workbench—his command center, his throne, his designated Spot—with the Doll nearby (mending something; her hands were always busy, always working, and the motions were always distracting for reasons he refused to examine) and a dozen messengers scattered around the workshop in various states of activity.
Something I know well. Something familiar. Something I've stared at for thousands of hours across multiple games.
He closed his eyes. Not all of them—he left two open on the sides of his head as lookouts, a habit he'd developed that felt instinctive—and focused.
The Saw Cleaver.
The most iconic weapon in Bloodborne. The default trick weapon, the first thing every hunter received, the serrated blade that had carried a million players through the streets of Yharnam. Derek had used it for his entire playthrough. He knew every inch of it—the folded blade, the handle, the transformation mechanism, the way it clicked and snapped and extended from cleaver to saw and back again.
He visualized it. Held it in his mind. Every detail, every scratch, every rivet. The weight of it, the balance, the way the handle fit in a human palm.
Then he pushed.
Not with his tentacles—with his will. He reached into the fabric of the Dream the way he reached into the essence when feeding, that deep, fundamental connection between himself and the reality he sustained, and he pushed the image outward, projecting it from his mind into the world.
The Dream responded.
The air in front of him shimmered. Rippled. Thickened. Something was forming—taking shape from nothing, assembling itself molecule by molecule from the raw stuff of the Dream. Derek could feel it happening, feel the Dream bending to his will, feel the exhilarating rush of creation—
The Saw Cleaver materialized on the workbench.
Sort of.
It was... approximately correct. The general shape was right—blade, handle, hinge mechanism. The proportions were close. The color was in the right neighborhood.
But something was wrong.
The blade was too long. And it was curved in a direction that no Saw Cleaver had ever curved, bending back on itself like a question mark. The handle was made of what appeared to be bone—not the wooden handle of the original, but actual, organic bone, pale and slightly warm to the touch. The transformation mechanism was present, but instead of clicking smoothly from one form to another, it was... breathing.
The weapon was breathing.
Slow, rhythmic expansions and contractions, like the ribcage of a sleeping animal. The metal—if it was metal; it had a sheen that was more chitinous than metallic—rose and fell with each breath, and a faint sound accompanied the motion, a whisper-quiet wheeze that sounded disturbingly like a snore.
Derek stared at it.
The messengers stared at it.
The Doll looked up from her mending, assessed the situation with a single glance, and set her work aside with the calm deliberation of someone who has seen some things and is about to see another thing and has long since made peace with the fact that things, in general, are going to keep happening.
"What," Derek projected, his thought laden with a flatness that transcended species, "is that."
The breathing Saw Cleaver wheezed in its sleep. One of the rivets—if they were rivets; they looked more like pores—opened briefly, revealing something wet and red underneath, before closing again.
"That," the Doll said, approaching the workbench with measured steps, "is what happens when a Great One attempts to create something from human memory without accounting for the fact that Great One creativity is inherently... biological."
Biological.
"The Dream creates what you envision, but it creates it through you. And you are a Great One. Great Ones do not create inorganic objects. They create life. Your mind said 'Saw Cleaver.' Your nature said 'alive.'" She gestured at the breathing weapon. "The result is a compromise."
Derek looked at the Saw Cleaver. The Saw Cleaver breathed at him.
So I tried to make a weapon and I accidentally made a... a creature? A living weapon? A weapon-creature?
"A trick weapon in the truest sense," the Doll said, and Derek could SWEAR there was amusement in her voice. "A weapon that is also a living thing. It is not unprecedented—certain Great Ones have been known to create similar constructs. The Kos Parasite, for instance, was—"
The Saw Cleaver opened an eye.
Not a metaphorical eye. Not a rivet that looked like an eye. An eye—large, golden, wet, and distinctly confused, embedded in the flat of the blade where a manufacturer's stamp might normally go. It blinked once, twice, and then focused on Derek with an expression of unmistakable bewilderment.
Derek and the Saw Cleaver stared at each other.
The Saw Cleaver made a noise. A small, uncertain, questioning noise, like a puppy that had just woken up in a strange place and was trying to figure out who all these people were and why one of them was a worm in a tiny coat.
Oh no, Derek thought.
Oh no. It's looking at me. It's looking at me like it thinks I'm its parent. Did I just—did I give BIRTH to a SAW CLEAVER?
"In a manner of speaking," the Doll said, and she was DEFINITELY amused now. "You willed it into existence using the creative power of the Dream, channeled through your Great One nature. By any meaningful definition, yes. You are its creator. Its... parent."
The Saw Cleaver made another noise—louder, more insistent, with a rising inflection that was unmistakably a request for attention. Its blade-body wriggled on the workbench, and its handle—the bone handle, the organic, alive handle—extended toward Derek like a baby reaching for its mother.
No. No no no. I am not picking up the living Saw Cleaver. I am not ADOPTING the living Saw Cleaver. I already have thirty messenger children and a cosmic Dream to maintain and an existential threat lurking in the deep places of reality. I do NOT need a PET SAW CLEAVER.
The Saw Cleaver whimpered.
It WHIMPERED.
A tiny, pathetic, heartbreaking whimper that came from somewhere inside its blade-body and resonated at a frequency specifically calibrated to destroy whatever remained of Derek's resistance to cute things, which was already significantly compromised by the existence of the messengers.
...God damn it.
He reached out a tentacle.
The Saw Cleaver's eye widened with joy. It wriggled forward, pressing its handle into Derek's tentacle like a cat nuzzling against a hand, and made a sound that was pure, uncomplicated happiness—a warm, metallic purr that vibrated through Derek's appendage and into his body.
It was warm. It was alive. It was his.
He had created life. Accidentally, incompetently, and in entirely the wrong form, but he had created it. He had reached into the fabric of reality and pulled out something that had not existed before—something new, something unprecedented, something that breathed and saw and felt and was, by every metric, a living being.
He was a god.
A god who had just accidentally given birth to a trick weapon, but a god nonetheless.
Okay, he thought, as the living Saw Cleaver settled contentedly against his side, its eye half-closing in a sleepy purr, its breathing synchronizing with the rhythm of Derek's own cosmic heartbeat. Okay. I'll keep it. But I'm NOT naming it.
Captain looked at Derek.
Derek looked at Captain.
Captain looked at the Saw Cleaver.
The Saw Cleaver looked at Captain.
Captain produced a tiny nametag—where did it even GET these things?—and held it up with an expectant expression.
I am NOT naming it.
The Saw Cleaver whimpered again.
...Fine. Fine. It's... it's Bitey. Its name is Bitey. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?
Captain chirped with evident satisfaction and attached the nametag to Bitey's handle. Bitey purred louder.
The Doll pressed a hand to her mouth. She was laughing. Not the wind-chime giggle from before—a full, genuine, shoulder-shaking laugh that she was trying and failing to contain behind her porcelain fingers. Her other hand was braced against the doorframe for support, and the motion of her laughter was doing absolutely unconscionable things to the structural integrity of her dress, but for once Derek was too busy being a reluctant parent to notice.
Mostly.
He noticed a little.
Shut up, he told the part of his brain that had noticed. We have a CHILD now. Priorities.
The echoes lesson came next, and it changed everything.
The Doll sat across from Derek at the workbench—she'd brought a chair from somewhere, a sturdy oak thing that she settled into with the careful precision of someone acutely aware that the previous three chairs had not survived the experience—and placed a small object on the table between them.
It was a blood echo.
Not the abstract, numerical currency from the game—an actual, physical blood echo. It looked like a small crystal, roughly the size of a marble, glowing with a faint, pulsing light that shifted between red and gold. It was beautiful in a deeply unsettling way, like a gemstone made of someone's dying breath.
"Do you know what this is?" the Doll asked.
Blood echoes, Derek projected. The memories of the dead. Consciousness fragments crystallized by the old blood. Hunters collect them and use them to— well, in the game, to level up. But Gehrman's notes say they're actually condensed memories. The last thoughts and feelings of whatever died to produce them.
The Doll nodded, a slight smile on her lips. "You have been studying. Good. But there is more to echoes than memory."
She picked up the crystal and held it in her palm, and Derek watched as something extraordinary happened. The Doll's fingers—those delicate, jointed, porcelain-and-something-else fingers—began to glow. Not with the echo's light—with her own light, a soft silver radiance that emanated from within her and reached into the crystal like roots into soil.
"Echoes are memory, yes," the Doll said, as the crystal pulsed brighter in response to her touch. "But memory is not inert. Memory is alive. It carries within it the essence of the being that created it—their strength, their knowledge, their will. When I channel echoes into a hunter, I am not simply increasing a number. I am feeding them the distilled experience of another being."
She held the crystal up to the light—the Dream-light, the ambient luminescence that was Derek's own life force made visible—and it blazed like a tiny star.
"This echo belonged to a beast. A large one, judging by its weight. In its final moments, it felt rage, and hunger, and underneath both—so deep that the beast itself did not know it was there—grief. It had been human once. It remembered, in the instant of its death, what it had lost."
Derek's tentacles curled. His many eyes stared at the blazing crystal. He could feel what the Doll was describing—the rage, the hunger, the grief—radiating from the echo like heat from a flame. His Great One senses were attuned to it, resonating with it, and for a brief, dizzying moment, he caught a flash of something—a face, human, terrified, looking into a mirror and seeing something that was no longer human looking back—before the vision faded.
That's... that's horrible, Derek projected. Every blood echo is someone's death. Every time a hunter levels up, they're—
"—consuming the dead," the Doll finished. "Yes. It is a terrible system. But it is also a necessary one. The echoes fuel the hunt. Without them, hunters would have no way to grow strong enough to face the beasts. It is a cycle—beasts were once human, humans become hunters, hunters kill beasts and absorb their echoes, and the echoes make the hunters strong enough to kill more beasts."
A cycle, Derek thought. Like everything else in this universe. Cycles within cycles within cycles. Nobody ever gets to just... stop.
"But you," the Doll said, and set the crystal down on the workbench directly in front of him, "are different. You are a Great One. You do not process echoes the way hunters do. You do not consume them for strength or power."
Then what do I do with them?
The Doll leaned forward—an act that caused a redistribution of certain physical elements that Derek's disciplined, scholarly, TOTALLY FOCUSED mind absolutely did not track—and her voice dropped to something low and intent.
"You hear them."
Derek blinked. Several eyes at once.
Hear them?
"Echoes are not just memories, Derek. They are voices. The last words of the dead, crystallized in blood. A human hunter absorbs these voices unconsciously—they fuel the hunter's growth but are never heard, never understood, never acknowledged. The dead scream, and no one listens."
She tapped the crystal with one finger.
"But a Great One can listen. A Great One can hear the voices in the echoes and understand them. Can give the dead what they were denied in life—an audience. A witness. Someone to hear their final words and carry them forward."
Derek stared at the echo. The tiny crystal, pulsing red-gold, containing within it the last thoughts of something that had once been human.
How?
"Touch it," the Doll said. "With your mind. Reach out, the way you reached into the Dream when you tried to shape it. But instead of projecting outward, receive. Open yourself. Listen."
Derek hesitated. The memory of the Saw Cleaver incident—the accidental creation of Bitey, who was currently napping beside him with its eye closed and its blade occasionally twitching in what he assumed were weapon-dreams—made him cautious about reaching into anything with his mind.
But the Doll was watching him with those eyes—those shifting, silver-gold, impossibly deep eyes—and there was something in her expression that said trust me, and Derek, who had trusted very few people in his human life and even fewer entities in his cosmic one, found that he did.
He reached.
Not with a tentacle—with his awareness. That deeper sense, the cosmic frequency that connected him to the Dream and everything in it. He extended it toward the blood echo, tentatively, carefully, like dipping a toe into water of unknown temperature—
The echo opened like a flower.
And Derek heard the voice.
It was a man's voice. Middle-aged, rough, with the accent of someone from Yharnam's lower wards—an accent Derek recognized from the game's NPCs, that distinctive, slightly Germanic intonation that gave every word a weight of old-world formality even when the words themselves were mundane.
"I don't want to go. Please. I don't want to go. I can feel it in me—the blood, the change, the hair growing where it shouldn't, the teeth too many and too sharp—but I don't want to go. Not yet. Not tonight. My daughter—Elena, my Elena, she's only seven—who will care for her? Who will—"
The voice cracked. Broke. Dissolved into a sound that was half sob, half growl, the human and the beast warring in a single throat.
"Tell her I'm sorry. If anyone—if anyone can hear me—tell her I'm sorry. Tell her Papa didn't choose this. Tell her—"
The voice cut off. Replaced by a roar—bestial, anguished, the sound of a man becoming something less than a man and knowing, in his last lucid moment, exactly what he was losing.
Then silence.
Derek lay on the workbench, trembling, his coat damp with the luminescent tears that were streaming from every one of his seventeen eyes.
Elena, he thought. His daughter's name was Elena. She was seven. He didn't want to go.
"Now you understand," the Doll said softly. "Why the echoes matter. Why listening matters."
How many? Derek projected, his thought raw and cracked. How many echoes are there? How many voices?
The Doll's expression was gentle and terrible.
"Thousands," she said. "Tens of thousands. Every beast that has been slain, every hunter that has fallen, every citizen of Yharnam who succumbed to the scourge—they all left echoes. And they have been screaming, unheard, for a very long time."
Derek closed his eyes. All of them. He lay in the darkness behind his seventeen eyelids and felt the weight of what the Doll was telling him settle onto his cosmic shoulders like a mountain.
I'll listen, he thought. I'll listen to all of them. Every single one. I'll hear their voices and remember their names and make sure that when they screamed, someone was there to hear.
It's not enough. It won't bring them back. It won't fix what happened to them. But it's something.
It's the least a god can do.
The Doll reached out and stroked his head, and he leaned into her touch, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
It was Captain who explained the hoarding.
Or rather, Captain showed him, because messengers didn't really do verbal communication—they communicated in chirps and gestures and vibes, and Derek's Great One senses translated these into rough impressions that got the general point across even if the details were fuzzy.
It happened when Derek asked why Captain was wearing a hat.
It was a simple question—one he'd been meaning to ask since the first day. The hat was clearly not standard-issue messenger equipment. It was hand-made, stitched from a scrap of hunter's garb with the clumsy enthusiasm of someone who had never made a hat before but was very passionate about the concept. It sat on Captain's pale, bulbous head at a jaunty angle, held in place by what appeared to be willpower and a bit of slime.
Why do you wear that? Derek had projected, directing the thought at Captain with gentle curiosity.
Captain had perked up. Then it had scurried across the workbench, disappeared into a crack in the wall, and returned dragging—
A box.
Not a large box—maybe the size of a shoebox, made of the same dark wood as the workshop's furniture. But it was heavy, or at least heavy for a creature the size of Captain, who was grunting with effort as it hauled the box across the surface and deposited it at Derek's tentacles.
Derek opened it.
Inside was a collection of objects so random, so eclectic, so utterly without organizing principle that it looked like the contents of a junk drawer that had achieved sentience and curated itself.
A button. A spent bullet casing. A lock of hair, tied with a faded red ribbon. A broken pocket watch. A small, smooth stone. A feather. A thimble. A page torn from a book, folded into a tiny square. A child's tooth. A piece of sea glass. A miniature figurine of a dog, carved from wood.
And—Derek's hearts clenched—a tiny, hand-drawn portrait of a woman. Pencil on paper, rough but recognizable, depicting a face that was both beautiful and sad, with large eyes and dark hair swept back under a bonnet.
It looked like the Doll.
Not the Doll as she was now—not the impossibly proportioned, Dreams-shaped version that Derek's subconscious had created. The original Doll. Or rather, the woman the Doll was based on—Lady Maria, the hunter of the Astral Clocktower, Gehrman's student and the source of the Doll's appearance.
Derek looked at the portrait, then at Captain, then at the box of trinkets.
What is all this?
Captain chirped. Then it reached into the box and pulled out the button, held it up, and pressed it against its chest.
Derek's cosmic senses translated the gesture: this is mine. I found it. I kept it.
Captain set down the button and picked up the bullet casing. Same gesture. Mine. Found. Kept.
The lock of hair. Mine. Found. Kept.
The stone, the feather, the thimble. Mine. Found. Kept.
Each object, held up and claimed with a fierce, proud, desperate possessiveness that made Derek's hearts ache.
But why? he projected. Why collect these things?
Captain set down the objects. It stood very still for a moment—unusual for a messenger, which typically vibrated with constant, nervous energy. Then it did something that Derek had never seen a messenger do before.
It pointed at itself. Then it pointed at the box. Then it looked up at Derek with those huge, glossy eyes, and the expression on its face was so raw, so vulnerable, so nakedly honest that Derek's breath caught.
And Derek understood.
The messengers were not just servants. They were not just tools, not just the Dream's workforce, not just the creepy little homunculi that held lanterns and carried notes and popped out of baths to sell you things. They were beings. Conscious, feeling, lonely beings who had existed in the Dream for centuries under a master who treated them as furniture.
And they had coped the way lonely beings always cope.
They had found things to love.
Small things. Worthless things. Objects discarded by hunters, dropped by beasts, left behind by a waking world that didn't know or care that the Dream existed. The messengers had collected these scraps—these buttons and bullets and locks of hair—and they had made them theirs. Had invested them with meaning and value and attachment, because when you have nothing and no one, even a broken pocket watch can become a treasure if you love it enough.
Captain's hat wasn't just a hat. It was a declaration. A statement of selfhood. A tiny, defiant flag planted in the soil of existence that said: I am here. I matter. I found this piece of fabric and I made it into a hat and I WEAR it, because wearing it makes me ME, and being ME is the only thing I have.
Derek looked at the box of treasures. He looked at Captain. He looked at the other messengers who had gathered around, each watching with expressions of nervous hope, many of them clutching their own tiny trinkets—a bottle cap here, a bit of string there, one particularly small messenger wearing a ring on its head like a crown.
These are yours, Derek projected, and he poured every ounce of warmth and certainty and love he had into the thought. These are YOURS. They belong to you. Nobody—NOBODY—is going to take them from you. Not ever. Not while I'm here. You hear me?
The messengers stared at him.
Then Captain launched itself at Derek's face.
Not aggressively—affectionately. The tiny creature slammed into Derek's cluster of primary eyes like a pale, clammy missile of love, wrapping its stunted arms around whatever portion of his head it could reach and squeezing with a strength that was genuinely impressive for something that weighed approximately as much as a tangerine.
The other messengers followed suit.
Within seconds, Derek was buried. Thirty-plus messengers piled onto him in a mass of pale flesh and tiny hands and fierce, desperate, overwhelming affection. They clung to his tentacles, his coat, his back, his everything. They chirped and cooed and made sounds that didn't need cosmic translation because the meaning was universal.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Derek lay at the bottom of a messenger pile, tears streaming from his seventeen eyes, his coat askew, Bitey purring contentedly beside him, and thought:
I will protect these stupid, beautiful little goblins with my life. Both lives. All possible lives. If the thing in the deep comes for them, it's going to have to go through me first, and I may be a worm but I am a worm who has FEELINGS and FEELINGS are a WEAPON.
From across the workshop, the Doll watched the pile of messengers and the worm-god at its center and smiled a smile that could have lit the Dream from one end to the other.
The new hunter arrived without warning.
One moment, the Dream was quiet—the pleasant, sleepy quiet of a place where nothing much was happening and everyone was content with that arrangement. The messengers were going about their business (which mostly involved rearranging their trinket collections and fighting good-naturedly over the best spots on Derek's back). The Doll was in the garden—the small patch of white flowers near the workshop entrance that she tended with a care that suggested the flowers were not merely decorative—doing something with a watering can that Derek was NOT watching through the window because he was BUSY with IMPORTANT GOD THINGS.
(He was watching.)
(He was watching very intently.)
(The watering can required her to lean forward and the garden beds were low and—)
(GOD THINGS. IMPORTANT GOD THINGS.)
And then the Dream shifted.
Derek felt it before he saw it—a tremor in the fabric of reality, a disturbance in the force-except-not-that-force, a ripple that ran through the Dream like a stone dropped in a still pond. Something was entering. Something was crossing the barrier between the waking world and the Dream, sliding through the membrane that separated reality from not-reality, pulled by a connection that Derek could feel tightening like a rope.
A hunter.
A new hunter was entering the Dream.
Oh shit, Derek thought, with a clarity that crystallized his panic into something almost useful. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. A hunter. A HUNTER. Someone is coming HERE. To MY Dream. And they're going to expect—what? What do hunters expect when they come to the Dream? They expect the MOON PRESENCE, that's what. They expect an established, competent, ancient cosmic entity running the show. They do NOT expect a WORM in a TINY COAT surrounded by MESSENGER GOBLINS and a LIVING SAW CLEAVER.
He whirled—undulated—spun his worm body around on the workbench, tentacles flailing. DOLL. DOLL, WHERE—
The Doll was already moving. She'd felt it too—of course she had; she was part of the Dream, attuned to its every vibration—and she was striding toward the workshop with a purpose that made her previous movements look leisurely. The stride was—the stride was—
FOCUS, DEREK.
She burst through the door. "A hunter comes."
I KNOW. WHAT DO I DO?
"You are the master of the Dream," the Doll said, and her voice had shifted from warm and gentle to something cooler, more formal. The voice she used with hunters. The game voice. "You must be present when they arrive. You must—"
Must WHAT? I can't TALK. I can't STAND. I can't make a GOOD IMPRESSION. I look like a CATERPILLAR in a TRENCHCOAT.
"You look like a Great One," the Doll said firmly. "And that is what you are. The hunter does not need you to speak. The hunter does not need you to stand. The hunter needs to feel the power of the Dream's master and know that they are protected. That is all."
The power of the—I don't HAVE power! I accidentally made a living weapon and it's currently napping in my coat!
As if on cue, Bitey stirred against Derek's side, its single eye opening with a sleepy blink.
"You have more power than you realize," the Doll said, and knelt in front of the workbench so that her face was level with his. Her eyes—silver now, formal, the Doll-of-the-game eyes—met his seventeen. "The Dream sustains itself through you. The messengers serve you. The echoes answer to you. You are an infant, yes—but you are an infant god. Act like one."
How?! How do I act like an infant god?! There's no MANUAL for this! There's no—
"Derek." The Doll's hand came up, cool and steady, and rested on the top of his head. The gesture was simple—grounding, anchoring—and it cut through his panic like a blade. "Breathe."
He breathed. Or did the cosmic equivalent.
"Good. Now—feel the Dream. Feel it as you've been feeling it since you woke. The flowers. The sky. The stones. The fire. It is yours. It responds to you. When the hunter arrives, the Dream will present itself, and it will present you. All you have to do is be present. Be still. Be there. The Dream will do the rest."
Derek stared at her. His hearts were hammering in arrhythmic panic. His tentacles were trembling. Bitey had woken up fully and was making concerned noises against his side.
But the Doll's hand was on his head, and her eyes were steady, and her voice was certain.
Okay, he thought. Okay. I can do this. I can be present. I can be still. I can—
The Dream rippled again, harder this time, and at the base of the hill, near the headstones, the air began to glow.
Oh God they're HERE.
The Doll withdrew her hand, stood, and smoothed her dress—an automatic gesture, the costume change from "caring partner" to "mysterious NPC"—and walked to her usual position near the workshop entrance. She folded her hands, lowered her eyes, and went still.
Just like that, she was the Doll from the game. Serene. Distant. Unknowable. The warmth, the humor, the person she had been with Derek—all of it vanished behind a porcelain mask of divine serenity.
It was deeply unsettling to watch. Like seeing a friend put on a costume and become someone else. But Derek understood—this was her role. Her purpose. The face she showed to hunters so that they would trust her, confide in her, let her channel their echoes and send them back into the nightmare stronger than before.
The messengers understood too. They scattered, assuming their positions throughout the Dream with practiced efficiency—some clustering around the headstones, others disappearing into the bath, others taking up posts near the workshop entrance. Captain gave Derek one last, encouraging chirp and then vanished into the floor.
Derek was alone on the workbench.
Alone with Bitey, who was pressed against his side and growling softly—a metallic, vibrating growl that was more nervous than aggressive.
Shh, Derek thought at the living weapon. It's okay. We're just—we're just meeting someone new. It's fine. We're cool. We look cool. We are a tiny cosmic god in a tiny cosmic coat and we are going to be FINE.
Bitey's eye looked up at him with the canine trust of a creature that would follow its parent into hell and out the other side.
Derek took one more cosmic breath.
And the hunter appeared.
She materialized at the base of the hill in a cascade of silver light—the same light Derek had felt when he'd first arrived, that scanning, reading, consuming luminescence that the Dream used to pull souls across the barrier. The light faded, and where there had been nothing, there was now a woman.
She was young—mid-twenties, maybe, though it was hard to tell with the blood. There was a LOT of blood. Her clothes—common Yharnam attire, the layered vest and trousers that the player character wore before getting their hunter garb—were soaked with it. Her dark hair was plastered to her face. Her hands were shaking. Her eyes—
Derek looked at her eyes and felt something in his chest crack open.
Her eyes were the eyes of someone who had just seen something that could not be unseen. Wide, fixed, staring at nothing and everything, pupils dilated to the point where the irises were almost invisible. The eyes of someone who had watched their world come apart at the seams and hadn't yet figured out how to put it back together.
She looked around the Dream—the hillside, the flowers, the tombstones, the silver sky—with the dazed incomprehension of someone who had just stepped from a war zone into a garden party.
"Where..." she said, and her voice was hoarse and cracked and barely above a whisper. "Where am I?"
The messengers at the headstones chirped softly. She flinched at the sound, her hand going instinctively to her hip—reaching for a weapon she didn't have.
"Welcome, hunter," the Doll said, and her voice carried across the Dream like a bell. Clear, calm, infinitely serene. "To the Hunter's Dream."
The woman turned. Saw the Doll. Her eyes widened further—not with fear, but with the specific bewilderment of someone encountering something that was clearly not human but was treating the situation as though everything was perfectly normal.
She also, Derek noted, did a very visible double-take at the Doll's proportions. A quick, involuntary up-down-up that ended with a slight parting of the lips and a blink that communicated, more eloquently than words, what the actual fuck.
Yeah, Derek thought sympathetically. I had the same reaction. You get used to it. Sort of. Not really. You just learn to pretend.
"This place is safe," the Doll continued, gliding down the hill toward the hunter with that smooth, almost floating gait that had always looked eerie in the game and was even eerier in person. "You are safe here. The beasts cannot reach you. The night cannot touch you."
"The beasts," the woman repeated, and something in her voice broke on the word. "There were—in the street, they were everywhere—people, they were PEOPLE, but they—"
"I know," the Doll said, and her voice softened by a fraction of a degree—just enough to be comforting without breaking character. "I know."
The hunter's legs gave out. She sat down heavily on the cobblestone path, her bloodied hands in her lap, and stared at the ground. She was trembling—not with cold, but with the bone-deep shudder of someone whose body was processing trauma faster than their mind could keep up.
Derek watched from the workshop window—Bitey beside him, his tentacles gripping the sill, his seventeen eyes fixed on the broken woman sitting in his Dream—and felt something that was bigger than sympathy and sharper than compassion and deeper than empathy.
He felt responsibility.
This woman was in HIS Dream. She had been pulled here by the contract—the same contract that had bound hunters to the Moon Presence, that cosmic agreement that said "sign here in blood and the Dream will sustain you through the hunt." The Moon Presence was gone, but the contract remained. The infrastructure remained. And this woman—this terrified, blood-soaked, shaking woman—had signed it, probably without understanding what it meant, and now she was HERE.
And Derek was supposed to protect her.
He was supposed to be the presence behind the curtain, the god in the machine, the cosmic insurance policy that guaranteed she would come back if she died. He was supposed to fuel her resurrections, sustain her connection to the Dream, ensure that every time a beast tore her apart or a trap crushed her or a boss she wasn't ready for turned her into paste, she would wake up here, in this garden, safe and whole and ready to try again.
He was supposed to be the Moon Presence.
Except kind.
I can do this, Derek thought, and he wasn't sure if he was convincing himself or making a vow. I can do this. I WILL do this. She needs me. She doesn't know she needs me, and she might never know—the Moon Presence worked in secret, behind the scenes, invisible to the hunters it sustained—but she NEEDS me, and I will NOT let her down.
He reached into the Dream. Into himself. Into that deep, fundamental connection between his consciousness and the reality he sustained. And he did what the Doll had told him to do.
He was present.
Not visible. Not dramatic. Not a swirling cosmic display of godly power. Just... there. A warmth in the Dream's bones. A steadiness in its foundation. A feeling—subtle, almost subliminal, like the hum of a furnace in winter or the scent of something baking in a distant kitchen—that said: you are not alone. You are held. You are protected. Whatever happens out there, in the blood and the dark and the screaming, you can always come back here, and here will always be safe.
The hunter looked up.
She didn't see Derek. She didn't see anything—just the Dream, the flowers, the Doll, the quiet silver sky. But something in her face changed. The trembling slowed. The breathing steadied. The wild, hunted look in her eyes softened by a fraction, and she took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Okay."
"When you are ready," the Doll said, offering a pale hand, "I will show you to the workshop. There are weapons there. And answers, of a sort."
The hunter looked at the Doll's hand. She looked at the Dream around her. She looked at the distant sky, which pulsed with colors she couldn't name.
And then she took the Doll's hand and stood.
Derek watched her rise and felt something bloom in his chest—his hearts, his cosmic core, whatever sat at the center of his being—that was warm and fierce and absolutely, unshakably certain.
I will protect you, he thought, directing it not at the hunter but at the Dream itself, at the fabric of reality that was his and his alone to shape. I will protect ALL of you. Every hunter who comes through these gates. Every messenger who calls this place home. Every echo that screams in the dark.
I may be a worm. I may be small. I may be wearing a tiny coat and sleeping with a living Saw Cleaver.
But I am the god of this Dream, and my Dream will be a GOOD Dream.
The hunter was coming up the hill now, the Doll guiding her with one hand on her elbow, and Derek realized with a start that they were heading for the workshop.
Where he was.
Where he was sitting in the window like a cat, wearing a miniature coat, with a breathing weapon at his side and seventeen eyes wide open.
Oh. Oh no. She's going to see me. She's going to come in here and she's going to see me and I am going to have to be a COMPETENT GOD and—
Too late. The door opened. The Doll entered first, stepping aside to let the hunter through, and the young woman walked into the workshop and her gaze swept the room—the weapons on the walls, the workbench, the fire, the empty wheelchair—and landed on Derek.
She stared.
Derek stared back. With seventeen eyes.
Bitey chose this moment to wake up fully, yawn—a motion that involved the blade splitting open to reveal a pink, fleshy interior lined with tiny teeth—and stretch its handle like a cat stretching its legs.
The hunter's mouth opened. No sound came out.
A messenger—not Captain, a different one, a small round specimen wearing a thimble as a hat—popped out of the floor between the hunter's feet and offered her a note. The note, written in what Derek recognized as the Doll's elegant handwriting, read:
"THE MASTER OF THE DREAM WELCOMES YOU. PLEASE DO NOT SCREAM."
The hunter read the note.
She looked at Derek.
She looked at Bitey.
She looked at the messenger in the thimble hat.
"I'm dreaming," she said flatly.
"Yes," the Doll said. "That is rather the point."
Her name was Elara.
She was twenty-four years old. She was from a city called Hemwick—a name Derek recognized from the game, though the Hemwick he knew was a dark, corpse-strewn zone populated by mad old women with glowing eyes. The real Hemwick, Elara explained in halting, shell-shocked sentences, was a modest settlement on the outskirts of Yharnam's sphere of influence. A farming community, mostly. Quiet. Simple.
Until the blood came.
The Healing Church had sent missionaries to Hemwick three years ago, offering the old blood as medicine. The townspeople had been skeptical at first, but the blood worked. It healed the sick, mended the injured, reversed afflictions that had plagued families for generations. For two years, Hemwick had thrived.
Then the beasts came.
Not all at once. One at a time, at first—a farmer who went out to tend his fields and came back wrong. A child who developed a fever and emerged from it with too many teeth. A priest who stood at his pulpit one Sunday and began to howl.
By the time the people of Hemwick understood what was happening, it was too late. The scourge had taken root, and the night of the hunt descended on a community that had no hunters, no weapons, no preparation.
Elara had survived because she was fast and because she was lucky and because, in the chaos of Hemwick's collapse, she had stumbled through a door that shouldn't have been there—a door that led not to another room but to a space between spaces, a liminal corridor of stone and fog that ended at a strange altar covered in cloth.
The altar held a contract.
She signed it because the alternative was death.
And now she was here.
Derek listened to her story from his position on the workbench—trying very hard to look enigmatic and godly rather than what he actually was, which was deeply invested and increasingly furious—and felt his understanding of the situation click into sharper focus.
The game had shown one city, one hunt, one night. But the scourge wasn't contained. It was spreading. Had been spreading for years, decades, longer. Hemwick, Loran, and now—how many other places? How many other settlements had been touched by the Church's missionaries and their miraculous, monstrous blood?
She needs weapons, Derek projected at the Doll, who had positioned herself between Derek and the hunter in a way that was either protective or strategic or both. She needs armor. She needs a starting weapon and— wait, do I still have starting weapons? Did Gehrman leave—
The Doll inclined her head almost imperceptibly—a gesture only Derek, attuned to her every movement (for purely professional, god-related reasons), could read—and said aloud: "The workshop has weapons, hunter. Tools of the old hunters, left here for those who would carry on the fight. Choose what suits you."
Elara stood before the weapon rack—the same rack from the game, lined with the starter weapons that Derek had spent forty hours making decisive about—and reached for a threaded cane.
Good choice, Derek thought approvingly. Skill build. Respectable.
She turned the weapon over in her hands, testing its weight, and something changed in her posture. The shell-shocked survivor straightened. The trembling hands steadied. The scared girl from Hemwick stepped back, and something harder, something fiercer, something with teeth stepped forward.
"How does it work?" she asked, looking at the Doll. "The Dream. The hunt. What am I supposed to do?"
The Doll smiled her NPC smile—serene, cryptic, infuriatingly unhelpful. "The Dream sustains you. When you fall in battle, you will awaken here, whole and ready to hunt again. The messengers will guide you. The echoes of the fallen will strengthen you."
She paused, then added, with a glance at Derek: "And the master of the Dream watches over all."
Elara followed the Doll's gaze to the workbench. To Derek. The tiny, violet, seventeen-eyed, coat-wearing worm-thing perched on the wood with a living weapon snuggled against its side.
"That's... the master of the Dream," Elara said.
"Yes."
"It's wearing a little coat."
"Yes."
"And the thing next to it—the thing that's breathing—is that a weapon?"
"In a manner of speaking."
Elara stared at Derek. Derek mustered every scrap of cosmic dignity he possessed and stared back. He drew himself up to his full height—approximately eight inches—and flared his coat's collar in what he hoped was an imposing gesture.
Bitey, sensing the moment, opened its eye and fixed the hunter with a steely, golden glare.
The effect was—
Well, Derek hoped the effect was "mysterious and awe-inspiring cosmic entity whose diminutive form belies unfathomable power."
The effect was almost certainly "adorable slug in a doll's outfit sitting next to a sleepy knife."
But Elara didn't laugh. She didn't scream. She didn't do any of the things Derek had feared she would do.
Instead, she walked to the workbench, knelt down so that she was at eye-level—eyes-level, rather, given the sheer number of eyes involved—and looked at Derek with an expression of careful, measured assessment.
"You're a Great One," she said. Not a question.
Derek blinked. Several eyes at once.
"I've read about you. The Great Ones. In the Church's texts. They said you were—" she frowned, searching for the word. "—vast. Terrible. Beyond human comprehension."
She looked at his tiny coat. At his tentacles, curled around Bitey like a child holding a stuffed animal. At Captain, who had reappeared on his back and was waving at Elara with enthusiastic friendliness.
"You don't look very terrible," she said.
Give me time, Derek projected, and the thought reached her—he felt it connect, felt the bridge of understanding form between his mind and hers, the god-to-hunter frequency that the Dream facilitated automatically.
Elara's eyes widened. "You can—I heard that. In my head. You can—"
Talk, yeah. Sort of. It's more like... directed thinking. I'm still working on it.
She sat back on her heels, processing. Then, slowly, a smile broke across her face—the first smile Derek had seen from her, tentative and disbelieving but real.
"The Great One of the Dream talks in your head and sounds like a regular person," she said.
I WAS a regular person. Like, recently. Very recently. It's a whole thing.
"A whole thing."
Long story. The short version is: I'm new at this, you're new at this, nobody knows what they're doing, the world is apparently ending, and also I accidentally created a living weapon.
She looked at Bitey. Bitey looked at her. Bitey yawned, revealing its tiny teeth.
"It's kind of cute," Elara said.
Bitey's eye widened. Its blade-body vibrated with pleasure. It made a sound that was unmistakably preening.
Don't encourage it, Derek projected. It already thinks it's the center of the universe.
Elara laughed. A short, surprised, slightly hysterical laugh—the laugh of someone who had been through hell and was now having a conversation with a talking slug and finding it, against all odds, kind of funny.
It was, Derek decided, the best sound he'd heard since arriving in this world.
Okay, he projected. Here's the deal. I'm the master of the Dream. I'm going to keep you alive out there. Every time you die—and you WILL die, because Bloodborne is... because the hunt is HARD—you'll come back here. I'll be here. The Doll will be here. The messengers will be here. You're not alone in this.
Elara's smile faded. Not into fear, but into something more serious. More grounded.
"Why?" she asked. "Why help me? The texts said the Great Ones are... indifferent. That they don't care about humans."
The texts were written by people who never met me, Derek projected. I care. I care a LOT. Probably too much, honestly. It's kind of my whole deal.
He paused, then added:
Also, I used to work at Arby's. My whole career was helping people even when they didn't appreciate it. This is basically the same thing, except the customers are scarier and I don't get paid.
Elara stared at him for a long moment. Then she stood, picked up the threaded cane, and held it at her side.
"Alright," she said. "Alright, tiny Dream god. Let's hunt."
Be careful out there, Derek projected, as she walked toward the headstones—the fast-travel points, the gateways between the Dream and the waking world. And if you find any blood echoes, bring them back. I can... I can hear the voices inside them. I want to listen.
Elara paused at the headstone. She looked back at him—at the small, violet, coat-wearing creature on the workbench, surrounded by messengers, with a living weapon at its side and seventeen eyes full of something that might have been hope.
"You're the weirdest god I've ever met," she said.
I'm the ONLY god you've ever met.
"Still counts."
And then she touched the headstone, and the Dream opened, and she was gone—pulled back into the waking world, back into the blood and the beasts and the screaming dark of a city that was dying.
Derek watched her go.
Come back safe, he thought, and the Dream carried the thought to its edges and held it there, a beacon in the dark, a promise that whatever happened, there was a place where the night couldn't reach.
It happened that night.
Or what passed for night in the Dream—the ambient light dimming to a soft, deep blue, the flowers on the hillside folding their petals, the messengers settling into their nooks and crannies for whatever messengers did instead of sleeping.
Derek was in the workshop, reviewing Gehrman's notes on Great One physiology—specifically, the section on growth and development, which he was reading with increasing urgency given that he was still, after several days, fundamentally a worm—when he felt it.
A tingling. A warmth. A pressure that started somewhere deep inside his body—not in any specific organ or structure, but in the space between, the cosmic substrate, the fundamental fabric of his being.
It felt like growing pains.
It felt like the moment before a sneeze—that building, inevitable, unstoppable sensation of something about to happen whether you wanted it to or not.
It felt, specifically, like something was pushing its way out of his body.
Oh, Derek thought, as the sensation intensified. Oh, that's—that's not—
He looked down at himself. His worm body was... moving. Not the normal tentacle-wriggling—something internal, something beneath the surface. His violet skin was rippling, bulging, reshaping itself on the left side of his body, about two-thirds of the way down from his head.
Something was pushing out from inside.
"DOLL," Derek projected with the psychic equivalent of a shriek. "DOLL, SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO ME. SOMETHING IS VERY MUCH HAPPENING TO ME AND I DON'T—"
The Doll appeared in the doorway—she was always appearing in the doorway, always there when he needed her, always present at the exact moment of crisis, and he was grateful for it even if the sight of her filling the doorframe with the full catastrophic majesty of her figure was not exactly CALMING—and assessed the situation with a single, clinical glance.
"You're growing," she said.
GROWING? This doesn't feel like GROWING. This feels like SOMETHING IS TRYING TO ESCAPE FROM INSIDE—
The bulge on his left side pulsed. Pushed. Strained against his skin with a determination that was both alien and horribly familiar—it reminded him, with a lurch of cosmic nausea, of the chest-burster scene from Alien, except it was happening to HIM and it was happening in SLOW MOTION—
And then, with a sound that was halfway between a pop and a sigh, something emerged.
Derek stared at it.
It was an arm.
An arm.
A tiny, articulated, three-jointed arm, extending from the left side of his body approximately two-thirds of the way down his length. It was the same violet as the rest of him, slightly translucent, tipped with four slender fingers that flexed experimentally in the Dream-light.
He had grown an arm.
His first arm.
His first ACTUAL, FUNCTIONAL, GRASPING ARM.
YES! Derek screamed internally, and the Dream shuddered with the force of his elation. YES! AN ARM! I HAVE AN ARM! I CAN GRAB THINGS! I CAN HOLD THINGS! I CAN—
He flexed the fingers. They moved. They MOVED. They curled and uncurled and spread and contracted and they WORKED.
I CAN READ BY MYSELF! I CAN TURN PAGES! I CAN HOLD A PEN! I CAN—
He paused.
He looked at the arm more carefully.
The arm was on his left side. About two-thirds down his body. Not near his head, where an arm would make sense for grabbing things in front of him. Not near his middle, where an arm would be useful for balance or locomotion. Two-thirds down. Approximately where a human's knee would be, if humans were worms.
It was in completely the wrong place.
"That is... not where arms typically go," the Doll observed, with a diplomacy that bordered on heroic.
Derek stared at his new arm. His beautiful, wonderful, completely mispositioned arm, waving its fingers at him from a location that was useful for approximately nothing.
WHY, he projected. WHY THERE. WHY COULDN'T IT GROW FROM MY HEAD? OR MY SIDES? OR LITERALLY ANYWHERE THAT WOULD MAKE ANATOMICAL SENSE?
"Great One physiology is not governed by human anatomical conventions," the Doll said, kneeling beside the workbench to examine the arm with professional interest. She took his new hand gently in hers—her fingers cool and smooth against his freshly-grown, still-tingling digits—and manipulated the joints with the careful precision of a doctor examining a newborn. "The arm has grown where the Dream determined you needed it."
I DIDN'T NEED IT THERE. I NEED IT NEAR MY FACE. NEAR THE THINGS I WANT TO GRAB. NOT DOWN BY MY—
"It will adjust," the Doll said calmly. "Great One bodies are not static. They grow, they change, they migrate. Over time, the arm will move to a more useful position. Or—" she shrugged, a gesture that caused a seismic event in the region of her shoulders, "—you will grow more arms."
More arms.
"Almost certainly."
And they'll all grow in random places?
"Probably."
Derek let his head—or the head-end of his body—drop to the workbench with a dull thud.
Great. Awesome. I'm going to be a PICASSO worm. Arms everywhere. Hands coming out of my elbows. Fingers on my back. A CUBIST NIGHTMARE.
Bitey nuzzled against his side sympathetically. Captain appeared from somewhere and patted his tentacle. The arm, unbothered by its creator's existential crisis, continued to wave its fingers in the air with the cheerful obliviousness of a limb that had absolutely no idea it was in the wrong place.
Fine, Derek thought, lifting his head. Fine. One arm. Wrong place. It's fine. I'll grow more. They'll be in BETTER places. Probably. Hopefully. And in the meantime—
He flexed the fingers again. They responded instantly, precisely, beautifully.
—in the meantime, I have a HAND.
He reached out—straining, stretching, contorting his worm body so that the arm, positioned absurdly far from his head, could reach the workbench in front of him—and grabbed a book from the nearest stack.
His fingers closed around the spine. Gripped. Held.
For the first time in his new life, he held something.
It was a book. A simple, leather-bound book from Gehrman's library. Unremarkable in every way.
But he was HOLDING it. With his HAND. His own hand, attached to his own arm, grown from his own body by his own cosmic biology.
The tears came again—luminescent, silver-tinted, immediately collected by the ever-present messengers—and Derek clutched the book to his chest (or the nearest equivalent) and thought, with a fierce and terrible joy:
I'm growing.
I'm changing.
I'm becoming.
And whoever—WHATEVER—is down there in the deep, whatever is waking up, whatever is coming—it's going to have to deal with ME.
Me, and my tiny coat, and my living weapon, and my messenger army, and my impossible Doll, and my one misplaced arm.
We're going to be ready.
He looked at the arm. The arm waved at him.
...Eventually.
END OF CHAPTER 3
Next time on SQUID BABY & THE ABSURDLY THICC DOLL: Elara returns from her first hunt with stories Derek DEFINITELY didn't want to hear. Derek attempts to Dream-shape again and creates something marginally less horrifying. The arm migrates (it's exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds). And something in the deep places of the world sends the Dream a message—a message that the Doll recognizes, and fears.