Luna Contritum: Grant Us Eyes

Prologue: Apotheosis

-x-x-x-

Today I died.

I came to this city, desperate for a cure to this maddening blight. To Yharnam, home of the famed Blood Ministration.

After the procedure, I woke up in a sickroom, empty beds and scattered medical equipment surrounding me.

Almost as soon as I got up, I was assaulted by...some sort of beast. Naturally, woozy and unarmed as I was, I was naught but the juiciest of prey.

The blood…

The agony of having my entrails torn from me and eaten before my eyes…

I fear that once the shock fades I will be useless.

After I died, I woke in a garden.

These little...creatures gave me some sort of sword-cane and a pistol, along with this very book.

I'm taking the time to organize my thoughts here so I can—

The rest of the page devolves into illegible scribbles and tear stains.

Journal of Cadfan Lloyd, The Good Hunter, Vol I

Circa 0 M.F.

(10000 Years prior to the Awakening)

-x-x-x-

In a garden of glowing white tulips, under a moon the bright crimson of freshly shed blood, a battle came to a close.

Cadfan's chest heaved as the gleaming silver, rune-etched blade of his scythe, the vestige of his mentor's last lesson to him, tore through the torso of the creature before him. Flora, the Moon Presence, let out a mournful cry, reaching out to Cadfan almost plaintively as she fell to her spindly knees on the bloodstained hillock. The thin tendrils upon the Great One's head drooped and shriveled as Flora, of the Moon in Dream, breathed her last breaths. Sorrow in his eyes, the Hunter took the hand of the rapidly fading creature. 'She did not want this. All she wanted was a child of her own…'

In spite of the fact that she was a creature entirely alien to him, Cadfan wept for her.

He mourned the fact that the minds of man and the minds of the Cosmos were so far apart; he mourned the deaths of Flora, Eibritas, and the newborn Orphan of Kos which had been the only way for man to escape the Nightmare.

But most of all, he mourned for his lost innocence, the coin he'd paid for his surviving the wasting sickness that he'd been born with. His parents had believed it would consign him to an early grave, and so when he'd shown the aptitude for scholarly work, they'd leapt at the opportunity, driving him down the path of the book and pen with all the fervor of people possessed. It was only once the disease had progressed far enough that he couldn't leave his bed that his parents grew desperate enough to send him to Yharnam, by carriage.

The rest, as they say, was history. It had taken him countless deaths, but he'd finally done it. The Nightmare was over, fading and leaving behind only the bitter hollowness in his chest.

…

A hollowness that was growing, writhing within him, swallowing him from the inside. The Good Hunter clutched his chest and sank to his knees. "Is this...the price...of my hubris? My selfishness?" he rasped, clutching the haft of the scythe passed to him by his mentor and—dare he say it?—friend.

The familiar sound of ceramic feet on a cobblestone path shook the Hunter from his mourning. Cadfan looked up through the silver mists that his body was giving off as parts of his flesh simply...ceased. The Plain Doll, created in the likeness of one of Gherman's disciples, the Lady Maria, knelt before Cadfan and took his hand in hers.

"Good Hunter," she murmured, "you've won. Flora has gone from this plane, and the Dream ends at long last."

"...Cadfan," he grunted. "My name is Cadfan. I apologize for not telling you before...some of the stories I've read implied that names have power."

The Plain Doll raised a hand to his cheek and cupped it. "I forgive you, Good Hu—no, Cadfan. Your fears may have been well founded. The Dream may well give power to names; I know not, as I am but a Doll."

By this time, Cadfan's lower body had vanished completely, and the encroaching void was now creeping up his torso. As his mortal form dissolved, he felt no agony. Instead, all he could feel was a distant, quiet sense of rapture and inevitability.

Knowing his time was short, he spoke in a quick, quiet rasp. "I haven't treated you as well as I should have, and for that I am sorry. I don't know what is to become of me, but allow me to give you a parting gift, should this be the last time we speak."

His calloused hand gripped her thin, ceramic digits. "You'll be 'Doll' no longer. My gift to you...a name, should you choose to accept it. Isolde. In my country, it means 'fair one'."

Her hands squeezed his with deceptive strength, the next words coming from her mouth unsteady and thick with emotion. "Oh...Good Hunter, Cadfan...this gift; I cannot thank you enough for it."

Isolde pulled Cadfan into a tight embrace. The Hunter closed his eyes and returned the embrace, his last moments as a human spent in the arms of a true friend and companion. Not a Doll.

Isolde's eyes snapped open in shock, as the mist that Cadfan had dissolved into began to swirl and coalesce into a small shape. After a minute or two, the mist had settled into a definite form: a small, fleshy creature about the length of an arm, tiny tendrils of dull grey chitin waving lazily at the end of its body. "Oh, dearest Cadfan…" breathed the woman who'd once been a Doll, "you have achieved what even the scholars of Byrgenwerth and Mensis could only dream at…"

The little creature wriggled in what seemed to be satisfaction, then shivered. Isolde clutched it closer to her body. "Are you cold? Let me take you to the Workshop; the fire's burned out by now, and it still stands."

A faint sense of agreement not her own passed through her mind.

"Oh, dear Hunter...I wonder what the day holds for—hmm?" A rumbling from above them cut Isolde's words off. She turned her face to the sky, and gasped. A feeling of concern and questioning was pressed against her psyche as she turned and ran towards the series of seven graves lining the far fence.

The diminutive forms of the Messengers moved two and fro at a rapid pace, gathering all manner of items from around the workshop and piling them unceremoniously before the furthest gravestone. Every rumble and crack from far above seemed to spur the little ones on as they frantically dipped in and out of reality through tiny, misty cracks in space-time to gather everything they could.

Finally, Isolde had to speak up. "There's no more time, little ones. We must flee, to the depths." One of the Messengers darted forward and placed a large chalice on the grave, before dumping several reagents into it and withdrawing. Isolde touched the chalice to the smooth skin of the infant Great One that had once been Cadfan the Good Hunter, and all was light.

…

Moments later, a chunk of rock roughly the size of the college at Byrgenwerth slammed into the garden, obliterating everything within a half mile, both within the fading Dream and in the Waking World.

This was only the first 'tear' shed by Luna, mourning the death of her child.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

Many, many years later…

-x-x-x-

Deep within the wooded wilderness of the Emerald Forest, a scar of brown and grey split the sea of green. A small earthquake had occurred recently and a fissure had opened in the earth, revealing unfamiliar and undocumented ruins. Even now, someone was plumbing the murky depths of the ancient complex in hopes of finding something of note.

"This is fascinating!" a thin man said rapidly, darting hither and thither with such violent vigor that it was a wonder that his cap and glasses remained on his green-haired head. "The stone that made these corridors, I've never seen the like!"

The man frantically waved a flashlight at the walls, taking in the sight of several carvings a second with a keenly trained eye. "And the markings...they seem to tell a story about the world before Moonfall! This may well be the discovery of the century—nay, the millennium!"

"If these ruins truly predate the Moonfall, you are absolutely correct, Bartholomew," a calm voice replied from the speaker set in the arm of his spectacles, its tone turning amused as it continued, "However, if it's not too much trouble, could you perhaps continue on? At this rate of exploration, the next batch of freshmen won't have a history class until they're seniors."

Dr. Bartholomew Oobleck had the decency to blush at that. "Sorry, sorry! You know how I get, Headmaster. Something like this? It's a dream come true!"

"Indeed."

The slender, spastic Doctor proceeded onwards, his eyes straying longingly to the petroglyphs on either side of him as he passed them by.

The walls were a murky green, and interspersed with the markings were strange symbols, perhaps letters telling a story? Oobleck shook his head. With any luck, there'd be time to explore these ruins further at a later date. For now, he continued on through the labyrinthine maze of stone, dust, and occasional puddles of a strange viscous liquid.

He avoided those.

After about thirty minutes of twists and turns, each of which he left a small, luminescent sticker on so he could find his way back, he reached a door of wood and metal, dimly glowing symbols etched into the frame. He clicked off his flashlight and hooked it to his belt so he could get a better look at the mysterious etchings, then shuddered. An ominous weight had rested itself on his shoulders, like the eyes of some vast, titanic consciousness had fixed themselves on him and him alone.

"Headmaster Ozpin….something about this area feels...wrong. I don't know what, but this...this place isn't right."

There was a faint beep from the other end of the connection, alerting both men that the Headmaster had just received the data transfer containing pictures Oobleck had taken during his descent. In particular, pictures of the petroglyphs and other carvings.

It was barely a moment later that Ozpin's voice once more came across the link, this time with no amusement and much more command. "Bartholomew, return to the surface. Those symbols...they're familiar, and not from recent memories."

Oobleck made to respond, but all that came from his mouth was a choked gasp as a massive, pale hand with thin, spidery digits erupted from the darkness behind him, wrapped around his torso and dragged him away.

His glasses clattered to the ground behind him, Professor Ozpin's voice sounding increasingly loudly in the corridor but fading from the ear as the distance increased.

Oobleck struggled against the massive, sinuous hand clutching him to the chest of an equally gargantuan...creature, but to no avail.

He'd been able to get a good look at the thing that had grabbed him once it had pulled him close; web-thin tendrils had sprouted from the giant's head and were now emitting a soft blue glow, illuminating the immediate area.

Even though it's limbs appeared to be little more than mottled greyish silver skin stretched taut over thin bone, the being was deceptively strong; Oobleck relied on his wits and his weapons, not his strength. Whatever this strange, new existence was, it hadn't tried to kill him like a Grimm would have, but to capture him. That suggested intelligence, and the doctor always respected intellect.

However, he knew well that intelligence turned to darker paths could lead to the discovery of abominable acts, tortures and agonies painful beyond measure.

He waited, noting that his mysterious captor was taking special care to grasp him just tightly enough to restrict his movements. For a man in his admittedly terrifying position, Oobleck was remarkably calm, confidence drawn in no small part from the fact that his weapon was still hooked onto his belt, a measure of protection in the event this venture turned…violent.

But it didn't. The lanky, faceless giant took him to a room lit with more of those glowing runes, several tables strewn about the area and messily piled with books and papers alike.

The most striking part of the room, however, was the life-sized Doll that sat at a writing desk, a quill pen gripped in its thin ceramic fingers and raised above a notebook. A shawl woven of brown cloth hung from the Doll's shoulders, terminating halfway down its ankle length dress. A brown bonnet partially obscured a meticulously maintained mane of white hair, and a pink scarf dangled over the brown leather corset that was just visible beneath the shawl.

To Oobleck's shock, the Doll's head turned towards him smoothly, and regarded him before blinking ponderously.

She set her quill down, rose from her chair, and smoothed the front of her dress before walking over to where he was cradled to a massive, emaciated chest by an equally large, equally spindly hand.

"Hello," she said, her ceramic lips somehow moving as though they were flesh when she spoke. "The Lattice was not expecting trespassers into His sanctum so soon. My name is Isolde, caretaker of this place. We have things to discuss, dear visitor."

AN: Well. Here we are. This is my first serious attempt at a non-SI fic in a while, and this promises to be quite the undertaking. I've received an incredible amount of support and encouragement from various people, to say nothing of the aid that Teninshigen, Magery, and my new friend Slavok have offered. So to you three, (as well as TheLonelyWillow for heaping encouragement and motivation onto me), I extend my most heartfelt thanks. I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it.