Nightmare's End

A little preread insight: The First Hunters

I know that reading backstory is not always fun, so if you already know the back story, feel free to skip ahead a bit.

In Yharnam there are very skilled, powerful people known as hunters, and the very first of them are now known as the Old Hunters. The First Hunter, Gehrman, had a student named Maria, a pale girl who hailed from Cainhurst Castle, and possessed the same blood as the the Vileblood Queen of Cainhurst, who provided her distant relative with the Rakuyo (cutlass shown above, supposedly means "lucky" in Japanese) and her armor. Maria likely came to Gehrman for further training, to hone her skills.

As a student of Gehrman, Maria worked whatever jobs her master did, ranging from simple one night hunts of lesser scourge beasts to escorting students of Byrgenwerth college to some place rumored to be home to a Great One, one of the ancient entities of primordial Earth. One of her final jobs was a trek to a small fishing hamlet where its inhabitants worshipped the Great One Kos (or as some say, Kosm). There had been word from some of the more skeptical residents that the corpse of Kos had washed ashore, and that she had been with child, and the College and Healing Church lunged at the opportunity; any chance to familiarize oneself with a Great One and possibly receive their elder knowledge, possibly from the Umbilical Cord, is a chance one should never pass up. After a few weeks of preparation, the students and the hunters made for the Fishing Hamlet. They would not be welcomed warmly, however...

Unfortunately, in their worship of Kos, the fisherfolk had become very grotesque and vicious, while diminishing their recognition of friends versus foes, so upon the arrival of the expedition, violence had already become the only path to Great Ones' wisdom. The hunters essentially murdered half of the villagers as they made their way to the shoreline, and nearly all the rest were killed while being examined for traces of elder contact, such as invasive searches in their skulls for eyes on the inside.

Their search for the Umbilical Cord of Kos eventually led them to the coast, where the corpse had laid like a beached whale, her pale, grotesquely beautiful body torn in places. As they searched, the body began to heave, and the Orphan of Kos was born. The hunters present, including Maria and Gehrman, murdered the Orphan as he attacked the students in blind rage and sorrow. After the murder of the infant Great One, Maria fell into a great depression, eventually growing so hateful of her choices until then that she abandoned her beloved Rakuyo, tossing it down a well in the village.

Once the party returned to Yharnam, Maria became a caretaker for the people within the Astral Clocktower, a place used for experiments on the patients to learn to make contact with the Great Ones. The patients suffered horribly, but Maria did all she could to ease it, earning her the name of "Lady Maria" among the patients. As the experiments continually failed, Maria so continued her death spiral into insanity, losing herself in guilt and shame. Eventually she was lost to the Nightmare, a kind of hell created by the sins of blood drunk hunters, as the Research hall and Astral Clocktower were. There she remains, standing guard over the last and darkest secrets of the Healing Church...

***

Many years have passed since she was lost to the Hunter's Nightmare, but Lady Maria, of the Astral Clocktower, still stands her vigil, wielding her Rakuyo (after mysteriously being returned to her), even after she tried to end her days, plunging her Rakuyo through her throat, the blood spurting over her hunting blouse, only for the wound to close immediately. The more recent years had been full of wondering for her, however, and she had felt many things in her soul searching, and the feeling she had a few years prior told her that her hunt was over, and that to continue it in the Nightmare would only kill her, and that she should instead await her fate at her post.

After so many years of dreaming, she felt truly sleepy. She rested her Rakuyo in its sheath on the wooden table next to her throne, leaned back, and closed her eyes...