[i]Yharnamites?[/i] Adelicia repeated in her thoughts. Somehow the idea that men, not beasts, caused this display of violence made it even worse. There were certain expectations men and beasts were held to; that the latter be a helpless slave to its hideous cravings and the former a moral being, beholden to the laws of civility. To see the one act like the other was a terror she could not put into words. Fear the Old Blood, they always said – she could see why. The Scourge came from the Old Blood and it was the ruin of man. For how many years was Yharnam beset by this plague? And when she thought of the devastation that the last great hunt had caused, she had to question if the church was right to continue meddling with the blood. Could anything good come from it? Was the all-cure that ran in her veins truly worth the price they all were paying for it? A shudder descended her spine and returned her to her senses.

The blood saint slowly approached the two hunters again with dainty, measured steps, ever careful not to come too close to the body. What detail she had spied from afar was more than enough for her sensibilities, and she had no desire to see it from up close. All her thinking on the nature of the scourge and the blood sparked a curious thought that she, without truly considering it, felt the need to blurt out when she was close enough to the hunters to look up at their grim faces: “Can the Scourge be cured? Is there any way at all for a man to come back from it?”

So fascinated was she in the prospect that, perhaps, not all who became thralls to the Scourge were lost, that she forgot to guard herself from Victor’s menacing eyes and looked him straight in the face. Her blood was a panacea that could cleanse any ailment in the world – by what irony was it also the root of a disease more horrible than all of them? There must be something that can be done, something other than slaughter. [i]There had to be[/i].