With eyes tightly shut and her form awkwardly hunched, Adelicia held on to her staff for dear life as the elevator ascended. Her soft knees threatened to buckle under her whilst a tingling feeling developed in her stomach. It took every ounce of her will not to sit down and curl up until the ride was over and it was perhaps only the, for once, welcome distraction of Victor’s mumbling that helped her ignore her fears – if only by virtue of causing her aggravation. Maybe the hunter was right, maybe beasts were beyond salvation. But to consider murder the only solution to the problem… did he not stop to think [i]what[/i] it was that created beasts in the first place? Had they no choice but to become slaves to the blood, cursed to repeat the same cycle of tragedy over and over? The church had taught her to think this way but doubt gnawed at her like a swarm of rats nibbled at a corpse. If she had not been feeling so queasy, she might have even given him a reply. Instead, all she could utter was a sigh of relief when the elevator came to a halt and its iron doors slid open.

She opened her slightly moist eyes and peered out into the street, where a row of quaint wooden houses perched upon each other. She was told the wooden buildings were mostly new, built to replace the ruins of the older homes that were destroyed in the last hunt. Just as she recalled that nugget of information, it dawned on her what horrible implications it promised for this night. A night of the hunt resulted in the ruin of entire buildings, even streets. She could hardly fathom such devastation, or being exposed to the forces that cause it. Yharnam was doomed, she thought, feeling suddenly overwhelmed by a pang of nihilism, and the city had only itself to blame. Just then, Victor took the lead and resumed his train of thought, no doubt trying to further justify the mindless slaughter of thousands but then – then he was gone. Not having properly seen what it was that yanked Victor out of sight, it was his gunshot that made her flinch and let out a shrill scream. Mouth agape, she stared at the empty space where the hunter had stood, feeling completely dumb struck for the few seconds of uncertainty that he was gone. When next she saw him he was hurtling forward, seemingly lifeless, onto the dusty cobble stones of the street.

But it was not the sight of the fallen hunter that made her heart sink – it was the sight of [i]it[/i]. Feeling completely petrified, her fingers stiffened as if under rigor mortis around the grip of her censer. She had screamed moments before, but now all voice remained stuck in her throat. Staring at the thing, it was not the abhorrent, pitch-black coloration that made her hairs rise to a point, or its ghastly, blood-stained saber, or even its damnably glowing eyes. Something far worse clawed at her mind, digging itself up from the grave it had been consigned to for many years. It was the knowledge that she had seen this monstrous face before.

It had been late dusk in the charnel lane and young Adelicia had snuck out of the orphanage after dinner. With tears streaming down her unwashed face, she was desperately grasping for a filthy doll that had been placed some height from the ground in the leafless, gnarled branches of a tree. The girl clumsily climbed up the trunk, fell and tried again to the sound of a wild dog barking somewhere downhill, in the shadow drenched valleys. She could feel cuts and bruises on her arms and feet. After many minutes of agonized  effort she was almost about to reach the doll when the sound of the dog’s surprised, painful yelp being cut short made her startle and fall, tearing off a branch. Slowly pulling herself up, Hemwick was suddenly very quiet – not even a single crow cawed in the distance. Fear compelled her to run, but fear also compelled her to stay. The doll was all she had, her ward against the nightmares and the cruelty of man. Undecided, she simply stood there, still as a candle, awaiting her coming fate. And then it crawled over the lip of the hill where she stood. Black as night, long and reedy like the tree she had climbed and with burning white eyes, like distant stars framed by the cold darkness of the cosmos. Perhaps she had fainted, or perhaps she had simply lost her mind. Falling over, bawling her eyes out, Adelicia had no idea what happened after that; save that she was still alive and that, when she had opened her eyes after an indeterminate amount of time, the creature was gone, the sun had set and her doll… was placed right in front of her.

Infantile memories resurfaced in her and, when she felt her back pressing against the rearmost wall of the elevator, could no longer contain her tears. If only she could tell whether they were tears mourning a wasted childhood, or lamenting her fated reunion with the demon of Hemwick.