[center][h2][b]Ophelia[/b][/h2][/center]

It was an odd experience to travel through a place you ostensibly knew quite well--enough, at least, to feel comfortable--and at once have it be completely fresh and unfamiliar. Even down to the types of trees, the rocks that had not yet been weathered and moved by countless ages, the soil and the roots... if not for the abject horror of what they knew was to come, it would have been serenely beautiful in a way words would struggle to convey. And then they got to the hill and climbed it, and Ophelia gasped audibly as the sight unfolded before her and she began to take it in.

The scale of it all was incredibly vast, hundreds of times moreso than modern Yharnam, and all of it so much grander and richer than the scraps that remained. She'd been awed by seeing Cathedral Ward in person, but to compare that to this was to do it a horrible injustice--and a profound sense of loss came over Ophelia unlike anything she'd experienced before. The relative grandeur of what remained to their time was but a fragment of a fragment of a fragment, and to understand Castle Cainhurst--already opulent and majestic beyond belief--as the reclaimed scraps of what was undoubtedly the greatest empire this part of the world had ever known...

"He destroyed all of this... all of it, and left us with the scraps... and now he's trying to take even that from us..." she seethed, her rage and hatred bubbling up for a moment as the only response her mind could conjure in the face of history's weight, the knowledge of which pressed down upon her like a weight she feared might never go away. The injustice of it burned in her blood, her face contorting into a scowl, as she gripped the hilt of the Cosmic Sword of Truth so fiercely that her knuckles went white. It was not as though they lacked in reasons to hate their gilded foe, but seeing the scope of what he had destroyed for the first time... what had been a very personal vendetta began to bloom into something richer and deeper--like the light of a single candle reflecting through an endless hall of mirrors, magnified and intensified to the point of scorching.

"I don't know how we'll be received, but... we have no choice but to enter and find our way. I suppose the best place to start is that gate over there--we'll have to see if I'm still shrouded by the Deception effect, mm? I doubt it, somehow, but... shall we?" Ophelia sighed, pointing her blade in the direction of the gate. If nobody had anything else to add of import after a moment or two she would set off in that direction.