[color=#007FFF][b][u][h1][sub][sub][sub]Farren[/sub][/sub][/sub][/h1][/u][/b][/color]		    felt it, even in the less familiar environs of the forest, felt the disparity that time alone had created. Felt the difference, the reversion from when they had lived to this strange surreal world to which the Great Serpent had taken them. He’d hunted in these woods before…snuck out of the city and around the standard defenses. He’d had to on meager months when work was sparse, coin nearly non-existent in his pockets. When his belly had ached for food and work had simply not been present to sustain him. Those had been lean, terrible times, but…as the hazy memories hit him–perhaps brought closer by the nature of where they tread–Farren felt…oddly nostalgic for them. So much had changed. His world was so much more complicated now.

[i]‘Oh to return to simpler times…’[/i] he thought…and then they crested the hill and his mind stopped as surely as his feet. Bolted to the spot, back ramrod straight, Farren’s eyes grew wide with shocked surprise, then slow building awe as he took in the reality of things. For though he had been told that they’d been swept back to another time, pressed somehow by the Will of the Great Serpent to Ancient Pthumeru, there was simply nothing that could have prepared him–or anything, by his reckoning–for the majesty of the city.

It was not Yharnam. Not just that it was different from the city he had come to know, not just that time had changed it. This was a place wrought from wholly different minds. Every structure–down to the materials, the glimmer of glass, the quiet startling gleam of polished white stone–had been hewn with a care and attentive detail that spoke of loving craft. By comparison, Yharnam, hells…even the Capital in which he’d been born and raised were mere mockeries of civilization.

Yet, as a man who had grown up with the ever-looming reality that was the harrowing Night of the Hunt…what he found even more profound were the lack of censers, the lack of fear, and the intense–even joyous–activity in the streets. While they were too far for him to properly see details, even with his senses enhanced by the potency of the Old Blood–tampered with though his was–he could still tell by the way the crowds moved and those sounds that did carry over the distance.

Farren’s hand loosened around the Piercing Rifle he’d been holding, the other in the harness at his back, and it was that simple thing that brought him back to himself as Ophelia spoke. The bizarre sensation of his mutated fingers relaxing, then Ophelia’s voice helping him focus for once.

[color=#007FFF][b]“I…somehow doubt I’ll be welcome,”[/b][/color] Farren murmured beneath his breath. Why…why did he feel so oddly…dejected? His mind supplied not a clear answer, nor the words of others from his past, but a view of Yharnam as he’d arrived years ago…and then a crushing sense of being displaced and unwanted when he’d walked along its twisting labyrinthine streets.

Farren raised his hand, looking upon the black chitin over its surface which had replaced his flesh. He flexed, feeling the alterations even to how it moved. He sighed and when Ophelia led–so long as the others had no reason to delay–he followed, quiet and surprisingly withdrawn.