Elara had been gone for approximately sixteen hours.
Derek knew this because he had counted. Not with a clock—the Dream still didn't have clocks, a design oversight he was increasingly determined to fix—but with the obsessive, anxious precision of a parent waiting for their teenager to come home from their first unsupervised night out. He had counted every heartbeat (all four of them, beating in that unsynchronized polyrhythmic mess that he was slowly learning to find normal). He had counted every breath of Dream-wind. He had counted the number of times Captain had climbed onto his back, adjusted its hat, and looked meaningfully at the headstones as if to say she'll be back, boss.
Sixteen hours.
Sixteen hours of trying to read and failing to concentrate. Sixteen hours of Dream-shaping practice that he couldn't focus on. Sixteen hours of lying on the workbench with Bitey pressed against his side and his one misplaced arm clutching a book he hadn't turned a page of in four hours, staring at the workshop window, watching the headstones for any sign of silver light.
She's fine, he told himself for the four hundred and seventy-eighth time. She's a hunter now. She has the Dream's protection. If she dies, she comes back. That's the WHOLE POINT. She literally CANNOT permanently die as long as the Dream sustains her, and the Dream is sustained by ME, and I am very much ALIVE, so she is FINE.
Unless she's scared. Unless she's hurt. Unless she's alone in the dark fighting something with too many teeth and not enough joints and she's wondering why the tiny slug god in the tiny coat isn't doing more to help—
STOP IT, DEREK.
He forced himself to look away from the window. Forced himself to focus on the book in his hand—a treatise on the Dream's connection to the waking world, one of the more technical volumes from Gehrman's library. His one arm (still in the wrong place, still requiring him to contort his body into a shape that would make a chiropractor weep to reach anything above his midline) held the book open while three messengers turned pages on his behalf.
He read the same paragraph seven times without absorbing a single word.
She's fine. She's fine. She's—
The Dream rippled.
Derek felt it before he saw it—that familiar tremor, that disturbance in the fabric of his reality that meant someone was crossing the threshold. His seventeen eyes snapped to the window. His arm dropped the book. Bitey's eye popped open.
Silver light bloomed at the base of the hill.
She's back.
Derek launched himself toward the window with an enthusiasm that sent three messengers tumbling and knocked a bottle of blood vials off the workbench. He pressed his face—faces? Face-region? The front of his head, where most of his eyes were concentrated—against the glass and stared down at the headstones.
The light faded.
Elara stood in the Dream.
She was covered in blood. More blood than before—layers of it, old and new, dried and fresh, human and very much not human. Her threaded cane was clutched in her right hand, its blade extended, its edge dark with gore. Her clothes—the starting Yharnam set she'd left in—were torn in several places, revealing skin that was bruised and scratched and—
Derek's seventeen eyes went very wide.
Wait.
Wait wait wait.
Something was different.
Something was very different.
It took him a moment to identify what it was because his brain refused to process the information, sending it back to his visual cortex three times with an increasingly emphatic "are you SURE?" stamp. But his eyes—all seventeen of them, each one independently confirming the data—were not lying.
Elara had left the Dream sixteen hours ago as a slim, athletic young woman of average build.
Elara had returned as a slim, athletic young woman of decidedly above-average build.
Significantly above-average.
Dramatically above-average.
The torn sections of her clothing revealed not just bruises and scratches but curves—curves that had not been there before, curves that had apparently manifested during her sixteen-hour absence, curves that bore a suspicious and deeply troubling resemblance to the proportions of a certain porcelain doll whose figure had been shaped by Derek's subconscious.
Not quite as extreme as the Doll—not the full, reality-warping, physics-defying, Geneva Convention-violating absurdity that the Doll embodied—but trending in that direction. Like someone had taken Elara's original character model and applied a slider adjustment of about sixty percent toward "what the actual fuck."
Her hips had... expanded. Her waist had not. The ratio between these two measurements had entered a territory that would have required a scientific calculator to express. Her torso had undergone a similar redistribution of emphasis, her simple vest now performing structural work that it had categorically not been designed for, its buttons engaged in a heroic last stand against forces they could not possibly hope to contain.
She walked up the hill toward the workshop with the confident stride of someone who had just survived their first hunt and was feeling pretty good about it, apparently oblivious to the fact that her body had undergone a transformation that was—
WHAT.
WHAT HAPPENED.
WHAT DID SHE TOUCH. WHAT DID SHE DRINK. WHAT DID SHE KILL. WHY DOES SHE LOOK LIKE—
IS THIS MY FAULT?
IS THE DREAM DOING THIS?
IS MY SUBCONSCIOUS—
OH NO.
OH NO NO NO.
THE DOLL'S PROPORTIONS WERE SHAPED BY MY SUBCONSCIOUS. THE DREAM REFLECTS ITS MASTER. THE DREAM SUSTAINS THE HUNTERS. THE HUNTERS ARE SUSTAINED BY THE DREAM. THE DREAM IS SHAPED BY ME. WHICH MEANS THE HUNTERS ARE SHAPED BY—
AM I MAKING EVERYONE THICC?!
IS MY COSMIC, UNCONSCIOUS, COMPLETELY INVOLUNTARY INFLUENCE ON THE FABRIC OF REALITY MAKING EVERY WOMAN WHO ENTERS MY DREAM PROGRESSIVELY MORE—
I NEED TO STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS. I NEED TO STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW BECAUSE IF I THINK ABOUT IT MORE IT'LL PROBABLY GET WORSE BECAUSE THE DREAM RESPONDS TO MY THOUGHTS AND OH GOD THIS IS A FEEDBACK LOOP—
"Welcome back, hunter," the Doll said from her position near the workshop entrance, and her voice was perfectly serene and perfectly neutral and perfectly normal, except Derek caught—with the cosmic perceptiveness of a being who was becoming increasingly attuned to the Doll's micro-expressions—a flicker of something across her porcelain features.
Something that looked a lot like appraisal.
Something that looked, underneath the appraisal, a lot like irritation.
The Doll's silver-gold eyes traveled down Elara's transformed figure with a precision that was almost clinical, lingering for a fraction of a second on the specific areas of change, before snapping back up to the hunter's face with an expression of perfect, practiced, completely unconvincing composure.
Is she—is the DOLL jealous? Derek thought, his cosmic brain spinning like a hamster wheel that had been hooked up to a power grid. Can she BE jealous? She's a DOLL. She's a construct of the Dream. She doesn't have emotions like—
Except she DOES have emotions. She laughs and she cries and she gets amused and she scolds me and she made me a TINY COAT and—
And she just looked at Elara's enhanced figure with the expression of a woman who has just been told that her monopoly on a particular market is being threatened by a new competitor.
Oh God.
Oh GOD.
This is not a complication I needed.
Elara, blessedly oblivious to both Derek's psychic meltdown and the Doll's micro-aggressive ocular assessment, reached the workshop door and grinned. It was a fierce, wild, blood-flecked grin—the grin of someone who had discovered that they were really, really good at hitting things with a cane-sword.
"I killed six beasts," she announced proudly. "And one of those big hairy things with the bricks. And I only died TWICE."
She held up two fingers, as if dying twice in sixteen hours was an accomplishment to celebrate rather than a profound trauma. Her vest strained with the gesture, the buttons shifting to accommodate the new geography of her torso, and the Doll's left eye twitched by approximately one-quarter of a millimeter.
Derek saw the twitch. Derek saw EVERYTHING. His seventeen eyes were a curse from which there was no escape.
"Well done," the Doll said, her voice precisely 0.3 degrees cooler than her usual hunter-greeting temperature. "You have gathered echoes?"
"SO many echoes," Elara said, and reached into her pocket—her pocket, which was on her hip, and reaching for it required her to twist slightly, and the twist—
STOP LOOKING. I AM A GOD. I AM ABOVE MORTAL CONCERNS. I AM—
—and pulled out a handful of blood echo crystals. They gleamed in the Dream-light, pulsing with captured memories, each one a life condensed into a marble-sized jewel.
But Elara wasn't looking at the echoes.
Elara was looking past the Doll, into the workshop, at the workbench where Derek sat in his tiny coat with his single misplaced arm and his seventeen wide eyes and his living Saw Cleaver companion.
And her expression changed.
The fierce, warrior-hunter grin softened into something else entirely. Something warm and bright and almost disturbingly tender, like a person who has just seen a kitten wearing a bow tie for the first time and is experiencing a neurological event.
"Oh my GOD," Elara said, pushing past the Doll—who stepped aside with a rigidity that suggested she was exercising considerable restraint in not stepping directly in the way—and rushing to the workbench. "Oh my GOD, he's wearing the little coat! You're wearing the little coat! I thought about you the WHOLE TIME I was out there—every time I got scared, every time a beast came at me, I thought about the tiny Dream god in his tiny little coat and I felt BETTER."
She reached out with both hands—hands that were, Derek noticed with horror, moving toward him with unmistakable intent to pick him up—and—
Please don't—I'm a cosmic deity—there is a PROTOCOL—I have DIGNITY—
She picked him up.
She scooped him off the workbench with the gentle but irresistible confidence of someone who has decided that a thing needs to be held and will not be dissuaded by considerations such as "that thing is technically a god," and she cradled him against her chest, and—
Oh.
Oh, she's warm.
She's really warm.
She's warm and she smells like blood and sweat and some kind of Yharnam flower and she's holding me against her chest which is—which is significantly more SUBSTANTIAL than it was sixteen hours ago and—
PERIODIC TABLE. HYDROGEN. HELIUM. LITHIUM. BERYLLIUM—
"Look at you," Elara cooed, holding him up to face level and gazing at him with an expression of pure, undiluted adoration. "Look at your little eyes. Look at your little tentacles. Look at your little ARM—oh my God, you have an ARM now? You grew an ARM?"
She spotted the arm—his single, misplaced, anatomically absurd arm, waving its fingers from the wrong part of his body—and her adoration intensified to levels that Derek's cosmic senses classified as "potentially hazardous."
"It's so SMALL," she whispered, with the hushed reverence of someone witnessing a miracle. "Your little hand! Your little fingers! Can you—can you grab things?"
She held out her index finger.
Derek, dignity in tatters, cosmic authority in shambles, eldritch majesty reduced to a party trick—reached out with his misplaced arm and grasped her finger.
Elara made a sound.
It was, without exaggeration, the highest-pitched sound Derek had ever heard a human being produce. A frequency so acute that it transcended normal hearing and entered the domain of dolphin communication. A squeal of delight so intense that it sent two messengers diving for cover and made Bitey's eye snap open in alarm.
"HE'S HOLDING MY FINGER," Elara announced to the workshop at large, as if anyone present might have missed it. "THE TINY DREAM GOD IS HOLDING MY FINGER WITH HIS TINY HAND AND I WOULD DIE FOR HIM."
I appreciate the sentiment but PLEASE—
"I would kill EVERY beast in Yharnam for this little guy. Every SINGLE one. I would fight the MOON for him."
You don't have to fight the moon, the moon thing is dead, I ate it—
"I'm going to bring you presents. Every hunt. I'm going to find things and bring them back for you. Pretty things. Shiny things. Whatever tiny Dream gods like."
I don't need presents, I need you to PUT ME DOWN before—
The Doll cleared her throat.
It was a small sound. Polite. Ladylike. The kind of throat-clearing that, in a normal context, would barely register as an interruption.
In the current context—the context being that the Doll was standing three feet away watching another woman cuddle her cosmic charge with an expression of porcelain serenity that was approximately two millimeters away from cracking—the throat-clearing carried the weight of a cannon shot.
Elara turned. "Hmm?"
"The echoes," the Doll said. "If you wish to grow stronger for your next hunt, I should channel them for you. It is... my purpose."
There was an emphasis on "my" that was so subtle, so precisely calibrated, that only a being with seventeen eyes and cosmic-level emotional perception could have caught it.
Derek caught it.
He caught it, and he felt the temperature of the Dream drop by exactly one-half of one degree, which was the meteorological equivalent of the Doll saying put. him. down.
Elara, who was apparently operating on the kind of post-hunt adrenaline high that made her immune to atmospheric subtlety, gave Derek one last squeeze—a squeeze that pressed him against regions of her anatomy that his scholarly, dignified, COMPLETELY PROFESSIONAL mind refused to catalogue—and set him back on the workbench.
"Right! Echoes! Yes!" Elara said brightly, and turned to the Doll with the eager enthusiasm of a student approaching a teacher.
The Doll's expression smoothed. The temperature of the Dream normalized. The microscopic crisis of divine jealousy passed, or at least submerged, like an iceberg dipping below the waterline—still there, still massive, still capable of sinking a ship, but temporarily invisible.
"Kneel," the Doll said—and was it Derek's imagination, or did she say it with a touch more authority than usual? The game-Doll had always said "kneel" as a gentle instruction. This Doll said "kneel" as a statement of cosmic hierarchy, a reminder of the chain of command, a subtle but unmistakable assertion of who belonged to whom and in what order.
Elara knelt.
The Doll placed her hands on Elara's head, and the blood echoes began to flow—that silver-white light traveling from the crystals through the Doll's body and into the hunter, the memories of the dead being transmuted into strength, the cycle continuing.
Derek watched the channeling from his workbench perch and tried very, very hard to think about anything other than the two women in his workshop, one of whom was jealous of the other, both of whom had figures that his subconscious had apparently decided to customize without his conscious permission.
I need a hobby, he thought miserably. A hobby that isn't "accidentally reshaping the bodies of every woman in my reality." Like knitting. Can worms knit? I have one hand. I could probably manage a scarf—
Bitey nudged his side, demanding attention.
Not now, Bitey. Daddy's having a crisis.
Bitey nudged harder.
FINE. What?
The living Saw Cleaver directed its single eye toward the corner of the workshop—the back corner, near the stairs to the library. Its blade-body vibrated with a frequency that Derek had learned to recognize as "hey, I noticed something and you should probably look at it."
Derek looked.
In the corner of the workshop, half-hidden behind a stack of workshop materials and a rack of hanging tools, was a chest.
Not the chest he'd found the library in. A different chest—a large, iron-bound, heavy-looking thing with a latch shaped like a coiling serpent and a surface covered in engravings that his Great One senses immediately identified as Pthumerian. It was old—older than the workshop, older than the Dream in its current form, possibly older than Gehrman himself.
And it was humming.
Not audibly—not a sound his ears (did he have ears? Unclear) could detect. But a vibration, a resonance, a frequency that thrummed in the cosmic register that only Great Ones could perceive. It was faint but persistent, like a phone vibrating in another room, and it had a quality that Derek recognized because he'd felt it every time he reached for the Dream's fabric.
The chest was connected to him.
It was part of the Dream, but more specifically, it was part of him—an extension of his being, a pocket of his cosmic nature made manifest in the physical (dream-physical) world.
What the hell is that? Derek projected, mostly to himself.
Captain appeared at his side—the messenger had an uncanny ability to materialize exactly when Derek was about to investigate something, as if it had a sixth sense for moments of discovery. It looked at the chest, looked at Derek, and chirped encouragingly.
Help me get down there, Derek projected, and the familiar indignity of being crowd-surfed by messengers began. Six of them hoisted him off the workbench and carried him across the workshop floor, depositing him in front of the chest with the careful reverence of altar boys presenting an offering.
Derek reached out with his one arm—stretching, straining, his worm body contorting to bring the misplaced limb into range—and touched the serpent latch.
The chest recognized him.
That was the only way to describe it. The moment his fingers made contact, the engravings flared with violet light—his violet, the specific shade of his cosmic signature—and the latch turned of its own accord. The lid swung open with a creak that was less "rusty hinges" and more "ancient seal being broken for the first time in forever."
Derek looked inside.
His seventeen eyes went wide.
His arm went limp.
His brain—cosmic, eldritch, supposedly capable of processing information on a level beyond human comprehension—blue-screened.
Inside the chest, arranged with impossible neatness in a space that was clearly, OBVIOUSLY, unapologetically larger on the inside than on the outside, was—
Everything.
Every weapon he had ever used. Every piece of armor he had ever worn. Every item, every rune, every tool, every consumable, every miscellaneous piece of inventory that his character—ButtStallion, the hunter, the original occupant of this Dream—had collected during forty hours of gameplay.
The Saw Cleaver—the original, non-living version, gleaming and sharp and slightly bloodstained.
The Hunter's Axe.
The Threaded Cane.
Ludwig's Holy Blade—the massive, greatsword-scale weapon that had been his primary damage dealer for most of the mid-game.
The Blade of Mercy—those elegant, twinned daggers that he'd bought from the Bath Messengers after sending Eileen's quest down the wrong path.
The Burial Blade—Gehrman's own weapon, claimed after their final battle, that gorgeous, sweeping scythe with its trick-form transformation from curved sword to full reaper mode.
The Whirligig Saw—the pizza cutter, the meme weapon, the spinning saw-on-a-stick that was simultaneously the stupidest and most effective weapon in the game and that Derek had used exclusively for the DLC because it made him laugh every time.
The Rakuyo—Lady Maria's weapon, the dual-bladed trick sword that he'd spent TWO HOURS fishing for in the well in the Fishing Hamlet because those shark-giant enemies were the WORST ENEMIES IN ANY VIDEO GAME EVER and he would die on that hill AGAIN—
The Holy Moonlight Sword.
The Chikage.
The Logarius Wheel.
The Evelyn pistol, the Hunter's Blunderbuss, the Cannon—the CANNON, the stupidly overpowered shoulder-mounted artillery piece that required fifty strength and still managed to be worth every single stat point.
And not just weapons. Armor sets—the Hunter's Garb, the Gascoigne set, the Choir set with its ridiculous blindfold cap, the Cainhurst set with its crown, the Maria set that he'd worn for exactly five minutes before switching back because it felt weird. Runes—those arcane symbols that modified stats and abilities, each one carved into a small tablet of bone, each one thrumming with a power that Derek could feel resonating with his own cosmic frequency. Consumables—blood vials, molotov cocktails, sedatives, antidotes, beast blood pellets, bolt paper, fire paper, a truly embarrassing number of pebbles that he'd never gotten around to using.
Everything.
Everything from his playthrough.
Every single item he had collected, bought, found, earned, or stolen during forty hours of blood-soaked, controller-throwing, profanity-laced gameplay, preserved in perfect condition in a chest that existed in a pocket of folded space connected to his cosmic being.
Hammerspace, Derek thought, the realization hitting him like a truck. I have HAMMERSPACE. I have a personal extradimensional storage space tied to my Great One nature and it contains EVERYTHING from my playthrough. Every weapon I ever found. Every item I ever picked up. All of it. RIGHT HERE.
He stared into the chest. The chest stared back, its contents gleaming.
The Burial Blade is in here. GEHRMAN'S SCYTHE is in here. I have a weapon that was wielded by the First Hunter for CENTURIES. I have Ludwig's Holy Blade—a weapon forged from the will of a man who BECAME a horse-monster and STILL managed to be noble about it. I have the Holy Moonlight Sword—the weapon that appears in EVERY FromSoftware game, the cosmic constant, the thread that ties the entire Soulsborne universe together.
I have a CANNON.
I can't USE any of them because I'm a worm with one arm that's in the wrong place, but I HAVE them.
He reached into the chest and—felt something strange. Not physical resistance—conceptual resistance. The hammerspace responded to his touch not with the simple mechanics of "hand enters box, hand grabs item," but with a more complex interaction. The space KNEW him. It was part of him. And when he reached in, it didn't just offer its contents—it offered a connection.
His fingers brushed the handle of the Burial Blade.
A jolt ran through his arm—through his entire body—like touching a live wire. Not painful, but intense. Information flooded his mind: the weight of the weapon, the angle of the blade, the feeling of swinging it—not the game-feeling, the button-press-and-animation feeling, but the REAL feeling, the muscle memory of a body that had wielded this weapon a thousand times in a reality that was less real than this one but no less valid.
He could feel ButtStallion's muscle memory.
The Hunter's experience—forty hours of combat, of dodging and rolling and striking and parrying, of fighting beasts and madmen and cosmic horrors—was encoded in these weapons. In the hammerspace. In HIM. Not as physical capability (he was still a worm; he couldn't swing a sword any more than he could tap-dance), but as knowledge. Understanding. The deep, bone-level comprehension of violence that only came from doing it over and over and over until it became instinct.
When he was big enough—IF he got big enough, if his body grew and changed and developed enough to wield these weapons—he would know how to use them.
He would know how to hunt.
Oh, Derek thought, and the thought was small and quiet and fierce. Oh, that changes things.
He withdrew his hand from the chest. Closed the lid. Sat back on the workshop floor, surrounded by messengers, Bitey at his side, his misplaced arm tingling from the contact, and thought about what he had.
A Dream. A library. A Doll. An army of messengers. A living weapon. One arm (wrong place). And now an armory—a full, stocked, battle-tested armory of hunter's weapons and tools, waiting for him to grow into them.
He was still small. Still weak. Still fundamentally a worm.
But he was a worm with resources.
When the time comes, he thought, and directed the thought at the thing in the deep—the vast, dark, sleeping presence that he'd felt at the edges of his perception, the unnamed horror that Gehrman had spent centuries worrying about—when the time comes, I will NOT be defenseless.
"You touched something," Derek said—projected, rather, directing the thought at Elara with the directness of a cosmic being who had spent the last hour trying and failing to figure out how to ask this question diplomatically.
Elara, freshly empowered by the echo channeling (a process that the Doll had completed with her usual grace and only slightly more force than necessary in the "hands on head" portion of the ritual), was sitting on the workshop floor examining her new stats—or rather, examining the way her body felt different, stronger, faster, more capable. She'd been flexing her hands and testing her reflexes and doing little practice swings with the threaded cane, and she paused mid-swing to look at Derek.
"Touched something?"
Out there. In Yharnam. In Hemwick. Wherever you were hunting. You touched something, or drank something, or got hit by something, and now you're—
He gestured with his arm. The gesture was meant to indicate her general... situation. The fact that she had left the Dream as a perfectly normal-sized woman and returned as something that would have crashed a PS4.
Elara looked down at herself. Then she looked up at Derek. Then she looked down at herself again.
"Oh," she said. "Oh! You mean the—yeah, I was wondering about that."
YOU WERE WONDERING ABOUT IT?!
"I mean, it happened pretty gradually. I didn't really notice until I tried to squeeze through a doorway in Central Yharnam and got—" she made a gesture of her own, one that involved her hands making a shape that was both descriptive and deeply uncomfortable, "—stuck."
YOU GOT STUCK IN A DOORWAY.
"Only for a second! I wiggled through."
Derek's arm covered his eyes. He didn't have enough arms to facepalm properly, so he made do with a single-handed face-tentacle that conveyed approximately sixty percent of his desired exasperation.
What happened? Walk me through it. What did you do, what did you touch, what did you encounter that might have caused a—a PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION?
Elara thought about it. She sat cross-legged on the workshop floor—an act that caused her tattered trousers to strain in ways that would have been distracting if Derek hadn't been operating in full crisis-investigation mode—and ticked items off on her fingers.
"Okay, so. I came out of the headstone near the Central Yharnam lamp—the lantern thing, the checkpoint. There were beasts everywhere. I killed some. I died. I came back. I killed more. I found a shortcut to the bridge. I fought the Cleric Beast—"
You fought the Cleric Beast on your FIRST hunt?!
"It wasn't that hard! I mean, I died three more times, but then I figured out you have to stay under it and—"
You fought the CLERIC BEAST. On your FIRST RUN. With a THREADED CANE.
"Is that... unusual?"
Derek thought about his own first encounter with the Cleric Beast. He had died seventeen times. He had cried twice. He had put the controller down, walked to his kitchen, eaten an entire sleeve of Oreos, and returned with the grim determination of a man who had nothing left to lose.
And this woman had done it on her first actual hunt.
You're a natural, he projected, and even through his panic about the whole body-transformation situation, he couldn't keep the admiration out of his thought.
Elara grinned. "Thanks! So after the Cleric Beast, I explored more. Found this building with a bunch of those church guys—the big ones with the crosses? They hit REALLY hard, by the way. And inside the building, in the back, there was this... fountain."
A fountain.
"Yeah. Full of this glowing white stuff. It smelled amazing. Like—I don't know how to describe it. Like everything good. Like safety and warmth and—"
Elara. Please tell me you didn't drink from a random glowing fountain in a Bloodborne—in a city full of monsters.
She was quiet for a moment.
Elara.
"It smelled REALLY good."
ELARA.
"And I was thirsty! I'd been fighting beasts for hours! And the glowing stuff was right there!"
Derek's arm dropped from his face to the workbench with a dull thump of cosmic despair. You drank mysterious glowing liquid from a random fountain in the most dangerous city in the known universe.
"...Yes."
Did it occur to you—even briefly, even for a MOMENT—that drinking unidentified substances in a world where the PRIMARY problem is people consuming unidentified substances might be a BAD IDEA?
"It... occurred to me afterward. When I started... growing."
GROWING.
"It was subtle at first! Just a sort of... warmth. In my—in certain areas. I thought it was the blood ministration taking effect, or the echoes doing something, or—"
It was the DREAM, Elara. The liquid in that fountain was—
Derek stopped.
He reached out with his cosmic senses, probing the connection between himself and his hunter. He could feel the Dream's influence on her—the sustaining link that kept her alive, that fueled her resurrections, that channeled echoes into strength. And threaded through that link, like a dye dropped into clear water, was something else. Something that came from him.
From the Dream. From the master of the Dream. From Derek.
The fountain she'd found—whatever it was, wherever it was—had been connected to the Dream. A waypoint, a node, a minor manifestation of the Dream's presence in the waking world. And when Elara had drunk from it, she'd consumed not just water but Dream-essence—the same substance the Doll fed Derek, the condensed manifestation of the Dream's reality.
And the Dream was shaped by Derek.
And Derek's subconscious was... well... Derek's subconscious.
Oh God, Derek thought, with the weary resignation of a man who has discovered that his own mind is his worst enemy. It IS my fault. The Dream-essence reshaped her body according to—according to my—
He couldn't finish the thought. He physically could not make himself complete the sentence "my subconscious ideal of feminine attractiveness has leaked into the water supply and is causing environmental body modification."
This is the worst superpower, he thought instead. This is objectively the worst superpower in the history of superpowers. I would rather have the ability to talk to fish. I would rather have the ability to change the color of my fingernails. I would RATHER be a worm with no powers at all than a worm whose BRAIN CHEMISTRY is INVOLUNTARILY RESHAPING WOMEN—
"Is something wrong?" Elara asked, watching Derek's tentacles curl and uncurl in what she probably interpreted as deep cosmic contemplation but was actually a full-body cringe.
No. Nothing's wrong. Just—don't drink from any more glowing fountains.
"But—"
ANY more.
"What if I'm really thirs—"
ELARA.
"Fine, fine! No more fountains. Jeez." She paused, then added, with a sidelong glance at her own transformed figure: "It's not... permanent, is it?"
Derek probed the Dream-link again. The essence was fully integrated into her system. It wasn't going anywhere.
...Let's talk about something else.
"That's not a no."
It's a 'let's talk about something else.'
"Oh God."
Tell me about the hunt. What did you see? What was Yharnam like? Give me DETAILS—I need to understand what's happening out there.
Elara's expression shifted. The playful levity that had characterized her since returning—the giddiness of survival, the thrill of newfound power—faded, replaced by something darker and more serious. She drew her knees up to her chest (a motion that her new proportions made significantly more complex than it used to be) and stared at the workshop fire.
"It's bad," she said. "Really bad. Worse than Hemwick."
She talked for a long time.
Derek listened. With all seventeen eyes and every ounce of his cosmic attention.
Yharnam was dying. Not the dramatic, spectacular death of a city falling to a single catastrophe—the slow, grinding, inevitable death of a place that had been sick for too long and had run out of medicine. The hunt had ended—Derek's ascension, the Moon Presence's death, the breaking of the blood moon—but the aftermath was somehow worse than the event itself.
The beasts hadn't disappeared. Without the hunt to cull their numbers, without the Dream sending waves of armed hunters into the streets, the beasts had multiplied. They roamed freely now—packs of them, prowling through abandoned districts, fighting each other over territory, establishing dens in the hollowed-out ruins of buildings that had once been homes and shops and churches.
The surviving humans—and there were survivors, more than Derek had expected—had barricaded themselves in pockets of defensible space throughout the city. Elara had found three such groups in her sixteen hours of hunting: a cluster of families holed up in Oedon Chapel (the same chapel from the game, the safe zone that Derek had sent every NPC to during his playthrough), a group of Healing Church militia holding the Grand Cathedral, and a scattering of individuals hiding in attics and basements and anywhere else that had a door thick enough to keep the beasts out.
They were frightened. They were hungry. They were running out of supplies. And they were looking for someone—anyone—who could tell them what to do next.
"They asked me if I was a hunter," Elara said quietly. "The people at Oedon Chapel. They saw the cane, the clothes, the way I moved. And they asked me if I was a hunter. And I said yes. And they looked at me like—"
She stopped. Swallowed.
"Like I was hope," she said. "Like I was the first good thing that had happened to them in months. A woman grabbed my hand and started crying. A man asked if more hunters were coming. A child—a little girl, couldn't have been more than six—asked me if I was going to kill all the monsters."
She looked at Derek. Her eyes—dark, serious, haunted—locked onto his cluster of primary eyes with an intensity that made his cosmic hearts stutter.
"I told them yes," she said. "I told them more hunters were coming and that the monsters were going to die and that everything was going to be okay."
A pause.
"I lied."
The silence that followed was heavy enough to have its own gravitational field.
Derek felt it settle on his tiny, coat-wearing body like a physical weight. The reality of the situation—not the game-reality, not the lore-reality, but the human reality—pressed down on him with a force that no amount of cosmic power could mitigate.
People were suffering. Real people—or as real as anything in this universe, which was fully and completely real now, as real as the life Derek had left behind. People with names and faces and children and fears. People who were hiding in the dark, listening to beasts howl in the streets, counting their dwindling supplies and wondering if tonight was the night the barricades finally broke.
And they were looking to the hunters—to the Dream—to him—for salvation.
I need more hunters, Derek projected, the thought crystallizing with sudden, urgent clarity. One hunter isn't enough. Elara is good—she's REALLY good—but she's one person. I need an army. I need to figure out how the Dream creates new hunter contracts. I need to reach out to the waking world and find more people and bring them in and arm them and—
I need to grow FASTER.
He looked at his arm. His single, misplaced, wrong-positioned arm, its fingers curling and uncurling restlessly.
I need MORE arms. I need legs. I need a body that can DO things. I can't save anyone from a WORKBENCH.
"Tell me everything," he projected to Elara. "Every detail. Every beast you fought, every person you met, every street you walked down. I need to know EVERYTHING about what's happening in Yharnam."
And Elara, sitting on the floor of a cosmic workshop with a worm-god in a tiny coat and a breathing Saw Cleaver and a porcelain doll who looked like a Renaissance sculptor's fever dream, began to talk.
She told him about the beasts—their numbers, their behaviors, their territories. She told him about the Cleric Beast, which she'd defeated but which she suspected was only one of several—she'd heard howling from the upper cathedral ward that suggested more were evolving. She told him about the church militia at the Grand Cathedral, who were well-armed but poorly led and increasingly paranoid, turning away refugees and threatening to seal the cathedral doors permanently.
She told him about the Healing Church itself—or what remained of it. The Church's upper leadership had vanished. The Choir, the School of Mensis, the Research Hall—all abandoned, their occupants either dead, transformed, or fled. The institutional infrastructure that had sustained Yharnam for generations was gone, and in its absence, the city was fracturing along lines of fear and desperation.
And she told him about the sounds.
"At night," she said, and her voice dropped to barely a whisper, "when the beasts go quiet—there are moments when everything goes quiet, and those are the worst moments—you can hear something. Coming from below."
Derek's tentacles went rigid.
"Not a roar. Not a howl. Not any sound a beast would make. It's more like... breathing. Like something enormous is breathing, deep underground, and the whole city shakes with each exhale. Just a little. Just enough to feel it in your feet."
I know, Derek projected, and his thought was tight and controlled and hiding a tremor that he didn't want Elara to detect. I've felt it too. From the Dream.
Elara's eyes widened. "You know what it is?"
No. Not yet. But I'm going to find out.
Derek's second attempt at Dream-shaping went better than the first.
Marginally.
He waited until Elara had gone to sleep—the Dream had provided a bed for her in the workshop, manifesting it from the fabric of reality with a smoothness that suggested the Dream WANTED to be helpful when Derek wasn't actively trying to make weapons that came alive—and until the Doll had returned to her usual spot near the garden, standing in the flowers with her hands clasped and her eyes half-closed in that meditative pose that made her look like a saint in a very structurally ambitious stained glass window.
Then he settled himself on the workbench, closed his eyes (most of them), and reached for the Dream.
Okay, he thought. Last time, I tried to make a weapon. The Dream turned it alive because Great Ones create life. So THIS time, I'm going to account for that. I'm going to create something that's SUPPOSED to be alive. Something useful. Something—
He thought carefully.
A messenger.
Not one of the existing messengers—a new one. A custom messenger, shaped by his will, designed for a specific purpose. Gehrman's notes had mentioned that Great Ones could create "servitors"—living constructs attuned to the Dream's frequency, capable of operating semi-independently. The messengers were a type of servitor, created originally by... someone. The notes were unclear on who. But the principle was the same: a Great One could reach into the Dream and shape a living thing.
Something small, Derek thought. Something helpful. Something that can... I don't know... carry messages between the Dream and the waking world. A better messenger. A faster messenger. A messenger with—
He pushed.
The Dream responded. The air shimmered. Something began to form.
This time, Derek kept his metaphysical eyes open, watching the process with the analytical attention of a scientist observing an experiment. He could see the Dream's fabric bending, folding, compressing—raw potential being shaped by his will into something tangible. He could see the life-force flowing into the construct—not his life-force exactly, but the Dream's, which was an extension of his, drawn from the ambient energy that sustained the entire pocket reality.
The construct took shape.
It was small. Smaller than a regular messenger. About the size of a tennis ball, round and pale and—
Derek frowned (mentally; he didn't have a face that could frown). Something was off. The shape wasn't quite right. Too round. Too smooth. Too—
The construct opened its eyes.
It had six of them.
Arranged in a ring around its spherical body, each one a different color—gold, silver, red, blue, green, and a color that didn't exist in the human spectrum but that Derek's Great One senses identified as "shimmer." They blinked in sequence, clockwise, creating an effect that was mesmerizing and deeply unsettling in roughly equal measure.
It also had wings.
Two of them. Tiny, translucent, insect-like wings that sprouted from the top of its spherical body and buzzed with a frequency that made them nearly invisible when in motion. They activated immediately, lifting the creature off the workbench and into the air, where it hovered with the ungainly enthusiasm of a bumblebee that had just discovered flight and was having a really good time with it.
It did not have arms. It did not have legs. It did not have a mouth.
It was, essentially, a flying eyeball the size of a tennis ball with fairy wings.
Derek stared at his creation.
His creation stared back. With six eyes. In six colors.
"That's..." the Doll said, having appeared at the workshop door with the silent efficiency of someone who had sensed a Dream-shaping event and come to assess the damage. She studied the hovering eye-sphere with an expression of careful neutrality. "...not a messenger."
No, Derek agreed. No, it is not.
The eye-sphere buzzed closer to Derek, its wings humming, its six eyes blinking in that clockwise pattern. It bumped against his head gently—an affectionate bump, the kind a pet might give—and made a sound.
The sound was: a tiny, high-pitched, crystalline ping.
Like a notification chime. Like a phone receiving a text message. A small, bright, unmistakable ping that was simultaneously the cutest and most annoying sound Derek had ever heard.
Ping, said the eye-sphere, and bumped him again.
Ping ping ping.
"It appears to be functional," the Doll observed. "And... affectionate."
It's a flying eyeball that makes notification sounds, Derek projected flatly. I tried to make a faster messenger and I made a flying eyeball that makes notification sounds.
"An improvement over the living weapon, at least," the Doll offered.
Is it, though? IS IT?
The eye-sphere did a loop-de-loop in the air, pinging happily, its wings leaving tiny trails of luminescent dust. It swooped past Derek's head, circled the workshop twice, buzzed the sleeping Elara (who swatted at it instinctively without waking), and returned to hover in front of Derek with all six eyes fixed on him in an expression of absolute, undivided devotion.
Ping? it said.
Derek sighed. With his entire body. A full-worm sigh that started at his head and rippled down to the tip of his tail and expressed, in a single motion, the complete and total resignation of a god who had come to terms with the fact that every creature he birthed would be adorable, useless, and impossible not to love.
Fine. Your name is Ping.
PING! said Ping, and executed a triple barrel roll of pure joy, scattering luminescent dust across the workshop like cosmic glitter.
Bitey opened its eye, looked at Ping, and growled.
Ping looked at Bitey.
Bitey looked at Ping.
There was a moment of tense inter-creation silence.
Then Ping landed on Bitey's blade and settled there like a bird on a branch, and Bitey's growl faded into a resigned purr, and Derek watched his two accidental children coexist and thought: I am the worst creator in the history of creation. My firstborn is a breathing knife and my secondborn is a flying notification. What's next? A sentient boot? A living doorknob? An eldritch TOASTER?
Captain climbed onto his back, patted his head, and offered him a cookie.
Derek did not know where Captain had gotten a cookie. He did not want to know where Captain had gotten a cookie. He ate the cookie. It tasted like dust and affection.
This is my life now, he thought, chewing. This is my beautiful, stupid, impossible life.
The arm migrated at 3 AM.
Or whatever the Dream's equivalent of 3 AM was—that deep, quiet, liminal hour when even the messengers had settled into their resting spots and the only sounds were the crackle of the fire and the gentle hum of the Dream sustaining itself.
Derek was half-asleep. Not fully asleep—he'd discovered that Great Ones didn't really "sleep" in the human sense. They entered a state of reduced consciousness that was more like meditation than slumber, where their awareness dimmed but never fully extinguished. It was restful, in its way, but it also meant that Derek was always, on some level, awake.
Which meant he felt it when the arm started moving.
It began as an itch. A deep, bone-level itch—except he didn't have bones, which made the sensation even more unsettling. An itch in the cosmic substrate of his body, located at the base of his arm, where the limb connected to his worm-form.
Then the itch became a pull.
Then the pull became a slide.
"Oh WHAT THE—"
Derek's consciousness snapped to full alertness as he felt his arm—his one, precious, hard-won arm—begin to move. Not at the shoulder, not at the elbow, not at any joint. The entire arm, from its point of attachment to his body to the tips of its fingers, was sliding along his surface like a bead on a wire.
It was migrating.
The Doll had warned him about this. Great One bodies were not static. Limbs grew where they grew and then gradually, over time, moved to more useful positions as the body adapted and matured.
What the Doll had NOT warned him about was that it would happen in the middle of the night and feel like someone was slowly dragging a piece of his anatomy through his own skin like a zipper.
"AAAAHHHH," Derek projected, the thought erupting from his mind with enough force to wake up every messenger in the Dream. "AAAAHHHH, IT'S MOVING, MY ARM IS MOVING, IT'S—OH GOD IT'S GOING THE WRONG WAY—"
The arm, heedless of his protests, continued its migration. It slid along the surface of his body with the inexorable determination of a glacier—slow, steady, and completely indifferent to the fact that the landmass it was traversing was screaming.
It moved upward. Past his midsection. Past the region where a worm's shoulders would be if worms had shoulders. Derek held his breath—metaphysically—hoping it would settle somewhere useful, somewhere logical, somewhere that would make anatomical sense—
It stopped.
Derek held very, very still.
The arm was now located on his back.
Between his shoulder-tendrils.
Pointing upward.
"No," Derek said—projected—with the flat, dead tone of a man who has been betrayed by his own biology. "No. That's worse. That's WORSE than where it was before. Before it was in the wrong place but at least it pointed in the RIGHT DIRECTION. Now it's on my BACK. Pointing at the CEILING. Like a PERISCOPE."
He flexed the fingers. They waved cheerfully at the workshop rafters.
"I look like a worm with an ANTENNA. I look like a SUBMARINE. I look like—"
The messengers, awakened by his psychic scream, had gathered around the workbench to observe the aftermath. They stared at the relocated arm with expressions ranging from curiosity to concern to what Derek was fairly certain was suppressed laughter.
Captain climbed onto his back, examined the arm, and placed its tiny hat on Derek's upturned palm.
The messengers erupted in chirping applause.
"I hate everything," Derek projected. "I hate my body. I hate Great One physiology. I hate the process of cosmic maturation. I hate—"
The Doll appeared. Because of course she did. She appeared in the doorway in what Derek could only describe as her nightclothes—a flowing, white, diaphanous garment that was somehow even MORE structurally challenged than her day dress, a gossamer-thin sleeping gown that draped over her figure the way fog drapes over a mountain range—vast, clinging, and offering the suggestion of every geographical feature beneath while technically concealing them.
Derek's upward-pointing arm gave her a thumbs up.
He had not told it to do that.
"The migration is complete?" the Doll asked, her voice husky with whatever constituted sleep for a doll.
THE ARM IS ON MY BACK. POINTING AT THE SKY. LIKE A FLAGPOLE.
"Hmm." The Doll crossed the workshop—each step a lesson in physics that Derek's seventeen eyes absorbed against his will—and examined the arm. She took his hand, manipulated the joints, tested the range of motion. Her fingers were warm from sleep-heat and her touch was gentle and her sleeping gown was TRANSLUCENT and—
HYDROGEN HELIUM LITHIUM BERYLLIUM—
"It will move again," the Doll said. "Probably within the next day or two. The migration is rarely a single event—it happens in stages, the limb gradually working its way to its optimal position."
And in the MEANTIME?
"In the meantime, you have an arm on your back."
Great.
"It may actually be useful," she offered. "You could hold things behind you. Scratch places you couldn't reach before. Wave to people approaching from the rear."
Is the DOLL making JOKES? Is the ancient porcelain construct of the Hunter's Dream making JOKES at my EXPENSE?
The Doll's expression was perfectly serene. Perfectly innocent. Perfectly, completely, unimpeachably neutral.
There was a twinkle in her eye that said otherwise.
"I'm going back to sleep," Derek projected with as much wounded dignity as a worm with a back-arm could muster. "And when I wake up, this arm had better be somewhere USEFUL."
"As you wish, Good Hunter," the Doll said, and retreated to whatever part of the Dream she occupied during rest periods—something Derek had never investigated because the investigation would require following her and watching her lie down in her sleeping gown and that way lay MADNESS.
Derek settled back onto the workbench. Bitey curled against his right side. Ping settled into a groove on Bitey's blade, its six eyes dimming to a sleepy glow. Captain and three other messengers arranged themselves around Derek like a protective perimeter.
His back-arm waved at the ceiling one more time, then folded its fingers into a fist and rested against his coat like a hitchhiker's thumb.
I'll get used to it, Derek told himself. I'll grow more arms. They'll be in better places. This is temporary. This is a PHASE. All gods go through awkward growth phases. Probably. Maybe. I have no basis for comparison because FROMSOFTWARE NEVER MADE A—
He stopped himself. The rant was a reflex at this point—a security blanket of righteous indignation that he retreated to whenever reality became too much.
He closed his eyes. Most of them. Left two open, as always. Sentries in the dark.
Sleep—meditation—the Great One approximation of rest—took him gently, like a wave lapping at a shore.
The message came at dawn.
Not the Dream's dawn—the Dream didn't have a dawn in any real sense, just a gradual brightening of the ambient light that Derek had come to associate with "morning." This was a different dawn. A deeper one. A frequency shift in the cosmic background radiation that made Derek's entire body resonate like a tuning fork.
He woke instantly. Every eye snapped open. Every tentacle went rigid. His back-arm shot upward, fingers splayed, as if reaching for something.
Something was coming.
Not the slow, patient stirring he'd felt before—the thing in the deep, the Dreamer Below, the vast presence that turned in its sleep and made the world shudder. This was different. This was directed. Intentional. A signal, aimed at the Dream with the precision of an arrow at a target.
Someone—or something—was sending him a message.
"DOLL," Derek projected, and his thought carried a frequency of urgency that he'd never used before. "DOLL, DO YOU FEEL THAT?"
The Doll was already there. Standing at the workshop door, fully dressed (when had she changed? How fast could she change? These were not relevant questions, Derek), her silver eyes wide, her hands clenched at her sides. She was staring at the sky.
Derek followed her gaze.
The Dream's sky—normally that soft, silver-grey twilight that he'd come to find comforting—was wrong. A crack had appeared in it—not a physical crack, not a tear in the fabric, but a line. A seam of absolute darkness running from one horizon to the other, thin as a hair, black as the space between stars.
And from the seam, sound.
Not a sound that ears could hear. A sound that resonated in the cosmic register, the frequency that only Great Ones could perceive—the frequency that Derek had been learning to tune into over the past days, the frequency that connected him to the Dream and the Dream to the cosmos.
The sound was a voice.
Not words—not language, not speech, not any organized system of communication. Something more fundamental. A presence expressing itself through vibration, the way a whale song expresses something to other whales across thousands of miles of ocean—not the content of the message, but the fact of the message, the undeniable reality that someone was speaking and expected to be heard.
And the message said:
I SEE YOU.
Two concepts. Simple. Direct. Devastating.
I SEE YOU.
Not a threat. Not a warning. Not an expression of hostility or intent. Just a statement of fact—a cosmic entity announcing, with the casual certainty of something that had been watching for a very, very long time, that it was aware of Derek's existence.
That the thing in the deep knew he was here.
That it had woken up enough to notice.
That it was looking at him.
Derek's entire body went cold. Not metaphorically—physically. The Dream-temperature plummeted. Frost appeared on the workshop windows. The fire in the hearth sputtered. The messengers, sensing the shift, burrowed into every available hiding spot with a speed and silence that spoke of instincts older than language.
Bitey pressed against Derek's side, its eye wide, its blade vibrating with a low, frightened hum.
Ping hovered in the air above them, its six eyes blinking in rapid, panicked succession, its pings reduced to a barely audible, trembling pip... pip... pip...
Elara stirred in her bed but didn't wake. The Dream was shielding her—Derek could feel it happening, feel the Dream wrapping itself around the sleeping hunter like a protective cocoon, keeping the cosmic frequency from reaching her mortal mind. An automatic response. The Dream protecting its inhabitants from a sound that would have driven a human insane.
But the Doll heard it.
And the Doll knew it.
Derek turned to look at her—and what he saw in her face made every one of his seventeen eyes go wide with a fear that transcended species.
The Doll was terrified.
Not the controlled, measured caution she'd shown when discussing the thing in the deep. Not the solemn concern she'd expressed when reading Gehrman's warnings. Terror. Raw, naked, porcelain-cracking terror that stripped away every mask, every persona, every layer of serene composure and left behind something that Derek had never seen in her before.
She was shaking. Her hands—those steady, precise, never-trembling hands—were shaking so badly that the joints at her wrists clicked with each vibration.
Her eyes were not silver. They were not gold. They were white—bleached of all color, all warmth, all light, like windows that had been painted over from the inside.
"Doll," Derek projected, and his thought was gentle because she looked like she might shatter. "Doll, what is it? Do you recognize—"
"Yes," she whispered, and her voice was small and broken and nothing like the voice of the Doll he knew. "I recognize it."
What is it? What sent that message?
The Doll's blank, white eyes turned to Derek. She looked at him—really looked at him, with the desperate, searching gaze of someone who is about to deliver the worst news in the history of news and is trying to find the strength to do it.
"The Moon Presence," she said, "feared one thing. In all the centuries I stood at its side, in all the eons of its existence, it feared one thing and one thing only."
She swallowed. Dolls don't swallow. She did it anyway.
"It called it the Dreamer Below. But that is not its name. That is its position—where it sleeps, where it has slept since before the Great Ones arose, since before the cosmos took its current shape. Its name—"
She stopped. Her mouth moved, forming a shape, but no sound came out. She tried again. Failed again. The word—the name—resisted being spoken, as if the very concept of it had teeth.
"Its name," she managed, on the third try, each syllable dragged from her throat like a splinter from flesh, "is Odium."
The word landed in the Dream like a stone dropped into a still pond. Ripples of wrongness spread outward from the syllables, distorting the air, warping the light. The flowers outside the workshop wilted. The fire in the hearth went out. A crack appeared in the workshop wall—a real crack, not a metaphorical one, running from floor to ceiling in a jagged line that wept a substance that was neither blood nor water but something older than both.
"Odium is not a Great One," the Doll continued, her voice gaining strength now—not from courage, but from the grim necessity of being the only person in the room who knew what they were dealing with. "It is what existed before the Great Ones. Before the cosmos. Before the Dream and the waking world and the space between them. It is the original dreamer—the consciousness that dreamed reality into being and then fell asleep within it, and whose sleep has sustained the universe ever since."
Derek's cosmic brain struggled to process this. The thing that dreamed reality? That's—that's—
"If it wakes up," the Doll said, and now her voice was barely a breath, a tremor, a confession made to the dark, "everything it dreamed... stops."
The silence that followed was absolute.
No fire. No wind. No messenger chirps. No Dream-hum. Nothing.
Just Derek and the Doll and the word "Odium" hanging in the air between them like a blade.
Everything stops, Derek thought, and the thought echoed through the Dream's hollowed-out silence. Not 'everything changes.' Not 'everything gets worse.' Everything. Stops.
Yharnam. The Dream. The Great Ones. The cosmos. All of it.
Game over.
Permanent game over.
No respawn.
He looked at the Doll. She looked at him. Two beings—one a terrified porcelain construct shaped by an idiot's subconscious, one a baby worm-god in a tiny coat with an arm on his back—staring at each other in the wreckage of a silence that used to contain a universe.
"Doll," Derek projected, and his thought was steady, because steadiness was the only thing he had left to offer. "Doll. Look at me."
She looked. Her white eyes, her shaking hands, her cracking composure.
"I heard the message," he said. "I felt it. And I know what it means. Something that makes the Moon Presence look like a goldfish just sent me a cosmic text that says 'I see you,' and our response to that is going to determine whether reality continues to exist."
He paused.
"But here's the thing."
He reached out with his back-arm—the only arm he had, the arm in the wrong place, the arm that pointed at the ceiling like a submarine periscope—and he stretched, contorted, twisted his worm body until the fingers of that ridiculous, misplaced arm brushed the Doll's cheek.
"I didn't come back from the dead to let some cosmic alarm clock destroy everything. I didn't eat the Moon Presence and become a worm and grow an arm in the wrong place and accidentally create a living Saw Cleaver and a flying eyeball and make every woman in my radius inexplicably thicc just to GIVE UP."
His fingers—four of them, small and violet and trembling slightly—cupped the Doll's porcelain cheek. She leaned into the touch. A tear—an actual tear, luminescent, silver—slid from her white eye and ran down her face and over his fingers.
"We have a library full of knowledge. We have a Dream that does what I tell it. We have weapons and echoes and messengers and hunters. We have Bitey and Ping and Captain and a chest full of every weapon I've ever used. We have EACH OTHER."
He straightened up—as much as a worm could straighten—and his coat settled around him, and his seventeen eyes blazed with a light that was not golden or silver but VIOLET—his color, his signature, the shade of a god who had been human and remembered what it meant to fight for something.
"And we have something that Odium doesn't have. Something that the Moon Presence didn't have. Something that every Great One in the history of the cosmos has LACKED."
The Doll stared at him. "What?"
Derek's arm gave her a thumbs up from behind his back.
"Spite," he said. "Pure, uncut, weapons-grade human spite. The kind that makes you fight a boss fourteen times at 3 AM when you have work in four hours. The kind that makes you play for forty hours straight because NOTHING in the UNIVERSE is going to beat you. The spite of a man who died on an Arby's salary and REFUSED to let that be the end of his story."
He paused for effect.
"Odium wants to wake up and end everything? FINE. It can TRY. But it's going to have to get through ME first. And I am PETTY. I am STUBBORN. I once spent SIX HOURS farming blood gems in a chalice dungeon because a Reddit post said the drop rate was 2% and I took that PERSONALLY."
The Doll stared at him. The crack in the wall was still weeping. The flowers were still wilted. The sky still had a seam of darkness running through it. Odium's message—I SEE YOU—still echoed in the cosmic register.
But the Doll's eyes were no longer white.
They were gold.
Warm, bright, alive gold, shimmering with tears and something else—something that looked a lot like the thing she'd shown him on the first day, the thing she'd shown only to him, the thing that existed because his Dream had shaped her into someone capable of it.
Hope.
"You are," the Doll said, and her voice was thick and wet and cracking and the most beautiful thing Derek had ever heard, "the most absurd god in the history of the cosmos."
I know, Derek projected. And I'm JUST getting started.
The fire in the hearth reignited. A small flame, tentative, but real.
The Dream was still there. Still his. Still standing.
And somewhere in the deep, in the places where light had never reached and reality was just a suggestion, something vast and ancient and terrible heard a response to its message.
Not a reply in words. Not a formal communication. Not a diplomatic overture or a cosmic negotiation.
What it heard was the psychic equivalent of a thirty-two-year-old Arby's employee, reborn as a baby eldritch god in a tiny coat with an arm on his back, looking into the abyss and saying:
Try me, bitch.
END OF CHAPTER 4
Next time on SQUID BABY & THE ABSURDLY THICC DOLL: Derek begins serious training to accelerate his growth. The arm migrates again (it's still not in the right place). Elara returns with more hunters—and more problems. The Doll reveals the truth about Lady Maria. And deep beneath Yharnam, in the tombs where the Pthumerians fell, something opens its eyes for the first time in ten thousand years.