Three days had passed since Odium's message.
The crack in the sky had sealed itself—or rather, Derek had sealed it, spending six hours of concentrated Dream-shaping to knit the seam closed with threads of his own cosmic will, a process that was approximately as pleasant as sewing a wound shut with your own tendons. The flowers had recovered. The fire had restabilized. The messengers had emerged from their hiding spots.
The Dream was whole again.
But the memory lingered. Not just in Derek's mind—in the Dream itself, like a bruise beneath the skin of reality. A faint discoloration in the sky where the crack had been, visible only to Derek's Great One senses. A reminder that something out there—something vast and old and patient—knew he existed.
Derek had made a decision about Odium.
The decision was: not yet.
Not because he wasn't scared. He was terrified. The kind of terrified that lived in the back of his mind like a permanent houseguest, rearranging the furniture of his thoughts and leaving passive-aggressive notes on the cosmic refrigerator. But terror was not useful. Terror did not help him grow, did not train his hunters, did not strengthen the Dream. Terror was a luxury he could not afford.
So he filed it. Put it in the mental drawer labeled "EXISTENTIAL THREATS: DEAL WITH LATER" and slammed the drawer shut and sat on it.
He had more immediate problems.
Like learning to crawl.
"The key," the Doll said, standing over him with her arms crossed and her expression pedagogical, "is to stop thinking of your body as a limitation and start thinking of it as a language."
Derek, lying on the workshop floor in a puddle of his own frustrated slime, stared up at her with eight of his seventeen eyes. The other nine were closed in concentration or pointed at the floor or, in the case of one particularly rebellious eye near his tail, staring directly at the ceiling for no discernible reason.
A language, he projected flatly.
"Your body speaks. Every movement, every shape, every configuration of your tentacles communicates something—to the Dream, to the messengers, to the waking world. Human bodies are crude instruments. They walk, they run, they grasp. One mode of locomotion. One set of limbs. Boring."
BORING?
"Boring," the Doll confirmed. "A Great One's body is an orchestra. Each tentacle is an instrument. Each eye is a lens. The body does not move—it expresses. And the first expression you must learn is the simplest: I am here, and I am moving."
She knelt beside him—her descent a symphony of structural adjustment that Derek had, through sheer force of will and three days of practice, learned to observe with only moderate cardiovascular disruption—and placed one hand flat on the workshop floor.
"Watch."
She pressed down. The floor beneath her palm rippled—a tiny wave of Dream-fabric, responding to her touch, reshaping itself in a concentric pattern around the point of contact.
"The Dream is not solid," she said. "It looks solid. It feels solid. But it is made of the same substance as you—the substance of the Dream, which is the substance of its master. You are not moving across the floor. You are moving through yourself. The floor is you. The walls are you. The air is you. Everything in the Dream is an extension of your being."
Derek processed this.
So when I try to crawl, I'm not... fighting the floor. I'm...
"You are rearranging yourself. Shifting the relationship between one part of you and another part of you. The worm does not crawl on the floor. The floor carries the worm, because the floor wants to, because the floor is the worm."
That's either the most profound thing I've ever heard or complete nonsense.
"In the Dream, those are the same thing."
Derek stared at the floor. His floor. His Dream. His reality, sustained by his will, shaped by his nature, existing because he existed.
He reached out—not with his arm (still on his back, still pointing skyward, still useless) or his tentacles, but with his awareness. The same awareness he used to shape the Dream, to feel its fabric, to seal cracks and create Biteys and Pings.
He reached into the floor beneath him and said: move me.
The floor moved him.
It was gentle—a wave, a current, a flow of Dream-substance that picked him up like a river picks up a leaf and carried him forward. Not fast—barely more than a slow walk—but smooth. Effortless. He wasn't crawling. He wasn't squirming. He was surfing—riding the surface of his own Dream like a cosmic body-boarder, his tentacles trailing behind him, his coat flapping in the breeze of his own motion.
OH, Derek projected, and the thought was electric with wonder. OH. THAT'S—
He accelerated. The floor responded, the wave beneath him growing, carrying him faster, smoother, the workshop blurring past him as he shot from one end to the other in a rush of motion that was—
He hit the wall.
Not hard. The wall was him too, and it cushioned the impact with the gentle resignation of a reality that had anticipated this exact outcome. But the sudden stop sent his tentacles flying forward, his coat flipping over his head, and his back-arm windmilling in a circle that would have been comical if anyone had been watching.
Everyone was watching.
The messengers—thirty-plus of them, lined up along the workbench like spectators at a racetrack—erupted in chirping applause. Captain waved its hat. Ping did a celebratory loop-de-loop, pinging madly. Bitey, perched on the workbench, clapped its blade against its handle in what was either applause or a threat.
Elara, sitting in the corner cleaning her threaded cane, was grinning so wide it looked like her face might split. "That was AMAZING! You went so fast! Do it again!"
The Doll smiled. Not her NPC smile—her real smile, the one that was Derek's alone. "Well done, Good Hunter. You have taken your first step."
Derek peeled himself off the wall, rearranged his coat, and pointed his back-arm at the ceiling in a gesture of triumph.
I can MOVE, he projected, and the joy in the thought was incandescent. I can actually MOVE. Under my own power. Without being carried by messengers or lying on a workbench like a sad noodle. I can—
He tried again. Reached into the floor. Said move me. The wave formed, and he was off—gliding across the workshop floor with increasing confidence, banking around the workbench, slaloming between messenger clusters, executing a turn that was only slightly wobbly before coming to a controlled stop in front of the Doll.
I'm a hovercraft, he thought gleefully. I'm a cosmic hovercraft. I'm a WORM HOVERCRAFT.
He spent the next three hours practicing.
By the end, he could move freely throughout the workshop and the garden outside—not fast, not gracefully, but independently. He could turn, stop, reverse, and even manage a crude approximation of hovering by asking the Dream to lift the surface beneath him into a small mound. He couldn't go up stairs yet (the staircase to the library remained his nemesis, conquerable only by messenger-surfing), and he couldn't move faster than a brisk walk, but he could go places.
It was the most liberated he'd felt since becoming a worm.
He celebrated by gliding out to the garden and doing three victory laps around the flower beds while the messengers cheered and Ping provided aerial escort and Bitey watched from the window with the tolerant exasperation of a cat watching its owner do something stupid.
The Doll watched too, from her spot near the flowers, and the warmth in her expression was enough to make the Dream-light brighten by ten percent.
Elara left for her second hunt at what Derek thought of as "mid-morning"—the Dream's ambient light at about sixty percent brightness, the flowers fully open, the sky its usual silver-grey.
She was better equipped this time. The Doll had channeled enough echoes to significantly boost her vitality and skill, and Derek had—after much deliberation and several false starts—managed to pull a set of proper Hunter's garb from his hammerspace and resize it using Dream-shaping.
The resizing had been... challenging.
The garb, originally designed for ButtStallion—a male character of average build—needed to be adjusted for Elara, who was a woman of decidedly non-average build, owing to the Dream-essence fountain incident. Derek had approached this task with the clinical detachment of a cosmic tailor and the internal composure of a man performing surgery on a live bomb.
"The shoulders need to come in," the Doll had said, holding up the coat and eyeing it critically.
"The waist needs to taper more," Elara had added, trying to pull the coat closed across her chest and failing spectacularly.
"And the—" the Doll had begun.
"I KNOW," Derek had projected, with enough psychic force to rattle the windows. "I KNOW WHAT NEEDS TO BE ADJUSTED. PLEASE STOP HELPING."
He'd managed it. Eventually. The coat now fit Elara properly—or as properly as any garment could fit a woman whose proportions had been modified by an eldritch god's subconscious desires—and she looked, Derek had to admit, exactly like a Bloodborne character should. The high collar. The layered cape. The belt with its pouches and vials. The whole ensemble, dark and weathered and deadly.
She also looked like the kind of person who would be very popular on certain corners of the internet, but Derek refused to think about that.
"I'm going deeper this time," Elara said, standing at the headstones with her threaded cane at her hip and a newly acquired Hunter's Pistol—pulled from Derek's hammerspace, loaded with quicksilver bullets that the Dream had generously manufactured—holstered at her other hip. "The people at Oedon Chapel said there are survivors in the Cathedral Ward, but the path is blocked by something big. Something they called 'the Vicar.'"
Vicar Amelia, Derek thought, and a chill ran through his worm-body. Oh boy.
"You know it?"
Big. Really big. Used to be human—one of the heads of the Healing Church. Transformed into a beast but retained enough of her humanity to keep praying. She's in the Grand Cathedral, at the top of the ward. She's... she's a hard fight, Elara.
"Harder than the Cleric Beast?"
...Yes.
Elara's jaw set. That look—the fierce, determined, I-will-punch-God-in-the-face look—settled over her features like a visor clicking into place.
"Good," she said. "I like hard fights."
And she was gone. Silver light, headstone, vanished.
Derek stared at the empty space where she'd been and thought: She's going to die. She's going to die SO many times. Vicar Amelia is a NIGHTMARE, and Elara's only been hunting for two days, and—
But she'll come back. Every time. That's the deal. That's the Dream.
And every time she comes back, she'll be stronger.
He turned away from the headstones—gliding now, his new hovercraft motion carrying him smoothly across the cobblestones—and headed for the library. He had reading to do. Growing to do. A world to understand.
But first—
Captain.
The hatted messenger appeared at his side with the instantaneousness of a creature that had been waiting for exactly this summons.
I need you to do something for me. Something important.
Captain straightened to its full height (approximately seven inches) and saluted with its toothpick spear.
I need you to go to the waking world. Through the headstones—you can do that, right? Messengers can cross over?
Captain chirped affirmatively. Messengers had always been able to cross the barrier—it was their primary function, delivering notes and items between the Dream and the waking world. In the game, they appeared as those eerie white hands reaching out of the ground near lanterns.
I need you to scout. Not Yharnam—I need you to go BEYOND Yharnam. To the roads, the outskirts, the surrounding territory. I need to know what's out there. Other cities, other settlements, other survivors. I need a MAP, Captain. I need to know the shape of the world.
Captain's eyes went wide. Its tiny mouth formed a perfect O of surprise—and then, slowly, a grin spread across its pale face. The grin of a messenger that had just been given a MISSION. A real mission. Not "hold this lantern" or "sit in this bath and sell things." A MISSION.
It chirped once—a sharp, military chirp—adjusted its hat, brandished its toothpick spear, and dove into the ground.
Gone.
Derek watched the spot where Captain had vanished and felt a complicated knot of emotions: hope, anxiety, excitement, fear.
The world is bigger than Yharnam, he thought. Time to find out how much bigger.
The arm migrated again at noon.
Derek was in the library, reading a section of Gehrman's notes about the Chalice Dungeons—specifically, about the deeper levels that even the game hadn't shown, the layers beneath Layer Four that Gehrman described as "not properly part of the physical world anymore"—when the itch started.
"Oh no," he projected. "Not again. Not NOW. I was in the middle of a really important—"
The arm slid.
It was faster this time—less glacier, more escalator. The limb detached from its position on his back and began migrating across the surface of his body with a determination that suggested his anatomy had somewhere to be and was running late.
"AAAAH—OW—THAT GOES THROUGH A SENSITIVE—OW OW OW—"
The arm traveled across his back, over his right side, down his flank, and—
Stopped.
Derek held very still. Assessed.
The arm was now on his right side. Approximately where a human's arm would be if humans were worms. Not perfect—slightly too far forward, angled a bit awkwardly—but close. Close enough that when he reached out, he could actually touch things in front of him without contorting his entire body into a pretzel.
He flexed the fingers. They responded. He reached for the book in front of him.
His hand closed around the spine. He lifted it. Held it up to his eyes.
He was holding a book. In front of his face. With his arm. Like a PERSON.
YES! he projected, and the Dream shook with his joy. YES! IT MOVED TO A GOOD PLACE! A REAL PLACE! A PLACE WHERE ARMS SHOULD BE! I CAN HOLD THINGS IN FRONT OF ME! I CAN—
He grabbed another book. Held both—one in his arm, one in a tentacle. Looked from one to the other. Two things. He was holding TWO THINGS.
I'M PRACTICALLY A HUMAN AGAIN! I HAVE ONE ARM AND SEVENTEEN EYES AND NO LEGS AND I LEAVE A SLIME TRAIL WHEREVER I GO BUT I CAN HOLD A BOOK IN FRONT OF MY FACE AND THAT MAKES ME MORE FUNCTIONAL THAN I'VE BEEN IN DAYS!
He glided out of the library (messenger-surfed up the stairs, then hovercraft'd across the workshop) and burst into the garden where the Doll was tending the flowers.
LOOK! he projected, holding up both books. LOOK AT ME! I'M HOLDING THINGS! IN FRONT OF MY FACE! THE ARM MOVED!
The Doll looked at him. Looked at the arm, now properly positioned on his right side. Looked at the books he was brandishing with the manic pride of a toddler who has just learned to stack blocks.
She smiled. That real smile. That his smile.
"Wonderful," she said, and meant it so completely that the flowers around her bloomed brighter.
Derek did three more victory laps of the garden.
Ping provided aerial support.
Bitey watched from the window and yawned.
Elara came back four hours later.
She was not alone.
Derek felt the Dream ripple—once, twice, three times, four—and by the time he'd glided from the library (where he'd been reading, actually HOLDING the book himself, like a SCHOLAR, like a REAL SCHOLAR) to the workshop window, the headstones were blazing with silver light.
Elara materialized first. Blood-soaked, grinning, threaded cane dripping with something that was definitely not human. She stepped aside, and—
A man appeared. Tall, broad, wearing the tattered remains of what had once been a Church militia uniform. His face was a map of scars, his eyes were wild, and he was clutching a wooden stake like it was the only thing between him and oblivion.
Then a woman. Shorter, wiry, with the calloused hands of a craftsperson and the watchful eyes of someone who had spent a long time being prey. She was holding a child against her chest—a boy, maybe four years old, with wide eyes and a thumb in his mouth.
Then another man. Old, stooped, leaning on a cane that was definitely not a weapon, wearing the robes of a Healing Church cleric. His eyes were milky with cataracts, but they moved with a sharpness that suggested the blindness was not as complete as it appeared.
Then two more women, a teenage boy, and a dog.
A dog.
Derek stared.
Eight people and a dog materialized in his Dream, blinking in the silver light, looking around with the dazed confusion of souls who had just been pulled across the barrier between realities and were trying very hard not to lose the remaining shreds of their sanity.
Elara, Derek projected, with the carefully measured tone of a cosmic deity who was trying very hard not to shout. ELARA. What did you DO?
Elara bounded up the hill toward the workshop, her enhanced figure bouncing with each step in ways that the Hunter's garb was not designed to accommodate, her face alight with the specific joy of someone who had done something they were very proud of and had not yet considered the consequences.
"I brought people!" she announced.
I can SEE that you brought people. WHY did you bring people? The Dream is for HUNTERS. These are CIVILIANS. That man has a CANE. That woman has a CHILD. There is a DOG.
"The path to the Cathedral Ward was blocked," Elara said, her grin not diminishing one iota. "Not by Vicar Amelia—I haven't gotten that far yet. By rubble. A building collapsed across the main road. And behind the rubble, I found these people. They'd been trapped for days. No food, no water, beasts on all sides."
She gestured at the group, who were now clustered together at the base of the hill, looking up at the Dream's silver sky with expressions ranging from wonder to terror.
"I couldn't leave them. The rubble was too heavy to move, and the only way out was through the beast territory, and they couldn't fight. So I—" she paused, for the first time showing a hint of uncertainty, "—I sort of... grabbed them and pulled them through the headstone."
You pulled eight people and a dog through a hunter's headstone.
"...Yes?"
Headstones are designed for HUNTERS. People who have signed the contract. People who are ATTUNED to the Dream. You can't just—you can't YANK random civilians through a dimensional gateway like—
Derek stopped.
Because as he was projecting this thought, he became aware of something. A sensation in the Dream's fabric—a stretching, an accommodation, a RESPONSE. The Dream was reacting to the new arrivals. Not rejecting them—accepting them. Wrapping itself around them the way it had wrapped around Elara when she first arrived, providing warmth, safety, the subtle psychic reassurance that said you are protected here.
The Dream WANTED them here.
Or rather—Derek wanted them here. Because Derek was the Dream, and Derek was a man who had heard Elara describe people trapped in rubble surrounded by beasts, and Derek's immediate, instinctive, non-negotiable reaction to that description was save them.
The Dream had responded to that instinct. It had opened itself—stretched its capacity, expanded its boundaries—to accommodate eight people and a dog because its master's heart had said yes before his brain could say wait.
Oh, Derek thought. Oh, I see. I... I did this. Without meaning to. The Dream read my reaction to Elara's situation and preemptively opened itself to anyone she brought back.
I really need to get my subconscious under control. First the thiccening, now this. My unconscious mind is running the show and I'm just along for the ride.
He looked at the group. The scarred militia man was scanning the perimeter with professional paranoia. The craftswoman was murmuring to the child, who had stopped sucking his thumb and was staring at the white flowers with wide, wondering eyes. The old cleric was standing very still, his milky eyes turned toward the sky, tears streaming silently down his weathered cheeks.
The dog—a scrappy, medium-sized mutt of indeterminate breed, with one ear that stood up and one that flopped down and a tail that wagged with the relentless optimism of a creature that had not yet learned to be afraid—was sniffing a messenger.
The messenger was sniffing the dog back.
...Fine, Derek projected. Fine. They can stay. The Dream has room. We'll figure out logistics later. But Elara—
"Yes?"
If you're going to keep bringing home strays, we need to TALK about capacity. The Dream isn't infinite. I think. I'm actually not sure if it's infinite. I'll check Gehrman's notes. But EVEN IF it's infinite, there are PRACTICAL considerations—food, shelter, sanitation—
"You're a god," Elara pointed out. "Can't you just... Dream-shape whatever they need?"
Derek opened his mouth to argue and then closed it.
Because... yes. Yes, he could. The Dream responded to his will. He had created life (Bitey, Ping), shaped matter (the coat, the resized armor), manipulated the fundamental fabric of his reality (the crawling-hovering, the sky-crack repair). Creating shelter for eight people would be...
Actually, he had no idea how hard it would be. He'd never tried to create a building before. The closest he'd come was accidentally making a living weapon, which did not bode well for architecture.
I'll try, he projected. But if I accidentally create a sentient house, nobody gets to complain.
He did not create a sentient house.
He created a sentient garden.
In his defense, the original plan had been perfectly sensible. He'd visualized a simple cottage—stone walls, thatched roof, fireplace, beds. The kind of rustic, medieval dwelling that Yharnam was full of and that the Dream could presumably replicate without too much difficulty.
But the Dream, interpreting his will through the filter of his Great One nature, had—as usual—added its own creative flourishes.
The cottage appeared. It was lovely—cozy, warm, exactly what he'd imagined. Stone walls, thatched roof, fireplace, beds. Perfect.
It was also alive.
Not the building itself—the building was inert, thank God. But the moment the cottage materialized, the ground around it erupted in vegetation. Not the white flowers of the Dream's default landscape—something new, something that came from Derek's creative energy. Plants that glowed softly in shades of blue and violet, with leaves that curled and uncurled in response to stimuli, flowers that chimed when the wind blew, vines that reached toward the nearest living thing with gentle, questing tendrils.
The garden was alive. Aware. Not intelligent, exactly—not the way Bitey was intelligent, with an eye and a personality—but responsive. It reacted to the presence of the refugees the way a sunflower reacts to the sun, turning toward them, reaching for them, offering fruit (small, luminescent berries that appeared spontaneously on the vines) and shelter (the plants growing thicker and denser around the cottage, forming a natural windbreak).
The refugees were, understandably, alarmed.
"It's FINE," Elara told them, picking a berry and eating it without hesitation. "The Dream god made it. It's friendly. Everything the Dream god makes is friendly."
"Even the breathing knife?" asked the militia man, who had been introduced to Bitey and had not recovered.
"ESPECIALLY the breathing knife."
Derek watched from the workshop window as the refugees tentatively explored their new home—the cottage, the garden, the gentle plants that offered fruit and warmth and the soft, bioluminescent glow of cosmic welcome. The child had already made friends with a vine, which had curled around his wrist like a bracelet and was producing tiny flowers for his amusement. The dog was eating a berry and wagging its tail.
I need to stop being surprised by my own abilities, Derek thought. I keep trying to make ordinary things and getting extraordinary things. Maybe that's the point. Maybe Great Ones CAN'T make ordinary things. Maybe every act of creation is inherently cosmic and alive and weird.
Maybe that's not a bug. Maybe it's a feature.
He looked at the garden, at the cottage, at the people settling into the safety of his Dream with the exhausted gratitude of survivors who had finally, finally found shore.
Maybe weird is exactly what the world needs right now.
Captain returned at dusk.
The messenger surfaced from the floor of the workshop with the dramatic flair of a submarine breaking the surface—bursting through the stone in a spray of Dream-particles, toothpick spear held high, tiny hat slightly askew, every inch of its small body vibrating with the unmistakable energy of a creature that had SEEN THINGS and could not WAIT to tell someone about them.
It was not alone.
Three other messengers emerged behind it—scouts, Derek realized, that Captain had recruited for its mission. They looked different from the workshop messengers. Travel-worn. Dust-covered. One of them was carrying what appeared to be a leaf from a tree that Derek didn't recognize—a deep red, broad-veined leaf that smelled of spice and distance.
Captain! Derek projected, gliding across the workshop to meet them. Report! What did you find?
Captain planted its spear in the floor, drew itself up to its full height, and began.
The report was delivered in the messenger fashion—chirps, gestures, impressions, objects. Not a verbal debriefing but a sensory one, each element communicating a piece of the picture that Derek's Great One mind assembled into a coherent whole.
The picture was bigger than he'd expected.
The world beyond Yharnam was vast.
Yharnam sat near the center of a large landmass—a continent, or at least a significant chunk of one. To the north, the land rose into mountains—tall, jagged, snow-capped peaks that Captain's scouts had seen from a distance but not approached. To the south, it descended into lowlands—marshes, river deltas, and eventually a coastline. The sea. Kos's sea. The body of water that connected to the Fishing Hamlet and, presumably, to whatever else lurked in the ocean's depths.
To the east, forests. Dense, dark, old-growth forests that Captain's impression conveyed as "wrong." Not wrong in the way Yharnam was wrong—not scourge-wrong, not beast-wrong. A different wrong. A primal wrong. The wrong of a place where something lived that didn't want to be found.
And to the west—
Cities.
Not one. Not two. Captain held up fingers. Five. Six. More, maybe, beyond the range of the scouts' exploration. Human settlements, spread across the western portion of the continent, connected by roads and trade routes and the invisible threads of shared culture.
Some were small—villages, towns, outposts. Some were large—cities rivaling Yharnam in size, with walls and towers and populations in the tens of thousands. And at least two of them, Captain's impression conveyed with unmistakable gravity, were experiencing their own problems.
Not the scourge. Not beasts. Something else.
Captain produced two objects from behind its back (where did messengers keep things? Their anatomy didn't support pockets. This was another question Derek filed away for later). The first was a stone—a small, smooth, river-worn stone that pulsed with a faint, cold light. Derek's Great One senses recoiled from it immediately. The stone radiated a frequency that was wrong—not hostile, not dangerous, but off. Like a note played slightly out of tune.
The second object was a tooth.
A very large tooth.
A tooth approximately the size of Derek's entire body, curved and sharp and black as obsidian, thrumming with a power that made his tentacles curl and his seventeen eyes narrow.
It was not a beast's tooth. It was not a human tooth. It was not, as far as Derek's cosmic senses could determine, the tooth of any creature he knew from the game.
It was something new.
Where did you get this? Derek projected, staring at the tooth with a mixture of fascination and alarm.
Captain chirped. The impression was: found it. On the ground. Near one of the western cities. It was just... there. In a field. Like it fell from the sky.
Fell from the—
Derek looked at the tooth more closely. His Great One perception peeled back layers of physical reality, reading the object's history the way he read blood echoes—not in words, but in impressions, feelings, fragments of context.
The tooth was old. Not centuries old—millennia old. It had been lodged in something once—a jaw, presumably, though whatever jaw had contained this tooth must have been the size of a building. It had been dislodged violently—cracked at the root, torn free with force. And it had been falling for a long time.
Not falling through the air. Falling through layers. Through strata of reality, through the membrane between the waking world and the deeper places, through the cosmic architecture that separated what was real from what was not.
This tooth had fallen from one of the higher planes—from the realm of the Great Ones, or from somewhere even further up—and had landed in a field near a city whose name Derek didn't know, and Captain had found it, and brought it here, and now it was sitting on his workbench radiating a frequency that made his skin crawl.
Something is up there, Derek thought. Something big enough to have teeth THIS size. And it's losing them. Shedding them. Like a shark—old teeth fall out, new ones grow in. And the old ones are falling DOWN. Into the waking world.
What IS that? What's up there, above the cosmos, big enough to—
He stopped himself. Filed the question. Added it to the ever-growing list of mysteries that this universe contained and that FromSoftware had never, EVER addressed because they were too busy MAKING ELDEN RING—
Focus, Derek. One thing at a time.
He turned to Captain.
Good work, he projected, and filled the thought with warmth and pride and the genuine gratitude of a god who could not do this alone. Really good work. You went further than I expected. You found more than I hoped. I'm proud of you.
Captain stood a little taller. Adjusted its hat. Beamed.
I need you to go again. Take more scouts this time—as many as you can spare. I need detailed information about those western cities. What's happening there. Why they're having problems. What that stone is. And I need someone to go south, to the coast. To the sea. I need to know what's in the water.
Captain saluted. Chirped. Dove into the floor.
Gone again.
Derek looked at the tooth. Looked at the stone. Looked at the red leaf.
The world was bigger than he'd thought. Stranger than he'd feared. And full of things that no game, no lore video, no Reddit thread had ever prepared him for.
But that's okay, he thought, settling the objects on the workbench with his one properly-positioned arm. Because I'm not playing a game anymore. I'm LIVING in the world. And in the world, you don't need a strategy guide.
You just need to keep going.
He glided to the workshop door and looked out at the Dream. The garden, the cottage, the flowers. The refugees settling in. The messengers going about their business. The Doll standing in the flowers, her hands clasped, her eyes on the sky, beautiful and terrifying and his.
Keep going, he thought.
And the Dream carried the thought to its edges, and held it there, and waited for morning.
END OF CHAPTER 5
Next time: Derek reads more of Gehrman's library and discovers that the old hunter had contact with someone OUTSIDE Yharnam. Elara faces Vicar Amelia. A second hunter arrives—and this one isn't from Hemwick. And in Old Yharnam, something that isn't a beast and isn't a Great One and isn't human makes itself known to the Dream's messengers.