The dog's name was Patches.
Not because Derek named it—he had learned his lesson about naming things after the Bitey incident and was trying to exercise restraint—but because the dog had apparently already HAD a name, given to it by the refugees, and that name was Patches.
"Like the bald guy?" Derek had projected, staring at the mutt with the specific dismay of a man who had been betrayed by a dog's nomenclature. "Like Patches the Spider? Like the NPC who has appeared in EVERY FromSoftware game since Armored Core and whose sole purpose is to push you off cliffs and lie about treasure?"
The refugees had stared at him blankly. They didn't know what a FromSoftware game was. They didn't know what an NPC was. They didn't know what Armored Core was. They just had a dog named Patches, and they didn't understand why the tiny Dream god in the tiny coat was having such a visceral reaction to this fact.
"It's a perfectly good name," the craftswoman—her name was Marta, Derek had learned, a leatherworker from the lower ward—had said defensively. "He patches things up. Cheers people up. Patches."
That is NOT why that name exists in this universe, Derek had thought, but he'd let it go, because the dog was looking at him with those big, brown, stupidly earnest eyes and wagging its mismatched tail and he was, as he was rapidly discovering, constitutionally incapable of staying mad at anything that wanted to be his friend.
That had been two days ago.
Since then, Patches the dog had become Derek's shadow.
The mutt had taken one look at the tiny, coat-wearing, tentacled, seventeen-eyed cosmic deity gliding around the Dream on a wave of self-propelled floor and had apparently decided: that's my person. It followed Derek everywhere—to the library (where it lay at the base of the workbench and snored while Derek read), to the garden (where it chased Ping in circles, the flying eyeball pinging in delighted panic as the dog leaped and snapped beneath it), to the workshop (where it curled up next to Bitey in what had become an increasingly crowded sleeping arrangement).
Bitey, to Derek's astonishment, tolerated the dog. More than tolerated—the living Saw Cleaver and the mutt had developed a rapport that Derek could only describe as "old married couple." Bitey would lie still while Patches gnawed on its handle (the handle was bone, after all, and the dog was a dog), and Patches would serve as a heated bed for Bitey during the Dream's cooler periods, the weapon settling into the warm curve of the dog's belly with a contented purr.
It was, objectively, the most disturbing and adorable interspecies friendship Derek had ever witnessed.
But the real reason Patches had become important—the reason Derek had stopped thinking of the dog as a refugee's pet and started thinking of it as his dog—was what had happened on the second morning.
Derek had been in the library, reading one of Gehrman's later journals. He'd been alone—the messengers were scattered throughout the Dream on various tasks, the Doll was attending to the refugees, Elara was preparing for her next hunt. Just Derek and the books and the quiet.
And then Patches had come down the stairs.
Not been carried down. Not fallen down. The dog had navigated the narrow, spiral staircase to the secret library with the nimble determination of a creature that had decided it was going to be where its person was, architecture be damned. It had descended step by step, its claws clicking on the stone, its tail thumping against the walls, until it reached the library floor and padded over to Derek and lay down beside him with a satisfied huff.
Derek had looked at the dog.
The dog had looked at Derek.
And then Patches had done something that no animal—no ordinary animal, no mundane, non-cosmic, non-eldritch animal—should have been able to do.
It had placed its nose against the page Derek was reading, sniffed deeply, and then let out a single, low bark that carried information.
Not verbal information. Not language. But information—a packet of sensory data, transmitted through sound at a frequency that Derek's Great One senses decoded automatically. The bark said: old. Important. Sad man wrote this. Sad man missed someone. This page smells like tears.
The dog could read the emotional content of objects.
Derek had stared at Patches with all seventeen eyes. The dog had wagged its tail, tongue lolling, utterly unbothered by the fact that it had just demonstrated a psychometric ability that shouldn't have been possible for a canine.
You're not a normal dog, Derek had projected.
Wag wag wag.
You've been living in a city saturated with old blood for God knows how long. You've been eating food grown in blood-soaked soil, drinking water laced with Great One essence. You've been marinating in cosmic radiation since you were a puppy.
Wag wag wag.
You're a blood dog. An insight dog. You're what happens when a perfectly normal mutt gets exposed to the Bloodborne universe for its entire life.
Wag wag wag.
Can you—can you understand me? Like, really understand me? Not just tone and emotion, but actual—
Patches had barked once. The bark said: yes, obviously, are there treats?
Derek had laughed so hard—projected his amusement so intensely—that three bottles had fallen off a shelf and two messengers had poked their heads down the stairs to see what was happening.
Since then, Patches had been promoted from "refugee pet" to "cosmic companion." The dog went everywhere Derek went, served as an emotional barometer for the Dream's inhabitants (barking warning whenever someone was upset, nudging comfort against anyone who was sad), and had an uncanny ability to find things—hidden objects, concealed passages, the specific book Derek was looking for in Gehrman's library—that bordered on supernatural.
Because it WAS supernatural.
Because everything in this universe was supernatural.
Because FromSoftware had created a world so thoroughly saturated with cosmic horror that even the DOGS were eldritch.
Derek loved him.
He loved him so much it was embarrassing.
I am a god, he reminded himself, as Patches lay across his tentacles in the library and snored with his tongue out. I am an infant Great One. I am the master of the Hunter's Dream. I am engaged in a cosmic struggle for the fate of reality itself.
And I have a dog.
Best dog.
It was Patches, in fact, who led Derek to the discovery about Gehrman's outside contact.
The dog had been nosing around the far corner of the library—a section Derek hadn't fully explored yet, a narrow alcove tucked behind a support column where the shelves were dustier and the texts were older and the air had a quality that Derek's senses identified as "deliberately hidden."
Patches had barked. The bark said: secret. Here. Something hidden. Something the sad man didn't want found easily.
Derek had glided over, his arm reaching out to brush aside the dust on the lowest shelf. Behind a row of decoy texts—blank books, their pages empty, placed as camouflage—he found a small wooden box, sealed with a latch that responded to his Great One touch with the same violet recognition as the hammerspace chest.
Inside the box: letters.
A stack of them, maybe thirty in total, written on paper that was thinner and smoother than the parchment Gehrman used for his notes. The handwriting was not Gehrman's—it was elegant, precise, with a feminine quality that spoke of formal education and steady hands.
And the letters were addressed to "My Dear First Hunter."
Derek's tentacles curled with excitement. He lifted the first letter—carefully, reverently, with his one proper arm while Patches watched with alert interest—and began to read.
"My Dear First Hunter,
Your latest correspondence reached me through the usual channel—I must commend your messengers; they grow more reliable with each passage, though the one with the hat insists on performing a small dance upon arrival that I confess I find charming rather than professional.
You ask about the situation in Arlenberg. I wish I had better news to offer. The blood trade continues to expand, despite my efforts and those of the Circle. The Church's missionaries have established a permanent chapel in the merchant quarter, and the common folk line up each Sabbath for their ministrations as though queuing for bread. They do not understand what they consume. How could they? The Church presents it as sacrament, as divine healing, as the mercy of gods who love humanity. They do not mention the cities that have fallen. They do not speak of Loran.
I have managed to secure three of the ancient texts you requested from the University archives. They are enclosed with this letter, wrapped in oilcloth to protect against the damp. The third text—the one you specifically asked about, the Isz Communion Record—was more difficult to obtain. The University has been infiltrated, my dear Hunter. Church agents sit in the faculty senate. Church money funds the research halls. The tendrils of Yharnam reach far further than you know.
I remain, as always, your ally in this work.
With respect and affection,
Annaliese Kroft
Keeper of the Circle of Arlenberg"
Derek read the letter three times.
Then he read it a fourth time, because his brain was still refusing to accept what his eyes were telling it.
Gehrman had a pen pal.
Gehrman—the isolated, imprisoned, wheelchair-bound First Hunter who had spent centuries trapped in the Dream with no one to talk to except a doll modeled after his dead student and a cosmic parasite that used him as a puppet—had maintained a correspondence. With someone outside Yharnam. Someone in a city called Arlenberg, which did not appear in any Bloodborne game, any item description, any lore theory, any fan wiki, anywhere.
Because it was new.
Because the world was bigger than the game.
Because of course it was.
Derek dove into the letters with a hunger that rivaled his first feeding. He read them in order—chronologically, starting from the earliest (dated to what he estimated was about a century before the events of the game) and proceeding forward. The letters painted a picture—slowly, in pieces, like a puzzle assembling itself one edge at a time—of a relationship and a world that expanded Derek's understanding of everything.
Annaliese Kroft was a scholar. She lived in Arlenberg—a city roughly three hundred miles west of Yharnam, by her description a center of learning and trade, home to a great university and a thriving culture that had, until recently, had nothing to do with the Healing Church or its blood.
She was also a member of something called the Circle—an organization that Derek had never heard of, that no game had ever mentioned, that existed entirely outside the scope of Bloodborne's narrative. The Circle was, from what Derek could piece together, an informal network of scholars, alchemists, and "those with eyes," spread across the continent, dedicated to studying the Great Ones and the cosmic forces that influenced the world. Not worshipping them, like the Healing Church. Not hunting them, like the hunters. Studying them. Understanding them. Trying to find a way to coexist with cosmic horror rather than being consumed by it or trying to consume it.
The Circle had been aware of the Healing Church's blood ministration for decades. They had watched it spread from Yharnam to the surrounding settlements with the slow-building alarm of people who understood exactly what the blood was and exactly what it would do. They had tried to warn the cities that embraced it. They had been ignored.
Annaliese's letters to Gehrman were equal parts academic correspondence, intelligence reports, and—Derek noted with a pang—genuine friendship. She asked about his research. She shared her own findings. She sent him books and artifacts that her agents had procured from universities and private collections. She asked about his health, his spirits, his state of mind. She expressed concern, admiration, frustration, anger.
And Gehrman wrote back. Through the messengers—Captain's predecessors, apparently, doing the same cross-dimensional postal work—the First Hunter maintained a lifeline to the outside world. A connection. A friend.
Derek reached the final letter in the stack. It was dated to approximately two years before the events of the game. The handwriting was shakier than the earlier letters—not Annaliese's usual precise elegance, but something hurried, pressed, written in haste.
"My Dear First Hunter,
I write in urgency. The situation has deteriorated beyond what I feared possible.
Arlenberg has fallen.
Not to beasts—not yet. To the Church. The Healing Church has moved from infiltration to occupation. Church soldiers—Executioners, they call themselves, though they bear the white of a different order than those you have described in Yharnam—arrived three weeks ago under the pretense of 'humanitarian aid.' They brought the blood in barrels. They set up ministration stations in the public squares. And when the University Circle protested, when we tried to warn the people, the Executioners declared us heretics.
The Circle has been scattered. My colleagues are dead, imprisoned, or fled. I write this from a cellar in the old quarter, by candlelight, with Church patrols on the street above.
I will not be able to write again. The messenger channels are being watched—the Church has developed some means of detecting them, some ritual or device that alerts them to the passage between the Dream and the waking world. Your messengers are in danger. My letters are in danger. This correspondence is in danger.
But I will not let it end without telling you what I have learned.
The Church is not what you think it is.
You know it as a religious institution—founded by Laurence, devoted to blood ministration, corrupted by ambition and madness. This is true. But it is not the whole truth.
The Healing Church is a HIERARCHY, my dear Hunter. Layers within layers, secrets within secrets. You know of the Choir—the highest visible echelon, those who commune with Ebrietas and seek eyes on the inside. You know of the School of Mensis—Micolash and his mad scholars, reaching for the Great Ones through nightmare. You know of the Executioners, the Hunters of Hunters, the various militant arms.
But beneath all of these—beneath even the Choir, beneath the deepest secrets that Laurence carried—there is another layer. A foundation upon which the entire Church was built. A group so old and so hidden that even the Choir does not know they exist.
They call themselves the Roots.
I do not know who they are. I do not know how many. I know only that they predate the Church itself—that the Church was not founded by Laurence but CO-OPTED by him, built upon an infrastructure that already existed, an organization that had been operating in the shadows of the continent for centuries before Laurence ever set foot in the Pthumerian tombs.
The Roots are not interested in healing. They are not interested in evolution. They are not interested in communion or insight or ascension or any of the stated goals of the Church's various factions.
They are interested in ONE thing.
Control.
Control of the blood. Control of the Great Ones. Control of the mechanism by which cosmic power enters the human world. They have been working toward this goal for longer than any living person can remember, and everything—EVERYTHING—that has happened in Yharnam, in Loran, in Arlenberg, in every city the Church has touched—is part of their design.
I do not know their endgame. I do not know what they want the control FOR. But I know this: they are aware of the Dream. They are aware of YOU. And they are patient.
Be careful, my dear Hunter. Be very careful.
If this is my last letter, know that your friendship has been the light of my later years. Know that I will continue the work, even if I can no longer share it with you. Know that the Circle may be scattered, but its members carry the knowledge with them, and knowledge, once planted, is very difficult to kill.
With love, and with defiance,
Annaliese Kroft
Last Keeper of the Circle of Arlenberg"
Derek set down the letter.
He sat on the library floor—Patches pressed against his side, the dog's warmth a grounding anchor against the cold that was spreading through his worm-body—and stared at the wall.
The Roots.
A secret organization WITHIN the Healing Church, BENEATH the Healing Church, PREDATING the Healing Church. An infrastructure of control and manipulation that had been operating for centuries—maybe longer—pulling strings, guiding events, shaping the course of blood ministration across an entire continent.
The Healing Church wasn't just a corrupt religious institution. It was a front. A public face for something older, deeper, more deliberate than anything Derek had imagined.
And that something had known about the Dream.
Had known about Gehrman.
Had, presumably, known about the Moon Presence.
And now—with the Moon Presence dead and a new master in the Dream—they knew about Derek.
Fantastic, Derek thought. Absolutely fantastic. A secret shadow organization. Because cosmic horrors and city-destroying plagues and reality-ending sleeper gods weren't ENOUGH. Now I've got a CONSPIRACY.
Miyazaki would LOVE this. This is EXACTLY the kind of thing he'd put in a game—hidden, cryptic, revealed through item descriptions that you have to read seventeen times to understand. Except I'm not reading item descriptions. I'm reading the actual letters of a woman who might be DEAD because of these people.
Annaliese...
He looked at the letter again. The shakiness of the handwriting. The urgency. The fear, barely contained, leaking through the precise academic prose like blood through bandages.
Are you still alive? he wondered. Out there, somewhere, in a cellar or a prison or a shallow grave? Did you survive? Did the Circle survive?
I need to find out.
I need to find Arlenberg.
He carefully placed the letters back in the box, sealed it, and tucked it into a secure spot on the shelf. Then he turned to Patches.
Guard this, he projected. This box. These letters. They're important.
Patches barked. The bark said: obviously. I'm a good boy. Guarding things is what good boys do.
Derek patted the dog's head with his one arm—a gesture that was awkward, given the arm's position, but that Patches accepted with the grace of a dog who had long since stopped caring about the anatomical peculiarities of his owner—and glided toward the stairs.
He had things to do.
A lot of things.
And the list was getting longer by the hour.
The hammerspace training began that afternoon.
Derek had been putting this off—not out of laziness, but out of a justified fear that attempting to wield weapons designed for a six-foot humanoid while being a nine-inch cosmic slug would result in either embarrassment, injury, or the accidental creation of another living weapon.
But the letters had changed his calculus. The Roots were out there. Odium was down there. The world was full of things that wanted to hurt the people under his protection. And Derek—the master of the Dream, the inheritor of the Moon Presence's power, the being responsible for every hunter and refugee and messenger and dog in his care—could not hold a SWORD.
This was unacceptable.
"I'm going to practice," he announced—projected—to the Doll, who was standing in the garden with her watering can, tending the new living plants with the bemused efficiency of a gardener whose charges kept trying to hug her. "I'm going to open the hammerspace. I'm going to take out the weapons. And I'm going to figure out how to use them."
The Doll set down the watering can. A vine immediately picked it up and continued the watering itself, which the Doll observed with an expression of fond exasperation before turning to Derek.
"You have one arm," she said.
I'm aware.
"It is on your right side."
I'M AWARE.
"Most of those weapons require two hands."
I WILL FIGURE IT OUT.
The Doll's lips twitched. That micro-smile, the one she deployed when Derek was being stubborn and she found it equal parts frustrating and endearing. "Very well. Shall I assist?"
Yes. Please. I need someone to hold things while I swing at them.
"I am not going to be your training dummy, Derek."
I wasn't going to ask you to be my training dummy. I was going to ask you to hold a book or something so I can practice precision strikes—
"You were going to ask me to be your training dummy."
...Maybe a little bit.
The Doll sighed. It was a sigh that encompassed centuries of patience and approximately three days of Derek. "I will observe. And correct your form. But if you swing a weapon at me, I will take it away."
Fair.
The hammerspace chest opened with the same violet flash as before—that recognition pulse, the cosmic handshake between Derek and the extradimensional space that contained his arsenal. He hovered over the open chest, his seventeen eyes surveying the contents with the covetous intensity of a child on Christmas morning.
Okay. Start small. Something one-handed. Something light. Something I can actually—
His eye fell on the Blade of Mercy.
The twin daggers—short, curved, wickedly sharp, designed for speed rather than power. In the game, they'd been a skill weapon, scaling with dexterity, perfect for players who favored quick, darting attacks over heavy swings. Derek had used them for the Gehrman fight—fast enough to punish the old hunter's openings, light enough to dodge his scythe.
He reached in and pulled one of the daggers from the chest.
The moment his fingers closed around the handle, the weapon's muscle memory hit him like a wave. Not his body's muscle memory—ButtStallion's. The phantom sensation of a hand that no longer existed gripping this handle, of a body that no longer existed flowing through the quickstep patterns of the Blade of Mercy's moveset.
He knew how to use this weapon.
His brain knew. His cosmic consciousness knew. The knowledge was there—complete, detailed, comprehensive.
His body did not know.
His body was a worm.
The Blade of Mercy was about three inches longer than Derek's entire arm. It was designed for a human grip, a human wrist, a human body weight behind the swing. Derek's arm was approximately the diameter of a pencil, his wrist was a ball joint of cosmic cartilage, and his body weight was roughly equivalent to a large potato.
He swung the dagger.
The momentum carried him. The dagger didn't move through the air so much as the air moved Derek, the blade's weight pulling his arm and then his body in a graceless arc that sent him spinning off the workbench like a top.
He hit the floor, rolled three times, and came to a stop against Patches' leg. The dog looked down at him with an expression of patient concern.
I'm fine, Derek projected from the floor. That was a practice swing. That was INTENTIONAL.
"Your form needs work," the Doll observed from across the workshop, where she had positioned herself at a safe distance.
YOU THINK?
He tried again. And again. And again.
Each attempt was marginally less catastrophic than the last. The first ten swings sent him flying. The next ten merely sent him stumbling. By the twentieth, he had figured out a crucial adaptation: he couldn't swing the blade THROUGH the air like a human. He had to swing it WITH the air—using his Dream-connection, his hovercraft motion, to move his entire body in the direction of the strike, turning the swing into a full-body lunge rather than an arm motion.
It was ugly. It was ungraceful. It was the combat equivalent of a bowling ball with a knife taped to it.
But the blade moved. And it cut.
On the thirtieth attempt, he managed to slice cleanly through a practice target (a rolled-up blanket that the Doll had hung from the rafters, because she was helpful like that). The cut was clean—not a hack, not a tear, but a genuine, precise cut that separated the blanket's fibers with surgical accuracy.
YES! Derek projected, hovering in front of the bisected blanket with the triumphant pride of a man who had just discovered fire. I CUT SOMETHING! I CUT SOMETHING WITH A BLADE! I AM A WORM WITH A KNIFE AND I CUT SOMETHING!
"You also cut the rope holding the blanket, the shelf behind the blanket, and part of the wall," the Doll noted.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE IS ACCEPTABLE IN EARLY TRAINING.
He moved on to the next weapon. The Saw Cleaver—the original, non-living one. Heavier, longer, more unwieldy. The trick mechanism was beyond his current capability (you needed two hands to work the transformation), but in its base form—the short cleaver mode—it was manageable. Barely.
Then the threaded cane—too long, too awkward, the whip form completely impossible with one arm.
Then the Hunter's Axe—too heavy, the weight pulling him to the floor like a magnet.
Then—against his better judgment, against every rational calculation of risk versus reward—he reached into the hammerspace and pulled out the Burial Blade.
Gehrman's weapon.
It was beautiful. Even as a non-expert, even as a worm, even as a creature whose aesthetic sensibilities were largely shaped by video game screenshots and fan art, Derek could recognize the sheer artistry of the thing. The blade was curved—a sweeping, graceful arc of pale metal that caught the Dream-light and reflected it in prismatic patterns. The handle was wrapped in aged leather, worn smooth by centuries of use. And the trick mechanism—the ingenious, elegant system that allowed the blade to extend from a curved sword into a full-length scythe—clicked with a precision that spoke of master craftsmanship.
This weapon had been Gehrman's companion for as long as the Dream itself. It had killed beasts, cut through nightmares, defended the Dream's inhabitants when nothing else could. It was, in a very real sense, the First Hunter's legacy—his skill, his fury, his grief, his love, all encoded in metal and leather and the muscle memory of ten thousand swings.
Derek held it in his one arm and felt the weight of history settle on his tentacles.
I can't use this, he projected quietly. Not yet. It's too heavy. Too long. Too—
"Too important?" the Doll offered.
Derek looked at her. She was watching the Burial Blade with an expression he'd never seen before—something complicated and deep and OLD, emotions layered like geological strata, each one pressing down on the one beneath. She was looking at the weapon the way you look at a photograph of someone who is gone.
Yeah, he projected. Too important.
He set the Burial Blade carefully on the workbench. Ran his fingers along the flat of the blade. Felt the echo of Gehrman's grip in the leather, the phantom warmth of centuries of use.
I'll earn this, he thought. Not projected—just thought, privately, to himself. I'll grow. I'll get stronger. I'll get bigger. And when I'm ready—when I've earned the right—I'll carry this weapon the way he carried it.
And I'll carry it BETTER. Because I'll carry it by choice, not by imprisonment. Because I'll carry it for love, not for duty.
Because I'll carry it for you, Gehrman. For the old man in the wheelchair who wrote a library and talked to a dog and corresponded with a scholar and never, ever gave up.
He turned away from the Burial Blade and picked up the Blade of Mercy again.
One more hour, he projected to the Doll. One more hour of practice. Then I need to talk to Aldric.
"The militia man?"
Yeah. About the Church. About what he knows.
Because if there's a secret organization inside the Church that's been pulling strings for centuries, I need to know everything. And soldiers always know more than they think they do.
Aldric was sitting outside the cottage, sharpening his stake with a stone he'd found in the garden.
The militia man—Derek had learned his full name was Aldric Voss, formerly Sergeant Voss of the Healing Church's Cathedral Ward Militia—was a hard man in the way that people become hard when the world has been hammering on them for so long that the soft parts either toughen up or break off entirely. He was forty-three, built like a wall that had developed opinions, with scars that mapped a career spent fighting things that used to be people.
He had not yet warmed up to Derek.
This was understandable. Aldric was a Church man—or had been, until the Church had collapsed and left him with nothing but a stake and a uniform and a group of civilians who looked to him for protection because he was the only one with a weapon. He had spent his entire adult life in service to an institution that he now understood had been built on lies, and he was processing this realization the way soldiers process things: by not talking about it and sharpening something.
Derek glided up to him on his Dream-wave, Patches trotting alongside, and stopped at a conversational distance.
Aldric.
The militia man looked up. His eyes—grey, hard, watchful—tracked from Derek's face (faces? Eye-cluster?) to his tentacles to his tiny coat to the Blade of Mercy tucked into a makeshift sheath that the messengers had fashioned from a strip of leather and optimism.
"Dream god," Aldric said, in the tone of a man addressing a superior officer he didn't quite trust.
I need to talk to you about the Church.
Aldric's jaw tightened. "What about it?"
Everything. I need to know everything you know. Not the public version—not the sermons and the sacraments and the 'the blood heals all' propaganda. The REAL version. The version they told the soldiers.
Aldric set down his stake. He looked at Derek for a long moment—assessing, measuring, weighing the tiny creature before him against the institution he'd served for twenty years.
"Why?" he asked.
Because the Church isn't dead. It collapsed, sure—the leadership is gone, the infrastructure is broken, the scourge tore through its ranks like paper. But the Church has been around for a LOT longer than anyone thinks, and organizations that old don't die just because a few buildings fall down. They adapt. They rebuild. They come back.
And when they come back, I need to be ready.
Aldric studied him. Derek held the gaze—all seventeen eyes locked onto the militia man's two, which was probably deeply unsettling from Aldric's perspective but was the only way Derek knew how to communicate sincerity.
Something shifted in Aldric's expression. The wariness didn't leave—it was probably permanent, engraved into his face by two decades of nocturnal combat—but it rearranged itself, making room for something that might have been respect.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
Start with the structure. The hierarchy. Who reports to who. How orders flow from the top down. And don't skip the parts they told you to keep quiet about.
Aldric exhaled. A long, slow breath that carried the weight of oaths broken and loyalties dissolved.
Then he talked.
The Healing Church, as Aldric described it, was not one organization.
It was seven.
Seven distinct bodies, nested inside each other like matryoshka dolls, each with its own leadership, its own agenda, and its own level of knowledge about what the Church actually was and what it was actually doing.
Derek listened, his arm taking notes on a sheet of paper with a charcoal stick (his handwriting was terrible—his arm was in the right general area now but his fine motor control was approximately at the level of a three-year-old, resulting in letters that looked like they'd been written during an earthquake—but the notes were legible enough).
Layer One: The Parish. The public face. The priests, the ministers, the blood saints who administered the healing blood to the faithful. These were the people the average Yharnamite interacted with—kind, devout, genuinely believing that the blood was divine grace. They knew nothing. They were the Church's face, its smile, its "welcome, child, let us heal you."
Layer Two: The Ward Militia. Aldric's layer. The soldiers. Tasked with maintaining order during the hunts, protecting Church property, and—in practice—keeping the citizenry compliant. The militia knew the blood was dangerous. They knew about the scourge. They were told it was "manageable" and that the hunts were "temporary measures." They were armed, trained, and expendable.
Layer Three: The Executioners. Elite soldiers. Derek knew about these from the game—Logarius and his band, the white-clad warriors who had laid siege to Cainhurst to destroy the Vilebloods. But Aldric's account expanded the picture significantly. The Executioners weren't just a historical fighting force—they were an active organization, with chapters across the continent, operating independently of the Church's normal command structure. They answered to their own leadership and maintained their own agenda, which was—
"Purification," Aldric said, the word dropping from his lips like a stone. "That's what they called it. The Executioners didn't just fight the Vilebloods. They fought anything that used the blood outside the Church's control. Independent blood ministrators. Unlicensed healers. Scholars who studied the blood without Church permission. Anyone who threatened the Church's monopoly on the old blood was declared 'impure' and... dealt with."
Dealt with how?
Aldric's expression said everything.
Layer Four: The Black Church. Not a color designation—an operational one. The Black Church was the Healing Church's intelligence arm. Spies, informants, saboteurs. They operated in the cities beyond Yharnam—the free cities, the coastal towns, the foreign kingdoms—gathering information, identifying threats, and ensuring that the Church's expansion proceeded unopposed. Aldric had interacted with Black Church agents twice in his career. Both times, the agents had arrived, asked questions, received answers, and left without leaving names or trails.
"They scared me more than the beasts," Aldric admitted. "The beasts are honest. They want to eat you and they don't pretend otherwise. The Black Church smiled while it worked."
Layer Five: The Choir. Derek knew this one—the upper echelon, the communion-seekers, the ones who had found Ebrietas and attempted to reach the Great Ones through music and madness and orphans with too many eyes. But Aldric added a detail the game hadn't included: the Choir wasn't just in Yharnam. They had outposts. "Listening stations," Aldric called them—isolated facilities in remote locations, staffed by Choir scholars, designed to detect and monitor cosmic frequencies.
"There's one in the mountains north of here," Aldric said. "Never been there. Never wanted to. The few soldiers who went up for supply runs came back... quiet. Not scared. Not mad. Just quiet. Like they'd heard something they couldn't unhear."
Derek filed that away with aggressive mental highlighting.
Layer Six: The School of Mensis. Also known from the game. Micolash and his nightmare ritual. But again, Aldric expanded the picture. The School of Mensis wasn't just Micolash—it was a tradition, a lineage of scholars dating back to the earliest days of the Church, all pursuing the same goal: direct contact with the Great Ones through the medium of dreams and nightmares.
"Micolash was the last," Aldric said. "But he wasn't the first. There were others before him, going back generations. Each one pushed further into the nightmare. Each one paid a higher price. And each one left notes for the one who came after."
Like Gehrman, Derek thought. Like the library. A chain of knowledge, passed down through madness and sacrifice.
Layer Seven: Aldric paused here. His scarred hands, which had been steady throughout the conversation, began to tremble slightly.
"There's a seventh layer," he said. "I wasn't supposed to know about it. Nobody in the militia was supposed to know. But I was posted at the Grand Cathedral for three years, and when you stand guard outside doors for that long, you hear things."
What things?
"Names. Fragments. Conversations that stopped when I entered the room. Once—just once—I was asked to escort a group of individuals from the Cathedral's lower levels to a carriage waiting in the courtyard. They were robed. Hooded. I couldn't see their faces. But one of them spoke, and the voice—"
He stopped. Swallowed.
"The voice was old. Not old like an elderly person. Old like the stones. Old like something that had been speaking for so long that the words themselves had worn smooth."
What did it say?
"It said: 'The roots hold, regardless of the season.' And the others—the hooded ones—they responded: 'The roots hold, and the tree grows tall.'"
Derek's tentacles went rigid.
The Roots.
Annaliese's letter. The secret foundation. The organization beneath the organization, older than the Church, older than Laurence, older than the discovery of the old blood.
The roots hold, regardless of the season.
A motto. A creed. A declaration of persistence—of something that endured, unchanged, through every upheaval, every catastrophe, every rise and fall of the institutions built above it.
They're real, Derek thought. Annaliese was right. The Roots are real. And they were operating out of the Grand Cathedral itself—the heart of the Church, the center of power, RIGHT THERE the whole time.
He looked at Aldric. "You said you heard the name once. A name for this seventh layer."
Aldric nodded. Slowly.
"The Presbyters," he said. "That's what the hooded ones called themselves. The Presbyters of the Root."
The word settled into Derek's mind like a key into a lock. Click. Another piece of the puzzle, another fragment of a picture that was growing larger and more complex with every passing day.
Presbyters, he thought. From the Greek—presbyteros. Elder. The elders of the root. The old ones at the base of the tree.
Not Great Ones. Not cosmic beings. HUMANS. Ancient, organized, patient humans who have been manipulating the Healing Church from its inception.
What do they WANT?
He didn't know. Annaliese's letter hadn't said. Aldric didn't know. Gehrman, in all his centuries of research, hadn't discovered their ultimate purpose—only their existence, hinted at in fragments and shadows.
But Derek was going to find out.
Thank you, Aldric, he projected, and meant it with every tentacle. This is—this is exactly what I needed. You've given me more than you know.
Aldric looked at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, something changed in the militia man's face. The hardness remained—it would always remain—but beneath it, like a green shoot pushing through cracked earth, something new appeared.
Trust.
Not much. A seed. A beginning.
"You're not what I expected," Aldric said. "When Elara said the Dream was run by a... a small creature in a coat, I thought she was mad. Or lying. Or both."
Both is valid.
"But you're serious. About all of this. About protecting people."
Dead serious. Literally. I died to get here. I'm not going to waste the second chance.
Aldric nodded. Picked up his stake. Resumed sharpening.
"Then I'll tell you the rest," he said. "Everything I know. Every secret I overheard, every rumor I dismissed, every order that didn't make sense until now." He paused, then added, with the ghost of a smile: "Might take a while."
I have time, Derek projected. I'm a god. Time is kind of my thing.
"You're a worm."
A god-worm. There's a difference.
Aldric snorted. It was the closest thing to a laugh Derek had gotten from him.
It was a start.
Elara faced Vicar Amelia at approximately hour six of her second hunt.
Derek felt it happen—felt the spike of adrenaline through the Dream-link, the surge of blood echoes, the sharp, bright flash of a hunter engaging a boss-level threat. He couldn't see the fight directly—his ability to project his awareness beyond the Dream was still limited, still murky—but he could feel it through Elara, through the connection that bound hunter to Dream, through the channel that carried her pain and fear and determination back to him like a radio signal.
She died.
The first death came fast—a crushing blow from Amelia's transformed arm, too powerful for Elara's vitality to absorb. Derek felt the impact, felt the connection snap and reform, felt Elara's consciousness dissolve and then reconstitute as the Dream pulled her back.
She materialized at the headstones, gasping, bleeding from wounds that were already healing, and before Derek could even project a word of comfort or advice she had turned around and gone BACK.
She died again.
And again.
And again.
Five times in two hours.
Derek watched—felt—each death with increasing anguish. He wanted to help. He wanted to reach through the barrier, project himself into the waking world, manifest at Elara's side, and face Vicar Amelia himself. He wanted to take the Blade of Mercy and the Burial Blade and every weapon in his hammerspace and throw them at the beast until it stopped moving.
He couldn't.
He was too small. Too weak. Too NEW.
All he could do was sustain the Dream, maintain the connection, ensure that every time Elara fell, she came back. Every time her body broke, it reformed. Every time she died, she lived again.
It was the hardest thing he'd ever done.
Not because it was difficult—the Dream sustained itself, fueled by Derek's power, maintained by his will. Resurrecting a hunter was as natural as breathing.
It was hard because he had to watch. Had to sit on his workbench in his tiny coat with his one arm and his dog and his breathing knife and his flying eyeball and feel his hunter die over and over and over.
Come on, Elara, he projected, pushing the thought through the Dream-link, hoping she could hear it across the barrier. You can do this. You're better than she is. You're faster, you're smarter, you've got the threaded cane and the pistol and you KNOW how to dodge. Just—
The sixth attempt.
Derek felt it differently this time. The adrenaline was there, but beneath it was something else—something cold and focused and ANGRY. Not the hot anger of frustration, not the wild anger of desperation. The cold anger of a hunter who had died five times and had decided, with absolute certainty, that the sixth time would be different.
The fight lasted twenty minutes. Derek felt every second—the dodge-rolls, the quicksteps, the visceral attacks, the pistol shots timed to stagger, the relentless pressure of a hunter who had learned the boss's patterns through five deaths and was now exploiting every single one.
And then—
A surge. A spike. A ROAR of echoes flooding through the Dream-link like a dam breaking.
PREY SLAUGHTERED.
Derek felt the words in his bones. In his tentacles. In his seventeen eyes, which all went wide simultaneously.
She did it. She did it. SHE DID IT.
He screamed—psychically, cosmically, with every ounce of his being. The Dream shook. The messengers erupted in celebration. Ping went into a frenzy of victory pings. Bitey opened its eye and purred. Patches barked, the bark saying: excited! Don't know why! EXCITED!
The Doll, standing in the garden, smiled and whispered: "Well done, hunter."
Elara materialized at the headstones a few minutes later, covered in blood, threaded cane dripping, grinning with the manic, incandescent, slightly unhinged joy of someone who had just killed a building-sized monster with a cane-sword.
"I DID IT!" she shouted, and punched the air, and her enhanced figure did things that caused the Dream's ambient light to flicker momentarily as Derek's concentration wavered.
You did it, Derek confirmed, gliding out of the workshop to meet her. You absolute MADWOMAN. Six attempts. Against VICAR AMELIA. On your SECOND hunt.
"She was HUGE," Elara said, still vibrating with adrenaline. "She was SO huge. And she kept HEALING herself. But I found this thing—this fire thing, a Molotov cocktail?—and it worked and she BURNED and she DIED and I—"
She stopped.
"I'm shaking," she said, looking at her hands. They were trembling—not with fear, but with the full-body tremor of an adrenaline crash. "I'm shaking so hard. Is this normal?"
Yes, Derek projected gently. Completely normal. Sit down. Breathe. You just killed a Great Beast. Your body needs a minute.
She sat. On the cobblestones, right where she was, legs splayed, head tilted back, eyes closed. She was still grinning.
"Best day ever," she whispered.
Derek looked at her—this woman, this stranger who had stumbled into his Dream three days ago with terror in her eyes, who had signed a contract she didn't understand, who had picked up a weapon she'd never held and fought monsters she'd never imagined—and felt a swell of something so fierce and so proud that it physically brightened the Dream by fifteen percent.
Best day so far, he corrected. We're just getting started.
The second hunter arrived an hour later.
Derek felt the Dream ripple again—that familiar tremor, the dimensional handshake—and for a moment he thought it was Elara returning from a supply run (she'd gone back to loot Amelia's arena and explore the now-unlocked Cathedral Ward).
But the frequency was wrong. The ripple was different—heavier, darker, carrying a resonance that tasted of smoke and stone and something ancient.
This wasn't Elara.
This was someone new.
The silver light bloomed at the headstones. A figure materialized.
It was a man.
Tall—taller than Elara, taller than Aldric, tall in the way that people are tall when their height is the least notable thing about them. He was old—not elderly, but weathered, aged in the way of someone who has spent decades in hard places doing hard things. His hair was grey, cropped short, military-precise. His face was a topology of scars—not the random scars of accidents, but the deliberate, patterned scars of someone who had been cut with intention.
He was wearing armor.
Not Yharnam armor. Not Church vestments. Not Hunter's garb. Something else entirely—dark leather over chain mail, with pauldrons of blackened steel and a heavy cloak that bore an insignia Derek didn't recognize: a circle, bisected by a vertical line, with three dots arranged in a triangle above it.
He was carrying a weapon.
A polearm—long, heavy, wickedly bladed at one end, with a mechanism at the haft that suggested a trick transformation of some kind. It was not a weapon Derek recognized from the game. It was not a weapon that existed in any Bloodborne wiki, any fan art, any lore compilation.
It was new.
The man stood at the headstones, surveying the Dream with eyes that were not surprised. Not awed. Not frightened.
Assessing.
The eyes of someone who had seen places like this before.
The eyes of someone who knew what a Dream was.
Derek's seventeen eyes locked onto the newcomer. His tentacles curled. Bitey's eye snapped open. Patches growled—not aggressively, but warningly, the growl of a dog that had sensed something it wasn't sure about.
The Doll moved to her position—the NPC pose, the greeting stance, the serene mask. But Derek caught a flicker of something in her expression before the mask settled. Something he'd never seen there before.
Recognition.
Not personal recognition—not "I know this person." But categorical recognition—"I know what this person IS."
Doll, Derek projected. Who is that?
The Doll's response was barely a whisper, directed only at him, carried on the Dream's private frequency.
"He is not from Yharnam. He is not from the surrounding territories. The insignia on his cloak—I have seen it only once before, in the Moon Presence's memories. It belongs to an order from the eastern continent."
The eastern continent?!
"The Watchers," the Doll said. "They call themselves the Watchers of the Veil. And if one of them has come to the Dream..."
She trailed off. But the implication hung in the air like a blade.
If one of them had come, things were worse than Derek thought.
The man began walking up the hill. His stride was measured, deliberate, the walk of someone who was accustomed to entering dangerous places and surviving them. His polearm rested on his shoulder, its blade catching the Dream-light.
He stopped in front of the workshop. Looked at the Doll. Looked past the Doll, into the workshop, at Derek.
Their eyes met.
The man studied Derek—the worm, the coat, the seventeen eyes, the one arm, the breathing Saw Cleaver, the flying eyeball, the dog—with an expression that was impossible to read. Not shocked. Not amused. Not disgusted. Just... considering.
Then he spoke.
His voice was deep, accented—an accent Derek didn't recognize, something that wasn't Yharnam's pseudo-Germanic, wasn't English, wasn't anything he'd heard in the game. Something foreign. Something from ELSEWHERE.
"You are the new Dream's master," the man said. Not a question.
Yes, Derek projected. I am.
The man nodded once. A single, economical motion.
"My name is Kovac. I am a Watcher of the Veil. I have traveled a very long way to reach this Dream."
Why?
Kovac's scarred face shifted. For the first time, something other than professional calm crossed his features.
It was urgency.
"Because the Veil is tearing," he said. "And my order has been holding it together for a thousand years. And we can't hold it anymore."
He looked at Derek. Looked at his tiny coat. Looked at his one arm. Looked at the breathing knife and the flying eyeball and the dog.
"I was told the Dream's master would be a Great One of immense power," Kovac said. "I was told it would be a being of cosmic might, capable of shaping reality with a thought, of commanding armies, of challenging the forces that threaten the Veil."
A pause.
"You are very small."
I GET THAT A LOT.
Meanwhile—three miles beneath the surface of Old Yharnam, in the charred and forgotten ruins of a district that had been burned and sealed and left to rot generations ago—something stirred.
It was not a beast.
The beasts of Old Yharnam were familiar—Darkbeasts and Blood-starved creatures, scourge victims too far gone to remember their names, prowling through the blackened streets in packs. Derek's messengers—Captain's scouts, the ever-expanding network of tiny operatives he'd been dispatching across Yharnam—had catalogued them, mapped their territories, noted their numbers.
This was not one of those.
It was not a Great One.
The Great Ones had a frequency—a cosmic signature, a specific resonance that Derek could detect from the Dream. Ebrietas in the Grand Cathedral had one. The Amygdalae clinging to the buildings had one. Even the lingering traces of the Moon Presence, fading like a bruise, had one. Derek knew what Great Ones felt like.
This did not feel like a Great One.
It was not human.
Humans had their own frequency—smaller, warmer, more fragile, but distinct. The refugees in the Dream had one. Elara had one (modified by the Dream-essence, but still fundamentally human). Aldric had one.
This was none of those things.
The messenger that encountered it—a small scout, newly created, sent to map the sub-levels of Old Yharnam's underground—reported back to Captain with a series of impressions that Captain relayed to Derek with visible unease.
The impressions were:
Underground. Deep. Deeper than beasts go. A chamber. Large. Very large. And in the chamber—something. Not hostile. Not friendly. Not anything. Just... THERE. Watching. Waiting. Existing.
It was aware of the messenger.
It did not attack.
It SPOKE.
Derek's tentacles went rigid. Spoke? What did it say?
Captain relayed the final impression. The words—not words exactly, but a concept, a meaning, transmitted through a medium that was neither sound nor thought but something in between.
The thing in the chamber beneath Old Yharnam had said:
"Tell the new one: I remember the old one. I remember the one before the old one. I remember the first. I have been here since before they had names for 'here.'
And I would very much like to have a conversation."
END OF CHAPTER 6
Next time: Derek has QUESTIONS for Kovac about the Veil and the eastern continent. The thing beneath Old Yharnam gets its conversation. Elara discovers something in the Cathedral Ward that changes her understanding of the hunt. And Derek grows a second arm. It's in a SLIGHTLY better place.