Backlund, the capital of the Loen Kingdom.
The "Land of Hope" and the "City of cities", it is one of the largest cities of the Kingdom, also called the Capital of dust, a less so flattering title that it earned due to the perpetual haze of soot and atmospheric pollution that hung above the thoroughfares of the city.
This city was divided into two parts by the Tussock River that flowed southeast to the sea. The two pieces of land were connected by the Backlund Bridge and ferries, with a population exceeding five million people, it was the most industrious and prosperous capital in the Southern and Northern Continents.
At that moment, in a dark alley deep within the East Borough, something was happening. A young man, who could not have been more than eighteen years of age lay crumpled against the cobblestones. His attire was curiously ill-fitted, fashioned in a style that would have struck any locals as foreign in cut, as if they didn't quite belong to this era. His feet were also bare, having darkened from having been exposed to the filth of the street. He shivered violently, clutching his throat with trembling hands as he struggled.
His complexion also possessed that peculiar pallor which physicians would usually associate with loss of blood, though there didn't seem to be any external injuries on his body. But his skin drained of all color and warmth, as though life itself had been leeched out from his body and his expression being extremely twisted as if he was suffering from immense pain, pointed to a malady of some kind of internal in nature.
And then, finally, the young man spoke with an hoarse voice:
"Thirsty..."
"Uhhh…So thirsty..."
On that final proclamation, he snarled at the darkened sky like a cornered beast sensing something encroaching on its territory. In that moment, there was less man and more beast in him, as if something primal and desperate had seized control. Driven by instinct alone, he dug his fingers into the alley wall, using it to drag himself upright. He stumbled forward like a drunkard, swaying with each unsteady step.
"Ahhh... aghh...ggrr"
His vocabulary devolved into nothing more than groans and guttural growls. His posture growing hunched and feral. He snarled at the shadows around him as he lurched forward, and then the beast found its prey.
A rat.
It scurried across the cobblestones, as if fleeing from some terrible presence. But it didn't get far. The Beast lunged with a startling speed, his hand snapping out as he caught the little critter. He brought it close to his face, and without much of a thought he bit into it.
The rat's blood squirted out in a violent spray painting the lower part of his mouth and the collar of his pale blue shirt in crimson streaks. It wasn't much, just a few drops but the feeding was messy and violent, completely tearing apart the small creature's body with an abandon that belonged more to a frenzied beast than that of a man. When the rat was finally drained of every last bit of its blood, he let his hand fall limply to his side with the tiny carcass tumbling out of his finger.
A guttural groan of pleasure escaped his lips, as he kneeled on the ground his eyes sliding closed as the warmth spread through his veins like a cup of warm coffee, the Beast feeling a little satisfied.
Then, slowly he opened his eyes, a pair of brilliant bluish-gray eyes like the petals of a blue lotus stared up at the smog-ridden night sky. The haze above Backlund never truly cleared even when the factories slept, but on such a night as this even the cloudy firmament was not enough to conceal such a phenomenon.
In the midair, against a backdrop of black velvet curtains, a crimson moon hung high, shining silently.
Wh— Arthur felt terrified, as the sight of such a thing snapped him out of whatever daze he seemed to have fallen into earlier, the barest hint of clarity returning to his eyes.
What the… am I dreaming about Yharnam?
But before he could even process fully what was happening, his senses prickled with unnatural awareness. He snapped his head down sharply looking at the mouth of the alley.
A group of ruffians seemed to have come, standing at the entrance of the alley, observing him as he knelt there on the ground. They seemed to exchange some meaningful glances among themselves before commencing their approach. They were predators too, after all, though of a different breed. And to them this disoriented young man attired in a peculiar fashion looked like an easy prey, if only the visibility inside the alley had been little better, if only they could have seen his face, the blood coating his mouth, the terrible madness that seemed to lurk in that Beasts eyes, maybe then they would have left it alone. If only they knew that they were not the predator but the prey.
Arthur tried to speak, but what came out wasn't words.
But a snarl.
A terrifying beastly low guttural growl that emanated from deep within his chest. The vermin's blood seemed to have done nothing. Nothing at all. The terrible maddening hunger seemed to have returned once more, this time more insistent than ever.
The Beast whispered maddeningly at the back of his head, wordlessly.
Blood.
More. More Blood.
FEED. BLOOD.
Instincts took over, he attacked.
The foremost thug barely had any time to react before he was upon him. With a velocity far exceeding that of any normal human capability, he seized the fellow ruffian by the head and collar and buried his teeth deep into the man's throat.
Blood.
It flooded his mouth, sweet, warm, coppery and alive in the way that the pathetic vermin's blood hadn't been. The young thug weakly as the man's scream died into a wet gurgle as the blood flowed freely and the young man held tight, drinking deeply and greedily. The world narrowed down to that few profound sensations that he was feeling— the warmth of the stolen vitae spreading through his veins, the terrible hunger inside him slowly being satiated.
He drank and drank, with each mouthful more and more clarity returning back to his consciousness, until the man's heartbeat grew faint and as if a spell was broken, comprehension suddenly dawned upon him regarding his action.
Horror descended upon him, as with a strangled gasp, he threw the near-lifeless body aside and leapt backward colloiding against the alley wall. The remaining thugs who seemed to have been frozen in terror, all seemed to collectively scream in terror. What they at first anticipated to be a simple robbery of some wealthy, delirious gentleman had now turned into a spectacle of utter horror.
"Monster!" one of them shrieked, as they reached towards their belt to draw their gun.
Arthur stared at his blood-slicked hands and whispered in a trembling voice, "No…no, I didn't… I didn't mean to…" as he looked up at them.
The thugs did not even try to hear any further of his explanation, overcome by a mixture of rage and fear surged forward as one. The eldest among them drew a revolver from his coat with steady hands and fired at him.
The crack of the revolver's hammer striking the bullet's primer echoed through the narrow alley. But something was wrong, the world seemed to have come to a crawl just for a heartbeat. He could see clearly, the motion of the thug's finger on the trigger pressing on it, could track the bullet leaving the barrel quickly. And then his body moved before any conscious thought formed in his head, twisting to the side a little as the bullet sailed past his ear and struck the wall behind him, with a small spray of brick dust, almost imperceptible to any normal eyes but in that short moment they were perfectly visible to him.
Impossible! At that moment, that was the only thought that ran through his head. But he didn't wait to question it any further and surged forward.
What followed was chaos. Arthur weaved through a hail of bullets, pushing past the thugs in a swift blur as he burst out of the alley.
"After him!" one of them shouted. "Don't let him get away!"
He ran without direction, without thought through the labyrinthine passages of these unknown Victorian streets.
Everything appeared foreign, incorrect, like a fever dream so twisted it felt all too real. His bare feet struck the cobblestones in rapid succession as he darted through one alleyway to the other, the voice of his pursuers never truly falling that far behind and neither were their shots.
"There! Down…"
But what Arthur failed to realize—or simply could not, in his state of utter panic—was that he wasn't getting tired. His lungs didn't burn with exertion, nor did his muscles ache. He ran with an endurance that was simply impossible, covering block after block. And with every stretch of distance he gained, he slipped farther and farther away from his pursuers as their voice started to sound distant.
The sky began to change.
The oppressive darkness of the night slowly gave way to sickly gray twilight as the eastern horizon took on a faint orange glow, barely visible through the perpetual smog that hung over Backlund.
Dawn was coming, and with it, an unknown lethargy began to seep into Arthur's body, making him feel dizzy and tired.
At that moment, he didn't quite understand why it was happening. His sense of reason was too impaired to attribute his exhaustion to the rising sun rather than to physical exertion, especially after what he had gone through earlier. He turned down another alley, this one much narrower than its predecessors, flanked by brick walls on either side.
As he burst from the alley into the broader street he very nearly collided with the police officer making his rounds. The constable that he found face to face was a man of heavyset with a thick bushy handlebar mustache and bearings of one who had known and walked these streets for decades. Perhaps the constable had heard the gang member shooting or maybe heard their screams of rage from afar, but whatever it was he had already reached for his truncheon.
"You there! Stop—"
But Arthur still driven by panic and the fading echoes of the bestial hunger, tried to dodge past him. But the officer was having none of it and instead he grabbed hold onto Arthur's arm with a firm grip strengthened by years of handling brawlers, gang members and drunkards. And the two began struggling, one trying to escape, meanwhile the other wanting to capture.
It was during this struggle that a ray of morning sunlight broke through the smog for just a moment and struck Arthur's face.
Pain. Unimaginable, searing pain, as if someone were constantly pricking him with thousands of needles. Arthur screamed, a sound of pure animalistic terror that echoed through the confined space and jerked back, his hand rising to shield his face. Where the sunlight had touched his skin, it had turned an angry red as it started to smoke.
The police officer, seeing this impossible reaction, stumbled backward, his weathered face assuming a pallor of shock and mortal fear. "What in the Goddess's name..." he murmured, then shouted louder: "Monster!"
He drew his service revolver and fired it.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The bullets flew wide in his state of panic, one of them grazing Arthur's shoulder making the Beast within Arthur which had been temporarily sated, roar back to life but this time not with hunger but pure primal anger that overcame him. He once again moved with the same impossible speed closing the distance before the officer could fire again. His hand found the man's throat and driven by rage, he bit down.
The police officer scream was cut short as Arthur tore into his throat, the arterial spray painting more of his face red as he drank deeply. The man's struggles grew weaker, then ceased entirely as he died there, in that nameless alley, his eyes wide with terror and incomprehension.
"Forgive me, Mary," a faint whisper echoed in Arthur's mind, the officer's dying voice heavy with regret. "I couldn't be there for our child's birth."
Reality crashed back into Arthur's consciousness like a bucket of ice cold water.
He staggered falling on his knees beside the body staring at it in horror. Silent tears of blood flowed from his eyes as he stared at his blood drenched hand. "What have I done?"
"Oh! God what have I done!"
"No," he whispered, then louder: "No! This is a nightmare. This all is a nightmare. Just a nightmare. It has to be…"
The sun crept closer, the rays sizzling his hand as the sound of people waking up and exiting their household filled the air.
He stood up and ran once more.
"This is a nightmare, this all is just a nightmare, just a nightmare…"
The words became a mantra, repeated with each footfall as he fled deeper in the maze of alleys and streets, far away from the chasing sunlight. Each stray beam that found him through the clouds brought with it a fresh dose of soul wrenching agony. He held his hands close to his body, protecting them from the stray light, and searched desperately for a shelter, for someplace to hide.
At length, he finally found himself before a narrow townhouse. The windows on the ground floor were smashed and boarded over with dark weathered wooden planks, as the door hung slightly ajar . Arthur didn't hesitate and threw himself inside and immediately dragged a substantially large self across the entrance, barricading the door. Only then did he allow himself to collapse against the flaky wall, and take in his surroundings.
The interior was dim, illuminated only by the weak light that filtered through cracks in the boarded windows and the candles. So many candles. They all seemed to be scented also. They were everywhere, on every available surface, in various states of melting, their wax having formed grotesque stalagmites on the floor and furniture. The sight of them gave Arthur a feeling of profound unease, though he couldn't have articulated why exactly.
It was then he noticed her.
An old woman lying on the floor, quite dead. A huge bullet hole in her head and her mouth open in a silent scream. The smell which was mostly being cloaked by the scented candle now assailed his heightened senses in overwhelming detail, suggesting by the blood splatter pattern, and how dry and dessicated it looked that she had been dead for at least a few days three to two days at max.
He moved past her, unable to bear looking at the corpse any longer, and made his way to the narrow staircase that led to the upper floor. Each step creaked under his weight, the sound unnaturally loud against the oppressive silence.
Upon reaching the second floor, he discovered a bedchamber. And there beside the bed not too far on the armchair he found the old man.
He was also dead.
He laid upon his back, pallid and still , attired in his nightclothes, a revolver clutched tight in his hand. Upon the table beside him was a bottle of alcohol. The wall behind him was painted in a macabre of blood.
Arthur's legs failed him as he fell down beside the bed leaning against its leg, staring at the scene with wide eyes.
"This is a nightmare," Arthur whispered for the nth time, but the words seemed to have lost all their meaning and conviction behind them. "This is a nightmare. I will surely wake up. I must wake up."
But he did not wake.
The corpse still remained, the memory of the atrocities that he had committed remained.
"This cannot be real. This cannot be happening. I'm not... I'm not a monster. I'm not..."
But the blood upon his hands spoke otherwise. The bodies in the alleys spoke otherwise. His blistered skin where the sunlight had touched spoke otherwise.
You know what you are, the insidious voice whispered. You know what you've become.
His eyes fell upon the revolver once more. As an idea resurfaced his mind. He once remembered having a similarly horrible dream and he had drowned himself, surely putting a bullet in his heart would wake him up.
Slowly and mechanically he reached and pried the revolver from the old man's fingers. It possessed considerable weight in his hand, feeling cold and like a final verdict. He carefully checked the cylinder, the chamber still loaded, only two bullets have been used.
One bullet would suffice.
Steeling his nerves, he climbed onto the bed. He understood now what he needed to do to wake up.
"This is a Nightmare. That's it."
He positioned the revolver, pressing it against his chest, angling it precisely towards his heart. After all that is the greatest weakness of a vampire. And with it his hand grew steady and he became a little more calm. This was the correct choice. The only choice.
"So, be it…"
His finger gently resting against the trigger.
Outside, the sun continued its ascension over Backlund. Indifferent to the tragedy that had unfolded in this forgotten house.
Arthur drew one final shuddering breath.
"Rational thinking only"
And pressed the trigger.
BANG!