Surgit opened his eyes and found himself lying on the cold floor. He stood up, trying to remember what had happened to him earlier. He remembered seeing that odd hybrid of a man and remembered his head being smashed to the ground. The beast was too fast and he was dead before he could even realize it.
The thought of having to go back through all those catwalks and jumping down in the darkness filled him with sorrow. To make matters worse, he had lost his torch somewhere and relying on his eyes in the darkness of the tower could prove very difficult to deal with. He looked around him and realized that something had changed inside of Oedon chapel.
The incense pots have disappeared and even the odd chapel dweller was nowhere to be found. It took him sometime to realize that he wasn’t in the chapel anymore. The bars surrounding him made him realize that he was in a different place altogether.
It appeared that he was dragged to this place by that beast that smashed his head to the ground. His belongings hadn’t been confiscated though. He still had his weapon and his blood vials. He injected himself with a blood vial to gain his strength back. He must have lost his consciousness for a long time.
He looked up and discovered that the cage in which he was held was at least twelve feet high. The bars looked weak and prone to breaking. High up above, he could see faint light emanating from what appeared to be a skylight. Even the door barring his access looked withered.
He went for the door and inspected it. He tried the silliest thing every prisoner usually does and pushed the door. To his surprise, the door opened and gave way. He stepped outside and looked around to have a better idea of where he was. The place was strange, filled with alien artifacts he had never seen before.
Big wooden frames which appeared to be antique mirrors were covered in cloth and chained. As if the chains were used to keep the cloth in place no matter what. Other cages were aligned in the place. All of them were devoid of living souls, only corpses and skeletons. Surgit inspected some of them and to his surprise all of them were human. Their skulls had human features and their hands were too small to belong to any hybrid or werewolf.
Some skeletons however, were small. They couldn’t have belonged to grown men. The only possibility that Surgit could think of, was that those tiny prisoners were children. They had strange long cages closed on their heads. No sign of bounding was to be seen on their ankles or wrists though. They were just skeletons, sitting on a chair, unbound but with a long cage around their heads. It appeared strange to Surgit to see these tiny remains. He didn’t expect to see children dragged into dungeons, but then again he had sent a helpless child to her death, although unintentionally.
What surprised Surgit most wasn’t the existence of corpses of children in the cages. It was mainly how it didn’t affect him as he thought it would. Seeing death and blood around him for so long had made him immune to shock from this kind of scenes.
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He started thinking that he had become heartless, a blood thirsty hunter who relishes killing beasts and rejuvenating at the sight of their blood. If he was presented with the opportunity to save the children, he might have done it. But looking at their skeletons didn’t disgust him nor did it make him angry towards whoever had done that. He was just witnessing the product of Yharnam’s decay into the city of beasts it was known for.
A voice in the distance caught his attention and brought him back from his ruminations. In fact they were voices, singing in choral some odd chant. The voices were dim and the words were hard to make sense of.
He walked out of the cage he was in. He saw in the distance to his right, some stairs leading up. On his left, among the chained mirrors, there were other stairs leading down. The voices were a curious thing, he hadn’t heard as many people talking in the city, let alone chanting in unison. He wanted to know what it was all about so he took the stairs on his right and went upwards.
The stairs were circular and led to two floors above. They appeared to be annex staircases. In the first floor he’d reached, he saw a door leading towards a larger room. The chants didn’t appear to come from there so he decided to go higher. As he climbed the stairs, the voices became clearer.
The words he heard were foreign to him. The chant had a grim tone to it. It gave the place, reeking of the smell of death, an even gloomier atmosphere. The stairs ended and gave way to a spacious room. It looked like a cathedral with a very, very high ceiling. From his estimation Surgit could’ve easily given it a height of 60 feet. Such a structure must have been built by expert stonemasons and designed by master architects.
The ground was made of metallic bars, aligned vertically and horizontally on top of each other. The little space that was left between the bars gave way for some light to be filtered and reach the lower floor. On inspecting it, Surgit saw the prison in which he was thrown. The light that allowed him to inspect the lower floor emanated from this part then.
He looked around him and saw a door further beyond from where he stood. Behind him, where the stairs ended, there was another flight of stairs leading to a higher platform on which a statue was erected. Surgit went up and looked at the big strange sculpture.
Its shape reminded him of something he had seen before. It was like an apparition in his dreams or during the period of his death and reanimation. He couldn’t tell when or where he had seen something similar before. The notion escaped him. As if trying to remember someone’s name; though you’ve heard it before, your mind seems to refuse to accept that it knows of that memory.
The statue was tall. The body had a torso and six arms, three on each part. Two arms were linked to the shoulders and the other four protruding from the back. The creature was sitting, crossing its enormous legs.
Its head was its strangest feature. It had an oblique shape and resembled a cage with hexagonal holes on it. It had a very skinny torso and its limbs were also as thin as its upper body. Its head however was gigantic, almost too heavy for the body to bear it. The statue was at least 20 feet tall and covered a third of the building’s height.
The singing continued and Surgit felt the hair on his back stand as the voices increased their volume and pace. It was as if he was trapped in a bad dream, where some bad people were trying to perform some type of dark magic. Only, all of Yharnam was a strange place and felt like being in a bad dream. He was thrust in an unforgiving world where he had to kill or be killed. Good or bad became obsolete notions for him at that point. If he had to kill to ensure his own progression, he would do it without hesitation.