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He has one proverbial foot out the door when he is caught.
But only proverbial, for he is still in the Cathedral Ward when it happens - still trapped by those corridors in the high, winding towers, perched and presiding over Yharnam like the throne of a god. Still cradled in the heart of the Choir.
To unburden himself he has shed his white robes, peeled them away with a strigil, like skin. Now he wears only the dark wool of Byrgenwerth - reborn, or so it feels, into the role he once had; his youth and intellect restored, his need to unravel the world. After years of sleepwalking through the Choir’s folly, he is alive again. His breath shudders; blood courses hot beneath his skin. In each stumbling step, the electric tingle of fear. His mouth goes dry with the possibility of being caught, but there is no guilt to his subterfuge - no undercurrent of the shame he believes all thieves must naturally have. Everything is his: the folio tucked under his arm, the parchment overflowing from the single case he takes with him. His life’s work. Greedily the Choir would call it their own. But he has refined it, sanctified and distilled it to perfection. He has seen where they have been wilfully blind. He alone has listened, heard the words of a god -
His cough echoes down the hall, and he brings a hand to his mouth. Perhaps this reveals him at last, wretched little noise as he makes his way through the darkness in the dead of night, neither gaslight nor flame to illuminate his way. Cold gulps of air rattle like pebbles caught in a shoe. How cruel the gods, to afflict him like this, to challenge his faith in the midst of fervent obedience. Was his denial of sleep and nourishment and all pleasures of the flesh not proof enough of his merit? Had She not promised to intercede on his behalf, the Mother herself, Her wet gaze tender and Her revelation blinding on that accursed beach so many years ago? To his sunken eyes these last few moons have passed with a ghostly hue; a slow death of colour and sound so that no light seemed to penetrate the Cathedral walls; no flame shone bright enough to illuminate the words before him. No sounds of exultation or excited whispers animated the night, no great revelation emerged to keep him fed.
So came, over those many months, the realisation that he would need do it himself. The final test, how he could bend like a river under the current of Her will. Now, at the threshold of his decision, colour returns, the whirring of his own excited breath like a machine churning to life with a billow of steam. Woken from his nervous prostration with the knowledge that only he is a vessel for Her message, that he alone heard Her voice in the roar of the sea. In the noiseless, moth-grey murk of his dreams She beckons with Her truth, and he can scarcely breathe to vow Yes! Yes.
So too he’d breathed to every ear that would listen. Quietly, at first, and then with mounting conviction. He did not sow doubt - let none here accuse him of being disingenuous! - but rather whispered his vision to those whose dismay at the Choir’s failures left a sympathetic crease in their brow. Some called him mad. But is madness not a prerequisite for a certain kind of leader? An intelligent sort of madness, with no bearing on a man’s function, one that rallies and is hot with persuasion? He has never been the persuasive type - the gods withheld their blessings of charisma and he is too canny to think otherwise, or to bumble through fakery and attempt a smile solicitous instead of slightly crooked. When he speaks he does not pull a length of silk from his throat, and in place of a silver tongue the fleshy lump in his mouth is heavy, clumsy in its coarseness.
But he has faith, and each step takes him closer to his new world.
This faith he follows like an apostle, like a holy man, through the Cathedral’s stone heart, so much narrower in darkness than it appears in daylight. Each soft footfall sounds to him like a wave smashing the shore. He restrains another cough, eyes watering, and grimaces. Would that Her miracle might cure him! Hyperesthenia, spinal neurosis. Temporal lobe inflammation, peripneumonia. Anaemia - the irony!
The visions, he’d told his colleagues. The visions are real.
Insomnia, they said. Shadows played against the surface of the moon, cut it open and bled its red juice over the earth. Neurasthenia, they said, those doctors masquerading as researchers, while lumenflowers bloomed from their eyes and mouths. Faithless, said the clergy, their silhouettes aflame. Things scratched at his window in the night. He watched Prospectors emerge from tombs dripping with arcane light, blindly clutching relics to their chests, as though stone and glass were as priceless as insight. Mouthless, limbless, squirming emissaries pleaded with him as their cloudy, marbled eyes spun in their sockets with nauseating speed. The living god, entombed far below, wept and wept and did not let him sleep.
So his colleagues poked and prodded him like a specimen, rattled off lists of malaises to explain his dis-ease, and in this veritable chokehold all he could do was accept their diagnosis. Epileptiform seizure of unaccountable origin, they’d called his experience at the cove - and not as he truly knew it to be. Epiphany.
Sleepless, perhaps, yes - but undeniably, selflessly devoted to his ideals.
At the top of the broad, snaking stairs that lead from the living quarters and down into the specimen rooms, he stops. He plans to take from them what he needs - what is his by rights - before leaving by the east wing. Like him, the Choir’s research does not sleep. The corridors are filled with syncopation, things that groan, plead, gurgle; spirits pulled apart at the seams like flora wrenched from the earth, roots exposed and helpless.
But now he is the one exposed, helpless. Caught by a shadow that emerges behind him. Did it see him? Hear him? Smell him? The brackish scent that follows him everywhere; or perhaps the pungent liniment he uses to soothe his ailments so that he remains one of the few who does not reek of incense and holy blood. He has long refused it, despite his constitution - refused to debase himself with the Church’s cloying drink, panacea and vice. Descent into such pleasure could only be for the masses. He sees how they flush, infused with vigour, drunk on their very corporeality. He finds such vitality earthly, base. Shamefully animalistic. Beyond the waking world is a plane for the diamond-cut edges of his mind, not this profane vessel and all its faults, and so the state of it will matter little when the time comes. Enlightened, he will dislodge it one day, this etheric body from the moral body. Why poison it with pleasure, the kind of pleasure that will keep him here for good?
This he was certain the Choir would understand. Byrgenwerth did - and did the Choir not proclaim itself successor to the great institution itself? Naive! Painfully so - a little Licentiate again, chasing the hem of a greater scholar, abased in servitude, the kind he’s always known by virtue of his birth, his class. Like Byrgenwerth, the Choir promised it would be different: an intellectual life without hierarchy, or subservience. Not a claustrophobic world of privilege. Yet when he asked to return to Byrgenwerth, to consult with the ailing Provost, he was denied. When he asked of the old man’s precipitous decline, he was greeted with silence, and disapproval. When he longed to stand by the lake, where he once sought guidance, he was met with stark pity. There is nothing in the lake. He would have preferred a severe reprimand to the mocking bemusem*nt he was regarded with instead.
In the end, he found the Choir was no different than Byrgenwerth. Adoration curdled, became jealousy and resentment. Still they flare, on occasion, at the cruel half-moon smile that comes with every theoretical challenge, every joust of methodology. He does not allow himself to dwell on such things, for they make him grow livid, and he has not the fortitude of constitution to contain so much fiery displeasure. Instead he must content himself by feeling terribly sorry for them all, and collecting the sweet vestiges of triumph that come with that most false kind of pity. All things will prove themselves in service to his plan, to Her will. Much easier to pity the Choir and its obstinacy than to fit himself into its misshapen idea of ascension. He sees the path where they do not, raises objections where they bend and contort themselves into obsession and dissonance in service to falsehood. Better to be boneless than spineless. The thought makes him smile.
“Wait.”
The voice, too, makes him smile.
The other man emerges from the darkness at the top of the stairs, a hasty sweep of white robes. No relief comes, except the kind that greets a necessary hardship with patience, and acceptance. He knows who it is already, who follows his footsteps in the dark with neither the strutting nor preening amble of the Choristers but the honest gait of a man; as he’s done since the Choir wrenched him from Byrgenwerth and installed him in this marble body that stinks of incense.
“Edgar.”
“Where are you going?”
Spectacles in his breast pocket, his usually affable eyes are wide and troubled in the dimness.
“Does it matter?”
“No. Yes.”
Of course, he could tell the younger man he is leaving out of exquisite boredom - which is not in itself a lie, and a thing that Edgar, in his unfailing passivity, would accept. Something about the former scholar reminds him of the augurs - at times aglow with arcane light, and at others dim and lost to the dark. Only a flash, held back by his own mind’s machinations, stubbornly disposed to dialectic and decree in the face of prophecy and miracle. But the doctrine of the Great Ones is clear: perfection may be born of imperfection; a substance pure will grow from corruption. A pale imitation of what he could be, and yet a strange, lingering hope for this man, who surely presides in the Mother’s favour.
When he speaks, Edgar’s voice is hushed but hurried.
“Undoubtedly you did not mean those anarchic notions-”
“Free-thinking.”
“-be put forth as such, though I am sure, as you must be, that the Choir will embrace reform-”
“In the service of idolatry.”
“-and that our discussions prove it; truly you recall such lively debates-!”
“Relativistic nonsense.”
“Micolash-”
Ah, he thinks. Outranked in every possible way, and yet the young man risks calling him by his name. Instincts born of Byrgenwerth demand respect, formality, the kind he was denied all his life before proving himself at the academy. Though he is skewed with indignation, he softens. He is benevolent, he is kind; most of all, he is not stupid. In the world to come they will have no need of rank or title.
Edgar steps forward. “Are you faithless?”
He must smother his peal of laughter.
“Faithless? I have seen God die on a beach, and I have eaten of Her flesh.” He closes the distance, Edgar’s small lamp a golden glow between them. “Is my departure not a supreme act of faith? Doubt is monstrous, my friend.”
“You doubt the Choir.”
Carefully he lays the case at his feet, and brings both hands to grip the sides of Edgar’s face, as though he is trying to calm a frightened animal. The other man blinks, recoils a little. In truth, Micolash is loathe to leave him here, at the mercy of the Choir. Despite - or perhaps because - he lacks curiosity as his face lacks colour, and is altogether without guile. But it matters little - these things can be taught, trained. Is Micolash himself not the product of great revelation? As much as Edgar is exactly the kind of creature the new world needs, that Micolash longs for. The sort of man whose head, not yet so stoppered with those wheedling songs of abandoned gods and whines of orphaned children, is wholly receptive to the greater mysteries of the cosmos. A blank slate, a mouthful of simple catechisms in which he will brew, like a great copper alembic, new proclamations to the Great Ones.
Micolash’s fingers trace the bones of his cheeks, thumbs arching below the sloping sockets of his eyes. “I do not doubt - I know! The evidence of failure lies all around us. Think of what more we could do.” He smiles. “What you could be.”
Hallucinations, his colleagues called them. Apparitions brought on by a sickness of the mind. But he knows better. He knows the thing that looms above and behind Edgar is real. He knows well the arch of its many limbs, massive, too big for the narrow corridor, its body disappearing into darkness. He knows well the curve of its ribcage, how it swells in an echo of the Cathedral’s vaulted ceiling. He has sought to rest mind and body in the pockmarked flesh of its long fingers, dry and withered as summer grass. It stares down at him - at them - with a head like a cage of bones, insides lit by a volcanic glow. All the eyes he could ever need.
Adoration fills his lungs like seawater.
“I would ask you to come with me.” Gently, he releases Edgar. “But I see, now, that you are not ready.”
Edgar’s mouth is an O, a reflection of the moon. “I-”
“I will wait for you. Do not labour here in the service of monstrousness.”
He bends and picks up his case.
“Take care of the augurs for me.”
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