Ainsworth had tied his white-stained hair back behind his head with a strand of red lace, and his eyes had filled with an eagerness to spill blood. He wore a white cloak that fluttered in the evening wind, a bright red insignia of a rose etched on its back. He had drawn his revolver and fired its single shot, but having missed, had resorted to drawing the sabre at his side.
"Priest of heresy, aren't you tired of living?" A hoarse voice spoke out. It sounded like iron scratching against a stone surface, dull and echoey in the enclosure of the backstreets of the middle borough.
In front of Ainsworth, whose visage had become grim and fatigued, a man stood silent and unmoving, staring at the priest as blood began to soak his clothes.
'There's nothing heretical about the Lady… these are just provocations from a true heretic. He wants me to let down my guard and grow angry.' Ainsworth cursed in his mind.
The man in front of the priest seemed rather unusual, disregarding the flowing blood that continued to seep into his linens. His eyes were much too far apart to be considered ordinary, and when he opened his mouth to speak, it was obvious even in the darkness that he had two rows of uneven, rotting teeth. Moreover, his hands each bore numerous amounts of fingers that were interwoven with each other like short writhing tendrils, and his lips were caked with dried blood and a pungent, greyish liquid.
"Will you tell me where your compatriots reside, before you lose yourself to madness?"
The man raised his two writhing hands of tendrils, and with his blood-caked mouth full of teeth, spoke out in his grating tone of voice.
"I'm perfectly sane, priest of the thorned malefactor. Even then, I would tell you nothing."
'Damn monster…'
Father Benedict, who had been patrolling through his designated section of the middle borough, had stumbled upon such a monster in human form. With the increase of the Peacekeepers in Leiden, he had begun to relax his heart when it came to such horrors. However, Leiden remained rife with tragedy, discrepancies, and terrifying creatures. It was not a pretty city that loved to put on festivals, or a haven of fruit-lovers in the springtime. That was only a mask for its true nature, of a city that should not exist, one filled with madness, despair, and tragedy. As a Heaven's Rose, a special sect of the Orthodoxy, who revered the Crown of Thorns, the Lady of Ivy, it was his job to investigate such matters in the area he was assigned to. Ainsworth, as an outlier when it came to power and strength, was assigned to a far less troublesome area, that being the Festival District of the middle borough, where the creatures lying in the dark would not often venture.
It was during his patrol that he did not expect to encounter such a creature, and so he had been quite surprised and horrified. It was a mark of one of those creatures that disguised themselves as people to seem quite 'strange' in certain areas. Their faces, hands, and proportions were some of the key things that a Heaven's Rose would look at in each person when surveying the general area. When he had encountered the man who seemed unusual in those aspects, he had tailed him into an area where not many people gathered in order to force an encounter and eliminate him.
However, he had given the monster far too much space to act. In an instant, it had killed three women who had been hanging their laundry in the alleyway, and the remnants of their corpses remained scattered upon the stone ground.
Ainsworth let out a calm sigh and looked towards the sky. Heaven's Roses would use pigeons to communicate quickly with the other members of the sect stationed in their area. Recently, an illness had swept through the pigeons that the Heaven's Roses in Leiden used, and so an order had been sent in to the Capital to send over a Master of Pigeons who could raise new ones up. So, it meant that it was unlikely he could call for assistance, and would have to make due with what he had. Still, the horror in his heart had abated, and he felt himself a bit empty.
'Will I die this time? Does it matter anymore, when I've become so small in the face of the world? Recently, have I even been finding myself enjoying the sunshine? What is the beauty in looking at what you know is much larger, much more significant than yourself? The cost of these powers is far too much, isn't it? Now that I know how large the world truly is, I can't look at anything right anymore…'
After the attack on the monastery, Ainsworth, who had been a member of a lower branch of the sect, had been allowed to gain intense magical power, albeit quite quickly to alleviate the growing number of incidents of the horrors in the lower and middle boroughs of Leiden. Because he had gained them without too much preparation, his mental state had taken intense strain. So, if he hadn't been patrolling, he had secluded himself in his room, ignoring Lumière's mental state, which he would have otherwise tried to attend to as his friend. As an astrologer, having seen the breadth of the universe, it all had begun to seem insignificant.
'Now, am I even afraid to die? Won't I see her sooner, and await Lumière's arrival? Isn't the Lady too benevolent, to allow this despite how insignificant we are?'
However, as Father Benedict raised his blade and resigned himself to facing the creature, a familiar, gentle voice called out.
"Have you started to make new friends? Am I not enough for you, now?"
Standing behind Ainsworth, the magician of the show hall, Lumière, had suddenly appeared. On his way home from his bout at the Fencer's Association, and his time spent with the Hammond Twins, he had made his way through the backstreets of the Festival district in order to reach the flowered staircase to the lower borough quicker. He had run into Father Benedict, but by the way he had approached the enclosure, the man standing apart from Father Benedict was slightly obscured, and so Lumière had failed to notice the discrepancies in the man's appearance, as well as the remnant corpses upon the ground.
Ainsworth turned towards Lumière slightly with widened, horrified eyes.
'Fuck. Why now? Why did you come here now? Are you crazy, Lumi? Why would you wander the city this late at night?' Ainsworth's thoughts became irrational, and his lips moved quickly as his emotions spiraled.
"Lumi, get out of here!" He yelled, raising his sword as he dashed towards the man, signaling with his free hand for Lumière to flee. However, as Father Benedict moved out of the way, Lumière caught a glimpse of the man standing opposite of them. He had grown a bit taller than the seconds previous, and a maniacal grin had crawled up his expression, revealing his skewn multi-rowed mouth of teeth. Quickly, his facial features began to melt off of his face, and he was left an expressionless, blank-faced individual, with softened grooves where his eyes, nose, and mouth would have been.
It was far too late for Lumière to flee. He had no clue why Father Benedict was stuck in an alleyway with such a horror, but he drew his sabre nonetheless, and ran to join beside him.
'This creature… isn't this exactly like the human amalgamation? I can sense it's innate fear… it's definitely human.'
Ainsworth glanced to the side as Lumière approached, but it was far too late to tell him to run away, for the unusually-shaped man in front of them had also started his approch. In an instant, the skin faceless man began to writhe, and tiny tendrils on his skin turned a dark-red colour, almost line blood. In an instant, his flesh became a mixture of rot and brackish red miasma. He was a churning mass of liquid and foul stench that hurtled towards the two. Immediately, a head emerged from the mass. Its leathery skin was a pale purplish-grey, like a rotting corpse, and it lacked any semblance of eyes. The entire lower half of its face sported a gaping mouth full of thousands of needle-like teeth that looked as if they would tear human flesh to shreds with a single bite.
Lumière dashed to the right of the monster, caught up against the wall in the cramped alleyway. He kicked off against the wall, rotating his body to the side to avoid his blade clashing with the wall and sliced into the flesh of the creature. At the same time, Ainsworth captured its attention, the gaping maw of the beast lunging towards him at a ferocious, unavoidable speed. Without hesitation, Lumière used the opportunity to pull the blade out of the monster's flesh and thrust it forward once more, piercing through its cheek muscle, whilst Ainsworth simultaneously speared his blade through the monster's jaw, intersecting with Lumière's.
In an instant, the two blades caused its mouth to become unable to close. Without hesitation, Lumière punched down on the monster's head several times. Pain radiates through his knuckles, but harsh cracking sounds began to erupt from the creature's skull. Its flesh became mottled and soft, and its greyish brain matter became exposed through the thin layer of skin on its head where the skull had shattered. Still, it continued to lurch forward, and Lumière lost grasp on his blade, causing the creature to lurch with its mouth agape towards Ainsworth.
Immediately, a silver flash filled the air.
In an instant, a woman with bright-red hair and violet eyes had fallen from the sky, the blade she had drawn a flash of silver in the air. It speared through the creature's mottled flesh, piercing into its exposed greyish brain matter, killing it instantly.
Ainsworth let out an exhausted sigh, and looking up at the woman, let a slight grin creep up his face.
"Thanks, Meraline."
She was dressed in a white fluttering cloak, marked with an insignia of a blue rose.
Lumière, ignoring the sudden presence of the woman due to Father Benedict's familiarity with her, inquired into the matter that had just transpired.
"What was that creature, Ains? What are you doing here in the first place? What is that foolish outfit you're wearing? Have you become a clown as I am a magician?"
Father Benedict let out an audible 'tsk' and began to wipe the remnant blood away from his face.
"A Nameless, spawn of the Lace of Blood who inhabit the bodies of humans and act as them in their personal lives, albeit very badly. Of course, there are outliers. You could be one, and I would be unaware of it until you lost yourself to madness and revealed yourself to me. The followers of the Lace of Blood are always quite keen to give themselves up to the Nameless, it seems. That group of heretics is full of insane, unlikeable people who I could never understand."
'So the parasites are called Nameless? How ironic. No wonder I was attacked that day, then. They're all over the place…'
As soon as he had recovered, Ainsworth stood up and glanced at the woman standing beside him.
"Lumi, you should go home now. I have to take care of this through official channels, along with my colleague."
"Will you offer me an explanation later?"
"I will." Ainsworth nodded his head. "So, wait patiently for me."
"Very well."