A desire for vengeance is in many ways its own currency and it buys you terrible things, but this wasn’t a goblin’s market, this was just the only thrift shop in a hundred miles that sold knives to minors and they took cash.
Eliza adjusted the angle of the drafting table and locked it into place. The parchment in the center remained fixed, but she eyed it wearily while sipping from the dark coco brew. Licking the cream from her lips, she picked up her pen and pressed the tip to the unfinished drawing. She worked in silence, not caring that the world around her was anything but.
The coffee den was always active, but the artist tables were blissfully undisturbed for working. It was a feature of common curtsy that the mapmakers and cartographers be left alone to complete their craft. If someone thought it acceptable to interrupt their work with questions or comments it usually meant they were an outsider, or someone from too far away to know any better.
Considering she didn’t have the money to rent a proper studio, as was the case with most sponsor-less artists, Eliza made an effort to stay civil when she was disturbed and remember to be thankful for what she had.
“Quite impressive,” a voice over her shoulder breathed.
Eliza didn’t pause in her cross-hatching, knowing if she did the end result wouldn’t be what she wanted. She forced her wrist to move down the length of the parchment and stop before crossing over into another shape. Lifting her pen from the drawing she capped it and set it to the side, perusing for one with a thicker tip, intent on not engaging the observers with anything more than a hum of thanks.
“It’s-the details are quite striking when I look at it like this. Is there a reason you draw it all upside down?”
Eliza paused, glancing upwards to see that the man standing over her shoulder was well dressed and smelled a hint of exotic spices afforded only to the wealthiest. She wanted to groan, but knew that would be impolite. He was more than middle aged, well to do, and likely didn’t know he was being rude. “That’s to keep the ink from smearing. I start at the bottom and draw down so my hand doesn’t smear what I’ve already done.”
He kept staring at her drawing, tracing the details with his eyes. He nodded to a section with his chin. “Is there a reason those windows don’t look like the other ones? They don’t have the same…dimension? Is that the word I’m looking for? They don’t look as real.”
“That’s because they shouldn’t be.” Eliza checked to see the clips were in place before cranking the angle of the drafting table all the way down. With her drawing on a flat even surface she gestured for the man to walk around and look at the piece from the right side up. She pointed to the first level of the house she had been drawing. “These windows are fake. In Central Yharnam there was a window tax early on. Homeowners were taxed by the number of windows on their property, this resulted in many of the houses in the city having bricked up window spaces, often painted to look like windows. There are even a few false doors.” Eliza pointed to one on the other side of the drawing.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Eliza nodded, understanding why someone from so far away wouldn’t know something so trivial about the city famed for much greater things. When a city was drowned in blood, fire, and death, windows and taxes weren’t what most people remembered. “Yharnam did not have an income tax as we do, and instead used a window tax as a crude measure of wealth.”
“Fascinating,” the man breathed, sounding like he was easily amused. His eyes were all over the artwork, taking in the details. “You’re quite knowledgeable for an artist. I’ve seen your work before. The governor has a piece framed in his home office.”
Eliza hummed in acknowledgment, turning the pen over in her hands. “I’ve done work for several senators and congressmen in the past. Commissions for Central Yharnam pieces seem to be popular among our politicians.”
She didn’t say what she thought, how she suspected art pieces of a failed and ruined city made men feel better about their own city doing any degree better. It fed their ego when little else about the condition of their city could. ‘At least there are no beasts about in our streets,’ ‘No vile plague here,’ ’There’s no crazed church ruling us.’ Looking at how terrible the forgotten city had fared made it easier to deal with the wealth inequality and financial unrest, or the failed maze harvest for the second year in a row.
“I wonder if you are very busy with commissions and do not have time for one more job request?”
Eliza looked back to the piece she was working on. It would take another two full days of work, but she had most of it finished. After this she would need to go back to drafting flyers for preservatives and lamp oil advertisements if more commissions didn’t come in. Outside a carriage rolled by on noisy wheels.
“They do take time. You would not be satisfied so readily.”
“I’m afraid it’s not your art I would be wanting to procure.”
Eliza raised a single brow, failing to see where he was going to go next with his words.
He chuckled at her expression and touched the edge of her table. “I’m quite of fan of it, and would love to own some of my own pieces one day, but I have a more pressing need at them moment, for a hunter.”
Eliza dropped the pen in her hands. “There are no more hunters, not since the death of the moon presence over fifteen years ago.” It was a story told often enough and immortalized in poem and song. Not everyone believed it anymore, and in another decade it would be all but myth to the people of her city. The refuges from Central Yharnam who had immigrated would be the last believes.
“Oh, I’m not looking for those old hunters, I know there is no dream for them,” he joked, waving a hand in front of his face. “I’m looking for the ones who were called by the new moon presence, the Greater Lunar Corpse. I need the ones gifted with his blessing.”
“What a funny story you politicians dream up,” Eliza mused aloud. “I’m not sure why you would come to an artist with such a request. I’ve been asked to sketch the moon presence and plenty of beasts and hunters before, and even an Amygdala, but I have no reference for this new dream creature you speak of.”
“I don’t want a sketch,” he repeated, turning his head and watching her as if he was watching a child. When he spoke it was the tone mothers used with their children when they were no longer willing to tolerate foolery. “I need a hunter.”
“I don’t see why you’re coming to me then,” Eliza replied, feeling a twinge of irritation at his tone. She wasn’t a child anymore. She looked young for her age, but she was far from being the little girl her took her for. Eliza made a point to eye him up and down before adding, “Or why someone like you would want a hunter when there’s nothing left to hunt. A beast’s never been seen in this city before.”
“Who said anything about this city?”
Eliza felt her fingertips go numb and curled them on reflex, reaching for something. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath before reaching down and picking up the pen she had dropped earlier. She set it down next to the others and reached for the knob that would elevate the angle of her drafting table but something heavy fell down on top of her drawing. She looked up, afraid it might have ruined her piece, but relaxed when she saw it was clothbound. He was lucky the ink was dry.
“This isn’t a table,” she bit out, doubly upset that her time was being wasted and her work being disregarded.
Mutely, he slides the wood pieces out from inside the cloth and peels them apart. Preserved between the wood pieces was a pair of art prints meant to be framed side by side. She recognized them from when she first started sketching Yharnam and didn’t have the start up capital to afford the larger parchment papers. These pieces were years old.
“Do you remember drawing these?”
“I don’t remember whom I sold them to,” she confessed easily. She remembered working on them, but sold them at a market and didn’t know who picked them up. She remembered caring more about the money.
“But you did draw these, correct?” he asked, inclining his head, watching her from under the hood of his wrinkling flesh. He seemed older in the direct light.
“They’re my pieces, but there’s nothing to set them apart from any other. Why do you have these out?” She didn’t care so much to how he got the pieces or where he found them, but he was wasting her time and she wanted to go back to work. She should have never lowered her drafting table.
He didn’t answer with words, but pointed to something down in the mess of streets for her to look to. She craned her neck and felt her jaw tense when she saw the lamppost. In the beginning, when her work was still young, she had done several pieces before remembering others who weren’t a part of the hunter’s dream couldn’t see the lampposts.
“So?” she asked, arching a brow.
She would play dumb and he would leave her alone. She wasn’t a hunter; she hadn’t been a hunter in Yharnam when she escaped with her father as a child. After he died leaving her to survive on her own in a new city; she started adding the lampposts as a way of paying tribute to him and those who sacrificed their souls for that awful calling. He told her enough about the lamps and showed her his own drawings; it wasn’t hard. She found out after a few prints left her hands, that the lampposts weren’t such a good idea.
“This.” He pointed to the first print, rougher and older from when she was first starting out. “This is not the same as this.” His finger switched over to the other print and she wanted to groan at the detail he noticed.
“No, as I’ve explained to others before, I never saw the lamp posts in Yharnam myself. These were based off field notes I got my hands on. You want those? Is that what you want?”
He pointed to the first lamppost. “This is not the same type of lamp posts we lit in Yharnam.”
His words echoed again in her ears. ’We.’
“You lit…” her eyes grew wide. “You were a hunter.”
“Which makes me an expert in these sort of things, dear. And I know I was never called into the new dream, but of those who were, they’ve told me this is what their lamps look like.” He pointed back at her drawing, rough and pulled from her memory. It was something she let go before she knew she needed to refer to her father’s notes instead of relying on her own sights.
“Then there was a mix up with my references early on,” Eliza forced herself to say. She was nervous and wanted her coffee, but didn’t trust her hands to hold anything without shaking unless it was a weapon. She smiled sweetly. “Like I said, I never saw the lamp posts myself. I was just a child when those things were going on.”
“But you’re not a child now and it’s not worth it to keep lying to me like this,” he laughed. His tone was light, like he had all the time in the world. “But don’t worry about me. I know more than one new hunter’s secret and I’ve yet to tell a foreign soul, not that you’d be in much trouble anyway. Most people don’t believe, remember?”
“There are enough angry and starving in this city to be willing to do anything for the silliest of reasons. Don’t you read the papers, old man?” she bit out, failing to be civil anymore.
Yesterday’s headline was about another starving group of youths making trouble with fires. Three months ago she saved the front page when it was about another hungry mob killing a hunter refugee and blaming him for the failed harvest. Hunters were not looked on kindly by all people, especially not the starving or superstitious. Constables were stretched thin as it was. The only thing more dangerous was to be linked to the healing church. Those lynching always made the front page.
“You can’t really blame me. Your work stands out a bit too much. You draw with too many details that shouldn’t be there. Even you messengers-“
“I’ve never published a work with messengers in it,” she cut in quickly, her voice tight.
He smiled and moved the wood plate to expose a third, smaller scrap of paper torn out of a notebook. She recognized it right away. Eliza looked up, not bothering to hide her glare. “Where did you get that?”
“I need a hunter from the new generation, one that won’t die on me before she’s finished with my job.”
“I’m not one of those-I’m not one of them.”
He smiled sadly at her and she found the look more condescending than anything. “You’re delinquent on your rent and barely able to afford food. How long until the loan sharks find you?”
“I’m not in debt.” She closed her eyes, whispering the lie and hating how it tasted on her tongue.
“No, you are, and I should know, since I own most of it, as well as what little your father left behind.” He looked down at the art prints and pulled up the one torn from her notebook, studying the drawing of the messengers. He smiled at the eyeless monsters almost fondly.
“Who are you?” Eliza asked, feeling a weight settle in her chest. Regardless of who he used to be or do, she assumed he was a collector or a politician or some merchant with too much money, but he knew too much.
“I’m curious, more than anything else, as well as ambitious, resilient and willing to do what I must to see prosperity in my city.” He dropped the drawing back onto the table, letting it drift to land by her fingertips. “But if you need a name you may call me Incognito.”
“That’s not your real name.”
He was still smiling. “No it’s not.”
“I’m not…I don’t do hunter jobs. They’re too dangerous.”
“That’s what they say, but where is the danger when you don’t die?” He leaned forward, his voice too soft to carry. “I know you’re a part of the hunter’s dream. I know you see the little demons in the water fountains and the cracks of stone. I know you know how to hunt, and I know you will do this job for me because it is in your best interest.”
Eliza really wanted to grab something with her hands, but couldn’t bring herself to move. She didn’t know what her hands would do if she moved. Sometimes they had a mind all their own. “It doesn’t sound like you’re giving me much of a choice.”
“I’ve already contracted another hunter and you would be traveling with my personal alchemist into the old city to retrieve an item left behind during the scourge. It’s a simple extraction, in and out. If you’re careful you wouldn’t even need to raise a blade.”
“Then what do you need me for if you already have a hunter and someone else?” If he had a personal alchemist she didn’t doubt he was one of the city’s most affluent individuals. She didn’t recognize his face either, so he likely wasn’t a political leader.
“You have a perfect memory of the city. You’ve drawn enough of it with so much detail that I could likely give you a location right now and you’d be able to see it in your mind’s eye. You’d be the guide for this mission.” He reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out an envelope. “This would be your advance. Use this to take care of yourself before the long mission. I would pay you the other two thirds upon your successful return.”
She heard its weight when he tossed it down on top of the drafting table. She pulled the envelope apart and quickly closed it again when she saw the rich maroon color, glancing around to see who else might have been watching. Cautiously, she peered inside the envelope again. It would be enough to square her father’s debts as well as pay her rent, something she thought would take her years to pay off.
She glanced up, eyes still narrowed. “What do you want so badly in the city?”
“A box. You don’t need to worry yourself with that since it will be my alchemist identifying the merchandise. You are to be the eyes and hands, nothing more.”
There were a hundred new and different reasons she should have pushed the money away. Even if she wasn’t at risk staying down after a death, she had no wish to reanimate in a messenger gathered body, she didn’t like the idea of pain, and there was no guarantee she could find the way in and out of the city after so many years. Who knew what had gone on inside after her exodus?
Also, there was the matter of her team. She didn’t know his alchemist, and even if she was remotely acquainted with a handful of the new generation of hunters, that didn’t mean she trusted all of them enough to share a mission into Yharnam with them. Even if the money was something she needed, was it worth spending so much time on such an outlandish mission with people she didn’t know or trust?
Summer is finally here! This is a personal project, a seasonal series of paintings of kids doing what they do when no one is watching. Summer: Licking ice cream off your elbows!
Process gifs and pdfs for this piece are available through my Patreon, along with artist livestreams and unique monthly comics! <3
Terrarium Jewellery - Wearable little worlds. - $12/€11/£8 on Storenvy
My pet project, the kind of little idea you have that takes 6 months to actually make a reality. I hope you like them! Signal boosts always appreciated <3
