Thread by @LMsDread

Past the sunken city and the warped village, the Hunter finds an outcropping where the expanse of the languid sea stretches past the milky horizon, and on the silvery sand lies a beached pale carcass.

His claws brush against the tips of the petals of the wilted Moonflowers left by the weathered wooden fence as an offering – a remembrance – a confession of the unassuaged guilt. Under his touch, they crumble and fall to the salted dirt.

The smell of sea and rot, of blood and fishlike viscera, it floats in with the breeze and never recedes. The sound of the wailing mewls carries on the air yet no sea-borne bird traverses the sky.

The Hunter understands before he vaults over the fence that below him waits the primordial sin in all its gruesome glory, the one wrong that can never be forgiven, only forgotten, and put to rest.

So he presses on to face it, and his thoughts return to the man whose face bears the visage of the Doll - keeping his vigil in the old clock-tower - for he is the one who deserves to be freed from the burden of his guilt.

When the Hunter returns to the Dream, the Doll stands with its back to him, almost pensive – its face raised towards the sky as if searching for something in the expanse of pale blue stretching overhead.

Its hair bound with the embroidered black ribbon sways on the gentle wind and the Hunter wonders at the fancy that made him do so: to weave the fabric through the blond strands.

“Good hunter,” the Doll calls to him – its voice hesitant and meek as it turns to face him, “is there anything strange, anything… changed about me?”

He approaches, a deep lurching feeling of remorse in his gut stirring; clawed gauntlets hit the cobblestones as he rips them off his hands.
“I sensed, from somewhere, a liberation from a burden, heavy fetters unchained, how passing strange…”

The Hunter’s fingers brush against the cold lifeless porcelain and the Doll, its eyes closing and one hand rising to his wrist, leans its face into his touch. “My hunter, would you ever think to love me, a doll bound to a little dream a nightmare dreams?”

“Would you?” The Hunter asks back with his voice hoarse.

“But of course, I do love you, my hunter.” The Doll brings his palm to its lips. “isn't that how you've made me to be?”

*
The hours spent under the overcast night sky turn into days – the passage of time unknowable, and unacknowledged by the sparse menagerie of characters Jesse acquaints himself with past the gates of the little workshop. The futility of his pursuit weights him down.

“And that?” He points to the one tool Jack had not explained to him.

“From this one, there is no way back,” Jack simply answers, head bowed over the book splayed on the blankets in his lap, and Jesse cannot help but ponder if there is any physical comfort for him in wrapping himself in fabrics such as those.

“It is here to etch a Nightmare’s own name onto one’s mind, to touch the beyond where they dwell, and dream their dreams, but once glimpsed, it is forever scorched into one’s being, for it is not with the eyes one sees the world for what it is.”

“Does it help?” Jesse comes closer to the contraption kept impeccably clean but worn down with age and use.

“At a steep price, Jesse. It is not to be considered lightly.”

Jack puts aside the book and untangles himself from the blankets, to trace his fingertip along the spines of the ancient tomes until he finds the one he’s searching for, more a collection of loosely put together parchments than printed pages bound proper in leather.

“One day, I should transcribe them to rid them of their history,” he adds as he places the book on the altar. “Each a name, each a contract. Choose wisely.”

Later, as he helps Jesse regain his balance, Jack smiles – and Jesse wonders at how alive his face seems in the vibrant colors he has no name for, and how his breath smells of sweet herbs and spices - and how he had failed to notice it during all his previous visits.

Only on the city streets he remembers Jack’s fingers were no longer the unyielding polished wood but soft and warm flesh, and thinks back on the strange parting words the man gave voice to.
“You needn’t have worried.”

*
Gabriel keeps his distance and revels in the thrill of the knowledge of the lies Jack tells with a light voice and no hesitation in his words, all the small and grand untruths his lips and tongue give sound to—all tricks of the game to throw off the hunt off its tracks.

The longer he observes, the deeper and sweeter the deception runs, in how Jack smiles, and how he casts his eyes to the ground, in how he does not shy from Akande’s touch but never gives in to it, and Gabriel ponders whose snare does he try to evade.

Dark and vicious is the thing that takes hold of him each time he sees their teacher show affection he now sees for what it is, unwelcome and tolerated with gritted teeth, because none of the others will know what slumbers below the surface of the lies.

When Akande’s hand lingers on his back, Jack turns his head slightly and his eyes meet Gabriel’s gaze with a smile he does not mean, a haunting ghastly grimace plastered on his face, and Gabriel feels his heart stop for the beast has grown wise to the hunter’s own tricks.

It is only after the curse creeps up Akande’s leg that Jack fades from the workshop, his presence less and less until he is gone as if he had never set foot on the grounds, and the framed pictures on the mantelpiece create the dissonance of absence.

Gabriel tracks his chosen prey throughout the city—slow and meticulous in his advance—up the creaking stairs of the old clock-tower into the makeshift lair of the beast, and Jack stands his ground with his back to the astral clock. Waiting for him.

He is thankful Jack does not tell him so because to hear it from his lips would make it a cruel lie—crueler even when Jack had let himself be known so well to him, enough that no other will know him as Gabriel does behind the falsehoods he masks his scent with.

Instead, they meet in a ravenous kiss that steals away all the words and fight—biting, scratching, and shredding their skins—on the thin bedding laid out on the dusty floor.
“I knew you’d come,” Jack tells Gabriel with fingers lazily threading through his hair.

Gabriel keeps the embroidered ribbon in his pocket as the trophy of a hunt well done. When one day he misplaces it, he doesn’t take it for the ill omen it is.