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Yharnam resembles nothing so much as a skipping stone as she washes ashore by moonlight, The cloth tentacles trailing jellyfishlike behind her, the blood of scraped knees and raw elbows foaming pink in the tide, a matted mess of sea-urchin hair - these are the things that Yharnam owes to the sea; it is her eyes, wide and gibbous, that belong to the moon.
She is driftwood until she walks into the nearby hamlet like it is home. Each rotted, barnacled building she passes is a familiar comfort though she has never set foot in a single one. She can imagine, on days when the fishing boats anchor in the shallows, a roaring blaze of laughter animating this place and she is swept up in a tide of burning envy, buoyed by the knowledge that such comforts are not for her.
She continues walking until her feet bleed. The blood of the gods pierces the veil and seeps into the earth. She stops for the first time since she crawled out of the ocean to look up at the bright moon above. What exactly it is she thinks at this moment is lost, only reconstructed a thousand ways by scholars she will never imagine in turn.
It is here that she founds Pthumeru Ihyll.
She dreams of great stone claws piercing the sky. If it is an omen, it is one she makes literal as she begins the construction of the tall spires of Ihyll. Pillars of coral, still home to the sea and all its creatures, rise up at her command. The water is brought ashore and the moon draws it nearer, its gentle rocking like a wet nurse with a babe.
The people of Pthumeru are not all people of the sea but all know better than to disrespect that which is deeper, more immense than themselves. A lull settles over the Pthumerians, peaceful and stagnant. In contrast, Yharnam grows restless. Her every deed is animated by some nameless anxiety and she wakes later and later, as though sleep evades her grasp.
Her people wonder with no little anxiety what she knows that they do not. For them, the dream she wrapped around the city remains a timeless thing. There is no need to hurry to rise nor rush to bed down for the night. Talk starts in whispers and begins to grow - until it is silenced.
With three segments of a cord, the cord of the eye, the cord of the soul, the cord of the body, she makes a petition to the watchful moon. She pulls on it as it conducts the tide, a gentle erosion until it answers her in the form of a son.
As she calls layer after layer of dream down upon the city, a blanket for her beloved child, she receives a visitor. Clad in veils upon veils, shielding a coat of downy crow’s feathers that she must resist the urge to take into her hands.
The creature of the dream smiles on her with radiant benevolence as it says, “You and I are bound by something deeper than blood, thicker than water: we both want the same thing.” It is this statement, a selfish one, that makes her trust the creature. She takes one of its ritual knife-sharp hands in her own and rivulets of blood pour from her unravelling flesh before she wakes.
No beautiful dream survives contact with the waking world. Her son is dead. Yharnam falls and with her, Pthumeru Ihyll. Her subjects are swept alongside her, cursing and mourning. It is unfair. It is cruel. The eyelid of the world closes, a reflex at the pain of grief. Tears rise up from the ocean and in them Pthumeru Ihyll drowns.
Not all is lost. Those who survive bury the dead - polyp and Pthumerian alike - in the earth and build their dreams anew of stone, a seawall against the librations of the moon. It is all for naught, of course. The world moves in synodics and synods and Yharnam begins to dream of vile blood.
I tell you this tale of the past in present tense. You may wonder, then, what Yharnam is in my time that I can speak so.
There is no longer a monarch in this city. Blood is queen and it seeps down into the foundations of the earth with the death of each beast. They think them divine - and why not, when blood is queen and their first queen, they whisper, was kin to a god. The nightmare below, never sated, demands more as it wakes. I hear it. I know.
But no matter.
My queen walks again beneath her city.
This is your only warning.