On transformation, agency, and the fate of those who bear the Old Blood
Note: This essay explores multiple possible interpretations of Laurence's origins and transformation. Where evidence permits multiple readings, both are presented rather than forcing a single definitive answer.
Laurence's origins resist simple categorization. The evidence supports two distinct possibilities for how he came to carry the Old Blood, and both deserve consideration as equally plausible interpretations of the game's deliberately ambiguous presentation.
Laurence was a young Byrgenwerth scholar who discovered the Old Blood within Mergo's stillborn corpse. Already possessing a transmasculine identity, he chose to use this transformative substance on himself—an act of both scholarly curiosity and personal agency. The Old Blood catalyzed his transition, refining his masculine presentation while his retained womb became the sacred crucible through which he could process the substance into Good Blood. This reading emphasizes Laurence's agency: he was not forced into transformation but actively pursued it, understanding and accepting the risks involved.
Laurence began as a female corpse—whether recently dead or preserved from earlier times—resurrected through the application of Old Blood in a Byrgenwerth experiment. The Old Blood granted not just life but transformation, developing masculine features while retaining the anatomical womb-structure necessary for blood refinement. In this reading, Laurence's initial resurrection was not chosen, but his subsequent actions demonstrate genuine contentment with the transformation. He actively pursued blood ministration, conceived a child with Gehrman, and resisted the Church's attempts to control his body—behaviors inconsistent with someone who rejected their transformed state.
Both interpretations recognize Laurence as a trans man whose body functions as the theological center of the Healing Church's blood doctrine. Both acknowledge his womb as the sacred medium through which Old Blood is refined into Good Blood via menstruation. The difference lies in whether the transformation was initially chosen or initially imposed—but in either case, Laurence's subsequent agency is evident in his actions.
FromSoftware's games establish that transformative processes can be either voluntary or imposed, with meaningful existence possible in both cases. Solaire chose to become undead specifically to pursue his quest for the sun. Dragon followers in Dark Souls actively seek transformation into dragons, understanding the costs involved. The Ashen One in Dark Souls III exists as resurrected ash, yet possesses full agency and purpose. The distinction between chosen and imposed transformation matters for understanding character motivation, but does not determine whether that transformation can become genuinely integrated into identity.
The Old Blood functions in Bloodborne much as the Undead Curse functions in Dark Souls—a transformative affliction that grants a form of immortality at the cost of gradual degeneration and eventual loss of humanity. Understanding this parallel is essential to understanding what happened to Laurence and why his fate was structurally inevitable.
The Old Blood transforms its carriers into Bloodborne's equivalent of the undead: beings who develop beastly features over time and resurrect as full beasts upon death.
This process is observable in Father Gascoigne, whose transformation provides the clearest example of this progression. During his boss fight, Gascoigne displays sharp teeth and other subtle beastly features even in his humanoid form. When he takes sufficient damage, he does not gradually transform—he dies and immediately resurrects as a full beast. This is not a slow werewolf-style transformation but a death-and-resurrection event, the completion of a process that had been developing throughout his exposure to blood.
You can summon Gascoigne if you happen to have insight before killing him. While being summoned, he notably uses no blood vials during combat. This suggests deliberate restraint—he was attempting to minimize his blood consumption, understanding that increased exposure accelerated the beastly progression. His wife's music box served as an anchor to humanity, a reminder of what he was trying to preserve. When that anchor failed, when he consumed too much blood and took fatal damage, the transformation he had been forestalling completed itself in resurrection.
The beast scourge, then, is not a disease that makes people gradually grow fur and fangs like a conventional werewolf curse. It is a death-and-resurrection cycle affecting those who have been exposed to the Old Blood. The beastly features that develop during life are warning signs, markers of how far the transformation has progressed, but the full beast form emerges only at death—just as the Hollow form in Dark Souls emerges fully only after sufficient deaths and loss of purpose.
Applying this understanding to Laurence reveals a probable timeline of his transformation, supported by the evidence of what Brador took from his body and what appears in the Nightmare.
Laurence carries the Old Blood from birth (see here). He ministered his refined blood freely in Old Yharnam, where it formed the theological foundation of blood doctrine and created the first generation of Beast Patients through secondary exposure.
Over time—likely years—beastly features developed, such as sharp teeth, claws, fur and antlers. His body began the slow transformation that would complete only in death. Yet he remained functional, conscious, himself—able to conceive Flora with Gehrman, able to minister blood, able to resist when the Church sought to industrialize and control his body.
Some faction, possibly a proto-church, seeing where this progression led, decided to act. Brador the assassin was tasked with eliminating Laurence before he could die to complete his transformation. He captured Laurence, possibly in his final semi-bestial form, and brought him to the Surgery Altar. During the dissection, he harvested the beast hide and scalp, still moist with blood, that would become Brador's garment. Laurence had to be kept alive during this to prevent him from fully turning beast.
And upon death, as the Old Blood's nature dictated, Laurence resurrected. Not as the androgynous scholar or the semi-bestial minister, but as the First Cleric Beast—the first person to complete the full cycle from Old Blood exposure through death to beast resurrection.
The item descriptions of Brador's set confirm that Brador wore his victim's beast scalp "while still moist with blood" and was given a soundless bell to ensure the Healing Church's secrets would be kept. This indicates a recent kill, a deliberate silencing, and the harvesting of body parts from a specific individual important enough to require assassination and secrecy. The beast scalp and hide are not from a random cleric beast but from a particular person whose death Brador enacted and whose remains he wore as both trophy and punishment. Both Cleric Beast Laurence and the beast hide Brador wears display silver hair, even though this is hard to see on Laurence's boss form due to him being on fire.
Laurence's remains are scattered across the game in a manner that defies simple explanation. Multiple skulls appear, each seemingly genuine, and their relationship to one another remains unclear.
The Grand Cathedral contains a beast skull with long hair visible, placed on an altar and clearly venerated. The Cleric Beast boss form that appears in the Nightmare has its own distinct skull, visibly different in structure from the Grand Cathedral version. The Surgery Altar scene involves retrieving a skull with the Eye Pendant and then presenting it to the Cleric Beast to begin the fight. Why does Laurence have multiple skulls? Why do they differ in appearance? And are all of them genuinely his, or do some serve symbolic rather than literal functions?
The multiple skulls likely reference Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), a British novelist and clergyman whose body was stolen by resurrectionists after his death. His skull was lost, mixed with others, separated from his remains, and his complete skeleton was never properly reunited. This historical parallel is particularly appropriate for Bloodborne's themes of body-snatching, dissection, and the violation of the dead. Laurence, like his namesake, ended up with his remains scattered, his skull separated from his body, his identity fragmented across multiple locations.
The structural difference between the skulls raises questions about whether they all represent the same physical bone or whether some serve different functions. The Grand Cathedral skull might contain transplanted knowledge or memories—a repository of Laurence's consciousness or insight separate from his physical remains. This is highly speculative, but it would explain why this skull looks so vastly different from his Cleric Beast form and why the Eye Pendant (which restores insight) is necessary to activate the Surgery Altar mechanism and why presenting the skull to the Cleric Beast form triggers his recognition and the beginning of the fight.
The Surgery Altar cadaver is most likely a sculpture—an artistic recreation rather than a preserved corpse. The Eye Pendant is placed into the skull to activate the lift mechanism. The skull is then retrieved from beneath the lift and presented to the Cleric Beast in the Nightmare. This sequence suggests the skull functions as both physical object and symbolic key, perhaps carrying Laurence's "insight"—his memories, his humanity, what he failed to protect—separate from the beast form that his body became.
Ultimately, we cannot definitively explain why Laurence has multiple skulls or why they differ in structure. What we can observe is that his remains are scattered, separated, fragmented across multiple locations and forms—a fate that mirrors the scattering of Queen Yharnam's body and foreshadows the fate of any who carry the Old Blood forward.
Laurence's fate structurally mirrors Queen Yharnam's in ways that suggest a cyclical pattern rather than coincidental similarity. Both are carriers of transformative essence. Both are dissected, their bodies scattered and repurposed. Both lose their children to stillbirth or early death. Both become the theological foundation for systems built on their extracted remains.
Queen Yharnam carried Mergo, a fire-coded stillborn prince, in her water-associated Pthumerian body. Laurence carried Flora, a water-coded stillborn daughter, in his fire-associated transformed body. The inversion is precise and deliberate.
When Queen Yharnam was dissected at Byrgenwerth, her organs became Great Ones—her womb became Kos, her kidney became Rom, her throat became Ebrietas. Her body's scattering created the Great Ones that haunt Yharnam. When Laurence died and was dissected on the Surgery Altar, his remains were scattered in a different but parallel way—multiple skulls, beast parts harvested, his consciousness fragmented between human memory and beast form.
The children both carried were fundamentally incompatible with their vessels. Mergo, fire-essence, drowned in water—petrified, killed by submersion in Queen Yharnam's water-associated body. Flora, water-essence, evaporated in fire—died within Laurence's fire-associated crucible womb, her essence released in the Old Workshop and the Hunter's Dream. Both deaths were structural inevitabilities, the result of trying to contain opposing elemental principles within a single body.
This parallel suggests that every carrier of the original Old Blood is destined to suffer a similar fate. The Old Blood derives from Mergo's stillborn corpse—it carries within it the fire-essence of that failed prince. Anyone who becomes a carrier of this essence takes on the same structural doom: their body will be used, scattered, repurposed; their child (if they conceive one) will die in the incompatible vessel; they will become the foundation for institutions built on their extracted remains.
In Soulsborne's cyclical cosmology, this repetition is not accidental but fundamental. The First Flame in Dark Souls demands periodic sacrifice and rekindling, with each age requiring new fuel and each linking creating new ash. The Old Blood functions similarly—each carrier continues the pattern established by Queen Yharnam, each generation recapitulating the original sin of dissection and extraction, each cycle producing new scattered fragments that the next era will build upon.
Central to understanding Laurence's role is recognizing his womb not as a site of exploitation but as an alchemical crucible—the vessel in which Old Blood (masculine fire-essence from Mergo) is refined through a feminine biological process (menstruation). This is not metaphor but the literal theological mechanism on which the Healing Church's blood doctrine is founded.
The Communion rune—the Church's central symbol—depicts a bleeding vulva with an eye which turns into an overflowing chalice in its higher-tier variants. Not a phallus, but an obvious yonic symbol, explicitly menstrual imagery combined with insight/vision. The sacred blood that "made men by the blood" is menstrual blood, processed through a trans man's retained womb-function, distributed as a gift that heals and gradually transforms recipients into beast through secondary exposure to the Old Blood's transformative properties.
During the Cleric Beast Laurence boss fight, a visible explosion occurs in the pelvic region, destroying the lower half of the body and leaving a cavity where the womb once was. This is not "the legs exploding" as commonly misidentified, but a rupture occurring specifically at the womb-site—the place of the alchemical crucible that processed fire-essence finally detonating after Brador removed the part that processed the blood and kept everything stable. Afterwards, Laurence bleeds immense amounts of lava, marking where the fire-essence is no longer kept under control by the water-medium that refined it. The lava is Old Blood on fire.
The Blood Saints who came after Laurence underwent similar transformation, their wombs enhanced through controlled Old Blood exposure to replicate his refining capacity. They were volunteers who underwent medical preparation to become living holy mediums, capable of producing the same sacred menstrual blood. When the Church decided to fully industrialize this process, when they killed Laurence and extracted every drop, the Blood Saints met parallel fates—dissected, drained completely, their emptied bodies resurrecting as the Blood-Starved Beasts that now haunt Old Yharnam's churches, flayed and sometimes crucified.
Laurence holds the designation "First Cleric Beast" not merely as a title but as a literal description of his role in the scourge's emergence. He was Patient Zero—the first person to undergo the complete cycle from Old Blood exposure through gradual beastly development to death-resurrection as a full beast. Every Beast Patient in Old Yharnam, every hunter who later succumbed to blood-drunkenness and beast transformation, every scourge beast that crawls from puddles of spilled blood—all of these trace back to Laurence's initial transformation and the Good Blood he ministered that carried forward the beast-tendency inherent in the Old Blood.
The Opening cutscene of the game, often interpreted as the player character's first-person experience of blood ministration, may actually be Laurence's perspective—the memory of his dissection on the Surgery Altar, the blood transfusion/extraction process that kept him in a liminal state during the procedure, the entry point into the anesthesia nightmare that structures the entire game world. If the game takes place within Laurence's surgical nightmare, his consciousness fragmented and expanded into the architecture of Yharnam itself, then his status as First Cleric Beast takes on additional meaning: he is not just the first to transform but the dreaming center around which all other transformations orbit.
No matter how Laurence came to be, his subsequent actions demonstrate agency within the constraints of his structural fate. He ministered blood freely rather than hoarding it. He conceived a child with Gehrman, pursuing relationship and generation despite the risks. He resisted attempts to industrialize and control his body—resistance that ultimately led to Brador's assassination mission but that represented a refusal to become mere resource.
The tragedy is not that Laurence lacked agency but that his agency could not prevent the fate shared by all Old Blood carriers. Like Queen Yharnam before him, like any who might carry the essence forward after him, Laurence was always destined to be dissected, scattered, built upon. The Old Blood is not just transformative but consumptive—it transforms the carrier, then consumes them, then uses their remains as foundation for the next iteration of the cycle.
Laurence was simultaneously the first victim of the beast scourge in Yharnam and the first person to complete the full transformation cycle—Patient Zero and First Beast, sacred womb and extracted resource, agent of his own ministration and prisoner of forces larger than any individual will could overcome.
His silver hair, visible on his Cleric Beast form, was likely inherited by Flora—the daughter who died inside him due to carrying incompatible feminine water-essence. His womb became the theological center of the Healing Church, even as the Church killed him to ensure uninterrupted access to that sacred function. His beast form appears in the Nightmare, still seeking the skull that represents what he failed to protect, what was taken from him, what he lost when transformation completed.
In the end, Laurence's story is one of transformation accepted or reclaimed, agency exercised within inevitable doom, and a body that became simultaneously sacred medium and extracted resource—a fate he shares with Queen Yharnam, a fate he passed forward to the Blood Saints, a fate written into the Old Blood's very nature from the moment it was first discovered in a stillborn prince's corpse.