Archive of Our Own

Daud woke up on wet cement floors. It was dark, only red emergency lights fixed along the top of the walls illuminated the factory from above. It looked as if the ceilings were bleeding, blood streamed halfway down the walls into the darkness. Machines, imposing shadows with irregular contours, surrounded him. Coarse white yarns were stretched taut on the power looms vertically. The yarns were packed so tightly they appeared to be thin sheets of pale phantoms. They shimmered, betraying their lack of physical integrity, as the yarns were shifted. Unseen shuttles flew through the yarns to and fro. The mechanisms that propelled the shuttles pounded rhythmically, sharp metallic clangour; the looms vibrated and seethed and hummed like a thousand blood flies. The floor itself was vibrating with the same music, the mechanical sound of the industrial age. Daud was dazed, deafened. He recognised the place: he was in the Hatter's fabric mill. The yards of thick white fabric that wrapped themselves around the cloth rolls obediently were death shrouds for plague victims. Soon, they would wrap themselves around emaciated corpses in a tight loving embrace, closing murky swollen unyielding eyes whose eyelids were chewed off by critters. Corpses stained with blood tears and black vomit, covered in insects stings, rat bites and self-mutilation, pus from untreated wounds where parasitic larvae once burrowed themselves into. There were no workers supervising the looms, amid the noise there was no human sound, but the looms laboured on incessantly. They could not afford to stop (are they capable of pity, can they appreciate the importance of human dignity in death?) The plague won't stop its bloody rampage just because no one's watching.

Daud found himself sitting, leaning against the side of a loom. Its pounding overlapped with the beating of his heart. The floor was wet, slick with some sort of congealing liquid. He held something in his hand, rough, heavy, sticky, of a rectangle shape. A brick, this was his first thought. I am sitting in a pool of blood, this the second. It's not mine, this the third. He looked around, the looms towered over him, silhouetted against the red emergency lights bleeding half way down the walls. The wall said: "An Industrious Worker Is…" with the rest submerged in darkness. Two paces away from him lie a lump of something, something dark against the grey uneven cement floors. Something human shaped, twisted. A pale hand extended outwards towards Daud, adorned in rings. Daud couldn't see its head.

There was no head. Not any more.

When was the last time he killed someone with a brick? He couldn't remember. It belongs to a species of violence he simply did not approve. It's messy, unnecessary, inefficient. It's too personal. When you bash someone's head into a mush of blood, brains, skin, and fragments of bones, it says something about you. It betrays a part of your emotional life that you might wish to keep from prying eyes. It betrays your weakness. It says that it's not that hard for you to be rattled. It means that you are not in control. People who are not in control have a habit of dying.

Memory came back to him in pieces, like shrapnel. 

The factory floor was flooded in blinding white light from industrial grade lamps overhead. There was no merciful darkness to spare Daud the details. He killed the man with a brick, yes. He knocked him to the ground, straddled him, picked up the brick with both hands and aimed between his eyes. He hit him with the brick until he was dead, even after he was dead (was the man alive in the first place?). He did not stop until the head turned into pulp, and he was too exhausted to lift the brick again. When that was done, he surveyed the fruit of his labour. He could glimpse the whiteness of the jawbones, everything above the upper mandibles were obliterated. It looked like someone spilled a bowl of soup.
What remained of his strength left him, he detached himself from the dead man. He crawled away, and leant on a loom. Its pounding overlapped with the beating of his heart. His body trembled. He felt like a field of reeds. A violent gust of wind just passed through him, where wrath once filled his being now there was nothing, just brittle tubes of hollowness. 

His right hand caressed the rough edges of the brick, a piece of scalp with hair attached brushed the tip of his finger. The hair would be black, he thought.

He was blinded by rage, the intensity of which was alien to him. Liquid fire coursed through his veins, his hands trembled, he could taste blood that might not be his. There were bits of the skull and meat stuck to his face, his hands. The looms pounded and seethed and vibrated, its industrial pandemonium drowned the sound of brick crushing into the skull cap, denting the cheekbones and cracking the brow ridges, the screams, the grunts, and sound of feet thrashing against the floor. Maybe it did not drown them all, the sound of his wanton violence, but Daud could not hear them. There was just one thing in his mind, one clarity:

He never wants to see this face again.

Red emergency lights bled from the ceiling, staining the walls, the death shrouds, the coarse cotton yarns stretched taut upon the looms. Daud blinked stupidly into it. His tears dissolved the drying blood on his face, when they fell from his chins they were the blood tears of weepers. The pounding of the looms overlapped with the beating of his heart, then took over it. When the loom ceases its pounding, his heart would cease too. Two paces away from him lie the corpse of the man he hated and despised. He had split the man's head open so he would never have to endure the sight of his face, his black indifferent eyes ever again. And with that, Daud had died with him.

The cotton yarns that were stretched taut on the loom shimmered, as the shuttle flew through them, carrying in its belly a bobbin of yarns, the metal reeds fell down and beat the interweaving yarns into cloth. The yarns whispered to themselves. The voices were weak, sickly, introspective, as thin as a whisk of smoke but clearly discernable above the rackets of the machinery. They sounded close, as if their non-existent lips were pressed to Daud's ears. They were the quiet utterings of the weepers, before the rot seeped too deep into their heads and had their reason obliterated completely. 

"Do you feel any better…?"

"Are your eyes still bleeding…?"

"Do you ever hear your name… in the buzzing of the flies…?"

"We've lasted a while… think we'll get better…?"

"If we do… will you still love me…?"
-

Daud woke up, it took a moment for him to remember that he was alive. 

Daylight fell through the collapsed roof, the plaster cornices that portrayed stylised water lilies and grape vines had mostly fell off, the ones that still remained were green with mould. He's alive, home. It was morning, there were sounds of feet shuffling downstairs and whalers conversing in hushed voices as papers were flicked through. There was no blood on his hands. Daud sat up, and found Thomas eyeing him discreetly.

"Morning, sir." He said. And went back to his task at hand, poring over an account book. 

Daud wondered what Thomas had seen. He hadn't been sleeping well since he killed the empress. He fought against shadows in his dreams, sometimes they took on familiar faces, sometimes they were simply Corvo. Often, he thrashed about in his sleep like his blanket was a writhing serpent that was trying to strangle him, and his bed sheet a pit of quicksand that threatened to swallow him whole. Then he would wake up abruptly, with cold sweat on his back and a quickened pulse. In those dreams, he held out against death, but the dream last night was different. In this one, he died. He could still hear the monotonous thundering of the looms, as they churned out yards after yards of shrouds under the lights as red as blood. He sat beside his victim, like a hollow reed taken root.

Daud shuddered. He touched his pillow and felt the slight wetness of tears there. Inwardly, he cursed himself. Then he cursed the Outsider. He was glad it was only Thomas who had been around. The whalers were already questioning his ability to lead behind his back, even more so after the betrayal of Billie Lurk. He would've heard no end about this if they knew he cried in his sleep. Not that he cared what they thought of him personally. But lack of confidence compromises discipline, then where would they be. Thomas, however, could be depended upon.

He put Billie's note and the book she left him in his pockets. It was time to get out of there. He wanted to be alone. Before he left, he flipped his pillow.
-

///

The year 1825 was a year of turbulence but also of hope. The death of Emperor Euhorn Kaldwin was not unexpected, the man had been ailing. The citizens of Dunwall mourned their late monarch, some half-heartedly. But it must be remarked that the newly crowned Empress Jessamine Kaldwin was universally admired. Daud respected her, in a way most of the populace did not. Why, they didn't, couldn't know. She had a hand at schooling her subjects, and not beneath giving tacit encouragement regarding some old feuds between the aristocrats, who leapt at the chance at changing the status quo. They elbowed a few of the more influential families out, families who might have thought that they could play the Empress, an inexperienced girl merely twenty years of age, like a fiddle. That was where Daud and his whalers came in. The Empress did not play tricks, she merely allowed tricks to be played, as long as the results were in her realm's favour. Daud was only too glad to oblige. A few bastards once beyond his reach would never be seen again. Unless you pry open a sealed brick wall, and dive to the bottom of the Wrenhaven. 

He watched from a third-floor window, down below, the Empress' elaborately decorated coach and her procession of calvary guards marched at their stately pace towards Dunwall tower with the crowd cheering and showering the road with flowers made of paper, silk, and whatever cloth they could afford. For it was the dead of winter that had been unusually cold, and there was not a presentable bloom to be found in the whole of Gristol. You cannot throw mountain gorse at the Empress, now. Daud had a queer feeling then, a mixture of elation and apprehension. The Empress' coronation started a new chapter for the empire. And a footnote of history Daud might be, there was no mistaking that he had a hand in unveiling the future fate of men. Tucked away in the shadowy balcony of this abandoned apartment, he felt a presence perched on his shoulder, like an invisible bird, or a friendly hand.

The Outsider asked: "Are you happy?" 

Yes, Daud replied in his mind, and before you ask, I'm far from satisfied. 

"Good."

Six horses wearing tall white plumes and heavily embellished blinkers drew the coach, they trampled the flowers, before the wheels of the coach treaded on them again, kneading them into the cobbled ground. When the Empress finally passed beneath Daud's window, he threw a single flower towards her. A primrose made of a newspaper clipping, detailing the mysterious disappearance of a once prominent courtier. The widely circulated and most accepted rumour was, after years of gross embezzlement and taking pensions from foreign princes, he finally did a runner. Rumours were just that of course, rumours. They were useful, but never were to be trusted. The primrose drifted slowly down, before getting carried along by a sudden draft of breeze and landed on the cap of a red coated cavalryman. Daud smiled at that. 

"All hail." He muttered.
-

From the Chamber of Commerce across the flooded Jassamine Boulevard, then traversing across the rooftops of two rows of crumbling shops and apartments, was a bookshop housed in a narrow two storied building squeezed between its broad-shouldered betters. The ground floor was inundated, but its upper floor held out surprisingly well. It was used as an office and storage place back then. The bookshop was a front however. Its spectacled owner was in fact a peddler of occult goods with connections in the Wyrmwood District and had a hand in Sixways gang's smuggling operations. Hidden behind a false bookshelf, the owner kept a shrine in a room that was no bigger than a broom closet. Daud never went into that room anymore, but he knew it was there: Pieces of wood held together by wires, with a purple cloth draped over it, surrounded by gutted remains of a dozen candles.  Perhaps it was why he was attached to the place.

Sitting on the settee, Daud flipped through the book Billie gave him. They described faraway places, places that were pleasant to visit, pleasant to live in, even. Why would you visit this little seaside town? The author started listing the various advantages of the sea air in restoring health, the blooming trawling fishery, the loveliest people you would ever meet if you get to know them, salt of the earth. Are you tired of the infernal hubbub of the city, are you tired of wading in filth on the street, rubbing shoulder with bad-tempered double-dealing undeserving nincompoop? Come live in the country.

They would write the same thing in reverse for people in the country, no doubt. Daud thought. He was moved, nonetheless. Billie was right, he had been stashing gold all over the empire for at least a decade, which was enough to settle himself in any part of the empire as a quiet unassuming squire. He told himself that he was preparing contingencies. Now the day had come. Yesterday, the day after he retrieved the boat's engine coil for Lizzy Stride from the Hatter's mill, one of his assassin's reported the rumour of Lady Boyle going missing. Was it an unrelated incident? Perhaps. All the Boyles had enough enemies waiting in line plotting their destruction. In the evening the rumour was confirmed, Lady Boyle was gone, likely dead. On the bottom of her guest list was signed by a man's hand: Corvo Attano. Daud knew enough of the Boyles and the lord regent to guess what Corvo was likely planning. Daud had hoped that he would take a much longer time working through the ranks before making a move on the lord regent himself, but perhaps there was some truth in Corvo being the most feared man in the isles after all. He earned the moniker before being given the Outsider's mark, now with the god's favour and the power of the void, who could say what kind of monster he had become? 

When the lord regent falls, Daud would be next. There was a pathetic part of him that yearned to embrace his inevitable demise. He would die gladly in Corvo's hands. The Void knows the man deserved his revenge. It was the least Daud could do, just wait here, until Corvo decided it was time to come and take his life. It was almost justice. Almost, because the same pathetic part of him also decided that death was too good for him.

Daud leafed through the rest of the book. He used to complain about Dunwall. Everyone who lived in this city complained. But when he leafed through all the charming towns and beautiful cities the empire had to offer,  he had never felt so attached to this emaciated glorious city. For the same reason he came here in the first place: Dunwall was the heart of the empire. A rotten heart it might be, it was and always would be the place where everything is happening. This was where you should be, if you still harboured any hope of making a difference. And perhaps, perhaps he still could – not undo what he had done, but at least to improve upon this ruin.

"Considering an early retirement plan, are you?" The Outsider said. Daud was startled. He looked up: the god was sitting on the desk with his arms folded. His manifestation looked unnerving under natural daylight flooded in through the window, illuminating just the left side of his face. 

Reality warped around the Outsider, light was fractured and distorted, Daud could hear faint roars of violent ocean waves and the strangled songs of wounded leviathans. Hearing was not the right word. He could taste the brine in his mouth, a sour concoction, like tears and coppery blood intermingled. Distant shores crumbled under the crashing waves, white foam erupted and dissolved, the vibration of the sea's eternal motion and that of the whale song's sustained deep rumbling note, he could feel the same vibration in his bones, behind his throat. Such dissonance could be jarring if an inexperienced mortal was exposed to it. It flayed the usual defenses of the animal psyche, the exposed nerve endings became raw, sensitive to otherworldly influences. This was part of the reason why the average men's minds decay if they were under the void's influence for too long: similar to how acres of land could be carried away to sea by wind and tide, this was the attrition of sanity.

Daud blinked, he had been out of practice for too long. The dissonance troubled him.

"Shouldn't you be perching on Corvo's shoulder and whispering in his ear?" Daud asked. Ignoring the god, he pretended to look at an illustration of an estuary in Morley famous for its blue lipped oysters. The flat muddy shoreline and sparse briars suddenly became captivating. 

"He's asleep." The Outsider said. His voice again caused Daud to blink: it really had been too long. He could hear layers upon layers of faint, turbulent, insect-like whispers rolling under the Outsider's voice. They talked in hushed secretive voices, they talked fast, words lapped onto each other into an indistinguishable swarm of phonemes. It was the void's lost souls' incessant chattering. 

You are bored. Daud thought, dryly. You are bored because your favourite toy is not doing anything interesting, so you are here to bait me. If The Outsider's first appearance only roused his annoyance, now there was true resentment dripping from Daud's every thought.

"And just what does the most feared man in the empire dream about?" Daud asked.

"He is not dreaming about the singular most excruciatingly painful way to kill you." The Outsider answered humourlessly.

"I'm disappointed." Daud said.

A moment of silence, then the Outsider said: "He is dreaming about taking Emily to see bluebells in spring. He dreams of Emily in her white riding coat, the one the late empress picked out for her to wear on her last birthday. He remembers the embroidery on its front panels very well, silver threads that outline two doves and every feather on their fanned out wings. She will soon put a wreath of drooping bluebells over his head and dare him to speak the truth. He will tell Emily that he loves her, and will protect her forever and ever. The doves will be all he sees. That is when the dream will turn into a nightmare."

Daud felt his face tighten and found himself clenching his teeth without realising it. 

"It will all be over soon." Daud said, with grim resolution. He fidgeted with the corner of a page.

"Nothing is ever truly 'over', Daud. You should have realised it by now." 

"You are in no position to make me feel guilty about the consequences of what I did." Pained, Daud wanted to scowl. He glared at the Outsider, practically spitting out those words as he would hurl knives into his enemies' eyes.

"I do not play favourites, but I favour you enough to reveal to you your fate. I put to you a question: who is responsible, the knife that pierced the heart, or the hand that wielded the knife?" The Outsider asked. He held Daud's scorching gaze, unflinching. 

Daud refused to answer. He stared into The Outsider's eyes that were nothing short of two punctures on the fabric of reality and felt that he was staring into the void itself. Perhaps he was. He felt powerless, like a child stomping on receding waves, throwing curses at the tide and waging futile wars against the ocean. His anger was inconsequential, and his scathing stare that would put the fear of the void in other people meant nothing to the lord of the void himself. The Outsider's very indifference and collected demeanour a mockery. Daud did not back down, however. 

"Answer me." The Outsider demanded quietly, his tone remained impassive. With that, the dissonance surrounding him grew more pronounced. It was as if Daud's blood had turned into rust and his bone marrows into fine grains of sand. Daud knew that the Outsider was doing it deliberately. 

"The hand of course." Daud snapped curtly, "What are you getting at?"

“And which of the two do you fancy yourself to be these days, old friend?" The Outsider asked.

Daud flinched at the word "friend". He conceded then, and looked away. His gaze wandered the room and then towards the window. The cheerless sky, the scudding clouds, the boarded up windows across the street. Daud gave the black eyed bastard this much credit: he certainly was cruel enough to ask the one question that for months, Daud had been denying himself asking.

"Daud, look at me." The Outsider said softly, like he was coaxing some unwilling gelding to accept the saddle.

"You promised me, and yourself, that you would force your will upon this world." The Outsider said.

Pointedly, Daud did not look at him. He looked at the cheerless sky, the scudding clouds, the faded bottle green curtain that draped over a pile of books on the windowsill, creating an unnatural bulge. He looked at the chipped saffron wallpaper, the boarded up windows from across the road like the many lidded eyes of a dead mummified giantess. He looked at all this and saw nothing. 

At length, he muttered, almost to himself: "I am the knife of Dunwall." He sounded amazed by what he uttered, as if he only just now stumbled upon this realisation, and the words suddenly became alien to him.

The Outsider said: "Are you satisfied? With a presumptuous nickname given to you by the gutter press and writers of penny dreadfuls? How you bore me."
A change came over Daud then. He looked at peace with himself, like a man resigned to his fate. As if he had just admitted to himself a painful truth. He was getting too old to pull the wool over his own eyes, and too tired to continue humouring the Outsider's baiting. He turned, looked the god in the eyes, and said in his usual raspy voice: "I am the knife of Dunwall, that's it. Whatever you have to say about this so called fate of mine, you know where to shove it." 

There was no anger in his words, only detachment. As if he assigned no value to what he was saying whatsoever.

The Outsider tilted his head, then, palms up, he put out his hands: "I have revealed to you your fate, the choice is entirely yours. That was the power I gave you, remember? To see your fate, but not be subject to it. You have been disappointing… But there is hope. Now, it seems you have a visitor. Farewell, Daud, I will be watching."

Thomas found his master in the upper floor of the abandoned bookshop, alone, staring into the book Billie gave him as if he had been absorbed into some sort of daydream. He appeared to be reading, but for ten minutes he had not turned a single page. His eyes without focus. On the left hand side was the copperplate illustration of a Morley estuary upon which bobbed a single sail. Thomas' appearance roused the old assassin from his stupor, Daud looked up with a frown, expecting an explanation for the intrusion.

"Lizzy Stride sent word that her territory is consolidated enough for her to leave temporarily to take you up river at a moment's notice. And… we found this note, sir. It was stuck on the mess table in our southernmost outpost with a knife. Delilah requests a meeting with you in the Draper's ward sewers." Thomas handed the note over. The message was written on thick writing paper which smelled like it had been doused in perfume. The aroma was so pungently sweet it was suspicious and bordered on revolting.

Daud glanced at the message. It was short, blunt to the point of rudeness. She wanted to talk to him through one of her statues.

"Are you considering going, sir? I can send out scouts before you." Thomas sounded concerned. He had reason to be. He had already failed to alert Daud of the witches's ambush once down in those riverkrust infested sewers. He could not help but measure himself up against Billie, who wouldn't make the same mistake, surely?

"No need." Daud said. He glanced up from the note at Thomas who was standing as straight as a board, and softened, "She's too smart to try the same tactic twice. Find out how her agent got past our sentries, this cannot happen again, not with Delilah, Corvo, and the abbey all baying for our blood. Tell Lizzy Stride we will leave at two bells in the afternoon watch. Post a few good people around the riverfront and have someone watch the Hatters, we cannot afford to have anything untoward happen to her or her boat."

Thomas nodded. Daud flicked his right hand, and the assassin was gone.

Without the Outsider's manifestation, the void retreated from the room like the falling tide. Washed by the brightening daylight, the small room was plain and uninteresting. It had nothing to say. Reality was very much intact. Daud felt a small sense of loss. Not that he would ever admit it to anyone. Despite the vertigo and sickness the void's dissonance now inflicted upon him at first contact, as time went on, the leviathans' dirge that vibrated in his bones became something akin to a lullaby, the crumbling waves a natural rhythm of his being. They lulled him, they raptured him, soothed him, embraced him, welcomed him into their fold. The perpetual hollowness in his heart was alleviated. Not because there was anything that could fill it, but because implicitly, he knew that he was not alone. It was what he had been missing in the past years: the Outsider's company, his very presence. It stroked a part of Daud he himself hadn't remembered existing for a long time. It made him feel like he was something other than himself, connected to otherworldly things like stars of a constellation. The Outsider was the void, and sometimes, when Daud was particularly in tune, he felt like a part of him, his god, his great leviathan. He breathed like the pores of the Outsider's skin, the membranes of his cold silky viscera. It terrified and enthralled him in equal measure.

He hated this. He hated him. He was repulsed by the idea because he loved every bit of it.

Daud walked over to the desk where the Outsider once was and touched its edge where the god's shadow fell. It was just wood. Rough grains, faded, chafed by use.
He did not want to remember, but he did in fact remember his promise. When he was young, he told the Outsider that he had travelled the length and breadth of the empire, he had learnt the lay of the streets of Dunwall and uncovered her secrets. He had seen the known world and found it wanting. And he would be the person to do something about it. He would reap the lives of the corrupt, the abusive and the cruel, he would make them beg for mercy and deny it. He promised, that come what may, he would force his will upon this world, cut off the tumours that plagued Dunwall and wash away the corruption that festered in this city's very bone and marrow with blood, if need be. If he could earn his keep this way, then he would be happy.

When Daud read in the paper regarding how Corvo Attano was dishonoured for killing the Empress, he mused over the meaning of that word. He thought about how dishonour was less about what the papers, the wider society, or even what one's close friends thought of one's deeds. One is dishonoured when by executing or failing to execute an action, he realises that he is not really the person he thought himself to be. At least we have that in common, Daud thought. Corvo was dishonoured because he couldn't uphold his pledge to protect the Empress. Daud was dishonoured too: the moment he failed his promise, he plunged the city into chaos. He thought himself a personage who could make a difference, but what was he really, other than a killer for hire, a tool to be borrowed for favours and traded for coin, a knife to be wielded by the very same aristocratic bastards that he despised as a young man. 

Again left alone with his thoughts, he looked outside at the cheerless Gristol sky, the scudding clouds fleeing before the wind, the brief flash of a white wing as a gull dashed by and soared out of view, the chipped saffron wallpaper, the dusty bottle green curtains that had long lost its lustre, the boarded up windows from across the street, rusted pipes clang to the wall like shrivelled vines of ivy. He looked at all these and saw himself. Flooded, rotten, decrepit, a relic from another age. Cold humid winds gathered into a swirl and swept the inundated street below. The algae infested water rippled. Green, oily, heavy, like congealed blood in the veins of the dead.

There he was, being moulded into the image of the city itself. It had been almost two decades since he made that promise, and now he was nothing, nothing but the knife of Dunwall.

He had just one last job to do. Then Corvo would come for him, and it would all be over. Perhaps then he would be nothing but a condemned soul lost to the void, one of many. He would be absorbed by the maddened chorus of spectral voices bubbling beneath the Outsider's own. Then he would be just another hollow reed, shivering, among a field of desolated hollowness. 

If forgiveness was out of reach, at least he could forget, and be forgotten.
-

///

Daud was lured here out of curiosity, following the trail of an odd band of workers just finishing their shifts in the fabric mill intermingled with dock labourers. He was on his way back to the chamber of commerce. Lizzie Stride asked for one day to deal with her "domestic affairs". It meant that the next time Daud saw her crew, he would notice a lot of bloody stumps where fingers once were

Daud saw the labourer he freed from the slaughterhouse, who now worked in the Hatter's fabric mill, nodded at him in recognition. Before he could respond, the man was already on his way over, elbowing other sweaty exhausted patrons of this old and low-ceilinged establishment. 

The man raised his glass in greeting, there was a thimble of whiskey in it: "I hope you got whatever you came for. I'm just glad that I still have a job. And alive."

"Thank you for the information regarding nurse Trimble." Daud said. 

"You freed me from Rothwild's thugs, that's the least I can do." The man chuckled, downing his whiskey, "If it isn't for my mate who was in that cell with me, no one's going to believe who saved us. I still don't believe it myself."

"Nice pub you have here." Daud remarked, gesturing around them. He was being honest. Dunwall had been hollowed out like a dead city by the rat plague, yet here sat this quaint small rectangular public house on the northern outskirts of Draper's Ward. The house boasted terrible, almost ancient masonry, its ceiling grazed Daud's head and he wasn't even a tall man. Taller men had to bend their necks and haunch their backs, creating the impression that they weren't on land but in the cabin of a sailing ship. It was stuffy, exacerbated by the body odour of thirty unwashed bodies who spent their whole day in factories or hauling goods at the docks, as well as the sour smell of spilled alcohol. The floor was covered in sawdust and the glasses looked dubious. However, people were merry. People laughed, smiled, bantered with their friends, the misbehaving drunks were thrown out into the street via the backdoor by a thickset Tyvian man. Three Morley musicians were picking a song in the corner, one of them tormenting a fiddle.

"Been here three hundred odd years. When there was still a market down in the ward, this was the weaver's haunt. The flood didn't tear it down, the insurrection bypassed it, the streets around here turned into flophouses and then were torn down, but it's still here. Guess not even the plague can destroy it". The man mused, nodded to himself..

"I didn't expect to see so many people gathering under one roof. Happy people. Not with the city being what it is these days. What about the plague?" Daud asked.

"What else can we do? Most of us work the same shift." The man said, there was no real edge nor sarcasm in his words. He turned a little towards Daud. Only then did Daud notice that his eyes were as dim as that of a day-old dead fish. But that hint of sorrow and numbness was just there for a moment, his smile soon reached his eyes again. 

"I suppose not much." Daud admitted.

"You know, over here, it's better than working for Rothwild. The hour's long, the pay isn't good and they treat us like pigs, but at least the gangs don't pretend to be entrepreneurs. " The man said, "I heard Rothwild the old bugger disappeared, was it you?"

"It's safe to say that he won't be prancing about his slaughterhouses any time soon." Daud said, with a wry smile.

"I drink to that." The man said, and gestured to the bartender, "What did you do?"

"I put him in a crate bound for Tyvia. If he's lucky, someone'd have found him by now. If he's not, well." Daud shrugged.

"People like him, they don't deserve good luck. By the void, let him rot in Tyvia." The man said. He bought Daud a drink.

"I drink to that." Daud said, raising his glass in appreciation. But really he was thinking to himself: don't you think that the void favours exactly buggers like him, like myself? Sometimes sheer luck, of great enough quantity, could make a seemingly incorruptible good man the worst buggers of them all. And show me such a good man, if you can produce one. Just one.

The man downed his drink and loosened up a little: "I thank him for locking me up. Wouldn't have come to work here otherwise. As long as there's people dying, and there will be plenty of people dying everyday while there's the plague. I will have work, my ration of elixir, and the perks of not coming home smelling like leviathan's rotting bowels."

"You are good humoured about it. People with a queasy streak might have problems coming over to your point of view."

"You hear enough of it, I'm sure," The man said, getting familiar and the fear dissipated a little, he inched closer. If it wasn't Daud he was talking to, he would've patted him on the back, "but I envy you. People like you and Abigail Amnes, you are important people. You talk to the bosses and they'd listen. You certainly saved me a beating. People like you make a real difference. You don't need good humour to keep on living. If something seems unfair to you, you just deal with it."

What do you know, Daud chuckled drily to himself. In a way, he was almost envious of the man's forced good humour. It was forced, sure, but it had become such a habit as to become perfectly natural. At least the man's not burdened with the guilt of killing an Empress and abducting a child. At least his hands were stained with the blood of whales, not of men. Well, what do you know?

"There's only so much difference a person can make. In the great scheme of things, it isn't much." Daud said, he nursed his drink for a beat, then added, "We aren't that different."

"I drink to that." The man said. Then he held out a finger, "a moment."

Daud watched as the man elbowed his way towards the musicians and leant close to the fiddler. The fiddler nodded, nudged the rest of the band and exchanged a glance with each of them, stomped his foot, and sawed away. After the first few notes, the entire room erupted into merriment. Daud then noticed that most of them were Morleyans, likely immigrants who escaped the wars and famines of their native land, only to be caught in the middle of a rat plague. The musician picking the guitar started singing then, its refrain echoed around the room sloppily:

We're all met together here to sit and to craic,

Wi' our glasses in our hands and our work on our backs,

There's nae a trade among 'em that can mend or make,

If it wasn't for the work of the weavers!*

The man elbowed his way back to the bar, and sat down heavily beside Daud. He had started drinking way before Daud came in.

"Half of the room is making shrouds for the dead. It cheers us up, that the living depends on us too. Even the lord regent has to get his clothes somewhere. That's the only difference we can make, I suppose." The man smiled, tapping along to the song. His eyes gleamed.

"Someone has to make them." Daud said. A little glum, he thought of his own work, his own legacy. He had been the person who put cold stiff bodies into those shrouds. What difference had he made in the past decades? What could he boast about, if he chooses to do so? What would the world remember him by, other than the aristocratic blood he spilled that could keep a whaler ship afloat?

"I'll drink to that." The man said. And he did.
-

Going deeper into the damp foul-smelling sewers of Draper's Ward, he could hear the gurgling of the riverkrusts echoing from far off, the deep, rumbling sound of heavy machinery, and faint pattering of small rodent feet. Flocks of rats, fattened on corpses of weepers and refuse dumped into the sewers. Rats, everywhere. Daud kept himself on high alert and investigated the nook and crannies, sweeping the tunnels with his void gaze, but the witches seemed to have vacated this area completely. There were two Hatters patrolling the engine room. Daud sneaked past them with ease. With a single traversal, he materialised in the small room adjacent to it, and closed the door behind them.

Delilah's statue stood there still, blindingly white under pale cold light casted from above, among white flowers blooming curiously, miraculously, over hard concrete ground. The sheer strength of their roots had created fissures in the concrete, and the magic of the void their only nourishment. Daud could appreciate their strange, otherworldly beauty, delicate and radiant. But sharp, as if they could make you bleed. Their aroma covered the pungent smell of decay and mould. He wondered what these flowers that always accompanied Delilah's magic said about her. How she created alien, rootless life that served no other purpose than beauty for beauty's sake, as if as an afterthought. A by-product that was borne out of her unconscious. He remembered the bizarre explosion in Coldridge prison, how thick vines crawled out of the floor, beautiful flowers dangled off the ceiling and pollens drifted in and out of the beams of electric lamps, shining brightly like so many drifting stars when they were illuminated and then dimmed when they drifted out of range, the verdant sweet-smelling vegetation that surrounded the horrific subject of the incident, a charred corpse cuffed to an interrogation chair.

Dark tendrils of roots dangled from the ceiling, veins of white-blue flowed threaded into them, like liquid void or diluted whale oil. They hang like jagged teeth, or chandeliers.
Among the flowers, and Delilah stood on the pedestal elegantly, haughtily, as if she herself was a goddess, who too had an otherworldly origin. The lines on her face were smooth, as if in her pride and power, she had not a care in the world. Daud was no art connoisseur, but even he had to admit, Delilah conveyed her unbridled arrogance perfectly. He had not wanted to punch someone so badly in the face for a long while. What a pity that the statue was carved from stone.

"I see you have received my message." Delilah said, condescendingly. 

Daud looked up – he suddenly realised why Delilah set her statue on such a high pedestal – so she could look down from her nose at other people all the time, and the other person, by constantly looking up to seek her eyes, must tax the muscles in their neck and have their pride suffer. In a way, she was conducting psychological warfare. 

"What do you want?" Daud asked tersely.

"You know very well what I want. I want you to stop meddling with business that has nothing to do with you!" Delilah started her sentence calmly, in her usual haughty-taughty tone, but as she talked, she began to snarl. 

"You know very well I am coming after you, and I won't stop, no matter what you say." Daud said. He smiled, amused at Delilah's reaction, and he knew that his amusement would bother Delilah. Even if she did not show it, Daud just knew she would.

"How do you benefit from this? When I am done, and have what is rightfully mine reclaimed, you won't even notice it. It will even be better for you, I will crush the overseers so you can practise magic however you like, I will make the city watch turn a blind eye to your operations, you can move out of the dump that was the chamber of commerce and I will let you have any gang's territory. I will have that power, believe me." Her tone softened, but still condescending, as if she's trying to explain to a child why they should eat their greens, she cooed and her voice was as smooth and gentle as if she was stroking the petals of a flower with it, "You are a businessman, Daud. We can talk business: what do you have against what I am going to do? I don't believe you even know my full intention. But know this, come for me and be destroyed, or turn away from your idiotic meddling, and you will be rewarded."

"I know this much, you have ill intention towards the heir to the throne, and you want to be crowned Empress. How are you doing it, I don't care. But I won't have it." Daud said, "It isn't just business."

Delilah laughed, sharp metallic peals of laughter that echoed in Daud's mind like marbles. She collected herself, bent down and teased: "The rumour is that you loved the black eyed bastard once, is that true?"

Daud frowned: "Did Billie tell you this?"

"There's an old witch who lives in the sewers, she too is touched by the void. Talk to her sometimes, she has entertaining insights on many things." Delilah smirked.

"I thought you are smarter than believing the mad ramblings of a deluded old witch who thought that she should be married to the Outsider and raise swarms of rats as children. But I overestimated you. Even if it is true, it has no bearing on anything." Daud said.
"Then why did you come after me blindly like a bloodhound the moment he tossed you my name? You want to be relevant again, to be entertaining. For that is what all this is for him, " Delilah gestured around them theatrically, her voice undulated and emphasised the word "entertaining" in plain mockery, "pitting two of his pets in a pen, and see what unfolds. It's pathetic of you."

"Did he warn you of me? Is that why you contacted Billie Lurk?" Daud asked. He had no patience for Delilah's presumptions.

"Or is this why you can't let go? Because I turned your second in command into a traitor, and now you hold a grudge?" Delilah teased.

"You flatter yourself." Daud answered coldly, "I failed her, it was between us. You just happened to be there at the wrong time. You could've been anyone. But on the other hand, yes, I do hold a grudge against you. Maybe you shouldn't be so unwise in making the situation personal before attempting to dissuade me from hunting you down."

"You and your grudges, Lurk told me all about it." Delilah shook her head disapprovingly, "The Outsider said that you will be my enemy, and was interested to see how I will set about destroying you. I learnt all about you: a reptilian killer for hire having a midlife crisis, moping around the flooded district like you are already dead. You might think you have grown a second conscience, but Lurk knew, as I do, it's nothing but a tumour. You cannot change, Daud. You are what you are. You were such a disappointment. You already destroyed yourself, it's putting a sick dog out of its misery. So the first thing I did was to take away the last thing in the world you can really trust, the only person who might understand you and have a sliver of sympathy."

"Always knew you are a bit of a bitch." Daud chuckled drily. His finger tapped the hilt of his whaler knife.

"Last chance, walk away. Or I will have my sisters tear you limb from limb, and use you as compost in the garden." Delilah threatened, straightened her back, looking at Daud from the corner of her stony white eyes. Fine dust fell from the statue. Then she smiled, it was all teeth, hostile, "I can't wait."

"I didn't come here to listen to your threats." Daud said.

"Then accept my offer." Delilah raised her voice.

"I wanted to ask you something, one marked one to another." Daud gestured the distance between them.

"You came here to compare notes with me?" Delilah sounded incredulous. A shower of dust fell from her stony shoulders.

"Has he ever told you about your fate? Or any similar nonsense?" Daud asked.
Delilah's statue stilled. For a moment Daud thought that she had concluded the conversation. But then the statue came to life again, its head cocked to one side.

"Yes." Delilah said, hesitantly, cautiously.

"What did he say?" Daud asked.

"You have a habit of poking your muzzle too deep into other people's business, Daud." Delilah frowned, crossing her arms. The thorns that covered her body appeared to grow. Longer, sharper, more deadly. 

"But do you think he might be right?"

Delilah laughed, albeit a little warily.

"As you've said, it's all cryptic nonsense. He likes the sound of his own voice. I have the power he gave me, what he says is of lesser importance. I will have what I want."

"I used to think that too." Daud mused, "A word from your elders: what you think you want isn't always good for you."

"Says an old man who, allegedly, has nothing but regrets." Delilah scoffed, "You only say this because you failed, and you are miserable. I will not fail. I might cut off your eyelids and keep your head as a trophy, so that you can witness my happiness."

"Whatever you plan is, think about it. Is it what you want? You are young. You don't know how impossible it is to undo what the mark allows you to do. What it tempts you to do." Daud said. He felt old, there was heaviness in his bones, like sediments settled on the riverbed. He was watching someone, perhaps making the same mistake as he. Every time you give in to the thrills that the void tempted you with, you lose a piece of yourself. That was the fine print of their contract. A bitch she might be, and grudge notwithstanding, no one deserved that.

"I am warning you, Daud." Delilah put her hands on her hips and bent down so that her face was just inches away from the assassin's, she snarled, "Do not teach me. Do not presume that you know me. You know nothing. I am no young girl. I have lowered myself many times to men whom I despise so that I might rise. I have calculated every move, because to be wrong is to be dead. I know what I want, I have wanted it since I was seven, spying on Jessamine practising quadrille in her fashionable ball gown through the keyhole. In my entire life, I lived and breathed for this, this one thing. When I succeed, and I will, there will be no regret. The world will be mine to command, and I wouldn't change that for anything. I am not you, I am greater than you. Now, get lost."

"Then I will have to stop you. You are afraid, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered talking me down." Daud said.

Delilah extended a hand to him: "You are very welcome to try. Maybe then, you will finally recognise that I am your better."

"So you are." Daud muttered to himself, sarcastic.

The words fell on deaf ears. Delilah was gone. Her statue returned to its graceful arrogance, like a still frame taken from a beautiful, beautiful dream. A layer of fine white dust covered the flowers that encircled her, illuminated, they shone like diamonds.

Perhaps she was right, Daud thought. Perhaps usurping Emily, however she wanted to go about it, would make her happy. Perhaps she would not regret whatever she planned to do to an innocent child. Daud could not judge her, he had already wrecked irreparable damage to the child, and he had harmed far more innocents than he'd like to remember. He would not let Delilah touch a hair on Emily's head, if he could still do anything about it. He owed the girl that much. He owed the girl's mother that much.

Then he heard a familiar voice, a presence on his shoulder.

"Did you just try to talk her out of it? I'm intrigued, did you really think that she will listen to you?" The Outsider asked.

"I didn't do it for her sake." Daud admitted, "I wish that someone tried to talk me out of killing the empress. It's something that needs to be said, if I have to do it, well."

"By someone, you mean me." The Outsider said, then paused, as if he's thinking, "You still blame me for your actions."

"You branded us. You gave us the power to do whatever we want, expecting a good show. And when we've wrought chaos and caused endless misery, do you think you can just walk away?" Daud asked accusingly.

"I did not give you the power to do whatever you want." The Outsider replied, his voice was suddenly quiet and small. Daud thought that he heard disappointment.

"What would you call it then?"

"I just gave you the power." The Outsider replied.

Before Daud could think of a sharp retort, the presence was gone.
-

///

The Outsider warned Daud once, of something of significantly less importance than the death of an Empress, the disintegration of civil order in the city of Dunwall, or the fall of an empire. He came with a warning, and a choice.

At the end of every year, there was the fugue feast. A day that existed outside the calendar, when upon the tolling of the great bells, Dunwall descended into sanctioned pandemonium, as it waited for the calendar of the stars to align with the calendar of men. It was a day of unhinged revelry, of despicable indulgence, and of horror, should you find yourself on the receiving end of cruelty or the unlucky target of revenge. For it was also a day of lawlessness, as the constraints of civilisation no longer apply, murderers could commit their monstrosities in broad daylight and walk away with contemptuous ease, blood still dripping from their fingertips. 

Before the fugue feast, there was silence. If the feast was to start at dusk, just after the firing of the one o'clock gun down at the dockland, the crowds on the streets of Dunwall would begin to grow sparse. Trade would be suspended and workers would have already left their posts. There was preparation to be made, windows to be boarded up, knives to be sharpened, consorts to be sought out, and the final finishing touches to be applied on the festive masks. Masks of grasshoppers, of orb-weaver spiders, of flowers sewn from coloured ribbons, of faces that inspire fear and faces that delight. The city of never-ending hive-like activity, of diligent industry, of scores of counting houses with coins ever flowing, for once in the entire year, ceased its labour. Dunwall never sleeps. Under the warm spring sunshine, it would lie sprawling on the southern plains of Gristol, paralysed by fear, excitement and feverish anticipation, as if she was nothing but a young bride fully clothed, with a blanket of silence thrown upon her, lie on the bed as rigid as a sprig, waiting for her husband with bated breath. The citizens would prick up their ears as daylight grows pale, waiting for the great bells to toll at the discretion of the abbey.

It was the last day of the year 1826, Daud had dismissed his whalers to do whatever in the void they wanted to do. He had no secret desires, nor repressed passions. The fugue feast was just an ordinary day to him.

Daud had a private room in his base of operation, a house at the end of an unassuming close. The house was near the slaughterhouses on the east bank of the Wrenhaven. It was a small room, with a bed, a desk, a chair, a dresser, a rather austere altar for the Outsider, and a singular sash window opened riverward installed with venetian blinds. It was quiet now. The slaughterhouse had stopped its operation. The apartments and houses in the neighbourhood were silent. 

Daud sat on the edge of the bed, and tinkered with a whaler's vapour mask. He unscrewed the metal rim that framed the goggles, so that he could put some anti-fog solutions on the lenses. He found the Tissot tubes quite inadequate for defogging just by itself. It was fine for a whaler whose only preoccupation was to burn the whale fat in a stove, but not at all for the use that he had in mind.

"No plans for the fugue feast again?" The Outsider asked. He leant on the wall opposite to Daud, his arms folded. 

Daud grinned: "Sorry to disappoint."

He never did tell anyone about that ghost-like sense of warmth he felt blooming in his heart whenever he was in the presence of the void god, even when he was just an incorporeal voice perched on his shoulder. He was grateful, he supposed. And awestruck, although his native insolence forbade him to show it: he did not grovel, that was to say. The Outsider was, in a way, a mystery. And Daud could never abide mysteries. 

"You have not disappointed me yet." The Outsider said. Daud could not help but grin a little wider at that remark before schooling his face. The god walked over to him and plucked the vapour mask from Daud's hands.

"I'm planning a… uniform for the whalers. Like other gangs. Now that we have a reputation, I need to put that reputation to use. When people see that," Daud pointed to the mask, "They will know it's time to be afraid."

"Whalers often hold the leviathans in great esteem and talk of them as affectionately as of their own brothers. The moment they don these masks and have their features occluded, however, they will tend to their work with ruthless industriousness. The whale becomes little more than a prodigious amount of meat, blood, oil and bones bound in lubber." The Outsider mused, turning the mask over in his hands, tracing a finger over the metal rims that framed the goggles, "The mask's true purpose might simply be to hide the truth of its wearer from themselves."

"What truth is that?" Daud asked.

"It isn't a harvest; it's a murder." The Outsider replied, contemplative, and handed the mask back to Daud, "An intriguing choice."

"There're still a few wrinkles to iron out." Daud shrugged, "Why are you here? I thought you might want to take a front seat for whatever interesting is going to happen tonight."

The Outsider sneered at this: "Whatever happens tonight is but what Dunwall had denied itself out of propriety and morals. I have seen their hearts, their tedious desires: I am the secret that lurks in their mind's primordial depth, the secret that they do not dare to admit to themselves, the truth they will not speak. Whatever decision they had to make, they had made them a long time ago. There's nothing new for me out there."

"You've seen my heart too." Daud said. 

"Yes, which is why I am here." The Outsider said and sat down beside Daud. 

Daud felt the mattress dipped under the Outsider's weight, it shocked him, as he had always thought of the god as a weightless incorporeal spectre. But the Outsider settled too close to him to give him the chance in deluding himself that this was an illusion. His right knee brushed the Outsider's. This shouldn't be a thing of interest, but he was oddly aware of the sensation. There, that ghostly warmth bloomed in his heart again. It bloomed like a flower, its petals retained what little heat there was from basking in the sunshine. Then it expanded, the phantasmal warmth flowed like liquid sunshine in his veins. Which was understandable, how else should he feel, sitting so close to a being whose existence was beyond human comprehension in scale, but also disguised in the form of a sweet young boy? What else, other than to inch closer? Daud did not move. He simply turned to face the Outsider and found the god looking back.

Involuntarily, Daud gulped. 

"I come bearing gifts." The Outsider said. He smiled, but it seemed inattentive, and his smile never did reach his eyes. He seemed to have his mind on something else.
The void-warped reality completely engulfed Daud. He was used to it, but never at this proximity or with such intensity. It was cold, his skin tingled at times as if zapped by static, the fringes of his consciousness were blurred: he was only part of himself, but he had never felt so whole. He could not tell where he ended and that alien presence bordering his own mind began. He did not know what it was. But he felt that he was finned, whiskered, that he was drifting alone over the barren seabed, shouldering an ocean of other's pain and dreams, and he was singing. One song per generation, a song with no words. It sounded indifferent, meaningless, because it was too alien and too immense to be comprehended. It needed no understanding. It was singing to itself for amusement. For a moment, Daud felt like a book wrote in ink that was immersed under water, the ink was running and the words were blurring. He was melting into nothingness, losing himself. The mark on his hand burnt in warning, it was only the pain that snapped him out of it. His consciousness regained its definition. The alien presence's intrusion disappeared. Daud mourned it a little, although he did not even know what it was.

"What's the occasion?" Daud asked, gathering himself from his momentary disorientation, as flippantly as he could.

"Call it a new year's gift." The Outsider said. He brought a hand up to cup Daud's face. Absent-mindedly, his thumb caressed the scar that ran through the assassin's right eye. Daud felt the cold feathery touches, one of the rings on the god's hand pressed against the skin under his earlobe. Cautiously, he leant into it a little, averting his eyes, fixating on a crease on the sheets caused by the dip of the mattress. He was suddenly very aware of his own breathing, and the Outsider's lack of it. There was a pit in his stomach: that was new. He felt a not unfamiliar thrill. He had often felt the same expectant excitement as he poised a knife over his victim, during the fraction of the second before his decision to strike and the act of striking itself. His eardrums thrummed in rhythm with his pulse: the murmur of his own coursing blood, the murmur of bewildered spirits lost to the void, the murmur echoed in the stomach of a whale. His consciousness blurred.

The Outsider's hand moved behind Daud's ears, entangled in his short black hair, and tugged him forward. The god leant in and kissed him on the mouth. Daud closed his eyes. He felt another hand come up, as cold as death, and pressed against his jaws, then slid down to rest on the side of his neck, its thumb pressed against his pulse point. It could be by chance, but it certainly felt deliberate. It exerted a steady pressure upon that tender artery which was now throbbing excitedly. Daud had never been so keenly aware of his own mortality. He leant in closer. 

His blood sang to him. And his heart ached. That was new too. His heart, which once housed a ghostly sense of warmth, was now occupied by a shard of the void. It was smooth, sharp, reflective, a piece of a shattered dream. It ached for something, anything. And vaguely, instinctively, Daud knew that there was nothing mortal that could fill it. His mind flaked away like soaked pages of a book, his sense of identity ran like red ink. Words, sentences, a narrative, a life half-lived, a personality half-forged, a story without an ending: written in blood and now dissolved into blood. His blood, his mind, his very self was mingled with someone – no - something else. Its blood was heavy, viscous, black as tar. Its presence was familiar: finned, alone, scarred, bemused, shouldering a sea of pain and singing a dirge for no one. 

What was the passage of time? An illusion. What was time? A river carved from stone. I did love you, I will love you, I do not love you, forever and ever and ever and ever.

Daud wanted to weep for it. He wanted to weep for himself. There was no difference. They were one wave lapping onto another, one pool of blood bled from separate veins, one story weaved from two strands of fate.

It was just a short, innocent, closed mouthed press of lips. But in that moment of contact, Daud tasted not just blood and brine, or the sensuous promise of the Outsider's physical form. He tasted the god himself. He felt the void, he was the void, he was everything and nothing. All the while, the Outsider's thumb pressed down his pulse point: only with that, was he reminded that he was mortal.

Before Daud could regain his senses and just when he raised his left hand to grasp the Outsider's sleeve, the god pulled away. Daud's eyes flicked open, he gasped.

The Outsider was unperturbed, emotionless. He observed Daud with mild curiosity like a natural philosopher would their test subject, or a child would an ant misplaced by a mischievous hand, away from its peers, favoured, isolated, teased, prodded and watched. He acted as if he did not just invite Daud to share in his existence, his godhood.

Daud put down his half raised hand. He felt sick, as if he was stabbed in the stomach, and it was the Outsider who held the grip of that imaginary knife. But his blood was singing still, his pulse throbbed with pleasure and his face burned. It was as if during the course of that short exchange, the Outsider had bruised his heart somehow. Now the god's very presence became a source of dull, blunt, aching torment. There was an emptiness in his mind where the god once was.

"Interesting." The Outsider commented, he caught Daud's hand. It flinched at the unexpected contact, before unfurling itself for the Outsider to toy with. The god's palm covered the mark branded on Daud's dusky skin. The Outsider smiled, amused.

"What's so funny?" Daud asked, feigning annoyance, as if gravely affronted.

"Never took you to be one to blush just because you were kissed." The Outsider said. 

Daud was glad that he was renowned for his inscrutable face. He remained collected, as collected as any man could be in this peculiar circumstance, and said: "Now you know." 

Daylight was falling fast, the dark blue twilight rolled in from the north east. Daud lit the cast-iron oil lamp mounted on the wall. It gave off white-blue light which reminded Daud of the light in the void. It made the Outsider look even more severe and alien. Daud turned up the light and sat back by his god.

"This is my first gift for you: a warning." The Outsider said. He caught Daud's eyes which were widened in surprise. The god reached towards his heart, and pressed his hand to Daud's ribcage. The entrapped heart was beating under it furiously, like a rabbit scared shitless and driven to madness by the threat of imminent death. The dull ache grew.

"One day, this wound of yours will be inflamed, it will poison you and it's rot will fester. It will feed on you, until you are hollow and there's no more of you for it to devour. Then it will die with you." The Outsider said, his black void eyes boring into Daud's. He sounded detached, clinical. As if Daud's malaise was physical, an abnormal growth.

Daud felt worse, as if the Outsider just twisted the handle of that imaginary knife lodged in his stomach. The pain was very real.

"But here's my second gift for you: a choice." The Outsider's voice softened - Daud counted the god's curved eye lashes stupidly – the god continued, "I can take that ache away, if you want. I have no use for a broken toy."

"Why would I want that?" Daud asked. He almost winced when the Outsider took away his hand that covered Daud's heart.

"Heed my warning." The Outsider said, "You are not the first. I do not play favourites, but I favour you enough."

Daud shook his head, then chuckled to himself. It was dry and humourless. People who were told that their pardon was a joke, that they would be walked to the guillotine at gunpoint this very minute, might very well let out such a chuckle. That of a doomed man. 

"I will not offer twice." The Outsider said.

Daud forced himself to look into the god's eyes (it was not too different from staring into a nightmare) and tried to smile, failed, but persevered nonetheless. He was so honest that he thought he would die of shame: "I think I might be in love with you. I've suspected it for a while. But now I know."

"You don't have to be. Take my gift, it is very simple." The Outsider said.

"Do you want me to?" Daud asked, "I will, if you want me to."

"It is solely your decision." 

"People before me, did they take it?"

"I don't always offer them this choice." The Outsider answered. If he still lived and breathed, he probably would've sighed.

"If I could…" The Outsider said, pronouncing each word deliberately, as if surmounting some great difficulty, he sounded as if he's narrating someone else's dream, "Do you know how it feels to watch the pain, the fleeting happiness, the suffering, the regrets and shattered hopes, of not only humanity, but all living beings, for four millennia? I am the void. I am nothing. I am a hollow reed through which the void wind whistles a scream. My heart still exists somewhere, bearing the wrenching cries of every disillusioned newborn lying in pools of their mother's blood. I still hear it, faintly, in a corner of the void forbidden to me, it speaks in a voice similar to the pulsating heart of a translucent snail… I read it as I read yours, I know of its desire. If I could I might, but I cannot."

"I won't pretend to understand." Daud confessed. He felt ill at ease with the Outsider's vulnerability.

"Now, dear Daud, you know more than any mortal should." The Outsider smiled bitterly, "Make your decision wisely."

Daud deliberated, then strengthened his resolve. His branded hand sought the Outsider's and gripped his wrist.

Outside, the great bells of Dunwall tolled. Almost spontaneously, fireworks were fired. Their brilliant specks of colour reflected off Daud's bare walls. The mild spring air smelled like gunpowder. The year 1826 had ended, officially, time had ceased to be. All over the city, revellers put on their masks and took to the streets. The fugue feast had begun. Daud could hear the eager stomping of feet that passed under his window, then the inhuman howling of a woman before it was swiftly cut down.

Daud leant in, and kissed his god. He was surprised when the Outsider kissed back. He opened his eyes for a split second to spy on him. He did so with the desperation of a dying man, knowing that he would never have another chance to find out what the Outsider was like when he kissed. He was surprised again, pleasantly so, that the Outsider had his eyes closed, he no longer looked indifferent, just peaceful. Daud settled his right hand on the Outsider's shoulder, then hooked his arm around the god's neck, a moment still later he had the god falling indulgently onto his bed, he himself propped up on his side, half of his body draped over the Outsider's chest. 

The kiss grew in passion, and Daud's heart ached. The border of his consciousness was blurred, but with none of the shock and violence when the Outsider initiated the kiss. It was mellow, tender even. His sense of self dissolved like running ink. It was dissolved by tears, warm, salty, like sea water: drops after drops, they stained the pages, Daud's mind flaked away. The words that defined him grew fuzzy, the characters that spelled out his story beyond recognition. Daud's mind held the Outsider's, a mortal could not envelope the mind of a leviathan, all he could do was hang onto it, like how an infant's smaller clumsier hand hung onto its mother's hooked little finger. But then the Outsider parted his consciousness for him. The same way the ocean parted itself to welcome the night swimmer as he waded into the black molasses-like tides under a moonless starless sky. The Outsider's consciousness lapped at his like the tide kissing a swimmer's ankle, then it flowed into him through his pores and every orifice, drowning him, filling his every cavity with heavy viscous brine as black as tar. Daud was whole again. It strangled a moan from his throat. But it wasn't his throat. The sound was not even remotely human. It was a note from a whale song.

His left hand took a fistful of the Outsider's jacket and clutched it into a ball. His knuckles turned white, his fingers trembled in forceful desperation. Their knees knocked and their legs entangled. Daud smiled into the kiss as he bore that pain in the pit of his stomach. That imaginary knife that was buried hilt deep into his bowels, it turned and turned and turned and turned by a merciless hand.

When they separated, the Outsider was back to being his indifferent, mildly amused, and insufferably arrogant norm. He cocked his head to one side: "Is that a no?"

Daud sulked but didn't let it show. He schooled his face and shrugged. Their faces were still just two inches apart as he half draped over the Outsider. He wanted to bury his face in the crook of the Outsider's neck, to lace their hands, to melt into that fascinating cosmic consciousness, to connect themselves physically as they did psychologically, to embrace the entirety of his human form as how he embraced the leviathan, the sea shouldering whale. But Daud was a realistic man. He knew that by accessing the Outsider's mind a second time, he had taken enough liberties. Daud breathed out heavily in resignation and sat up.

The Outsider stood up too. He straightened his jacket, and, fastidiously, smoothed over the wrinkled fabric that was gripped in Daud's fist and still held the man's warmth. He folded his arms again, and mused: "Interesting, but most unwise. I did not realise there was a masochistic streak in you, or a romantic streak, depending on your interpretation. You chose the most desperate and hopeless endeavour even when you were given a choice, were informed of the odds against you and the consequence of your choices. You continue to fascinate me, my dear."

"I know I will regret it," Daud said, resolutely. Now that he had made up his mind, he was his cocksure self again, his native insolence resurfaced, "When that day comes, I will deal with it."

In the city of Dunwall, the streets thrummed with excitement. There seemed to be infinite possibilities, infinite freedom. The same atmosphere that had emboldened the populace now worked its effect on Daud too. The night demanded release, it demanded fulfilment. However fleeting it might have to be. However meaningless. However illusory.

"Whatever happens in the next hours - however long the abbey dictates this fugue feast to be – none of it counts." Daud said.

The Outsider arched a brow in question.

"Let me have this day." Daud suggested. He did not plead, he did not beg, neither did he grovel. His native insolence would not allow it. And the Outsider would have been disgusted. 

"You cannot have what you want." The Outsider replied coldly.

"Stay with me. Time doesn't exist anymore. And what is a day in four thousand years? It will be just a moment, a fraction of a moment, until the fugue feast ends, until time starts to run again." Daud showed his hands as if to illustrate his point, "Stay with me."
Daud left a piece of himself forever behind in that small room near the slaughterhouses. It had been demolished years ago, when the whale-oil revolution demanded the expansion of the slaughterhouses. The room was ten feet across, contained just a single bed, a desk, a chair, a dresser, an austere shrine dedicated to the Outsider, a whale oil lamp that burnt brightly in the white-blue of the void, a sash window with the blinds fully closed, a black eyed god and himself. It was the fugue feast between the year 1826 and 1827, time had lost its meaning. In a way, whether the god agreed to Daud's suggestion or not did not matter: in Daud's mind, they were both sealed hermetically in that small room, and neither of them had ever left. 

For the passage of time was an illusion, time was but a river carved from stone and one song could last forever and ever and ever.

Daud did regret his choice, but he bore suffering well. He was renowned for his inscrutable face, after all.
-

The Undine broke the unusually placid, murky water of the Wrenhaven as it crawled its way up river. Its engine rumbled beneath the bridge like a caged, irritable beast. Daud stood beside Lizzy Stride on the bridge with his feet apart and a hand on the railing, as he watched the city of Dunwall recede behind the Undine's pearl white trail of foam. The wind brought fresh damp air, free of the decay and sewage of Dunwall's riverbanks. 

It was Wakefield however, who occupied Daud's thoughts. The man's corpse was now strung up on a lamp post in the riverfront for all to see. Naked, upside down and inside out, his purple entrails covered with spider web-like veins hung out of his belly over his bloodied face. He had no nails left. He was still fresh and yet already huge, hairy flies were swarming over him, stumbling into his rigid flesh like hard green peas, suckling at his bare bulging eyeballs and viscera. At night, rats lapped up the blood spilled on the floor, black under the moonlight: drip, drip, drip. It was a demonstration of Stride's ruthlessness, the woman had a reputation to maintain. It was her way of settling "domestic affairs".

Daud glanced at Lizzy Stride, who was rooted on the bridge barefoot despite how the ship was being tossed to and fro. Her face was screwed together in grim concentration. She had a cigar dangled out the side of her mouth, it burnt slowly, but most of the time she seemed to not even remember it was there. It was not because of the difficulty of navigating the river as such - she knew the river like the back of her hand - she was just an intense person. 

"I spared Wakefield." Daud said.

Broken out of her trance, Lizzy Stride looked back. Finally, she remembered the cigar again. She gave it a puff and extinguished it.

"And I thank you. It'd have been no fun if you didn't." Lizzy said. She smiled, her shark-like triangular teeth gleamed. The muscles on her chiselled face were strained, her eyes were shone like mother-of-pearls. Bright, beautiful, but cold. It was horrifying to look at. But Daud knew her well enough to see that her smile was genuine, and she was very pleased. 

"You didn't have to." Daud argued, quietly.

"What got into you? The words on the grapevine is that you spared your lieutenant who betrayed you, like how Wakefield, the bastard-" Lizzy spit on the floor. Instantly, a miserable looking dead eel who had been standing behind them like a statue leapt into action and began to scrub the spit away furiously, Daud noticed that the man had recently lost his ring finger. Lizzy continued nonchalantly, did not even acknowledge her crewman's presence,  "- who backstabbed me. The Daud I know would've cut the pair of them to ribbons without batting an eye." 

"Would I?" Daud muttered to himself.

"Listen," Lizzy said, her eyes fixed upon the waterway before them, "I respect you. And I know you respect me. And you can trust me. We've known each other for years. Just what in the void is eating you?"

"I killed the empress." Daud confessed. He felt as if someone just took a little of the weight on his shoulders, hearing his own voice admitting to his great crime.

Lizzy scoffed in derision: "Tell me something I don't know."

"How did you…" Daud started to ask, but then thought better of it. He chuckled at his foolishness. Lizzy walked many roads. Her profession as a smuggler demanded it. Her network stretched up to the aristocrats and down to the same aristocrats' manservants and maids, to the workers on the docks who exchanged gossip so readily. Any move made by anyone would not go past her notice for long. Walls had ears, bulkheads were not soundproof, files could be stolen or mesmerised with a furtive servile glance, rumours travelled fast in alleyways but faster over the water, a secretive mind could be lured out or broken into. An operation as big as the assassination of an Empress wouldn't have been easy to hide. Not from Lizzy Stride.

"So what, you killed the Empress. And you got away with it." Lizzy rolled her eyes.

"That masked killer that we've been hearing so much about? He's Corvo Attano." 

"Ah, so you are afraid that he's coming for you." Lizzy said, smiling, amused.

"I am not afraid." Daud said. He thought to himself privately: it'd be much simpler if he was afraid. If he did not hope for Corvo to come for him, to do what he deemed beneath himself to do. Then, if just by a little, this lopsided world would be righted.

Daud continued: "This city. The Empress was the only one holding it together."
"So you think that somehow, you plunged Dunwall into the deep end, is that it?" Lizzy said, turned back to glance at the older assassin with the white of her eyes. 

Daud shrugged.

Lizzy spit again, prompting her crewman to again assume his hectic activity, Daud suspected that she was doing it on purpose. Then Lizzy said: "This city is fucked, it's fucked way before we came along. In fact, I'd say that it fucked us first and it's only fair if we fuck it back. Don't guilt yourself."

"So life is just a circle of fuckery, that's how you see things?" Daud probbed.

"A grand circle of fuckery and backstabbing. Or just stabbing. That's your forte." Lizzy laughed. It was a surprisingly pretty laugh. She had a good voice, that was, when she was not snarling or sticking her hook down someone's throat while laughing vehemently like a crazed wild cat, hooking out someone's limp tongue and trachea as if catching an eel.
Daud was not amused. Light danced upon the turbulent waters seething along the boat, if danced the gentle undulated waves further afield, and reflected into his face like powdered diamonds. It made him wince.

"Listen, Daud, really: fuck Dunwall. You are not the first to start doubting his morals mid-life. What do you think would've happened if you didn't kill her? Someone else would've. If not by a blade then by poison. She might catch the plague and be dead in a week. She might break her pretty neck falling down the stairs and there're so many stairs in the Dunwall tower like you won't believe. She might lose control and the city would still have crumbled, falling through her fingers like bone meal. It's all easily done. However you might choose, Daud, it doesn't matter. The city fucks itself with or without us. All the difference we can make – and here's the truth - is the benefit that we can reap for ourselves."

"I can't argue with you," Daud smiled numbly, "And they say that you are crazy."

"Oh believe it, I am crazy." Lizzy nodded, serious, "Because I don't give a fuck. Say Wakefield. There's nothing to what I did to him that his enemies wouldn't. You spared him and I killed him. If I had spared him, don't you think the eels who lost a finger for following him would take their revenge? Given the chance, and if that man wasn't such a lily-livered two-faced queasy little shit, Wakefield would've done the same to me, gladly. It's a rat race. And you and I, we are the fiercest, smartest, biggest and most deadly pair of rats. This is my advice to you. I give it to you because I respect you, and you might be of use to me someday. Do not give a fuck. Morals are for the weak and stupid, they invented them so they can have something to bitch about."

"Let's agree to disagree, Liz." Daud said, spreading his hand in resignation.

"You will come around." Lizzy said, she bared her sharpened sabre teeth to Daud in a great smile, "You will be tearing people's throats out with your bare teeth in no time."

The crewman standing in the corner shuddered. Daud suspected that he had witnessed the said infamous incident, it wasn't pleasant, and it left its impression.

"Then you must let on our secret of teeth sharpening." Daud said.

Lizzy Stride laughed, her head thrown back: "You are alright, Daud. You are grand."

The Outsider reached out from the void and asked him, teasing: "Will you?"

Daud pretended that he did not hear a thing.

The Outsider was persistent, however: "Is it not your motto, man is wolf to man? Or are you just upset because you were compared to a rat? A mere disagreement in metaphor."

Daud ignored him still. The corner of his mouth twitched.

The void hummed. There's harmony in that humming, but no perceptible tune. It came from just behind Daud's ears, beneath his feet, beneath the seething watery fury stirred up by the Undine, beneath the deadly undertow of the wrenhaven, beneath the boat wrecks and old coins littered on the riverbed for a thousand years. It dulled the rumbling and stuttering of the boat engine. 

The Outsider's voice sounded faraway: "There lives a spirit in every water. He takes the shape of the most beautiful horse any man has ever seen**. He will lure you to mount him, promising his spotless white fur, incomparable strength in his iron wrought bones, wind-like speed in his bulging muscles and great agility in his tendons strung fast like harp strings. All of this is his, and he will give it to you. He will lure, he will promise, and you will climb onto his back: the pull of freedom irresistible. But then you will not be able to get off. And the horse will walk towards the water, into it. He will drown you, eat you, and spit out only a floating, bobbing pair of lungs."

Irritated, Daud snapped in his mind: What is it to me?

"The only way to save your life, my dear, is to put a bridle over his head." The Outsider said, concluding his tale of morals.

Daud snorted. Lizzy Stride glanced at him.

"What's your business with those witches, anyway?" Lizzy asked.

"I have a score to settle." Daud said.

Lizzy nodded appreciatively, this is something along her line of thinking, this is something she understood, very, very well. 

"What are you going to do to them?" Lizzy asked, then added: "We are almost there."

"I don't know yet." Daud said. As much as to himself as to Lizzy Stride. 

A mist was descending upon the water. The ancient woodland on either side of the banks were shrouded, draped over by a sheet of thin, white vapours. Daud could only make out ominous contours of a wall of dark green. This was peculiar, and Daud wouldn't be surprised that this was Delilah's doing. He felt watched.

"Well," Lizzy Stride shrugged, "whatever you are going to do, I hope it's entertaining. I will want to hear all about it when you get back."

Daud felt the presence that had been with him this whole journey shifted itself, illusory arms encircled his waist from behind, a spectral chin landed on his shoulder. There was no weight to the presence, it felt like the dip of a dragonfly. The Outsider whispered into his ear: "I agree with her. Entertain us, we want to hear all about it."

Daud ignored him.
-

In the void, upon a broken island suspended in white-blue nothingness, stood a giant tree. Her branches stretched outwards, her thick rotund body bore the scars of many human lifetimes. Cradled in her roots, under her shadow, the portrait of Emily Kaldwin stood on the easel. It was a flurry of blue, white, red and gold. Daud felt like he was not just looking at the painting and its subject with his eyes, but with his very soul. He saw a pain that was not his, a sense of loss permeated in a heart too young to be aware of itself, too young to know grief. He also saw love: fervent, sincere, undiluted. A child's unstained, unashamed attachment to her father and protector. She was no longer innocent, but she had done no wrong. This was Delilah's power, to capture the likeness of spirits. 

With every blink, Daud traversed closer to Delilah, who was too concentrated in performing her ritual to notice her surroundings. Perhaps she did not think Daud would make this far, putting too much trust in her witches. Perhaps she did not think the old assassin, who had lost his touch, would be here in time. None of her statues that stood in vigil noticed his approach. Nor did she notice that her painting had been switched, that she would soon swap her soul into that of the floating tree instead of the future empress. 

It was easy. Perhaps too easy. Daud watched her being sucked into the portal, becoming her painting, falling victim to the trap of her own making. He did not pity her. He did not spare her life because he thought she did not deserve it. He's just tired of killing, that's all.

Then the portal closed behind her. It was done. There was only the perpetual hum of the void, the tree sighs heavily over Daud's head, her leaves rustled by the void wind. The white-blue flowers that always accompanied Delilah's magic wilted, their sharp white petals that resembled shards of glass lost their luminance, turned to shades of dim grey, and then drooped to the ground like flaccid tongues of the dead. Their blue pistils shrunk and turned black. When Daud touched them, they shattered into a pile of dust. Without the nourishment of Delilah's magic, those rootless flowers only had seconds to live.

But almost at the same time, the floating tree stirred. Perhaps he was imagining things, but Daud heard the tree scream. Its leaves wilted, turned black, and fell. They fell like a black weightless rain over Daud's head. A torrent of dead leaves. They looked not just wilted, but charred, almost fossilised. Thick vines crawled along the tree's bare branches, black vines with thorns at least three inches long. Leafless flowers bloomed upon the vines, upon the tree's numerous branches, wrapping, covering the tree like a blanket, like a set of armour. It was the same glassy white-blue blooms the size of a hand. They emanated pale blue light. Their thin sharp petals threatened to maim, to cut the throat of anyone who dared to come near, like a blade of glass. They looked different, however. Their veins were no longer pure. It used to be filled with white liquid void, but now some sort of black mucus took its place. They were poisoned by resentment.

In her defeat, Delilah was no longer what she once was. She was no longer human. She had roots instead of feet, branches for arms, bark for skin, her every cell a blinded eye. She stood, knee deep in black charred leaves, crowned with her own flowers: not an empress of men, but of her own domain.

Despite all this, she was still beautiful.

"What was her fate?" Daud asked, knowing that the Outsider was listening, watching,

"What did you tell her?"

The god manifested beside him, hovering a foot off the ground. He was toying with a dead leaf, twirling it between his fingers. 

"'What strange blooms', I said." The Outsider looked up at Delilah, her flowers flustered by the howling void wind which rippled through her crown in waves, " 'beautiful flowers, grown in bitter soil and nurtured by a child's naked tears. Do you love them?' I asked. 'Will you let them die so that they will bear fruit?'"

"What did she say?"

"She said nothing. She laughed." 

"Why do you have to be such a cryptic little shit?" Daud asked, turning to the Outsider, "This is probably the only thing those who bear your mark can agree on."

The Outsider disregarded Daud's insults completely: "She wanted to be someone important. But she would not know how to shoulder the responsibility that comes with importance. She had the dream of a broken, fearful, inquisitive and clever child. It was a beautiful dream. She was too much of an artist: the only realm that she could rule, was her own realm of imagination."

"Now she will flower forever." Daud said. He also looked up, admiring her. 

Then he sighed.

"You have saved the empress's daughter from the greatest witch of your generation. You saved the empire from a tyrant, preventing its ruin. You have accomplished this with such skill and grace… All without taking a single life. Truly, you have outdone yourself, my dear." The Outsider said. His manifestation drifted closer towards Daud until they were inches apart. Void distorted around him like wrinkled silk of silver and blue. Daud felt those black void eyes on him.

The hollowness where Daud's heart once was disturbed. It recognised something familiar in that distortion. In the millions upon millions of minute voices that seethed beneath the Outsider's plain, indifferent young voice. The void god's presence nagged and pulled at him in the same way the moon tugged the tide away from the desolation of a parched land dying of thirst. It tempted him, teased him, cajoled him, daring him to stumble forward like a moonstruck fool. Daud was suddenly very aware of the boundary of his consciousness. It felt like a heavy yoke upon his shoulders. He resisted the temptation, however. He held the gaze of the Outsider, his demeanour remained poised. 

"I had hoped…" Daud said, hesitant, "I had hoped that this would change everything. That this would be my redemption."

"Is it not?" The Outsider asked.

"I still feel like a piece of shit." Daud said, chuckled to himself, "One good deed. It cannot wash away all the blood I've spilled in my lifetime. All the lives I've ruined. All the horrors I've spread and pain I've caused."

"Is that what you want, forgiveness?" The Outsider asked, spreading a hand.

"I hate you." Daud said, calmly, his hand gripped the hilt of his knife so hard his knuckles turned white, he schooled his face, teeth clenching: he didn't know what would've happened if he did not school it, he could snarl or he could weep. He would loathe himself for the Outsider to see how broken he had become, "I am the knife of Dunwall. I am the knife that pierced her heart and the hand that wielded it. It's true that I was used by Burrows and tempted by you, but it was my decision. My responsibility. Now I'll deal with the consequences, as I should. 

"Saving Emily didn't earn me forgiveness. All I earned is an excuse. I can tell myself that I've paid my debt, in however small way I can, to the Empress, to Corvo, to Dunwall. I can tell myself this, and have this small consolation to continue living. You didn't just give me a name, you gave me an excuse to live . I've accepted that forgiveness is impossible. I wanted to forget, and to be forgotten. I wanted to die… I was ready. You knew, you fucking knew. I can't even have this small thing, I can't even die in peace."

Daud flinched when the Outsider touched his elbow. The god was hesitant, his face unreadable as he looked down. His hand slid down the side of Daud's forearm and rested on the assassin's branded hand, still gripping the hilt of his whale knife. He caressed it for a while – Daud's breathing hitched – and then he pried it open, coaxed it to release its tension. Daud complied. He let himself be manipulated, allowed the Outsider to take his hand and pin it to his side. The Outsider smiled at him, his lips pressed into a thin line and Daud knew that there was no point in resistance. He let the Outsider pull him into a tight embrace. He felt the crook of the god's elbow wrapped around his neck, soft hair against his cheek and his right ear, a flat stomach against his own, a bony hand cradling the back of his head, cold fingertips rested against his scalp. Their bodies aligned in counterpoint. Still with his guard up, he put his arms around the god too. The Outsider's body had no warmth, he smelled like sea water, copper, and old leather. He had no pulse, no heartbeat; he had no blood. He was a lifeless solid bundle of bones and nerves and meat bound in milk white skin: Daud wanted to tear his throat out with his teeth, if just to see what would happen.

Daud closed his eyes and relaxed into the embrace. His once aching heart had long became a flooded room, its floorboards rotten, its furniture crumbled, its wallpaper peeled like scratched, self-mutilated patches of dead skin, its moulding walls lined with rows of empty portrait frames and mirrors that refused to reflect anything but their sole object of obsession and desire. It was flooded with algae infested water, rings of oil bloomed upon its surface like iridescent flowers. Rings of white light interconnected, they danced upon the walls, reflected off the water. It no longer ached for anyone, it no longer longed for anything. It was empty, and it waited. It waited for the one who claimed it to return, if he ever cares for it enough. If not, then it's fine too. That was his solace: there was nothing alive enough in him to cause him pain for affairs of the heart. He was no longer that passionate young man with a romantic streak, and he was all the better for it.

Yet for a moment, he was at peace. He was no longer himself: their minds intertwined like fungi. He pulled the Outsider a little closer, pressing them harder together. He wanted the Outsider to struggle. He wanted him to scream. He wanted to crush him against his chest for all that he had done to him, so he could kiss small brittle pieces of shattered bones, smear the god's cold, tender, fish-like flesh onto his own lips, and have bits of his skin stuck to his red coat like debris. He brought his hand up to cover the back of the Outsider's neck with his burning palm and felt short bristle hair sticking up against the side of his hand. He smiled at this. 

Slowly, reluctantly, his mind flaked away: he felt the invitation. The parting of one mind for another like a woman spreading her legs. 

He was whole again. He let out a small involuntary sign in satisfaction, in fulfilment .

The emptiness that had dogged him for years was filled. It was like retrieving a jigsaw piece that he thought he had lost. There was no telling where the Outsider's mind ended and his own began. The leviathan's long whiskers that were suspended from its great toothed jaws caressed him soothingly. It hummed a song for him, just for him. His veins were flooded with tears, they burnt his lungs as much as they burnt his eyes. And he was a tear himself, falling into the ocean, deeper and deeper and deeper. One drop of salty water losing itself in an incomprehensible expense. The leviathan extended a fin for him to hold. Its great gentle eye regarded him quizzically, with the curiosity and wonder of a child. It felt nothing. It understood him, but it did not care. It was utterly, utterly indifferent to his suffering. It sympathised with him in the most primitive way there was. It made him forget. It made him a part of itself. Housing him in its heart, wrapped up in its artery like a roll of rubbery blanket. It had no words, not human ones anyway. Its attempt at communication was clumsy. It said/thought/sang: Dear, you are. Always. Yes. To. Us. Us. Us. Us. Us. You and I. Us.

It had no tears, so it bled itself. A mist of crimson bloomed in the water like a rose.

The Outsider turned his head a little, pressing his lips against Daud's earlobe.

"How brazen of you," The Outsider said, "To think that I will permit you to die."

"What do you care." Daud said.

He opened his eyes, the Outsider was gone. He held nothing but an armful of wind.
-

///

Daud waded through the knee-deep murky water of the flooded district, looking for his knife, which was knocked out of his hand by a victorious Corvo Attano. He could've located the knife in a matter of seconds with his void gaze, but he did not want to. He wanted to do this like an ordinary man. Painstakingly, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, stumbling around like a clumsy idiot, burying his arms into this foul water, he felt for that whaler knife of his. His fingers touched many things, revolting things, some hard, gritty, some with sharp jagged edges that pierced his skin and caused him to wince, some slimy and disgustingly tender, clinging to his finger, burying themselves in his nails. When he finally felt metal, the knife's edge cut deep into his thumb. He bled. Blood red upon dark green. He picked the knife up, it was clean. It looked innocent, even. Beautiful.

Daud asked Corvo for his life. By some miracle, the man spared him. Daud was grateful, but also insulted. He was not even worth killing. He wasn't even a threat anymore. How far the mighty had fallen.

"He couldn't possibly have forgiven me." Daud muttered to himself, as he wiped the knife dry with a piece of fabric, and put it back into its scabbard. 

"Of course he had not." The Outsider said.

"Then why was I spared?"

"Who said it has anything to do with you?" The Outsider said.

"Why?"

"He loves his daughter. He doesn't want Emily to be a vindictive empress or let hatred and grudges poison her heart. He wants to teach her a lesson in forgiveness and in letting go." The Outsider replied, "He wants her to be good, gentle, kind, and wise. Like her mother."

"He spared me to set a good example." Daud smiled to himself, "even if this is the only legacy I leave behind, the only difference I can ever make, I'm satisfied enough."

"Are you? Satisfied?" The Outsider asked.

Daud did not answer. He waded in the murky, foul smelling water. Behind him, the derelict statue of Jessamine Kaldwin surveyed the world benevolently with stony eyes. She was dreamy. Peaceful. She looked like the girl who used to store her favourite memories in perfume jars. Corvo: sour orange basked in Southern sunshine, a piece of tree bark soaked in warmth. When she touched his rough callused hand, they were so, so warm. Their stolen kisses in secluded woods: resin, bergamot and amber. Her pregnancy: lavender and galbanum. Her little Emily: everything, everything, everything. She looked like she had just taken a blissful sniff. Her eyes glazed over, lost in reverie. She was dead. And her killer was going home.
-

Daud was on a ship bound for Karnaca, the place of his birth, the jewel of the south. The little boat was tossed about by the choppy waves like a toy. The lantern that was hung on the beams swayed, casting uncertain shadows. It did not burn whale oil, but tallow. It emanated a weak light, and it stained the lantern black.

He couldn't sleep. The nightmare from last night still plagued him. He was back into the Hatter's fabric mill, sitting against a loom. He had killed someone in blind rage. He had a brick in his hand. Red light poured from the ceiling, staining the walls: blood streaming down. Blood tears stained his cheeks, but it was not his blood. He was a hollow reed, waiting for a purpose that wouldn't come. He had killed the Outsider, and with it, he killed himself. He had the same nightmare a week ago, the day he confronted Delilah. He wondered about the dream's significance, as he leafed through the book Billie gave him. The Serkonos section. If he was to retire anywhere, might as well be back home. A sun-kissed harbour town perhaps. He wouldn't want to settle too far away from the sea, from the leviathans that roamed it.
The cabin was warped, as the Outsider sat down at the foot of his cot. The warm light of the lantern paled into white-blue, and it had stopped its swaying, fixed at an unnatural angle. In the dimness of the cabin, the Outsider's black eyes looked almost nonexistent. Daud could feel them no matter what, however. He sat up, defensive.

"I admit, I was being selfish with you, dear Daud." The Outsider said. 

"What about?" Daud asked, "I can't even keep count anymore."

"Once upon a time, I came to you bearing gifts: a warning and a choice." 

Daud chuckled, drily: "It was never a choice. It was rigged. How could you expect me to make the right decision after what you did to me. Giving me a taste of… whatever that was. You manipulated me."

"I did not mean to." The Outsider said. His eyes were downcast. He looked small, wearing the mist of the void like a cloak too big for his bones.

"I hope my decade of suffering was good enough entertainment for you. Oh no, it was just boring." Daud snarked. 

"I wanted to know." The Outsider paused, he seemed to be rooted to the foot of Daud's bed, keeping himself as far away as possible. It was odd, Daud thought, the god always had severe boundary issues. It wasn't like him to stay away yet at arm's length, as if they were tethered. Ominously, he thought of his nightmare. How he beat the Outsider's pretty head into a pulp, like spilled soup.

Then the god continued, his voice small, quiet. There were no murmurs of the dead seething under it. Even the faint whale songs and void winds that usually seep into reality with the Outsider's manifestation had ceased. Time was halted, the choppy sea looked like uneven concrete under the stormy sky. The ship had ceased its groaning, the sound of waves lapping against its metal hull abated, so was the rumble of the engine. l

There were just the two of them, separated by the half length of a bed and a vast expanse of silence, their expressions sheathed in the darkness. He said: "I wanted to know what it feels like, to have you inside me."

Daud's bubbling rage froze.

"What?" Daud asked. Fear seized him. He did not want to know. It's easier if he did not.

"I wanted to let a mortal see me in my entirety. To share in my existence. For four millennia, I had kept the most intimate company only with the leviathans of the deep. I looked through their eyes, communed with their minds, learnt their wisdom and had their songs tattooed on my tongue. I wanted to see what it would feel like to be with a man. To be with you." The Outsider said. 

Daud did not dare to move a muscle. Silence stretched between them. There was no uneasiness in it. The small cabin suddenly felt like a grave, a hearse.

Daud gulped.

"Why are you telling me this?" Daud asked.

"I want to give you another choice, old friend. Now that your story has reached its conclusion and you are ready for a new life..." The Outsider said and spread out his hands, his ringed fingers looked gaunt and claw-like under the harsh light, "I can take away that hollowness in your heart. I have seen it, that empty room of yours. I will mend it and you will be able to love again. It's still not too late."

Daud shook his head. He wanted to laugh.

"This is a chance for you to start your life anew. Take my gift, if only as an apology." 

"It is not an empty room," Daud said, looking at the Outsider's still outstretched hand, held out in offering, "It's flooded, yes. It's rotten, infested, derelict and foul. But it is yours. It's not empty, it's just waiting."

He glanced up then, with a wistful smile, his eyes boring into the Outsider's: "You were inside me too, remember?"

"I do not have the capacity to give you what you want." The Outsider frowned, annoyed with himself, "The ritual that made me took away my heart and my name. It took them because no mind can bear the sufferings of every living being and the non-passage of eternity without breaking, if it retains its humanity. My heart is somewhere… but it has been mutilated and corrupted beyond recognition. As for my name, it had long been forgotten, if anyone bothered to remember it to begin with."

"Can't you even say it? What I want?" Daud asked. He wanted to grasp the Outsider's hand, but he did not move.

"I cannot love you, Daud." The Outsider said, "Even if my heart sings for you."

"What - what if," Daud stuttered, "What if I can give your heart back to you? Would you want it back, if you can?"

"It's not possible." The Outsider seemed shocked, as if he had never even entertained the idea. His brows knitted tightly together.

"It's been four thousand years, don't you think that maybe, just maybe, everything's possible?" Daud suggested, his eyes looked towards his god searchingly.

"At least consider my gift." The Outsider said.

"For years my heart was filled with rage and hatred, until it burnt itself to cinders." Daud said, harbouring a small smile to himself, "now it's just an empty room. It will always wait for you. When my rage passed through me, it left me with this emptiness. This hollowness in the shape of you. You can't take it away: it's all I have now."

"I will give your heart back to you, if it's the last thing I'd do." Daud said, in earnest. He hadn't felt so alive for a very long time.

He shifted closer to the Outsider, leant in, and kissed him. 

His consciousness flaked away like the pages of a book: of one story finally complete, and another just beginning.

The lantern resumed its swaying, casting uncertain silhouettes of a pair of entangled bodies. The engines roared beneath the cabin, drowning the eerie, whirling melodies of the void wind and strange heretic notes pried out of an inhuman throat.

They were inside each other. Their minds mingled. They were two waves lapping onto one another, one pool of blood bled from separate veins, one story threaded from two strands of fate. 

Daud was almost satisfied.