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Chapter Text

The World As It Should Be

The illustrated minds of philosophers and avid thinkers alike had tried to untangle the mysteries of the void for centuries. Even the Empress of the Isles had tried to unravel the dark abyss when reading the works of Joplin and Sokolov as a young heir —motivated by the morbid curiosity for the unknown only children possess—. She had ignored that dreaming about the void could never be compared to the devastating cold one experienced when truly being in its obscure landless landscapes.

Anton Sokolov, when being asked about this matter, described the vastness of the void as the unfinished work of an artist, a white canvas where reality took shape by the skilled hand of the great leviathan. To him, the void was proof even gods leave some paintings unfinished.

Piero Joplin, unlike his coeval, had visited the limits of the tangible world many nights and had moulded abominable creations driven by the delirious whispers of a blind man long since dead. He explained to the young Empress once —absently, as he worked— the void was nothing but a fragmented world, a shattered mirror of their very own existence. There, the abstract concepts of time and space were as meaningless and almost as foolish as the desire to decipher the secrets hidden behind the black eyes of a stranger.

The Empress dreamt about that realm far away from the grip of her imperial authority long before she proved herself worthy of respect and adoration: long before the coup, long before Delilah. In her dreams she was sinking and drowning in an airless substance —thicker than water— without ever reaching death. The echoes of the world moving into motion deafened her ears as the great colossus of the oceans witnessed her: Emily Kaldwin, Empress of the Isles; in her midnight visions of the dark abyss, she was blind but could distinguish shadows and silhouettes, particles of other lives —much different to her own—. Those dreams were an enigma for she was never visited by the outsider who could answer all her questions about the sorrows and origins of the place where the world endlessly ended.

What would the Overseers do if they found out? What would the Abbey of The Everyman do if they knew she yearned for a visit of the god they curse in every scripture? Anton had changed the subject of them when he asked those very same questions to the crow watching over the Empress with a hand marked by black ink and dark witchcraft, and Corvo had answered with a low rough voice —almost mute— he had for months after what they did to him in Coldridge. “The question, Sokolov, is not what they would do to me, but what wouldn’t they do if they discovered the mark on my hand.”

Emily had nightmares for months in which that question was answered as she was forced to witness how the Abbey burned another heretic.

Those were fears of the past, created by a childhood of lies and assassins holding knives that executed her innocence as they stabbed the beating heart of another Empress. But even after all those many years, the darkness welcomed her and reminded Emily: nightmares are meant to warn children of the horrors of the world. Despite everything Delilah had done to her, it was still him —the man in the red coat— who appeared in all her night terrors as the flying whales sang their eulogy. The Empress woke up screaming, helpless. The beating of a heart: the only thing she could hear.

“Emily” Her name on her father’s lips was an anchor to reality and a silent promise of protection. It had been a long day, Corvo had rescued her and honoured with glory and grace the whole Empire, restoring peace to those places where her grip had not been severe enough —allowing seeds to grow rotten—. The world was, once again, as it should be. Corvo had requested to spend the night watching over her and not even an Empress could deny such humble request from her father. “A nightmare?”

“Yes.” Emily nodded. “I can’t believe it’s over.”

“It is, you can rest now.” He spared her some mercy.

As she laid awake, she still felt prisoner of the stone, drowning in air, sinking in the limits of reality —forced to see everything and forbidden from seeing anything at all—. She realised quite fast the dark abyss of her dreams was no longer an abstract location, but a hole in her chest. A void no heart could fill. If Corvo noticed something was amiss he said nothing that night, allowing Emily to pretend Delilah hadn’t ruined her in ways that could never be fixed.

The Month of Nets would, in time, be described by scholars and historians as the month where the reign of chaos ended, and justice prevailed over revenge. But as the morning sun irrupted her thoughts, the legitimate Empress wondered what would have happened if it had been Corvo Attano—and not her— the one imprisoned in stone. It had been a torture, a timeless existence in which the events that took place in the world lacked importance; they were a mere entertainment for all eternity. Emily stared at her hands with nervousness as she remembered the witch —with dead roses on her hands— that slit her neck in every one of her dreams. The action, back then, almost made her forget her own name: whispered by a lonesome heart, praised by heartless thousands.

Delilah had no throne except for the one where she sat impregnable in Emily’s mind, where she meticulously crafted all her nightmares.

“Oh, my child. Look at you now: powerless, forced into submission- as you should’ve by birth. To think once I could have inhabited that sharp face of yours and those hands you despite for being adore while stained red.” The scent of rotten orchids followed the witch. Her promises were the words of a despot, her lies made thorns grow around the glorified perception Emily had of her mother. Callista once told her the decreased should be spoken to with benevolence and beautiful words for their essence hardly remained in this world. She taught her: kind words aided them in their path towards eternal peace; and the Empress always found herself following Callista’s lessons about such matters.

Dear mother,

beloved beating heart,

how much in her accusations is real?

how much is an abstract piece of art?

The void’s wind brought her no answer and no comfort. The Brigmore Witch who wanted to make of the Empress a bird of prey —her greatest masterpiece— held Emily’s chin up as she watched her from above as a blind god watched fools pray on their knees.  “Well, I have a present for you, my little bird.”

She promised Emily Kaldwin, first of her name: the vacuous black, freedom from mortality, an eternity of drowning, and a prison of stone —that not even the greatest minds would realise— was a representation of her true confinement in the void. Delilah promised her she would eventually fail to remember her own name but never forget the name of the witch who sliced her neck as she drifted into a soundless scream. Endless.

The Blink Of A Blind Eye

There was a woman in a town near Cullero that invited the knife into her house every night. She bared the name an Empress ached to possess and suffered the consequences of it. Eyes like a crow’s, a face too sharp to be kind, a Serkonian who had abandoned a family for adventure and regretted her choice for decades. In her kitchen the knife wasn’t a weapon but a tool; he cut the vegetables as she cooked.

Emily had seen them —side by side— while she was blinded by minerals, as she had seen a child with dark Pandyssian skin die by the hand of his own father; as she had seen many others and forgotten most of their stories. The memory of the knife’s steady hands slicing vegetables allowed her to hold onto that specific image. She had witness the movements like an outsider, unable to ever belong in that world.

As the Empress sat upon her throne, she was stroked by what Serkonians call solitude and the Tyvians named as absence. Wyman —in their accent— had described it once as the lack of another, and in Gristol that feeling was known as loneliness. But in the end, no words were necessary to describe the void in her chest, silence was explanatory enough.

She ignored that starving nostalgia and attended the royals and nobles that stood around her deific figure. Her hands were kissed and observed meticulously as if they had crafted the world itself. Emily stared at them, rough, marked with scars —a map of skin of all the battles she had lost— and maintained her firm posture. Then her eyes closed and the emptiness began.

She saw everything, she saw nothing at all. An eye that blinked despite being blind.

It only lasted a second —maybe less— but she felt the knife against her neck. An Empress made of stone blinded by the uncanny valley of dead stars. She saw a girl sewing her brother’s clothes, she saw a dog bite the hand that fed it; and then she was back at the tower, as if she had never left the throne. She blinked feeling confused about the action itself: the blinking eye, forced into an existence of darkness for the sole purpose of glimpsing a temporary light.

“You look tired.” The crow asked over her shoulder, almost as an apology for suggesting her to remain in the tower until the delirious hysteria caused by the witches was under control. He wanted to protect her from the sight: her town malnourished and corrupted by Delilah’s coven. Emily was thankful for the thought, but exhausted nevertheless. The Lord Protector tried to bring her joy during those dark times. “I have a present for you.”

My little bird

Emily almost flinched. This time, Corvo frowned and didn’t remain quite. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. What present have you brought me, father?” She changed the subject with an steady voice —severe, almost like an order—and Corvo pretended not to notice. He led the way through the corridors until they reached the garden where her mother’s corpse rested without the comfort of a heart. The Empress of the Isles felt sunlight gently touch her skin as she closed her eyes with a sigh.

The act itself, was a desperate attempt to feel alive once again. Emily tried to remain lost in time for a second, in a place where her mother had not died and grief was only an abstract concept and not a wound that never seemed to heal.

“Your imperial majesty-” She barely heard the distorted echo of a voice; her mind was focused on the small details of existence —the subtle warmth of the dying sun, the wind serenating for her and the remote murmur of a conversation and a laugh—. It seemed no words could fully reach her there.

“Emily.” She turned around.

Wyman. A name her mind could forget but her heart would never. They had the shadow of a frown on their face but they were smiling with devotion. The spark in their eyes affirmed they had longed for their reunion and so did the signs of insomnia she could read on their face. Emily found a place to rest (far away from grief) in their arms as the crow disappeared into the blackness in a blink.

Her name on their lips gave her a sense of belonging, as if Emily Kaldwin had been disappearing until Wyman had whispered her name as an undying declaration of love. She melted on their arms as the tears —made of salt and vacuous vertigo— decorated her face, like pearls.

In the Hound Pits Pub, the young Empress had many teachers: Callista had taught her etiquette and diplomacy, Piero explained the basics of mechanics and human anatomy, Sokolov illustrated her in the art of philosophy, and Corvo taught her mercy was as much of a choice as cruelty was; but of all those wise lessons it was the words of a sailor, Samuel, slightly influenced by alcohol, which made Emily cry in the arms of her lover many years after being spoken out loud. He said “Existence begins with a name. You’re walking through a crowd and someone calls out your name- that’s when you exist; when you look back searching for a familiar face without even thinking about it. Suddenly you’re real, your name belongs to you and so does your identity.”

Emily Kaldwin, Empress of the Isles, could live without honour but never without her name: chosen by her father, the surname of her mother. Only the strange stranger of the vast emptiness understood what it meant to exist outside existence while the cosmic whales were the witnesses of the brutal punishment imposed to a child who screamed his mother’s name as he drowned on his own blood until he forgot the syllables and phonetics of a name that once was a synonym of the deep ocean, now having no meaning at all.

“Your hands are cold” They whispered as they held them closer. Alexi had told her once she had the hands of a musician or an artist: long thin fingers, full of veins and bones, too rough for delicate tasks. A sword had never naturally belonged in her hands —meant for creation— but Emily had managed to morph and adapt them to the shape of the grip. Steady hands were both required for art and murder, the choice was right there.

If she had been given the choice and the power that came with it, Emily wouldn’t have been as merciful as her father. She had welcomed callous and bloody knuckles as a child, blood had never bothered her that much. The Empress would be fair above everything else, but moral justice appeared to be rarely merciful.

“You look older. Wiser.” Wyman admitted. They saw shadows and lights make Emily seem more angular and sharper, like fragmented glass. “But I guess it is to be expected after what happened.”

“To think about a time before Delilah seems impossible now. She made obvious all my mistakes as a ruler.” Her voice was as soft as her mother’s when a burden was carried in her heart. She knew as a fact, the words that left her mouth were an echo of a similar tale, told during the times of the plague. Emily questioned if her mother felt as helpless as she felt now. Maybe. Probably. Only the Outsider could tell.

 “Don’t blame yourself, we were young and foolish back then, both of us.” They didn’t deny her words. Emily had always appreciated their brutal honesty but sometimes it was hard to swallow. There was a time for sincerity and a time for courtesy, Wyman had never known when it was appropriate to tell white lies to a lover. Despite it, Wyman was skilled in omission, unsaid words that hang in the air. “We won’t repeat the past’s mistakes.”

Emily’s hands while Wyman held them. They were freezing, as if Emily Kaldwin were already dead. She was exhausted but no amount of sleep seemed to be able to provide the rest her soul craved for.

“Ah, yes. I remember. You made some bold declarations when we last saw each other.” Too long ago, she wished to add but stopped herself from doing so. She loved Wyman, there was no doubt. But she had changed and, in the process, her love had changed too. For a while, Emily had wanted to marry Wyman, offer them a position at court and a permanent place in her bed. Despite the logistics, she knew she didn’t want to follow her mother’s steps: her children would grow with a father allowed to publicly act as such. But as she visualised her future —as Sokolov did with his paintings before even choosing the pigments— she only saw darkness and sorrow. Nothing to offer to Wyman.

They chuckled recalling an unfinished midnight conversation before softly revealing their thoughts. “Don’t misunderstand me, your Imperial Majesty, I still believe gods would worship you.”

Hierarchy Of The Abyss

Emily skipped a verse, paused —as the waves of insomnia drowned her— and forgot what she was going to say. Her lover slept besides her, arms and legs under the sheets as an only being, finally complete. Wyman kissed her forehead and she breathed once again, like a battle cry, while she remembered the bitter words on the tip of her tongue.

I am the Empress of the World, my love,

My hands were made to hold the skies,

Not to touch the delicate hand of a lover.

I would never wish for this night to be over,

but-

She hummed the poem as a eulogy, and an apology for the life they would never have. No children with hair of fire running towards their parent’s arms, no future where they would remain in each other’s arms. The darkness of the abyss consumed her before she could formulate the final verse of their story.

I cannot love you in a way it won’t break you.

The words died unspoken, but the weight of sentiments and ideas held Emily down like gravity, unable to fly. The performance the void created in front of her (the untamed ocean demanding a sacrifice) reminded her of a lesson her mother had taught —while she played hide and seek through the corridors of Dunwall tower and felt pride when she successfully stole from the guards—, she taught her: “My dear child. cruelty, in some extent, is nothing but love.”

A man was drowning, a man she loved. She could save him: letting herself fall into the water and keep him afloat until a merchant ship arrived; but every time she tried to save him, he tried to drown her. He loved her —faithfully, devotedly, blindly— but he was drowning, and his fear didn’t allow him to see she was trying to save him. The drowning sailor kept her head underwater, attempting to use it as a support to save his own life. She loved the man, but he was killing her. When telling this story, Jessamine —the beating heart of a mother— had exposed the final problem an Empress had to face. “What would you do? Stay hoping that a ship arrives soon and saves you both without any certainty of how long will that take? Or swim away and let the man you love die?”

“I don’t know” she said unable to meet her mother’s gaze.

“You do know, as do I.” She spoke with benevolence. “If you love yourself enough to not put the lives of others above your own, you will let the man die. As would I.”

“That is cruel and selfish, mother!” And it went against everything her father had taught her. She remembered her mother smile at her and explain carefully, hoping she would understand. “Yes, and you will be judged as such. But it is also vile and merciless of them to expect you to sacrifice for another.”

She didn’t understand. “The sailor loves me!”

“Yes, but if he kills you, his love is worthless.” The image of a sailor —an orphan of the storm, as they called them in Mereth— drowned between the lines of the world. Whales were marvelled by the presence of an Empress, with golden blood in her veins and rotten blood staining her hands. Emily didn’t even attempt to save the drowning man, she merely watched him suffer until the waves took his corpse to shore. It was cruel and selfish to allow them to die, red hair underwater —like Wyman’s—. Her father wouldn’t understand her actions, her mother would. Emily confessed to the void. “I love Wyman and yet, I’d let them drown every time.”

The wind changed, colder then before. Prying eyes stared into her soul. The Empress of the Isles realised she was no longer dreaming. She was not awake either but lost somewhere in between. An outsider welcomed her like an exiled traveller in an inn, drunk and lonesome, who had just stumbled upon another foreigner in those strange lands. Someone whose solitude —as Serkonians say— matched their own. A boy with no home to return to and a melancholic song that starved him slowly. His eyes were black, his hands were cold.

“Where am I? Why am I here?” She asked.

He stared at her meticulously in a gesture that reminded her of Joplin. The stranger seemed to be trying to decipher her words as a foreigner would when coming across a language they couldn’t even attempt to comprehend. The words she spoke would eventually become meaningless when empires turned into dust and centuries allowed the waters to meet.

“Wrong question.” The void repeated the echo. His lips moved but he had no voice, the sounds came from everywhere around her while he stood in front of her. Emily had never worshipped him, nor offered prayers and gifts, but she had always been victim of a morbid curiosity towards his figure. A God, the only being hierarchically above her.

“What questions should I be asking then?” Emily hid her hands behind her back, a gesture he mimicked.

“Your Imperial Majesty” Her title became sardonic in the void where there were no lands to admire or citizens to rule. The Outsider seemed to find delight in the act of reminding her how alone she was. In the depths of the abyss, She was the empire. “what a fascinating creature you are.”

The black-eyed prisoner saw reality though shuttered glass, he caught glimpses of the world and imagined reality as a whole —and its infinite possibilities—. The stranger was aware in another life Emily would have died long ago. In another life she would have a throne of blood and bone. In another life Delilah had been killed by the knife the Empress feared at night. In another life Emily Kaldwin was still trapped in stone. He offered her the illusion of power by recreating the Hounds Pits Pub in the abyss. Fragmented, as all memories were.

She inquired “Is this a dream?” before suddenly remembering she had already asked that, once. Long ago. The echo of his answer came back since time did not exist and conversations that at some point took place in the eternal abyss, took place forever.

“A dream?” He paused; young Emily had thought he appeared to be trying to define the concept. His mother tongue had no concept such as that, dreams had never existed for him. Everything was real, even while one slept. “If you wish so, this will be a dream.”

In a blink (of a blind eye), reality shifted. The child was an adult, young still, but a shadow eclipsed the innocence her eyes once possessed. An Empress who was not bothered by blood or screams, crafted by many men: a protector, a murderer, a painter, an inventor, a god.

“No. No, this is real. I was here before.” She affirmed, ordered even. Her wish was the command of many, and  as such she decided what was considered reality or illusion. In that aspect, she was her very own God. What a fascinating creature indeed.

The outsider had slithered into her dreams when she was a young girl kept captive by mistrusting hands in the same halls she now wandered through in the void. He saw her in dreams, and she saw him, as terrible as that is. But the memory Emily was recalling didn’t have a forlorn traveller but a witch —like the old tales Callista told her of Pandyssia— that had sculpted her sharp cheekbones in stone and minerals. The heart throbbed faster.

“I was here once, for a while, before Corvo set me free.” Emily repeated trying to calm her aching heart. The God admired her devotedly since —by the hierarchy of the abyss— they were both imprisoned authorities. Worshipped by fools who could never understand them and the torture of eternally drowning in their own blood. He offered her no gifts since she would accept none, but he walked around her as many young royals had in an attempt to dance with her and tannish her honour. The outsider’s intentions were unknown, not dishonest but driven by curiosity. Their figures were dark and clear in that white canvas of the world’s shattered mirror —Sokolov would sell his own daughter for the chance to paint a pair so bizarre—; the Empress courted by the God. She allowed him to get closer.

 “Your imperial majesty” He whispered; a sonnet written in the wind. “you are not free.”

The dream she called reality claimed her back possessively, she couldn’t remain in the dark abyss any longer. The light of life and its sorrows took her away before she could ask the right question:

How long have I been here?

Tears escaped from her eyes as Wyman dried them while whispering sweet promises of a love undying. She was cold as a corpse and her heart screamed erratically in a desperate attempt to remain alive, she breathed, air burned in her lungs. The answer to her question came from the soft heartbeat of a soul she used to know. The heart answered her: “Forever”

Chapter Text

Kingsparrow's Lighthouse

The whales were wailing as they sailed into the ends of the world. Emily was unable to understand the melody; who were they crying for? Whose death had brought the most terrible of despairs? Who had died that ill-fated day? No one, yet.

As the heavens cried, young Emily admired the sky thinking she remembered it clear, no thick storm clouds or lightning as arteries beating across the inscrutable heights. Havelock dragged her up the stairs, Emily screamed her father's name (it tasted of metal on the lips). The stoic-eyed admiral dug his fingers into her like a claw, like an animal. “Hold still, you stupid girl.”

“Let me go! I am the Empress!” Emily clung to her title, delusional, a moribund holding onto the hope of seeing another dawn (how foolish). The whales sang her eulogy, a poem for the lost years.

“Didn’t you learn anything in your short life?” She learned the path towards glory was through a ladder of bones.

“Empresses are pieces on the board. And an Empress can sometimes die.” He muttered. Havelock had taught her how to play chess —sitting beside Martin in that joyful Pub— as he explained wonderful stories of sailors and pirates conquering the seas. She had learned to smell the blood in the air and understand the cryptic words of adults. She had learned to smell any drink that was offered to her before trying it.

From those who claimed to be her saviours she learned: betrayal can be found even in those one has close to the heart. Emily tried to break free, but Havelock kept her still. “Everything has come to nothing. The plague will take us all. You could have sat on the throne, with me behind it, but now Corvo is racing towards us, ready to dash it all to bits.”

The snarling of rain prevented her from thinking clearly. She was desperately looking for someone to save her —poor, harmless Emily (my little bird)— but no one answered her call. She wept for the lost future, for all that could have been, for a father who never forgave himself, for an empire that would be consumed in flames before the day was done. And the whales accompanied her weeping with their own grim symphony.

No, no— the story was all wrong, Corvo saved her a long time ago. Emily had walked through the wrong door, into the wrong epilogue.

A merciful crow —with bloodless hands— had rescued her that day, as he did from Delilah many years afterwards. Yet Emily experienced the agony of a phantom limb. Her throat sliced, the numbing pain of forever. Minerals across her eyes. A heart beating erratically as thunder stroke and the leviathans mourned the loss of another empress. “Corvo’s going to kill you!”

“Hah! Possibly. Corvo’s killed a lot of people, but he’s terrible at saving Empresses. He’s the worst of us all, you know.” Havelock told her and Emily couldn’t bring herself to deny his words. At some point of the story, the narrative went awry, and Corvo had come to the Hounds Pits Pub with hands dripping red. No-one ever told her whose life had been ended by the crow’s sharp feathers, and Emily didn’t ask —but she knew in her way back to the throne one could find a trail of blood—. It was unbearable. “No, he loves me and he’s my friend! And I am the Empress!”

Her teeth sank into his flesh, and she welcomed the taste of blood. She was the daughter of a beast; her sharp teeth were proof of it. In the face of adversity, even a lamb sharpens its teeth. “Ow! A little dignity, please. I think we’ll go now. You and me, into the history books together. Say goodbye, Emily the First. This world is no place for little girls!”

She fell. A sparrow attempting to fly too soon. She fell into the nothingness, the abyss where she was imprisoned. As a phantom limb, Emily Kaldwin —first of her name— became the empress that never ruled. The history books would name her as the one who could have saved them, if she only had more time.

Then, a hand found her in the dark. Unlovable fingers (cold and undead) clinged onto her and raised Emily from the shadows. She met the stranger’s eyes, devoured by the blackness. “Be careful, your imperial majesty. There’s nothing but death awaiting for you in that path.”

“What was that?” A nightmare, too close to reality to be considered just a dream. Another version of the story, another ending. Emily shivered, standing in that fragment of land that sailed through the Void, following its tides.

“The darkness at the end. Another world in which your father’s actions weren’t as noble.” In the abyss, reality unfolded as an unfinished story —in which one could witness all the possible outcomes of every turn of events—. The narrative was nothing but the consequence of the actions of certain individuals; the importance of said people in the storyline was the criteria the Outsider used to find those worth of baring his name, and its power.

“My father is a good man.” She said without meeting his gaze.

The god of the dishonored crooked his face, fascinated. “I have seen many men declare to be good and perform noble actions out of weakness. Men incapable of violence, who chose mercy out of fear. There are many of them.”

He appeared in front of her with a blow of arctic wind. “Your father is not one of them.”

“I don’t understand.” The void —Emily decided, after glancing at its horrors— was, as Sokolov had asserted, a landscape painted by the skilled hand of an artist. Despite the veracity of his words, his description had been mistaken for the world wasn’t an unfinished masterpiece (reality was); the abyss was in truth nothing but the work of an artist who never had the privilege of seeing the ocean, yet attempted to paint it based on the vague descriptions given by a delirious sailor: it shifted coloursrs like the sky —its sunsets were barely kind—, and its waves were moved by the wind as an only being, a carrier of solitude for those who analysed it for too long. It could drive men mad and drown them in false hopes, it could let ships sail and never let them reach shore. In the depths of it, fragments of misplaced empires remained static.

And as emperors of those strange tides, the leviathans observed the world unfold unaffected by the years that went by. The old god admired the empress. “Corvo Attano is a man capable of great violence, he could have brought the empire to its knees and let you forever captured in stone. Yet, he made a different choice. Had he chosen to draw more blood, the narrative would be very different.”

“My father is a good man.” She repeated stubbornly, like a child.

“That doesn’t make him incapable of being heartless. Are you judging him, your imperial majesty, for making a different call? Can you blame him for not wanting his daughter to follow his bloody footsteps? Would you have preferred the blood? the carnage?” A resting whale was witnessing them (both prisoners on their own) as their story was being told; older than both of them, wiser.

Emily left all the outsider’s questions unanswered, and the truth she wished to hide from herself remained unsaid. She had two freckles on her right hand —one darker than the other— and whenever she felt uneasiness take the best of her immobile position as a fair ruler, she scratched the freckles, attempting to erase them. Empress didn’t have freckles; their skin was pale like the light in the end and devoid of any imperfection. She changed the subject with a firm voice after staring at her surroundings. “Why did you bring me here?”

“I didn’t.” He admitted. “You came here on your own.” Emily blinked and stood once again in her quarters, with breakfast served and a crow watching over her. She couldn’t meet his eyes for the day, since they made her remember a tempestuous day at Kingsparrow’s Lighthouse.

Agujetas en el corazón

There's a word in Serkonan for that lingering pain, soreness in the muscles after physical overexertion. It's a strange word he couldn't venture to translate. Like needles, he thought, like needles under the skin.

Corvo couldn't remember the word, spoken by his mother long ago. Like needles; he felt them on his chest. The needling pain was common, chronic, something he couldn't live without. "It's time, the ship will sail at dusk."

Wyman nodded. Three days at court was all they could afford, they had to go. Emily held their heart carefully with her rough hands, cold, bloodless.

"Farewell." She kissed their cheek. There was something awaiting to be read between the lines.

"I love you." She said. There was an apology there, right there.

Emily was empress before she was herself, she often abandoned her own identity for the sake of the empire —as her mother had before her— she surrendered her name and her heart to keep the isles safe. Soon it became easy to forget her own name. And she had these eyes, bright and full of innocence. The eyes of a lamb. But her wool was stained with red, her jaws held a living heart. Since when were her teeth so sharp?

With her lover gone, Emily only had her father to remind her even empresses have names. She was Emily the just, Emily the vengeful, Emily the wise. She was his little girl, Emily, he was the one who gave her that name.

He watched as the empress stood on her throne like it wasn't made of thorns, like it didn't hurt, like it wasn't both her hope and curse. A naive insect imprisoned in paint —that's what she was— forever kept inside a masterpiece because it accidentally laid in the canvas' bright colours while the artist finished the piece. Emily had wanted to be a pirate, once, there wasn't much left of that child. Just a dead insect drowned in paint.

At night, the crow watched over his daughter with feathers of a scythe and the dreadful smell of iron remaining on the air. He crossed his heart and swore to protect her a long time ago. Corvo Attano was all heart (all ventricles and aortas) beating without blood, without life. It wasn't even his own heart.

Emily had her eyes closed, her final resting, as Corvo sang her a Serkonan lullaby; ragged, fragmented —like all his memories from Serkonos were—, yet he still remembered the tune and the warm smell of a recently cooked meal. He swore he could even hear his sister loudly telling another tale about the adventures of Jules from Mereth.

The nostalgic memories brought no peace, only tears to his eyes. Like needles. He hadn't realised how much he had missed the sun's warm rays until he had been to Karnaca once again. Corvo wouldn't mind leaving the coldness of Dunwall, its broken skyline that only carried grief and sorrow, and sail to the South, towards his homeland.

But (and there was always a but) he couldn't leave Emily alone. Not now, not ever.

His heart had been taken from him, taken by the red hands of a knife. Corvo had clinged onto his lover's heart as if it was his own, the only light he could find in the end was her voice: soft like a bird's, kind through the pain.

You try to protect her from the world

and the horrors threatening her,

you think she might finally be safe.

The heart of another empress —malformed, corrupted— had perished to ensure Delilah's end. Yet, Corvo could still hear her words. Terrible waves during a storm. The day in which he had saved young Emily from Havelock's grip the heart had beat a warning:

My dear, she will never be safe.

He observed Emily sleep. So cold, so still. He held her hand. Another heart without a heartbeat. It took him a second to acknowledge what it meant. "Emily?"

No answer, no breathing.

He shook her. "Emily, wake up. Emily!"

Corvo couldn't breathe. His heart skipped a beat. He sunk into the nothingness like his daughter. A servant came and the crow sent them to find the Royal Physician. The omen of death held his daughter unable to let her go. He wouldn't be able to stand it if she was gone. Corvo clinged onto the little things: Emily's drawings from her youth were still inside the first drawer of his office, their sparring sessions were the only time he could smile without pretending, he always felt pleasantly helpless when she called him father. He felt helpless once again. "Please, wake up. Don't- You can't leave."

He had spent all his life trying to protect her from harm, and it was all useless.

My dear, she will never be safe.

He kept calling her name.

Her eyes opened, the dark brown of the Serkonan mines had been replaced by the vacuous black. Her lungs burned from the inside and tears escaped from her eyes as she struggled to keep her heart beating. She blinked, and her eyes were brown once again.

Corvo fell to his knees with a howl of desperation trapped inside his throat. "Emily-"

"Father? I-" Her voice was off by a key. Strange, like an outsider's. "Wha- how long was I gone this time?"

This time. His heart was stabbed once again as Corvo attempted to understand. "This has happened before?"

He couldn't stop thinking about the blackness in her eyes. Frighteningly familiar. The black eyes of a lamb who couldn't find the way back home. Emily looked down and scratched one of the two freckles on her hand until it hurt. She had a troubled expression, as if she was about to confess a terrible crime.

"Four, five times counting this one. It's the second time it happens today." It was also the longest. Three minutes in which the empress above the world was dead. Her inert body remaining in land while her soul sailed through the void; uncalled, travelling on her own. "Since Delilah I've- They are dreams about the abyss, nothing more. Nothing to worry about."

"Emily." Her name was heavy on his mouth and it hurt. Like needles —what's the word?— under his tongue. The warning of an empress' living heart pierced his thoughts. "Emily, you were dead."

She blinked slowly, blindly, then frowned. "What?"

"You weren't breathing, you had no pulse, you were cold as a-" He didn't dare to finish the sentence. The crow with feathers sharper than blades couldn't stand to think about his own daughter's corpse (he couldn't even say the word). Corvo held her hand, still cold and numb.

"Father?" Emily asked, her voice had a hint of a child-like panic.

"I'm here, we're gonna fix this." He promised, the aftertaste was bitter. "As long as I'm here nothing will ever harm you. You're safe."

You're safe, You're safe, you're safe, you're safe— Corvo repeated the words, a devotee following the strictures: Wandering Gaze, Lying Tongue, Restless Hands, (you can't save her) Roving Feet, Rampant Hunger, Wanton Flesh, Errant Mind (you can't save her). Another beloved slipping through his fingers into the unresting void where he could not follow.

He was all heart, all the stab wounds never healed into scars. Each day was harder than the last. He couldn't describe exactly why or how it felt to have a heart with an open wound, unhealed, drowned in sea salt. Painful, like needles under the skin. The Royal Physician entered through the door and found the crow holding onto his child as he cried for all that could have been lost in an instant.

She would never be safe.

A candle in the darkness

Batista was a place made of dust, where memories were blurred by time and turned into echoes, where there was no kindness, no mercy. Corvo knew it too well.

His mother hadn't cried when his father had died, her tears in the dust would have turned into mud. Instead, she took all his properties and kept them in a chest under lock as precious memories, a treasure made of melancholy. His mother prepared his favourite dish on his birthday, always, yet Corvo couldn't say without doubt if his mother had loved him —the Dust District was no place for love— or her sister, for the same matter. But she lit up a candle when Beatrici left, to keep her safe and guide her through the dark.

Corvo wondered if she had lit a candle for him as well.

"There are mild symptoms of hypothermia, her lungs are affected from the lack of oxygen and she may experience some physical sequels of this incident." Toksvig had a rough voice like a clash of swords, like a forge. Royal Physician as he was, his mind was bright and polished from years of study. "She's sleeping now, rest will do her well."

Corvo nodded. Isaac Toksvig was a short man, wide on the shoulders and with a needling pain on his elbow caused by an accident during his childhood. His father claimed he hadn't pushed him down the stairs on purpose, Toksvig knew better than to believe him. He was fascinated by metals and its properties, and despite his cold manners Corvo knew him as trustworthy.

He was aware of the secret tangled around the ink in the crow's hand. His brother had one too. He never specified if the brother was dead or alive, or what use he had given to his unnatural abilities (and Corvo never asked). Toksvig excused himself and left as he wrote down anything worth mentioning about Emily's condition. He would spent the night awake, trying to find a solution to her Void-touched sickness. He would find none.

Corvo sat near her. Hands still trembling in fear. He left a candle on her bedside and lit it hoping its light would guide Emily thought the darkness of the abyss and help her find the way back home.

The flicker light of a candle standing against the shadows one could find in every corner, in every dishonest smile, in every dream, in every lie. Corvo didn't know what to do, or how to save her. Trapped in the depths of a bottomless pit, his child was slowly being taken from him.

He now regretted not having killed that witch.

Awaken by the moonlight, Corvo realised he had fallen asleep in his seat near her bed. His neck was sore and his legs ached, like needles inside his muscles.

Emily was resting. Her heart was beating, his lungs were breathing and she was dreaming about a thousand different lives. She was watching them as a prisoner looks through a crack in the walls of their cell, watching the world and the years go by without fully experiencing the passage of time. The crow positioned the candle away from the wind blowing through an open window and abandoned Dunwall Tower.

As a crow, he wandered into the night, discrete and clandestine. Without his heart, he didn't know how to find a shrine where to pray all his questions. He went to the lower streets, followed the rats, overheard conversations, read the Overseer's files. The moonlight accompanied him as he looked for his own personal god in every corner.

Then he found it.

Violet silk from overseas, soft, not meant for violence. The altar was made with woods and stones. Nearby Corvo found old worthless pieces of jewelry, a totem of a child meant to protect him of all harm, a note (some last words), and the corpse of a child —gone, taken by a fever far too soon—. There was a rune in the shrine, Corvo traced his fingers across the foreigner's name and the wind changed, it painfully clinged onto his bones. Like needles.

"My dear Corvo." The echo of a voice surrounded him. He saw the outsider's eyes made of charcoal, as black as his daughter's had been that very same night. "The years are long, but it's always good to see a familiar face."

"What is happening to Emily?" He demanded. Rough voice, wounded.

The stranger took pleasure in the language and its words —many of them were untranslatable—, he found delight in speaking, in finding his own voice in the dark (as weak as a candle's warm light) and he marveled at the choices made by a crow. Yet, he didn't lingered in the semantics. "Delilah's power grew roots across the Void as parasite slowly decomposing the world. Never hesitant, Delilah carefully crafted the right punishment for you daughter."

He turned into ash, appeared near Corvo and added salt to his raw heart. There were things Corvo preferred not to acknowledge. "Daud saved her from Delilah long ago, and a witch never forgets. It was Daud's choice of procedure what inspired Delilah."

"What has she done to Emily?" Fragments of land drew a path for him to follow as The Outsider disappeared. White slowly faded into blackness. The Void breathed with difficulty where they were, the air was heavy and there was something there, something rotting in the abyss. "Emily."

Imprisoned in stone (as she had been near the throne) and with her throat sliced. Corvo touched her. Polished boulders made her skin as minerals shined across her figure. There was a heart there, deep within. Corvo could hear it's soft rhythm, still beating.

"Delilah, who had once been casted into the void, brought her to the Void and offered her as a sacrifice to ensure she'd never stand in her path towards glory, condemning her to witness helpless how she ruled her empire." In the abyss there wasn't any light to guide him, and the world seemed so dark. But there were stars in the sky, even when he couldn't see them. "Or so would have happened, if you hadn't stopped her."

"The Empress is once again being taken from you and I wonder, what will you do to get her back?" There was something hidden under the curiosity in his voice, a whistle of something else. Unusual. Like fear, high-pitched fear. Would he chose the carnage? The knife? Would he chose to kill the one who blinked despite being blind?

He could, the choice was right there. The blind stranger warned him there's a consequence for every action as he examined him in detail. "Careful, there's always a price to pay. What you decide will ripple across the years as a dreadful wail."

"The end of an era is coming, there are very few choices left." Even in life, the boy with black eyes hadn't been able to bear violence, even when he was holding the knife, even when he was the sacrifice and the lamb.

Emily had been teared apart and sewed together, intertwining her to the abyss and its god with every one of the needle's stitches. Her being was directly linked to the Void through its oldest prisoner, nothing could separate them.

"How can I save her?" The crow asked, all needles in the heart.

He blinked. His eyes had been green. Not the shade of the deep forest of Morley, but softer, almost blue. His eyes were clear green, the colour of Pandyssian minerals. They were beautiful. Corvo thought he saw a glimpse of colour in his black eyes, in the middle of the mist and the darkness. "To save your daughter, you have to kill me."

Chapter Text

All The Cracked Mirrors

Watercolors across her ribs, the kindest of purples and the most joyful yellows and greens. Red dots surrounding her eyes, sweet little hemorrhages, like freckles or stars. She was withering, slowly falling apart. Slowly, like a silly wildflower once winter starts. And if she were to die, tarnished, watching all the bright colors decay, they would cherish her lovely bones and her very pretty grave. While she rested in the tub and tried to wash away the bruises on her skin, Emily held her breath under the water and held still; as if she were nothing but a painting of another drowned girl. Everybody knew, despite what was commonly said and thought, empresses never lived that long. 

On the last day of the Month of Nets, Emily spoke of love. She mentioned the garden and the beauty of the flowers, she had yet to plant their seeds. She mentioned her mother, and how she wished to be more like her. Love, to her, was a landscape of a graveyard, a bouquet for every grave. Her love had been buried, she watered it with her tears; she hoped eventually flowers would grow from underneath. She looked up at the surface and decided to remain tangled on the waves of cosmos a little longer, as someone who, when admiring her own reflection in the water, caught a glimpse of something else. Emily dipped her fingertips in the waters, testing him, testing them.

Emily knew she was dying but she didn’t know where to start. She didn’t know where to begin or where to stand when she was so close to turning twenty-six. She wished for a moment of silence that wasn’t tarnished by the Void. Her fingers trespassed the folds of the waters with both longing and disgust. Emily traced strange lines on her skin, and with her fingertips wrote his name. Through the cracks of the sea she held his gaze, watching him watching her. The tides became unhinged at the frenetic movements, she created a hurricane with circular motions, sinking ships in search of something so close and still out of reach. A little relief, a bit of ecstasy in this blissful epiphany. A touch of red, a hint of life, something that would bring back the color to her cheeks and lips. So close, almost there; the line was erased between the ocean and the sky. There was a name resting on her lips she didn't know how to pronounce. Emily closed her eyes and lost herself in the verses of a wet prayer.

In the darkness, she opened her eyes and discovered the world had become pitch black.

The Void built the world according to the map in her soul. Her heart must have been all wrong, blacken, arteries twisted within the ventricles, wailing at the sight of blood. The scenes of childhood resembled a rough mosaic, they were supposed to be beautiful images —the source of nostalgia, the place where she would always return to—, they weren’t. She remembered the gazebo, the floor stained with blood, more vividly than she was able to recall her mother’s last embrace. Near the gazebo, Kingsparrow Lighthouse arose amid a labyrinth of dark clouds; there, her old bedroom at the Hound Pits Pub remained intact, with Mrs. Pilsen still resting by the bed. There was a soft ballad coming from an old audiograph, and the aftermath of a girl's laugh. Emily awoke in the necrosive bathroom the courtesans shared in the Golden Cat; all the mirrors cracked, all the girls dead. “Outsider?”

In the absence of God, the abyss grew teeth around the edges and, starving, attempted to consume every light in the world, and every little soul that was lost in a dream. She was cleaned by the black waters, cleaned, like the wings of a dead sparrow buried by the assassin's hand.

One minute, her head was above the surface, her hands resting by the tub’s sides, the next her body was pulled underwater and her lungs began to burn. The blackness cracked open and swallowed her whole. She had seen a sailor die once, and thought it the most horrid death.

When she drowned it was always as a child, without any wisdom teeth, like an artist’s masterpiece. White clothes in the name of purity and innocence; the shadows drawn with blues, a child that was drowned, the waves sung the lament of the sea. Around her small figure there was only blackness, only death. Through the chasms of the Void Emily saw a writer get up from his chair and pour himself three fingers of whiskey, his hands shaking as he rubbed his eyes and wondered how one begins a child’s eulogy. 

He was on his way to buy a new supply of Sokolov’s remedy before heading back to the Dunwall Courier offices when he found out. He bought four elixirs and a spare to give to that lonely widow living down the street, he paid in small coins. Then the Bottle Street boy he was trading with offered him an exclusive in exchange for as much gold as he had left.

“Word’s spreading around, by tomorrow morning all the isles will know.” He gave him his father’s watch and his wedding ring, and the boy shared what he knew. “The empress drowned today.”

“Oh…” The writer clinged onto the emptiness inside his pockets. “Where?”

Emily watched the plate break, a hand reaching out through the dark, through the blank pages of her eulogy, through the limits of the canvas. The Outsider was beside her when she regained consciousness by the shore, vomiting everywhere, broken glass filled her lungs. She coughed and gagged and cried while she tried to drag herself away from the tub. “Your majesty…”

“No. Don’t-” Her lips were purple and she could barely feel her fingers. “don’t say- leave, please…”

The foreigner disappeared in gray undertones. The sun hid shy behind the Lighthouse and Emily couldn’t tell if it was a sunrise or a sunset. She felt like a lamb being devoured by a wolf; a lamb still awake when the wolf satisfied its hunger, and the meat began to rot. Still awake when the flies came and on her lacrimal laid eggs. Still awake when the wolfhounds arrived to play with her malnourished bones. Still, when an old woman killed the hound and stole the bones. Awake even when the woman cracked the bones and molded them into arcane shapes, when she decorated them with wires and feathers, and condemned the lamb to sing a crooked song. The black charm granted its carrier a familiar scent so that no wolf would be able to hunt the lamb ever again.

“I never expected us to meet.” He said as he appeared before her, and then paused —thinking about the chosen words, noticing he had chosen wrong—. The foreigner selected every word with dedication as someone who wished to be understood in a language he didn’t fully comprehend. “I watched your mother die at the hands of schemers who wanted your little empire. Rescued by a man in a strange mask. Without even noticing, you changed an assassin’s path. I thought that was the end of the excitement-”

Emily snapped. 

“Oh, by the Void- Shut up, shut up! I can’t stand you. I was drowning, I- I was in so much pain. I thought- I just wanted some rest, a- and for the pain to end. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t- I was drowning, I was drowning. I don’t want any of your speeches.” Her voice came out ragged, fragmented, from both near and afar. And, for an instant, the world cracked like a mirror and she loathed him.

“Look at you, it seems” Another pause without a blink. “not even empresses are above self-pity.”

“I am not one of your marked, I built you no shires and I begged for no gift. And I owe you nothing. And it might all seem insignificant to you- that I almost drowned or that I hold onto my title like it’s the only thing keeping me alive. And oh… you surely love mocking me about it. Isn’t that right, your majesty?” Emily stood with her piercing brown eyes, she might have been underwater but her eyes held The Great Burning in them, like fireflies. The Outsider listened to the sounds and the words and attempted to understand what it all meant. Some of it must have been lost in translation, most of it, by the rage boiling in her gaze. "This, isn't pity, there's no self-pity in me. And I have every right to be angry. I was drowning... I was- and you were watching me sink."

Hadn't she done the same? In a different dream, in a different tale? Watched as her lover drowned unmoved by the winds and the tides. Wasn't that the nature of those who witness from above? The depths of the ocean were a cementery, whaling trawlers instead of caskets. She loved her people, even as they drowned; she loved them enough to watch as they drowned. The whalers had their own verdict and their own trial: Emily loved them, her love meant nothing to them when the water became their grave.

She looked away like a sailor who cursed the name of every god when the ship was caught in the eye of the storm. "Send me back home, now. I have no intention of listening to you any longer."

"As your imperial majesty wishes." She winced as he bowed and the world decayed around her. He addressed her by her title as an expression of high regard, he respected her enough to never forget who she was and the power she held. But, it seemed, he had chosen all the wrong words.

Isaac Second-born

When he was twelve years old, Isaac Toksvig adopted the name of a child that had died on his behalf. He saw him again after many years across the town square. The Everyman was singing his sermons while burning the bodies, they corrupted the market food with the smell of charred flesh. He saw his brother there and, in his wide empty eyes, he witnessed his traded fate.

Isaac watched in horror the cremation of the man who shared his own face; his brother, older by thirteen minutes —and thirteen years ahead, that only one of them got to live—. He had a confession to make, and had committed no crime: his father had lost six of his fingers and loved only one of his sons, the fast and strong. He named him Isaac (a name pronounced with laughed joy, always meant for a first-born son) and when they were short on whale meat he asked the evergreen trees why they fed two sons when only one was worth keeping.

There was a man in Meya, a merchant of another kind. His fingers were black and his teeth were made of gold; He traded with young meat and offered good coin. Isaac’s mother died in High Cold and by morning her father sent for the merchant man to come.

There was a doctor, who ripped off the pages and told a different tale. Isaac had admired the man and praised him and his irrational philosophy, mesmerized at the long words and the pleasant sound of his voice. The Doctor shared a glass or two of Tyvian red with his father, and told him about the brightness of his second-born and how, if the tides were kind, he would one day see himself as a very rich man. His father looked at his least favourite son and, for the first time, found something worth saving.

When the merchant man came, he was offered the wrong twin for trade.

Toksvig carried what was done to him through the rest of his days. No one asked if he wanted any of it. He was accepted at the Academy of Natural Philosophy for all the wrong reasons, and spent a lifetime trying to make amends. As he observed an anomaly, on her blackened eyes and her lungs tarnished with charcoal, Toksvig refined an elixir made with a leviathan’s oil that whistled a soft song for the ears of the marked ones. It was a temporary solution to the Void leaking through her cracks.

The Royal protector thanked him with the most candid sincerity one could find in a crow. He had been stealing golden trinkets and leaving them by the empress’s chamber, as he always did when his mind was troubled and his heart wavered against the beat. Toksvig confessed then his most terrible crime. “I fear, my lord, you have nothing to thank me for, I didn’t do this. You see, I’m not a very bright man. I read every book that falls into my hands to make up for it, but knowledge and intelligence are still two very different things.”

“A long time ago I stroked the ego of a very prideful man. I did it without malice, without knowing what it meant.” His face had morphed through the years, wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes, sagging skin under his chin. He wouldn’t look much like his brother now; but he'd been his brother's keeper for as long as he'd been gone, and every time he wrote an essay particularly clever he signed it with his brother's name. “And my life was spared that day, and another was condemned in my name. I was accepted in the academy by mistake, and although I’ve dedicated my life to making myself worthy of the position that was given to me by the empress, I am aware of all my limitations. I’m not capable of untangling the mysteries of the Void or taming the force that torments her. The solution was brought to me by another, the one that can only be seen in dreams.”

In the land without a sky, Toksvig had wanted to ask for his brother. He whose eyes are black gave him no mouth, and told him no lies. Isaac, first-born, was slaughtered with the witches and the heretics. In the lonesome square where the cremated bodies were hanged Toksvig understood why his brother had been put down when he saw they had cut off his brother’s left hand.

In The Aftermath of Drowning

Blue, the color of all the seas and the heavens ahead. A hint of gray, storm clouds, dirt on the snow, the color of the mist and of every word that left his chapped lips. The taste was bitter and citrus of the wrong kind, acid, and an aftertaste that remained after every dose and every dish. Toksvig’s elixir was of a clear blue and a hint of charcoal gray, nineteen vials meant to be consumed with a full stomach, daily, religiously. Emily observed its opacity when placed in front of a faint light. It pretended to be see-through, Void-like, but the outlines were crooked and the colors were of a darker shade.

Emily knew the leviathans were dying, and yet here she was, drinking their oil. There was a knock on the door, stop, two more knocks, another stop. A black crow, hands of a thief, restless since the world found its end every night. He offered her an old Serkonan dish, liquid gold, toasted bread with a river of oil; turned it into something sweet, using sugar instead of salt.

Her father didn’t meet her gaze for the day, she wondered if there was something she had done, or something she had said. Corvo was afraid of looking up and seeing black where once was brown. The whale’s corrosive blood didn’t stop her from traveling the landless land where all the ancient gods were made blind. Alone, by her own stubborn choice; but alone either way.

Corvo watched the candle’s flame dance in the darkness. “Does he visit you as well?”

“It’s me who goes to him, or so he says. I wouldn’t know.” She didn’t mention the solitude, there was no need to. “The Void is endless, there’s no other place to go.”

In the aftermath of drowning she pursed her lips, just like Jessamine always did. Corvo watched her scratch the two freckles on her hand and held it to stop her before she harmed herself. “What do you talk about?”

She finished her toast, unsure of the taste. “Many things. He does most of the talking.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him.”

There was a book on her nightstand Corvo couldn’t read the title of. Between the pages, an old drawing of a woman, eyes as black as hers. Sokolov once drew a portrait of the late empress with his non-dominant hand, a messy sketch marked by flaws and crooked likes. Emily found the distorted portrait when she was thirteen, adored it as one loves a mirror and the image to be found in it. She kept the drawing and used it to mark the pages of her favourite book, she only began to hate it when Sokolov revealed it wasn't her but her mother. She didn't know how to feel, how to name the feeling of being a recycled outline. People always compared her to her mother, and often (too often) found her lacking.

Abandonment and solitude, as synonyms, disconnected her from reality and condemned her to be an hermit of silence —muted nature, a sparrow singing no song—. Emily claimed to love her gilded cage, the lilac watercolors. She resented the loneliness, and stubbornly believed she wouldn’t want anyone around anyhow. Like famine, her solitude infected all her thoughts, and Emily starved all alone. “Is there a reason why you’re avoiding him?”

Even then, she demanded solitude, but her heart betrayed her lying tongue. She wanted her father to stay and watch over her while she slept. She wished for Wyman to become a traitor of the empire and go against her commands (and stay a little longer by her side). As the portrait of a child in pure whites and cerulean shadows, the heart declared she saw more than she told, and drew everything she saw. She drew his welded face, and his eyes of ferrous alloy. She drew underwater constellations, and drew the stars too close since the distance that tore them apart was a curse; how terrible it was to burn alone in this dreadful night.

The crow often lost himself in the rooftops and her lover accepted every condition she made. Emily wanted them to be quiet with the same feverish need she ached to hear them shout, loud and angry; and call her stupid for isolating herself, call her pretentious, and selfish, and too stubborn for her own good. Lonesomeness was unbearable, she wished she could draw lines to link together all the stars.

“Have you forgotten? He gave you nightmares in your sleep.” Words betrayed her, along with her pride. She couldn’t request it, not out loud. A strangled scream (by her own hands), a stifled cry that believed silence to be the beginning of madness. 

“Maybe there’s nothing else he can give.”

“You pity him.” she realised.

“Don’t you?”

The corvids, birds of a feather, spoke in a mutual tongue but in different alphabets. Her cyrillic verses written in black ink seemed all red to him, and to her, his curiosity was venomous; a question, like a snake. An accusation in disguise.

Don’t you? Can't you? Crystalised in minerals and precious stones, the stranger drowned in his own blood (like she had). She was the one who came to him, she was a burden, a parasite in the nervous system that linked together all the stars. How can you not pity him? How can you do nothing while he drowns?

“He watches and does nothing.” Emily’s eyes reflected the fire’s flicker light. “He expects to be amused and never interferes.”

“That’s what he says, not what he means. The Litany is right about his lying tongue and that too; but he does interfere, he does it every time. It irks me to admit he has kept you safe more often than I have, and I have.” 

Through the darkness and the mist, he found a Lighthouse made of screams; there was no other place to go. Like a starved wolf, looking for that metallic taste, even in his own blood. He was her tarnished reflection in seawater, he was her shadow in each mirror. He could not feel sorry for her, without feeling sorry for himself. He couldn’t witness her pity without experiencing it as his own. It was obvious now, he’d rather be loathed than pitied. Emily finally understood why the stars had lied.

”What does that mean?” She commanded. An empress doesn’t ask, all her requests are orders. Her politeness was superficial, a learned trait, a white lie.

“You don’t know?” 

“Know what?”

“I can’t tell you. I don't know how to say it. He’s not- '' Corvo stopped, picked the dead skin around his fingernails and attempted to explain himself, looking for a word that didn’t exist; a way to describe a god’s mercy, a quiet company by a deathbed scene. “It’s a common factor, something he says that isn’t meant to be acknowledged. But it’s there, everywhere, and it’s you, in every choice he makes and everything he says.”

Her name was hidden in every corner, at the end of every line. He hid it carefully in plain sight, afraid someone would notice all the influence she had —even from afar, even without a mark—. There was an unmentionable longing between the sun and the stars, in the darkness that made them all seem so bright. He addressed her by her title, stubbornly, indisputable, as someone who ached to be allowed the luxury of whispering her name. Emily wanted her father to stop talking, she didn’t want to know more. “He gave me this mark knowing I’d use it to protect you. And when it was taken away, he gave it back.”

“I’m not claiming to understand him, Void-forbid; most times I can’t stand him. I don’t know what he expects me to do or what he means on every visit.” His heart had wires and pieces of steel, it spoke in the voice of an empty seat; his spine had grown roots and his hands were marked not only by ink. Today he found two more grey hairs than he did the day before, he was growing old. Enough old not to waste time searching for the reasons why a god did what it did. “But Toksvig has been having trouble sleeping these past weeks, and I’ve seen before the eyes of those who have seen the Void. And I know no amount of intelligence alone is enough to achieve what Toksvig has.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” It meant everything, but she closed her eyes and called herself blind.

“I know he no longer visits you in the Void. I know it because he visits me instead, asking all the questions that were meant for you.” In the night, she would look for him behind the veil of dreams and call out his name in the darkness, ask him to meet by the river where all the sailors drown; she would listen to his monochromatic tale of twin-bladed knives and dripping red lines. She would hate all the words, and it would be alright. He would drown by the river and she would be there, watching him watching her.

Chapter Text

Metaphors To Describe The Heart

A malformed muscle that ached for a man who wasn’t there. A foolish organ, creating a beat without a melody.  —once, Callista asked her to make a list of all the metaphors she’d use to describe her love and heart. Emily repeated the exercise whenever she was either anxious or afraid— A hole in the world, hidden behind her ribs, where all her sadness found a place where to bloom and exist. A book, abandoned among her memories of training. A kiss on the cheek. A letter to the empress. The boy’s name. Wyman's advice. Alexi’s laugh. Her mother’s soft voice. Her father’s presence by her side.

That very morning the last of the funerals were held dedicated to the Overseers who had died trying to recover Dunwall Tower from Delilah's grasp. The outdoor restorations had been completed and the tower was slowly recovering the majestic luster it once had, but Delilah's presence still lingered in the air, heavy and corrupted. That’s why Emily preferred to spend her days enclosed in her safe room, where time seemed to be static, keeping her forever trapped in an instant.

By mid-afternoon documents needing her signature or letters from dignitaries flattering her nobility and bravery had begun to arrive. Emily had set aside all her royal duties hours ago to dedicate her full attention to a task of the greatest complexity: finding the right words to apologize to a god. She wrote the words down and wrote over them, she crossed them out and wrote over again. The stranger contaminated her thoughts but rarely visited in her sleep. Emily was growing restless. She spilled the ink. 

“Shit.” It stained her hands, she attempted to clean the blackness on her pants. 

There was a whisper in an arcane tongue, the room was cold and the wind shifted. The colors lost their brightness and all the clocks remained silent. Emily was sitting by her desk when the Outsider appeared on the last step of the stairs. Her heart, disfigured, traitorous and vile, accelerated against her wishes.

“You came back.” Emily hesitated, surprised (she hadn’t even finished writing her apology). She had been cruel in the past, holding him accountable for the hostility of the Void; but he had rescued her. Once, twice, maybe more. —what did her father say?— He has kept you safe more often than I have.

It wasn’t her fault she had never been taught how to be kind. She was raised in troubled times, when the rats brought death and sorrow, and love was often substituted by grief. Callista once attempted to show her acts of empathy and benevolence: to request, forgive and apologize. She tried to teach her but Emily was never a devoted student. Her apologies always came across as insincere, tainted by blackwater, corrupted by power. Her humbleness was misunderstood by anyone who saw only the gold and not the cage; she didn't know how to express regret.

Children —Callista told her when she was older— learn to apologize and forgive from other children. They play, they hurt one another by mistake and apologize for the pain they've caused. And they learn to forgive since they are both the blade and the wound. But there weren't many children around when Emily was young, she was often alone. Always changed the rules and played her own game.

He said no words, and like the wind which makes no sound, he disappeared in a dense fog. Emily found him again, observing the drawing she had made long ago of the man hidden behind the mask of death, of the Golden Cat and the tower near the Hound Pits Pub. She had visited the place again and found only ruins of the tower that was once her home. His fingers caressed the yellowed paper and the deep marks Emily had left in her youth. On the left was a drawing of her father, the first of a series of sketches Emily hadn't had the courage to burn. The stranger seemed to be looking for a particular drawing, she realized a second too late what he was looking for. 

“Don’t touch that.” She exalted, a bit too sharp. He stopped, his fingertips holding the edge of the crimson painting she had once done of the man in the red coat.

He took a step back and Emily looked away. Her hands were still stained with ink which highlighted every little imperfection on her skin, every wrinkle, every scar. She rubbed her hands together trying to erase them all. Finding her voice, at last, Emily attempted to make amends.

“I’m sorry.” Her lack of sincerity was found in every vowel, he took notice.

To him, she was a subject hard to define, always changing, too contradictory. Her brown eyes were full of life, and, in them there was a touch of every emotion that crossed her heart like a traveler who can’t but wishes to stay. She was a curious thing —an empress searching for a god’s forgiveness—. He wasn’t sure how to respond.

“I never intended for us to meet.” His accent was strange and hard to place on a map, he stretched out the E's and emphasized the U's as they did in the remote mountains of Morley, but he only did so in certain verbs. He pronounced intend how Serkonans did, with both yearning and sorrow. And despite having no voice all his words were clear, a rehearsed choreography Emily had seen before in the children of Whiteclif who memorized verses without understanding their meaning.

“Intended?” Emily asked. They’d had that conversation before, but he had chosen another verb then. He looked at her with a careless glance back over his shoulder in a gesture she’d consider insulting if they were in another setting. The Outsider sat on her bed as he sought for a word he couldn’t translate, a verb half-way between expectation and dread. The words of a sparrow buried on another shore.

“Long ago, I saw in your father a man with the power to both destroy and create, a man who could save the empire or flush it down the drain. And what I saw in him was the same spark I found in Daud, years before his name was a synonym of blood and death. They had the potential to alter the narrative, and they both did, in their own way. It's a funny thing: Ambition, It can take one to sublime heights, or harrowing depths. And sometimes, they are one and the same.”

When Emily stood up, the wooden boards creaking under her feet, she took two cautious steps toward him —wary lest he disappeared in a charcoal mist—. She had many nightmares during her childhood, and, some of them, told the tales of Dunwall in shades of pruples, blues and greys. “It was you. You gave me all those nightmares.”

He blinked slowly, surprised. “I gave you many things, not as many as I intended at first.” 

She noticed a pattern in his rehearsed lines.

“You wanted to give me your mark?” She didn’t know how to feel about that, a bittersweet emotion, both disappointment and relief.

“I did.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t give away my gift to those who would find no use to it. You, alone, could already face every adversity standing in your path.” In a blink, he appeared in front of her. Emily stepped back, suddenly too aware of the proximity as he leaned in. ”Your imperial majesty, you should know there’s nothing one could offer you that isn’t already yours.”

It was so easy to get lost into his eyes, trying to find a glimpse of color in the dark. She saw how the blackness leaked into his skin, tarnishing it with charcoal. The air was cold around him, humid. It was suffocating for all the wrong reasons. She was tense and expectant, and it annoyed her —the same way she had been annoyed at Wyman’s stupid red hair the first time they had kissed her hand— enough to step back and swallow everything her heart desired. 

She found her voice in the sink near the bed where he had been sitting minutes ago as she washed her hands. The water fell to the ceiling, defying all the rules of gravity. There was still ink under her fingernails, she didn't really care. “My father told me there’s something you wanted to discuss with me, what is it?”

She masked her emotions behind an armour made of stoicism and royal apathy. And the black-eyed man allowed her to play her part.

“Delilah, in her craftiness, trapped you in a part of the Void not even I can access in its totality. Your days are counted, your imperial majesty. Now, what are you willing to do to survive? Can you forget the spilled blood in order to save your own life?“ He hid his hand behind his back and paced around the room and only stopped when he stood in front of where Emily had hidden that dreadful crimson drawing. "Can you forgive your mother's killer if he puts down the knife?"

“Wha- no.” Emily flinched and frowned, angrier at him than she was before —rightfully so—. She remembered the knife better than she could recall the man; she remembered his red coat, and his scar. She was haunted by the sight of her mother’s blood staining her untouched white clothes, and the smell of it. It made her gag. “Not him. Don’t you dare to ask me - no, I refuse. There must be another way.”

“There isn’t.”

“You can’t actually expect me to forgive that man. He killed my mother!”

“I’m aware.” He said, uninterested. "There are many secrets your father hasn't told you. Daud and his right hand are the key to your salvation, as they were long ago."

Emily picked the skin around the freckles on her hand. “He’s an assassin, why in the Void would he help me?”

“Because you are Emily Kaldwin, there's nothing he wouldn't do for you.” The way he said her name made her nervous. It was the first time the stranger didn’t address her by her title. The empress sighed trying to capture the sound of all the vowels as he pronounced them. He always did that —Emily realized—, every once in a while. As she thought she had him all figured out, his sardonic cynicism and his strange manners too, he said something unusual, an anomaly. Every now and then he chose the right words and disarmed her.

“I don’t want to see him, I don’t- I want him dead. I- when my father told me he had spared his life I couldn't- It's the only choice I hold against my father, one which I can't forgive." She sat on the bed and he appeared by her side. The sheets were messy and dirty since she didn't allow the service inside her safe room. There was a wrinkled letter Wyman had written to her weeks ago under a pillow —she still hadn't found the courage to write an answer—. Near the letter there was also a little trinket, a piece of carved wood Alexei had given her long ago. Emily often dreamed about her and everything that could have been. She looked at him, searching for anything —a hint of life, a reaction, any proof that he had a heart. “There are some days in which I can’t stand you, did you know that?"

She paused, her heart beating tight behind its cage of ribs. She wanted him to suffer a bit, see if he could; verify he wasn't above experincing the aches of the soul and her presence by his side.

"I tell myself it’s not your fault, that you are not responsible for what your marked do with what was given to them, but sometimes it gets hard. Sometimes all I can do is hate you. Void, even the thought of you makes me so angry. And all your speeches and riddles only make it worse, they make it so much worse." She closed her eyes and laid on her bed —near the letter, near the trinket—, near her traitorous tell-tale heart. “I’m aware that you’re trying to help me here but today is one of these days in which I hate you for all the things you didn’t do and for everything you say. And for that I am sorry. I really am.”

She didn't know what Callista would think about her truth-touched apology. Emily hoped she would appreciate the sincerity.

When she opened her eyes he was gone. Her room was warm and the landscape had recovered its familiar color palette. Emily buried her face in a cushion to hide her disappointment as she mumbled her last confession. “Please, despite it all, come back to me. Do not leave me alone in the Void.”

The Wrong Side Of The Red Line

It was not her hand that held the knife. It was not her blade that day, on the rooftops, as the empire collapsed in the blink of an eye. It was not her crime, she had no right to claim that remorse. She knew it and yet she couldn't remember if there was a time in which the sight of her own hands didn't disgust her, a time in which her fingers weren't stained with blood. 

Billie found a dead sparrow on deck, young enough it didn't know the grace of the heights. She cradled it. Already dead, the sparrow died in her hands.

It wasn't her hand that day, but it had been many other days.

To Billie Lurk, regret came as a second-hand instinct, not born within her but planted in her mind by observation and imitation. Long ago, she had seen a man draw a red line on the ground to tell apart right and wrong; it was then she realized she had long since crossed it.

That was a long time ago, and the years hadn’t been kind. Nowadays, the only thing she could see was that bloody red line. She stared at it in horror as if it had been drawn with someone’s blood, it was heavy on her conscience — yes, that was someone’s blood — and was often the cause of her inaptitude for violence. She had taken the vows of another and committed to them. Billie knew all that regret and guilt wasn’t hers, but she watched that red line and thought about all those other days in which she had felt proud of her stealth, of her quick knife. She had taken too many lives.

Billie didn't understand all it took to be closer to rightness was one step forward; instead, she sank her heels into the ground and stared at the red line from afar, thinking there was nothing she wouldn’t do to take it all back.

She could never forget how it felt to see the red line being drawn in front of her for the first time. 

"The Empress was different." From Dunwall’s lonesome tower, a line was drawn with a fresh trail of blood. —royal blood, blue blood; as red as anyone else’s— Jessamine Kaldwin wasn't right or wrong, no, she was the red line on the floor that told them apart. She was morality itself and her death had made obvious all her abominable crimes. 

The dead sparrow she found on deck reminded her of a little girl she had met once, an orphan of the empire who cried her mother's name until her throat was sore and in her cries there was blood. Billie had left her in the hands of evil men and pretended to not know what they would do to her, but she had known it all too well. She had seen the doe-like eyes of the heir and hadn’t felt a single ounce of sympathy, she had dared to feel cocky —as if she hadn’t cried as much when her dear Deirdre had been taken from her arms—, she had dared to feel proud of the slaughter. Now Billie cleaned the blood off the sparrow’s delicate feathers attempting to fix all the bridges she had burned in the past.

The day Corvo Attano appeared on her ship Billie was terrified. She saw the mask he was wearing and thought for an instant he was death itself who had come as a ghost to claim her soul; but it was an illusion, nothing more than a mask. (And yet) she couldn't look him in the eyes. The crow had always stood on the other side of the red line, with his back turned to her: never looking at the wrong path, never taking one step back. He carried the face of death, yet his actions spoke of mercy. His daughter had been taken from him again (that little bird) and even though his hands were clean, he did look back —thought about choosing another path— and sharpened his blade. He would do anything to protect his little girl. Billie watched it with the same flicker fear she experienced the first time she saw the red line.

There was right and wrong, and there was the line. It took a certain kind of man to see the difference yet choose violence, Billie was relieved to discover Corvo Attano wasn't one of them. But he had hesitated, hadn't he? He had hesitated and that was enough to let her know he would choose to end her life if she gave him a reason to. Billie had already given him a thousand reasons to.

One cold morning on Dunwall’s harbor, the crow spread his wings and left. He didn't kill her, she often wished he had. She felt a migraine start to grow from the inside of her eye. Sometimes the pain made her fall to her knees, sometimes it made her hallucinate with memories that never took place. Her arm experienced a similar ache. The doctor had called it Cervicobrachial Neuralgia and had given her some herbal remedies to ease the pain, but they made her throat sore and gave her nightmares about old griefs and dreamt ones: 

there was Aramis Stilton, 

a messy fight with the guards. 

there was an old memory, 

and Deirdre dying in her arms.

Billie kept Corvo's belongings in her ship because she didn't dare to throw them away. She kept a rusty sword from the old days in Dunwall too. It was both an object of pain and comfort: it reminded her of him, and the good days —never as good as the memories pretended they were—; yet it brought tears to her eyes to know it was all gone. Absence had always been a concept hard to define. An unfinished letter she never got the chance to send, a symphony that ended abruptly, without mercy. She thought: absence was a blank piece of paper where one could see some remaining lines and marks; there had been something written there once, it wasn't there anymore and the only proof that it had ever existed was the very same proof of its absence.

The Empress was different —her mind repeated in another's voice—, it was her and not the throne that kept the empire together. She had been so graceful, so fair. Killing an empress was an unforgivable crime, like killing a sacred sparrow before it got the chance to fly.

Billie dreamed about that day at Dunwall Tower as if a fragment of her soul was still there, not in the arms of the deceased Empress but in the cries of her heir. She couldn't find a single reason why a street rat's life was worthy of being spared —once, by the assassin; twice, by the protector—. As she watched the sparrows fly with the dead bird resting in her arms, Billie accepted some people are just meant to be on the wrong side of the red line, no amount of regret would bring an usurped life back.

With that thought in mind, Billie gave the sparrow a name and buried it in Karnaca.

When Wine Speaks Of Wrath

He had a nightmare, an old one. The memory of a Lighthouse blackened with grief, his scream when she slipped. He fell asleep on the chair behind his desk —decorated with knife marks on the edge—, his back complained when he awoke, startled by a knock. He drew his knife. His neck cracked at the sudden movement, like the engines of an old clock. 

“Father?” His daughter stepped in, a bottle of Tyvian red in hand —a peace offering in the eye of the hurricane—. Dry ink stained her hands and partially her pants. He noticed her clothes were wet, kissed by the rain. Under the cover of the night she had moved like a shadow, unafraid of the light. Emily was more careful than before, yet she still visited the roofs when her mind was troubled. The crow's first instinct wasn't to put away the knife, instead he hid the documents resting on his desk. An advertisement of a cheap flight down in Karnaca dated last week. He cleaned his desk as Emily sat down in front of him. She wasn't frowning but the wrinkles of her frustration remained. 

She placed the bottle on top of his desk. Corvo recognised the brand, Tyvian, dry, old and rich in alcohol. Emily preferred sweet wines, always had. This wine was far from it. "What's this for?"

"I want you to tell me about Daud." She said, her hand still holding the neck of the bottle. Her voice trembled like a ship against the waves, in her eyes there was great sandness. Corvo couldn’t stand the sight of it. He felt the needles begin to grow —from under the skin, into his bones.

The crow went for the knife and, in a skilled motion, uncorked the bottle. He let it breathe as he tried to find any glasses in one of the drawers. He found two covered in dust. In each pair of brown eyes there was red underneath; in hers there was anger, in his there was grief. She had craved the slaughter long ago, she wanted to see the man dead in his bloody red coat. Back then, she had been unfamiliar with mercy and the roots of her wrath grew in the calm before the storm. As his heart began to hurt, Corvo asked her. "How much did he tell?"

"Not much. He only went as far as to mention his name."

He looked at her hands as she scratched the skin around her fingernails. "Is he the reason why your hands are stained with ink?"

"No- yes." She frowned and looked at them. "Partially. I was attempting to write him an apology when he appeared."

Corvo was pouring the wine and almost slipped. "An apology?"

"Bad idea, I know. As you can imagine I was unsuccessful.” She took a sip of her glass and a grimace spread across her face at its bitter taste. “Although I'm pretty sure I told him how annoying he is at some point of the conversation. That should count."

"Count as what?"

"Honesty. As you know, the empress ought to restrict the Lying Tongue that is like a spark in a man's mouth."

"That's a risky move, your majesty. I doubt the Abbey would approve of his presence in your dreams.” He laughed and, for an instant he forgot the subject of their conversation. Corvo stretched out his laughter, attempting to delay the conversation about the man who had taken her away. He still missed her, Jessamine, and saw in Emily a blossoming piece of her spirit. Then there was silence as his heart starved for a presence he couldn’t replace. “It wasn’t mercy. In case you ever thought it was, you deserve to know it wasn’t mercy.”

Emily was quiet, like a sparrow in a breeze, or a prey who’s heard a sound. He drank the content of his glass and continued. “That day… I was so angry. Void. I wanted to tear him apart and feed him to his hounds, I wanted- I wanted him to suffer but no amount of pain seemed enough. He told me he regretted killing her and all the harm he had caused and I- It only made me angrier. Because he was mourning her loss, like I did. How dare he.”

Emily barely even breathed, trapped like the part of her soul lingering in the depths of the Void, as if she were made of coal and limestone. He looked older when he expressed his anger: a web of wrinkles across his face, dark shades, an absence with a woman’s name. He sighed, tired. “I let him live because I thought he’d be consumed by guilt or would die by his own hand. I thought either outcome was fitting for a killer like him. I didn’t spare him out of mercy. It wasn’t until I visited Karnaca that I discovered the truth.”

He proceeded to tell her a tale of assassins and Brigmore Witches, of corrupted bone charms and slaughterhouses, of Delilah’s first masterpiece and the man with the knife who saved her life. He mentioned a woman, Billie Lurk, hidden behind a whaler’s mask. He told the story of a little sparrow who died in her arms. And Emily listened, with the big eyes of a lamb, unsure of what to expect of that wolf of a man.

“You forgave him.” She said, it wasn’t a question.

“It’s not about forgiveness, it’s about… letting go.” He admitted, looking at the bottom of his empty glass with a frown. “I can’t deny I’m relieved I did not kill him all those years ago. He rescued you from threats I knew nothing of, if he hadn’t- you would have died overnight and I wouldn't have known you were gone. I can’t ignore that.”

"What do we do now?" Emily commanded in a furtile attempt to change the subject. "He could be anywhere."

"He's in Karnaca. He's being hold captive in the Albarca Baths. They make bets and force him to fight." Corvo said, Emily wasn't even ashamed to admit she was glad the man was being treated like a wild beast.

"Alright, we go to Karcana, then what?"

"It'll take us at least two weeks to reach Serkonos."  Corvo sighed and rubed his eyes. "Let's do this one step at a time."

The conversation ended not long after, Emily visited Toksvig the morning after and took her medication pretending not to notice the side effects. When she went back to her safe room she searched around the sketches she had made long ago and burned the drawing of the man in the red coat.

Chapter Text

The Lament of King Daire

Through the ink, Emily couldn’t tell which promises were only lies and which ones were sincere. She saw the elongated T and the inconsistent E, she watched the N get confused with each H and tried to untangle the pattern in every verse. The letter was two weeks old and the paper had wrinkles all over. She attempted to straighten them more than once. There was an accidental coffee stain in one corner, and a list of tasks written by her hand on the back. 

For the last five years Wyman and Emily had become linguists and architects of their own dialect. Together, they had created their own language, choosing carefully each verb: a shared disdain for obligations and etiquette, a hundred goodbyes, shared tobacco, a touch of honesty, some silly rhymes. Words of endearment she couldn't venture to translate or describe. It was easy to be loved by them and to love them in exchange. It was exactly how love was supposed to feel like, the sound of an untranslatable gentle tune and a compassionate hand brushing her hair. Wyman promised her once they’d find the man who killed her mother, and kill him for her. Hadn’t she loved them then?

As she read the letter once again Emily realized something had changed in the juxtaposition of all the sentences and paragraphs. She was suddenly a foreigner of her own mother tongue; she didn't know how to write an answer, how to speak of a love that couldn't reach her anymore.

In her response, Emily spoke in half truths and the burned remains of a flame-like love, a vanished echo, promises made not long ago. She mentioned her trip to Karnaca and how lonesome were her nights. She didn't mention her sickness, nor the visits that guided her through the dark. Her hands trembled while writing the last sentences, and her tongue tasted of acerbic and blood. She didn’t mention the man they were searching for, she didn't wish to name the killer by any other name than Knife . The letter was sent the same morning her ship abandoned Dunwall's port.

The Lament of King Daire had seen better days, the ship was old enough to witness a time before the empress and the one before her. Its current captain was a Morleyan with a Cullero accent. Emily caught him more than once using an archaic word to name the ocean, mare —tender as only a mother can be—, and choosing the wrong pronouns for the sea. Corvo was having a cordial conversation with him about Serkonan cuisine, they were specifically discussing the proper way to cook a blood sausage. The secret, it seemed, was on the meat, on the slaughter. On the way one holds the knife and recollects the blood.

Emily was watching him mimic the motion, cutting the air, slicing the silence, making the sun bleed and the water turn red. She wasn’t unaccustomed to violence, she knew how to recognize it everywhere —in a laugh, in a look, in Myriam, Clementine, and Juddy too—. It was precisely the abundance of violence what made her catch a glimpse of it and flinch. She looked away into the horizon’s line, the wound separating the sky and the sea. There, she saw the dying red touch the endless blue and flourish.

She had learned to find beauty in the light and the sun, Sokolov had introduced her to poets and essays about ancient history. He had taught her about foreigh civilizations from Pandyssia who worshiped sunlight as their own personal god. For them, the sunrise was a violent act. Red tainting the waters with the bloodshed of birth. She wondered if the one who remained in the dark was also a devotee of sunlight.

It was pointless to think about him at all —the winged serpent who tormented her in dreams, the nameless boy who crafted all her nightmares with dedication and diligence—. Emily couldn't help herself, she wasted all her thoughts on him.

Could he see it? Was he watching too? Maybe if she described it to him —this malnourished landscape, this cyanide blue perish and morph into something else—. Maybe. If she managed to find a common tongue, a transitive verb to describe it all, a name to call out when the darkness fell. Could he see her? Did he care?

Emily had an irrational fear of indifference and divine malice, a nervous reluctance to discover the Overseers were right after all. Did he enjoy watching her suffer? Did he mean every hurtful word? Or was it a misunderstanding? A gap, perhaps. The negative space between each word.

She found him in dreams, by the lighthouse near the shore. Mothers told tales about the Outsider to children in cradles, filling their nights with fear so they'd behave. When she was younger, Emily used to eavesdrop as the servants warned their children. She wanted to hear the stories her mother didn't have the chance to tell her.

It was a surprise to discover she was no longer angry at him, not really. She enjoyed holding him accountable, resting a knife by the base of his neck and causing a wound as an answer to all his smart remarks. But she was thankful that he was there, with her, in this eternal torment without a proper name. Emily knew —she realized then— there was nothing he could do that would make her disregard him. Even if he was a god of a tyrannical nature, she’d always shiver beneath his gaze.

It was the reciprocity of it all what compelled her to stay and forgive his perverse insolence and his implication in the movement of the spheres. Emily didn’t know with exactitude what the stranger thought of her and her stubborn nature, so predisposed to wrath. But he addressed her by her title, even in his reign; he vowed before her and remained silent only to hear her speak. “Your majesty…”

Oh, how insufferable he was. 

Emily didn’t address him by any name or title, he had called him by that given name, ‘Outsider’, only once; when she found herself alone and lost in the guts of the Void. It was a pejorative term. The Outsider, the one who never belongs, the one who looks from outside but can’t ever feel the warmth of sunlight. In Batista they used a different word to call the sovereign of the hollows, they called him ‘the foreigner’, the one from another land. Emily prefered the use of personal pronouns and the distance they offered. 

“Can you give him nightmares too?” She said, another set of pronouns to call the man whose name was a synonym of dread and carnage. “You know he deserves them far more than I do.”

He could tell her about the terrors of the night that haunted him, about the visions of a little girl, and the mother’s last breath. He could mention he was dying, how he would find no rest in the Void where he would search for a mother whose name he won’t be able to remember. But he chose to remain silent.

Emily sighed and dropped the subject. 

 "Callista used to say we are meant to preserve the memory of those who watch over us from the heavens. She said we are meant to be the keepers of their name and life." Emily wasn't looking at him, she had found Mrs. Pilsen covered in sea salt, in a deserted island where children often drowned. She spoke with the musicality of her mother tongue, but sometimes she used the Serkonan word for the sky . He noticed the change unaffected by the connotations. Emily sighed. It was foolish, wasn't it? He’d never understand. In what language does one pray to a god who never listens? What does one say to make him understand what’s both crossed out and underlined? 

In the core of the abyss, Emily attempted to discover if the sympathy a crow had claimed the Outsider possesed for her was true. She looked at him and caught him staring. "Am I my mother's keeper? My father carried the heart of a dead thing for a decade and called it by my mother's name, isn't he her keeper as well?"

The Outsider tilted his head, curious, like a bird or feral child. There was a light at the end of the corridor, and a faint tune, one she had already heard before. She recognised that tarnished light, that room, and something about it forced her back to childhood. He was looking in the same direction, into the roots of wrath. "He held onto an absence and caressed it as if it were a life, as if it were a synonym of love. You are incapable of such sacrifice."

 He disappeared and then he came back. She counted the seconds until he came back. 

"You and him tell different stories."

"You're wrong." Emily denied and tried to swallow her frustration and bury it deep within her heart. "We tell the same story, we talk about the same love and loss."

"He speaks of grief." The foreigner’s words were chosen carefully, synthetically. "You rejoice in wrath. You enjoy being the one holding the knife." When the leviathans walked by her they always looked twice at this bird-creature, singing her own song, careless, featherless. A beast crawling between worlds. In her they found a mirror of their own god, a reflection of an infected wound. She clenched her teeth and attempted to tame her insensitive tongue. "I like having the means to protect myself."

"Is that so?"

Emily liked the uncanny sound of his voice, even when he was mocking her. Especially then. "What else would it be?"

"Anger. Pride." The words were whispered through the dying wind. He appeared in front of her —too close, nearly not close enough— as she tried to mask every feeling hidden in the hollowness in her heart. "You and him are more alike than one would think; taken as children, forced to defend yourselves. Daud lacked your power, all the harm you can cause.... You'd enjoy being the oppressor for once, being able to inflict pain instead of receiving it. Don't you already know this? You can't stand being touched unless you are the one in control. You resent Wyman for growing ideas of their own."

She hated his terrible eyes, black stars painted in the blackest night. It was their own personal language, wasn’t it? He antagonized her and she always answered with fury and cruelty, like two children who never learned how to get along. What for? Was this all they were capable of? Or was it a consequence of fear? An unwillingness to admit how much she enjoyed having him near.

"What do you want me to say?” Instead of drawing away, Emily reached out and stopped halfway. “That you are right? Do you expect me to lie? You were there ." 

There: indeterminate, subjective. There , around the blurred edges between Myriam, Clementine and Juddy. Myriam watching the door as Juddy counted the coin. The most darling girl, Clementine, with dreams of aconite and death between her thighs, had held Emily still and told her what to do —be quiet and docile— he'd finish soon. 

"You saw me, you saw what happened. Do you want me to lie?" Her voice was only a mere whisper, the loudest sound in the eternal silence. She touched him afraid that he would back away any second, and reached out to hold his hand when he didn’t. But he couldn’t feel her, he couldn’t touch her back. He had been disconnected from all the small details, from her smell and her touch. He felt an echo of the warmness of her skin, and how it burned him to have her near. “You’ve always seen me, I could never lie to you.”

Restrict The Rampant Hunger

In a crumbling island at the very edges of the Void Emily hid from the embarrassment of being seen. It was their own personal symphony, a choreography for those who remain; he took a step forward. She took a step back. The beating of a heart substituted the drums. She took one step forward. He took one step back. They moved in unison, like the wind and the sails or the moon and the tides. Never close enough to erase all the lines. She succumbed to an inexact description, betraying the mouth, betraying the tongue. Emily thought herself lost in the labyrinthian construction of modern language and found all her words empty, detached from meaning. Her thoughts became black and shapeless —an ink stain on the paper—. The metaphors she had once used to describe the heart were inarticulate and desecrated. She distrusted every word for they were all deceiving.

She stretched out the words attempting to find the sutures between the syllabus. And with her tongue, like a knife, she cut the stitches holding them together. There was the sound of distress, a silence that shouts. If her crippled hands could hold silence with a needle —as a thread— she'd sew her lips together and never speak again.

“Emily.” It was her father's voice that awakened her and released her from her abyssal reverie. It was raining outside, Emily didn’t even notice. “A nightmare?”

“Yes.”

“I have some of those.” He said sitting down nearby. “Was it too dreadful?”

“It wasn’t dreadful enough.” There were lines of demarcation across her sentences where the skin had been torn apart and pulled back together by a reluctant hand. 

Corvo frowned slightly confused. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing, forget about it.” Emily hid her face under the covers like she used to when she was a child. She felt foolish; like a hound barking at a grave or an old leviathan who didn't understand the fugacity of the last breath. Samuel had told her long ago the story of a man without a name. A sailor, born in Arran. On an eerily quiet morning, the man discovered a leviathan at sea. The creature spoke to him in a language made of wails and cries the man from Arran couldn't understand. The sailor, appealed by the beauty of the beast, got closer to it. 

"What then? Did they become friends?" She had asked Samuel, as he smoked near the shore. He had smiled then, compelled by her innocence —by the pure credulousness only children possess—. In his eyes it was a virtue, but Emily had soon learned otherwise.

Arguments on the 'gentle nature' of the brutes could be refuted by seamen who return to shore, wide-eyed with tales of the whales' savagery. The whale took the sailor and sank him into the darkest oceans where he drowned. There was no malice in the leviathan who took the sailor to the surface afterwards, expecting to see him laugh and shout, for the whale had only wanted to show him that in the depths of the ocean one can also see the stars.

Emily felt foolish, like the leviathan —like the sailor who decided to get closer—, like the little girl who asked if the whale and the sailor would become friends. Foolishness wasn't the cause of her discomfort, only the source. It embarrassed her and made her feel ashamed of her ingenuity. Why did she have to get closer? What did she expect would happen?

“Are you feeling sick?” The crow asked her, unable to force the truth out of her, incapable of asking if the man from the Void was responsible. He could tell, he wasn0t blind. He was aware by the way Emily averted his gaze there was something she didn’t wish to share.

“I’m fine .” Emily answered from under the covers.

“Are you sure? Because you used to get seasick all the time when you were ten. I made Toksvig pack some herbal remedies in case, I could get you some and-”

“I said I’m fine!” She hoped her father would leave at once and allow her to rejoice in her misery. How stupid. How foolish. If the Void were to take her and dissolve her into the darkness, she’d have no complaints. Emily would prefer that rather than the embarrassment of saying too much. 

Emily didn't dare to put her own shameful famine into concrete words. The wish to find the ripest fruit and taste it on his lips. To peel it and slice it into small pieces, to lick it and satisfy the urge for something sweet. To savor that instant where the sky meets the sea. For a while she had chosen to ignore her own curiosity, the wish to know if it tasted how it looked.

She was torn between hunger and shame. Between the shame of desire and desire itself. And shame, like a cavity, did not restrict the rampant hunger . Emily felt it, a bolt of lightning on the tip of her tongue. A question: unasked, unanswered, underlined. Please . All it takes is an oblivious god to make an empress plead. Quietly, silenced by shame. Please . Her eyes were burning with a feeling as intense as hatred but with a sweeter flavor, fresh, fruit-like. Void, she could almost imagine the taste .

He had seen it when he had visited her as a knocker on the window or in her desire to reach out. Looking at her, he caught a glimpse of something he didn't know how to name. A feeling, more tender than admiration, far more violent than devotion —drawn with the undertones of famine—. A hunger born from within the heart. 

Emily repeated the strictures vehemently well aware of how much she wished to act against them. Willingly, as someone who misplaced their faith in the overwhelming ecstasy brought by a lover's tongue teasing the lips .

She felt the call of the Void, a pull from inside her heart. The echo of a song she once knew, but the words were all wrong, mangled and askew. She felt the ancient verses speak in a language where words often lie. 

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Corvo inquired once again.

“Father! Why don’t you leave me alone!” She appeared from under the covers with her cheeks flushed, overtaken by the embarrassment of being seen in such unfavorable condition, weakened by an arrogant god.

“Emily…” His voice couldn’t reach her anymore. Her thoughts overlapped as her vision began to blurry. She couldn’t stand the weight of her own body, this carcass of meat that trembled at the idea of contact. Her pupils widened and soon the darkness overshadowed the colors of the world; she sunk into the depths of the abyss and her own errant mind. Her instincts were eclipsed by a visceral hunger she couldn’t explain or understand.

And this fruit of salt, this object of ecstasy, would feel just as sweet wetting her throat, juice running down her chin. If he were to touch her, she'd find bruises across her skin once awake. Her organs obscured with an unknown disease, blackened by the touch of he who remained out of reach. Finally alone in the desolated blankness of the Void, Emily noticed some bruises on the edge of her fingers; dark spots, blood underneath the skin. She couldn't remember how she got them, or when, but she brought them to her lips and kissed them.

Myriam, Clementine and Juddy

“Dreams have a peculiar smell, the sweat of release and a hint of blood. They are bit putrid too.” Myriam had told her, as she brushed her hair in the house of pleasure and filth, where young girls were torn apart when they began to bleed. The girls saw Emily’s innocence and discovered something funny in it. Emily hadn’t been able to understand what was so funny about it or why they laughed. Why would they laugh at her?

After the seventh day, the Madame had sent three of the girls to take care of her. Myriam had cleaned a bruise that began to grow on her wrist, where blood flourished under her skin. “Juddy knows how to recognise the smell of dreams and decipher what they mean. A witch taught her.” She turned to the other girl. “Juddy, what was the witch's name?”

“Melina.” Juddy said, looking away into the resting sun and wondering if she’d ever see her again or if she had been turned into a chrysanthemum by the dark magic that blossomed from her flowers and fingertips. “She might have been a witch but she had the sweetest lips.”

“Can you smell nightmares too?” Emily asked suddenly. Every night she dreamt about the man in the red coat and her thirst for blood. She dreamt (often enough) about her own dismissal; a portrait, a lighthouse, the rusty edge of a damned knife. Visions of a sparrow, lying dead on the deck. 

Juddy walked over to her and kneeled. “Yeah, I can. Do you want to know what I smell in you, little empress?”

“Leave the girl alone, Juddy.” Clementine snapped nearby.

“We’re just talking, and we're taking good care of her, aren’t we? Madam Prudence can’t complain.” Juddy’s crooked fingers, blackened by filth and blood, brushed against Emily’s cheek. “Also, Emily here is my friend.”

Myriam laughed, back then Emily hadn’t been able to recognise her mocking tone. 

Out of the three of them, Myriam was the prettiest. Her face had delicate features, elongated, yet to be corrupted by vice and alcohol. Juddy had a cut down her cheek, the skin surrounding it had darkened but the man who had caused her told her he’d pay twice as much if she kept it untreated and let it leave a nasty scar. A proof that she was his —as he often did with his livestock—. Clementine had been fourteen and in her face still remained the features of a child, and the careless cruelty of childhood.

“You’re friends with the little empress then?” Myriam lit up a cigar from Cullero she had stolen from a customer and blew the smoke on Emily’s face. “Maybe she can make you a Lady.”

“Lady Whore if anything.” Clementine said with a chuckle, Myriam laughed with her.

Juddy ignored them. Embraced Emily like one would with a daughter and kept her close to her beating heart. It would have been comforting if it wasn’t for the stretch of her breath and the feeling of her bony hand —like a rope— around her neck. “She’s a grateful girl, she’ll take good care of us. If not, we'll find a way to make good coin out of her.”

Myriam looked at Juddy with a wicked smile. “And how exactly do you plan to do that?”

“Clem’s Morlean client, Lord D’Arco.” She tightened her grip around Emily’s neck. “He likes to play with Clem because she looks just like a little girl. I’m sure he’ll let us choose the price if we offer him a taste of the little empress.”

Emily tried to hold back the tears. Even then she had wanted to be more mature, like Corvo. How foolish she felt for being unaware of what all their words meant. She looked at Clementine. Hadn’t she trusted her? Just because she was fourteen and liked to play with her? And hadn’t she smiled as well with Myriam and Juddy, as they crafted their plan?

That night, while the others slept, Juddy slithered under the covers of her bed and kissed her forehead and smelled her skin. She kissed her cheek, “I smell your mother’s blood, in your veins, spilled on the floor. I smell endless agony, and the thickenss of blood. I smell solitude. Alone, with him .” Then she kissed her lips. “I see your dreams, I see him in them. I see you die in the morning and die once again in the Month of Rain.”

Through the eyes of the abyss, the Outsider saw her fate sealed in the outline of her figure, carved into her flesh by Juddy, —with her nails—. He saw a girl like many others, a girl who was taken like the others. He heard her scream and saw her cry. He saw Myriam, Clementine and Juddy turn the girl into an object of desire, a sparrow who learned how to sink instead of fly. In her wails there was dread and fear —of the things they wanted to do to her, of her own ignorance and naiveness—. How trusting, how foolish. He watched the despicable Lord D’Arco unbutton his pants as Clementine kept the girl down. 

Emily Kaldwin was meant to be the personification of innocence, with her white pure clothes and that sweet spark in her eyes. It was removed in an instant by her own hand. She went for the knife, went for his throat. She sliced his neck like she had seen other men do before.

Emily woke up in the abyssal plain, in the carcass of a decrepit god where all the lights were obscured by the Void. It was blacker than the night and Emily could feel a vibration; the sound of an old song, or someone else’s name. She recognised the smell as familiar and uncanny, of sweat —she thought—, sweat and blood. The scent of a decomposing corpse. Then she noticed them, whales who carried harpoons of dead civilizations in their backs, and chains caught in their bloody teeth. She could feel his presence near. “Welcome, your majesty. Look around you, a crumbling island at the very edges of the Void.” he shifted through the mist before her. “But this one is special. It's the place where my throat was cut, four thousand years ago. This is where my life ended and where it began again. It's where they made me.”

“Why did you bring me here?” She managed to ask him. Emily followed him through this landscape of perpetual darkness, attempting to find an answer, a sign of empathy; a lighthouse in the abyss. “This part of the Void feels… older.” 

On her path to the altar, she stumbled and fell. The blankness filled her lungs and devoured the oxygen of the last breath. Emily stopped breathing, she attempted to breathe the nothingness but it was useless. She got up and reached the altar, disturbed by how silent her heart was. Seeing him lying on the altar, Emily saw in him the reflection of a spirit that once had life. She saw his innocence and the havoc left behind. “Right up until the end I thought I'd find a way to escape. I fought but the ropes only cut my skin so I went limp. And then the knife touched my throat and I knew I'd waited too long. The blood ran out and I became a god.”

He massaged his wrists. Four thousand years ago the leviathans witnessed the birth of a new god who appeased the shrieks and disruptions caused by the merging of the worlds. His throat was cut and his blood was turned into charcoal. He reached out to her, moved by an unfamiliar desire for contact and warmth. But he hesitated and hid his hands behind his back as he decided to resist the foolish appeal of intimacy.

Emily didn’t notice. She was rubbing her throat, remembering Juddy's cold hands around it, feeling the edge of the knife that imprisoned her in the penumbra. Delilah had brought her there not long ago. Emily could remember the sensation and the cold.

As the knife sliced her throat, Emily had looked into the darkness and found a star.