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She whirls, one fist pressed against her mouth as if to stifle a scream.
Only she doesn’t have a fist. She doesn’t have a mouth. She doesn’t have vocal cords to scream with, nor lungs to gather the air with which to propel the scream. She has only her self, which is all anyone can take with them into the Void.
Except for certain special exceptions.
Mouth or not, body or not, she lowers her hand and stares at the tall and thin and extremely pale young man standing on the wide floating blade of stone. A few feet away from her—she’s found herself at its edge. Before her is the hideous vastness of nothing at all, and yet she can sense in it the equally hideous potential of everything that ever was and ever could be. This place...
This place.
Behind her, the guards of Dunwall Tower are dragging Corvo Attano away from her crumpled body. Echoing through all this nothingness, so loud she wants to clap her hands over the ears she no longer has: He’s crying her name.
Crying Emily’s.
She has never heard him sound that way—anguished, desperate, utterly bewildered—and it’s enough to drive her mad.
Oh, you can’t help that, the young man says. His voice is low and rough and somehow feline. It’s a sleek voice, and coolly satisfied with itself. We’re all mad here. He gives her the faintest possible smile. I’m mad. You’re mad.
“What—“ She drags in a breath. Perhaps it’s only habit, breathing. Perhaps it’s a habit she’ll break. His eyes. Stars, his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
The man—really he’s almost more of a boy, which only makes the whole situation feel more dizzyingly skewed—waves a hand airily. Never mind. Just a little joke from elsewhere. You’re not mad, sweet Jessamine. Poor Jessamine. I truly am sorry. He gestures at the nightmare scene unfolding behind her. Would you like me to make that go away? There isn’t much else to see in any case.
She glances back—bites her lip and whimpers. Other guards bending over her body now, moving her. She wants to scream at them not to touch her. They didn’t kill her, the man who did is gone, but—
She whirls again, her fists clenched as fearful anger floods into her. She knows who this is. She knows exactly. There is only one creature this can be. And she never really believed in him, always thought he was nothing more than a boogeyman used by the Abbey to scare people into behaving... Only did she? Did she never believe in him? Did she always consider him a story and a fraud?
Or is there something familiar about those endless black eyes?
“Tell me,” she breathes, “where my daughter is.”
The Outsider shakes his head. No.
“Tell me!”
It tears out of her, a snarl nearly twisting into a shriek, and she’s plunging forward, her fists raised and her lips curled back from her teeth as if she’s ready to bite him. Bite him, strike him, claw at his skin and see if he can bleed. She doesn’t care if he’s the monster the Abbey always made him out to be, and she doesn’t care if she’s in his world and doubtless therefore under his total control. She’s dead already. What more can he do to her?
She’s dead, her daughter has been stolen... and the love of her life and the father of her child is being dragged to Coldridge Prison for a crime he would have cut his own throat rather than ever commit.
Her fist swings—hits flesh. Or something that gives under the impact the way flesh does, the solidity of muscle beneath it and bone under that. His shoulder, his chest, his side—she beats at him, pummels him, rakes at his face with her hooked nails. She can in fact fight, a little; she had Corvo teach her a bit of hand-to-hand at one point, mostly for fun, and a bit of swordplay also. But all the skill she has is gone, cast aside in the storm of her fury. By all the stars, she wants to murder him. As if she could. As if it would somehow make anything better.
When her ferocious clawing closes in on his eyes, he seizes her wrists and stops her.
Not painfully. Not violently. He simply holds onto her with a grip that isn’t merely strong but is somehow universal, all the strength of thousands of years of time and space in his hands. She can no more get free of him than she could get free of the ocean if it decided to clasp her.
So she goes limp. Hopeless. And notes with a pang of despairing annoyance that far from being scratched to ribbons, his skin is pristine.
Are you finished? He pauses, cocks his head. You can go for a little longer if you need to. I just prefer you stay away from the eyes. Not for myself, you understand. I think it might be unfortunate for you.
She swallows hard. “Why? What would happen?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead he releases her and crosses his arms, regards her thoughtfully. And remains silent, which she doesn’t like—not that she likes any of this. She flicks her eyes down at herself. No blood. No sign of injury at all. She steps back, rubbing at her wrists although he hasn’t hurt her any more than she seems to have hurt him.
“Why won’t you tell me where she is?”
Because I won’t. Because there are things that aren’t yours to know. And I don’t owe you an explanation for why they aren’t yours to know. I don’t owe you anything, as a matter of fact. He gives her another infinitesimal smile. And yet I’m here to make you an offer. Or rather you’re here.
“I’m here,” she echoes softly, and looks up. A whale is swimming over their heads, impossibly huge and waving its tail ponderously through air that is not air but is instead something for which there’s no name in any tongue. Other whales in the distance, drifting through woven palaces of stone in the light of a dead star. The sad, haunting moan of their songs, which she’s never heard with her living ears but nonetheless recognizes in the very center of her being.
The Void.
Only damned souls are here. Only they wander this place. If there’s any truth to what the Abbey teaches—and apparently there is.
No, you’re not damned. I could have easily let you go on your way. This is merely a waystation. Or it might be merely that, depending on what you decide.
Numbly she turns away from him, walks a few paces. The image of the world she was stabbed out of has vanished, replaced by a jagged black spire rising over her head. Its top is strung with bone-colored banners, and she knows without having to ask that they’re made from the hides of drowned men.
Skin nearly the shade of his. Only his skin isn’t dead. It’s luminous, nearly glowing, as if some immense power pulses inches beneath its surface. Although when she touched him, when he touched her, he was cold.
She hugs herself as a wave of misery overwhelms her. Everything is cold.
“Why should I listen to anything you have to say? After what you’ve done?”
What do you mean, what I’ve done? To her faint surprise, the Outsider sounds offended. I haven’t done anything. I did give the man who killed you the gifts he used to do it, but he’s the one who chose to use them that way. All of you choose. She turns back to him in time to see him spreading his arms in obvious exasperation. Not particularly well, I might add. You all make the worst imaginable choices and then you blame me for it when everything goes pear-shaped on you. Try holding yourselves and each other accountable for once. Better yet, stop constantly making horrible choices. Just in the name of variety.
She blinks at him, momentarily startled out of words. That kind of minor explosion of annoyance is totally outside the picture of the Outsider the Abbey always presented—sly and ruthless, cruel, completely absent any human feeling whatsoever, and she’s not certain what to do with it.
The Outsider has also fallen silent, pulled back into himself and returned to gazing at her coolly. It’s up to you whether or not you listen to me, he says after a moment or two. I’m not going to try to force you into it. I’m not going to try to force you to do anything. I just told you, that’s not how I work. You choose. You can always choose.
She can choose. A fat lot of good that does her now. She shakes her head and spins away again, strides to the very edge of the slab of stone and peers over. Nothing—nothing below, nothing above, nothing on any side. And also everything.
She feels this place as if a tiny part of her is in every part of it. As if she permeates it. As if it’s in her very cells and always has been. She knows it in a way she shouldn’t be able to, and it frightens her.
“What would happen if I jumped?” she asks softly.
An icy breeze and a cold, dry whisper, like a handful of slate chips. He’s standing beside her. You could fall forever. Or you could land. Whichever you like, you don’t have to make up your mind right away.
She huffs. “I couldn’t get away from you.”
There’s nowhere in the Void you could go to get away from me, he says quietly. You already know that.
“Yes.” She closes her eyes. He’s cold beyond cold, and she doesn’t know whether or not she hates him. She probably should. “I do.”
If you want to go, you can go. I said I won’t make you do anything and I meant it. Or. He steps forward and long shards of stone hiss into being beneath his feet, forming a low flight of winding steps as he turns to face her. You can hear what I have to say.
She gazes up at him, at the calm abyss of his eyes. She doesn’t hate him, or she doesn’t think she does. That sense of familiarity won’t stop gnawing at her—as if she almost does know how she feels about him, just as if she almost does know this place. As if she almost knows him.
Maybe she does. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone is born knowing him, and the Void itself. Maybe it calls to them in a voice they don’t know they can hear.
She exhales and everything in her slumps, and she sinks to the bottom step and presses her hands against her face. “Tell me what you have to say.”
Jessamine.
Another flickering hiss and he’s crouching in front of her, and she raises her head and somehow finds the strength to once more meet his eyes.
I know this is very hard for you. He pauses, appears to deliberate over something. I know it better than you’d think. But believe me when I tell you that I never intended any harm to come to you. Or Corvo, or your daughter. I don’t intend harm at all.
She gives him a wan smile. “I don’t believe you.”
He ducks his head and actually lets out a quick laugh, as if granting that no, of course she wouldn’t. But he goes on.
Corvo is... special. I’m going to give him the same gifts I gave the man who killed you. Almost the same ones, anyway. He see-saws his hand. No two Marks are quite alike.
“Marks?” Her gut tightens. Gifts. The gifts he gave the ghastly man who just took her life and ruined two more, who may have doomed countless others if the Rat Plague can’t be brought to heel by whoever takes charge in her place—and she’s no fool. Not anymore. When he reappeared to find her murdered in Corvo’s arms, Burrows was oddly quick to reach what is, on its face, a completely ludicrous conclusion.
She launches a bitter inward curse at herself. If she had seen it. If she only had seen in time.
Blaming yourself is pointless, the Outsider chides gently. Corvo will be doing enough of that for the entire Empire. The next six months are going to be bad for him, I won’t lie to you—and I never lie to anyone. They’ll torture him, but he’ll torture himself far worse than they will. But after that, things will change.
Her eyes widen. She doesn’t want to hope. Not for anything, not now. “Change how?”
That part is up to him. I’m simply giving him the ability to change them. He’s rather remarkable, our Corvo Attano, the Outsider adds, lowering himself to sit comfortably crosslegged on the stone. You know the sweetness in him, the kindness, the strength. You know him as a lover and a father, and you’ve seen all the best parts of him. But not every part of him is that way. There’s rage. There’s violence. There’s darkness beyond what you could ever have imagined.
She looks away, out at the whales swimming along their own slowly meditative currents. The Outsider might not be entirely right about that. For nearly all their too-short time together, yes: Corvo has shown her only the best of himself.
But she’s sensed things he’s never let her see.
Men like him are capable of extraordinary good. And they can also shock you with the evil they can do. Over the next half year everything good in him will be put to the fire. If it can be beaten and flayed and burned out of him, it will be. But if it survives, if he emerges with even the smallest fragment of that goodness intact... The Outsider rolls a shoulder. That might be very interesting.
“Interesting,” she repeats, and laughs hollowly. “If he’s so interesting to you, why don’t you save him now?”
And what if I did? the Outsider asks evenly. Let’s say for a moment, for the sake of argument, that I even can. What if I interfered to stop every evil act, every disaster? What if I reached my hand into the world and somehow corrected every injustice? What if I smoothed over every rough spot, straightened every crooked line, and made the whole world shiny and perfect? What kind of world would that be?
“I don’t know, a better one?”
A dead one. His voice is still perfectly even, but there’s a flare in its core as he speaks. An almost concealed intensity. A world where there are no more choices. No stakes, no consequences. No one learns. No one grows. No one ever gets a chance to get it right. He leans forward slightly, voice dropping. I will not take that power from you, ever. I will not choose for any of you. And I will not save any of you from the consequences of your choices.
“He didn’t choose this!” She jerks her head up and slams her fists into the stone. There’s no pain, and she doesn’t notice its absence. “He didn’t choose any of it! He didn’t choose for me to die, he didn’t choose for Emily to be taken, he didn’t choose to be where he is now. How can you say that he chose?”
Sometimes terrible things happen to people, the Outsider says, very soft. Things they never chose. Things they can’t stop.
“And?”
And nothing. And that’s the world. And, once he emerges from this hell he didn’t choose, Corvo will have the power to choose what to do with whatever he has left. He will be alive, Jessamine. He’ll be alive to make that choice. That’s more than many can say.
She should, she supposes, find that some form of comfort. It occurs to her now: if he’s alive, he can fight back. If he’s alive, he might be able to somehow set things right. He can find a way. He can find Emily—even if this heartless monster sitting in front of her won’t tell him where she’s been taken, won’t tell her, Corvo can still find her. She knows him. She knows the awful power of his love. Corvo would tear Dunwall apart to find her. He would burn the city to the ground.
She stops.
He would burn the city to the ground.
Yes, the Outsider murmurs. He might do that. He might do worse.
Wearily she tips her head back and closes her eyes. Breathes, although she no longer can. “Why are you telling me all this?”
Because you can be one of the gifts I give him.
She snaps up, all her attention locked on him. All weariness fled her. Baffled, stunned, hopeful in spite of herself, and the closest to alive she guesses it’s possible for her to get. “What?”
If you like.
“How?” She straightens, groping at the stone as if to keep herself from spinning off into the Void. “How is that possible?”
He lifts a hand as if to cut something off before she can say it. I can’t raise the dead, so don’t think that. But I can capture a part of them. I can keep them here—and there, on that plane, for a time.
“Even if I haven’t been...” She fumbles for words that aren’t the Abbey’s and can’t find them. “Condemned?”
He rolls his eyes—which is quite an unsettling thing to see. Oh, please. I don’t condemn anyone. People condemn themselves. They choose to do the things that set them wandering the Void, and they choose to stay here. You... The Outsider shakes his head. You would never have come here if I hadn’t called you. You weren’t ready to go, but you would have gone without resistance or protest, accepting that your time had come. The corner of his mouth twitches. If anything I’m offering you the opportunity to condemn yourself after all.
“Tell me,” she whispers. “Tell me how.”
For a very long moment he’s silent, gazing at her, his hands curled loosely in his lap as the whales sing above him. And for an instant in that moment she ceases to see a monster or a creature or a god, and instead she sees a boy, strange and distant, and a little sad.
Then it’s over. Possibly she never saw it at all.
It will be a kind of prison, he says quietly. It will be a kind of torment. I can’t give you to him as you are, you see. You’ll need a vessel and that’ll involve changing you. You’ll lose some of yourself. You’ll be trapped, and I won’t release you until it’s time. I won’t be the one to release you at all. That, too, will not be my choice.
A vessel does not sound like a body. Likely because he doesn’t mean a body. He’s already said he can’t raise the dead—can’t or won’t, it doesn’t much matter—and it’s not difficult to extrapolate outward from that; didn’t she grow up hearing cradle stories about fairies and spirits trapped inside enchanted objects, granting wishes?
She comes perilously close to laughing at the thought of being one herself.
“How will that help him?”
Because it’ll be you, the Outsider says simply. Your voice. Your truth. Haven’t you always told him the truth, even when it hurt him? Have you ever spared him when he needed to know?
Yes. Yes, she has always given him the truth. To his sorrow and his joy and also to hers.
You were once there for him in a moment when he most needed direction, when he felt hopelessly lost. He was unmoored and alone in the world. Since then you’ve been his guide and his mentor, his lodestar. Your love and your wisdom have kept him on course, held him steady, reminded him of who he is. Cold fingers on her arm, and she doesn’t flinch. I’m giving you the chance to help guide him one last time. To your daughter, and possibly to better things even than that.
She stares at him. He looks back, impassive and unblinking.
“Will it hurt?”
Physically? No. Nothing will ever hurt you that way again. But your mind, your... heart? Strange emphasis on that word. He nods. Yes. I think it might hurt worse than you’ve ever been hurt before. And the worst part, Jessamine, is that he’d be the one hurting you.
She gets to her feet. Moving without thinking, she steps past him and toward the opposite edge of the wide island of stone. She looks up at the whales gliding through their halls and gardens of broken slate shards, and notes how a few swim alone but a few more are in close company, traveling through this vast emptiness together. As if they’re companions even in the midst of such strangeness, finding a home in each other.
As if they’re family.
Sometimes choices aren’t really choices at all.
“Have you ever done this for anyone else?”
No.
“Why?” she asks, barely a whisper. “Why would you give me back to him? Why would you try to help him that way?”
Because, the Outsider says, suddenly very near to her. Near, all around her, closing in on her, as if he’s huge or she’s small and he’s taking her in his cold, cold hands—changing her, horribly changing her, mutating not her body but her very consciousness, hurting already in a way beyond experience or description, tearing pieces of her away and leaving her in crushed shreds. Now she truly has no mouth or lungs or vocal cords to scream with. Only the brutal grinding of gears, and the astonishing gentleness of the Outsider’s voice.
Because to be perfectly truthful, Jessamine, which I always am... I would really like this time to be different.
I would really like him to be the one who surprises me.