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The dream is his, but the panic isn’t.
Corvo blinks into the wind of the Void, flinching as it shrieks against his skin, tries to claw into his ears and burrow behind his eyes. Pale light like a drowned sun shivers in the distance, turning his hands the colour of old bone when he tries to shield his face. The only thing louder than the copper-tasting gale is Corvo’s heart against his ribs. Smell of blood without, roar of blood within.
“Why am I here?” he asks, trying to shout over the din. His voice barely gets past his lips before it’s dragged away. The echoes are pinned viciously to floating hulks of night-black stone and torn apart, carrion words in a carrion place. He tries again. “What do you want?!”
The wind gets stronger, and with it so does the fear-rage-desperation. Corvo can feel it, like possession, like things crawling in his bones. There’s hunger too, or its relation. Empty wanting, hollow needing. An absence that makes Corvo’s chest want to cave in.
The mark on his hand burns like a fired coal, white with wrongness and singing pain.
CORVO
It comes from everywhere at once, from the nothing that lurks between everything real, out of the black where there should be stars. Noise without sound, so loud the ground shakes against his feet and his teeth rattle.
THE CHOICE WAS MADE AND NEVER MADE AND NOW IT COMES AGAIN
He knows the voice, even like this, horribly stretched and twisting on itself. With his eyes narrowed to slits against the squall, Corvo tries to spot the face or the outline or the black, black eyes with too much depth. But there’s only the shuddering sky and the light that’s inescapable as dying.
“What choice?!” The wind almost chokes him, full of the dust of ages or the ground-up bones of time. “Whose choice?!”
THE ONLY CHOICE
THEIRS AND YOURS AND MINE
BETWEEN AGONIES
BUT WHICH IS CLEANER WHICH IS KINDER
A tremor sends Corvo stumbling back a step, close to the edge and a fall that doesn’t end. “I don’t understand!”
OFFER THE THROAT OR WIELD THE BLADE
WEAR THE CROWN OR ENDURE THE BOOT
SEE THE DARK OR SEE FOREVER
Something like a scream rips from one side of the unbearable horizon to the other, and Corvo swears, flinching with his head ducked low. He half expects some monster or other to sail above him, to pass below his little suspended slab of an island, maybe to rush up from out of that distant seizure of blue fire and devour everything.
“You brought me here!” he yells, the anger pushing past the fear that is and isn’t his. “Either tell me what you want or let me leave!”
YES
The mark flares again, brighter, the pain so strong Corvo’s knees nearly buckle. He cradles his hand, waiting to see his skin flake away to ash, the tendons curling away from his bones like paper. The haze of dread and almost-hate isn’t gone, but it’s being bent into a new shape, like relief turned inside-out.
THE TIDE WILL LEAVE THE SHORE AND THE SHORE WILL CHANGE BUT IT WILL STILL BE THE SHORE
AND WHEN THE TIDE RETURNS IT WILL NOT BE ME
The slab breaks and Corvo stumbles. The pieces heave and Corvo falls to one knee. Everything drops and Corvo slides too fast to stop himself, fingers missing the edge of jagged stone, nothing beneath him except forever with the wind fleeing past.
Well. He should’ve known this place would kill him someday. Bleakly he thinks, I’m coming, Jessamine.
The hand that catches his is like ice, the grip so tight Corvo feels his pulse ricochet into his fingertips. The edges of rings bite into his skin and the jarring stop to his plummet wrenches his shoulder in its socket, knocks the breath from him.
When he looks up along the arm into the Outsider’s face, the human eyes staring back at him are somehow stranger than the infinitely empty non-night overhead.
Slowly, Corvo gets dragged up onto another unsupported stretch of black rock, left shaking and winded on his side like something hauled out of the sea. The Outsider, kneeling a cautious distance away, scans his face, studying him with too much raw expression. He shouldn’t be more unnerving like this – as more of a person - but he is.
“You bring me here to take your place?” Corvo asks, a sick weight in his gut, wondering whether he wants to stand or roll to the side and accept the fall instead. “Is that how this all ends?”
The Outsider’s mouth twitches, his head tilting. It’s like seeing an unpractised puppeteer trying out the strings. “Would you really want that?” The voice is the same, but it’s rough in a way that only comes from screaming.
Corvo pushes up off the chilled stone, sits braced on one hand. The wind’s died down, and the sudden quiet is like a muffled deafness. He refuses to imagine it: Emily waking up and finding him gone, being trapped and ruling over this howling nightmare the way she rules the Isles. Bitterly he asks, “Does what I want matter?”
“Always,” the Outsider nods, calm like a frozen river is calm, full of things seething underneath. “Especially here and never more than now.” He looks away from Corvo, staring all around them, as if he’s just noticed how bizarre this place is. “So many possibilities.” He looks down then, at his hands, turning and flexing them. Corvo watches without commenting as he slowly pulls the rings from his fingers, weighing them in the flat of one palm before he tips them over the side.
Corvo doesn’t know how long they sit there before the Outsider speaks again. He doesn’t know if a moment passes at all. A cold song, like the creaking of a thousand iron branches, rings out from far away. Neither of them acknowledge it.
“They could have murdered me, our old friends. They had the knife.” The Outsider lets out a sharp breath through his nose, makes a low noise from his throat. It’s impossible to call it a laugh. “My second death with the same blade. I doubt it would have felt much better than the first.” The eyes, pale now, bright and terribly ordinary, flick to Corvo. “Death has variation, but dying doesn’t. That’s what makes it less interesting.”
He’s young, is what Corvo thinks, despite himself, ahead of all the questions and before all the things that don’t make sense. And then: No one deserves this.
“Mercy is never the easier way,” the Outsider says, like a reply to something unheard. “The path doesn’t exist until after you’ve walked it.” He blinks, and asks, “Will you miss it?”
Corvo frowns. “Miss what?”
The Outsider nods at him. “Your hand.”
Corvo looks. His hand is still there, but the mark is gone, just bare skin where he’s grown so used to the whispering black forms and lines pressing up from somewhere inside, somewhere other.
All the years of power and secrets, of feeling blessed and cursed, and he didn’t even notice it leave him. He isn’t accustomed to painless losses, wasn’t sure he even believed in them anymore.
“Just like that?” he asks, rubbing a thumb over his knuckles, the new-old blankness.
The Outsider shrugs a shoulder in a slightly awkward-looking movement. “There might be an Outsider’s mark again, eventually, even if it won’t be the same. Maybe you’ll be the first to wear it. Maybe you’ll give the marks instead. You or your clever Empress.” There’s another twitch of the lips when Corvo glares.
“Getting the hang of being mortal?” Corvo mutters.
“This isn’t mortal,” the Outsider says, like it’s obvious. “The tide hasn’t gone out yet. We’re in the lull between the waves, before the new laws are made. Things will be…worse, away from here. I’ll have to learn how to forget, or I’ll end up wishing for that knife. I don’t look forward to dreaming again.”
The sympathy is inconvenient, maybe unwise, but Corvo can’t shove it down. “Will you miss it?” he asks, turning the question back.
“No,” the Outsider says, flat and unhesitating.
The expression on his face makes the hair on Corvo’s nape stand up, but more than anything it’s the scale of him that’s new. He’s been reduced to human proportions, no shadows clinging to him or inaudible dry music boiling from the space around him. With a grim kind of smirk he says, “What do you suppose the Abbey will think?”
Corvo can’t help the grimace, the worry, even if he wants to. Does he? “You’d better just stay well clear of them. The Overseers won’t care what colour your eyes are.”
The smirk shifts a little as the Outsider tips his chin at Corvo, sly and almost mocking. It’s the most familiar he’s seemed so far. “Not even with the good word of their Lord Protector?”
“I could—” Corvo starts, halts, realises he doesn’t even really know what he was about to say or offer. Protection? Coin? Shelter? It’s all too ridiculous, even here where all the rules are warped and absurd.
“Poor Corvo,” the Outsider says, shaking his head. “At the mercy of your mercy. You always were more bloodless than the world deserved.” It almost sounds like admiration, or just the same old unceasing interest, made new with what’s left of the wind picking at the Outsider’s hair, uneven strands falling into his face. He seems uncomfortable here now, all bird limbs and twitching motions like overwound clock springs, his bony knees pressing into the harsh stone. In any other setting he could be anyone at all, and Corvo can’t reconcile it.
The bastard went and found a whole new way to be impossible.
Finally Corvo sighs and gets to his feet, looking off to the side, down into that shining gulf. The light feels different, expectant somehow, and there’s pressure in the air, a charge like a waiting storm.
“It’s trying to see what shape it will take,” the Outsider says, following Corvo’s gaze. “Curiosity is wrapped up in the architecture here. It’s picking through its own bones.” A rough shiver plays across his shoulders, down into his clenching fists. His face is corpse-blank now. “It opens out in all directions and it can’t escape itself. Only the passing dead know how, and they’ve never explained it.”
On impulse, Corvo steps closer to him, drawing his eyes away from the open grave of a skyline. He crouches in front of the Out—whoever he is now, puts an unremarkable hand on the unremarkable shoulder. The eyes bore into him even without the inky darkness, pupils gone wide and taking him in, here on their equal, untrodden ground.
The thought wanders through Corvo’s head that they probably know each other better than anyone else could, much too well and with too much keenness. There’s no safe and soft way between them, like holding a sword with no hilt. Any movement, any change, just draws more blood. Better to hold on and get used to the sting.
“Which way do we go?” Corvo asks, after too long, not looking away. He’d meant to ask What’s going to happen to you? but he’d glanced off it as soon as he’d opened his mouth. If there was a choice here, he thinks he’s already made it. There’s never only the one choice though, is there?
There’s a dull thump nearby, and when Corvo looks there’s a small boat nudging its rusted metal and grimy planks against the stone, a pale lantern hung from the bow. It’s an achingly familiar boat, one that Corvo trusts.
“Out,” is the answer he gets, along with a hand on his arm as they stand up together, sharing balance between them on the smooth stone. “Out is the only way there is.”
Corvo huffs, tightens his hand for a second, feeling human warmth through plain dark cloth and trying not to find it odd. The returning grip on his arm isn’t as cold as it was. Takes a while for the heart to adjust to living, he thinks. It’s not hard to understand.
The faint smile tugging at Corvo’s mouth as he nods isn’t especially well-worn either. He could get used to it, he thinks.
“Alright then,” he says. “After you.”