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Steam rises from the hot bath, meandering with the choking heady scent of priceless bath salts and petals from freshly plucked roses.
Flushed red from the heat, pale as she is, Emily breathes slowly in the silence. Each movement in the hot water scalds, but still she heaves her deep breaths slowly.
She stares at the still water surface, drifting and drifting.
The night is always still for her, as if knowing that her days are constantly in chaos, bustles of movement that threaten to trip her. She fears the break over the horizon, when she has to take up her pen once again like every other morning, throat always dry even before she speaks.
A chill breathes life at her back, acrid ashes and wispy smoke bleed into the air, fractals of chills breaking across her bare skin.
An icy hand falls onto her shoulder, the crook of her neck, a breath drifting past her ear on the other side and the touch of his lips like a brush.
"Fond of self-sabotage, the Empress of the Isles is. How would her people think, a woman who could care less if she dies tomorrow, in charge of their welfare?"
Most of them would celebrate, for one.
Emily tilts her head back to lay against his shoulder.
"They would know that most of their affairs, especially the enterprise budget subsidiary for the flooded district, would have been approved already. It wouldn't be my fault if there's any delay in the deployment." There would be, actually. She has to review the relevant ministries again to relieve that particular concern.
"How efficient."
"Says the one who appears in people's dreams the second they become interesting."
"The Void surrounds all, sees and hears all, at once." Who am I, at the whim of the Void? Unspoken. “It is not to the perception of any being.”
Emily snorts. Turning her head to breathe deeply into his neck. She wonders if it is because of his lacking warmth that he seeks hers, always close to proximity. She wonders if he knows how she craves the chill of The Void, a reprieve from the constant furor of the world.
“Everywhere, anywhere, all at once. And yet you are still privy to its whims. Where else are you now?"
Have you seen my death, once too many times? How do I go?
The Outsider breathes out and pulls away, straightening. “I am nowhere else. The Void serves no need to split me apart."
How privileged.
She's needed everywhere; amongst her people to assuage them of her presence and proactiveness in aiding and to abate their rising concerns and needs as their society progresses, amongst the parliament as a watchful eye ready to cull them back in line, with her father to show how she is capable of juggling every component of her life, every day that she spends walking in her mother's shadow.
Emily stares over the chilling surface of the bath.
Without further fanfare, she pulls herself up with the rims of the tub and reaches for the towel that The Outsider offers from nowhere. It is cool to touch, the chill of The Void already seeped into the thick cotton.
She dries her body as she steps out of the bath, uncaring for the presence that darkens the bathroom, unabashed by her nakedness because she's been bathed by handmaidens long since before she even took the throne. Only was she crowned was she given unquestionable privacy, ironically enough.
"How bright is the moon tonight?" She asks softly.
"Can the Empress really afford to be running about?"
She cuts him a look in the mirror, ashes and fractals floating in the corner.
"Is that concern I hear, Outsider?" Tyvia was barely a month ago, was it? A land of frost that welcomed her home to snow and her people much less with a poison that nearly took her lungs. Assassination attempts have been a few too many since she was twelve. It had sent Corvo into a panic, and she was just so lucky that her monthly flow had arrived and made her appetite lacking for if not she would have consumed an overdose of the muscle paralytic and choked on her own tongue and died unceremoniously.
The Outsider must have been cackling when he found out.
She sweeps over and takes nothing of her scented oils, merely binding herself tightly in her underclothes.
The Outsider doesn't acknowledge her question. She only feels his stare on the back of her neck. She turns to meet his gaze with a raised eyebrow, expectant.
"Not very. You will find that a sea has blanketed your beloved city. Surreptitious wrongdoings will find safety in the cover while your people will shy from it tonight." The Outsider answers, already distant, charred voice breathing out smoke and ashes. He turns and walks away into nothingness, haughty chin tilted away. "The quick-footed may rest and the unknown will remain unknown."
Run, boy, run.
Emily tilts her head in his direction as he disappears, gone until the next moment she will see him again.
For now, she reaches for her form-fitting turtleneck and leggings, both garments insulated and dark like the pitching night.
In the dark, her father won't notice her slipping out and jumping across rooftops, no moon to illuminate her fair skin nor a silver line to glint off her edges.
She runs freely over rooftops, footsteps tapping over stone. Her shadow doesn't touch light falling from windows, they don't cross anyone's path. Emily scales walls as if she was born for a life of climbing and free running instead of writing legislation and culling debates in court.
She is young and she is old, never older than her mother and yet, she is alive and she is not.
She is here, solid and flesh and bone, and she is not.
In thousands of lives, hundreds of deaths that he was privy to, this is neither. Unblemished by his mark but beloved by The Void and nothing but The cold, unbearable, Void. He held this one once, close enough for her lips to brush his bones, but somewhere along his absence, she had walked the line like her many counterparts and could bear no child as consequence.
This will be no death.
Whalebone. Sunken deep in hot ichor and a tar that drips off her fingers thickly to splotch back in the pool of inky darkness, a pool that flows constantly from ether, cascading down over the edge of the floating isle to the abyss below.
Carved with his mark, his blood beads into the etchings scorn on the bone.
She easily plucks the Whalebone dagger free by the handle between two fingers, revealing a two bladed knife burned with his name. His blood spills over the bone, making threads down her wrists.
"You leave your mark upon everything," she says, “have you no shame?"
"A hypocrite, says the face minted on her coins."
"Semantics." She dismisses, peering at the silver lines gleaming down each blade, sharp enough to beg for a prick for a taste of blood.
Emily obliges. She plunges the knife into her wrist and pulls, just like she had for the treacherous witch. An offering, a shell, a prison made of flesh, bone and breath. Instead of a shattered untethered spirit spilling in to chill her bones, she bleeds out instead. Tainting instead of being tainted.
Blood spills warm as he watches maroon dribble down her arm to join the ichor pool, the deep red sinking into the tar. She cuts too deep for her to control her left hand, but she doesn't ever need to again. She slips her arm into the pool, burning warmth up her skin.
The atramentous surface of the pool starts to bubble with maroon around her arm, her fresh red blood staining, an infection spreading across the ocean of ichor and it doesn't stop. She leans forward, lowering herself until the pool comes to her shoulder, maroon spreading across the isle of blood like fire, splashing up onto gunmetal voidstone.
She slips in head first, maroon splashing up her skin like thousands of tiny embracing hands.
The Outsider merely watches as she disappears into blood. A tremble starts on his skin like a chill has blown over him. The Void has never been warm, not for entities before the bloodless god.
Somewhere down the road of a gray city, the Empress roams in silence and peace.
She has burned, has killed for the dead, blood on her hands tainted and staining.
When she ruled, she used to be untouchable by the consequences of her welfaring decisions, only moved by the subsequent reaction events after an implementation, and even then they would have been part of the predictions laid out prior to the larger scheme.
Here, now, she wears a steel sinewed mask coppering from bloodstains, an eyeglass that lets her see for miles. On this stretch of empty roads, the men are tied out of sight with hands pierced through by their blades.
Her people flee at the sight of her, the imprint of her father's mask haunting their sleep with glints of sharp steel and warm splatters of blood.
When she has placed herself back upon her old throne, would they fear her for the invisible threat of the mask appearing whence the Empress is opposed once again? The crown killer by her name, replaced with a less tangible identity, bloodier than anyone could imagine.
Run, little girl, run.
Delilah sings in her, pleased.
Far unlike her fair and just mother, who had to make decisions against her heart, pulled taut by the Council and the Abbey instead of the other way around.
Her father would wonder. Blood under her fingernails, the trinkets she brought home in memory of the days of her worst displayed for the world to remember.
Emily spies an Overseer hunched over and against a crumbled post, body batting with heaving breaths.
"Fitz." She calls.
The Overseer startles slightly at the sight of her, but he doesn't know her like she does. He only sees the blood that stains her clothes, the mask, the blades hung on both flanks, the Void that has kissed her skin and left less than a mark and more than a claim.
The High Overseer has fallen, battered, bruised and unrecognisable with the vines piercing through him and the fire that turned him to char.
"You…I don't know…you're still better, better than the lot of them."
"Am I?"
"An Acolyte of the Unspeakable. A witch on the throne that…has caused this. I will not…it is not up to me…I will not live much longer to see…"
He doesn't.
Emily looks over him, the messily strewn bodies and the scorched earth of spontaneous fires that burn with desperate passion.
Heresy the world should call, but who will they call for now, the Abbey in shambles?
The Outsider leans against the bedpost, a fine weave of mahogany, and glances down at the sun-tanned hand highlighted by the ochre glow of the bedside lamp resting upon Emily's arm, too tentative to go much higher because the last time they shared an intimacy, Emily Kaldwin drowned herself in the ocean when her daughter was six and finally an heir to nothing but her name.
But it's different, now. The once-acolyte merely does not have his supposed all-seeing, all-knowing timeless gaze to know it anymore. Red blood rushing in his veins, a beating heart in his silence.
"She is not so fragile, this one." The Outsider remarks, knowing the severed bodies left in warning by a ghost that embodied the vengeful nights. "But you have become so.”
She watches him exhale a soul-emptying breath.
“How poignant.” He says softly.
The Outsider chuckles, something that echoes in The Void that she has brought to shadow the walls.
She sees how he trembles in the cold, the fact is that the young Empress is now more accustomed to The Void than the once-acolyte would ever be again. Four thousand years squandered by her twenty-something humanity.
She's yet to know whether it serves him well, this fragility that has now overtaken him, never again will he survive a blade to his throat, cruor spilling in everflowing rivets. She remembers lives long past where she would bleed dry on gray stone, on blood red carpet, in cold arms.
A shift in the air catches their attention and she pulls on a muscle that takes her right to the side of the little girl in the crib by the bed.
The young daughter doesn't start. She blinks open her wide golden eyes, caught lovingly by her own amber atramental ones.
She thinks to the thousand lives that the little one has lived, the thousands more she has yet to.
“Will she chase the wrinkles of my face one day? Mock the rasp in my voice, be mistaken for her mother’s likeness and hold our hands before old friends of the court?” He asks, oddly sentimental.
The Outsider tilts her head. She doesn’t know what he knows, how much he knows and remembers after careening through so many lifetimes in the dying dredges of his godhood.
“Would you do the same if you’re the only one she has left?”
The number of worlds he's pulled himself out of with the ebbing dredges of his power just to find one that the little Empress would live and live and live.
A love lost and a love to live with.
She watches him tilt his head like she does, looking down upon his wriggling flesh and blood.
He moves to pick her up, holding her in the cradle of his arms like he's known how to do so his entire long life. She knows the warmth in his arms, an encapsulating chill.
"The tides are changing." He says one day.
Emily watches how he holds her daughter. When she turns at his words, so do the both of them, ochre eyes burning in all they perceive.
"The tides always change. That's what they do." She replies.
He tilts his head, his cheek brushing against hair as inky as his. "Yet they usually do not change the world with them."
"Change is necessary. Even you aren't stagnant." Emily glances back down at her work, the different drafts for a revolution.
A bigger council, more inclusive of minds that don't think alike but care also for the wellbeing of the people of the isles. People who won't forget their roots and would find learning opportunities in crisis instead of just lamenting their woes.
There are few key individuals conforming to that line, the ones she'd left wondering in the wake of her leave, and some who only knew her murderous facade. People in the former had sent letters to regard her absence. People in the latter have to be convinced that the Empress will leave the world in better hands.
A killer on the throne.
An easy task. The seat wouldn't exist anymore.
Instead, the parliament will be directed by a seat that will merely guide them to beneficial causes, no power of ruling, merely a talking head to bring like minds together throughout the isles, a face that represents not just the might of the Isles, but the coalition of it. Heads of the Ministries will liaise with their foreign counterparts themselves, dictate over their respective rulings, only be brought to line by the held whip by the seat of power, a seat held in check by two other minds.
Decisions made by vote instead of a blanket authority, therefore it is a must and an encouragement to bring key rulers fraught with different upbringing and backgrounds. A thousand different goals for one singular vision. Leaders elected by merit rather than birth.
Wyman steps over from the window, her daughter bouncing happily in his arms.
Emily feels him peer down at her work. He has always been like this, always had found himself privy to the state matters she lorded over. Were he any more sociable with the people beyond their merry little band of assassins and protective fathers, she would've had him thrown out as a security risk. His mind retains information far too well, even now he still regales tales of the old to her daughter.
Alas, his barren social circle only extends to two assassins and their protective fathers, and even then his presence is only tolerated by her grace.
From every point of view, the only one that truly welcomes him unconditionally is her daughter, and isn't that just a little pitiful.
Though, he doesn’t seem to mind only existing in a little girl’s world.
In the corner of her eye, she sees him take a pen to her daughter's grubby hands. A pale finger directs the tiny fist holding the pen like a knife ready to stab, and Emily turns fully in time to see the pen strike across a piece of legislature.
Ink across fine print.
There's no point in taking away the pen now that there's black cutting streaks happily shrieking across the parchment. She looks sharply at his raised eyebrow, challenging, as she reaches over to take away the rest of the stack underneath her daughter's drawing medium.
She imagines him then, a blade through his throat, what colour would his blood run now?
Phosphorus black or bright, bright glistening red?
She stares at him. His face is unrepentant. She waits, no blade but a letter opener in the drawer and her daughter between them. He knows that well.
“In the days of the plague and whilst your mother laid cold, this man was ancillary to claiming the lives of more people than your father. Bloated bodies still remain afloat on uncharted seas from whence they had been lost from their own homes, too light to sink.”
The Pendletons hadn't just taken power from her mother, they had milked it from her and used it to destroy lives and familyhood. Unjust murders and frauds pointing fingers at innocent men, more women twisting their skirts at the Golden Cat, more hat shakers lining the streets for pitiful coin.
And that was before they'd poured water into the pier.
The flooded district took the lives of a hundred people and destroyed a thousand homes. First it was entrapment from rising waters and closed bay doors, and then it was the attempts to escape in lieu of lacking emergency services.
“You think I don't remember him and every other name that should have been buried with my mother?” Emily hisses. “The Pendletons helped build this city. I'd sooner have one of them attempt at my throat than to be able to find a valid reason for their downfall, that and they still monopolise half of the port.”
“You have new names to play with, young Kaldwin. It is your council, your loyalists, more capable than you have ever dreamed of.”
“You’ve seen me try! Even for a founding family full of rats, what do you think will happen if we strike off all their names?”
“Then you should remember what you've always done best, my dear Emily.” Wyman tilts his head, cheek against the soft curls of her daughter's hair, poignant ochre eyes searing through to bone.
Blood on her steel blade and a cabinet full of stained souvenirs.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I won't send them to their graves.”
“You don't have to, dear Empress.” He tilts his head back, words of a contemptuous god. “You need only make sure the world knows they're the ones who dug it.”
A barren circle of two assassins and their beloved father mentors.
“How different am I from the Empress they thought had the employment of the Crown Killer?”
Wyman tilts his head. “For one, love, they sing your praises in the open as their knives twist deeper inside your back.”
“So now I am an Empress that kills my allies.” Emily narrows her eyes and shakes her head before reaching for the landline. “This isn't a discussion I should have with you. Leave the door open for Eleanor on your way out.”
Wyman stares for a moment, peeling her layers with his golden gaze much like he usually did when he used to have intoxicating atramentous black eyes.
Between them, her daughter bubbles over her masterpiece, improving upon Maximus Pendleton's latest little hint of a project that will end up commercially gentrifying the merchants of Dunwall port.
Wyman says nothing, as if conceding. He tilts his head and she catches the barest upwards tilt of his lip as walks out with her daughter.
When she suggests to Helmswater and Curnow later, they both readily provide a list of political moves to from outright assassinating either Maximus himself or his career as if they'd had one for not just each of their entire careers, but carried forth even from their predecessors.
_______________
Old Whalebone, worn dark and stained maroon, the fresh blood of a newborn god upon a relic.
A chill blooms across his skin, frigid even from a distance. Inky darkness spreads in the corner of his eyes. The cold is foreign, it prickles him, and it would only get colder as he grows older.
"How fares the Acolyte of the Unspeakable Void?"
"I would ask the same." Comes the echoed reply, ashes in her voice like how they had once been in his.
A pale hand appears by his side, reaching for the Whalebone. He watches it disappear into nothingness.
"None of that now. There are better things for this world."
"A world where there is no heresy, and where the masses are free to worship more than just an Agent of chaos." He says, wandering souls made of ash and Voidstone, echoing fire as they worship forever in the Void they gave their souls to. He no longer feels the dredges of the Eyeless rancoring upon the Void.
"Emily Kaldwin is an enigma, as you've mentioned. She would see to it herself that the world no longer follows a council on its way to a slow death."
"How magnanimous of her, grown wiser than anyone could have imagined after two coups within the short span of her life. She could have easily fallen, could have decided to sail the Pandyssian seas instead of sitting herself back on her throne like a martyr."
Emily Kaldwin steps up by his side to look out the same window view of the sea, weaving wisps of Void shadows cackling in the sun.
"Be nice. All that will come by, will. She is young, still."
“Am I not? Perhaps one day she will still sail.” He looks down at the Outsider, carefully reading the lacking change in her expression.
“She might. She can still choose to. Her daughter has given her less bearings.”
He looks over the courtyard where just moments before, Emily had brought their daughter to the gazebo to look over the gardens. They'd left when the wind grew stronger. The Empress had looked up earlier when the chill had turned biting.
“You would know." He says.
The Outsider tilts her head, eyes dark like the imminent Void, seeing all and everything and nothing at once. She turns to him, curious and complex. “Not yet.”
Still young.
Her chill is piercing, fractals of ice splintering across his face, threatening to make him bite his tongue off with the vehement cold.
Nonetheless, still, he leans into her touch. He could almost imagine the maroon soaked cruor of her hands leaving trails across his sun-freckled skin. He closes his eyes, breathing in the foreign frost of the Void.
He feels her lean close with her head tilted up, but just the same to all her subjects, she was never touchable.
Emily Kaldwin presses the whisper of a ghost across his neck, an old ache that pulses with her touch.
When he opens his eyes, he is enveloped in the cloud of her shadows, passing through him in inky wisps like a bone-chilling embrace, dissipating into the nothingness of the Void.
How peculiar, the Outsider.