Shallowly, she breathed in, and choked on the taste of blood.
Everything ached as Jessamine shifted, eyes fluttering open to blurred contours of gray. There was a humming around her, a cold beneath her cheek. Slowly, her every muscle protesting like rusted hinges, she pushed herself upright, wavering on unsteady legs. She pressed a hand to her forehead, groaning with its throbbing, and lifted her eyes.
She was in the gazebo. That was the only thing she recognized. She blinked dry eyes, shaking her head. Beyond that, there was nothing.
Stumbling sluggishly, she gazed outward, to where the waterlock, the river, the city should have been. Instead there was a drop into—into nothing. She saw patches of land, street lamps floating impossibly in the emptiness, turning over in light cast from below. Slowly, she looked over the edge of the gazebo. She found a sheer drop, a circle of dull, blue light hovering in the chasm.
Slowly, she closed her eyes, a stifled groan falling from her lips. She was dreaming. She had to—
"Mother!" a voice tore through her mind, and it all came back.
With a cry she tripped, catching herself on a pillar as memory ripped through her like fire. Her hand flew to her stomach—she felt the stinging on her face, the frozen burning inside her, the sticky warmth that had spread across her skin. The hands that had cradled her as she drowned in blood.
"Emily!" she cried hoarsely, the sound painful in her throat. Her held her neck as her breath pounded and she spun around with wide, frantic eyes. "Corvo!"
A roaring wind answered her, cold and dreary. Even as she searched feverishly, she saw no one, heard nothing of their voices—but found, at the gazebo's edge, a thin, rocky path.
Certain she had not seen it there before, Jessamine paused before taking a cautious step, pressing at it with the sole of her foot. It felt solid, and even as nerves and disorientation turned her breathing ragged she stepped onto it, carefully walking down the trail. "Emily?" she called again. "Emily, can you hear me?"
The quiet held, giving way only to the wind and the crunching of gravel beneath her feet. She looked around at the nothingness—she saw buildings now, structures shattered as if rent by a great storm, floating in seclusion. She looked over her shoulder, back to the gazebo. It too hung in emptiness, no garden, no Dunwall Tower flanking it.
When she turned, she found another island at her toes, and a great carriage before her eyes.
Cautiously, she edged toward it. The great wheeled thing was solid black, wood painted black rather than metal. It was adorned with a field's worth of white roses, sewn on strings in lovely and intricate patterns.
She knew the look of it. She had seen her mother drawn away in one when she was quite young, and her father when she was old enough to remember with pained heart. A funeral carriage, arranged for a proper burial. She moved closer, confusion and curiosity at agreement in her mind as she approached the viewing window. Climbing onto the step of the carriage, she curled her fingers around the sill, and peeked inside.
She found herself, closed-eyed and bloodless, laying frozen in fine silks.
Jessamine screamed, leaping from the step and tripping backward over the stone. She felt, impossibly, a steadying hand on her back.
"I beg your pardon, Your Majesty," came a slow and soft voice, shooting violent pangs through her chest. "I was not expecting a royal visit."
Jessamine whirled, stumbling back the way she came. A man stood before her, hair light and short, clothes frayed, a neutral and unreadable sort of expression on his face. He looked utterly normal. But there was something about him, something that told her, on first sight, that he belonged here. She raised her hands, ready to clamp into fists.
"Calm yourself, Jessamine," the man said, arms folded over his chest and voice lacking any attempt to ease. "Little harm can come to you, now."
"Who are you?" Jessamine asked before a thousand more prudent questions. She swallowed. "Who are you?"
A hint of amusement snuck onto the man's face, the corners of his lips turning up. He looked almost cat-like, eying her. "I believe you already know me, Miss Kaldwin," he said. "Don't you remember?"
She certainly didn't, Jessamine thought. Her life, often sadly, had been replete with restrictive privilege. Perhaps there were times she could have met a ruffian like this man, but she found nothing about him memorable, or remarkable. How he expected her to know him, she had no idea.
But she realized, with a crawling discomfort, that there was something memorable about his voice. She knew she had never heard it in her life—but it brought memories, of cold and rushing waves pounding against her back, breathing water and the hum of dark ocean song.
"No," she said, clearing her throat again. "I don't know you."
He seemed beguiled by that. Slowly, he unfurled his arms and set them behind his back. "Then at last, we meet. I am the Outsider," he said, plainly.
Jessamine stared. "The Outsider," she repeated.
"Is that strange to you?" he asked, waving a hand blithely toward the emptiness. "Stranger than this place?"
She let her eyes move in their own, uncertain way. Surely she was dreaming, and this place was not so strange for a dream—
"Is it stranger than a plague that springs from nothing, and devastates your city?" he said. A pang shot through her chest and her eyes snapped back to him. "Or men emerging from air, and snatching away your precious daughter?"
The memory came in a violent flash. "Mother!" she heard, saw the mask and dark suit grab Emily—vanish, as life seeped away beneath her hands and her face stung against the stone.
"Or your bodyguard, bound by magic, helpless as he watched you die—"
"Stop it!" she cried. She wasn't sure when she shut her eyes—saw Corvo's face, burned into the black there—but when she opened them again, the m—the Outsider was gone. In his place was a new stone path.
She walked it, for there was nowhere else to go.
She came upon a sign at its end, one almost as tall as she. A simple piece of board with a great, red X, the upper section of its cross filled in. PLAGUE, read the writing beside it. BY ORDER OF THE CITY WATCH. STAY AWAY!
"These are the works of men, Empress, but it is by my power that they achieve their ends," she heard, and looked forward. She saw him not a few feet away, before the sign—and saw, too, the large, linen-wrapped shapes that littered the ground. She felt her stomach turn. "If you see these things and know them to be true, then you cannot deny my part."
"Where are we?" she asked, almost breathlessly, pacing past the sign and the ominous shapes, trying not see their whole number. "Where have you brought me?"
"This is the end of all things. And the beginning," he said. "But I did not bring you here."
The question that drifted through her mind, sliding haltingly off of her tongue, was twin to an answer which she did not want to hear. "Did he," she said, "did that man . . . kill me?"
The Outsider was silent, tilting his head before vanishing in a puff of black smoke. Her insides twisted and ached with the truth, and for a moment she took her face in her hands, rubbing feverishly at her eyes. And now she knew there were more questions, answers she did not have, answers she needed. When she could no longer handle her own stillness, she lifted herself, and continued down the path.
It became a twisting descent, like a grand staircase with impossible gaps that she needed to crouch and slide and balance to pass. When she reached the next island she stopped for breath, staring at the stone beneath her feet. "Did you send him?" she asked.
"No," the Outsider said, though this time she did not see him. "These forces are my gift. It is not with condition that I bestow them."
"Then who?" she said, turning around, not sure where to look. "You have agents, don't you? What did he have to gain from—from killing me?"
"Daud," he said, with what sounded like a touch of familiarity, "was promising once. He visited my shrines, and I drew him in. But, of course, he is a man."
In the midst of her turn, she nearly struck a frozen figure, and jolted back when she realized who it was. The assassin, face pocked with scars and lines, sitting on a cot with hand against his forehead, looking pensive. The face she had seen as she lifted her eyes, blood dripping from her lip and cold metal in her belly.
There was something behind him, on a small island a few feet from this one—a desk, a well-dressed man, a shaven head and sallow face that she recognized in an instant. Her bottom lip fell. Hiram Burrows, at the desk in her study, pressing coin into an envelope with a small smile.
Her eyes drifted, slowly, to the assassin's cot. That same envelope sat there, the very same coins spilling over the slight cover.
"And he succumbed, as all men do. I find him rather dull, now," the Outsider said, and she only flinched slightly as he appeared behind Daud. She looked from the assassin, to Hiram and back, not wanting to believe.
"And now you, Jessamine Kaldwin," he said. Finally her eyes lifted to him, something burning like bile in her veins, knotting her stomach, scorching the backs of her eyes. "Gone from the world too soon. Your people lost without you, the heir to the throne missing. How quickly your city descended into chaos."
"What did they do with my daughter?" she whispered, and felt the fierceness in her voice. The Outsider's smile grew.
He did not move to show her the way; he simply watched, as if waiting for her next move. She saw the path at his side, weaving past Hiram, arching down toward the blue light. She looked at the Outsider as she passed, then turned her eyes to the treacherous incline.
She stumbled to the next island, her feet too quick to control for a moment, and caught herself on an ornate, red armchair. She looked up to a darkened fireplace, walls of crimson beside delicate standing shades. When she turned to take in the scene, she immediately wished she hadn't. With an indignant huff, she slapped a hand over her eyes, but had already seen too much of the frozen, naked man to avoid.
Keeping her eyes high, she parted her fingers, glancing at the group of figures within the half-present room. She immediately recognized one of the Pendleton men (she was sure she could never forget a face so ugly, a smirk so slimy), though which, she could not say. There were two women as well, one older and oddly painted, another in bejeweled dress and running make-up. She seemed to be yelling at Pendleton, looking utterly scandalized, and Jessamine let out a bitter sort of laugh. Perhaps she had never been—acquainted with an establishment of this sort, but she was no fool. She had read widely and heard tell enough to know what sort of place this was.
Which was why, when she surveyed the scene and spotted the figure in the corner, she nearly felt ill. Emily sat on the floor, ducked partially behind another chair, sheets of paper and crayons and pencils spread out before her. She was looking at the, the obscenity of the other three, and Jessamine felt compelled to dash forward and cover her eyes. Heat boiled in her chest, and she whirled on Pendleton's frozen figure. This filth! Crossing the room, she knelt down beside Emily and felt a burning in her own eyes, her teeth gritting behind her lips. To what depths did this reach, for whom was this done? Was Pendleton to blame, his family's paltry funding enough to pay off Hiram? Or Hiram himself, because she would not concede to his horrendous plans—?
She reached forward to brush hair from her daughter's face, as she had done a thousand times before with hands that quivered less. And to what had they subjected her daughter, her poor, innocent Emily!
"None of these men suffer for their crimes," came the Outsider's voice from behind her. "They have found someone else to blame."
She whirled on him. Pendleton was gone, the women, the couches and the shades. The Outsider wasn't there. There was someone else.
She felt cold rush through her. It bit at her insides, stopped her lungs with a quiet gasp. She felt as if she were a frozen figure herself. For a long, horrible moment, she did not move.
Her feet seemed to work outside her command. She moved stiffly forward, like a statue attempting to walk. She glanced back, found Emily still there, still watching—and when her eyes turned forward, she was upon him, standing at his toes with bones gone cold.
Corvo.
His ankles were chained. Hands, shackled. He sat locked in an interrogator's chair, a dank, dirty, blackened room stretching out behind him. A table with implements cruel and ugly stood beside him, a fire pit burning low.
Her hands shook as they moved toward him. His clothes were tattered, slashed and in spots turned charcoal black. His skin was burned, bloody—she glimpsed a fresh wound where something had eaten through his shirt to his chest, leaving the skin raw, peeling, oozing. Slices and scars on his arms, neck, forehead—he sat hunched, head collapsed onto his shoulder, loose with unconsciousness. His eye swelled. His lip bled.
Jessamine felt warmth down her cheeks as she took his broken face in her hands.
"He has been locked away in Coldridge Prison for many months," the Outsider said, calm and cool. "Tortured, in the search for a confession known to be false, that he would not speak."
The Outsider paused for a breath of silence, a rush of wind—and in the horrible quiet, her chest tightening and sight blurring, she already knew what he would say.
"Now he is to be executed, for the most heinous murder of the fair Empress."
"No," came her voice, a pathetic sound that fell from her mouth as if from that of a wounded animal. Corvo did not move with her when she changed her grip, when her fingers brushed his jawline, when her head fell nearly to his knees. He was not here. She could not do as he had done, near tears, cradling her into the dark. She could not reach him. She could do nothing.
"Send me back," she whispered, so quiet even she barely heard it.
There came a sound that could only have been the Outsider's appearance, the only noise outside the constant wind. "Send me back," she said again, louder. Reluctantly she let her hands drift from Corvo's face, fall to her sides as she stood and turned. Again, the Outsider was absent, and the cold within her suddenly surged with the heat, swirling violently. "Send me back!" she cried to the abyss, into the non-existent sky. "You're all-mighty, aren't you? Granting magic on a whim! Fine! Then send me back where I can stop this!"
There came a chuckle near her ear, though there was no body there from which it might emanate. "You think very highly of yourself, Lady Empress," he said, dismissively.
"I must do something!" she called, marching across the island, trying to search him out. "I can't let this happen. Not to my daughter, not to Corvo!"
"You are dead," the Outsider said bluntly. "There is nothing more you can do for the world you left behind. They'll join you, soon enough."
His words were a bolt to the heart—a bolt into the center of a great storm. "Listen to me!" she shouted. "If you are all-powerful, if you are half what they say of you, prove it! I demand you send me back!"
There was an explosion in her head. A searing pain, a shrieking and a rending—she collapsed to her knees, hands clamped over her ears, but they did nothing. The sound was deep in her mind.
"You forget your place," came the Outsider's voice, morphed and twisted, transformed into something that she would have never called his—if it didn't tell her in his every note, if it didn't force her to know. "In Gristol you are Empress. In death you are as nothing. What right do you have to demand what you will of me? Everything you claim as your own, everything you hold dear, is my gracious gift. If it is my wish to see it taken, it shall be done."
She curled in, feeling as if her skull would burst. If she screamed, she could not hear it over the horrific shriek. Her body crumpled, her shoulder hitting the stone, the whole of her tightening to force him out.
She didn't know how long the sounds lasted. In time, she came to hear her own sobbing breaths, the whistling wind that now seemed so quiet and calm. She twitched, cold with sweat, slowly pushing herself up.
He approached her, silent as light. She stared at his shoes a long moment, breathing hard, before lifting her gaze. The Outsider looked down at her, appearing positively boyish with the tilt of his head, this uncanny disguise.
(And she finally realized what it was, what told her what he was—his eyes. It was his eyes.)
"Please," she said, her voice soft and nearly gone. "I'm sorry. Please, I—I have to help them."
In a shocking display of emotion, his eyebrows rose. Slowly, he bent down; she edged away from him instinctively, like a frightened beast, only to find him offering his hand.
"I find humility is often lacking in those of assigned esteem," he said as he pulled her to unsteady feet.
She nodded, though delicately, her head pounding. "Death," he said, "is a tide not so easily reversed. With what nature has done to your earthly form, I don't think you would wish for it."
Jessamine felt a heavy lump in her throat. She closed her eyes, warmth pooling at their corners.
"He will be saved," the Outsider said. Instantly, her head shot up, her eyes wide and spilling those held tears. "On the eve of his execution. It has been carefully plotted."
Turning, he gestured to a final island, shrouded in darkness. A table stood there, replete with candles upon its wooden surface. She saw three figures in the dark, three sets of eyes reflecting the light. She saw a hand held over the fire, the men looking to each other. She glimpsed the gleam of a knife.
"These men have use for Corvo," the Outsider said. "They seek to return power to the throne. They seek Emily, and they believe Corvo is the key. They will go to great lengths to release him."
Jessamine turned to the Outsider, standing at her shoulder now, looking at the darkened men. Slowly, she turned back—she saw the red of walls where Emily hid, the back of the interrogator's chair where she glimpsed Corvo's bound wrist.
"There are no certainties," the Outsider went on. "They will open the door. Corvo's life, and Emily's, will be in his own hands."
Jessamine breathed in, let it shakily out. "You know what will happen, don't you?" she said as she turned to the men and their miniscule flame. "You're the Outsider."
There came a puff of air from him, like a chuckle, and when she glanced up he had the expression of one speaking to a child. "Mortals do not understand my sight," he said. "I see all the tomorrows that may ever be. There is no single path. There are possibilities, and choices."
He lifted his arm, a strange flow to the motion, and gestured at one of the men. "He will have his loyal manservant murdered. But through a bullet to the back, or a knife to the eye?"
Jessamine flinched, hands twitching as they reached up to grip her arms. "Some men are simple," he said dismissively, as if bored with talk of killing. "Their possibilities are faint and weak, and I can see their futures with near certainty. But they . . ."
The Outsider turned, and Jessamine with him, back toward Corvo and her daughter. "They stand as if in a fog of time. So many choices. They are very intriguing."
The wind whipped around them. She felt a chill deep inside, deeper than bone. She chanced a look at the Outsider, that small and awful smile, plainly focused where she did not want it. Swallowing, she turned away again, following his gaze.
"There has to be something," she whispered as she stared at the chair and the red, red walls. "Something I can do. There has to be."
He looked at her with those black eyes, as if he expected her to go on.
"I can't leave them," she said, breath catching in her throat, and she felt so weak. "Not like this."
His head tilted, like the strange predator he was. "You have a strong heart, Jessamine Kaldwin," he said.
It was a moment before she realized his gaze had dropped to her chest. In an instant of sheer ludicrousness she felt scandalized, nearly moving to fold her arms over herself. When he raised his eyes again, however, they held something meaningful, his own arms folding in obvious consideration.
"What would you do for them?" he asked plainly. "For Emily, and for Corvo? What would you do to protect them, in the world left in your wake?"
She felt the cold of metal in her stomach. The trickle of blood in her mouth. She heard Emily's cries, saw her ripped away into nothing. She saw her smile, her drawings, heard her laughter and even her childish complaints. She felt the weight of Corvo's face in her hands, the blood and the pain—and like the touch of a ghost, sensed his arm beneath her shoulders, his fingers on her cheek. She felt her heart beating.
Slowly, she lifted a tear-streaked, whitened face, and met that black-eyed gaze. "Anything," she said.
The Outsider smiled.