A/N: Last day of submissions for High Chaos Week 2016 on Tumblr. Did anybody else notice that the heart's conversations don't change from low to high chaos? I mean, I guess the heart does see in the heart of things, and those don't differ much.
Finger-tap pulses
The heart knows much, but it does not know all.
IX. the overseers always find the guilt they seek
The Overseer did not want his last thoughts to be of regret.
Regret is time wasted on things unchanged. There is no use in moving an immovable object. The impulse for such unpractical things have been scraped away from his person like sea-salt barnacles, along with the last dregs of humanity- his and his and his and his and theirs, useless filth mixed with the coarse sand of Whitecliff.
Overseers do not regret, for they have none.
Instead, he thinks of his sister's hand in his, warm at the palm and chilly at the fingertips. He thinks of Garrett, hoping that no one's going to forget about feeding and training him after all this is over. He thinks of the sea, how its howling changes into a song during the nights when the stars take turns hiding.
He thinks nothing of the masked man watching them at the rooftop, poised like the stone guardians of Pandyssia, watching over the resting and dead.
Just as well, the Overseer thinks. Dunwall was a graveyard long before she was a city. Hallowed ground built on hollow ground. Let her guardians rise, let death take over her plagued streets once more. Covering her in corpses is the same as unearthing her secrets.
Elsa's fingers tighten in his.
The shot echoes under the bridge, ringing in his ears, but it isn't distracting enough.
In a matter of seconds stretched as cruelly as they can be, his sister's hand falls slack in his and the cold metal of the shotgun sends one last sliver of fear down his spine before he dies.
They didn't have the inclination to ask him to recite the Scriptures before they killed him. He wouldn't have done anyways.
If he had been given time to breathe, his last words would have been for the Empress and her empire, gone, gone, and lost, inherited by the vermin.
In the end, there never was a dead Overseer under that bridge.
If one is brave and doubtful enough to check, they'll see a rat-eaten corpse, along with another body, whole yet rotting on the bricks, brain matter scattered like a halo.
(The first mistake is that Berthold, in this lifetime and the next, is a good man.
The Abbey of the Everyman does not believe in goodness or wrongness. They are simply against.)
XIV. there are rooms they have yet to clean
She knew she would never see her daughter again.
She knew it the moment she set her bag on the wet dirt of Dunwall's port. There came a foreboding thud in her heart, a mother's sixth sense waking in her throat, when she is led inside the carriage and corralled along with the other girls from the unnamed boats.
All of them, young and younger still, the same hollow eyes in everyone. This new batch is not any different, except there is more acceptance than hysteria in their demeanor.
The tattered, dirtied clothing (or lack of it) and the skin clinging to their fragile bones made it clear that whatever the pawing of men and gnawing of bones had to offer in this sinkhole is better than what they have faced.
None should have to choose between terror and horror, but the times have forced their hands. The thud-thud-thud in Marie's throat had ebbed in due course, drowned out by the ghastly whalesong that permeates through the abandoned city.
It shames Marie that it takes her three months of employment to find out the reason why she had dreaded it so.
Who can blame her for not noticing soon enough? The rats are everywhere. They all blend in perfectly with the walls, now.
It's just like in her great-grandmother's stories. People dying left and right, with no obvious cause of death until their corpses had decayed past the point of gruesome staring.
Hearing about the death and witnessing it, however, is a different experience entirely.
She had spared a few coins from the money she had filched from her latest customer to light a few candles in honor of the poor girl. Tyvian-born, she wasn't used to the heat or the tastes of men in Gristol, and after painstakingly learning enough of the local tongue to understand her paramour's misplaced intentions, had willingly succumbed to the cold streets and sought the company of the rats. Marie doesn't know if the wailing was worse before or after the weeping started.
It was then, during the stolen moments on the way from one city guard to another that she remembers the raving girl, bugs in her eyes and thick blood and bile the only thing covering her body. It was then that she had decided to stay.
Never seeing Lisette again is a small price to pay for her safety.
Her fingers are still quick and light. Every coin she has, she sends to Serkonos. Her elixir rations, she slips in the others mattresses, hides in the locked bathroom.
A few weeks more, the Pendletons announce that the heiress to the throne of Dunwall will be placed under the Golden Cat's care.
Everything goes to the rats soon after.
Marie is both grateful and sad that she can never see Lisette grow up. From what she could hear and see of the Lady Emily, she would be at times fitful as though possessed, badly short-tempered and always crying.
Does Lisette cry for me, too?
Unlike the entertainment rooms, their quarters are not soundproofed. During nights when the draft from the distillery wafts in their rooms, the girls push their mattresses together and sleep in a pile, sharing what little warmth they have, weaving an illusion of comfort.
Lately, they have spent those sleepless nights drinking along to the various curses the Lady Emily spits out, tame and clipped versions of the lewd ones rolled out by the whalers and the nastier customers of the Cat, voice carrying through the walls. They rush as a group when the child screams, wordless and gaping, blowing out the candles not to make her sleep easier but rather to hide her drawings in the shadows where they should belong.
It was her silences; however, that Marie dreads the most. The Lady Emily would run out of tears and stare at the wall, blank and uncanny, without a single speck of emotion crossing her face or tinting her voice.
She turned quiet when Marie asked her about the doll she has drawn. The girl sat very still, and Marie thought for a moment that if she dared to touch the Lady Emily's face, her fingers would come off with paint and reveal a clear canvas.
When the masked man comes in the room- blade turned copper by blood, broken clockwork face as blank as the Lady Emily's- she screamed as loud as she could, for the girls.
(The warm rush of the blood from her neck was more comforting than Marie expected it to be.)
CIX. what do you see in the stars
Kaldwin's bridge is a thing of beauty.
The Artists' strip, the bridge of lights, Kaldwin's last stand- it was more of a community than a passageway, and indeed, was where the greatest minds had flourished and helped Dunwall turn around and crush the economy under her whale-oil powered heel.
Even now, with the river krusts lining its edge like acidic calluses and warm lights replaced by burning floodlights, smack dab in the middle of a sea slightly tainted with dirt and blood and the occasional badly-disposed corpse, the bridge is still beautiful. A sore thumb of grandiose simplicity.
The metal monument was built by the late Emperor Euhorn Kaldwin in the hopes that it would be the reminder of a new age, the main landmark of the sudden turn in technology for the whole of Gristol.
He got his wish.
Kaldwin's bridge, blinding and stinging and slightly smoking, is a gem in a middle of a grisly rubble, and is still mentioned in the history books long after Empress Emily herself had been forgotten.
(The unflattering comparison of Kaldwin's bridge slowly collapsing under the weight of the plague-ridden dead to the empire's ruin? Semantics, nothing more.)
VI. there is no lightness or merriment here
The invitations are all sent.
And the punchline is that Lady Boyle wouldn't cancel the party.
She is still nobility. Even Dunwall, as detoriated as she is, deserves to be treated kindly by her fair children. It is her duty and responsibility to make sure that their kind gets the treatment they deserve.
Everyone's has a parenthetical cloud of doom with them these days, especially with the dreaded vermin suddenly appearing out of nowhere, making life hard for everybody. They had to fire a lot of servants at the Boyle estate, and now service is slow.
Yes, it is her social responsibility to make sure that everybody stays content in these changing times. Why, she might even get to humiliate that dreadful Adelle White at the masque. Possibly even organize a search warrant on her lands while she's busy drinking and mocking her and her sisters. The Lord Regent has such power these days, Lady Boyle is sure that he can make quick work of it.
There might be the party few that will be coughing during the festivities, but what can you do. If she had to strike out everyone who was rumored of having the plague, she'd have no one to come to her party and no one to talk about how grand and welcoming and a 'bright beacon of hope in this dark times' it would be.
No, she won't cancel. The Boyle's aren't known for going back on their words, and most certainly not on their party invitations.
And it's a masque event, anyway. If there's anything the rich can do during times of despair, it's to pretend otherwise.
(Everyone keeps up the illusion of lavishness. They'd certainly look the fools if they didn't.)
XXI. we have both been here before
A ruler in their safe space, with their treasures and unavoidable doom within arm's reach.
A hired killer, walking with and in the shadows, blade stained with the blood of innocents.
A pull, a stab, a scream.
It's only been six months.
XLI. these waters are greedy
They say that Rudshore is saved.
Spared, even.
It's better to have been called back to the sea, and to the slimy bellies of the great leviathans of old, says the madman, than to be devoured by the vermin descendants of this cursed place.
These are the stories discussed in hushed tones over a small fire and rationed food, whispered talk about the cousin of a friend of a neighbor that still has correspondence with the few stragglers that stay with the corpses. All of them, some of them, a few of them say that the flooded district is under the protection of the Outsider.
That the leviathan would let Gristol be swallowed by the Void. That Rudshore is spared the rats because the sea is a wicked and jealous mistress.
That if you stay too long in the waters, you'll grow out of your lungs. That if the shadows get closer it won't be long before you learn to walk in the dark.
They say that Rudshore is saved, not punished.
Salt water savors the district slowly, bit by bit, rust by rust, and clockwise from the Chamber of Commerce to the old accounting firms and circling around the Greaves Refinery, a child leaving out the tastiest part of the meal for last.
The Outsider's chosen walk freely and unharmed in the mossy canals and broken rooftops, pulling power over the floodwaters. The Overseers- trained in warfare since childhood- never return from the depths.
Charred bones litter the wet ground, the thick smoke mixing in with the smell of brine as the few sane survivors, the ones with care enough, burn the dead and warm themselves with it.
Fire purifies. Water erodes.
None dare enter the flooded district, even if it is saved. The water and the rats gnaw just the same.
LII. they spread their nets wide
Plentiful is the harvest.
The end is the end is the end is the end. The city kneels and collects her dead, holds them close to her hallowed chest, thrumming with the whalesong anew.
In due time, they will unearth this place and make a good story from the wrong pieces. In the meantime, she sleeps. The Outsider leans back on the rolling sea.
There is no Dunwall.