"Once there was a boy who only knew fear and loneliness."
The boy wandered the back alley ways to avoid the vituperative adults and the other children that threw him against the cobblestone roads, and brick walls as if he were nothing but a filthy rag doll. This was his life. Every night I could hear his silent whimpers and hiccuping sobs, hidden away in a puddle composed mostly of feces or whale oil, perhaps both, maybe water. His only 'friend' was one of the few hundred white rats that were untouched by the plague. He had not even bothered to name the rat, 'twas a creature only used for his comfort and to aid his pain.
To say I took pity on him would be a blatant lie.
Despite all the iron nails that had been hammered into his skin and removed, and all the repeatedly opened lash wounds and regained purple stained skin blotches, he kept living. The boy kept slinking about the streets of Dunwall with the thinnest, glistening thread of hope. He listened to stories of the better days when Dunwall was a peaceful place, but that's all they were to him, just stories.
It was enough.
I appeared to him in the dead of the night. He knew who I was, he'd heard of my being in Dunwall's stories. I could see his mind's whispers in his diminutive eyes, 'The Outsider.' The one and only my dear boy. …My visit didn't take long; only mere seconds of his life.
"I present you with my mark," the child looked to his hand as it began to itch. I remember my black oil filled eyes watching him with layered enthusiasm, and returned to the Void, "Consider it….a gift."
What the boy chose to do with my gift was of his own choice, and my hungry interest. Humans could be unpredictable beings and their minds were a tangled but intricately woven web wired with thoughts, feelings, and productivity. To see the spindles attune to the boy's own thoughts is what I watched for. He'd realized his new found powers and immediately I could hear his heart and mind's chords hum in a symphonic harmony. The boy knew what he was going to do with my mark.
I wasn't amused.
I watched as his horde of rats tore his abusers' bodies limbs and flesh. Blood filled the stone's cracks and the boy seemed pleased with the chaos he'd wrought on the men and the other children that lay dead with rats inside their innards before him. He only added to the plague's numbers, only created more death. He had become predictable. Was I upset with the turn of events? No. The boy wasn't the first to make such decisions with my power, and like those before him, his mindless choices came back to bite the hand that had created them, that had fed them.
The horde of plagued rats turned on him, and one bit him, infecting the frail child with the spreading death.
I turned my back to him, and moved on. I knew he was to die in a matter of days, or hours. I had no pity for him. Another child, another tool, another death. Soon he would grace the Void and be done with his tormented life.
And I would forget him.
"As his eyes began to weep, the boy searched in vain for the Outsider, but found himself alone once again.
He only wanted to see the Outsider one last time to thank him, for he would no longer live in fear...
...For what little life he had left."