Chapter one

Again, I own nothing

Hello again, I would first like to say that I really did not plan on this chapter to be so bloody and gory and disturbing and I will try keep this from being a trend

Reader discretion advised

Cecilia slowed her pace down; her breath was chaotic and ragged, her legs were screaming in protest of their continued use, and her heart was beating in a fast, panicked rhythm, she was exhausted but relieved, she had made it. The incident at the hound pits pub was a very recent and bitter memory that clung to her mind, especially since she had been running from it for the past hour or so. She just couldn't think about what had happened to the others, no, just keep moving.

After Corvo left to "take care" of the guards she thought that maybe she could slip out in the confusion. She had a pack of essentials and a note waiting for him should he return to find her gone. In the conversation with him she may have hid or at least try to hide the fact that she was scared and shocked and disturbed. What followed after he walked out the door, she almost wouldn't dare recollect. She did not want to see what happens, next she knew what Corvo did and what he was capable of doing, or at least she thought she did.

First, silence apart from the noises the guards made nothing. Then there it was a sound of flesh being cut followed by pained gurgles and a thud. Naturally what followed next was of shock and alarm, then an almost silent strange noise almost indescribable in its eldritch tone, and again gargles of misery but the thud was drowned out by a loud series of explosions mixed with cries of surprise and screams of anguish. That eldritch sound again only this time followed by a loud metallic crash, crumble of pavement and a load explosion. Swords against sword in a melee of clangs and gunfire, there were several wet sounding impacts and splatters followed with what can only be described as hell. The screams sounded like souls damned to eternal torment in the deepest darkest pits of the void. Quickly the screams and cries of the dismembered and disemboweled ether faded or were silenced with a slice or gunshot.

Silence, it was welcome but only worsened the previous sounds by contrast. Cecelia just sat there in the abandoned apartment she was hiding in. she was shocked to her core. What she knew took place in less than eighteen seconds, but it felt like minuets as every sound from the battle was experienced and digested as if one at a time. After what seemed to be minutes of silence (five seconds) she came out of her apartment, detesting and marveling at the sight of the carnage. There were 12 bodies, and many more parts of bodies, and what seemed to use to resemble the human form now charred and mangled flesh fused to metal wreckage. The street was no longer a street, it is forever changed, morphed and tainted by not just the blood and the scorch marks but the memory of this massacre.

She slowly walked into the sight of the massacre trying to avoid the gore but it seemed to be almost everywhere. Her face was green and bile was rising in her throat as she slowly traversed Corvo's massacre, so slowly and carefully as a dear would approach civilization. She inched her way through the mess trying to avoid any of it, but sometimes it could not be avoided as a sickening plot or squelch echoed across the scene.

Suddenly, footsteps so many footsteps, eighteen of the city watch raced to investigate the ungodly sounds of the massacre. Cecilia was petrified her, flight response overwhelmed by fear. It was when all eighteen of the watch was present that one of the mangled corpses began to moan as it awoke from unconsciousness. Some stayed steely eyed and barely kept their composure with years of experience and discipline, most lacking that showed a mixture of shock, disgust, and fear, then there were three rookies who completely lost all composure and vomited were they stood. In the end they were all scared, backed into a corner and they knew it, there fear lead to anger and rage, they had to lash out at something. The commanding officer screamed out among other profanities, "get that murderous bitch!" It was in that moment that her flight instinct overcame her fear, she ran.

Abandoning all respect and fear of corpses, she hastily treads over them in her flight. There was a large hole in the Quarantine blockade to the right of the scene, which is how she escaped it. At first she ran from her pursuers, but after around ten minutes it was obvious that she escaped them. Running and running she just had to escape. The city watchmen that chased her are either dead, lost or retuned to the pub. So why run, she was running from it all, the executions of Lydia, Wallace, and Calisto, the executioners Havelock and Martin, from the assassin Corvo, even the philosophy of the loyalist, the memories. That is what she ran from, down the corpse laden streets, the victims of the plague, all wrapped in sheets and placed in piles and lines throughout the streets. These victims were all once normal people bakers, housewives, merchants, beggars, and children, all swept away in the chaotic and merciless maelstrom that is the plague. She ran from that to, but even when she ran to the next street death was there, and the next one and the next one, it was always there, a serpentine miasma slowly tightening its grip, chocking the fast dying city, before consuming it.

She had found a building with an unlocked door she made a quick scan of the inside, it looked clean and the stench of death seemed to lessen inside. The house had two stories, the stairs were close to the front door, to the left was to kitchen/dining room and further from there were the utilities and the right had the living room and study, upstairs were as she could guess the bedrooms. The whole visible house had a warm inviting felling it would have been almost unnerving if she were capable of it. She quickly collapsed to the floor from exhaustion, then plunged into unconsciousness

Her sleep was dreamless. When she awoke she began to look around the house, it seemed well preserved, too well preserved to be uninhabited. She began her search of the house in the kitchen. She noticed that the cabinets where all closed, when she looked in them they were all stocked with food, strange that they have not been raided yet. She searched throughout the lower floor of the house which looked completely undisturbed, it unnerved her.

Now she started to look up stairs. The city had (ever since the plague arrived) developed a strong stench of death. It was still present in the house but it seemed greatly diminished so far. At first the change was undetectable in its obscurity, but as she climbed the stairs though, she began to notice, death, the stench strengthened. As she neared the door the smell increased in potency. When she reached the door she could almost make out the sound of buzzing, it was greatly muffled. Slowly the door knob tuned. Quickly and quietly she opened the door, and the stench climaxed.

The room was filled with the loud sound of hundreds of flies buzzing, two corpses, just that, any traces of identity that these corpses had in life was gone, all that was left now is festering flesh bursting with maggots and greasy bones. There was a gun in one of their hands, caked and stained with dry blood, almost black now. From the stains and dried splatter it seemed like double suicide. She closed the door pausing a moment letting what she saw sink in; fell down, vomited and burst into tears.

She cried for the dead, so many innocents, taken by the nonsensically brutal hands of god, the misery. Dunwall now a dammed city quickly plummeting to its demise, the knife at its throat had finally sliced, now it's just bleeding out. It was in that moment she realized that she had to get out before death claimed her too.

Quickly she gathered all the supplies she could carry and then trekked across the city to try and board passage on one of the last ships out of the harbor getting on one of the ships was not a matter of money it was that of speed. If you got there first you're getting on, if you arrive late and the ship is full your stranded. Cecilia arrived in the nick of time and was just barely able to board one of the last ships out "The Wailers Hope."

Authors note:

Sorry about rushing it at the end I did not feel like lingering to long in Dunwall for obvious reasons, it was messed up. And now that we have that out of the way we can get to what will happen on the ship. Also with this I am editing the first chapter some more so that it is more coherent.

Rambler