Corvo wakes up drowning on land with seawater streaming over his face and tangling his hair. His bedroom glows with a deep blue twilight and he doesn't notice he's scratching at himself until blood makes his fingers too slick. His skin is too small and itches in a way that he'll never be able to reach, and the loss is so consuming that he tries to scream but can't find the breath for it. He's lying on cold stone in his bedroom and missing half of himself.

"Corvo," the Outsider whispers, running fingers through the knots in his hair, and Corvo finally manages to gasp around water in his lungs, "You were human."

The fingers go still. Corvo is still trying to pick up his pieces. He is suddenly alone and it's one of the worst sensations he's ever felt.

There is more than one type of my death, my dear.

"What's wrong, Corvo?" Emily demands in that half-entitled, all-sincere way she has. Corvo blinks and realizes he's standing beside the throne, Emily twisted around to look up at him while the rest of the court waits. He's in human flesh and uniform, hair combed and lungs filled with air, and doesn't remember when that happened.

"Nothing, Your Majesty," he says, bowing, and she hums a little disbelievingly but thankfully lets it go and turns back to the court.

There are two overseers standing by the door. Of course there are. Corvo's eyes bleed amber and see the yellow of their bodies, the green of their purses. Ordinary, just human fear and authority looking out from behind inhuman masks, dreaming of a seventeen-note scale. He looks at Emily, who is trying so hard not to swing her legs and yawn, and sees a tiny white moth fluttering away its little life. It would be easy to snuff it out. He wants to cup his hands so carefully around it and watch it spread its wings a few more times, for as long as possible, before it inevitably dies.

"But, Empress," whines a noble from a thousand miles away. The curve of his skull under his hair is gentle and fragile and wouldn't stand up against a hard stone floor. Desperation writes lines along the angles of his body and they speak of old cruelties and future lies. Corvo breathes in air, holds it, and lets it go. It doesn't taste of salt and decaying things. He hears, "How long can we afford not to have a Spymaster?"

Emily replies firmly, "As long as it takes to make sure that the new one isn't going to have me murdered."

Silence. Corvo does not flinch. Eyes flicker in his direction and just as quickly flicker away, unable to hold his gaze. Good.

(But he's not entirely sure it isn't because his eyes might still be a little too dark.)

It only takes a day or two before Corvo remembers how to be human, stars and time and inevitability fading to soft mortal dreams as his body becomes his again. Every few nights, when his paranoia lets up just enough that he can make himself trust in the abilities of his hand-picked guards for Emily, Corvo goes into the city and walks the streets. Surprisingly few people recognize him because who would expect the lord protector to crawl through the muck and filth of the slums, so far from polished smiles and gleaming marble and the light of decadence through crystal-paned windows?

He slips through shadows that whisper in dry hisses. Rats stare but never bite. Corpses still smile. He finds a few runes and bone charms even though he's not actively searching for them, even with the Heart tucked away in Jessamine's secret room, because his Mark glows gently whenever they're nearby and there's a pull like a fishhook under his breastbone.

The treasurer comes to Emily and says that one of the Dunwall's largest whaling companies has been almost completely destroyed: the workers have been leaving en masse, Rothwild himself is missing, and the vital machinery of its largest processing warehouse is damaged beyond repair. The royal treasury, already nearly empty, has taken a hit from the sudden loss of tax revenue.

"How did it happen?" she asks, but all they know are rumors of a scar-faced man, Walls of Light deactivated seemingly for no reason, guards waking up in strange places with no memory of how they got there, pressure valves destroyed despite all the failsafes in place. So Corvo scours the whaling docks and asks, Delilah, hears back Knife of Dunwall and Lizzy Stride, puts together the whispers and realizes that Rothwild's disappearance has nothing directly to do with the workers' strike after all. They say, It was a shadow that passed through here, killed the whale they was butcherin', what a fuckin' waste, and, Some of the stupid choffers say they can still hear the damn things singing at night.

(They are.)

(Corvo carefully doesn't think about he sometimes feels like one of the beasts they suspend from rope and kill so slowly.)

(The Outsider doesn't return.)

The Hound Pits looks a little more polished than the last time Corvo, facedown on its stained rough floorboards with the poison like broken glass scraping his veins raw, saw it. It's late afternoon and he finds a few patrons inside, three sitting in a booth and a fourth hunched over the bar, and also Cecelia, who's wiping out pint glasses with a distant stare. Corvo slips up to a corner of the bar on the opposite side of the fourth patron.

"Hello."

Cecelia twitches, yelps, and drops the glass, which Corvo catches before it can shatter on the floor. She takes it back with a stammered apology and adds, "What're you doing here? I mean, not that you're not welcome, you always are, if you want, but with Lady Emily – I mean, Empress – and being back in the Tower – "

"I'm looking for Samuel."

"Oh, um, he's been spending more time out on the river ever since the…the Loyalists. He still sleeps in his shack outside, though, usually comes back every night." She looks out one of the stained glass windows. "He might be outside right now with that tobacco of his."

"Thank you, Cecelia," Corvo says, trying on a sincere smile that seems to surprise her, and walks outside one of the back doors leading down to the shore. Samuel isn't there, so Corvo Blinks up the tower that used to be Emily's and sits on the ledge, legs dangling over empty space with the late-afternoon horizon sprawling before him. It doesn't look quite…real, more like one of the exquisitely detailed dioramas in a puppet show, as though the sky could crack like an eggshell and rain down bits and pieces of the Void.

"Corvo!"

Samuel's voice is raspy and grounding. He leans over, sees Samuel standing at the top of the stairs leading up from the dock and waving. A glance around the yard reassures him that there's no one around – no one sober, anyway – and Corvo casually Blinks down, mouth twisting when Samuel startles badly.

"Gotta admit, Corvo, I don't think that'll ever be any less strange," Samuel admits when he finds his words again, and Corvo thinks, I'm glad, thinks, It shouldn't, and then wonders, What does it make me when it's become so easy?

"How have you been?" Corvo asks softly as Samuel starts steering them towards the back wall of the pub.

"Been doin' a lot of thinking. You get to be my age and you think you've had plenty of time to get to know yourself, but then something happens and you realize that maybe you didn't know much at all."

There's an empty wooden bench pushed up against the pub's brick wall. Samuel sits down on one end but doesn't gesture at Corvo to do the same, leaving it entirely up to Corvo himself to decide what to do. He chooses to sit, shoulder-to-shoulder, the rich blue of his coat a bright contrast to Samuel's humble, rough browns.

"You did what you had to," Corvo murmurs as Samuel pulls out a battered pack of cigarettes and a lighter, takes out a stick, and lights up with the sudden tang of smoke in Corvo's nose. Samuel takes his time to pick his words, and finally says, "I did what I thought I had to to save my own skin, and it was the actions of a coward. I ain't proud of what I did."

"If you'd refused, they'd have killed both of us."

"Maybe so."

Silence finds a seat between them.

"Don't imagine you came all this way just to see an old man, Corvo. What can I do for you?"

Corvo says Delilah and Samuel thinks for a long pause, the cigarette smoke curling long and lazy over the crags in his face, and then Samuel says, "Knew a ship named Delilah up at one of the whaling factories, but no, can't say I recognize the name."

And Corvo, who had expected this, who knew the Outsider wouldn't have given him a puzzle too easily solved because then it wouldn't be fun, says, "I can get to the Flooded District on my own, but your boat would be faster."

Samuel says, "Yeah," and stubs out the cigarette, and doesn't look back at the shadow silently following him towards the dock and onto the Amaranth.

Samuel says it's very quiet on the river today. Corvo glances over the edge of the boat at the rippling water and doesn't tell him he's wrong.

Jessamine's statue, still white but with crevices slowly going green with algae, towers over the district and its crumbling buildings. Corvo doesn't look for very long, telling himself he's more concerned with the narrow alleys and dark doorways, broken windows still lined with glass and the steady sound of dripping water that drowns out other, softer sounds. Samuel had been chattering cheerfully since they'd left the pub, but he trailed off when they passed the first of the dilapidated, decaying buildings. It smells like old standing water, mildew, and the rotting of the occasional weeper that had eventually dropped dead under a weak sun.

"Guess he still comes around to see you," Samuel suddenly says as they come to a gradual stop in front of the old train station. The wooden boards under the waterline that were cracked just wide enough for a hagfish looking through human eyes to slip through are probably still there, unseen, gradually falling apart. "Not that it's any of my business, sir."

There's nothing sly in Samuel's voice, nothing slick as oil or twitchy as Sokolov's fingers when Sokolov's gaze falls on Corvo's gloved hands. Corvo nods once, jerkily, and Samuel hums to himself, murmurs, "You ever need me to do anything, you let me know and I'll see what I can do. You're a good man, Corvo."

The dripping of water echoing through the windows sounds like whispers in a half-familiar language and Corvo isn't sure that Samuel's right. (Whole fortunes were once traded here, they say, and now all that's traded is silence. When Daud left, he told them not to follow and to find a better life for themselves.) As he stands up carefully in the stern, reflexively calculating distance and height and whether or not he remembered to bring some extra remedies, Corvo tells him, feeling inadequate, "Thank you, Samuel."

Words never quite fell into the right combination to shape what Corvo was thinking, but Samuel just smiles lopsidedly, the creases in his weatherworn face deepening like the grooves in the rocky cliffs that patiently bear the ocean's waves year after year, and maybe Corvo doesn't need to worry about finding the right words after all.

He leaves Samuel ("Go back to the pub, I'll be fine. Go, Samuel") and flickers up the brick and scaffolding. The path lies where it ended for one man, hisses a hagfish far below, and where it began for another.

There's only one person on the top floor of the old bank, standing where Daud had stood when Corvo took his breath and his dignity but not his life. It's a masculine figure, broader shoulders and narrower hips, shorter and slimmer than Corvo himself despite the bulky whaler's uniform. When the assassin realizes that Corvo is there – it takes several seconds, but still faster than Corvo had expected – he tenses but doesn't look up from what appears to be a journal lying open on Daud's desk. Corvo takes the opportunity to look around, pacing a wide circle from the window behind the desk to the open space in the middle of the library. The roll-top desk he'd ransacked before is still gaping and empty.

"I know you're not here to kill me," says the whaler. A young man, to judge by his slightly muffled voice, younger than Corvo thought he'd be, "so why are you here? Daud is long gone."

"What makes you think I'm not here to kill you?" Corvo asks. When the assassin straightens and reaches up, Corvo manages to check the reflex to reach for his sword as the assassin pulls off the whaler's mask. He's pale and smooth-faced, only the barest hint of stubble, with an old scar crossing an eyebrow.

"You don't have a reason to," the assassin replies, as though it's really that simple, and Corvo doesn't know what to do with someone willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. So he ignores it and lets his hand rest casually on the sword hilt.

"I'm looking for a woman named Delilah."

"Aah. Another witch."

"Where is she?"

"Knowing Daud, probably six feet under."

Oh. It'd been a possibility, of course, but having it confirmed is still…odd. (Anticlimactic. Unsatisfying.) The assassin must see something on Corvo's face because he tilts his head thoughtfully and continues, "You don't actually know why you're looking, do you?"

"Where did Daud find her?"

"The Outsider must have said something to send you here."

Corvo just waits, and the assassin finally sighs, ruffling a hand through his own hair with a soft huff in a weirdly normal way. "Daud wasn't the same after the empress died."

"What a coincidence," Corvo says tonelessly. "Neither was I."

The assassin winces. Corvo wonders how old this man actually is. "After he killed the empress, Daud…changed. Then the Outsider appeared and gave him a name, too."

"Delilah," Corvo mutters. The assassin nods, fiddling absently with a fountain pen on the desk while Corvo remains unmoving.

"Daud hates not knowing anything, it's one of the things that made him so good at what he does. What he did. Eventually he tracked her down to Brigmore Manor where she was hiding with the rest of her coven and the damn zombie dogs."

A large property abandoned, isolated, no City Watch to interfere or bystanders to spread the kind of rumors that would attract Overseers like flies to meat. If Daud and his assassins are any example, it was highly likely that Delilah had somehow shared her powers with this alleged coven of hers.

"He never said exactly what happened. He managed to get past most of her coven and then whatever happened, it…unsettled him, but it also seemed to…provide some measure of closure, somehow." The assassin is obviously picking his words carefully, and Corvo doesn't know why he's being so precise, doesn't know why the man is so willing to share so much detail so easily, especially when his face softens in some tiny way when he's obviously thinking of Daud. Loyal, then, probably to a fault, which makes it odder that the assassin remains in the Flooded District while Daud has disappeared – unless Daud ordered him to stay. A distraction for me, even a year later and with no guarantee that I would ever have a reason to return here? Or out of some sense of consideration for this man himself?

"Where's Delilah now?"

The assassin shrugs. "Dead. Or as good as."

"What does she have to do with Emily?"

The assassin's eyes narrow ever so slightly and Corvo's senses go sharp, the stillness of the library suddenly so loud and the assassin's movements suddenly so exaggerated. He's already memorized the entrances and exits and his back is already turned to a solid bookcase and magic begins to lick along the veins under his skin, and then the assassin…just looks rueful and so, so tired.

"I used to wonder what kind of person could experience what you have and then not only get the better of Daud but also spare his life. No wonder the Outsider thinks you're so interesting." Before Corvo can respond, he continues, "I know Delilah had something planned for Emily, but Daud never said what it was, only that he stopped it."

"…What?"

"Daud saved Emily's life, Lord Protector." The assassin gives another rueful half-smile. "If it makes you feel better, you can think of it as you saving Emily's life twice by sparing Daud's."

"Don't insult me. I don't take credit for other people."

The assassin unsubtly eyes the scar scrawled halfway down Corvo's face and says softly, "I can see that," and for the first time in a long time Corvo misses the mask.

"Why are you being so forthcoming?"

"Daud's gone, Delilah's dead, and Lady Emily is on the throne. What do I have to lose?"

"No," Corvo says slowly. "You want me to forgive Daud."

The assassin shrugs, completely unashamed. "Will it work?"

Despite himself, Corvo is more amused than anything. He's vaguely reminded of Emily and isn't that a bizarre thought to be having about one of Daud's men, however young, whatever the circumstances.

"We'll have to see."

Brigmore Manor is flooded and decrepit. Statues of the same woman are spaced evenly around the property – this must be the infamous Delilah – with the occasional dog skull randomly moldering in the shallow water. He Blinks his way towards the fallen perimeter walls, through the shattered gate, and over the shin-deep water to the front door. He doesn't hear anything beyond the grumbling of river krusts and distant dripping of water, doesn't see anything in the honey-gold of his Vision, but there's something about the place that's off and making his skin crawl.

The door is unlocked. Water lit gold by sunlight spilling in through open windows splashes against his boots as he picks his way around waterlogged furniture, ducking beneath low-hanging vines and flowers. It's eerily silent; not even Coldridge had been so silent the day the guards took away three other prisoners in his cell block and they never returned, leaving Corvo alone with the dark and the rats, with the torturer and Burrows and Campbell. (And, oh, how Campbell had desperately wanted to sear the sin of witchcraft into Corvo's flesh. Not just a traitor and a foreigner but a witch. Ladies and gentlemen, see the witch writhe under the agony of his sins, held down by steel manacles while bare, powerful, sweat-slicked muscle – the Sixth Stricture has nothing to do with this, no – twist and flex under the cleansing heat of the brand. Such irony, now, with the dark lines carved into the back of Corvo's hand.)

Corvo bites the inside of his cheek hard and waits for the chill under his skin to pass before moving on. In deeper places the water has a green tinge and it's a struggle to keep his footsteps from echoing loudly around the sodden hallways, in the air that tastes damp and heavy on his tongue. The walls and broken ceiling seem to be pressing down on him, threatening to swallow him like the throat of some deep-sea beast. There are signs of a fight: a few misplaced bolts, some blood splatter, an empty elixir bottle. When he turns a corner on the ground floor hallway, he nearly trips over the bloated corpse of a woman in fashionable clothes draped artlessly over a pile of brick, green veins stark against bloodless skin. It reminds him of leaves that have partially rotted and left behind their delicate webbing. Corvo looks around, notes the unusual abundance of plants, and wonders if the dead woman's skin is marked with uneven lines like that because roots had filled in her veins.

He finds another corpse pointing the way, and Corvo climbs up a slope of shattered wood and brick, through the floor to a second-story room. It's not a room so much as a long hallway opening up into a balcony overlooking what looks to be a small ballroom, bounded by windows looming tall and empty over the echoing space. There's a large, plain canvas with a few whale oil lamps and a smaller lantern scattered haphazardly on the floor in front of it. Two more corpses are piled carelessly to the side.

Corvo crouches on the edge of the balcony for several long moments. There's only the distant, unending echo of water dripping in the manor's tomb-like silence.

He Blinks down and stands in front of the canvas. It must mean something: it's the only room that hasn't been halfway destroyed, has several corpses inside and out suggesting that someone thought this room was worth defending with human lives, and there's too much a sense of purposefulness in the whole presentation. The question, he decides as he paces a slow circle around the easel, is what that 'something' is. There aren't any visible catches in the wooden frame, no indication that the canvas itself is hiding anything between its layers.

Delilah was another witch. Did she have a power allowing her to hide herself or things in plain sight? She once lived in the Tower, so she knows how Dunwall works from the inside. She would know people and how to get around them, and she would know where to push to find weakness. Emily, the Outsider had implied something about Emily. Delilah was apprenticed to Sokolov for a time, she would've been closer to the royal court than most. Probably a ploy for the throne, then, that's always the reason for getting close to the royal court, but how?

The canvas seems to have pride of place in the center of the room, which maybe isn't an unusual thing for a painter, Corvo wouldn't actually know for sure, but he doesn't see anything else offhand that might be worth so much protection and death. Corvo picks up one of the small lanterns, finding a little oil left inside, and flicks on the catch. It sputters to life and casts weak, eerie light that spills blue-white over his hands, the overgrown floorboards, part of the canvas and its stand, and a corner of the blank canvas suddenly blooms a spot of vivid color like blood through gauze. Corvo holds the lantern closer, and where the light falls, color bleeds thick across the surface and cracks, breaking open a small piece of the world into the Void.

Without hesitating, he steps through.

Corvo stands on an island with thick grass shadowed by a gnarled, old oak. He recognizes it as the one under which he would listen to Jessamine read stories about pirates and brave princesses to Emily, those rare afternoons when all three of them could slip away from their duties and steal a few hours together. In front of the tree are a long, white marble altar and a second canvas, taller than even Corvo, dominating the space behind it. Unlike the other canvas, however, it isn't bare but a riot of colors, indigo and scarlet and gold, a pattern barely able to contain its own chaos. In the midst of it he sees a tall, severe woman, draped in the same vines and roses that had infiltrated every corner of Brigmore Manor with her aristocratic face twisted into a frozen scream of fury.

"Here you are, Corvo, driven once more to find answers. Does it feel like taking a breath for the first time since you finally put the crown on little Emily's head?"

He can sense that the Outsider is several feet away, close but still not within reach. "Daud stopped Delilah, and in doing so he saved Emily's life, didn't he." It isn't even a question anymore, and not just because of what the assassin had said.

"Daud witnessed what his greed had cost the empire. He could not give back little Emily her mother or her innocence, and so he sought redemption the only way he knew how."

"Hunting."

"You and Daud share more than my Mark on your hand."

Corvo doesn't respond, walks up to the canvas instead, raises his Marked hand and stops just short of touching the canvas with his fingertips. "I always thought that you and the Void were one and the same," he says abruptly, conversationally, and can't resist a curl of satisfaction at the noticeable silence behind him.

"As I am now, I am the beginning and the end of all things."

"But you weren't always. And I suppose there'll be a time in which you aren't again."

"…I don't know."

Hearing such a straightforward answer from the Outsider is unsettling. "You said you could see everything."

"Not even I can know my own death, just as you cannot know yours until the moment it steals the life from your body."

"What was she planning?" Corvo asks tiredly.

"She made her brushes from the hair on Emily's head, collected from her rooms. She wove the canvas on the same looms which made the clothes that Emily wears. All she had left to do was become the young empress herself."

Corvo's heart stutters. He imagines the afternoons of puppyish excitement, the nights of sobbing grief and I want my mother, the moments in which her potential to be an extraordinary empress shine through that come increasingly more often – everything that makes her Emily scraped out and thrown away to make an empty shell for Delilah to crawl in, a parasite that would smile on the outside while feeding off the rot on the inside. He tells himself that he would've noticed, that no one knows and loves Emily the way he does.

"Would you have known, Corvo? When you want so desperately to wake up from the nightmare? Would you have allowed yourself to see?"

He steps back from the canvas, letting his hand fall back to his side. "I don't know. But it doesn't matter. It never happened, so whatever possibilities you saw, they're no longer relevant."

"Do you not see how futile it is? How, in the grand scheme of things, none of it matters?"

"All I can do is try. It's what makes me human."

When he turns, he finds the Outsider sitting on the altar with his legs crossed at the knee and leaning back against a hand. It's the first time he's actually seen the Outsider physically interact with the world, even in the Void, and Corvo casually puts his hands in his coat pockets as he steps close enough that he could reach out and touch. The Outsider tilts his head up to hold Corvo's gaze, his eyes as dark and inscrutable as always.

"You'll always be a, a mystery," Corvo says quietly, trying to find the right words to define the fear and awe and fascination and hate and love that holds his heart together with staples and wire. "But I think I'm…starting to understand. Just a little."

A smile curls slowly on the Outsider's thin mouth. "You stand at a crossroads with the kind of potential that very few people will ever know. You will be the shadow behind a throne, no more and no less, until the end of your days. You will become twisted by bitterness and boredom until even the little girl you love so much is forced to declare you an enemy of the empire. You will be declared a hero of the people. You will die in agony with a traitor's blade in your ribs. You will die in despair by your own hand. You will die in peace under the weight of so many mortal years. Which will you choose?"

"Like you said," replies Corvo, "I won't know until it happens."

"And if you were given the opportunity to know?"

Corvo gives the Outsider a small smile back. "I'd rather wait and see."

The Outsider leans forward, looking up from under dark lashes, reaching out to rest his fingertips on Corvo's jawline. "I'm sure you will find it to be a good show, my dear."

Back home in the Tower, all but the nightshift long gone to bed, Corvo pushes open the door between his room and Emily's and sits on the edge of her bed, careful not to wake her. She sleeps curled on her side, her doll on the nightstand, her hair a nightmare of knots from tossing and turning. A few spots of blue paint that Callista's scrubbing had missed stain her hands. Corvo watches her for a while, memorizing the way she occasionally scrunches up her nose or twitch her fingers like she's reaching for a paintbrush. One day she'll have to choose a new lord protector, and she'll be expected to marry, and long before then she will have learned how to be empress without Corvo constantly watching from over her shoulder. It's terrifying and part of Corvo wants to wrap her in her mother's velvet and hide her away from the world where she'll never grow up, never outgrow Corvo himself, but mostly he wants to see what kind of empress she'll be, the kind of revolution she'll bring about – because this is Emily, it'd be against her nature not to revolutionize something – and most importantly he wants to see what kind of things she'll paint when she's learned to wear the crown like she was born to do.

"So ends the interregnum, and now Emily Kaldwin the First will take her mother's throne after a season of turmoil. You will stand at her side, Corvo, guiding her young mind and protecting her from those who seek to exploit her or cause her harm. You watched and listened when other men would have shouted in rage. You held back instead of striking. So it is, with the passing of the plague and Emily's ascension, comes a golden age, brought about by your hand. And decades hence, when your hair turns white and you pass from this world, Empress Emily - Emily the Wise, at the height of her power - will lay your body down within her mother's great tomb, because you were more to her than Royal Protector. Farewell, Corvo."

...

Corvo stands in front of the gold gilt frame of a large canvas, tucked away on an island of green grass and white ruins in a blue void. Where a canvas should be, dripping in vivid paint and screams, Corvo just sees Emily – slim and strong, laugh lines around her eyes and steel in her shoulders – setting a ragged little doll on Corvo's headstone.

"'Farewell'?" murmurs Corvo, not looking away from the canvas.

"Perhaps not so final a farewell as one might expect."

Corvo takes a deep breath even though he doesn't need to. There's no pain in a tired body, no aching in old joints, no stiffness from years of scars pulling too tightly across muscle.

"It's been a long time."

"Has it?"

Corvo snorts and finally turns around. The Outsider hasn't changed at all, just as the Mark on his hand never did even after he stopped dreaming of infinite blue, but now, now, Corvo can look at the pinpoints of stars in oil-slick eyes without drowning in the gaping chasm behind them.

"What is this?"

The Outsider's head tilts but, to his credit, he doesn't try to fake confusion. "It is whatever you choose to make it."

"You can't see it anymore, can you. My…possibilities."

"Everything changes, Corvo, except I, and now you. Your fate has passed and your future is a blank slate. This is my final gift to you."

Corvo looks back at the canvas without really seeing it. The moment stretches on and Corvo thinks about death's mask worn on a very mortal face, fate shaped by very human hands, altars standing as thresholds between the mundane and the divine. He wonders if he should be angry, if he should try to give back this double-edged sword of a gift he'd never asked for, if he should even be surprised.

"I wonder what they'll call me," he finally says, and the Outsider smiles. For the first time in decades Corvo hears the soft crooning of whales, and it sounds like they're welcoming him home.