[AN] Just something short while I edit the other part. Also, double upload again because I got over 100 views on AO3 and another on FF! Yaay!
There was a desk in a house in Dunwall. It was an old desk, worn out wood, nothing special by any means. The man sitting on that desk worked for the city guard. Not a high position. But he knew a thing or two. And that information was kept in his desk. He wrote his letters there, drank there, sometimes he slept on the desk. The desk was his most trustworthy possession.
The man had caught wind of all the changes, about rumours ,the changing tides. Tide change regularly, but with the high and mighty, it's a thing. You have to use violence to remove them. And the man was very aware of that.
Hushed whispers of a coup had spread, but no one really knew if they were true, or who would strike.
It could have been all lies. But another thing with the ones above...they don't like talk of them being removed. And the longer the talk stays, the more nervous they get. And you don't want a knife on your throat twitching. It will kill you just like that, one flicker of a hand, one wrong, nervous breath.
And so ,as the man was sitting on his desk, he got a visitor.
That visitor was not a man of words, nor of great prone and intelligence. He only carried tasks his master gave him. He asked the man about the rumours. The man told him what he knew, for he was scared, and fear makes men confess.
The man's live ended at his table, where he had spent his living, without as much as a friend to mourn him.
The other man returned to his master, hidden in plain sight, where smoke and metal laid many men to rest. He heard a story of promised riches, of a man in a island, concealing his face behind a mask.
The story of a old woman who would meet her end. People said it was him, the master in the fabric, who would end her and take what was hers. By all means her reign was over. She would die. One way or another. All people do.
The master thanked and paid his man and pondered what to do. He was smart, that one, and as time would tell, he would live for a very, very long time, despite crawling bodies and vicious rats. He wouldn't stay in power that long, for his body was weak, and as the flesh decayed, his puppet master behind the desk used him to be in power.
For now, the man in the fabric, cloaked in fog and iron, would wait. He would watch his rivals move. Then he would take what was left.
On the same evening a man in the docks was hitting his wife. Love goes the strangest ways, and as he kicked her in the face she fell, but lay and waited for the last blow.
That husband was a violent man. He had spent his whole life in the streets. Violence was the language he knew and his fists were his way to talk. But just as the guard on his desk, this one played a small part. For he had been on the island with the masked one often. He had rowed a boat along the shore, carrying a breathing body without a nose . He had signed a woman's death with it, not that he. And even if he did he wouldn't have cared.
Just as he took his wife's last breath, another one did the same.
Far away, were laughter echoed in a hallway and a whore took a customer to her room. This murder was not witnessed, but it was planned and carried out swift.
The hand that held the sword bore a mark, hidden under dark leather gloves. The hand that bore the mark was skilled. And the hand took the money for it, knowing about the spark that he had lit.
The powder keg was ready to burst.
The hand that bore the mark and the man it belonged to were no stranger to the danger. Stories were told about him already, and whispered was the name they had given him.
He did not fear for what was to come. Not for himself. But deep and hidden in his black heart he feared for another, though he couldn't explain why he felt so deeply.
But as it was, the one he cared for, did not have any fear in her heart.
As she strode through the streets, dagger hidden in her hand, she wouldn't know someone cared and watched out.
She was, as people often were, foolish.
A good story, you might say, takes a bit of foolishness sometimes, and it needs the care, the love, the hidden infatuation. The fool that was the woman would not agree. But she didn't have to. She was far from realising any of this.
And unaware of the desk, smoke and the masked man she strode into her doom proudly.
There is no happy ending for you to seek. The man that bore the mark would not stride to her rescue. The fool that was the woman would not meet him at the sea and laugh.
Alas, this is another story to be told.
What comes next is the blood on the streets and the downfall. The tragedy. And don't we all love tragedy?
We can deny it, but it keeps us on the edge of our seats. It makes us hope, it makes us ponder, sometimes it makes us cry.
Let's look one last time, together, count meetings, smiles, before everything turns into ashes. As the ruins in the sea tell you,nothing ever lasts. All goes down someday. All drowns. Suffocates. Dear, dear Dunwall, watching on a river on a rock, and seeing all the lives jump off its cliffs.