Hey, you kept reading! Thanks! anyway, continuing with the drama...

Sleepwalking

Adjusting his suit, the soon to be lord regent, Hiram Burrows, walked purposefully towards a very specific door in the tower. Strange, dissonant notes reached his ears, and he sighed, preparing, when he turned the corner, to confront the overseer cranking a music box outside the room of Emily Kaldwin. "Why are you playing that awful sounding thing?" He asked the golden masked man.

Not stopping winding the box, the overseer shrugged. "It wards off demons and servants of the Outsider, sir."

Hiram nodded condescending. "Yes. So why are you playing that awful sounding thing?"

He couldn't tell, but underneath the mask, the man was probably glaring. "With respect, sir, under an hour ago this child stabbed her mother, the empress, to death, before screaming herself to sleep. Surely you realise that this must be the work of some evil force?"

Foolish, religious little… Hiram sighed. It had already been a long day and it was nowhere near over. "Outsider or no Outsider, I must see her."

He brushed past the overseer and opened the door, attempting to adopt his caring face, but was still stopped short by what he saw. Alit by a small, high window, he could see Emily. She was curled up in a ball on the bed, crying, white dress still stained red by her mother's blood. "My dear." He started. "Did no-one clean you up?"

She recoiled, before shaking her head. "No-one wanted to touch me. "They said I was… called me a…"

Murderer. Treasonous. Heretic. The words ran through both their minds. Hiram sighed. "Now, now my dear, I'm sure that they-"

"Where's Corvo?" The question took him of guard. "Corvo?" He spluttered. "Well… Corvo vanished."

"They took him!" She yelled. "The ones who killed mother, they took him, you have to find him!"

Hiram coughed. "Well, you see, people may not want to do that-"

"They have to!" Emily almost screeched, her voice cracking. "They- I'm the empress- the empress' daughter!"

"Well, you see, that's what I've being trying to say." Hiram stated nervously. "No-one knows what to tell the public yet, but everyone who witnessed the event seems to believe there was some… ah… demonic presence." He shuffled closer. She shuffled further away. "Now, if you were willing to tell the public that you were putting me in charge during your-ah, rehabilitation, I could get a word in to the high overseer, ensure this rubbish about the Outsider is pure nonsense, and-"

"No!" She crawled against the backrest. "Corvo didn't trust you! I don't trust you! I bet you told those monsters to kill mother!"

"No! Miss Kaldwin!" He yelled. "You killed your mother!" Emily choked on her words, and her eyes rolled back into her head as she collapsed.

._.

Emily was dreaming, but she couldn't think. Someone was speaking, but she couldn't hear. Everything seemed… off… but she couldn't see. The notes of some horrible, atonal melody were driving a spike of pain through her mind and she couldn't think straight. Then suddenly, with a cacophony of rodent-like squeaking, it stopped. She sat up. She was still in her bed, but her room was strange, ethereal looking, the light from the one window, high above her, swamping the room in an eerie blue glow. And a strange man was stood beside her bed. "Well." He said, black irises glinting in the pale light. "Now that that awful thing isn't running interference, we can speak. Greetings, miss Kaldwin. I am the Outsider."

The Outsider, the one who there was an entire religious force of overseers dedicated to opposing. Somehow, that fact failed to bother her much. Calmly, she asked, "Did you kill my mother?"

The Outsider smiled. "Not directly. I was the one who gave those assassins their little vanishing tricks, among other special gifts. Rest assured that had I known this would come of it, well, I would probably have given them more. You'll forgive me, but this is the most interesting event I have had the pleasure of meddling in for a long while. Ah, but where are my manners." He extended a hand.

She knew she should have been panicking about now, screaming, but something about the Outsider seemed to exude calm, as though dulling her emotions. Tentatively, she reached out to shake, but gasped and drew her hand back as she noticed a strange symbol emblazoned on the back of her palm. "Wh-what?"

"Consider this my apology. The mark of the Outsider. A gift for the one who brought about your mother's death, and a gift for the one desperate to redeem her. Poetic, don't you think?"

He vanished, just in time for the door to burst open and a swarm of rats to come pouring through the aperture. She screamed and stood up on her bed, looking for an escape, her eyes alighting on the window high above her. She reached up, jumping and flexing her fingers, knowing there was no way she could reach it-

The symbol on her hand glowed, and a blue tendril shot out from her fingers, latching onto the window ledge. Her fingers tightened on the tendril reflexively and even as she let out an "eep!" of surprise, she was pulled up to the ledge. She barely got her feet under her and balanced tenuously before jumping forwards onto what looked like a slate roof. She rolled to a stop, looked around, and gaped. The world was gone. The sky was a dark purple with chunks of buildings and ships just… floating there. If she squinted into the distance, she could almost make out a whale.

"Welcome to my domain." Emily jumped at the sudden sound, spinning to see the Outsider stood there watching her. "I could talk for eternity, literally, on its significance, but I can imagine you're in quite a rush to leave it. So go on, get used to your new skills. You'll need them soon enough."

He vanished, and Emily, in a daze, just nodded, and looked across the rooftops.

._.

Three grapple's later, Emily pulled herself to the ground outside the tower, landing in the bushes and crouching there. She looked back at the building, seeing the twisted, floating version of her home, before looking forwards to see something strange. Three assassins, her mother and Corvo, all apparently frozen in time as though the moment had been immortalised through this strange world. The Outsider appeared beside her again. "One of them holds the key to move forwards, but you cannot see it, can you? You will have to see without seeing, gaze through the void. I am curious as to how."

He vanished and she thought, gazing at the scene in front of her. See without seeing… Her gaze drifted over Corvo's frozen form, remembering how, just hours earlier, he had been playing hide and seek with her. She had…

Slowly, tentatively, she put her hands over her eyes. Something changed, the edges of her vision blurring and the darkness her closed fingers forced upon her eyes no longer feeling quite so intense. She dropped her hands and gasped. The darkness was gone. She could see everything as though it was (a bluey) midday, but the light was source-less, as though everything just glowed. More importantly, the figures in front of her were highlighted yellow, as well as what looked like their areas of vision, and she could see a green key on the back of one assassin's belt. She moved forwards to grab it. When she did so, everything changed. Her mother vanished, and the assassin's guises fell away into merely shadowy forms, her new sight highlighting more appearing around and nearby, staggering away from her in shock, calling to each other in words she couldn't understand. She whipped her head around, confused, what was going on-

When one drew a weapon, she began to move in a blind, hurried panic. She launched a grapple towards the boat lift building, then another further in, she crossed a corridor, saw a door, slammed the key into it praying it would open, it did, she ran through onto a balcony, she saw a route down and away, she looked back once, and she fled.

._.

Almost half an hour later, she collapsed into a street, far from the tower, she was still in the dream, they could still be coming for her-

"Relax, young one." She spun to see the Outsider stood there, chuckling. "You have evaded them for now. I'm sure that the next time those guards see you, they will not be feeling merciful."

"Guards?"

"Yes. You should thank me. You are out of the way of Burrows' manipulations, and well on your way to redeem your mother."

Emily looked at him with increasing nervousness. "What do you mean? This was a dream, right?"

The Outsider smiled, and began to fade. "Do not make assumptions, young lady. You may have been dreaming…

But that doesn't mean you were asleep."

As he faded, so did the ethereal quality of the world, she wasn't in some void at all-

And then it hit her, like a series of hammer blows. It hadn't been some horrid dreamscape, it had been her real home, those shadowy figures that had chased her had been guards, and the rats… the rats had been real. Shaking, she lifted her hand to before her face. The symbol was still there. She, Emily Kaldwin, had just consorted with the Outsider, and used his power to escape the Dunwall Tower… Her brain shut down, and she collapsed, unconscious, onto the broken pavement.

Man, that Outsider is a tricky deity. So emily's out. What will she do? Find out soon! Please review, and see y'all!