Dusty sunlight seeps through the bedroom in the Clockwork Mansion, as silent as the snow that has never fallen on the city. Only the impossible brightness of the Karnacan summer fills the room. If he ventures outside, he will find the giant redwoods growing near the diverted river, nourished by the constant misting. It's perhaps one of the only places on the island the trees can grow now, so drastically has industrialization changed the landscape.
He raises himself up from the bed, where the black-and-white-striped blankets have been tossed to the side in a sleepless fit, and slips past the assorted prototypes, still where he left them, onto the balcony. Sunlight slips through the ironwork and spirals into abstract patterns on the floor. They keep shifting ever so slightly each time he glances at them.
Below the balcony, the peaceful, orderly hum of machines—the heartbeat of the world.
They walk the leaf-strewn streets of the Upper Avanta Quarter, ambling towards their pre-programmed goals. They're not machines made flesh, neither are they flesh made machine. They are simply, purely mechanical beings with only the faintest resemblance to the life that preceded them.
He's merely plucked different parts from the different timelines that pleased him the most—a tenuous amalgamation.
And beyond the door, in the mansion that bends to his will and whims, the mechanical beings are at work. Perfectly obedient, perfectly empty. They sweep and dust and mend, each in accordance with the secret coordinates assigned to each one. They prepare food they will never touch, clean linens they cannot feel.
They guide him through the mansion when he asks them, shifting the floors with a pull of the lever. He trails behind them, admiring the sway of wires and metal. He's crafted them: the details elude him, as always, but a note of half-remembered pride still rises in his heart.
He moves among his creations, unperturbed.
If he were able to name the sensation that spreads throughout him when he's around them, around their predetermined lines and actions, it would be safety. They recognize when he is lost, and they don't judge him for it, because they can't.
The clicking of the mechanical beings imbues Karnaca with the illusion of human life, while all around it, wildlife slowly advances into the surrounding, desolate buildings: squirrels scurry behind shattered windows and rats haunt the walkways, climbing the ropes like greyed sailors. Birds snap up straying bloodflies, and sea turtles wend down the sandy shoreline in search of a place to leave their leathery eggs.
A shadow flickers across the wallpaper of dark-green, geometric tangles, quick enough to be overlooked, carefully tense like a kingfisher poised above the water. Kirin understands what this means. Not even here, in the world as it should be, will he be away from Corvo.
To his surprise, Corvo doesn't blink into the room, full of precise fury. Instead, he staggers into view as sunlight streams through the windows like an open wound. Breathing heavily from his injuries, his hand on the handle of his blade, he only regards Kirin. His hands are surprisingly clean, perhaps wiped on the clothing of a dead cultist.
(What was he doing here again? Why is Corvo here? Why is he hurt? Why, why, why, and underneath it all, the same, tedious pain.)
Kirin shakes his head. "You made me like this," he says, by means of explanation. His halting voice fills the empty air. His perpetual disorientation makes it a struggle to keep his gaze on Corvo's face, but he manages, half out of spite.
He doesn't want any more contemptuous pity. He didn't ask to be like this. It's unbearable to live in a world that regarded him as an afterthought, as a human animal.
But there's a small note of acknowledgment in Corvo's eyes, a small concession. He's tried all his life to be an honorable man for his daughter, but terror and a desperate need to be free from Delilah's threat had overtaken him that terrible day. Now, both of them have to live with what he's done. And maybe, as the adrenaline had worn off as he departed Kirin's laboratory—that which had once been an observatory, meant to record the great heights of the heavens, the apex of natural philosophy, as the counterpart to the conservatory and its records of humanity—he'd known a deep and unabiding regret, aware of what it's like to be treated as an anomaly, too.
This thought has simply never crossed Kirin's mind before.
It's a moment of painful familiarity, come perhaps too late. It hurts far, far worse than if Corvo had never had this shared experience.
"You know what it's like, too," he says to the half-finished prototypes in a moment of painful revelation. "You know."
Did they say bad things about you too, he means to ask, but the answer is startlingly clear. Again and again, comes the question of why. He cannot help but keep revisiting the puzzle of why, unaware that it's not a solution that he's searching for, because it's not a question that he's asking.
Kirin's gaze is drawn to Corvo as he starts to sign, but resentment takes hold of Kirin again. Arms crossed, he turns away, refusing to listen to him, but this denial doesn't come as a triumph, but rather a cruelty that he's passing on.
Uneasy with himself, he picks at the fingertips of his gloves.
He remembers what it's like to be treated dismissively. That knowledge isn't attached to any particular memory, only half-joined fragments; instead, it's clearest as heaviness in his chest. Carefully, he considers this new revelation. He knows what it's like to be treated cruelly and what that leads to—what else could there be? (An echo of his old mentor ringing in his head, far more patient than he'd been in Kirin's time, worn gentler by time and experience in the same way that river water smooths the stones. )
Reluctantly, hesitantly, he glances at Corvo, and to his surprise, Kirin finds a weary relief on his face. Kirin's gesture isn't borne from forgiveness, but he's learning that there are other ways to live in the world.
He tries to follow the careful signs, but they elude him. He shakes his head in confusion. (What is he doing here? Has Corvo always been here in front of him? Time to endlessly reconstruct the scene.)
Corvo reconsiders his methods—it's a well-worn strategy. He rifles through the drawers for scrap paper and a pen, and Kirin cannot help but peer at what he jots down. Emily. Of course. Emily. She'll always be his little girl. She kept him alive through the horrors of the first coup—the little girl who had her childhood stolen from her in the useless and trivial game of men.
"No," he replies haltingly. "She's not here." Why would she be? He wants to be alone in this perfect world.
Corvo closes his eyes briefly—in pain? A sinking realization?
A new fear rises in Kirin that he'll be made to give up this world. He doesn't want to return to how it was before: who would choose that world? It's an ugly, cruel one—but she's there, and Corvo cannot bear to live without his little girl.
Kirin backs away slowly. He doesn't want to extinguish this perfect world, overlayed onto reality with a careful hand. He doesn't want to return to the world where the days will be as fleeting as gladioli blossoms, one curling and fading away even as the one above it opens its bud. What will he do when the notebook fills up? Better to not need it in the first place. Here, everything is remembered for him, and everything is in its perfect order.
But reality is just a matter of frequencies, and there are so many more to pick from. (And then, garbled like static, something flutters in his mind and then sinks back, half-recalled.)
He reaches out to the Void: it's a simple as plucking a string and listening for the resonance. He's done this before on the floor of his student room of the Academy, cross-legged, as he adjusts another bolt and picks at the taut wires inside the machine—
What was he doing here again?
Kirin steadies himself against the sudden and sharp pain in his chest. A nervous restlessness pulls at him, draws him in. The Void is cold now, like the air rising from a deep well. Through the wrappings on Corvo's hand, the unearthly black ink of the Mark flutters and fades on his hand in its death throes as the magic that tethered it to him slowly but steadily unravels.
All Kirin knows is that he doesn't want to be here anymore. He doesn't want to look at his own death: every time he looks into Corvo's face, all he can remember is the coiling, nauseating terror of waking up to the intimate horror of being ripped apart from himself and having his perception permanently, cruelly altered against his will. The private world in his head, the way he processed the world—the only way he could perceive and process the world. The helplessness of it all.
He tries for another chord, another resonance, but the metaphor that comes to mind now is one of a lever instead. Yes, he likes that. It's as it should be: The world should move at his whims, and reconfigure itself to his liking. How easy it all is, here at the source of it all.
It's as simple as pulling a lever and—
When he glances around him, the study at the Academy, with the autumnal leaves of the Month of Wind, surrounds him. The high bookshelves border the room like sentinels, each spine of their innards perfectly placed upwards. Leather, calfskin with gold lettering. There's nothing that couldn't be found here. But this time, unease follows him. He doesn't want to be found again, better give the lever another pull, better to jump to a new reality.
It only vaguely occurs to him that Corvo might get caught in one of those changes, those shifts (do they stop existing once Kirin leaves them, or do they continue on, masterless but resolute, never to be found again, one of the many spinoffs of reality). The ugly part of Kirin finds it fitting.
The resentful part of his heart wants Corvo to suffer for what he did. There's no forgiveness for what he's done. There's nothing he can do to ameliorate it. How could you live with such mutilation? Better that he suffers now. The resentment burns in him, constricting his throat.
That's just how the world works: one will is imposed on it, and the rest suffer. Once the Mark has left for good, Corvo will simply be an ordinary man at the mercy of what he's chosen.
And what Kirin chooses for him.
That's how it goes in the end: another fate chosen, and the timer starts again. Who will hunt Kirin down and deliver his retribution? Who in return will make the wrong choices, the cruel ones, the thoughtless ones, and subsequently be punished for it? Without the Outsider, who will be chosen next to continue the morality play of revenge? Is this something the Void also wishes to see played out endlessly?
Vengeance demands vengeance. It's the only thing left in the end.
He hopes Corvo is caught between the unseen machinery of the world, trapped between the liminal walls forever and ever, not ever dying but not ever being found. It's simply another pull of the metaphorical lever, and the world shifts again.
Kirin's childhood room comes into view. This was a wrong turn: he doesn't want to be back here again—he wants his perfect world. This is only a mausoleum. (He can almost see his mother there, crouched next to him, her long black hair loosely tied back: "Why are you such a strange child?" she asks maliciously, with no pretense of wanting to understand. "There's something wrong with you. You'll dissect me one day too, won't you? And you won't even be sorry about it.")
Tucked away in a corner is his empty four-poster bed, its pale curtains drawn back. The bedside table with a secret compartment he'd rigged at the age of eight, wanting to have a secret place to store his thoughts. (This will be the record of genius, he'd tell himself earnestly. Something for the historians.) On the plain wallpaper hangs maps of the Isles (and on the other side of them, Kirin's annotations). A utilitarian mirror—Kirin avoids this one; he's afraid of looking into it and seeing the dull-eyed imitation of himself. A person he still doesn't know. But looking at it obliquely now, a painful rage creeps into his heart. What was the point of it all now? The inverse of hope pervades the room now, clinging to the furniture, seeping into the floorboards.
He can't hold onto anything.
The shadows cross behind him. It seems Corvo can manage this world just fine. Figures. Even half-dead and passing his prime, Corvo will still persevere. What else would he be if he didn't?
"If you knew what it was like," he tells Corvo, without taking his eyes off the maps, not caring about the consequences now, "why did you make me like this?" And now there was no point to anything, no more meaning to be had. What could he tell himself, in those few moments of focus? Yes, he'd suffered, he'd endured, and this is what he made despite it all. He would have brought a new era to the world—those were always difficult births. Instead, he was a fumbling wreck who, having gotten the dream of anyone, couldn't even control the power he'd been given.
And now, he finds anger in this place of regret. He hates this horrible room with all of its desperate, unfulfilled hopes. All of its furnishings had been chosen for him, and he'd lived quietly in this dollhouse of a room for almost sixteen years. And when he went out into the world, among his peers, he'd found that this quietness had followed him, so that he was constantly, silently observing this strange new world with its strange new inhabitants. He hates the mirror most of all, endlessly reminding him of how different he's been made and how he can't conceal any of it.
And here he was again, with nothing to show for it. His only refuge has been made quiet for him, and there are no more stars in his night sky—nothing to dream about, nor to sustain him. His mutilation didn't make him into a child, no matter what the maid thought; it only gave the illusion of docility. This rage has been inside him, dormant.
As he gazes into Corvo's face, his body tenses with rage. He'd never wanted to dissect his mother, she was no mystery to him, but he wants to pull Corvo apart. He wants to mutilate him beyond recognition, precisely dissecting him until nothing of Corvo remains and there were only anonymous hunks of flesh on the steel dissection table. What amends could be made for Kirin being made as he was?
Where was he again? Why was Corvo so close to him? Why was his heart loud in his chest and his throat tight?
(It's only a faulty connection, a missed transmission flickering into the night.)
His anger drains away, uneasy, it drains away, never to be enacted on, never to be resolved. There's only an empty place in his head again. He wants to scream. He wants to throw the mirror against the wall until it crumples and splinters and breaks. It's so cold in his hands, taken from its horrible perch, but the moment leaves him again. He lowers his arm, unable to recall what he wanted to do with the piece.
Pity again in Corvo's eyes. Only pity, and Kirin cannot bear that hell of never truly being able to express his rage. If only, if only he could—but this inability to hold onto it was by design. He can never resolve it: it will always only be an open wound. He stares at the sharp edges of the mirror.
Corvo tilts his head slightly, thoughtfully. He regards Kirin closely, as if he's figured out something about him, and it's a familiar look. Deciding on something, he takes the mirror out of Kirin's hands, and Kirin waits for it to be placed back on the wall, paternally returned back to its pristine order.
Instead, it smashes against the wall in a flutter of fractured glass. It's not a gesture of intimidation, but of continuation.
Kirin stares at the wreckage, bemused and dazed. Then, he turns to Corvo.
"Why?" he asks in his halting voice. His heart beats faster, not from fear but intrigue. "Why now?"
Why care now, when there is nothing left of him?
But that was only the mystery of Corvo.
Corvo regards one of the fragments carefully, before selecting one. Then he places it in Kirin's hand carefully. Then he carefully takes hold of Kirin's hand and directs it into a throwing motion. Underneath the wrappings on his hand, there is only an expanse of unblemished skin.
It slips from his hand, cracking against the wall.
The sparkling, sharp fragments, scattered across the floorboards, are thrilling to behold. It's not a question of making amends: not everything could be corrected, as Kirin has learned. Rather, it is the longer process of learning to live in the world with each other. And watching the fragments, Kirin begins to feel as though something is moving again.
He's not sure what to do with the anger he feels, if there is anything to be done, but acknowledging could be a start. He's afraid of what he might find there.
Kirin glances back at him, searching his face.
Does he dare to break the mirror further? Kirin's unsure: he didn't think this could happen, that he was allowed to do this. He's terrified that if he indulges his rage, even through a proxy, he'll be treated like a wild animal again. This rage that storms through him. How quickly he's learned to abide by the rules of others. But now that he's known that, what else could there be?
Slowly, carefully, Kirin picks up one of the shards. (Don't look, don't look!) His gloves protect him from the sharp edges. He throws it back on the floor: it shatters into smaller fragments, and slowly the anger inside him starts to budge.
It's not insurmountable.
It's not terrifying.
In turn, each of the major fragments splinter into numerous offshoots, glittering across the floor like new-fallen snow. They crack into many-toothed fractals. Again and again, they snap and burst into copies of themselves, dusting the area with little thin glass shards. How hard, how frustrating it had been to be a walking punishment, to be made disabled as punishment. The words escape him, little ghosts of themselves hiding between neurons, but it doesn't matter.
He'd worn his earlier disability as a marker of his inclinations: the merging of man and machine, a marker of his genius, knowing but never acknowledging to himself that his solution was only as good as when he had access to his the part of him that had hated himself so much for being disabled had also been a sliver in Corvo's heart as well. (This won't be so bad, he'd told himself, as he pulled the lever, perhaps. He deserves it. What's one more disability to live with? And a hundred other justifications that had shown themselves to be threadbare in the morning light.)
It's not that Kirin's anger has been lessened, only that, for now, in seeing it, it has been made easier to bear.
Breathing heavily from the exertion, he only watches his handiwork. He supposes he should be sorry, but he isn't. Instead, an exhausted relief seeps through him: relief that this stumbling block in his mind has been overcome. And underneath that, a longing. He wishes he were able to communicate with Corvo, that he could read for longer or understand his signs. He's so cut off from him, this man who ruined him but who also gave him back part of his peace.
(He's forgotten that Corvo is full of surprises.)
There is always time to begin again.
It's not that all will be forgiven, it's that they have to learn to live with each other again, that they must learn to live together in that gradual process. (And somewhere in Karnaca, a baker is asking himself the same questions in the half-remembered spaces in his mind.)
Kirin's head is a little clearer now, and he recognizes the look of curiosity on Corvo's face—the particular pattern of his facial muscles.
The worn patches of the Void spread across the room, breaking through and bleeding through here too, in this small dreamworld of Kirin's, an enclosed bubble of the past and what could have been... He is not so afraid of going back now. The world is hard and the world is cruel and unfathomably terrible, but if there was hope, it could be borne. He's still afraid, but he's curious now as well. What could the world be?
"Time itself is an illusion," Kirin recites, "not so much the inevitable decline of a system from order into chaos, but merely an additional aspect of space, the nature of which... the nature of which..." (The memory is so close: Kirin can almost see the thinned and crinkled pages of his lovingly annotated copy of The Hungry Cosmos on his desk at the Academy.)
The knowledge slips away again, but this time, Kirin thinks of it as a transient visitor to his mind. Not gone. Not lost. Not diminished by its brevity. It's only a hand on his shoulder that he glances up to meet: this fleeting fragment merely reminds him that it's a part of himself too. Why else would it haunt him?
Corvo watches him, confused.
If only he could show him this wonder of the world, how delicately strung together it was!
Gingerly, Kirin takes Corvo's hand and studies its blank canvas. He's still afraid of these hands; perhaps he always will be. This is almost too intimate a proccess. How did it go again? He can barely remember, but he doesn't have to. Something about continuous motion, a thread that binds. He takes a steadying breath, trusting himself to know, and connects the two of them in his mind with a single thread. His breath hitches a moment from the sudden little pinprick of pain.
And when he opens his eyes again, the Mark glows on Corvo's hand.
Flexing his fingers, Corvo marvels at the lines that connect and prop up the world, running his fingers against the worn holes in the Void, where it's leaking fast and responding to anyone at will.
It's only a new point of view. It's his.
And it's so unspeakably intimate to share this world with Corvo that Kirin almost wants to take it back and hide it.
Kirin directs Corvo's hand across the hole in the Void, across the frayed edges.
Corvo considers this carefully. He grasps the edges and pulls them together, like a fishing net rising from the water. Then he ties the edges together in a rough knot—the practical Serkonan in him showing. When he lets go, it springs back, tense and bound.
Kirin means to quip about fishing boats and nets, but he never remembers the rest of it. Instead, he watches Corvo methodically search for and repair the fraying Void where the Outsider's corpse once held everything together.
"Will it hold?" kirin means to ask, but perhaps that's only a wish. Someone else may one day have to return to this strange land, but not now. Perhaps the Void itself will reach out. It's not that magic will cease to exist without the Outsider. The witches had always been able to contact the Void with their effigies, herbs, and exchanges.
An exchange.
Oh. That's what he's been doing this whole time, subconsciously, having been rudimentarily taught to access the Void by a witch. The Outsider's Mark promised a conduct to the Void that bypassed this atavistic need for symbols and exchanges, but the Void is always happy to take what it's offered.
Corvo breathes a sign of relief as he releases the last mended tear.
His work done, he reaches for Kirin's hand. Corvo must be thinking of Emily again; there's gentleness that spreads across his face when he thinks of Emily. They'll return to the Void together, the meeting place of all these infinite worlds and from there, return to the world with Emily.
It is not a perfect world, but for all its faults, it has the promise of being a better one.
The dream is over, but he doesn't awaken in the Void. Instead, when he opens his eyes, he finds himself in the dark place—alone. His head pains him, and he lies there in the darkness, dazed and hapless. His limbs are weak and don't respond well to him.
This must be death.
He doesn't know how long he spends dead, only that the time goes on seamlessly. He cannot tell where one moment begins and ends.
The door opens again (somehow, he knows that it's opened before)—he sees himself, his fingers, the empty shelves where the cleaning solutions have been removed.
The maid comes into view. She kneels next to him and says something gentle to him, he cannot quite focus enough to understand it. The sudden and intense sensory input stuns him, and he lies there, crumpled, blinking against the sudden light. She surveys him, but for what he cannot tell. Fear stirs in him—what did she want with him? How did he get here? Why does his head hurt? He means to ask her with his strained voice, but he's not quick enough. Already, he's become used to the agonizingly slow time, and checking on him is just one of the things to do for her today.
The door closes, and a key scrapes against the lock that was once meant for the housekeeper to ration cleaning supplies. He strains to listen; this is his only respite from the nothingness, but even that leaves soon enough.
It's worse this time. The fear grows: he can't see anything now, and knowing that he's not ensconced in the nothingness drives him to terror. He can't see! He can't see, and he's so afraid of what's happened.
His limbs still don't respond to him. They weakly fumble in the darkness, knocking uselessly against the walls. The only thing that action brings him is a stinging pain, warm and raw. His fingers brush against something soft, and he panics. He doesn't remember this being here before. What else could there be now with him?
And something shuts off inside him, like a machine overheating. It's more bearable now, because he's not really there anymore. He's dead, or so close to it that the definitions no longer apply. He lies there, unmoving, no longer capable of stirring or resisting.
Death is so easy, he thinks.
There's no more him and no more room, just the idle lifelessness of it all, just drowning in a sunless sea. Once you got deep enough, there wasn't any light down there either. Everything was mechanical, even the flow of light. Tick, tick, tick; he's only listening for the heartbeat of the world.
The light returns: he is reborn. He's vaguely aware of himself now.
The maid crouches beside him. Only now is the lunch tray visible. It's stew. She scoops up a spoonful and nudges it against his lips, but he can't seem to part them. Instead, he just watches her, the only departure from the nothingness. Everything is too fast now.
She frowns slightly and says something upbeat that he doesn't catch. She squeezes his hand with her free one, and tries again.
The spoon brushes against his lips, but to no avail.
He wants to be dead. He can't bear this anymore. He's terrified of what will happen after she leaves again. What a strange turn of fate to be so heavily dependent on the servant whose invisible labor he would have never acknowledged, not even to himself. But she is his world now.
He means to tell her that he's scared, but as he opens his mouth to do so, she understands it only as a willingness to be spoon-fed. She slips it into his mouth with a gentle smile and perhaps even relief.
He recoils from this. The smooth metal in his mouth is horrible, and he immediately turns away from it. He can't help but shudder against the unpleasant sensation.
Alarm flashes across her face, and the hand holding the spoon droops in confusion and worry.
"Do you not like it?" she asks.
He can't answer. Everything is too tender right now. He shuts his eyes against the brightness and draws his limbs towards himself. He can't think it's so bright—he can't think at all. The brightness is red behind his eyes—but, at least it's not the unending darkness.
As she moves to leave again and close the door, he reaches out for her, not to harm but in a plea. He doesn't want to die again.
Getting through to her is his only hope.
She glances down at where his fingers have brushed against her arm, then at him. Then, her face falls, her cheery facade broken: she sits back, staring horrified at nothing before her.
He can neither answer nor accuse. The words simply have vanished.
Then her gaze returns to him, searching his face for the answer she's feared all along—that good intentions were simply not enough; that the only solution the staff could find to keep him safe has destroyed something inside him, at a time when he was so exceedingly, excessively fragile and vulnerable and in pain, a person made of lawn fabric so sheer that a single catch on a nail would ruin it—and horror crawls across her face. In a small voice, she whispers to herself, "What have I done?"
He thinks it must be a trick of the light when the first tear slides down her cheek. She tries to wipe it away with her gloved hand, to conceal its existence with a fast enough movement, but that only makes the situation more real for her. The tears fall faster and more insistent now.
"I don't know how to help you," she says. Her words are muffled and choppy. "I don't know."
He watches her, her discarded doll.
"You'll end up like poor Mr. Stilton like this, won't you?"
She draws her legs up to herself and sobs into the crook of her arm, the product of a sleepless week of exhaustion and fear.
He doesn't understand it. If he were in her position, forced to care for someone, he'd have shut the door on her and never thought about it again, as the numerous, cut-up corpses in his lab testified. Maybe he'd even have been amused by her distress. It would have been so easy to ignore her.
But she doesn't close the door on him.
Her tears gradually taper off, and she collects herself. "Right," she says to herself. "I don't know where else we can keep you, but I'll think of something. There has to be something. The hallway maybe. I'll lock the elevator and put up a pallet."
Her words fall past him, as impossible to hold as meteoroids in the night sky. The only thing he grasps is that something has changed.
"Come with me," she tells him gently. She pauses a moment. "Here, take my hand. You can still do that, right?"
He recoils from her fingers brushing against his. Too much sensation now. He doesn't want to stay here, but he's become terrified of leaving. The world keeps shifting, and he's half convinced he's late for something important, but he can never quite remember what it was. His head pains him whenever he moves it, so he tries to keep as still as possible. But more than that, he doesn't understand the look of guilt and sadness on her face—he's never felt bad for anyone in his life.
She sits down across from him, and offers her hand again—this time, waiting for him to be ready. "It's ok," she says. "I'm here now."
Silhouetted by the artificial light, she strokes his arm in reassurance, murmuring words he doesn't catch, while he only searches her face, uncomprehendingly.
Kirin awakens on the hard crystalline surface of the Void, under Corvo's arm thrown over him in a gesture of protection. Around them, the shattered remains of his invention, with its scattered wires and cogs and unidentifiable bits of metal—once again reduced to merely debris.
Perhaps, it took Corvo's last bit of power to try to find him.
Kirin wishes he hadn't remembered that dark place now. Perhaps the Void had held onto this half-formed part of his memory for him.
Around him, the endless, sunless Void swirls and gently ripples.
He doesn't know how to find the way back. Already, his body is chilled at the point where it's made contact with the dark surfaces. He doesn't want to die here in this strange place, nor does he want to wander it, like Delilah, as the Void slowly picks him apart, assimilating him with itself.
Corvo doesn't stir. For all Kirin can tell, Corvo's died there, leaving him alone. He should be used to it by now, he supposes miserably. He doesn't even remember what signs of life to check for. Should he explore the Void, or would it be better to wait by Corvo's corpse to be found? No one was going to find him here, though. He should—he should—
The thought is gone again.
He meanders through the dreamland of the Void, with its lifeless imitations of the world it encloses. From this angle, it's not empty at all. He passes through the facsimiles of the things that have defined his world for so long: his plain student desk at the Academy, cluttered with useless bits of metal and sawdust, opened books perched here and there, scrawled notes to himself; the large iron-wrought windows of his childhood, with the leaves that collected and curled under them in the Month of Wind; the trappings of his miserable cabin he shared with several other criminals being deported from Dunwall back to Karnaca. The plain bunk beds with their stained sheets and the crude etchings on the walls.
He pauses at his office desk, a perfect imitation of the one in his mansion: the delicate porcelain tea cup on its saucer to the left, Breanna's letter on the right. And in the center, on a brass tray, the mechanical part he'd been refining for a Clockwork Soldier. A hunch he'd had. It'll never be finished now.
He only stares at it, heartbroken and unable to comprehend how his life had diverged so. Maye this is a point he keep revisiting for the rest of his life.
There's a slight movement around the legs of his desk, just out of frame. Crawling in front of him, dark and low to the ground, sniffing and raising its whiskered nose to the sky is a grey rat. It doesn't speak to him with the voice of a long-dead little girl. It doesn't speak to him at all.
This creature, so terribly out of place, reminds Kirin of the Lonely Rat Boy with his pet rat, a little thing also of the streets, ugly and unloved. The boy must have known it would die soon—the lifespan of a rat is meager, only two years. He'd have witnessed, on the other side of the window, the beginnings of the industrial age written in Roseburrow's blood. A mind turned inside out on the glass panes.
This little stranger, this nameless orphan that had existed at the same time as Kirin, but had slipped into anonymous myth with only a moniker to call his own. An outline of a person. Tormented, cursed, died. What else could there be for him in those stretches between fear and loneliness? Was there ever a moment, tucked away in the winding alleyways, that some peace washed over him, as it was just him and his only friend, before his story would lapse into the well-worn cautionary tale of revenge and comeuppance? Perhaps, he was easier to understand that way: a throw-away of the streets given to enacting all the same horrors he'd experienced. This boy, who'd known nothing but fear and loneliness, had been rewarded for his gesture of kindness towards the rats he'd brought forth, with the bite that would be his demise.
And what of his only friend? Had it buried itself deeper into his pocket, terrified of these new rats, whose violence it knew in its own heart but kept still for the sake of its friend? Or had it watched over the fraying seam of his pocket, seeing new possibilities? It had watched the little boy die, and then lapped at his bloody cheek. What had that been? A final communion, a consolation given too late? A descent into madness? Or had it, too, succumbed to the violence it had witnessed, a final tragedy?
This wasn't that rat.
It was only another wanderer in the Void. But perhaps, from the whiskered mouths of other rats, it had also heard the tale of the Rat Who Loved Too Much. This secret belongs to it alone.
"I'm very lost," he tells it. "Please, I want to go home. Please, show me the way out of here."
It doesn't reply to him, kindred wanderer that it is, but only regards him with its dark eyes. It brushes one pink paw against the other, before dragging that paw against its ear in a thoughtful cleaning motion.
He can't bear for it to become only another stranger to him again as his thoughts recede, but it beats him to that inevitable conclusion. It scampers off into the Void, further and further, just as much of a visitor as he is.
Soon, it's only a pinprick of grey, haunting the darkness as it crawls away; then, nothing.
Kirin draws himself together in the ever-present cold, and rests his aching head for a moment. He closes his eyes. He just has to try again. Surely, there has to be a way out. He just has to—
Kirin glances up—one of the ghostly remnants from before is near him, not hovering over him, but crouching beside him, studying his face. Kirin cannot quite understand who this is. He's not good at remembering faces now, and his memory is not helped by the flickering and fading of the spirit.
"I know you," the shade says, the holes in its form dragging and flashing into nonexistence, "even as I don't remember myself. Curious."
Nothing is really ever over.
There are a thousand things Kirin means to say, and he forgets them all in the wave of sheer relief that he's no longer alone in this empty land. He's safe again. (What a strange feeling that he's come to enjoy. He'd have scoffed at it before, but now what comes over him is more than just relief and respite from terror, but also delight from seeing a familiar face.)
"Come," what remains of Daud says. "Let me take you back."
A little moment of horror goes through Kirin as he notices the fluttering, unraveling holes in Daud's form. Has he done this too? All this wavering light, inevitably being erased, marching towards entropy. Are these holes from the entomological pins he'd gladly have stuck in Daud to keep him from leaving?
He hadn't meant to do that.
And he cannot quite figure out where Daud will go when the holes finish their fissures across his form—what will be made of him when there is nothing left of his body. Perhaps, the self was just paint on a canvas, each layer simultaneously expanding on and concealing what came before. Even now, could Daud be still the same person?
Yes, Kirin decides.
It pains him to realize that he's already forgotten Daud's face, but something else remains under that absence. A tactical memory of his careful gentleness: hands that could killed and had killed willingly, efficiently, but had chosen to reign in that violence for him.
A slight guilt, unfamiliar and unpleasant, slips into this moment. Was Daud angry with him? Should he have broken his promise to rescue him? (He doesn't know the small relief that carried Daud in those dark moments of unfathomable cruelty, a relief from the knowledge that he only had to worry about extricating himself from this predicament.)
What does it feel like to die, Kirin almost asks. Instead, he says, "The Outsider, he's gone," as a means of explanation.
(And with that disappearance, Daud's side of the preternatural bargain had been fulfilled, but what could he do but what he'd already grown used to? The quiet and weeping loneliness of the Void had been its own prison. Perhaps, he hadn't been ready to resign himself to the nothingness of nonexistence just yet—not yet. For being such a wanderer, he'd found it surprisingly difficult to renounce the world fully. And just as he'd freed the Outsider with a single word, Daud had been called back to himself with Kirin's plaintive pleas.
Kirin will never learn any of this. All he knows is that Daud's reappearance is one of those mysteries of life.)
Instead, Kirin accepts the hand that's offered to him. It's surprisingly solid and feels of the same dry cold that comes in a Dunwall winter. The weight of Daud's hand in his own keeps oscillating: one moment there, gone the next. This sudden change would frighten Kirin, if not for the fact that he trusts Daud not to disappear on him.
As they make their way across the sunless sea, Daud listens patiently and periodically redirects Kirin's path, while Kirin recounts what he can remember of what's transpired. It's a fragmented remembrance with crucial parts absent, but Daud nods along, focusing on his words.
"The holes in the world, I don't think they're fixed," Kirin tells him as they near another inexplicable island of stone. "Not forever." He fumbles for the metaphor that's arisen in his mind, distant, as if it was underwater. "It's like... like a tuning. Frequencies."
Daud considers this.
"You're really remarkable, aren't you?" he says at last.
His praise is so unexpected that Kirin almost stops right there, taken aback. He almost recognizes Daud's words for what they are, the closest to love Daud could express, but instead, he's surprised by the words themselves, having subconsciously consigned himself long ago to no longer being remarkable. That descriptor seemed to belong to someone else, and this loss, revealed so abruptly, unsettles him a little.
If Kirin never moves from this spot, it will never be over, and he will never have to reckon with what comes afterwards. He's grown to enjoy the look of tenderness in Daud's eyes, even as he doesn't really understand it or feel it towards others. It was simply new to him: despite everything, there are still new experiences out there in the great and terrible world.
But this is not the end. It never could be.
"Wait here," Daud tells him, near where the Void slips into reality, like where the waves meet the sand of the shore. "You didn't come alone, did you?"
It's not a question, but an assumption.
Kirin frowns as he tries to sort through his drifting memories. "I don't know," he manages in his halting voice. "Corvo?"
"That figures," Daud says with a small smile. It's almost hidden by the fissure across his face, but it's still there. "Wait here," he repeats gently, one hand on Kirin's shoulder.
The replica of the Heart that worked for exactly thirteen minutes, before it crumbled into ash as white as birch bark, had revealed secrets to Kirin about the others with the horrified voice of his victim—"What have you done to me? I... I can see everything. Eternity stretches before me." It had been such a long time ago that Kirin has forgotten his victim's name by now. He'd held the replica to his teacher as it shuddered and contracted: "His apprentice, he calls her. But that's not all they do."
And marveling at all the horrible deeds of those around him, Kirin had come to the conclusion that it was cruelty that turned the world.
Only now, sitting on the steps to eternity, he realizes how terribly wrong he was.
Sitting on the stone steps, he's not afraid this time; no, this time it's not terror that weighs his heart down. The longer he picks at it from some morbid curiosity,
The exhaustion of it all finally reaches him. He cries like his heart is breaking, because it is. He is irrevocably surrendering something, and he cannot even have the luxury of remembering what it was now. How terrible, he thinks, to have become dear to someone.
He sits down on the stone steps and cries into the empty air, uselessly wiping away tears.
Corvo staggers beside him, seeking a respite from the pain that courses through his body and perhaps recognizing that they won't be going anywhere for a little bit. He's no stranger to this.
"Where did you come from?" Kirin asks haltingly, as he surveys the dried blood stains on the stairs. Whose were they? Certainly not his. Corvo's, perhaps. He must have struggled up the steps, badly wounded but determined to see this through, if only for his daughter.
Corvo pats his hand reassuringly, and as Kirin stares at Corvo's worn hand against his own, all he can remember is how, in a different timeline, he'd mistaken the thrill of a new puzzle for desire. What wonders he could have brought to Dunwall—renewable energy, automation, music that made its listeners weep. He remembers the note of pride at seeing the reports of the whale population increasing, not out of any love for the beasts but out of the knowledge that it meant that renewable technology—his technology, the technology of his homeland—was being implemented.
Maybe a different time, then.
He'd found something different in Corvo's arms. Perhaps he'd have spent his whole life in the shadow of what he'd been told signified adulthood, maturity, status. He was supposed to desire others, and he simply did not, not in that way. And he hadn't cared about any of that—look where it got Breanna and Stilton—until he'd come into Corvo's world, first as an unwilling prisoner, and then, an intrigued guest. And Corvo had come to recognize something in Kirin as well. It's not that Kirin was precisely the same as Daud, no one was the same as anyone and Daud had accepted himself a long while ago, but rather that there were enough echoes for Corvo to understand.
(And somewhere, in a different iteration of Dunwall, Kirin lies in his arms, languidly, as they discover each other. "You should kiss me again," Kirin signs with a smirk. "For research purposes, of course."
And Corvo complies with his own wry grin. "What about that one?"
"I think that one will suffice well enough."
And sprawled on a window-perch, they define their own intimacies, not bound by the demands or expectations of what such love should be.)
They will not return to the world as lovers. But that's not all there is to life. He's still afraid, but the future will progress, regardless. He holds Corvo's hand tightly, and steadies himself again. Through the bond that tethers them, he can sense Corvo carefully testing out the limits of this new link to the Void. Perhaps he's not as unused to manipulating space as Kirin might have thought. How fascinating.
And before he realizes it, they've returned to Dunwall Tower.
Corvo guides Kirin back through the hallways in the Tower, where night has solidly settled around it. Corvo's jaw is tense from the pain, but he brings him back to his room all the same. When Kirin peeks through the opened door to his room, the maid is on the edge of his freshly made bed, the quilt neatly tucked and smoothed over. Next to her is a member of the City Watch. The maid's face is blotchy, and she keeps tucking the same strand of hair behind her ear.
"I can't remember when I last saw him," she says to the officer. "This afternoon?"
She trembles a little, from the terror that they'll find his body in some ravine and she'll be blamed for it. Perhaps, he'll never be found and she'll meet the same fate regardless.
"I don't know where he could be," she continues. "He's so gentle now. He's never hurt me, not even when he was terrified. He gets frightened sometimes, and I'm never certain as to why, but that's it." Perhaps, in her own way, she's pleading with the officer to treat him delicately if he's found. "He's so gentle," she repeats to herself quietly, horror creeping in as she imagines what terrible fate could have befallen him.
She glances up at the sudden arrival at the door, her hands twisting at the edge of her apron. Worry gives way to relief. And with that, she pulls him into an embrace so right that the cording of her stays brushes against him. He doesn't quite understand her, but he relaxes, feeling safe in her arms.
"There you are," she says, as she begins to tenderly brush the hair from his hair with her fingers. "You had me worried. I looked everywhere. Where were you?"
"I was in the mines," he says excitedly to her confusion.
She searches his face for a moment, and then decides to leave it for another day. "Well, I'm glad you're back now."
"It seems everything's resolved itself, Anna," the officer says as a means of excusing herself, and it's at that moment that Kirin realizes the maid has had a name this whole time. How unkind he's unwittingly been to her. She's—
"Anna," he says to her.
Surprise registers on her face and is then quickly overtaken by delight.
"Yes?" she replies, unable to repress a smile. She cups his face, overcome with tenderness and pride.
"Anna, I… I'm very tired," he tells her. It's not entirely what he means to say, only what he can find in his weary mind right now. He would like to lie down in a cool, darkened room with someone safe nearby.
"Of course," she says gently, taking his hand, but she cannot help but run her other hand through his hair one last time, her eyes crinkled with joy.
And he cannot help but marvel at how strange and impossible the world is.