The Duke sends for him shortly.
The message, left in official ink and paper, directs Kirin to meet the Duke at the jail to discuss "an important matter," and Kirin's heart sinks accordingly. He can't decide yet, not yet.
"You'll be alright," his maid reassures him as they walk there, her hand in his. "The Duke is a fair man. He won't give you any trouble."
It's not the Duke that Kirin's worried about, but he doesn't tell her.
Once there, they are separated: the maid waits in the lobby of the jail as Kirin joins the Duke and a few members of the Grand Guard. The new environment is overwhelming, and it's difficult to follow the conversation between the Duke and the Grand Guard. Kirin doesn't realize he's lost them until he's staring at an empty corridor with no idea of how he got there.
The cells are all identical, and fortunately for Kirin, empty.
He wanders a little further, growing increasingly worried about how to get back to the group.
A bout of dizziness comes over him, and he crouches down, tightly shutting his eyes against the swirling walls and clutching at himself to keep from passing out. Oh, how is he supposed to get back now? Will they look for him? Will they even remember to do so?
Something changes near him. He squints, his curiosity piqued. It seems that the door to a nearby cell changes in shape and form—something not of this world, or perhaps something alien interlaid over it.
It mesmerizes him. Did he do that, or did something respond to him? He rises to his feet. What was this?
Noise comes from one of the halls. They've found him. The leader of the Grand Guard breathes a sigh of relief, and when Kirin turns back towards the door again, it's simply normal steel door again.
"It's dangerous to wander around," the leader of the Grand Guard says, as if Kirin didn't know that already.
"Here," the Duke says as he offers his hand to Kirin.
The tips of the Duke's fingers are stained yellow from smoking—the smallest of giveaways, a little differentiation despite it all. Kirin accepts his hand, embarrassed now, and they continue back on the path. What's it like to be able to wander and not get lost? He misses that too now. Is the rest of his life really going to be being escorted from place to place?
The Duke makes some small talk on the way there to keep Kirin's mind occupied, which Kirin supposes is an improvement already since most people don't seem to think he has a mind left to keep occupied. The questions are diplomatically mild, steering clear of any mention of his disability—has he enjoyed the weather? Has he seen anything interesting lately? Still, it's nice to be treated like a person, and Kirin doesn't mind it. It is unusual for the Duke to hold hands with anyone on official business, but Kirin's fragility allows for certain rules to be bent.
They follow the members of the Grand Guard down the dark corridors of the jail, shot through with harsh slivers of sunlight. The bright red jacket of the leader reminds Kirin of a cardinal bouncing through the shadows, and he daydreams about a bird-machine, gleaming golden and bronze, as he holds onto the Duke's hand. Once at their destination, the Duke signals the Grand Guard to leave them.
"I'm in no danger from some frail madman," the Duke says with a knowing smile. "Kirin and I are perfectly safe."
A moment of hesitation, swallowed words of concern, Fragility never stopped any man from killing or perhaps It'll be my neck if the madman gets either of you. But the leader acquiesces, and the Grand Guard leave them.
"Now, we can talk," the Duke says, carefully cordial. He surveys Kirin's other self, who is badly shaken by the harsh conditions of imprisonment, but not yet broken by them. "I'm prepared to offer you a mutually beneficial arrangement. We will decide on a story. You were temporarily addled, and you thought you were someone else. Pick whatever name you want. From there, we can decide on what you will work on. No more of the Clockwork Soldiers, I'm afraid, but Karnaca has need of other inventions and your replacement is only that."
Kirin's other self smiles a little, self-satisfied at the flattery. Still, there's an underlying resentment—the humiliation of being carried off like that. "I want to be myself."
"It's not possible," the Duke replies.
"Then, there's no point." Kirin's other self sits back on the thin bed with its bleached sheets. "If I cannot be myself, who am I?"
"The finest inventor Karnaca has ever known, and also her most traitorous," the Duke replies smoothly. He considers something. "Why the attachment to a name? Names come and go."
Kirin's other self looks hard at the Duke, and there is an unspoken for you, perhaps that passes between them. But that is too dangerous to voice.
"You have no living family that I'm aware of," the Duke continues. "No partner, no children. Why not a fresh start?"
"Why must partners or children matter?" Kirin's other self counters, more defensively than he means to be. "They're no mark of anyone's greatness. No one speaks of Sokolov's eight children, grown-up as they no doubt are now, only of the man himself. When you look upon a creation, you also obliquely gaze upon its inventor, who has shaped this part of reality in his image. Without a name to string the inventions together, there is nothing. You would break the record of me."
"Of you?" the Duke asks.
"Yes. Great men reshape the world in their image. There is no greater mark of power than to be able to pluck a design from your own mind—where it rests as a dream of the imagination, nestled between the synapses—and bring it to life." This is perhaps the most he will ever reveal of himself to another, but Kirin has never been able to refuse an audience, and Kirin's past self is really no different.
Without the traditional signifiers of success—a partner and children to pass the family name down—Kirin chose the unconventional means of achieving immortality, or at least the perception of it. And he pushed himself so hard for those twenty frenetic years of little sleep and little sustenance, perhaps because he was so uninterested in having a partner and children, and what else was there for a man? What other means of immortality were there? Perhaps that's why he stamped his name on every single invention he had mass-produced, every unique device. A kind of talisman against the namelessness of death itself.
And what had his empire come to in those two months of his incapacity? The clockworks were almost no longer, the very last few patrolling the interior of the Bank; his mansion, his technological marvel, slowly turning to ruins, unable to be fixed by the new Grand Inventor; the silvergraphs and their processing materials were relegated to boxes in the Academy's storage facilities. At least the audiographs were still in use, the remainder of his genius.
He had simply been swept from the world, despite his efforts.
Perhaps, what Kirin's past self is seeking is one final effort to make things right for him again, to take the last few years remaining to him and prevent his lapse into obscurity.
The Duke considers this. "You cannot take that name. If you did, you would immediately be considered fit to stand trial for treason against Her Majesty Empress Emily Kaldwin."
"For something I haven't done yet?" Kirin's other self crosses his arms and leans back.
"Something you've already done," the Duke amends.
Kirin's other self raises his eyebrows in disbelief, but says nothing.
The Duke takes this as a sign. "I'm offering you a state-of-the-art laboratory in the Dust District. A generous stipend. Your pick of the brightest assistants from the Academy. Open invitations to the finest events at the Palace. All I ask in return is that you use your talents for the benefit of Karnaca. Prosthetics. Automation. Quick tests to detect toxins. Protective mining equipment."
Behind the bars, Kirin's other self is small and grey, but still grimly determined to bargain.
"Wise men know when to accept the terms of an arrangement," the Duke presses.
"Only fools accept an unequal one," Kirin's other self counters seamlessly.
"An unequal one?" the Duke repeats, blinking. "Then, we're at an impasse."
"It seems so," Kirin's other self replies. There's no note of disappointment or frustration in his voice, though. This is simply the end of a game whose conclusion he saw several steps ago. Perhaps, he never meant to consider the arrangement in the first place, but meant to drag it out as a way of reminding the Duke that he needs Kirin's talents far more than he needs the Duke. He's willing to wait it out, deplorable conditions as they may be. He's plucked himself from prosecution once, and he'll manage it again.
Karnaca simply has too much to lose without him.
The Duke signals to Kirin that they're leaving. Kirin is reluctant to leave his other self there, remembering how miserable and cold the cells are. He still remembers counting every single one of the bricks in the cell where he was held when he was held for carrying out experiments on his "peers." There, in his mind, he rearranged the bricks into patterns, into exponential functions, dividing and multiplying and hypothesizing all to keep from boredom.
Everything he can no longer do.
He's still trying to figure out who he is without those prodigious talents that defined him, for right or wrong. And if he lets his past self go, he'll lose the only link he has left to that before time. If the Duke can make his past self see reason, what will be Kirin's purpose for existing? Karnaca will have the "correct" Kirin, the one who can endlessly benefit it, and he'll only be in the shadows, watching what he should do—could have done.
Daud stops by the cottage later, paler than usual now. The damage has begun to accumulate.
"Will you take me to the baker?" Kirin asks at last. This is something he must see for himself.
They travel together. Kirin no longer needs Daud's help to travel across the rooftops: it's point of pride at his newfound skill, but also a distant sadness as well. Maybe he had begun to enjoy being helped and looked after—at least this once.
They come to one of the simple houses in Karnaca. Not opulent, not run-down, just a common, clean house with the bakery on the ground floor and the living arrangements on the first. Through an open window, Kirin can see the baker—a man in his fifties, greyed hair, stubble, sitting quietly on a quilted bed spread.
They travel inside the bedroom now.
Kirin is afraid now. Should he go further?
He glances back at Daud, who only gives him an encouraging nod.
Timidly, Kirin approaches the baker, unable to anticipate the reaction to his presence. In turn, the baker doesn't register his arrival at all, only continues to stare at the striped wallpaper—a machine at rest. Kirin doesn't even remember the man's name; it wasn't important at the time, and the whole thing reminds him of a fairytale his brother told him, about evil spirits stealing away people's names. Who stole his name?
It would be easier to leave this sight behind and never reckon with it again, but Kirin cannot. It's like picking at an old wound. He has done this to another living being out of scientific curiosity, but truthfully, mostly for his own amusement in destroying a lesser being.
And now what is left? A few notes already burned by the Academy? A blurred memory, drifting out to sea? What was one man's mind worth?
Kirin wants to ask the man if he still dreams—that has been lost to him. Does he write his thoughts down too, to preserve them as best he can? Or does he simply relinquish them to the nothingness? There is safety to the nothingness that ordinary people don't understand, but also a death beyond measure.
All of his questions go unanswered.
Kirin tries and tries, but nothing moves the baker to answer. Is this his final act of revenge? To deny the man who burned his mind away the final secrets of it? Even that would imply a recognition, and Kirin sees nothing of the sort in the baker's eyes.
There is a only terrible loneliness in the gulf between them. Kirin doesn't know what he expected from any of this. A guide to help him understand this new state? Someone to commiserate with? Anything to feel less of a burden?
Kirin sits on the bed beside the perfectly still baker, and holds his head in his hands to clear the swirling thoughts. Downstairs, the baker's daughter is chatting with customers and filling orders with an easiness she wears because she doesn't want the pity. She is more than the violence that has been visited upon her house.
Methodically, the baker pulls at the edges of the handkerchief in perhaps the same way that a pie would be crimped, into the shape of a flower. He holds the middle taut so that it forms the center, and places the handkerchief-flower into Kirin's hands. As the baker lets go, the linen flower falls apart in Kirin's hands, briefly blooming. The cloth unfolds back into a neatly hemmed square, perhaps a little more creased than usual, but Kirin understands how wrong he's been this whole time.
He examines the little piece of cloth, this little gesture of kindness: despite everything, despite living in his own unreachable world now, the baker hadn't wanted to see him sad.
Perhaps Kirin deserves nothing of this: he's been a selfish, cruel man for most of his existence; he has done incalculable, irreparable harm in the name of progress, and yet, there's something that his violence could not take away. He could not burn out the human to find the machine at its core. That was impossible. Even now, despite it all, the baker kept his humanity in the same way that Kirin did—that could never be burned out.
He had only figured other people to be puzzles to solve: their behavior, their minds, their bodies, the secret workings of all could be determined. How wrong he was. There is something beyond all of that, something unpredictable. The baker's gesture is simply one of the resonances of life, a note strung out into the air, seeking its own complement.
Some of the terms that some of the crueler members of the Academy would call this exchange between them floats to his mind: "the secret language of the addled" being the least horrific. Kirin doesn't think he'll ever escape the dim knowledge that he's considered less than human now, a talking pet. He's not sure now where he heard that phrase, but it haunts him.
His head hurts badly now. The thoughts recede, and he's only staring at a creased handkerchief with no knowledge of what it meant or how it got there, or even how he got to this tidy, if modestly furnished bedroom. The stairs creak: the daughter is coming upstairs now.
Daud reaches for Kirin, and they reappear on a nearby roof. The baker's bedroom is only another window in the sea of houses now, but Kirin can see the daughter come into the room. She chats with her father, squeezing his hand as she tells him about someone she just saw—an old friend perhaps. There's no change across the baker's face, but Kirin suspects that he likes to be told these things, to be kept in the social loop.
There's an unfurled handkerchief beside the baker, but Kirin cannot remember the significance of it all now. Something fragile has been lost, and he forgot to write it down in time.
"It's gone," he tells Daud. It takes a moment before he realizes that he is not actually telling Daud this, but pleading with him. Maybe Kirin had wanted to hold onto that memory for just a little longer to feel less alone.
"It happens," Daud replies with a measure of gentleness.
Not to you flashes through Kirin's mind, half-articulated but still felt. A wild anger burns inside of him. Daud knew it was a punishment, an invisible mark left upon him forever, for what? For building a few mechanical soldiers and lending them to a coup? A coup that the Empress, with her perennial luck, had escaped unharmed? Good men had died, true, but good men die on the streets of Karnaca and Dunwall every day from want of food or shelter.
Did he really deserve to live the rest of his life with his thoughts like mirages? Did anyone have the right to do that? There are moments when he feels that it would be kinder to be dead than have to endure this, and he cannot bear for the remainder of his life to be moments of enduring.
He cannot keep the moments of pain nor of beauty, it seems. Rather, there are precious moments that, despite his notebook, fall into the gaps of his memory.
And if he could unmake himself, he would and choose it gladly. But he cannot.
He doesn't know how anymore.
"Please, kill me," he pleads. "Make me die."
(He's said that to someone else, a shadowy figure, too.)
His request visibly disturbs Daud. "What?" Daud asks.
"I won't remember everything. There's no point."
Daud collects himself. "No one remembers everything," he says.
"But they remember what's important to them," Kirin replies, distressed. "It's gone again. Gone, gone, gone."
And for a moment, he thinks Daud understands, and there is only horror in that understanding. Daud cannot tell him the meaning of what happened back there in the baker's home, that moment passed between Kirin and the baker. What Daud perceived was not what Kirin experienced.
Kirin's thoughts change again, and it pains him to feel them doing so. But he cannot give into the desperate rage inside him. He has only one dim memory of doing so, fragments really, and that produced a fear in his servants that he didn't enjoy. He doesn't want to frighten Daud away.
He doesn't remember now what he asked Daud that has shaken him so. All he can feel are the remnants now: unease in his limbs, as if he has revealed something he shouldn't have.
"You're overtired," Daud replies. "I keep asking too much of you." At Kirin's confusion, he softens. "You're just overtired."
He keeps repeating that explanation as if he needs to believe it.
Kirin suspects that he has spoken nonsense again, but Daud has never been unsettled by that before. He doesn't want Daud to leave, not yet. Within Daud, the temporal wound is stretching and yawning, rotting him from the inside. Kirin can see it, he's the only one who can see it. Can he not fix it?
He places a hand on Daud's arm, over the writhing wound. Daud only gives him a look of half understanding and half fatherly tenderness, before enclosing Kirin's hand in his own, his worn hand that has choked and broken bodies and saved.
Daud gently pulls Kirin's hand away from him. "It's alright," he says at last.
But it's not alright, and it'll never be right again. Oh, he wants to keep Daud forever, pinned like one of his beetles, and that is a cruel thing in its own right. He's helpless against this loss that has not yet occurred, but has begun to slip in, regardless. Daud has always been one of those people who resists pinning: he'd prefer to die like a wild animal does, on his own.
Time is slipping through his fingers. Eventually, they will come to their last meeting, the bottom of the hourglass, and Kirin will have to bear that as well. He's not ready, but who ever is? Perhaps Kirin has always been fascinated with fixing time, saving it to one immutable point. His silvergraphs stole moments of time from its stolid passage, liberated it from the artist's eye and the writer's pen. He was so close to replicating a facsimile of time itself, moving pictures that would repeat their order perfectly, endlessly, freed from age and death.
His silvergraphs, which are slowly breaking down in the basement of the Academy, are almost entirely of dead people now. In time, he too will be dead, and that will be the end of him. He will be only a face in a portrait, a face that will perhaps distort and fade as the silvergraph does, a face permanently fixed to a moment in time and also free from all that came before it.
Kirin can't really articulate how afraid he's becoming of other people now, being constantly subjected to their whims. He's increasingly aware that there is a difference between himself and other people—and that other people can discern this difference quite easily. The thought of it all makes him nervous. Whatever it is, it's outside his control, and yet, he wishes it weren't.
He hadn't written down any of what the doctors had said to him, because he hadn't wanted to remember it, but he hadn't known that someone could talk to him in that way. It's just another lingering phantom of a realization, detached from its context. Maybe the maid will get weary of him and start to talk to him that way too.
It's always a gamble, talking with other people, and he's quickly getting to the point where he doesn't want to leave the house anymore.
"Let's go to the seashore," his maid says at last, sitting beside him. "It's beautiful out, and it'll be nice to see something pleasant."
He agrees, even though he really doesn't want to, because it's better to make her happy, he thinks, than to risk making her upset if he refuses. After all, he'll get sent to Addermire if he's not good. He can't remember now who told him that. He doesn't think she did.
The seashore is as it always is. Dark-brown seaweed lie in serpentine heaps along the sandy dunes. The waves advance and recede like a heartbeat. Further to the west, the line between sky and sea blurs: perhaps it stretches all the way to the Void. It's not possible, Kirin decides. Not in that way.
The sand warms him, and his maid talks softly to him as they rest on the seashore.
"I wonder if we'll see a jellyfish today," she says. "They're supposed to be quite beautiful."
She draws one on the wet sand: a rough sketch that Kirin might have looked down upon as painfully amateur before. Now, it's simply a sketch that he recognizes the outline of a jellyfish in, regardless of artistic merit.
She invites him to draw one of his own, but he refuses, nervous about drawing any attention to himself now. He wants to hide away forever and ever. There is something wrong with him, and he doesn't want anyone else to see it. Maybe when he gets back to the cottage, he'll spend some time in front of the mirror and he'll figure out what's wrong with him, and then how to hide it.
She pauses in thought. "Have you ever built a sandcastle?" she asks.
He can't remember clearly now. Just a few moments, just out of frame: finding the correct consistency of sand to water, watching the jellyfish dry up on the shore, flicking sand at the pale grey sand crabs that stared back at him with their alien eyes.
"I don't know," he says at last. He's too warm now, and the calls of the circling seagulls pierce him.
"My father showed me how to make sandcastles like this," she begins. She digs a hole so that some of the water from the incoming wave swirls away and is trapped there. Then she mixes in some sand so that the consistency is fluid yet firm. She lets some of the mixture flow through her almost closed hand so that it falls in spirals and loops.
Kirin considers this strangely ornate sand castle. He can't quite pinpoint the exact moment everything becomes too much to bear, but it does. His words are all tangled in each other. He's not sure how to tell her that everything is too bright and too warm and far too loud. Pain. Maybe that would be a good summary. He tries to sign the word to her. His movements are quick and jerky from his distress.
She considers this carefully. "Pain?" she confirms.
He nods. His skin hurts from the overstimulation.
"Should we go back home?" she asks.
He nods again. It's exceedingly difficult to follow her words when all he wants is a dark, cool place to lie down for a little bit.
She nods in confirmation. She brusquely brushes the sand off herself, before dusting him off more gently, as if she's afraid she could hurt him by accident. Taking him by the hand, she guides him back to the cottage, and then to the sofa.
"What hurts?" she asks.
He tries to tell her, but his words come out wrong again. He clasps a hand to his head.
"Your head?" she confirms.
He nods. He's terrified that she'll lose her patience with him any moment now. Part of his fractured mind supplies him with the long, long list of names people like him get called. Maybe she'll grab him by the arm and pull him to bed as a punishment. Maybe she'll hit him. He doesn't know where any of those fears originated from, only that they're there now.
"Want to lie down a bit?" she asks in a softer voice now, placing a hand on his arm. She's noticed his trembling.
She doesn't begin her task until she has his consent. She darkens his bedroom, shutting the curtains against the strong Karnacan sun and pulling the black-and-white-striped covers off the bed. Kirin remembers them from the mansion: they seem so out of place here, a temporal orphan rearranged into a new timeline. Then, she helps him into a fresh nightshirt, something less restrictive than his day clothes, and once he's slipped under the covers, tucks them around him. The pillow is wonderfully cool against his cheek.
"There we go," she whispers, gathering up his clothes. "Rest a little and I'll be back with a compress soon." There's a slight weariness under her words that gives him pause.
Under the covers, he worries. Some of the sensory overload has begun to fade now, leaving him with the fear that he's done something bad. Maybe she's just pretending not to be angry with him. Maybe she's begun to resent him for being broken.
True to her word, she returns with a clean, damp cloth.
"I'm afraid," he tells her. "I'm very afraid."
She surveys him. "It's alright," she replies. "I'm here now." Brushing away some of his hair from his forehead, she places the compress there.
It hurts in a way he had never expected. Just having something on his forehead brings him back to the chair and the sparks and the burnings and the futile pleas and the horrible understanding of it all. He recoils from her. The compress falls onto the blankets.
His words blur together. "You can't have put me through the machine—no, no—turn it off—turn it off—you don't know what you're doing—turn it off—"
His inexplicable terror frightens her in turn.
She pales, and he feels as incomprehensible as a wild animal in his fear. First comes the weariness, then the resentment, then the abuse.
What happened, her lips trace out soundlessly.
Kirin's body stiffens automatically, unconsciously anticipating that she'll put her hands on him next. It's just a matter of time. He was so foolish to not have just endured everything.
To his surprise, she doesn't hit him. Instead, she collects herself, and taking a deep breath, offers her faintly shaking hand to him. She's afraid of him too in that moment, possibly fearing he might strike out at her in his terror, like a cornered animal does. But her gesture of fearful hope moves him, and he doesn't know what to do with the realization that she's just as afraid of him as he is of her.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs. "I didn't mean to scare you. I didn't know it would scare you."
Gingerly, he accepts her hand, and she slowly draws him towards her, to where she can soothe him.
"That was really scary, wasn't it?" she continues in a soft voice. "It's ok now. Shhh, shhh, it's ok."
She holds him gently for a few moments. His breathing steadies in turn, and his body starts to relax again.
She releases him from the embrace with a small smile. "See? All better now. You just got scared; that's all."
He's not sure what to think now. He's embarrassed at his display, but he also can't remember what happened. In turn, she only squeezes his hand again, before rearranging the covers.
"You did so well," she says.
He watches her nervously, but when her gentle praise fails to change into anything else, he accepts it. Perhaps she wouldn't have been upset with him if he had told her he didn't want to go to the seashore, but rather would have chalked it up to the fact that he's a person with wants of his own. He's still trying to figure out how to live in the state he's been left in, and maybe she is too.
He's become so unsure of his own wants after waking up to a foreign world that he let other people tell him what he wanted, and even now, it's still a struggle to remember himself. But he can see now that she didn't mean anything malicious by it.
And for right now, for this fraction of time, curled up in the blankets, he thinks he can try again.
It's dark now, and he cannot stop thinking about his other self in that miserable cell.
Perhaps, he could go see him again, and they could talk properly about all of this. For all of what happened in the Clockwork Mansion, he understands. He'll have to decide: this is no solution, and he would never be happy living under someone else's name. Then what? Death is out of the question, for either of them. He thinks of his past self with a certain nostalgia. He will never be that person again.
But how to get there? He doesn't think anyone will take him there, and he'd only get lost on the way.
He runs his hand across the wall, sensing where the Void curls and pulses. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a crawlspace between this world and the Void? Somewhere he could be by himself for a little bit.
The Mark on the back of his hand burns.
For a fleeting moment, before it recedes and he's left staring at the space he's created, or rather the Void has created through him, he understands. The Void is not a static thing, anymore than any living being is. No rules could be written about it, simply because it is constantly changing and masterless. It responds to him out of an alien curiosity, is responding, refracted though him.
He conceptualizes the world as orderly and manipulatable, with clean, clear lines between time and death, and that's how it appears for him with the magic of the Void. Rather than producing a new vision of the world, the Void has merely reflected his own understanding of it back at him.
Then his thoughts leave, and he's staring at a mirage of a crawlspace door with little knowledge of what he was doing before. He just has to trust himself. It's a painful thing to do after his struggles with his own limitations, but he takes a deep breath and does so. Trailing his hand along the guiding strand of the Void, he crawls into the space between the world and the Void. No light nor darkness greets him there, just a grey nothingness.
He presses on.
The space turns here and there, appearing more as a spiral at times than a proper crawlspace. He follows it down, regardless—he's made his decision. And then, he's standing in the interior of the jail cell.
His other self raises himself from the thin bed where he'd been laying on his back and arranging his next seven moves according to intricate scenarios.
"You're full of secrets," his other self says, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. "You must have seen reason, even if that fool could not. Swap places with me."
Kirin shakes his head.
"Fine," his other self replies. "What have you come here for? Revenge? Surely not. To show me mercy? Also unlikely. To taunt me? Perhaps. Do you think I can fix you?" A faint smile. "We both know the answer to that, don't we? The human mind is not as fixable as the flesh." His gaze falls to Kirin's left hand. "Surely, you've reconsidered?"
Kirin ignores the monologue. "You're entangled in the Void," he says simply. "I can see it."
His other self only stares at him.
"I tried to set you free, but I... time is wrong now." His fingers twists at each other. "Delilah's ritual, it broke something in the Void. It left an imprint of me there in Stilton's house." The thoughts will flee soon, he can feel it. He's afraid of it. "I can show you the Void," he continues. "If I bring you there, it might fix you. But it also might change you. It drove Delilah mad, and she was a witch."
"I don't care. I'm restless in here," his other self replies, dismissive and self-assured. "Any longer and I'll have to take myself apart for fun."
It's not quite the same as sharing the Void magic with his past self, right? Daud won't be angry with him over that, surely. Still, he has to be careful. His other self won't have any qualms about ending him. It's like being locked in a pen with a bored tiger.
His thoughts are slipping through his fingers, and before they leave, he turns to the wall, towards the strands of the Void that encircles the walls, moving like tendrils past the concrete and slats of wood, in the hopes that he'll understand what to do next.
His thoughts are blank, and he's trying to figure out what he's already done. All he knows is that he's somehow gotten himself in the jail cell. He just has to trust himself.
He reaches out towards the strands of the Void that encircles the walls, moving like tendrils past the concrete and slats of wood, and with a burst of effort, bridges the gap between this world and the Void.
As the familiar, coldly fresh air rushes them, all Kirin can think is that he has made a terrible mistake.