For a few seconds, Kirin's chest is painfully tight: all he can do is take shallow breaths to avoid the constriction. He sinks to his knees, trying to soothe this newfound pain, as his other self marvels at the Void.
"A world of perfect emptiness! A complement to our own," his past self says. "The perfect inverse of it! Or should that be 'reflection'?" He picks at some of the dark rock, trying to get enough of a sample to examine later for magnetic properties and the like.
And as Kirin recovers his breath from his place on the floor, closing his eyes to gather himself, he makes his decision.
He reaches out in the Void. Undoing the last of the lines that keep his past self anchored to this time, tenuous as they may be, is as easy as dissolving sugar in water. This disturbs him as well: so, so easy to kill then. A small gasp of fear and surprise, a final why, why you? why not me? before dissolution. But when his past self stumbles in shock towards Kirin, as his consciousness unravels, Kirin can feel an echo of that grasping, frantic fear. He backs away from his own doing, but it's not enough. He can feel it, oh, he can feel it; he's reliving the terror of the chair and the helpless horror of watching his nightmare come true.
When it's all over, and Kirin peeks from behind his fingers to see his own cooling corpse, he doesn't feel relief, only a weariness.
Kirin had needed him then, and now he didn't. It is—and is not—a death, after all. He'd thought of it wrongly. He'd hesitated not out of mercy, but because he needed to see himself, his past self, his intact self, his perfect self, struggling, if only to confirm the strangeness of the world he woke up to and has never left. It had been a kind of wish fulfillment.
If he could look inside himself, really look inside himself like the growth rings inside a tree, he would find that his past self was there too, not as a bygone relic of someone he could not fathom, but as a marker of whom he had been. He did not have to be afraid of losing that person anymore. Yes, his research notes, if he still had had access to them, would have been beyond his comprehension now, but that doesn't mean they weren't still his.
Yet, he was different now. That was indisputable. He had changed and been changed in a steady gradient, and when he looked back at that point in his life, he couldn't understand how it had all come to pass, but it had.
His past self had told him that he was superfluous, but that wasn't really true, was it? Kirin was the one who had merged into this new world and its new roles, not him. In her own way, Breanna had been right: his work would fall into disrepair, his inventions would be forgotten or subsumed. It had always been a poor sort of immortality he'd sought. There was always something else beside it, something he had neglected even as it haunted him.
Perhaps he had first begun to understand it when Hypatia cried for him and he'd been puzzled over it, because he would never have done the same for her. She carried this little part of him in her heart, a reflection of him filtered through her eyes, and would until she died. It wasn't the totality of him, nothing outside of himself ever could be, but it was something. And in the same way, he didn't see the entirety of her, but rather particular traits or words or impressions.
He'd have scoffed at this transient immortality before, if only because he was above the world of the living and their matters of flesh and blood, struggles and love. But now, having spent time among them, at their mercy and their kindness and their cruelty, he's begun to realize that he isn't exempt from this. When he dies, he will linger a little longer in their memories, an incomplete ghost, until they too die, and it won't matter what's written in the books about him—eccentric footnote to Serkonian history as it may be—or which works of art are preserved. There will be no record of him outside of himself, just fragments.
He stands over his own corpse, lying haphazardly like a second skin or a discarded puppet. To leave it—himself and not himself!—here in the desolate realm seems too cruel. He cannot bear the thought of his own corpse never decaying in this lonely place. He moves to pick it up, but as his fingers brush against the lifeless body, time slides against itself roughly. He frowns at this. Why? Why now, when he's closed this door to what could have been?
He tries again, and the Void responds to him with that piercing, alien curiosity.
He dies on the floor of the Clockwork Mansion, trying to make sense of the impossible—the masked intruder standing over his failing body, mirthless and silent.
He dies with the blade of the Clockwork Soldier opening up his gut, a perfect machine to the very end—headless as it may be. His own voice, crackling and gloating, accompanies him to the darkness.
He dies in the chair, hemorrhaging, and his last words are a plea to turn off the machine. He doesn't know if he dies with his mind intact.
He lives when the masked intruder pulls him from the chair at the last moment. They share the shock surging through the machine, and as he crumples onto the floor, his limbs jerking with the residual trauma, all he can do is marvel at this strange mercy. He doesn't understand it, and he never will, but it's enough to make him leave Delilah. Coups are only fun, he thinks, when they're abstract. He spends the rest of his days with only minor neurological damage and a debilitating fear of electricity.
He lives when the masked intruder chokes him unconscious and takes him back to the Dreadful Wale, where he'll spend months bickering, scheming, and finally, reluctantly acquiescing to the demands of the masked intruder. There, he finds himself drawn to the intruder, fascinated by the knifepoint between brutality and restraint. They begin a relationship that will never be recorded in print, but there will be talk at Dunwall Tower about the Royal Protector's Serkonian lover. The roughness of Corvo's worn hands thrills him.
He lives when the masked intruder steals his mind from him, and rather than leave him to the mercy of his staff, brings him to the Dreadful Wale. This time, remorse is heavier than revenge. What the machine has done to Kirin disturbs Sokolov to no end, and he uses his influence at the Academy to propose a rudimentary ethics standard. When he's done, Sokolov brings Kirin with him on his travels to the ice sea beyond Tyvia. Kirin thinks it's incomparably wonderous.
He lives when Daud gives up his futile fight against the Outsider, and they move to Morley, to a small but tidy apartment above a bookshop. He doesn't mind if Daud repeats his stories, because each time he hears them, they're new to him. When Daud dies, a whole flock of beetles come to mourn and then to take him in. And he spends the rest of his life bemused and intrigued by them, but also doted on and cherished. He can't quite figure out if it's the same beetle that comes to tuck him in at night; or to encourage him to talk or build, useless contraptions that they are; or to show him the skyline of Dunwall. By that time, the open sky is simply too big for him, and he prefers to stay in. But the beetles are always there to talk with him.
He dies on the floor of Breanna's apartment, and Daud never thinks about him again, too consumed with his own guilt to consider anything else.
He dies in the Overseers' interrogation room, never understanding what they want from him. His last thought is that the pattern of blood on the wall looks remarkably like the map of Dunwall.
He lives when one of the Overseers cannot go through with the interrogation and hides him instead. This one did not pass the trials only to torture people who don't understand what's going on. The next hour, the Overseer requests a transfer to Tyvia with his sick "brother." In the dark, snow-quiet forests of Dabokva, Kirin gradually forgets his own name and lives out the rest of his days in spitting distance of the place his mother once called home. The Overseer, in turn, considers it his life's work to live so close to the Outsider's handiwork and then resist its taint. He conceals Kirin and teaches him the Seven Strictures over several years, but Kirin understands them only as a set of ritual phrases to soothe the Overseer. Kirin's life is never endangered again, and so he never learns to draw on the Void. A familiarity slowly ensues between them, followed by an almost friendship. When Kirin dies many years later from neurological complications, the Overseer considers him his spiritual masterpiece, to have converted one of the Outsider's chosen heretics to the Scriptures, not through force but through brotherly love. (The Outsider, truth be told, finds this all endlessly amusing.)
He dies soon after his brother takes him in and his mind is stolen from him. At first, his brother is resolute that he can manage both his clerical work and caretaking. He's done it before, after all. When Kirin accidentally overflows the sink, partially flooding the apartment below, unable to figure out how to turn the water off, it becomes apparent that he really can't be left alone for long stretches of time. His brother considers his options and the years Kirin will spend living like this, and makes up his mind. He chooses a drink with a strong flavor and dissolves enough sleeping tablets in Kirin's. His brother will call it a mercy and think otherwise.
He lives when his brother takes him to Addermire instead. He can't remember where they were supposed to be going, but he knows his brother would never hurt him. He doesn't understand when they're separated. He waits for him to come back until he forgets, and then, there is only a starched eternity of sometimes disinterested, sometimes sterilely polite faces, and experimental treatments that don't work, and disorientation and the quiet terror of knowing he's at the inescapable mercy of others. After a while, he goes quiet, and they call it a success. On the way back from Addermire, his brother stands up in the empty carriage, places one foot on the metal body, and throws himself into the sea.
He lives when his brother confesses to Hypatia instead that he cannot bear to put Kirin away, but also that he's overwhelmed with caretaking. They decide on a plan: Kirin spends a few months at Addermire to try to regain some of his basic skills, but it breaks his resolve when he fails to relearn any. In the end, a caretaker is hired to keep him company during the day—an older woman with grown children of her own. She treats Kirin kindly, and he spends the rest of his life being tended to and indulged. The evenings, when his brother comes home from the office, are his favorite time. Sometimes, he wonders if there's something missing, but those thoughts never stay long.
Kirin lives, and he dies, and the Void shows it all to him without remorse, endless spirals of diverging choices.
He clutches at his own corpse like a rag doll, limp limbs dragging against his own, stumbling in the sunless Void, as time unravels before him. Some of the different timelines disturb him greatly, only to be replaced by those he'd gladly live in. He feels that he's spent years following these different trails now, slowly aging and dying and suffering and living. Perhaps, if he had stayed there in the Void, he could have seen the accumulation of every rippling choice in his life, time peeling itself back like old wallpaper. Perhaps he'd have learned something about others, or perhaps he'd have gone mad, unable to make another choice in his life for fear of what it could bring.
But instead, he fumbles in the dark, away, away, away from these tempting and ghastly unspun lives. And perhaps, to stop looking down the hall of mirrors is its own choice.
He wants out of this horrible place now, and the Void always listens.
The boundaries weaken, and before he returns in the world he hardly understands, he glances back—the inevitable pull to the underworld. The Outsider has been watching him with those dark eyes of his, strangely silent. A red-mouthed whale swims behind him, higher and higher in the unblinking dark.
"Why?" Kirin asks, and it seems to encompass everything: why him, why only watch and never intervene, why let him stumble and suffer, why, why, why.
The Outsider ignores the question. Perhaps it's too trite to warranted an answer, or perhaps he's grown callous to it. "Lives unlived always seem the most appealing, don't they?" And there's a note of bitterness this time—the only crack in the detached cynicism. "You think you'll forget them, but they never leave."
Kirin considers this. "You must not have any," he says carefully. "Any lives unlived." The Outsider's phrase is strange to him, and he manages it at last.
"Everything leaves an imprint," the Outsider replies, and Kirin cannot tell if this is an answer or an aside. "But what will you do now? You can be free in a way you'd have shunned before. Names are impermanent."
Kirin watches him, confused. His arms ache from carrying around his own corpse. He cannot leave it in the Void—no, not that!—nor can he bear it.
"I want to go back," Kirin says. And as he does so, it seems to him that he sees the Outsider differently. He's no longer this strange being, capricious and cruel, but a strangely youthful deity. No lines mark his face, like they do with Daud, there's no grey in his hair. There is simply no time here.
If the Outsider were to stand with his feet on the ground, he'd be shorter than Kirin. Perhaps his growth was halted before it was done, but what could kill a god? Perhaps it's because he's been so recently attuned to others out of necessity, that he recognizes this detail, whereas he might have dismissed it as superfluous.
What had his past self said? Facsimiles of revenge? If all of this is about vicarious power, it's a failed experiment. The Outsider should have known that from the start. Kirin thinks of Daud's final goal, the thing he holds to himself like a lantern. That, also, must been known by the Outsider, who sees and hears all—the god who only watches. Why not revoke his gift then?
He thinks of his own deaths, which are still so fresh in his mind.
"Is death one of them?" he asks the Outsider on a hunch. He mimics a branching path with his fingers.
"By necessity, each choice has something that didn't come to pass," the Outsider answers neatly. "You have perhaps gotten closer to this diverting paths than any of my other Marked. How interesting. How did it feel to die over and over again? To know that your life has hinged on the choices of others just as much as your own? Time moves relentlessly forward, but you already know that. How does it feel to live with the things you've lost? To live with the choices others have made for you?"
No, this was not about some voyeuristic power fantasy for the Outsider, watching gleefully as oceans of blood fill the streets of Karnaca or Dunwall, waiting for the moment of accusation, the comeuppance, the sweet reversal of fate. Not this time. This was maybe not even about revenge. It was about mourning, and if Kirin understood how the Void had come to be propped up with the body of a street urchin, perhaps he'd understand it too. But he doesn't. And instead, he only stares at a reluctant, useless god.
The Outsider considers something, crossing his arms. "Some men find mercy in death, and some find relief. Far more fear it, and most pretend they'll never die. It takes them by surprise when it happens. I've seen dukes crumble, and pious men begging me for another day, another hour. Day in and day out, I hear pleas from the beggar in the street to the sick child."
"You don't save any of them," Kirin replies. It's not an accusation, but a simple statement. He's not convinced he'd do any differently.
"How can they have mercy when there's none to give?" the Outsider answers. "What could I give them, if I could? Another day of suffering? Another sunrise of misery?"
"The world forms itself around you," Kirin says, repeating what Daud told him.
The Outsider shakes his head with a knowing smile. "I'm only the observer in the storm, not its center."
Kirin thinks that other people could say the same about him, but he's beginning to suspect that he's shaping the world just by existing—not in the grandiose sense he once knew, but in the smaller sense, by the simple virtue of being among people. Perhaps that's inescapable.
"Why did you give me your Mark?" Kirin asks at last. he's only dimly aware of the reasons that have been suggested: to watch him suffer, to find some malicious amusement in watching him flounder.
The Outsider considers him with those lifeless eyes. "Because I want to see what you make of the world." Because I wanted to is perhaps the real answer, but Kirin doesn't decipher this.
Kirin tears himself away from that unfathomable gaze, grasping for the boundary between the Void and the world of the living. And he knows that he will not be miraculously saved, and he will not be spared the horrors, but perhaps, there must be something else that waits for him out there, in the great and gut-wrenching world.
He's back in Daud's hideout.
Daud's sitting on the windowsill, his back to Kirin and one leg up as he scans the dark skies, or perhaps ponders them. At the creaking of the floorboards, Daud only smiles to himself. "You keep changing," he says, carefully climbing down.
Kirin, in turn, keeps holding the corpse close to him, unable to relinquish it. The way the evening light fell through the windows of the little apartment still haunts him. Perhaps, in another turn, he and Daud are still sitting on the sofa somewhere far away as Daud tells him something from his childhood.
But he has to live without it.
It's only then that he realizes that Daud has been speaking softly and carefully to him, the same way that you'd speak to an injured animal. Just a stream of soft words, as his fingers slowly, methodically pry the corpse away from him.
"I saw everything," he tells Daud. "In the Void. In the Void, there's everything." And as he does so, he loses his grasp on the corpse as he tells him about all the images in his head that he can't really make sense of anymore. The Void and its alien curiosity, his own death, his brother. The events are scattered and out of time, and Daud listens patiently, having taken up the corpse, as he reassembles them.
All his life, Kirin's longed for an equal to understand his great heights, and now, he's been damned to the inverse: perpetually trapped in a world where almost everyone understands far more than him. There's nothing to look forward to now: he understands that this state won't change for him. He won't magically get his mind back.
But isn't that too much to bear?
"I'm afraid," he tells Daud, the only way he can articulate the sheer despair that comes up when he thinks of the future. He can't explain how he understands that everything about him takes effort and planning for very little reward. He'll never make Karnaca prosperous; he'll likely never contribute to the scientific record ever again. He'll have to find something new to love, and he doesn't think he can anymore. What could possibly fill the hole that inventing left?
"First things first," Daud replies wryly. "Let's get you back to bed, and then I'll bury this."
Kirin remembers suddenly that he's been in his nightshirt this entire time. "I want to—I want to bury it," he manages, gesturing towards the body—his body.
Daud surveys him. "Alright," he says. "I suppose you ought to have that."
Daud chooses a spot away from the lights of the city, near the woods, and all Kirin can think as they shovel the soft earth into heaps is that everything is ending before him. Even this moment will be over. He can't seem to preserve any of this, no matter how hard he tries. Even those unlived lives, as vivid as they were, are beginning to sink into his subconscious. And then, where will they be? Who will remember them?
He's at his own burial, and he can't bear it. He sinks to the ground, trying to ward off his fear and frustration.
"It's almost over," Daud reassures him.
"I wish it wasn't," Kirin confesses.
Daud frowns. "What wasn't over?"
But Kirin's thoughts have left again, always leaving, and the only thing he knows is that nothing stays.
"I don't know," he replies earnestly. Those are words he'd rather have died before saying in the past, but now they're just a painful reminder of the present. Despite everything, he can't seem to gain any hold on it.
Daud ambles over to him, his limbs stiffened not from age but in pain.
"It hurts you," Kirin says, and it's a strange thought that other people can have the same feelings and sensations that he has. He's never really considered it before. He knows how a festering wound feels, the pulsing pain and dull nausea, and maybe Daud feels the same. What an odd thought.
Daud grimaces faintly, then takes a deep, steadying breath against the wave of pain. "I touched the blade that killed the black-eyed bastard and made him a god. It doesn't sit well." The temporal wound aches inside Daud, turning over like a restless sleeper, wanting only its own reunion with the Void.
"He died?" Kirin asks. "He was—he was alive once?"
"He'll find out what it's like to die a second time." Then his tone softens. "Don't worry about it. A man's got to have a war with something."
You could give it up, Kirin thinks. You did once. It's less of a clear thought and more of a feeling at this point. He doesn't know where this amorphous memory comes from.
Daud shovels more dirt over the corpse, and pauses a moment, taking Kirin's silence for sadness. "Just north of here is a patch where some of the strongest herbs grow. My mother used to ask me to harvest them from time to time."
"Your mother?" Kirin can't remember much of his own mother now. Just the knowledge that she never wanted anything to do with him. He'd thought it fitting at the time, saw it as a sign of his own superiority that she, who could never understand his gift, didn't want him around, but now he's not so sure.
Daud pauses. "We can take a look at it, but then you have to go back. You don't want people to worry."
Kirin's not sure if he's ever cared if people worry before. Before, that seemed like a concern for the lesser people. If anything, that would have been moderately amusing. But he agrees to this, if only to have this moment.
They pass the rest of the burial in silence, save for Daud's occasional soft intakes of pain and Kirin's quiet, periodic chatter about whichever insect he's spotted creeping about in the moonlight. Then, the last of the dirt is displaced, and there is only the broken-up soil to mark what has been done. When Kirin comes back to this spot, he will not recognize it: the grasses, ferns, wildflowers, and, in the Month of Rain, the brown mushrooms with their grey gills, will have advanced and darned the upturned patch of earth.
And with that, Daud leads Kirin to a small clearing. Some of the wildflower blooms have closed for the evening, and others reflect the moonlight with white, wide flowers, or closer to the ground, small, five-petaled stars. Daud's fingers trace the thin vine of morning glory, sliding along the ground, entangling itself in the grasses.
"They're all still here," he says.
Kirin searches for his notebook to jot down a quick note before he forgets what he's looking at, and then remembers that he's in his nightshirt. His notebook is miles and miles away on his bedside table. "I'll forget," he says, afraid. "I'll forget." What a waste this all was. Now he won't remember any of it, and it may as well not have happened.
"I'll remember it for you," Daud says. "And when we get back, I'll put it down in your notebook. Tell me what you want to remember."
Kirin's not sure it will work, but he points out particular aspects of the scene that Daud overlooked. The way the jasmine hung from the overgrowth in a cloud of dense, almost oversweetness; the dried flowerheads of the snapdragons with their eyeless sockets; the curling ferns. At Daud's suggestion, Kirin collects a few to press later. He's careful to not crush them. This is just one of the many moments that will slip through his fingers, and yet, it still happened.
"Come on," Daud says in a gentler tone. "Time to get you back."
And they do.
As Kirin settles back into bed, surveying the way that the night sky has slowly settled into the earliest of mornings, Daud, in turn, keeps his word, making his rough sketches in Kirin's notebook: a composition perhaps not of a singular memory, but from overlapping ones. It will never be called a masterwork, nor perhaps even the work of a talented hand, but it's beautiful in its own right.
Kirin falls asleep easily now, and it doesn't take long until he does so. Daud readjusts the covers, and then he pauses. He turns to the very end of the notebook and taps the pen thoughtfully against the page, as he considers something. And before he leaves, he jots something down, just in case.