Kirin stares at the brightening window in his bedroom, uncomprehending. He's… in his cottage, yes, that's it. He's… alone. He could be anywhere, it seems. His thoughts are difficult to corral, instead they come apart like wool roving, separating under the light pressure into thick strands. He's seen this done before, but where?
"It's something the noblemen like to teach their daughters," someone had said. She's vague in his thoughts now. He struggles to put a name to her: Breanna. Yes, that was her; that part, at least, is still clear to him. "Spinning by hand," she'd said. "No one does it that way anymore. It's all done in factories now. Filthy, dusty work. Hundreds of whirling machines that'll take a finger or a scalp." She joined another strand of roving to the newly forming strand with her deft fingers. "They hire girls by the dozens, because no one else will take the work. But in the manors, it's an art, a callback to more pastoral times."
At the time, Kirin had thought it all very stupid, these manipulations of nature, but a bottle of fine Tyvian wine had made him indulgent. He took another deep breath of pipe smoke from his prosthetic and leaned back on her sofa, as she continued.
"They forget that, in those idyllic times, spinning used to be the domain of unmarried women," she said, running her fingers along her handiwork spiraling on her lap. Thin thread she'll use later to bind and confine with her diminishing magic. "Witches." A half smile to herself, before she regarded him with that fierce determination of hers. "I'm going to stay free," she said. "I'll wait a hundred years for Delilah, but I won't suffer a day of being some noble's pet wife."
He'd known then that she'd gladly kill him, yes even him, if it meant she could stay free
She'd learned all the arts that went along with the expectation of being a noblewoman, and at the time, he hadn't been interested in this experience so foreign to his own upbringing, dismissing it as lesser and more facile than his own interests in natural philosophy. He can't say he misses her, but he thinks of her from time to time, trying and failing to puzzle out her strange, reckless devotion.
He stares at the wallpaper, blinking at the morning light, his fingers curling into his blanket. Soon, the rains will come again, the cold rain that leaves the fresh greenery in its wake. He thinks this might be where he is anyway. Part of him still fully expects to wake up in the Clockwork Mansion, with a pile of tools on the bedside table, left there in the dim haze of early morning.
He checks the bedside table just in case. Just a lamp; a notebook, carefully laid in the center of the table with a pen crossed over it; assorted leaves, stiffened overnight; a cup of bedtime tea long gone cold. He's not particularly sure why he was looking at the table now. Something about... no, it was gone now—something that had turned a corner quickly and had slipped from his sight.
He's just going to have to live with these fragments for the rest of his life. The illusion of linear time has faded.
A woman comes in, a tray full of fresh tea in her arms. She sets it down on the bedside table. "Good morning," she says gently, aware he's might be only half-awake and not wanting to startle him.
"Good morning," he repeats by rote.
She smiles at him. "Bad dream?" she asks.
He only stares at her, uncomprehending. She's... she's... who is she again? He should know this. This is important to know. Instead, he feels as though he's looking through a lens that refuses to focus, no matter how he adjusts the magnification. The sensation is unpleasantly familiar.
He shakes his head, not in an answer to her question, but to shake off his own fears.
She watches him as he tries to figure out her identity. She's younger than him, but old enough that she's begun to have lines at the corners of her dark eyes. She has on a white cap and a white apron over her dark clothes. That.. means something, though what he cannot say. Her hair is carefully pinned back with bobby pins slightly darker than her hair: she's been awake for longer than he has. But what does that mean?
"Do you remember me?" she asks on a hunch.
He shakes his head again.
"You've just forgotten," she says, sitting on the bed beside him. She's not frightened of this development, not in the slightest because she's seen it before. And perhaps it's for the best that Kirin doesn't consciously remember most of those times. "Just give it time."
He's not sure he believes her, but her serenity soothes him. If she had shown any signs of fright, he might have believed the worst. But now, it's simply a matter of patience, right?
"Will you show me around?" he manages.
"Of course," she replies, with a squeeze of his hand.
As she leads him by the hand through the rooms, it seems as though there's a veil between him and his understanding: just opaque enough to know that understanding is within his reach, but enough of a barrier that he cannot breach it. Fear twists at him: what if this is it? What if it never comes back? He wants to scream and rage at this internal confinement, but he suppresses it, not wanting to frighten her.
He has to keep trying, he reminds himself. He's learning how to trust himself again, even when his mind becomes uncertain again. He has to find that space between relentlessly pushing himself in the name of progress and letting himself stagnate and grow fearful of the world. He's not sure he'll ever find it (perhaps it can't ever be found, because nothing in life is ever static), but he has to try.
They finish the tour in the living room, and Kirin still cannot remember where he is. At least the walls don't move.
"It'll come back," she reassures him, reading the disappointment on his face. "Everything does." She thinks a moment. "Let's start with breakfast. Maybe you'll remember after that."
She brings him to the kitchen and sets him in a nearby chair with a fresh cup of tea. It's herbal, something lightly sweet—raspberry leaf maybe? The steam that lazily floats from the tip of the kettle fascinates him. That means something too, but that meaning has been closed off from him for a while now.
She chats with him as she prepares a simple breakfast. She's hired as a maid, not a cook, and so she draws on the simple recipes she was taught before she entered service at fourteen. It's certainly not the opulent fare offered at the Clockwork Mansion before—endless fruits and spiced wines and roasted creatures, all of which went untouched in a display of excess and grandeur—but it's nourishing.
Her movements fascinate him in the same way that the movements of the beetles do: movement independent of him, working towards an end, a glimpse of something outside himself, untethered to himself. As she begins to butter the fresh bread, filling the air with a gentle running commentary on the matters of the day, he watches the way her fingers move through the world: picking up a butter knife, the way her wrist rotates as she goes about her task. Lost in his observations, he misses the way she leaves spaces in her commentary for his, and seeing none, changes the topic.
Part of him would simply be content to watch the world go by, as mysterious as it now is. But that's not enough. He knows this now.
He thinks about his own wrist, and how it must rotate as well. Experimentally, he tries this out, but he forgets that he's holding the cup of tea, and it spills all over the front of his nightshirt in a horrible rush of warmth.
At his sharp intake of breath from the shock of it all, she turns to him, slightly worried. Then, she regains her composure.
"It's alright," she says, taking the cup from his hand and setting it aside on the counter, but he doesn't believe her this time. She's going to be angry with him, he can feel it. She's going to tell him how stupid and useless he is now, like he doesn't already know that.
But it never comes.
Instead, she pulls out a clean dishcloth from one of the drawers and tries to soak up some of the liquid from his nightshirt. He recoils from her. The sensation of damp linen clinging to his skin is unbearable.
She considers the situation. "Let's have a bath first," she says. "It's time for that anyway, and then we can change into something dry." She reaches for his hand to lead him to the bath, but then pauses. "If you would like that," she adds.
He watches her, weighing what has happened with what he expected. One day, he'll get used to having an opinion again, he decides, though he's constantly afraid it will be revoked and that this is only a reprieve. But this is just another thing to relearn. "I would like that," he manages.
She smiles again at him.
He endures and endures, and then it's over again, and she dresses him for the day. She sits him down on the stool and prepares to shave his face. Her hand is steady as she works; as she gently tilts his head this way and that, she murmurs little words of encouragement to keep his attention. She tides up his moustache with a few careful strokes, and then wipes off the reminder of the shaving cream from his face with a clean washcloth. For a moment, surveying her handwork, she looks as through she wants to give him a small kiss on the forehead, the way a parent would give a young child. Then she draws back with a small nod. "I think we're ready," she says at last.
Breakfast is uneventful. His memory still refuses to come into frame: part of him is still terrified that this is the new reality for him.
"I'm afraid," he tells her, as she is clearing away the dishes. "I'm very afraid."
She pauses in her work. "Afraid of what?"
He tries to tell her about this lapse in his memory in the most careful language he can manage, but what tumbles out instead is what he remembers of the life he didn't spend at Addermire. The grey walls, the lonely sea. The salty chill that hung in the air. The politely blank faces. The slow understanding that there was a deep gulf in communication between them that he could simply not bridge. Not being able to leave. The isolation of it all. How the first night, he'd been too nervous and baffled to eat anything, and truthfully too unhabituated to idea of regular meal schedules; and how that had been taken as a sign of some petulant display of will. How they'd forced him to eat, and when it was all over, and he was finally alone in his room again, he'd turned to the wall, and seen how it was—
Grey, grey, grey. He doesn't realize that he's been repeating those words until she brings him back to the present, gently brushing the hair out of his face.
"That was a really bad dream," she says, carefully guiding him over to the sofa. Then, she sits beside him. "It's ok. I'm here now, and you're here too. You're not dreaming anymore."
She hums a little as she strokes his shoulder. She thinks of the dishes and how putting them off now will only lead to more work in the afternoon. But it seems callous to leave him alone in this state, and while he might not remember it later, she thinks, she will.
"It happened," he manages at last. "It wasn't a dream."
Those glimpses of other choices made came with a price—the pain of those other lives. And it is a strange thing to feel this pain for something he both did and did not personally experience. It feels as though his heart will break from the strain of it all. But to block it off seems cruel—a refusal to look at this pain. Pain, pain, pain; the world seems to run on it. Maybe this is why the Outsider seems to only care about his own entertainment: he's seen enough, seen enough tedious and minute variations in the same old set of stories, to know nothing will change. The sun will rise, and there will be endless suffering amid the mundanity. How miserable.
He's slowly become aware of this, and pain seems to be everywhere now, like a plant whose name is finally learned. He's just never cared before, and perhaps caring is too strong of a word for the man who regularly watched the spark of life drain from the eyes of the dying with relish and fascination. Rather, he's learned to notice pain in others beyond a superficial, cursory level—a brief annotation to his own, more important world, an indicator of weakness to exploit—and that knowledge cannot so easily be undone.
She's confused at his insistence, combing through the last few months for anything even remotely similar to what he's told her, but Kirin misses it. "That's terrifying," she says gently at last, deciding privately that this must have been an especially vivid nightmare. "That's so scary to think about. I won't let anyone do that to you."
He's not so sure he'd do the same for her.
She thinks a little. "What would help?"
He's surprised at the question, subconsciously waiting for her to tell him instead. He considers this change: he doesn't want to be left alone in this place. That's bad too, but for reasons he can no longer remember or perhaps never could. "Please, would you stay here?" he says.
"Of course," she says, staying beside him.
They remain there in silence. This almost-understanding is like a thorn in his skin, caught and pulling but unable to be resolved. And instead, he sits there and tries to not think about the pain of being just aware enough to understand that there's something he's missing.
In turn, she only gives his hand a reassuring squeeze. She pulls the light blanket off the back of the sofa, meant for the afternoon rests she's never been able to get him to take, and drapes it over him. "There," she says. Pulling him close to her, she rests his head on her shoulder with a gentle hand.
Now that he's nestled beside her, she can feel how his breathing is slowly beginning to become steady again, attuning himself to her. Every so often, a tremble goes through him, and she offers a soft squeeze of reassurance in reply.
She's still surprised that he's so relatively aware of the world, even if he often doesn't fully understand it. When they'd come to the cottage, the two maids had divvied up the tasks between them, and Maria had gotten settling him down often after he'd had one of his episodes. Maria had been able to calm him down the fastest, and ever time she'd gone into check on him afterwards, he'd been quiet and dazed in the way that she'd come to expect from someone who is helpless. Sometimes, he'd speak very softly to himself about things she couldn't understand, not because the thoughts were complex, but because they ran together or were abruptly left off in favor of another topic. But now, holding him and becoming aware of the subtleties in his reactions, she's come to realize with a sinking dread that being dazed and distant was a sign of severe stress for him. And she thinks now about her own hand in all of this: what if she had been there with him instead? What if she'd been there to see what happened between him and Maria for herself?
But she already knows the answer, and this piece of cruelty in her heart haunts her. It was easier to leave him to Maria and not worry about it, to let the hierarchy between them prevail unchecked. She had only been the most recent hire to the mansion, after all; Maria had been there for years. It was easier not to look, but not looking made it possible.
When he'd come back after his long disappearance and hadn't been so dazed, had struggled to communicate as always, true, but seemed far more aware of the world, she'd known there that she'd been a part of something cruel, something that had been killing him.
She'd been afraid that he'd remember and ask her why she hadn't done anything, had been afraid that he wouldn't remember after all and this little piece of wickedness would live only between her and her god. She'd resolved then to treat him more kindly to attempt to atone for it, if only to herself and her own conscience, and had been surprised when her reward was his open vulnerability and genuine curiosity—not the frenetic, single-minded, spiraling curiosity of the Clockwork Mansion, but a more wondrous one where he was simply fascinated by everything. She found that she liked explaining things to him, and when she didn't know the answer, she wanted to learn for him. The episodes of terror and bewilderment that she'd come to fear were mostly easily dealt with, so long as she made sure that he was comforted early on, before his reoccurring fright and disorientation were allowed to foment into panic.
He wasn't some strange creature given to unexplainable and unexpected bouts of terror, she'd realized; he was simply trying to deal with the new limitations of his life.
As his breathing steadies, she rests her head on his and rocks him slowly. "You're doing so well," she says.
When she's certain that he's calm again but he doesn't pull away from her just yet, she takes a tatting shuttle and some thin thread from out of her apron pocket. "Nothing worse for a servant than idle hands," she says. "Or at least, that's what my last mistress said."
His head still resting on her shoulder, Kirin watches her adjust the rings of lace in what seems to be a border for a handkerchief.
"The pattern's called 'hen and chicks,'" she replies to his unasked question. "There are the chicks," she says, pointing to a row, and at the one above it—"These are the hens."
She prepares to add another ring of lace to the border, and Kirin watches the way her fingers wind around the thread trailing from the small, wooden tatting shuttle and form small, moveable knots. When the thread wound around her left hand is pulled, the knots are drawn into a new ring of lace. She then begins to softly muse on the day and asides about how she's making the lacy border as part of a gift for her mother, back in one of the smaller cities of Serkonos—but when she fills the silence, it's not called babbling.
Regardless, it puts him at ease.
The rhythmic clicks as the thread is unwound from the shuttle soothes him, and he finds his mind wandering again, idly slipping past the barriers he's put in place to keep his tenuous hold on this world. He dreams of small machines that float through the air, large ones that breathe steam, bronze flying machines, a more efficient method of processing silvergraphs.
He's cut this part off to survive and yet, it's been waiting for him this whole time, undaunted and undiminished. It's so peaceful being submerged by what he knew best for so long, even if all that remains is this private, untouchable world. And maybe that's even its allure: that this one thing remains to him, even after everything.
He gradually slips out of his reverie, gradually becoming aware of his surroundings again. But this time, the lens slides back into place.
"I remember you," he says at last.
The maid smiles back at him, before she stores away her handiwork back into an apron pocket. "I'm glad," she replies, reaching out to squeeze his hand. A slight tension goes out of her shoulders. "I'd be sad if you forgot me."
And this is simply just one of the strange turns his life has gone down. But he is learning, he's alive and he is learning, and one day, he'll learn how to handle them all the same.
Daud stops by later, wanting to check up on him after last night, and Kirin is happy just to talk with someone as the afternoon carries on. Daud listens carefully to him, looking for where he's had gaps in communication. There's a bird singing nearby, and Kirin doesn't know which kind it is—he doesn't remember ever caring before. And curled up in the blanket, Kirin learns a few more signs—lost, overwhelmed, confused.
And part of the world continues to open up for him.
Daud teaches him and the maid separately, largely because her quick progress tends to discourage Kirin, and while she's learning, he buries into the blanket and lets his mind wander again. The eventual rains haunt the fringes of his mind, the dark and heavy rain that's the namesake of the month. Despite this, it's not an unpleasant topic for him to think about: it's simply another turn of the year, of the cycle. He imagines the rains sweeping down in great, whispering sheets from the northern isles.
And then, the lesson is over, and the maid leaves them to tend to another part of the house.
The wound is deeper in Daud now. It's carving its way to the surface.
"I dream of it every night," Daud says, in response to Kirin's searching stare. "Every night, I dream that I kill the Outsider with it. Isn't that fair? One killing to balance out all the rest that he's overseen. Isn't that what he deserves? If he hadn't given me his Mark, I'd never have been able to do a fraction of what I did."
"What you did?" Kirin asks.
"I turned the streets of Dunwall red for coin," Daud replies, and it's a mixture of nostalgia and pain that lines his voice. "I killed so many people, and thought nothing of it. I ran the city, and I did it all because I had the Mark. He must have known what it would do to me. He sees everything there in the Void."
The Outsider's form comes to Kirin's mind, how slight he was, how surprisingly young.
"If he'd never seen fit to give Delilah the Mark," Daud continues, "the second coup would never have happened. Do you think the Outsider looked at her and saw goodness in her heart? Ambition, drive, yes, but there's no goodwill in her. Giving her the ability to wreak Void magic on the world was no different from giving her a loaded gun or a vial of poison." This knowledge gnaws at Daud, the painful hindsight that came to him near the end of his life. "He'll keep doing it, unless he's stopped," Daud says. "He'll keep giving out his Mark to keep himself entertained in this perverse game where he's the only winner."
Kirin considers this. "But what will happen when he dies?" This line of thinking strains his mind tremendously, considering what might happen next in a theoretical future.
"Whatever happens afterwards won't be nearly as bad as now," Daud replies. "Maybe the Void will collapse without him and leave this world forever."
A world without the Void seems a loss, Kirin thinks.
Daud pauses, considering something. "I've found it," he confesses. "I've finally found the knife. I know where it is. It's here in Karnaca. It'll all be over soon."
Kirin watches him. Over? Nothing will be over. This will never end, only change in form. He doesn't know how he knows this: perhaps it's just slipped in along with the memories of his other lives. "Where is it?" he asks instead.
Daud hesitates. "It's far too dangerous to bring you along," he replies.
Kirin can't hide his disappointment at this. It's always too dangerous now. A few months ago, he was working with electricity and currents in a perpetual state of sleep-deprivation, but now everything is too dangerous for him.
Daud thinks a while. "You could wait for me to return," he says carefully. "But only if you promise me two things."
This catches Kirin's attention, and he readies his notebook.
Daud smiles a moment at this—a small, fatherly smile on his worn face. "The first—I want you to be able to get back to your place on your own. We'll practice until you get the hang of it." He waits as Kirin adds this to his notebook. "Second," Daud continues when Kirin's writing finishes, "I'm going to have you wait for me in front of one of the clock towers. If I don't get back by the time we agree upon, I want you to promise that you'll go back home. Don't look for me, don't try to find me. Just go back home. It's unlikely, but I'll deal with whatever happens to me on my own."
"I promise," Kirin says solemnly.
Daud nods. "Right then. Let's practice."
This is a compromise of a compromise. He'd really prefer to leave Kirin in Thomas's care instead, where he knows for certain that he'll be safe. But that entails questions he doesn't want to answer. He's dreamed all night of striking back against a callous god and woken in the night to the aches and pains of age and old injury. It will kill him or he'll kill the Outsider—he knows this. Thomas still believes otherwise. He'd turn his back on the Void and its magic forever the moment Daud did.
Daud points out landmarks to jot down as they move through the city: trees, signs, certain houses. It's the kind of thing that can only be learned through practice, and Daud is careful to take his time and make sure Kirin is able to observe the landmark thoroughly. Finally, they reach the clock tower, an ornate relic of the relatively more prosperous time in Karnaca under the old duke (though that prosperity rarely reached the least fortunate), delicately shaped with bronze spirals.
Daud rests on a rooftop across from it a moment, ignoring his old pain. "Now then," he says, "show me how to get back."
Kirin considers this new puzzle. He makes a right at the fieldstone house—no, no, that was wrong. Left, instead? No, that wasn't right either. Daud patiently helps him work through this by having him go through the list of landmarks in his notebook and consider their position relative to his home. Painstakingly, he makes it about halfway back, largely through trial and error, and Kirin can already tell that Daud doesn't think he's figured out enough to be able to do this on his own.
The realization is crushing. It's not a matter of pushing through: he simply can't imagine the spatial layout of the city or anything else anymore. He sits down on the rooftop and puts his head in his hands, sick with grief over this. Nothing will ever be alright again. He can't learn this; he can only learn very rudimentary things now and not easily at that.
"I've been too hard on you," Daud says at last, but he's been the only one who thought Kirin could still learn new things, and Kirin cannot give that up so easily. "It's a difficult thing to learn in one go," Daud continues. He rests a hand on Kirin's shoulder. "Let's go back, and I'll tell you everything tomorrow. There's always a next time."
Kirin is silent. He can't imagine how the city is laid out, not even if he had a map, but there must be something else. Things on maps were marked often with dots or names or other signifiers. Could he do that somehow?
He considers the tidy roof of his cottage. Could he mark it in a way that was only visible to him? It would have to be high enough so he could see it. He frowns in concentration as he feels for the Void and finding its dark undercurrent, draws on it. He molds a small light between his fingers and then thinking of the roof, carefully sets the light over it, adjusting it from afar.
He blinks when his experiment is concluded. And when he sees the light, there's lightness in his chest. He's forgotten how good it feels to have a hunch work out, to solve something. He feels almost like himself again. "Can you see it?" he asks.
Daud shakes his head. "No, what did you do?"
And in a breathless rush, he explains his new idea. The words fall into each other, and the line of thought is not always clear, but Daud understands.
"Interesting," Daud replies thoughtfully. "Do you want to try again?"
And they do. The journey back to the cottage is easier now for Kirin, who searches for the marker after every reappearance and then readjusts his position. He's no longer struggling against an impossible task. It's a sign just for him, one only he can see.
When he reaches his home on his own, Daud in tow, he cannot help but beam.
True to his word, Daud departs soon after, leaving Kirin alone in a secluded place near the clock tower. In the meantime, Kirin daydreams in the shade. The sounds of the city drift towards him: bustling of crowds, laughter, arguments, greetings, the gentle click of the clock tower as it counts down the hours, the salt breeze combing through the city trees. Daud had promised to return in an hour, and Kirin had dutifully written it down. There's something so freeing about being able to navigate on his own now. He could go exploring if he wanted to. The world is welcoming again.
He hasn't been on his own in a long time now, and it's thrilling in a way. He doesn't have to worry about how he comes off to other people, how different he is from them, that gap that's always at the back of his mind.
The time clicks away in perfect, measured form, as he waits and dreams.
One hour turns into two by the time he notices. Kirin consults with his notebook now, to remember what's happened.
How strange. Daud did say he was going to return, and it's well past that time now. The shadows have lengthened across Karnaca, stretching across the roads and spilling onto the sides of houses. Well, he did promise. It's not like Daud to misjudge a situation.
But he did promise. And it's time.
Kirin gets up from his place in the dappled shade. The light greets him, and he welcomes this new familiarity. He starts on his journey back, passing over the rooftops of Karnaca with a practiced ease, when one in particular catches his eye. It's a large building, an exclusive club of sorts, but the open window shows something different: stripped down beds. There's someone lying on the bed, hooked up to... to wires. How peculiar.
Maybe this could be part of the journey back. Just a small detour. He's just going to look, nothing more. Just check out some innovations. And he's not looking for Daud. Daud never said to go directly home, he rationalizes. Just home.
It's easy to reappear inside the room. No one's there, save for the man lying in the bed. It seems to be a backroom of sorts. It's in the wrong place for a hospital. His thoughts fade away, and when they return, he wonders what he's doing in this strange room again. Just looking, he decides. Yes, that's it. He considers the red wires flowing out of the man into the wall, tapping against them not out of malicious curiosity, but rather a self-centered one. He doesn't wonder for a moment if this might hurt the man for a single moment. With his fingers, he follows the warmed, red wire as it goes into the wall—no, through the wall, he realizes.
There's something on the other side.
Fascinating.
Does it go into a barrel? Into a machine? Is it a power source for a machine?
Opening the notebook to a fresh page, he makes a rough sketch of the scene to remember later—the man, the stripped bed, the mysterious wall, the switch. It takes several cycles of his thoughts slipping away and returning to an empty present before a rudimentary sketch is finished, and even in that, parts blur together. His head hurts badly now from the strain.
He reconsiders the switch: what would happen if he flipped it? Would the machine come to life behind the walls?
Giving into his curiosity, he flips the switch. The man groans—relief or pain?—and the red wire seems to shift: it's not transporting electricity but blood. Kirin stares at this, trying to reckon with this realization. Someone is out here transfusing blood into others. Now that he's closer to the wall, he hears the shifting of chairs and low voices.
He backs away from the wall. How many people are there? He surveys the area for an exit. He doesn't want to be here anywhere and he can't remember how he got in here in the first place. There's a hallway leading off somewhere, and Kirin makes the split second decision to check the neighboring room instead.
It's another backroom, this time full of cooling corpses hastily wrapped in rough cotton body bags.
There's heavy footsteps on the stairs now. Voices conferring with each other. Kirin panics. He can't be caught here.
He turns around to see, but he's not fast enough and bright sparks of pain radiating across his head accompany him into the dark.
Kirin comes to on the floor of the backroom, blinking heavily as he tries to regain his sense of his surroundings. What was he doing here again? The only thought the comes to mind is that he's strayed from the path. The heavy black boots near him move as the two people near him discuss something amongst themselves.
"i told you not to leave the window open. You're lucky it's not the Grand Guard in here."
"They don't care about all that," the man replies. He must have been a dockworker at one time—all muscle and sun-roughened skin. A raw whalebone charm hangs in his back pocket. Kirin closes his eyes in pain: they don't look like witches, and Breanna was always particular about not letting men into the coven. He'd asked once, out of curiosity, and she'd told him not to press his luck.
"Don't get caught," the other man replies. He's lean and sinuous, yet there's still the suggestion of strength in his form. "You'll have to get rid of this one. Damned journalists are always trying to get in here. Only good thing about that fake Empress was that she kept the press in check."
His head throbs in pain from the recent attack.
"I don't get caught," the first man says smugly. "I don't think we have to worry about this one. He was fucking crazy by the look of it." The man snaps the notebook closed and throws it aside. "Whole damn thing makes no sense. Probably thought we were hiding some long-dead assassin or something. The Silver Spike sure does know how to hire them."
"Would have made one hell of a story, though," the other man says. "Should've been a novelist instead." He nudges Kirin with his dirty boot. "Oh well. What do you think they see when they die?"
"That's the mystery, ain't it?"
Terror shoots through him, cold and urgent. They're going to kill him, and if they'd thought to remove his gloves after choking him out, he'd be waking up to the sight of his own severed hand. He has to act now, or there won't be any more time.
One of the men moves to carry his body over to the vacant bed.
At his touch, Kirin panics. "No!" he says.
The man tightens his hold on Kirin's body, pinning him to the floor and in a single practiced moment, leans his forearm across Kirin's throat. Kirin tries to gasp, but no air comes. The hard sinew and muscle dig into his windpipe. He's going to die here. He can't die. His vision clouds; there's a ringing in his ears, blood pulsing loudly.
Desperately, he pulls at the Void. It slips from his fingers, heavy and languid.
The man presses his forearm deeper into Kirin's neck. At the increased pressure, Kirin forgets what he was trying to do. His hand knocks uselessly at the floorboards, as he tries to push the man off him. The sensation of being choked isn't new, he realizes in horror. This has happened before. He wants to scream, but only a strained gasp comes out.
"Not today," the man says with disinterest.
Kirin used to know the exact time and pressure it took to render a man unconscious: he's nearing the end of his own capacities.
But the Void, so close to him now, moves in him, cold and familiar, and the man explodes in a shower of blood and viscera over Kirin.
Kirin rolls onto his side, his eyes closed, as he gasps and coughs hoarsely. He tries frantically to wipe off some of the blood from his face—not from the horror of having killed someone, but the unpleasant warmth of the viscera on him. He tries to get to his feet, but the second man grabs him roughly and throws him back to the floor.
His head knocks against the boards. He can no longer differentiate where the pain is coming from: everything hurts.
The second man jerks Kirin's head roughly, exposing his throat. A flash of the knife. And before the metal can rip open Kirin's throat from side to side, the man meets the same fate as his colleague.
As the blood pools around him, Kirin closes his eyes. Shaking from exhaustion and adrenaline, he tries to get off the floor, but his hand slips on the mess. He's only pain now. Just a mass of pain in the outline of a person.
He's not sure how any of this came to pass now, but he knows he wants none of it. He wants to be gone now. He wants to be far away from this place. He reaches inside his pockets for the notebook to see if that'll give him any clues to the situation, but finds nothing.
Surveying the room in a panic, he spots it lying near one of the corpses—knocked away in the chaos. He retrieves it, pushing down the jarring unease of having his privacy invaded, his personal notes read and judged.
He has to leave now, before more of these people come up and try their hand at killing him too. There must be more of them.
He pulls at the Void, and it answers, as it always does. And perhaps this terror of dying has awakened something old in Kirin. When he opens his eyes again, he's in a place he's never been to—no, not this time—but which he remembers in fragments, like everything else. Ferns curl on a side table, basking in the fading evening light. Leather-bound books carefully line the shelves. One has been taken down, and then halfheartedly reshelved on its side.
It would be an average apartment room if not for the empty bottles—wine mostly, but also smaller gin and whiskey ones as well. They refract the orange light within themselves and onto the walls.
And sprawled out on the sofa is the one he knew best.
His brother.