Thomas stops by a little later, wanting to know about the last time Kirin saw Daud. Together, with the help of the notebook, they retrace Kirin's steps, until they come to the clocktower.
"There's an abandoned house nearby," Thomas muses to himself. "He might be held captive there."
"The knife," Kirin says, almost to himself.
Thomas tenses from the growing hatred he has for the knife now, that horrible thing inexorably intertwined with his own ruin. "If it ever was there, then yes. The knife, or at least the promise of it, was probably there to lure him out."
Would it feel powerful to hold the blade that could kill the Outsider, Kirin wonders instead. To wield such a heavy judgement?
Thomas glances over to Kirin, not wanting to answer any speculation on what particular fate might have befallen Daud in captivity, but finding none, relaxes a little. "Let me take you back," he says gently. "It's dangerous here."
"I would like to see this place," Kirin replies. He's intrigued now. Could Daud really be close by? He wants to know why he didn't come back and how the knife looks.
Thomas, in turn, weighs the not-insignificant possibility that Kirin would come back on his own and the danger he'd face as a result. He really doesn't want to bring him along and subject him to any unnecessary fright, but that way, at least he'd be able to keep an eye on him.
"Alright," Thomas says at last. "But only if you promise me something."
Kirin nods.
"Once I determine a room is safe, you have to stay there and stay quiet. I'll come back when I've either found Daud or information on where he might be."
Kirin dutifully jots this down, and Thomas leaves with a nod.
The room in the abandoned house that Thomas brings him to looks just like any of the other abandoned places in Karnaca. Dust settles on the mantle, the iron-wrought frames of bleached photographs. A chair and a desk full of letters.
Don't say anything, Thomas mouths before leaving.
Kirin settles on the chair, watching the way the dust twists in the faint breeze. Idly, he peeks in the mirror on the mantle, but It's not his reflection that gazes back.
It's the Outsider.
Kirin frowns at this. The Outsider still watches him from behind the glass, as his mouth twitches in amusement.
"Don't worry," the Outsider tells him. "They can't hear me."
Kirin glances around the room, then draws closer to the mirror with both hands on the mantle as he leans forward. His reflection floats on the glass.
"You've met the Eyeless by now," the Outsider begins. "They're obsessed with the Void, of touching it, walking in it as immortals. It's a fool's endeavor. This morning was the beginning of the end for Daud. Jeanette Lee has never been able to turn down a good business opportunity, and in the right hands, pitfighting is a lucrative one. It will wear down what's left of his body, and even after he escapes, the damage will take its toll."
Kirin starts to ask a question, but the Outsider only raises a finger to his lips.
"It's all been set in motion. You can't stop any of it. Neither of you will ever see him alive again."
These words don't seem to come as a warning, though. Under the vague boredom is an almost-excitement—and if Kirin could recognize it, he'd understand it as the kind of excitement of coming into contact with danger. But Kirin cannot, and so the only thing he suspects is that this isn't the whole story.
The Outsider notices his hesitation to accept this conclusion, and continues. "If the Eyeless catch you, they won't force you to pit-fight to break your will, nor will they train the hounds on your body. No, not you. You're easy to control now, and instead, you'd be given to their particularly studious members in the Shindaerey Mines as a gift. And there, so close to the Void is where you'd spend your final days as they torture you to death in a vain attempt to understand how the Void manifests itself." The Outsider gives him a wry smile. "I don't think you want the details. And when they're done with you, you won't even get an open pit for a grave." He pauses. "Would you have found it ironic, I wonder, to spend your last moments experimented on by those lesser minds you so despised?"
The names and places—some vaguely familiar, others not—fail to register with Kirin. He opens his mouth to clarify something, and the Outsider anticipates it.
"Albarca Baths. Jeanette Lee," he replies. "That's where he is."
Kirin jots this down quickly. He can't remember who the he is being referred to is, or why he needs to know this, but that's just his life now. Has he lost someone? What was it again? Pit-fighting?
"Will he die there, in the pits?" the Outsider voices for him. "Part of him will. The Eyeless enjoy breaking people."
Kirin doesn't know what they were talking about. He feels adrift in this conversation, and in that confusion comes a kind of loneliness. He crosses his arms to reassure himself and studies the room, unsure of where he is. He came here with...
"Thomas?" Kirin begins, forgetting the warning, but the Outsider only smiles back.
"They can hear you," is the last thing the Outsider says, mildly amused.
There's a shift in the air—a tilting of the head from deep in the house. Kirin's heart sinks. Two women appear in the room. They might be sisters—they share the same dark blonde hair color. They must be remnants of Breanna's coven: outcast women who, having no place in Karnaca, turn towards each other for meaning and protection.
"Aww," one of the witches says. "Are you lost? Don't worry, we can fix that."
"We should keep this one," the second one says. "Make bonecharms from him. These would be our finest yet."
Kirin shakes his head. "No."
"You're so cute now," the first witch says, reaching out to pinch his cheek. Her thumb and forefinger graze his face, as he pulls away from her. She laughs. "Aww. It almost makes me feel bad. But then I remember your gaudy mansion with all the dead people between the walls and how hilarious you found it, and then I don't feel so bad."
"What goes around comes around," the second one adds.
The Void seeps through the walls, lazily and unconcerned, in sharp contrast to Kirin's rapid heartbeat.
"If all it took to make you less tiresome was some electricity through that brain of yours," the first witch continues. "I'd have done it myself." She smiles. "Listening to you tinker with those damned lens nearly drove me mad." Her gaze sweeps over him as she assesses his tense body. "Don't bother trying to escape," she says. "The Outsider won't save you. I don't know what he told you, but you're not even a pawn to him, not like the old fool. The Outsider, well, he just likes watching you suffer. That's it. There's nothing else to do in the Void, you see."
Kirin backs along the wall, searching for the door. Behind him, his hand grips the door knob. This doesn't go unnoticed.
"If you run," the second one adds carefully, "you'll make me very cross with you. And you don't want that."
"What are you going back to?" the first one says. "There's nothing out there for you anymore. You'll never make anything beautiful again. You'll never make anything at all. We all know what the world is like, and it's simply not a kind one. If you behave, we'll take you to see the old fool as a treat. You might not like what you find there, though."
She laughs at his fear, and moves to grab him, to pull him towards her.
He panics.
The lines bend and cross and break—every time he does it, it gets easier to snap the threads of life. This time, he doesn't even wait to see the death-throes as proof. He knows she will die because of what he did to her, and he pulls the door open and flees deeper into the house as a scream of fury and grief follows him.
It's dark and ill-lit. Heavy boards block out the sunlight, while tallow candles perch in alcoves, tables, stairwells, doorway arches. There are open burlap bags of dried herbs and powdered bones and more that he only vaguely recognizes now. Florescent blue markings on the floor in a language he cannot read.
He has to hide, he thinks. His head hurts badly, and he doesn't know how he got here. There's only the pulsing fear and strangled promises of what will happen when she finds him—"I'll tear out your intestines first. Would you like to hold them?"—as he surveys the room for a hiding place.
"I told Breanna that we should have just killed you and chopped off your hand when you were helpless," the second witch continues. "You'd do the same to any of us, and fair is fair. But she thought she knew a better way. Now she's dead, but don't worry. You're about to meet her again."
He glances upwards. There's a hole in the ceiling between floors. If he can get up there, it might be easy access to the roof or at least, some time in a secluded part of the house to regather his thoughts. But how to get up there, again? He can't focus through the terror. Something about drawing himself forward to the spot?
"There you are!" she screams triumphantly.
He took too long.
She pulls him towards her with the remnants of Void-magic that still flow through her—not as strong as before, but still there. There must be another coven leader in Karnaca, one of the witches who ascended as a result of Breanna's death.
He pushes away from her—despite their differences, he's still stronger than her—and her body knocks against the wall.
"I'm going to have fun taking you apart," she says, out of breath, as she rises to her feet. "For what you did to Lucianne, you monster." Her face contorts in rage, and she raises a practiced hand.
Then, a gasp of shock and pain as a blade emerges from her chest. It withdraws, coldly efficient, and her hands scrabble at the wound, but Kirin doesn't wait to figure out the newest addition to this horrible place. He seizes his chance and runs deeper into the house.
This time, there are haphazardly stacked shipping boxes. They're easy to navigate up to yet another hole leading to the next floor (what a derelict house, it's a wonder it's not infested by bloodflies at this point), and he lets out a shaky breath. There. Now he can see what's going on on the floor below and figure out what to do next. No one will look for him here.
More footsteps. A careful search.
And when he opens his eyes again, a beetle-face is looking at his.
He didn't hide well enough.
"Come on," it says firmly, yet gently. It reaches up for his hand in an attempt to soothe him, but he doesn't know what it is and moves his hand out of reach.
Every time he glances down at it, any understanding eludes him. It opens its arms to help him down, but he's too afraid to understand what's going on. He keeps shaking and staring into its glassy eyes like a hunted thing.
The beetle climbs onto one of the boxes, prepared to go up to where he is and simply carry him down. Kirin backs away from it, unaware how close he is to falling through the rotten floorboards. It stops, weighing the options.
"They're all dead now," it says in a familiar voice. "It's safe to come down." It's not angry with him, just weary. Perhaps it had wanted something else from the witches than just sword practice. And met with the terrified blankness in Kirin's face, it adds, "I'm Thomas, remember?"
Everything is clear again.
"Thomas," Kirin repeats with relief.
As Kirin climbs back down, Thomas offers a hand to hold onto while his other one steadies Kirin's back to prevent a fall. Once Kirin is back on the ground, all he can think about is how glad he is that his predicament is over.
"Are you hurt?" Thomas asks, surveying him for any signs of damage.
"No," Kirin replies. Something else had happened, but what was it? It had to do with a mirror. Yes, a mirror and—
"The Outsider, he came to talk to me," Kirin begins, but he can't remember what happened after that. "In the mirror." There's something else, something crucial that's been reduced to a perfect blank. "He said, he said..."
"I wouldn't listen to him," Thomas replies. "He talks out of both sides of his mouth."
Something is over. Something is over, and Kirin cannot even remember what it was.
Thomas only takes quiet note of his distress, and mistakes it for the stress of almost being killed again. "I shouldn't have brought you along. It was exceedingly foolish of me."
Kirin shakes his head. What was it again? Out of habit, he checks his notebook, and there it is: "Albarca Baths. Jeanette Lee." There. It means nothing to him, but Thomas tilts his head slightly, considering this.
"It's disused," he says carefully. "No one's been there for ages, unless... That might be a good place to look." He pauses. "The Outsider told you this? Sometimes I think we're only entertainment for him."
"We should go there next," Kirin tells him. There's something important there.
"No," Thomas says decisively. "No, it's far too dangerous." He pauses, considering something. "Promise me you won't go to there—Albarca Baths."
"Why not?"
"It's too dangerous."
Kirin doesn't fully accept this answer, but he can tell that Thomas will insist on this, and so Kirin adds a reluctant promise to his notebook.
Thomas softens, relieved. One more variable he doesn't have to account for now. "I hear you're going to Dunwall," he says, trying to redirect Kirin's focus now.
It's not true, or at least, not fully, but it's the only word he can find to express the sense of desolation that comes over him at the thought of being exiled from the only place where he ever wanted to be. It twists in his throat, and he resents everyone at the Academy for having what he couldn't. He could have remade this age, and now there's only the remnants in his mind, pulled translucent like torn spider silk and wavering in the breeze.
"If the Empress wants you there," Thomas replies, "it's best to go of your own volition. Makes for a nicer voyage, anyway, if you're not under heavy guard. I'm surprised it took this long. It must mean she agonized over the decision."
No, not the Empress, part of Kirin's mind fills in, idly—the calculating part of his mind that, had he been even vaguely interested in the workings of other people's minds on more than a superficial level, would have loved to pit the entire court against itself for his own amusement.
Her Royal Protector.
He's been behind the throne, weighing his choices and his options with a practiced hand; maybe he didn't tell his dearest daughter, his only child, the only living remnant of his first love, about all that he did in Karnaca to save her. How he'd been moved by the shock and terror of the coup, the dull aches and weariness of middle age on a rocking derelict boat, the dampened mix of nostalgia and loss and ineffectual pain at seeing his birthplace—his first home—still in the same overwhelming misery as he'd left it, and above it all, the golden mirage of the Clockwork Mansion, a moment of decadence surrounded by those who have so little, those who are made to have so little.
It had been a long time since he'd made split-second decisions of life and death, not since the first coup. The first had been to spare Hypatia, and it had left him filled with fear that it was the wrong one, that he'd been too soft and perhaps some tendencies ran too deep to be repressed. But he'd gotten tired of killing, even in self-defense, even to protect Emily, and life was life, wasn't it? Nothing was as bad as death. He'd been so proud of himself for figuring out how to spare Kirin while neutralizing his threat right up until he realized the full extent of the damage. He'd really just meant to burn out the bad parts—the last few months of memory, for example. No, that wasn't true, not fully anyway. He'd been weary and terrified and full of aches, and that terror led him to do things he'd come to regret the longer he thought about them.
Kirin can't remember what he was thinking about now. Something about the Academy; he keeps living in its shadow even as he tries to not think about it too often.
"Let's go back," Thomas says at last, guiding Kirin back to the room with the open window. "Hold onto me, alright?"
They step over one of the witches, her limbs contorted in death, and as they do so, Kirin has an inexplicable foreboding that he'll never see Thomas alive after their parting.
Kirin stops dead in his tracks. He doesn't want Thomas to leave now. He's grown used to seeing him, to being cared for by him, and now he can't imagine having that be gone too. And that was just the way of the world that people come and go, but that didn't make it any easier to bear.
Thomas glances back. "What's the matter?"
How many of these small deaths were waiting for him? These pinpricks of unbearable pain and grief? What a terrible world it all was. For a moment, he can see all the threads and how they will bind and sever: how the Outsider's death wish will ripple across the city in its quiet ways, tearing it apart once again. He wants to run away, and he's denied even that now. The Outsider will have what he wants in the end, and there's nothing he can do to stop it. If he had all of his mind, it would be an easy thing to infiltrate the Albarca Baths and simply act on whatever sadistic whim struck him then, but now he's lucky if he knows where he is and what he was thinking a few minutes ago. How miserable to be so close to full agency, but denied it.
Thomas misreads his silence. "Daud is alive," he reassures him. "I can still feel the Void through his bond, and as long as I can feel that, I can carry on. I'll find him wherever he's taken to."
I'll find you wherever you go.
And it's not enough; it'll never be enough.
On the lace curtain in Kirin's bedroom, there's a dead, dull-orange beetle simply hanging there, one of its rapidly desiccating tarsi caught in the lace. It must have tried to escape the rains by fleeing indoors. Its other thread-thin legs are curled inwards. If Kirin had been familiar with tarot cards, he'd have thought of it as the Hanged Man. Breanna would have told him it was an ill omen, and then to stop playing tricks on her, but she's dead now, buried by her own devotion. It's a strange little appendix he keeps having to affix to any of his idle thoughts about her—she's dead now, she's dead now.
Kirin waits there on the bed, not sure precisely what he's waiting for. He's not ready to travel to Dunwall—that horribly wet city he'd been deported from more than twenty years ago now. He can almost remember the humiliation of having to pack his things under the watch of the boorish Dunwall City Watch before they put him on some miserable ship back to Karnaca, among people who hardly cared if he'd been poised to remake this age. He'd forgotten the music machine in his haste: he'd been furious when he learned they'd taken it apart, and then smug when he realized they couldn't put it back together. With all the immediacy of youth, he'd felt used up, washed up, having wasted his one chance at fame and renown. And then came the spite, the resentful disdain for that silly place with their ridiculous rules that would have only hampered his genius. It would almost funny to think about now in his forties, the painfully frenetic drive of his early years—the surety that it all would end soon, so he must seize greatness while it was still in reach—if there wasn't still so much shame tied to it.
Idly, he flips through the book of cartography, tracing over the illustrated mountain ranges. He wants to escape, but to where? Certainly not Gristol.
A knock at the door. Lucia enters without waiting for an answer, her dark eyes worried. He watches her, unsure of what she wants from him.
"The Crown Killer," she begins, pulling up a chair. "You... worked with her, right?"
For some reason, the time directly before the electricity burned through his mind is the easiest to remember. He keeps returning to it as a kind of reassurance, and so it's a pleasant reminiscence for him. "She brought me Sokolov. We were going to streamline the production costs for the Clockwork Soldiers, but Anton didn't want to help."
Lucia takes this into account. "What did the Crown Killer look like?" she asks, only a faint hesitation to mark her fear at what she might discover.
Kirin happily tells her this and far, far more, running through the details, the serum that the Duke controlled her with, what Breanna thought of the situation, how he'd really wanted to dissect Hypatia's brain and see if he could find the imprint of Grim Alex on it.
"The what?" Lucia interrupts, visibly disturbed. She's pale, and she keeps swallowing back her words.
Kirin repeats himself. "The Duke promised me that I could have it."
"You're making all of this up, aren't you?" Lucia cannot help but reply, clinging to this last hope of hers. His confusion at this accusation is the only answer she needs, before she turns away. Her body shakes as she tries to suppress her tears. "Of course," she says, "of course. But why? Why does it have to be her?"
Kirin doesn't understand why she's upset. He thought she knew too. Everyone knew, he'd thought.
"Why are you in pain?" he asks, baffled by the tears she's trying and failing to hide from him now.
Lucia wipes her face with the edge of a bleached handkerchief. "Are you serious?" she asks, and finding nothing but earnestness on his face, only shakily draws in a breath. "Why? Do you want to cut me up too?"
Kirin can't remember why they were talking about dissection. He's not opposed to the prospect, but he'd rather think about something else now—the way the mountain ranges sweep across the page, for instance.
Lucia stares numbly at him as he shows her the page. "You're the strangest person I've ever met," she says at last, stuffing the handkerchief back in her jacket pocket.
His face falls. Oh, no. She's upset with him, or is she going to laugh at him? He can't really read her expression well.
"No, wait—don't be sad," she says. She draws in a shaky breath. "They're very interesting maps, I guess. I'm just not in the right place to hear about them."
"Why?" he asks, curious now.
"Why?" she repeats in disbelief. At his genuine interest, she reconsiders. "Because I'm heartbroken right now," she explains.
He ponders this and as he does so, thoughtfully looking up to the right angle of the room, where the wall meets the ceiling, he misses her bemused expression. He knows what the agony of knowing something is lost forever... would he call that heartbreak? Does that mean she can feel that too? Can other people feel this too?
He thinks of what the maid does when he's upset. Experimentally, he puts a hand on hers. She flinches from the contact, and then, judging that he doesn't mean any harm by it, pats his hand reluctantly at first and then more genuinely.
"I take it back," she says more gently than she intended to. "You're just full of surprises."
They stay that way for a while.
Lucia can't go back yet. She needs a distraction from it all. When she returns to her apartment, she will have to cross the threshold between what she didn't know and what she has learned. Her heart cannot reckon with such a burden just yet. It is because she's grown to love Hypatia so that she feels that her heart will break. It's not that Hypatia filled the void her husband had left with his death—people could never replace each other—but rather that she'd opened Lucia up to another love.
It occurs to her that Hypatia has already known what today would bring, the moment that Lucia insisted on letting her rest and that she would check up on Kirin. Hypatia had known that today the dream would end and she would have to face herself.
Lucia turns her thoughts anywhere else but that. She's looked into endless exploitation, but this, this final thing so close to home is what breaks her. But if there's one thing she's learned in Karnaca, it's how to separate her feelings from herself, to close them off in a box to look at later, no matter the pain. She despises herself for how good she's become at it.
"What's on your mind?" she asks at last, and at his surprise, adds, "You look like you've been wanting to tell me something."
He tells her about the dead beetle.
"That's really sad," she replies after a while. "Which kind of beetle was it?" This is less an expression of interest in the world of entomology and more of a polite gesture towards his interests. Just because she doesn't like him doesn't mean she has to be cruel.
His expression is perfectly blank. She should be used to it by now, she supposes. "I don't know," he says.
"Let's see if we can identify it," she says, after a moment of thought. She hadn't planned on spending some of her afternoon with him, but this way, she can assure Hypatia that, yes, she did check on him and he was doing fine—or at least as fine as he's ever going to be now. That way they can have one moment of normalcy before it all crumbles.
She scans the bookshelf for anything that might help the identification process. She's never had the patience for entomology, but she'll try again this time. She pulls at the spine of particularly heavy tome with the promise of 500 illustrations, and he plucks the dried-up insect from the curtain, but not before a final moment of stubbornness from the dead thing as it refuses to part from the fabric. She places the dead creature on the table in front of them for further study. It's the kind of gruesome autopsy that natural philosophers do, she thinks. Thankfully, it's too small to dissect, though she wouldn't put it past Kirin to have some horrible equipment stashed away especially for this purpose. She plans on making him do most of the identification work, anyway.
"What color is it?" she prompts, resting a finger on the guide. Color, size, shape. They find a measuring ruler tucked away in the back of an unused wardrobe and determine the length of the creature.
They study it carefully, and when its identity has been determined (a common Serkonian beetle), a quiet comes over them. It's extraneous: Kirin already has one in his collection, and there's no further use for it now. She's glad in a way that this one won't slowly decay on a pin: a small mercy. She considers opening up a window and just throwing it outside, used-up and unwanted as it now is, but her hand stills.
She's cognizant of the fact that his gaze has returned to her—not in that piercing, horrible way he'd once had, nor the periodical blankness that moves across his face. No, he was considering her, watching her.
"It's morbid to leave it like this," she says. "Let's put it outside."
"It's dead," he tells her, and she can't quite decide if it's a rebuttal or a simple statement.
"I want to bury it," she tells him. Then she softens her tone. "Come on," she says more gently as she offers her hand.
She's always surprised at how readily he takes her hand, but perhaps he's come to recognize that as a sign that they're leaving to a different place now.
Would she be so docile if she became like that? It can't be a matter of trust with him, but what other option did he have? She's never figured out just what life must feel like for him now; Hypatia staunchly refused to go into any details, and that was simply the end of her thoughts about him. He got what he deserved, she supposed, and then the schadenfreude started to wear off once Hypatia's visits never wavered and Lucia begun to see what a toll it took on her.
Lucia holds his hand, or maybe he holds hers—it's hard to tell. But as she picks her way through the house and into the backyard, she becomes aware of the fact that she's carefully assessing the way there, making sure the path is clear of any potential hazards. If he'd never become like this, then perhaps this careful tenderness would have been a secret to her for the rest of her days, never aware she was capable of it. It's not a latent maternal instinct: Lucia Pastor has never been accused of such a thing in all her years. Rather, they were changing each other by the sheer fact they were both alive.
He needed her gentleness now, and she'd found it within her. What else lives in her heart, but is still a secret to her?
And there are smaller signs, more subtle ones that she's beginning to pick up from him: when she's moving too quickly, he holds on just slightly tighter to her hand, as if he's afraid she'll slip away. She hadn't given a thought to how much of his life now must be ruled by fear.
Still holding on to him, she kneels next to him and digs in the rain-softened earth. The tips of her fingers are damp and dirtied, but she pays them no mind. "Hand it to me," she says. At his confusion, she clarifies, "The beetle."
It's light, so light in her hand, and then it slips into its thumb-sized grave, dipping below the soil and lost forever. Then, one-handed, she pushes the dislodged soil back over it. A faint pride fills her as she rises to her feet again.
Kirin watches her, vaguely interested.
Did no one show you what to do with dead things? she means to ask, but the answer is right there.
Perhaps she can be accused of sentimentality just this once, but perhaps she wants to extend this almost ludicrous mercy to a dead insect, because she's been denied being able to show it to many of her fellow citizens. One day, if she can bear it, she'll have to face how living in Karnaca has torn her soul apart with its daily cruelty. How she can love the city despite all its misery, knowing that her own actions cannot stem the tides of injustice there. Some days, it feels like holding broken glass, but she cannot let go.
The day of leaving comes faster than he wants it to.
The boat is one of many that Empress orders from time to time to bring her subjects to Dunwall. He knows they are expecting him, and he hates it. He's not special anymore, he supposes. But more than that, he doesn't want to be a spectacle: the former genius turned nervous, fumbling invalid, damaged by his own creation, left in the eternal shadow of pity and what could have been—enacting his own fall from the Academy again, in a different key. So close to achieving greatness, but always having it torn away. The first time, he'd gotten the disgrace, deportation, and banishment. This time, he'd been exiled from his own mind, a perpetual stranger to the world, dependent on the goodwill of others. No, it wasn't just that he'd been made ordinary, it's that he'd been made worse than ordinary—he'd been made to live out the secret nightmare of many people, to be both trapped in his own mind and estranged from it, and this punishment doesn't go unrecognized.
But even now, he can see little ways that the maid is trying to mitigate this, to leave space for him too in his own life. The night before they were scheduled to leave, she'd sat them down and compiled two lists: the first of things they could do together, and the second of things Kirin could do on his own. He'd stared at her blankly when she asked him what he'd like to do on his own, subconsciously waiting for her to tell him. And when the silence persisted, he'd ventured that he remembered that he liked sketching. He'd been humiliated to voice that little part of him aloud, that implicit want—it'd caught in his throat—but she wrote it down all the same, making a mental note to herself to find room in their luggage for a sketch pad and some pencils. And then, the second idea came forth: he liked listening to music recordings. The more of his own inner world he told her, the more easily these details came to him.
The core of him hadn't really changed, after all.
And seeing that list of things he could do by himself, things that were more stimulating than staring at the wall, lost in his own meandering thoughts, was strangely comforting. They were drastically fewer than before, but they were something. He could start there.
She'd pasted both lists into his notebook for him to review whenever he felt lost or overwhelmed. And whenever he saw them, he felt like a person again, with wants and desires like everyone else. Here were some things he could do, liked to do.
For the first few days, he stays in his room, too afraid to leave, and so the maid stays with him for periods of time, encouraging him to talk with her before leaving to attend to other matters. She reads to him from time to time, selecting one of the books with the most pictures. Her favorite is a book of generously illustrated short stories, quick enough to read in one setting, but complete as a narrative. He doesn't remember any of them afterwards, though.
When she reads to him, she drapes the blanket over him first and holds the book so that he can follow along. Her reading is not as precisely enunciated as Hypatia's, and she mispronounces a few words occasionally, but he doesn't mind. Instead, he considers the illustrations, how beautifully ornate they are, and in a moment he will not remember, how to improve the color consistency in ink. As his mind wanders, his fingers curl in the blanket, seeking out the softness. Sometimes she rests his head on her shoulder, and sometimes she strokes his hand. He's grown to relish these small moments of peace, and find enjoyment in the way that the sounds are strung together on the page. Sometimes, if there's a particular pleasant one, he'll repeat it to himself.
To minimize as much travel stress as she can, they've decided together on a bedtime routine. When he's dressed and ready for bed, she arranges the covers around him, and they pore over Sokolov's illustrated travelogue of Serkonos. He doesn't always fall asleep afterwards, but she always lets him know that he doesn't have to. Sometimes, he just closes his eyes in the dark and contemplates the different illustrations, soothed by the images of his homeland. He's not quite homesick yet, but it helps ease his mind to see pictures of Karnaca.
He'll never know, but she agonized about what to do if he wandered at night on the ship, terrified he might fall overboard. Locking him in his room at night seemed too cruel (she imagined him becoming increasingly distressed when learning the door was locked), and yet she couldn't be there all the time. He tended to stay awake longer than she did, and woke up later. In the end, the ship's captain offered to let her night crew know that he might be on deck during those times and to keep an eye on him.
Cradled by the dark sea, Kirin dreams for the first time in months—or at least, it's so vivid that it can be mistaken for a dream. In his almost-dream, the waking memory that the Void carves through him, there's a room below ground and a terrible suppression weighing on him, dampening his thoughts to a single note of pain and desperation; cruel laughter and drinking and an exchange of coin.
The body breaking down, he thinks, and then doesn't know where this thought came from.
He stares at the gently swaying wall. Then, he decides to explore this new area, just a little, just to get his bearings. Slipping on his gloves (these are very important for some reason), he wanders the halls of the ship and makes his way to the deck.
And as the ship gently rocks in the waves, his mind turns back to the dead beetle. Once the impression of the beetle leaves Kirin, as it will, does the beetle vanish from this world too? Or perhaps it already has, and its body is the only thing left to break back down into the minuscule particles that once made it. He vaguely remembers theories on this now. Tiny particles left to reconfigure and reassemble, but as never the same creature twice. How terrible to be made up only of flesh and time, he thinks, endlessly running down the hours.
He's lonely now, for a reason he can't quite articulate. He's on the brink of remembering what was lost—no, it recedes again. There's a sunny apartment in his mind though, somewhere in Morley, and he is happy there, he is happy and loved, even if it did not come to pass in this permutation of time and space and choice and fate, it still happened.
The waves whisper against the ship—the sky is calm and clear. Carefully, he surveys the deck, mostly out of his own curiosity, matching the layout up with what he'd see earlier. And as he does so, a voice calls out to him.
"There you are! We were wondering when we'd get to meet you."
It's the first mate. She's tall and tanned. She tells him her name, and he immediately forgets.
"It's late now, but the stars are still out. Do you want to look at them?" she asks.
He agrees, unsure of her.
She sets out blankets for them to lie on against the cold deck, and points out various clusters. The spreading stars pierce the night like the tips of misplaced or forgotten entomological pins, not yet corroded. For a moment, when he closes his eyes, he can imagine a perfect model of the known universe, can rotate the celestial bodies in their orbits at will. He remembers them well: for a time, he used to sneak out at night to a clearing in the forest, untouched by the city haze. His mother found out quickly about this, but allowed it, on the off-chance that the wild animals might resolve the problem of him. "The best solution for all of us," she'd said in front of him, and he'd wondered why she hated him so much. His brother had said nothing to this.
If the stars remember Kirin, they don't show their hand, and when he opens his eyes again, the thought is lost, fading farther and farther down the road, until a new thought supplants it.
When the first mate notices how Kirin's sentences begin to trail and other signs of sleepiness, she guides him back to his room and makes sure that he's all set before she leaves him. This becomes a nightly occurrence: he wanders onto the deck after that night's almost-dream and chats with one of the crew members until he's drowsy and then brought back to bed. Sometimes, they chart the night sky together and he traces the way the stars move slowly across their own dreamless ocean. Sometimes, they watch the waves knock against the sides of the boat, and they talk about the creatures that live in the deep. He learns things and then forgets them in the next breath, but what never goes away is the sensation of being a person, of being listened to and engaged with.
By the end of the week, he's lost his self-consciousness and ventures out on deck during the day. There are new things to see then, people in motion, and he stays out so long that he gets a sunburn. He spends the next few days being fussed over as it heals. He finds the peeling skin fascinating; the maid does not.
At night, he still doesn't dream, but instead, visions of the world pass through his mind. It's not that he sees through Billie's eyes, but rather that the Void that swims through her also swims through him, and that resonance simply echoes between them. There's a final recording, and an aching last breath, alone with a bottle of whisky and a sense of finality. The eye of a dead god, this one more forgotten than the last. The horrible dark-stone knife. The dream is over, and a fifteen-year-old boy sits in the daylight for the first time in thousands of years. Did he deserve forgiveness? Did any of them? But now it's not a question of what is deserved and what is not. Now, there is only the dusty sunlight of Karnaca that welcomes a former god, shaky and overawed at how big the world is after all, once he's brought down to scale.
"His eyes, they're green," Kirin tells the maid when she wakes him up. This is important, somehow.
"Whose eyes are green?" she asks, as she sits on the bed beside him and brushes some of the hair from his face, but he's already forgotten whom he was thinking of. This time, though, he doesn't mind forgetting. This is just one of those mysteries that, once glimpsed, fade back into secrecy, and perhaps it's for the best.
They're in Dunwall now, and the world moves in circles, not spirals, offering another opportunity to revisit the past—not to change it, but to understand it from a different angle, another inflection.
He's in Dunwall, again.
