The mines are relentlessly dark now. At the entrance, the metal sign announcing "Shindaerey North Quarry" cuts into the jagged cliffs. The sky seems out of reach, an afterthought in this land. Bleached wolfhound bones litter the sides of the streets, abandoned in death as they were in life.
Kirin definitely doesn't like this place now. The ghost town flickers with whispers from the Void, holes in the fabric of reality that distort and tear.
"What have you done?" his mother's voice asks (had asked, did ask more than twenty years ago) from the corner of a broken-down bookshelf, cracked, its burden spilling out in untidy piles. At the time, she'd gripped his left hand tightly, turning over the prosthetic he'd so carefully crafted and fitted, but only her words exist now. "So you managed to get yourself deported and mutilated?" It's less of a question than an appraisal of the situation. "Why are you like this? Why can't you just be normal? You're not going to change the world; you're going to end up in prison, carrying on like this."
If Corvo can hear her words as well, he makes no sign of it. Perhaps he hears something else plucked from his own memories.
"You killed a student," his mother continues. She's looking for a fight. "You're lucky they just deported you. They should have put you in Coldridge so I wouldn't have to look at you again. At least in Tyvia, they're have sent you to Utyrka. They say on a clear day, you can see all the frozen corpses of the escapees." A pause. "You've shamed us all. What will his parents think now?"
"He gave his life for science," comes Kirin's past retort, guarded, embarrassed even, but unwilling to concede to his own fault. It's so strange to hear his own voice again: the youthful lilt of his syllables.
It's almost painful.
"You're a monster, and you make monstrous things," his mother replies.
"I create the future," he insists.
His mother laughs. "What a future that would be. I'd rather be dead than live in such a hideous time."
"That is merely in the eye of the beholder," Kirin's voice patiently, if measurably irritated, rebukes (a voice of him, but also indelibly separated by time now). "Anton Sokolov—"
"Anton Sokolov is the Royal Physician," his mother interrupts. "When you're the Royal Physician, you can cut up as many people as you'd like. You'd love that, wouldn't you? I should have stayed in Dabokva. I'd rather have been the cheapest whore there than give birth to you."
Her words fade out: at that point, he'd retreated to his room, the room that had become only his after his brother insisted on his own room in an act of will that Kirin had never anticipated nor seen again. At the time, he'd consoled himself with the sentiment that to be an inventor was to struggle against a simple-minded, frivolous society that could never understand him or his creations, and that in time, they would recognize him for what he was—one of the greats. Time was his only constraint.
The idea seems paltry now.
Kirin moves from the spot, unwilling to hear what else the Void might whisper back to him. His mother's words hurt as much as they did twenty-two years ago. He'd always known that she'd hated him, but to be confronted with that evidence again is another matter.
The shadows waver across the brick walls, hastily built to accommodate a mining boom lost gone. Clusters of tiny, white, luminescent mushrooms peek back at Kirin from the damp walls. They are almost familiar to him. He would like to take a sample to study later, but the longer he stares at them, the less he can hold onto. He's simply run out of time again. What did he want with them? Did Breanna want them? No, no, that couldn't be: she's dead now. Dead again, maybe.
It's a few hours from sunset.
He should get back home soon to watch the fireflies emerge from the grass, eerie and fluorescent but strangely beautiful too—little sickles cutting through the evening air. No, that's wrong again. It's the wrong month for that. It's too cold and wet right now.
Corvo shifts, uneasy, in a corner, glancing over the empty streets and desolate, watching buildings.
Kirin just has to keep his head, that's all. He fights down a wave of terror: he just has to figure out where he is, and then he can try again. An endless cycle of trying again. The alternative is so terrible that it is only a perfect blank in his mind, a placeholder. He just has to try again.
(Again and again and again, with nothing to show for it. Even the weariness in his heart must be endured without rest.)
He consults the notebook, and Daud's carefully steady hand meets him again. It's a relief to find something familiar again. Let's see, it was the mines that drew him here—that hole in the world. He peruses the instructions again—the way Daud has been shown again and again in his dreams, taunting him with a path he will never walk.
There is something dangerous in the mines, something as old as the Outsider, but he can't remember what it is. Breanna had mentioned it offhand, as part of something she'd learned recently and had wanted to discuss with Delilah. She'd been cagey about the details. The Void likes to play tricks on us, she'd said in his laboratory, with a trained evasiveness to rival anyone at the Academy, as she studied the lens he'd made for her. It could distort the archives.
Kirin studies the outlined path, then turns to Corvo. A familiar look settles on Corvo's face—pensive, careful. He's weighing where to keep Kirin, how much time he'll need.
"I want to come too," Kirin insists, against that look.
An even more familiar hesitation on Corvo's face, a pause as he tries to figure out how to communicate this reluctance to Kirin.
"I want to come anyway," Kirin says.
Endless calculations play out subtly on Corvo's face, but Kirin's seen them all before with Thomas. And still, an inchoate rage seeps through Kirin at all of this: powerful enough to know that it's there, but he's never table to hold his thoughts long enough to act on it. A useless rage, perhaps. A cycle without resolution.
Corvo reaches a conclusion. Carefully he lays out his terms in his own notebook and shows them to Kirin. He doesn't want to be spotted by the cultists, so they'll have to proceed carefully. Above all, he doesn't want Kirin getting injured or captured, so he'll only take him along if he promises to listen to him.
Kirin reluctantly agrees to this. (A formless anger once again sits in his chest and reminds him that once he didn't have to rely on others.)
Corvo spends twenty minutes teaching him the most important signs to recognize: wait, come, hide. Kirin learns the first two with difficulty, but the last one escapes him.
Only the long shadows on the wall convince Corvo to settle for this.
The mines are, at first glance, largely abandoned now. Heavy machines lie idle; papers and statues change seamlessly in the flutters of the Void. Bits of trash line the walls. Still, Corvo is on edge, and they do not venture out into the open, instead sticking to the rooftops and alleyways.
A bored conversation reaches them from a junction just ahead, and Corvo springs into action.
He carefully presses Kirin back into a darkened corner with a small "wait." Corvo seamlessly draws on the Void, as if it's a part of him now. He warps the parameters of the known reality to his whim. (It's thrilling to witness, truth be told.) The first cultist goes down seamlessly from a blow to the head, then is tossed onto a heap to awaken hours later. The second he drags back in a chokehold, the cultist's leather boots knocking against the ground until they finally slow and then still.
Kirin surveys the damage. "They're not dead?"
In the sudden emptiness of the alley, he's also aware again of his own voice—the haltering, dreamy quality of it.
Corvo nods. Then, he reaches for Kirin's hand again—hindrance as that may be, there's no other way to navigate the mines and keep track of Kirin. Corvo is far better than a machine, Kirin begrudgingly admits to himself.
Together, they continue onwards
No warmth emanates from Corvo's mark, nothing to show that he's been chosen to wreck his will upon the world, save for that distinct lettering. A dead language. There were notes in a little waterlogged room that Kirin found tucked deep in the mines. Syllables scrawled across the wall. They seemed important somehow, as if they went together.
The deeper they venture into the cultists' stronghold, the louder the humming is under Kirin's skin and the more vibrant the world seems.
Glancing down at Corvo's hand in his, Kirin can remember what it felt like to have Corvo lie beside him, not asking anything of him except his presence. He remembers Corvo's curious look of thoughtfulness, as if he's finally understood something about Kirin that Kirin himself has not yet fully grasped. As if though he'd finally seen through Kirin's attempts at normalcy, or at least its illusion, for that they were.
Lying there, wrapped in the warmth of Corvo's arms, Kirin had mused a little—to Corvo's endless amusement. What was it that Corvo had figured out before him? It had been maddening, really.
He'd thought everyone had wanted sex, that if he just tried enough, he'd come to like it too. But maybe that had been the wrong way to think of it. Being lovers didn't have to include sex. How liberating. A tension in his gut loosened in relief: he'd been steeling himself for this without even really being aware of it.
What else could there be in this world?
How strange that he might have never learned this about himself if Corvo had never left him this little space to be different, to have a different way of being.
Kirin cannot reconcile those two realities—cherished lover in one, ruined mind in another—two slowly moving tectonic plates colliding against each other, one subducting into nonexistence. How thin the boundary between his mind and the outside world had been—how cruelly his mind had been invaded. That was the only word for what had happened to him in the chair. Invaded and razed.
What did it matter if Corvo treated him gently and tried to keep him from harm now? He'd made him this way irreversibly, and left him to the mercy of others. Kirin would never be allowed to die of his own volition, only of the endless little heartbreaks.
That was different somehow.
As they make their way through the mines, following Daud's recounting of his dream, the pattern repeats. Corvo gently and quickly conceals Kirin (in a dark corner, behind a bookshelf, under a table, and one time, carefully perched on the exposed ceiling beams) and then effortlessly eliminates any nearby cultists. Corvo is quick to use the environment to his favor, and Kirin cannot help but wonder if he's getting another look at how Corvo must have explored the Clockwork Mansion, this time without the mass of sensors that alerted him to every footfall and shift in weight.
Still, envy rises in him. Why does Corvo not suffer when he draws on the Void? Why does it work perfectly with him, for him, as if there had never been a learning period?
The answer always eludes him.
As they draw closer to the Ritual Hold—so close, but yet, they do not see the stone stairwell that Daud described—the number of cultists grows. Discarded sketches, torn pages, and silvery whispers dot the interior of what Kirin can only surmise is a study of some kind. He peers over a desk at a mess of penciled calculations and a calendar of sorts. The owner is slumped in a corner, poised just well enough to make it look like exhaustion. Once, Kirin might have understood these written asides, but now, it's only clutter.
He tries to not be frustrated with himself—all this hidden knowledge and it means nothing to him. But he cannot make himself understand any of it, no matter how hard he tries. He can't even remember what the cultists wanted again. Something about the Void.
Hushed voices, spliced out of time, discuss the restlessness of the Envisioned, how they've seen the ghostly miners trudge through the tunnels again.
Kirin's not sure if he understands any of what's going on. He just wants to see what the Void looks like without its mediator. Has it refracted onto itself, thousands of realities happening all at once? Are they merged together? How does it know what to select for and what to discard? The death of a butterfly moves no one, and the fall of a sparrow goes unnoticed, but what about humans? Is that what the Void moves around, or is that too narrow a window?
What was he doing here again?
He doesn't feel like a person in those moments when his thoughts fade away. Instead, the helplessness comes over him, as he tries to figure out again (and again and again) what preceded this lapse in thought. He was so close to understanding something again, but he never does.
And it never gets any easier.
As he surveys Corvo's face, he can see just a telltale flicker of Corvo's thoughts, unbroken: resentment burns in him. Why him? Why couldn't Kirin have had his own mind to himself for just a little longer? What might he have been able to accomplish then?
A humming trails from the next room, and Corvo quickly tucks Kirin away under a desk. The wood frames his view as he watches Corvo move to dispatch another cultist into unconsciousness. The telltale movements of Corvo's left hand as he curls it into a fist to blink across the room. But as he does so, he falters this time—a half step, hardly noticeable to anyone who has not watched him at work. And yet, it was there. That telltale sign of something far worse.
His connection to the Void is fading.
Without the Outsider, would all their connections eventually leave them?
The cultist goes down, no match for the Royal Protector, still in the vestiges of his prime, but worry shows on Corvo: he flexes his left hand almost unconsciously, trying to reassure himself against what he's realized must come to pass.
Everything is ending.
Half alarm, half schadenfreude goes through Kirin as he re-emerges from under the desk. It's what Corvo deserves, he thinks. How could anyone settle for an ordinary life after knowing the extraordinary? To be haunted by what he once had is far more generous than he deserves.
His thoughts fade away again, but this time, he's slowly become cognizant of how badly this time being in a stressful new place and being unable to hold onto his thoughts worn him down. In theory, they are not far from the Ritual Hold, but in truth, Kirin may as well still be in Dunwall for all he can understand of the place. Fear starts to rise in him. What was he doing here again, anyway? He doesn't want to be here anymore. He wants to be... he wants to be... he can't really answer that. He doesn't think he wants to be back in Dunwall with all its ruins.
Corvo is watching him now with no small measure of concern.
It doesn't allay his fears.
The duration of his thoughts only seems to shorten now. He doesn't remember what he was doing down in the mines. He's staring at Corvo, trying to make sense of it all, but the answer never comes. He surveys the masses of papers with growing alarm. Where is he, anyway?
Corvo touches his arm, trying to get his attention, but it doesn't work.
Kirin recoils and slowly backs away from him. "I'm afraid," he says plaintively. "Where did you take me?" And as he tries to sort through the present, the only thing he comes up with is an amalgamation of the past.
Corvo offers his hand again, having come to a firm decision, but Kirin shakes his head. He doesn't want to be near Corvo. It frightens him badly for a reason he can't name. It's like being next to his own death: he needs to get away.
Something is nearby. He can't name it, but the longer he stays here, the more he wants to flee from it. This thing is wrong somehow. Alien, perhaps. It would find him entertaining in the same way that he once considered other beings.
Voices fill the air, and Corvo acts quickly. As he reaches for Kirin, fear gives way to terror.
"No!" Kirin cries out. "Don't."
And before Corvo can grab him, he slips out of reach.
Rearranging the world is as easy as running an idle hand through seawater, arbitrarily dividing the water here and there. The mass of crumbling rocks and slate, snapped wall reinforcements and discarded ore, opens up behind him. As he flees into the newly made passage, the earth slams behind him. He asks, and the world answers—it's the same as before in his laboratory, as he uncovered the secrets of the natural world, just transposed.
Those few seconds of bewilderment and horror cost Corvo dearly.
A struggle breaks out on the other side of the wall—a tangle of swords and limbs, strangled gasps of fear and choking death. Clattering steel and shouts of triumph—Corvo may be skilled beyond any measure, but the cultists have strength in numbers.
Panic grips Kirin, but he goes unnoticed, muffled by the thick wall of earth and minerals. Finally, the noise dies down. Perhaps they've killed Corvo, Kirin reasons, as he struggles to breathe against the constriction in his chest. He staunches the bleeding from his nose with the edge of his sleeve.
Voices come dimly through the walls. Not the mumbling asides of the ghostly miners, Kirin realizes with a start, but of the cultists. He strains to hear them.
"The Void always makes its wishes known," a man says decisively. "It wants to be whole again. It understands what must be done, and it has bequeathed us the opportunity to serve it as the Envisioned once did."
"But can we do it? The ritual has not been conducted in millennia."
"There's no room for doubt. Blood suffuses all of us: why should it also not suffuse the Void? Yes, this man will make a fine replacement."
Kirin frowns as he tries to understand what any of this means. His head hurts now.
The voices grow frenetic, but the first voice cuts them off with the air of one who is used to being obeyed.
"It's doesn't matter where the other one went," he says. "He'll be dead soon anyway."
They will do this endlessly, repairing the Void with blood. Something nasty and painfully raw in Kirin tells him to wait, that his inaction will be rewarded by this fortuitous turn of revenge. This is what Corvo deserves, isn't it? A life for a life. They will cut his throat, and his blood will spill out across the Void, as they are bound together. Corvo will spend eternity watching his daughter live on without him, grow old without him—unable to comfort or protect her through any of it. He would only watch as his legacy—the little girl he killed for, ruined the lives over—becomes a lingering memory in time, a portrait on the wall, unable to reunite with her even in death.
Ahead of Kirin is only the darkness.
Kirin can't see his hands or the outline of his form. He gropes along the worn-down wall, recoiling when his hands brush against splintering wood or sharp metal. He tries to figure out what must be here with him, but he can't hold a thought long enough to reconstruct the layout. Perhaps he's only been going in desperate circles. He's trapped himself.
He sits back on the cold, worn floor, uneasy and sick from a familiar fear.
"I'm afraid," he says to no one now. His voice is delicate and fearful.
Nothing responds. No one comes. It's only him and this endless darkness now. The silence frightens him for reasons he can't remember now, and perhaps they're not reasons at all. His throat hurts. For all he knows, he's gone blind: nothing appears before him to tell him differently.
He stumbles and knocks his knee against something stiff. Pain bursts across his skin. He cries out, fear and desperation lining his voice.
No one comes to rescue him. He's alone again. He'd have welcomed the solitude once, as a relief and a respite from the tedium of everyday life, but it terrifies him now. Something bad happened to him the last time he was alone; he just doesn't know what it was—
What was he doing here again?
Kirin searches the unyielding darkness for any answer, before fear sets in again. He's going to die here, lost in the mines. He wants to be safe at home again, but he can't visualize it anymore—he's scared and it's a blank in his mind, to match with all the other empty places.
He fumbles for the wall again, any hint of how to find his way out of this place, and as he does so, something inside his jacket knocks against him.
Oh.
With trembling fingers, Kirin retrieves his Void machine: the blue light gently seeps into the room, blanketing him in an illuminated circle.
"Are you there?" he asks. "I'm very afraid."
And to his relief, there's an answer.
"Most people would be," Sokolov replies at last, as if guiding him through a particularly difficult calculation. "But we are here together. Let's find a way out."
Kirin is almost angry at this gentleness: it was not what he experienced from Sokolov at the Academy. No, this gentleness had been learned for Emily, during his tutelage of her.
Kirin surveys his surroundings: broken lights jut out from the walls, wires of dubious quality connecting them like a linear constellation, receding into the night. Warm, stale air circulates around him, while a discarded newspaper puts the date at several decades in the past. He's in one of the abandoned mine shafts.
"Fascinating," Sokolov muses. "How much of the mines were sealed off. The why is easy enough to surmise."
Kirin's not sure he particularly agrees, but he considers the path ahead. A silver ripple bleeds into the world. ("You've heard voices down here too, haven't you? I can't understand what they're saying. Maybe we dug straight through to Tyvia.")
"Fragments of time," Sokolov continues, almost as an aside, but Kirin is just grateful for the light that his machine provides. It never crosses Kirin's mind just how dangerous striking a match might be right now.
Instead, he traverses the tunnels, peeking around the corners for anything frightening. Occasionally, he murmurs an observation to himself: an unusual poster, discarded bottle, even a particularly fascinating souvenir abandoned in the tunnels. This periodic commentary feels easy and natural to him; he's no longer worried about being perceived as incapable and babbling, down here in the mines and free from everyone's eyes. And he finds that when he's less stressed, he loses his thoughts less frequently and it's easier to roughly deduce what he's been doing.
He's reluctant to relinquish this freedom.
When he comes to a crossroad in the tunnels, he's stumped. Both ways seem equally foreboding. Only a little more discarded litter distinguishes the right from the left.
"Which way?" Kirin asks Sokolov. "Which way to the Ritual Hold?"
The wires hum and buzz. "I'm an old man, Jindosh. Too old to answer riddles. Ask the Void."
Kirin frowns. "Ask the Void?"
"It's watching. Don't you feel it?"
The image of a large, dark eye—cold, dead, and yet still seeing, condemned to seeing—trapped in a half-buried face appears in Kirin's mind, unbidden. He's never seen the image in any book, but here it is. It doesn't beckon to him, it doesn't serve him, but it does bestow its sight.
Forward.
The way is forward. On closer inspection, he can see that the path ahead of him has caved in, likely decades ago. It buts up against an old building, and beyond that, a stone staircase. He just couldn't see it there before. They would have never found the way to the Hold without the Eye.
Kirin places his hands on the rubble, feeling the wall stir in response to him. It's not a living being, but he can still commune with it, mentally travel along it, feel for any weak points, or areas that are amendable to change. With the light from his machine at his feet, casting steep shadows across the walls, he gently separates the rubble from itself to a narrow passageway.
A sharp pain in his chest causes him to redouble on himself, sinking to the floor. When it passes, he closes his eyes and gradually collects himself, before continuing onward.
Ahead, the stone staircase is littered with the desperate statues of the cultists, having thrown themselves before the entrance in a plea that would always go unanswered. Looking at their broken limbs, Kirin doesn't feel sorry for any of them—not in the slightest. It's only a curiosity to him. He carefully steps around their brittle forms.
The air continues to cool the higher he climbs, and though he could not tell the moment that he looks out onto the sunless sea of the Void, it's there all the same. Empty oceans and smooth obsidian line eternity in various arrangements. The final mystery. A voyage that refused to be charted.
Half-dissolved spirits waver around the spot where the Outsider was sacrificed, drawn there by the pain but not set free with his return to life. They scatter as Kirin approaches it: he thinks he almost hears Delilah's half-formed lamentations.
Beyond them, the Void whispers and waits, impatient and uncontained. A wound. A hole in the world to look through.
"There's a monster in me; maybe it's been part of me this whole time. Just waiting to be free."—"You'll find a cure for it, Alex. If anyone can, it's you."—The rats are on the Dunwall docks again. One of them is wheezing heavily, feverish and scratching at an old wound. Nothing is over.— The orange sunset pools through the lattice work on the balcony of the place Kirin once called home, empty now but not waiting for a new master.—Two children play dice in the streets of Karnaca, unaware that their mother, alone in bed, has breathed her last.—The whale sobs in the slaughterhouse, aware no help will come.—"If I fail, even once, Lucy—I can't, I can't—she's there too; she'll always be there. I'd gladly kill myself to be rid of her, but then who will care for the forgotten—"
It's sickeningly disarming to listen to the thoughts of the world pool through this hole in reality, pushing past the thread-bare patchwork of magic and desperation that once tethered the Outsider to the Void, itself a facsimile of an act long since forgotten.
If he doesn't act, the cultists will be here soon, and they will seal the hole with Corvo's blood this time. No one will ever believe Kirin anyway, so isn't this for the best? Kirin got to have a peek at the Void that anyone in the Academy would (and did, in vain) commit unspeakable horrors for, and then gets return home, largely unscathed. He could do it, and his meager conscience would never trouble him over it. It was just the world adjusting the scales again.
"It's a cruel thing to do," Sokolov says, not reproachfully but rather wearily.
"It's easy for you to judge," Kirin replies. "He locked you in a cage and gave you brandy to make you co-cooper-cooperat—to make you nice." The words are malformed. He's angry now, and made even angrier by the knowledge that he will not be permitted to hold onto this rage, that it will slip away like everything else. He doesn't remember what happened in the past week or even yesterday. He barely remembers how he's gotten to the Hold or how he'll get out. He's a creature of the painful present.
"Does everyone get what they deserve then? I'm an old man, Jindosh. I've seen how the world turns. Do you think this won't come back to haunt you?"
"i won't forgive him," Kirin counters. "He took me from myself." And he cannot express the horror that is still inside him at feeling his mind being burned away and being unable to act. The helplessness. The sheer erasure of boundaries between the outside world and his interior, his private mind. He cannot dwell on it, or he will never stop screaming.
"I know," Sokolov says, softening his voice. "I wouldn't ask that of you."
Kirin hesitates. "Then what?"
"You've seen the world with the Outsider—people killing for his favor. But we're men of science, you and I. We're not bound by the mundane solutions. You could let the same old prevail, or you could take the chance no one else will ever get. Can the hole in the Void be repaired?"
Kirin considers this. "Repaired?"
He turns over this new thought carefully. Not everything could be repaired. Was the Void one of those things? What would it feel like to touch the very fabric of the Void? He peers over the hole in the world, as it seethes and flickers.
The only thing left to do is to try.
If Kirin had been asked in his pristine laboratory to speculate what the Void would feel like, he'd have surmised it would have felt like plunging his hands into too-warm viscera: powerful above all, a domination of nature, an irrevocable crossing of thresholds.
Instead, it's like plucking notes from an untuned piano. Not all the notes land well, and sometimes the keys stick fast. But if he tries hard enough, his muscle memory can manage a tune. (His machine! His beautiful music box, ransacked for its secrets and then left loosened and pulled apart to rust in the unlabelled archives in the basement of the Academy. He grieves for it, even as he barely remembers it now.)
The Void ripples and bends as he matches the frayed threads of reality to each other, listening for the blissful resonance. One of his earliest memories is struggling onto a piano seat and figuring out the patterns to the notes. Two notes side by side—a second. Two notes with a space apart—a third. And so on, and so on, until he'd figured out fourths, and fifths and swooping octaves.
The rest was only arranging the patterns.
As he drifts into the land of intuition, another thought arises. He doesn't have to return to the world out there.
There's more than one way to write a melody.
He's the last of the Outsider's Marked. He's seen so much of the world, and there's even more he hasn't been privy to—miserable, dark corners of the human heart. It's not judgement that he's been invited to visit upon the world, and neither is it revenge—though the Outsider wouldn't have been surprised if that's what transpired in the end. If Kirin were to pick a different resonance here and there, what would it look like?
"That will only drive you mad in the end," Sokolov warns. His voice holds no reproach, only a weary sadness.
But Kirin has not come all this way just to listen to his old teacher. What other resonances can he find in the world? And as he matches the patterns together, a fourth here, a second there, the whole of the Void seems to appear clearer to him. He selects for different choices made here and there, and then—
It's perfect.
The world is finally perfect.
