Chapter Text
Corvo gasped as a chill ran through him, marble splintering and falling away from him in an instant leaving him shaking and numb. He remembered Delilah, the Coup, and afterwards... only murky memories, despair, and loneliness. He breathed acrid air and coughed painfully. How long had it been?
He lost consciousness before he could truly confront what had happened- what had been done to him.
When he woke again, the light was the same twilight as it had been. He could have been unconscious for minutes or days, but now the numbness had worn off. The cold was still there, leaving him shivering; it highlighted how much he ached and the pressure... something was on top of him, pinning him down. It hurt, it hurt so much; perhaps in part to his time in stone, but now everything raked at his oversensitive nerves like he’d been flayed.
Corvo’s palms stung as he pushed on the weight in vain. “Help” he tried to call, but it died in his throat and left him coughing harshly. The thing on him, rubble maybe, bit into his ribs with the movement of his chest. Is anyone there? He thought helplessly.
A whooshing noise, interspersed with crackles like a dying fire, had Corvo’s head lolling to the side to see.
The Outsider smiled from the shadows, black eyes glinting. “Corvo Attano, it’s been a very long time.”
Corvo shuddered, “Outsider...” he choked.
The Outsider’s head tilted and he raised a brow.
Corvo frowned, his vision was blurry and his confusion only continued to grow, but he thought the Outsider looked... flat somehow... diminished, more shadow than figure. “Help?” Corvo mouthed.
“I’ve never played favorites” the Outsider said, but he flickered out of existence and reappeared crouched at Corvo’s side. Close enough to touch.
Corvo jerked in surprise and it sent every muscle screaming. It took several minutes of careful breathing to banish the spots from his eyes enough to focus again.
The Outsider was different. His image flickered at the edges, transparent or washed in a golden glow, eyes entirely inky black or ordinary but with irises washed in silver.
Corvo swallowed painfully, mouth dry with the realization that perhaps his dreams- and nightmares -while in stone... hadn’t been. “What happened to you?”
The question was at a barely audible whisper, and slurred beyond recognition, but the Outsider had never seemed troubled by Corvo’s inability to communicate- not even at their first meeting where torture and trauma had rendered Corvo all but mute. Now the God seemed to keep his expression purposefully impassive. “Those I’ve chosen to mark have always caught my interest at moments where they stood at a threshold of desperation, the knife’s edge to determine whether they will thrive... or fall to ruin. For you, the murder of your empress and all that came after; and yet against all expectations, though you emerged a broken man, you kept your hands clean. No other among my marked can claim the same, no matter what I’ve given them, no matter that their choices were always their own... they all wanted more, or someone else to blame.”
The Outsider dissolved into ash again.
Minutes passed and Corvo was struck with terror at being left alone, trapped. His breathing went rapid and uneven. “Outsider? Outsider!” He thrashed, bucking against the slab of weight across his torso. Renewed blood flow to his feet left his toes in pins and needles with hot agony lacing up his legs, and he could tell that his lower legs were free. However, there was no way to get the leverage he needed to free himself.
“Shhh...” the Outsider soothed, somewhere Corvo couldn’t see, but he’d worked himself into full panic and couldn’t stop the way his limbs strained or his breathing devolved into ineffective gasps. He couldn’t tell exactly when he passed out again.
Something almost like fingers were running over Corvo’s scalp when he woke once more; the Outsider humming. Corvo shuddered, exhausted and wrung out.
The Outsider paused in his motions, “My dreaming in the void has always been lucid, how was it for you? I marked Emily, I wanted to see if she’d show your restraint, do you know what she chose?”
Corvo whimpered low in his throat and shook his head as memories came to mind, fragmented and blurred like dreams, but too well remembered for them to be imagined. Years worth of memories, decades, perhaps even centuries.
The Outsider answered anyway, “disgraced Lord Protector, your charge carved a bloody path through the empire in the name of her second lost parent. Then, when the corpses lay cooling beneath her throne, she decided to leave you safe and sound in your stone prison, rather than free you and face that inevitably- sooner rather than later -she’d lose you for good.”
A sob caught in Corvo’s throat, and he closed his eyes against the sting of tears.
“Shh...” The Outsider hushed, “now you’re free”, he murmured, beginning to comb barely-there fingers through Corvo’s hair again. “Freed too late. The Void has turned away, and were humanity to survive to see tomorrow night, they would gaze upon a sky filled with the ghosts of devoured stars, each night after showing fewer and fewer until there would be nothing remaining but blackness above and below.”
“Why?” Corvo rasped.
The Outsider met his eyes, ink black for a moment and then pale and human. “I’m here to give you a final gift”, he said instead of answering. “At the end of the world, the last gift of a twice-murdered god, existing now only as Void and space and time collide, to a twice-failed Lord Protector. I’m giving you a choice and a chance.”
The Outsider disappeared, reappearing in front of Corvo again, one hand outstretched in offering.
Shakily, with no other options, Corvo took it.
The god smiled, his grip surprisingly strong even as his form lit up gold, wisps of light dispersing in tendrils that licked up Corvo’s arm. The burning on the back of his hand was familiar, but not the way it leached up further like it was reaching through his veins for his heart.
“For what it’s worth...” The Outsider said with a mournful smile as transparency grew over his body, “I am sorry. It’s no small thing to unmake a timeline, and you’ll bear the brunt of it even as you stand in the eye of the storm.”
Corvo was gasping like a whale on land, the heat was spreading, scorching up his neck and deep into his bones, burning the air in his lungs; there was a roaring in his ears though somehow the Outsider’s words rang clearly.
The Outsider’s other hand, the one not merging into Corvo’s, brushed over his jaw, then as strong as iron forced Corvo to meet the dead god’s eyes. “This is the last time I’ll see you Corvo. As always, what you choose to do with my gifts is entirely up to you.” He seemed to falter for a moment, like he had much to say and no idea what words would actually convey it all, “I don’t know what state you’ll arrive in through your displacement, but I hope... I know you will weather it as you have everything else....” His eyes turned human, pale and watery. The Outsider visibly gathered himself, “I’m scared. After centuries of isolation and apathy, now I find that here at my end... I don’t want you to hate me.”
Despite the burning and pain, tensed so stiff he could almost be stone again, Corvo blinked in surprise and sudden sympathy. His lips worked, but he found his voice to be beyond him.
The Outsider smiled regardless, the transparency had taken over all but his face and the arm that led to their joined hands. “Goodbye Corvo Attano” the god whispered and dissolved into gold that surged around and into Corvo.
The burning flared to an inferno and Corvo screamed.