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The river catches you.
It hurts at first. You punch through the water’s grime-green surface like a bullet shattering brick, the shock of the hit to your side and the frigid cold turning the world incomprehensible as you plunge deep, deep down. Your diaphragm seizes in response to the submersion—a basic animal reflex to breathe that you know will get you killed. You clench your teeth and cover your nose and mouth and force it down and hold on. If there’s one thing you’ve become good at, it’s that.
It’s quiet here, you observe, a detached thought that makes it through the shock. Everything is muffled, soft, distorted by depth. There’s yelling. You open your eyes to see the final pieces of stone and shrapnel and bridge truss twisting through the water around you, trailing bubbles until the air they forced into the river with them has all escaped and they disappear into the churning silt. Pressure builds in your ears and your lungs begin to burn.
A bullet tumbles slowly downward in the gloom past your aching body, spiraling end over end in a useless, lazy drift. More follow, rhythmic and futile. One knocks against your leg. It’s still warm.
Embraced here in the river currents, you realize that you’re actually free.
And when your numb back finally hits stone and all you see above you is scintillating light and water weeds reaching for the sky, you know another thing: that even though the river caught you, it cannot cradle you forever.
So you push off the bottom and you start to swim.
In your dreams the air is fluid and heavy. You wonder hazily if the Void has a surface, somewhere up past the diffuse glow of wherever the water all lifts to. Maybe you left a part of yourself behind on the riverbed, the Wrenhaven seeping so deep under your nails and into your mouth that you carry its dregs with you even into sleep.
The pressure here holds you close like whale oil packed into a firing cylinder, compressed and ready to combust. All the weight without the skull-crushing depth. When the Outsider offers you power his voice wobbles to your ears on a rippling invisible current. His smile is sharp—and you say yes.
When you wake you spit lungfuls of brackish water onto your threadbare sheets, glistening with oil and stinking of salt and iron.
Dunwall has become a rotten, still-beating heart, rainwater washing the blood you spill away through concrete capillaries and veins until the great sewer mouths disgorge their rushing slurry into the river. The wetness keeps you clean, or as clean as it can.
A downpour drums in the streets. Your coat hangs sopping and heavy about your shoulders and condensation from your heaving breath curls before your mask like smoke. You push the Overseer off your blade and his corpse crumples into the puddle that’s overtaken the alleyway you found him in. All the red parts of him, fresh and bright, run quick and pink into the water.
The blood is brief. The screams, whenever they get a chance, are briefer.
You push up your mask to wipe the sweat from your face, but in the process you smear blood across your mouth from where you’d touched the man. You realize the mistake too late. You lick your lips, then bend and cup your hands in the puddle at your feet.
The taste of blood is a mundane one to you. A scabbed-up lip on the streets of Batista, sucking on a scraped knuckle after a good spar, changing a dressing and holding the linen taut with your teeth. Biting your cheek until it splits to keep from screaming. Drowning in it when they took your tongue.
Now you think it tastes like brine.
You wash your face and three-day beard in cold, gritty water and it feels like an ablution. When you find her, you assure yourself, you will already be rinsed clean by the wind and the rain and the waves.
The amalgam of riveted metal and bone hums beneath your touch as you crouch in the warehouse basement. Rat corpses and weeper limbs lie strewn across the dusty floor behind you like blooming red flowers.
You scoop it up and turn it over in your hands. Its yearning, resonant vibrations spread through the flesh beneath your mark and set the hair of your arms prickling. Later, when you leap from Kaldwin Bridge and plunge deep into the water after leaving Sokolov’s home rancid with death, its song bursts forth through you.
The laceration across your shoulder seals shut with a surge of cold fire. Your elbow re-locates with a snap. A grin cracks sharp across your face and you laugh in elation, bubbles rising in the dark.
The boatman stumbles across you one night and regrets it.
You come down to the river often now, near nightly for the last week and always long after Emily’s been put to bed. It’s dead still beyond the pub’s excuse for a yard, quiet enough to hear the calling of night creatures echoing from the opposite shore. The Wrenhaven’s dark surface reflects a perfect mirror of thin clouds and a hazy moon. Mist drifts across it and curls among the reeds.
Soft, cold river mud presses up beneath your feet and you feel half-numb where you sit, flushed dark with the water’s chill. The charm you now wear hung around your neck soothes the aches, pushes back the exhaustion, makes you feel full and whole and part of the vastness of the water. You curl your toes in deeper.
Rustling from shore, then footsteps—you tense. A light bobs down past the corrugated fence and across the haphazard dock where the Amaranth is tied. The lantern is held low, but you recognize Samuel’s weather-worn trousers and rolling gait. He kneels next to his boat and bends to search for something beneath the seats.
You exhale slowly. He hasn’t seen you and so he’ll be on his way soon, and you can return to your solitary quiet.
Needle teeth sink into your calf.
You hiss and shoot your hand beneath the water to grasp thick, slimy skin before the hagfish can react. Water slaps around you. You sink your fingers hard into its rubbery gills and then deeper, scales and bone crushing with satisfying little pops within your fist. The creature thrashes and spasms around your leg until it doesn’t anymore and you twist it free from your flesh.
A startled breath floats out from shore.
“Hello?” Samuel calls tremulously. “Is someone out there?”
He raises his lantern to search the darkness. The lens flashes, momentarily blinding you, and you flinch away to cover your eyes. When you turn back, the boatman gasps. Samuel’s expression flits through shock and confusion before raw fear overtakes him and he stumbles back across the damp cobbles.
You know what he sees. You’re naked, wounds on full display, hunched chest-deep in the mist-covered water about ten feet from shore and still grimacing in pain. The very edge of the lantern’s flickering pool of light catches you, all glistening dark eyes and wet skin and the fish oozing bright blood and organs out over your fingers.
You rise on instinct. The water only comes to your thighs when you’re standing.
“Outsider’s arse,” Samuel chokes out. He raises a shaking hand. “Lord Corvo, you—“
You sweep your arm in an aggressive arc that says leave.
“Are you alright? You’ll freeze to death—“
A frustrated snarl rips from your mouth in lieu of the words you no longer have the tongue to speak. Your mark flashes. It’s bright enough to leave a split-second afterimage and the boatman finally gets the point. He scrambles away up the steps into the pub yard, stammering apologies as he goes.
And then it’s quiet again.
You stand, heaving, in the river. The hagfish’s corpse slides from your hand with a soft splash. Another gift for the current, the birds and the crabs.
The frigid water feels nearly warm in comparison to the air when you plunge below the surface once more and stay there, holding your breath, hair tangling around your face and shoulders in the weightlessness. Your lungs burn. But the water doesn’t feel like a cradle anymore. It doesn’t feel like it’s yours, the sacred privacy broken.
You had terrified Samuel. But in the whites of his eyes and his reaching hand there had also been fear on your behalf.
The river catches you again. Oh, the river catches you so gently this time.
A vibrant, earthy scent of estuarine decay washes over you and you rise to panicked consciousness with the knowledge that yes, you are in a boat and yes, you are furious. You have been furious for so very long now. The river rocks you gently in and out of fitful oblivion, silent the face of your sorrows and your fear. You hear insects thrumming among the reeds. Urgent nausea curls in your gut but the rest of your wrung-out body is too weak to care.
Voices come. You’re laid face down and your arm hangs off the side of the little boat, fingertips in the water. You flex your hand and reach deeper, deeper, deeper. You reach for power that won’t come and the simple quiet that swallowed you up twenty feet down in the Coldridge channel. You reach for solace.
Can you hold solace? Can you pluck it from the Wrenhaven like a pearl?
You drift again. The river rushes past your feverish skin in an endless cool caress and it’s the last calming touch you’ll ever have.
You couldn’t reach her.
You sag, gripping the weather-beaten iron railing. The platform’s grate creaks under your weight in the gale and the spitting rain. Far below there are two crushed bodies you never laid a hand on and endless miles of angry, raging, white-capped sea. You look at the horizon and see the end of yourself.
In the river it was quiet. In the river, you were free. You step up to the edge and wonder if the ocean will catch you just the same.