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They say the Empress painted a masterpiece the night the world fractured.
Daud never used to think history was a tangible concept; yes, words pass from the lips of one to the ears of another, imperfectly formed, half understood and poorly remembered, but ultimately what happened in the past is surely immutable.
Instead there is this – this splintered reality, like a knife in his brain slicing the fabric of his two identities that only dulls after the fifth, sixth, seventh glass of cider he downs.
The Empress didn’t just paint a masterpiece the night the world fractured.
She also wept.
Daud remembers himself at the age of nineteen, winning the Blade Verbena and the Duke of Serkonos gifting him to Emperor Euhorn’s beautiful daughter to be her loyal bodyguard – the happiest day of his life. But sometimes, he also remembers himself at the age of nineteen sleeping in a grotty abandoned apartment in some derelict corner of Dunwall, scraping the bottom of a tin for the last morsel of whale meat and killing a man in his sleep to take his shoes.
The second cannot be true. He shakes his head to clear his mind, and announces the Empress’s arrival.
When he stands on the cool granite tiles of the pavilion, reality shifts, just for a second. He sees himself, not at his Empress’s side, but driving a blade through another – none like the last, none like her –
It ends, head aching, shaken to the core.
“Be calm, my Lord Protector,” Empress Delilah Kaldwin coos, soothing his heart. “This is the world as it should be.”
Yes. Of course it is.
She asks him to kneel; he kneels. She asks him to kiss her feet; he obeys. She asks him to bleed; he cuts himself for her and loves it.
Empress Delilah Kaldwin is the glory of her loving subjects – the ruler of the Isles, the Conqueror of Pandyssia, the finest artist the world has ever seen. The people chant her name, lick her flesh, sing her songs; she weaves paint with magic and crafts statues from her citizens. She has – is – everything, and yet her eyes are sad.
When Daud watches her, he wants to kiss her pain, her loneliness away. But sometimes – to his horror – he finds his hand closing around the hilt of his blade, as if to fulfil the urge to drag it across her neck.
They say she cannot die; that she's one with the Void itself, immortal, eternal and beautiful. She has no need for an heir if she will live forever.
“There are others more worthy of you than I,” Daud says, unable to understand why his skin crawls and his stomach revolts at his desire to worship his Empress in the most intimate of ways.
“It would amuse me,” Delilah says, and he is not one to question her will.
(He throws up afterwards, shaking and shivering, clawing at himself to cleanse her thorned-rose touch, the scent of poison from his skin.)
She names the child after the mother she lost, and for a while the young princess calms her mother’s restless nights in the gallery where she paints and paints and paints, the tears in her empty, lonely eyes as water for her brush.
Daud cannot bear to look at the girl. There is little of him in the young lady he is sworn to protect – only Delilah’s sneer and pale skin and high cheekbones. When she is ten years old, begging him to play hide-and-seek with her, the world splits again and he calls her Emily.
Delilah’s punishment is fierce.
There is a statue in the throne room and it has been there for as long as Daud can remember; the figure of a man, reaching out in defensive fury, his hand grasping at an invisible foe and his face twisted in horror. It is one of Delilah’s favourite works – she paces around it when she’s in one of her moods.
It haunts Daud’s dreams, that cold marble face warping into a mask of death that holds a blade before his throat as he pleads for his life. He wakes with dying screams of terror on his lips and regret.
They say the Empress is going mad.
It starts as a whisper, flooding the streets, making its way onto her posters and portraits in the form of graffiti, then it twists upwards like the sharp vines that decorate the city, erupting through the cobbled stones and crawling up the side of Delilah’s palace. They say she paints her days away, obsessed with her latest work, that it consumes her, so much so that she barely even notices her own daughter anymore.
This is his fault, somehow. He knows he should do something, but do what, he thinks – make it worse?
The figure that enters his dreams and watches him from the corner has eyes as black as coal. He has the look of a young boy about him and yet he feels ancient; a ghostly figure who should not exist in Delilah’s perfect world.
“Hello, Daud,” he says, his voice a cool melody in this place that feels like home. “I’m impressed you resisted her this much. But then, you always were a stubborn bastard.”
“What would you have me do?” he growls, feeling more himself now than he has in years, and the true Outsider whispers in his ear.
It takes a year to destroy Delilah’s immortality, but the world is already fracturing and the girl is dead by the time he arrives.
“A necessary sacrifice,” Delilah whispers. The masterpiece stretches from one end of the room to the other, her fingers dripping with paint. “I will be happy.”
Daud cradles the child in his arms. “You had everything, witch,” he snarls. “I should have killed you when I had the chance!”
“Yes,” she agrees, “you should have.”
When the blade that doomed another world is shoved through her chest, the Outsider laughs, the world fractures, and Delilah weeps.