The Discovery Tour

PART I: A New Breath of Life - Chapter I

"I see... t-that there are no choices left..."

The Outsider had seen all possibilities, and each led to his demise, like this one. For this, he was secretly grateful. The pain and suffering over thousands of years had numbed him, and yet he still longed for a release from the Void which had taken him hostage, bending him to its will, to be its caretaker, its hand, its meddler, its mischievous god.

And yet Billie Lurk had chosen a rare possibility: one where The Outsider tasted life again, like sweet candy on his tongue, melting at a leisurely pace and leaving a strange stickiness at the back of his throat. It amused him beyond all end, he'd like to think, that a human would choose to free a god. Slowly, agonizingly slow, she caressed his face, each finger carving out its own path down the granite, gently, his terrified eyes locked on some unseen terror in the distance.

"After everything I've done, everything it's taken me to get my ass to the Void... And you're not even some horror that I have to face. You're at my mercy... but you've always been at the mercy of bad people, haven't you?"

Billie's words stung in The Outsider's ears, watching from a distance and yet never able to step a foot closer. Something about her actions, whichever path she chose to take, took his breath away, leaving curious, painted eyes to watch from afar. This was The Outsider's last interest, his last game, his last piece to play. Now, Billie Lurk was playing hers. Well, Billie? What are you going to choose?

With a step back, the woman clutched her prosthetic, Void-gifted arm over her new eye, trying to feel what she could not. Instead, only the reverberations of stone against stone, metal against metal resounded in her ears. Billie's dark eyes scanned over the imprisoned Sacrifice, holding her breath as she calculated what she would do next. In an instance of weakness, she decided.

"I've seen what you've wanted me to see, you black-eyed bastard, but..." Billie glanced away, letting her flesh hand drop from his face. Still, he screamed silently as he had been for all of his eternity, awaiting her answer. "You don't deserve this--No one deserves this." She looked away and towards Daud. His ghostly form flickered at her gaze, almost in shame, almost in embarrassment, tendrils of the Void licking up his sides and caressing him.

Turning away from the Sacrifice, Billie approached Daud, her worn and tired boots clopping on voidstone, each step reverberating on the still air around her. Was it even air? Was this even real? Everything here was so foreign to her, so ghostly, so cold. It was almost like a dream--a dream she wasn't ready to wake up from. She had a duty to carry out--Daud's last dying wish--and she was going to finish what she'd started whether she liked it or not. "Daud."

His eyes never lifted from his hands. They sat folded on his thighs, flickering like a broken projection. "Billie." Daud was no longer Daud. He was broken; He was lost.

But Billie sensed that Daud was more than that: The way his yellowed teeth ground, his pale lips quivered, and his dead eyes flicked along the age-old lines running over his ghostly flesh. Daud wanted revenge, and he wanted Billie to take it for him.

"What are you doing here, old man?" To Billie, it was a simple question, but to Daud it was more than that--it was rhetorical. It hit him like a punch in the gut.

"I accepted The Outsider's Mark like a greedy rat child," his rugged voice croaked, self-hatred flickering in his eyes. "I ran the rivers red with guilty and innocent blood alike. I did it for coin, Billie, with his Mark. I murdered an Empress for my old selfish desires, beginning a tale as dark as time itself. I killed Dunwall, Billie, with his help."

Billie understood where he was coming from. She had been full of her own hatred for the same reasons, for the same selfishness. "You did it to survive, Daud. The Whalers needed your guidance."

"The Whalers were blinded by me! You were blinded by me! It's all-! It's all his fault." Slowly, his flickering eyes slithered over to rest on the rigid form of the Sacrifice. "It's your final assignment from me, Billie Lurk. Kill The Outsider. Make sure he feels it."