woodlandrealms | imagine it's a kind of... timepiece

make a starter for this

[ Six months, the black-eyed child had said, in a tone too flat to even suggest boredom with the passage of time. Six months, and this is what had become of Jessamine's beloved Dunwall. The Flooded District almost more full of corpses than water, carpets of rats blanketing entire alleys, people weeping in the streets even before the blood ran from their eyes, resigned and devastated to their inescapable fate. At night, fireworks and laughter explode over the wrought gates around the Estate District — Jessamine can see the lights from every rooftop in the city, though the music is never loud enough to travel too far over the sound of weepers, rats, and sirens.

Had her reign truly been so corrupt? Had her efforts truly been so weak? Had she truly been so blind?

Six months, my fair Empress,, the Outsider had said, and you've gone from the most powerful person in the empire to a cold, bloodless body. Your city has fallen to ruin. Your Royal Protector faces the gallows for your murder, and your beloved daughter a lifetime of puppetry under scheming men. In the Void, she had felt frozen, her own heartbeat silent, unable to cover her ears or demand that the boy stop tormenting her like this. The only consolation had been how impassive he seemed, gaining no amusement from her imprisonment. Do you think you can rebuild what's been taken from you?

Yes, Jessamine had hissed, finally, through locked-shut teeth, because an empress with a stolen throne may no longer be an empress, but a mother with a stolen child is still a mother. Perhaps that's a sign that she was never fit to rule, that as much as her heart breaks for Dunwall it still comes far behind her daughter. Perhaps it won't ever matter.

It will be interesting to see how you fare, going from your mortal power to the power I give, the boy mused, at last sounding something less than removed from it all. Then her hand had burned, like hot oil poured in a thin boiling stream over her skin, and she had —

Woken up. In an boarded-up apartment in the Distillery District, in the bloodstained suit she eventually traded for clothes she scavenged from abandoned rooms in the building. The only new thing, besides the neat, silvery scar under her ribs and the pale sigil etched into the back of her left hand, is a beaked mask, leathery and dark, with glass eyes and a note beside it that dissolved into ash the moment she had finished reading it. Your is face on every stamp and banner, Empress. You may want to take care.

As a young teenager, she had snuck out of the tower, intending to have adventures in the city proper, among the common people who only recognized the princess from a distance in her carriage. She thought it exciting, to shake off her Royal Protector and wander the streets like a regular girl. She had learned, eventually, that she'd never actually been without her Protector at all, that Corvo had rolled his eyes at her attempts and shadowed her without her notice. Jessamine had never been alone.

She's alone now.

She scavenges tins of food and lost vials of elixer, staying out of sight of the gangs and civilians, and spends every other waking moment using her powers to scour the city for any sign of her daughter. It is agonizingly slow going, not least because nothing in her life has prepared her for this kind of experience. She is — was — an Empress, a monarch, a ruler, a leader. Not a spy, a mercenary, an investigator. But it doesn't matter how out of her depth she is — Emily has been taken from her, and she will not rest until she has her daughter back in her arms.

At first, she considered trying to slip into Coldridge and rescuing Corvo, but by the time she started planning out the attempt, announcement of his escape had been blared across the city. Every time the loudspeakers crackle to life, Jessamine rubs her temple in disgust, the heavy-handed fearmongering of each declaration a staticky reminder of everything wrong in her city.

It gives her some degree of hope, that Corvo had managed to get away before it was too late for him, but Jessamine knows Corvo can take care of himself, and she turns all attention to finding Emily. She wishes her beloved Protector patience, wishes him safety, but Emily comes first before all things. Corvo, her dear, quiet, loyal Corvo — will simply have to wait.

Especially when further announcements start to circulate, of a masked terror slipping through the streets. By the time Jessamine gathers enough information to direct her toward the High Overseer, someone else has already gotten there first, emptied out his secret room of anything useful and branded him an exile.

Whoever this masked fiend is, they are snatching away what Jessamine needs right out from under her. Someone else is hunting her daughter.

So three nights after Thaddeus Campbell's exile, she scrapes her hair back into a plain braid, wraps herself up in a dark stolen coat, fits her beaked mask over her face, and sets out over the rooftops. There's only so many places a man with nothing can go. If she searches them all, eventually she'll find the man, and the law against speaking to a brand-carrier means nothing to a woman already dead. He will tell her where Emily has been taken.

It's during this search that she sees, on another rooftop several buildings away, the otherworldly flicker of a shadow blinking across distance, and it makes her heart seize in her chest with the memory of the last time that had happened. Breathless, she freezes in her own travel, then slips as silently as she can around the brick tower of a chimney, peering carefully around to watch the other person.

In the dark, from so far, it's difficult to see their mask, but it doesn't have the same protruding muzzle as the whaler's-masked nightmares that haunt her the few times she sleeps. It looks different somehow. Jessamine cranes her head a little farther than perhaps good sense would indicate, in her narrow-eyed attempt to see the other person more clearly.

And then a roof tile slips out from beneath her heel, skidding down and shattering to the street below. ]

Edited 2017-06-19 04:59 (UTC)

[Three nights it had been since Corvo took put down his knife and took up a brand. Three nights it had been since Corvo had the opportunity to dig through skin, to mark a man's flesh to double the amount that Corvo gained in Coldridge Prison. Three night it had been, and it was those three nights that Corvo gave his sleeping darts a new purpose. To calm a racing mind, and a racing heart of a man who could not forgive himself no matter which path he took.

Corvo desperately wished that the months that had passed made the sting of losing Jessamine more dull. He would prefer a numbness that allowed him to spill blood without regret, for it was blood she was left lying in. But the world was not kind, and with every stamp and banner he passed, his heart filled with a dread the Void itself could not create. It was as if the assassin's knife had plunged through Jessamine and settled in Corvo's, the ache in his chest constant. Corvo held no heart in his hands, and because of that sacrifice, her voice seems to seep into every silence that befell him.

He'd lose his mind, like this. He'd become like Granny Rags, speaking to the rats and waiting for a gift that would never come. There was no tether to the past, no momento to bring him a moment of reprieve. He could not possibly know what the Outsider mended in its place. The only guidance he had was the thin hope of finding Emily, and how her mother would not stand for her to see him embrace her with red hands. At least, that's what he believed once. If he would never hear her voice again, could he be so sure?

What he could hear, in this moment, was the tile crash to the ground below. It's within seconds that he turns, gaze falling from the roofing and dragging up to its origin. It's within a second that the Void sang and warped around the masked felon, who vanishes one of the several rooftops that'd separated them.

Corvo never once hesitated around her. There was no mistake; he's coming.]

[ In an instant, Jessamine goes bloodless-cold, plunged into the freezing depths of the ocean. The mask may be different, but the way the shadow vanishes from one place and reappears in another — Emily echoes in her ear, Mommy!, the phantom of her little arms trembling around Jessamine's waist, Corvo's ragged breath suspended above, and her ribs ache like splitting open.

There's no hesitation: at the first glimpse of that unearthly movement, Jessamine turns sharply to the side, dodging back behind the pillar of the chimney and throwing out the whip of her own new power to propel her through the air. Her footing slips as she lands, but she manages to right herself, clatter a few steps to the side before reaching out to make another jump, trying to make her direction as random as she can manage when her thoughts run icy with terror.

Running hasn't been an option before, even if things had not happened in such a blur, not with Emily for her to protect. But Jessamine is alone now, and still cannot fight any better than she had before. She has no hope of fighting this off. She can only hope to lose it in the dark. ]

[Unfortunately, she's running into the dark with a man who's spent all those months in it. Corvo pulls his sword from his belt and pulls the Void in his other hand, appearing to be two steps closer with every jump they both make. They were both practiced in the Outsider's gifts, and their hearts both jumped for Emily, but Corvo kept a steadier foot in his chase.

It's not long before Jessamine blinks and Corvo is in front of her, reaching out to grab one arm and raise his sword in the other, not yet plunging it through her. Unlike her last assassin, he simply dug his fingers into his skin and held his mask's intense gaze. A question, without asking.]

[ There's a power Jessamine rarely uses: it doesn't work on weepers, presumably because their minds are too far lost to obey any impulse but that of the plague, and she works hard to avoid encountering anyone else to begin with. She has no idea whether it could possibly work on someone as obviously touched by the Void as herself, but at this point, it's her last option.

She throws her other arm up in a bid to protect herself (a useless bid, as she knows very well how little it stopped the last attacker) and pours the compulsion of the Void into her voice, an Empress's proclamation: ]

Don't touch me!

[Corvo released her as he had been burned, taking several steps back before he catches himself at the roof's edge. But instead of a tighter grip on the hilt of his sword, he lowers it, eyes wide behind the mask. No one has caught him off-guard so easily, and no one... no one strikes him with such familiarity that he can't think to immediately attack again.

He holds his tongue, shifting his weight in a stance of a man on edge, both literally and figuratively. A moment passes before he gestures out towards her, simply holding the eerily menacing gaze on her with expectancy to explain herself.]

[ The relief of not experiencing the splitting agony of a blade through her ribs again washes over Jessamine, but only for a moment, not enough to make her truly relax even as she slowly lowers her arms. Not used to being questioned, even silently, Jessamine draws herself to full height under the gaze of that expressionless mask, every inch the ruler expecting to be obeyed without hesitation. ]

You will turn away. You will let me leave.

[ Even doing that much with the Void is tapping low on her spirit's energy, after her desperate attempt to Void-fling herself across the neighborhood. The power in her voice is already wavering. ]

[Corvo comes to a stand still, simply facing her with his hand still outstretched. His hand becomes a closed fist, which becomes a shaking fist, as he turns on his heel to face Dunwall ahead. Not because he has to, no. He hadn't made any attempt to resist. It was because he needed to. It was because he couldn't face her as a rough voice finally comes through the mask.]

Who do you think you are? [It can't be what he thinks it is. Who has the audacity to use a voice he lived to hear so long ago?]

[ Beneath her own mask, Jessamine can feel the blood drain from her face, her heart flipping over in hope, confusion, fear. For her it's been only days since she heard that voice — at least, something like it, though the one she remembers had been smoother and warmer and tender with affection for Emily's bubbly chatter. Not warped by a gruesome mask and hoarse with unspeakable weight.

That's not possible.

But...

It's barely a whisper: ]

... Corvo?

[The one thing Corvo remembers is the last whisper of his name. It had been so final, dying off as she did, and making the weight of her body in his hands the heaviest thing the world has ever made a man carry.

His hands drop the sword, rounding on her in one swift motion. He's quick to grip the front of her coat, dragging her forward. The intensity with which he speaks is riddled with anger, but it wasn't what made his voice crack so. He was a swarm of guilt, sadness, and simply an echo of the man who could greet their daughter with a smile.]

Who... are you?

[ The clatter of his sword falling to the rooftiles at their feet is almost deafening compared to the hushed exchange of their voices in the dimly-lit darkness; Jessamine cries out in surprise at the sudden wrench of fists clenched in her coat, hands coming up again to grab at those wrists, either to pull him away or keep herself steady. Even she isn't entirely sure which.

Then, this close to the figure, recognition returns to her in inches despite the death's-head mark snarling down at her: the familiar breadth of the shoulders, even hunched as they are, the grimy detail of a coat Jessamine knows without uncertainty she has touched countless times. Rough, broad hands, mangled in ways that send ice down Jessamine's spine, but still hands she would swear she has felt before.

Slowly, she releases one wrist to grip the beak of her mask, pulls it up over her head, blinks in the cool night air.

She can't see the other person through their mask. She can only trust that she knows him as thoroughly as she thinks she does. ]

[Corvo could not return to Karnaca.

It was to be expected, when you wake from a stone slumber to find Dunwall's streets littered with corpses yet again. In what seemed like what now must be a decade ago. Corvo had thought the Flooded Districts would be the extent of the horrors this city had seen, and what this city deserved. Corvo had no such thoughts. The karma from its citizens cruelty never seemed to bleed dry.

So Corvo accepted many things. He accepted that he would have to prevent all the newfound orphans flooding the now empty Overseer ranks, to avoid more lost souls than there were already. He accepted there was no way of giving the screaming widows with dead sons and daughters any peace. He accepted there was only so much he could do for Emily when he could hardly grasp how much time had gone by. Ultimately, Corvo accepted that he failed another Empress, and there was little he can do but pick up the pieces.

Corvo could not return to Karnaca, but with the aid of a sleep dart not meant for this purpose, he could dream.

He dreamed of the heat of the shores, the salt on is face, and the sands between his toes. He dreamed of endless shores and the sun setting in the horizon. He dreamed of a body where he did not ache, and a weightlessness he so often had as a child. It was a bliss, like most things in his life, that was too good to last.

The Void was heavy, cold, and the sand was only second darker to the oceans. Corvo exhales as the color of his once-home melts into a place he once regarded with fascination, but now only dread. He feels every scar here, every sign of his age, but he does not get angry. No, he was much too tired for that.]

Emily spoke of Delilah finding corners of the Void. It's a shame it wasn't this.

[He speaks, knowing even if the Outsider was not nearby, The Outsider was this place. There was no avoiding it, even if he may ignore it.]

imagine it's a kind of... timepiece

in which jessamine stalks corvo stalking everyone else

uhhh lmk if this ....... does not work at all

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remember that time you died