It was beautiful. Daud allowed himself a small smile as he finally admitted that fact. He’d been away so long that he’d forgotten the true splendor of the Empire’s capital, the largest, densest city in all the Isles. His memory, he realized, had been selective, his subconscious choosing to remind him only of the stench, of the rot and decay, of the violence and pain and death between narrow alleys of crumbling stone.
Of course, those memories, along with the feelings they elicited, were genuine. Decades ago, Daud had made Dunwall his home, and here he had done terrible things under the cover of the city’s shadows. The side of the city that he knew—the side that had been his home, with all its danger and darkness—had been the underbelly.
But there was another side to the city, one that, perhaps, Daud had not seen enough of. Up here, he at least had a glimpse of that splendor.
Daud grunted a laugh, amused at the way his mind had wandered. It wasn’t like him to think this way, but then he had been away a long time, and he was older than he cared to admit and had perhaps changed over the years more than he realized. The city had changed too. His time as leader of the Whalers was so long ago, the activities ofhis group no doubt now just an unpleasant footnote to an unpleasant period of the Empire’s history. A period he had played a key role in. Not a day went by when he didn’t remember, and he knew he would carry those memories—memories that grew heavier and darker with each passing year—to his grave.
He had tried to forget. Exiled from the city on pain of death at the hands of the Royal Protector, Corvo Attano, Daud had run. He’d got as far from Dunwall—from Gristol itself—as he could. He went to Morley, where he lasted a year in Caulkenny before getting tired of being around people. He went to Tyvia, settling not in Dabokva or Tamarak but heading inland, skirting the tundra and finally settling outside a village near Pradym, in the barren northern territories. There he built his own shack and spent the days harvesting lumber and the nights carving the endless cords of chopped wood into intricate animal forms: bears, wolves, owls. He was especially fond of carving owls.
His hair and beard grew long and he spent six years avoiding the curious residents of the village as much as he could, until one night he saw them gathering with torches and he slipped away before they came to burn his cabin down, the more suspicious village leaders ready to accuse the strange hermit in the woods of witchcraft.
He had walked north and had thought of nothing but Dunwall. It seemed that the farther he got from the city the more the place pulled at him, like he was tied to its very stones, in the same way that the Mark of the Outsider had tied him to the Void. Daud almost turned around, surrendering to his doom and the inevitable return to Dunwall, but once he reached Wei-Ghon, he felt a change come over him. He had never been one to give much thought to any kind of greater meaning in life,but in Wei-Ghon, at last, he began to wonder whether he could finally let go of his past—or if he could go further. Reinvent himself. Take a new name, start a new life. He even began to sleep again—properly sleep, not the semi-conscious doze his body was used to, his mind slumbering but ever alert for approaching danger.
For the first time in years, Daud dared to wonder if he had found a life he could actually live.
And then the dreams started.
They were all the same. He was a Whaler, holding a bloody knife as he stood over the body of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin. The city of Dunwall was crawling with an infinite swarm of rats. They raced up his legs, covering his body, crawling behind his mask, clawing at his eyes, eating his face. And through the bloody ruin of his eyes, Daud saw the Outsider standing before him, arms folded, silent, watchful, the corner of his mouth turned up in an evil, knowing smirk. And then the Outsider turned, gesturing the landscape around them, and Daud’s final dying vision was not of Dunwall but of Karnaca—the city of his birth, a city he had not seen in more than twenty years—on fire. The air filled not with smoke but endless black clouds of bloodflies, the beating of their wings the sound of the end of the world.
Daud woke up screaming the first night. The screams became less frequent over the days and weeks that followed, but only because he found himself afraid to sleep. But the night terrors didn’t stop when he was awake, because all he could see when he closed his eyes was the Outsider’s face. His black eyes; his black smile.
Daud left Wei-Ghon and headed south to Karnaca, the capital city of Serkonos and the southernmost country of the Empire of the Isles.
His home.
The journey had been long, but Daud had used the time well. He had come up with a plan that would free him from his past, once and for all. He gave himself one last task that he hoped would atone for his lifetime of anger and hate and violence and deceit. One final mission that would release him, forever.
And not just him—if he was successful, he would free the whole world from the grip of the interfering black-eyed bastard.
Daud was going to kill the Outsider.
The only question was how? The answer eluded Daud for a long time—until he began to hear rumors of something that sounded like the solution. It started with a story whispered in a back-alley drinking hole, a story that had taken Daud six weeks just to get one complete, vaguely linear version of.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough—and Daud took the fact
