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With her niece locked in her chambers and her Protector as a statue by her side, Delilah relaxes into her new throne.
She's never been so happy, she thinks. She watches the room: the Clockwork Soldiers whirring; the Duke patting Ramsey on the back, joviality spread across their meaty faces; dead actors sleeping on the floor like content little children.
Luca comes closer, and she sighs; there is a greedy eagerness behind his eyes that she immediately recognises. Delilah isn't exactly sure how she comes across so many dependent men. He's like a dog, she thinks, as he puffs out his chest and places a presumptuous hand on her thigh.
"Good dukes get kisses, Luca," she drawls dispassionately. Every ear in the room turns red. Ramsey shifts slightly where he stands, feigning a loyal guard's stance. "You haven't been good."
"I-- I'm not quite sure what you mean, my dear," Luca stutters, flustered, turning pink under his moustache. "We've won! Look at what we've achieved -- total domination!"
Ramsey politely -- or, as close to politely as he is physically able -- clears his throat. "If I may, Your Imperial Majesty: Tyvia and Morley still have to accept your rule in writing. It isn't legitimate until they agree to it."
She pays the thought less than a second of her time. "No matter." She swats Luca's hand away from where it was slowly creeping up to her waist.
Once they hear the coup was successful, her witches descend upon Dunwall Tower like a colony of bloodflies. They wander around the halls, touching everything (leaving dirt on the balustrades), stepping on the corpses (and remarking on the odd texture of the Tower floors; they laugh at their own joke), and shaking their heads at the Sokolovs hung above the mantels. They giggle and cackle to themselves, then run off to find their mistress in her beautiful new room. The warm updrafts of Earth scatter them about the grounds like dandelion seeds.
This is it, she thinks: the world as it should be, looking back at her with adoration in its big, stupid, beautiful eyes -- grovelling at her feet, rolling in its own blood as her coven swarms the streets.
First, she visits the servants' quarters to the side of the entrance hall, where she still held vivid memories of her mother. She sees her toss in her bed -- and when Delilah goes to enter, she sees young Lady Jessamine hovering to the side of the door, her eyes wide with fear of being caught awake so late.
"I snuck out for you," she says, as she says every time she comes down. "Do you want to go feed the tower hounds?"
Delilah is helpless to intervene; as she always does, she watches her younger self, wrapped in its maid uniform, slip through the door after Jessamine's shadow. Their bodies are very different: Jessamine resembles their father much more than Delilah does. Delilah lopes like a lazy wolf while Jessamine walks with the upright trot of nobles. There's something wild and ancient in Delilah's eyes, even in her preteen years, while Jessamine's expression is already becoming something controlled and inoffensive, the muscles trained into strict rigor.
The memory fades, and reality comes back to her.
Delilah is overcome by a sudden, consuming rage.
The scene unfolds: the witches inside the room, perched on waterlogged mattresses that drip onto the floor below, recognise this immediately. They jump upright (and some of them still have their noble trots, their refined ways of checking for other people's emotions) and direct their gazes towards the toes of her high black boots.
"Your Majesty?" asks one, eyes darting nervously to the wall. "Is something the matter?"
Behind her is an overgrown forest of herbs, flowers, and vines. One of them pierces straight through the mattress that she remembers from so long ago. A dead man's body sleeps soundly in her childhood bed.
"We come to live in luxury," she begins slowly, with the monotone learnt from the Outsider, all those years ago; "and you purposely destroy it?"
Their brows furrow in confusion. "But--"
She cuts them off with a sharp, high noise. They cower. "What is the point in coming to Dunwall Tower if we don't enjoy everything about it?"
With a sweep of her gloved hand, she sends a vase crashing to the floor. "Clean it all up."
Their eyes dart to each other like grey, greasy fish. They wonder where their mistress has gone -- the one who took them out of their lives of splendour, and showed them the joys of living among rats and weeds in a dilapidated manor. They followed Delilah into a life of greed, sex and freedom -- and what they see of her now isn't part of it.
They nod -- and breathe a collective sigh of relief when she leaves.
Delilah decides to try something she was cheated out of trying years ago: pretending to be Jessamine.
For the sake of beginning the charade on the right note, she sets a kettle to boil; she had no doubt that Jessamine had never performed physical labour once in her life, but all the servants were long dead. She digs out a bag of loose leaves, rotten with mould -- although, Delilah considers that as extra flavour. Finally, to complete the scene, she sprinkles a handful of shattered plates at the foot of Corvo's statue.
The statue itself, Delilah thinks, is a masterpiece of art. It reaches out towards her, hand grasping at the air, face twisted in fear and shock; a moment snatched out of time, like one of Jindosh's silvergraphs capturing a bird in flight.
She sits down across from it, tea held elegantly, and considers what she knows of Jessamine.
"Lovely weather we're having," she begins haltingly. Thunder rumbles outside, followed by peals of haggard laughter. "I wonder if we should host a ball, soon."
Despite its eyes being blank, the statue's focus is clearly directed to somewhere above and to the left of her. She resents it.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you, Corvo," she chides. "I'm your--"
What was Jessamine to him?
"...Your partner," she decides. "It would do you well to pay attention to me."
That was right, wasn't it? Corvo fathered Emily, and his devotion to service must be because of ownership. Royal Protector -- a glorified slave, passed between family like a heirloom.
What she knows of Jessamine and Corvo's relationship is exceedingly little; she congratulates herself for the bare minimum, and smiles into her cup as she takes a sip. It never occurs to her that the pair could have loved each other for more than their bodies -- or, indeed, loved at all.
"What do you think I should do about our unruly servants, Corvo?" she asks, and takes a sip of her tea while she pretends to listen to a response. "Mhm. Alright, Corvo. If you say so."
She believes that Jessamine was a cruel and deeply rotten person. Any voice of reason must have come from Corvo, she thinks -- and because of that, she reluctantly decides to be merciful.
She looks up at the statue; Royal Protector, cast in stone, stuck before the throne he spent his entire life kissing the feet of. She thinks that there isn't much of a difference between him before, and it now.
She picks off the film of mould covering her tea and finishes it. She stands up daintily, brushes off her breeches, and kisses the statue on the lips.
Her phase of pretending to be Jessamine lasts less than two days. In the hours after speaking with Corvo, she takes the role very seriously; she adjusts the rattle of her Void-tinged voice to align more with what the remembers of her half-sister, and digs through Corvo's wardrobes until she finds a white dress that stinks of dust.
When she puts it on, it barely fits her. It flows like a wedding dress; the neckline reveals a little too much cleavage to be polite; and the white crust at its hem suggests that it wasn't meant to be worn in public at all.
She stares at the spot and thinks, Emily was made from that. She touches it, and wonders how far she's willing to go to uphold the illusion of Jessamine.
When she takes it off, she decides very, very firmly -- not that far.
Later, she addresses her coven, her posture elegant and straight. The women who grew up bourgeoisie recognise the change, and shift uneasily; the ink and oil slathered on their faces glint in the candlelight.
"Citizens of Dunwall," she begins, and the hall rustles with indignation -- they were not citizens of anywhere. Papers and formalities were what trapped them to begin with; they were free spirits, promised the power of the Void by their mistress -- who seemed to be forgetting that.
"I have decided to celebrate our successful reign," she says, and their expressions lighten. "Let us feast!"
Using a bloodbriar's Pull on the tablecloth begins an orchestra of empty clanging and ringing metal; it reveals a dinner spread filled with plates and bowls of rotten and wilted food.
"Enjoy," she bows. The room fills with cheers; the witches begin slurping and chewing noisily. She looks at them with an empty, happy expression.
She wasn't enjoying being Jessamine, she thought, as Ramsey's replacement fetched a sheaf of papers for her the next day. He was a nervous man, but very large -- and he looked ridiculous as he tried not to damage the fragile papers he held in his calloused, leathery hands.
"Your Majesty, if I may speak?" he asks politely, to which she nods. "I'm very glad that you're taking responsibility for the Empire now. For the first few weeks -- well! You have a chance at appeasing Morley and Tyvia now." He deposits the correspondence in front of her gently. "If you need any help, Your Majesty -- you know who to ask."
She smiles and nods, but says nothing. The replacement knows when he shouldn't speak, so he leaves quietly without fuss.
After that, it's just her and the papers. She takes down the first one -- a letter from the Morleyan queen, demanding to know what happened to the previous empress. At the very bottom of the carefully-calligraphed letter, she writes 'My daughter is alive and well. We had a family disagreement. Love and kisses from Dunwall.'
Satisfied, she takes an envelope and locks the letter inside. She dips her quill back into her vein, and takes up the next letter.
She is bored to tears by the time she reaches the bottom of the pile. She doesn't understand the subtle politics embedded in every word; the veiled insults hit her harder than they should -- and so, at the end of the second day, she decides that perhaps she wasn't meant to be Jessamine after all.
She prepares another pot of tea, harasses one of her witches into preparing braised bloodox, and sits in front of Corvo's statue. She rests her chin on her fist and her elbow on her knee. She looks up at the stone.
Her possession of Emily was a backup plan -- her first choice was Jessamine, but once she died, Delilah didn't have much of a choice. She wonders if being Corvo's daughter was actually the better option all along.
She decides to try.
"Hello..." She is immediately stumped. Was Emily the kind of girl to call him 'daddy' or 'father'? "...father. How have you been?"
She steals a slice of the bloodox from Corvo's plate. She eats it reluctantly; she never had a taste for meat -- but Corvo enjoyed red meats soaked in their own salty juices, and so Emily likely did too.
She swallows. "Me too, father. Alexi is doing alright, yes -- she's proving promising for the Watch. You should train her." Then, she scowls, and corrects her sentence to apply to the present: "Alexi is dead now. She was very promising; it's a shame she didn't follow... my new orders."
What else did fathers and daughters talk about? What else was there to even say?
"...Do you miss mother?" she asks, the shudder of her voice pitched higher. She nods along to whatever she hears him say in her head. "So do I. She was..."
Rage consumes her. It surges from her hands in the shape of sharp rock, embedding themselves with floor-shattering thunks around the statue's base.
"She was wretched," hisses Delilah, "and ruined my life. I will continue to take from her what she took from me. The Empire is mine. The Tower is mine. Her Protector is mine."
Being someone who revered Jessamine's memory enough to mourn her even fifteen years in the future is, decidedly, too much. She scowls, stands up, and seizes Corvo's face between her long, spindly hands.
"They kicked me out just before she chose you as her Protector," she tells him, seriously and slowly. "She was twelve. I was thirteen. I didn't deserve that, did I? And now, look at me -- at the head of the Empire, from my own strength and genius. Just like you, in a way, hmm? Winning the Blade Verbena? Jessamine was sickening about you. And now--"
She lets go. Her hands curl into claws; she paces the room, suddenly wrung with anxious energy. She lets out an angry scream.
She leaves to the roof. Several of her witches are found displayed around the Tower parapets by morning.
The coven continues to destroy the Tower, either by negligence or through throwing ostentatious, rowdy dinner-parties with the stashes of tinned meats in the cellars and kitchens. Every shattered piece of glass, destroyed painting and graffitied table drives her further and further up the wall; she directs that energy into planning.
First she sends Breanna back to Karnaca. Her second looks reluctant, and trails her hands along Delilah's arms -- but with a package of kisses and hugs, and a little more convincing on Emily's bed, she takes the next ship down to the south.
With her, she sends Jessamine's Sokolov portrait. She says that she doesn't care what happens to it -- any royal portraits in the halls will be her own face from now on.
Next, she takes a day trip to the Abbey and resurrects some of the Overseers' sick hounds. They become grizzled and grey, with blue veins bulging out of their papery skin. They treat her like a goddess. She beats them when they try to lick her.
Afterwards, she sits on her throne and sighs. She closes her eyes. Suggestions of scenes and timelines dance across the insides of her eyelids. Whispers of the Void soothe her into a doze.
Her eyes snap open; she can't pretend anymore: she is not happy, not satisfied, and must be missing something. She jumps up, stamps her heels on the floor, and marches over to Corvo's statue, where it guards her throne like the Royal Protector it once was.
She stares into its face. Shards of Void-rock jitter around its outstretched arm. She sticks her finger in its open mouth to feel the ridges of its hard palate.
She ponders as she traces the lines in the smooth, black stone. She must be missing something -- but she's already the Empress of the Isles. There is nothing else left to become.
A thought catches her. Her eyes dart to the empty back of her hand, Mark long removed.
There is another realm to become empress of.
She forgoes the tea, and instead brings in the single bonecharm she kept from decades ago. It sings loudly; as the Void flows more freely through her, the feedback from the bone becomes stronger. If she tries, she can catch words on the breeze, spoken by people who once knew a black-haired, green-eyed boy between the columns of a long-dead city.
She dismisses that as unimportant; the charm's only purpose is set dressing. It used to improve her ability to use magic, but her need for that has long passed.
She gets into character: she replicates him as she knew him that night in eighteen thirty-one, after she'd knocked herself out with a creative mixture of medicinal drugs. She wasn't intending to meet god that day, but -- well.
Cold and detached, she briefs herself, rocking on her heels. She stands at a respectable distance from the statue.
"Hello, Corvo," she tries. Frowns. "Hello, Attano." Shakes her head, then says again: "Hello, Corvo."
She opens her mouth again -- and then is lost. What did they speak about?
Uneasily, she retraces the steps to her own Marking.
"I have watched you, and have taken great interest in what you could go on to be," she says, then trails off. She tries again: "Your talent is not something that is often seen in the living's hands."
She looks up into Corvo's grey, frozen eyes, and the moment is gone. She simply cannot visualise this conversation -- and that makes her furious.
And then, with a cold wave of certainty -- she realises that, to be happy, she must become the Outsider. Possess him. That is what she's been missing all along; if becoming an empress didn't work out, then surely becoming the god of Terra and all the Spheres beyond would -- because who would there be to stop her?
Her face splits in a grin. She pats Corvo on his cold, spiky head, spits in his open mouth, then marches back to her throne. She has a painting to draft.
Hours later, she's breathing sharp breaths, and repeating to herself that she has no desire to become a man. She tears down the bloodox-hide canvas with one swipe of her hand, its sketched visage of the Outsider facing the floor.
She's furious, scared, and tired. She wants to be adored, and the Outsider is the most-worshiped deity across all the Isles and Pandyssia beyond them. Becoming him would solve everything -- but she doesn't want to have his body, and so she has to come up with a different solution.
It would all be so much simpler, she thinks, if had started as the god of the world. If her witches listened to her, always, and everyone loved her. That would make her happy.
She experiments. She takes the bones of the dead servants, freshwater seagrasses from the Wrenhaven, and the raw pigments for her paints. She creates runes, balances life and death, and uses the power strung inbetween to draw a picture.
It succeeds. She stands before the tree standing proudly in the Tower's chapel, and thinks that this must be how it's like to conquer universes. Now, it feels like no task is too large in her pursuit of happiness.
On her walk back to her throne room, she sees how the Tower has fallen into utter disarray -- but it no longer makes her angry. Instead, she smiles as she skips up the stairs; her witches scatter as soon as they see her.
Everything she sees can be fixed, she reassures herself, and retrieves the scrapped canvas and pins it to the wall again -- all five metres of it, a true landscape of creativity waiting to be unleashed. She mixes her paints, and swipes the first stroke over the sketch of the Outsider's face.
In her painting, she sits on the throne, and love flows from the masses of the common people into her. She is the god of the world; she was never kicked from Tower; she never knew Jessamine, or Daud, or Emily or Corvo. There was never an Outsider; she was the goddess that everyone stooped to kiss the feet of. She lived in luxury, untouched by unappreciative hordes of witches. She has never known hunger. The restraints of time and space don't apply to her.
She paints the world as it should be.