The torture is nothing. He barely feels it, knows that there must be pain only because he smells the acrid scent of his own burning flesh. His mind is somewhere far away. It is with her.
In the gardens. Under the gazebo. Above the city and below the stars.
His rage splits his throat open, bleeds him. He breaks his knuckles on the stone walls of Coldridge, leaving smears of rust. By the end of the first night, every word is a rasping whisper in his cell, and at times they do not come at all.
He talks to Jessamine. Tells her that he’ll be joining her soon.
On the eve of his execution, however, his plans go awry.
He kills every single guard. Every last one. Even the man who he has to track through the bowels of the prison, who whimpers and pleads as he is backed into a corner. He clutches his own intestines back into his belly before he is granted the mercy of death. His head rolls into the muck and is abandoned there.
How can their lives matter when hers has ended?
He is baptized in acid and sewage, clawing his way back into the light.
The Mark is a blessing. Death in his heart and death on his hand, death grinning with a cold metal gleam across his face.
In his bed at the Hound Pits, he wakes from his nightmares, falls on the floor and screams. He coughs until red spatters his lips and claws at the floor until exhaustion. He sleeps.
In the morning, there is nothing. Only the indifference of the Loyalists and another man to slaughter.
They don’t like words like “slaughter”, the Loyalists. He says it anyway. Does it anyway. He has no qualms with slicing through guard after guard, widowing, orphaning. There is blood between the cobblestones. Much of it is his own.
They fear his insanity, his recklessness. He is no stranger to what they whisper behind closed doors, and the disappointment on the old boatman’s face is easy to read. Corvo doesn’t care. After all, the worst they can do is kill him. It’s nothing. He’s already dying. Still dying.
He has died a thousand times.
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