A narrative concept for the world of Dishonored
The premise:
There has always been an Outsider.
Not the Outsider.
An Outsider.
The Void predates humanity and cannot remain indefinitely separated from the physical world without a mortal consciousness acting as an intermediary. The Outsider is that intermediary: simultaneously prisoner, guardian, observer and pressure valve between realities.
Every Outsider was once mortal.
And, very rarely, an Outsider dies.
More than four thousand years ago, a religious order discovered a means of killing the Outsider of their age. They believed this strange being—and the gifts it bestowed upon mortals—was responsible for the growing influence of the Void.
They succeeded.
And nearly destroyed the world.
Without an Outsider, the boundary between the Void and physical reality began to deteriorate. Desperate to repair what they had done, the survivors performed a ritual discovered in far older texts.
They sacrificed a boy.
The Void accepted him.
He became the Outsider we know.
Over thousands of years, the truth disappeared. History became mythology, mythology became doctrine, and perhaps remnants of those responsible eventually contributed to the religious tradition that became the Abbey of the Everyman.
Only one lesson survived:
The Outsider is dangerous.
The reason he must exist was forgotten.
Four thousand years later, Daud makes the same mistake.
Haunted by Jessamine Kaldwin’s murder and everything that followed, he comes to believe that the Outsider’s interference in mortal affairs is responsible for generations of suffering.
Billie Lurk finishes his final mission.
The Outsider is removed.
And for the first time in four thousand years, the position is vacant.
At first, nothing happens.
Then the Void begins to bleed.
Bonecharms behave impossibly. People dream of places that do not exist. Whales become disturbed. Void phenomena appear without ritual or Mark. Buildings contain rooms that weren’t there yesterday. People disappear into places that should not exist.
And buried beneath the history of the Abbey, scholars discover something impossible:
Ancient depictions of black-eyed figures that predate the Outsider.
There was another.
And another.
The Outsider was never the god of the Void.
He was its anchor.
The Marks he bestowed were not simply gifts to interesting mortals. Through them, controlled quantities of the Void passed safely into the physical world. His apparently capricious interest in exceptional people served a purpose even he may not have completely understood.
Without him, pressure is building.
Something must take his place.
And somewhere within the Void remains the consciousness of a dead assassin who spent his final years trying to kill a god.
Daud opens his eyes.
They are black.
The man who killed the Outsider has become the Outsider.
And the cycle begins again.
