When he stepped out of the void with nothing but a name he had lost thousands of years ago, he remembered everything.

His eyes had seen it all, his ears had heard it all. And although the void had finally let him go, there was still so much left of it.

A trembling breath escaped his lips, the very same ones that had whimpered for mercy eons ago. But like the world, he had changed over time. His mouth was no longer exactly the same, no longer that of a boy but of a man.

His face had become more angular, he realised when he discovered himself in the reflection of a shop window, as if by chance.

The eyes looking back at him were green. Even though he had not seen his own reflection for thousands of years, the sight was still strangely disconcerting.

The humans had whispered his name, prayed to him and called him whatever they thought fit. The black-eyed bastard, that term for himself, had burnt itself into his mind.

On the way through the streets, he had seen paintings they had drawn of him. The likeness hadn't been bad, it had even looked quite like him.

Only those eyes had triggered something in him because they had been black, full and complete, without pupils or light reflecting in them. They had swallowed everything.

Now he stared at himself in the glass of the window, a pale reflection of his appearance. Green eyes.

Had he always had green eyes?

Or was that just the colour he thought he had?

Lost in thought, he looked down at himself. He had grown, he was sure of it. Most of the people next to him were now about the same height or even shorter.

In the past, his head had reached about to the shoulders of an average man. Now he was almost taller than some of them.

He looked at his hands. After all these millennia, he could finally feel again. There had been nothing in the void, neither warmth nor cold nor the feeling of hard stone under his feet or the scratching of sand.

Slowly, he moved his fingers, one after the other. To his amazement, small pieces of black stone and smoke danced between them. As if he had summoned them from nowhere.

They gave him a feeling of familiarity. The void had consisted of these same black stones. He had once been able to dissolve into nothing and had jumped from place to place as he pleased.

Perhaps these were still tiny remnants of the being he had once been for thousands of years. A spark of magic still lived in him. Surely it would fade over time and he would be just a simple man, mortal, as he had long observed them from the void.

The next moment he frowned. Even though he was no longer part of the void, no longer a kind of god, he knew that his assumption was not entirely correct.

He would never be just a simple man because he seemed to have taken with him everything he had once seen, heard and known.

More than once he had looked around on the street and seen people, recognised faces. He knew that the woman in the coffee shop was having an affair with her husband's brother. He could sense that the child in the apartment above would soon succumb to the plague.

One of the imperial guards securing the area had an illegal trade in the harbour, selling alcohol and tobacco at better prices than the shops.

Looking around, he knew which people were good and which were not. Although that wasn't true either, because neither good nor bad mattered to him. What mattered was that he wanted to be entertained.

Inside the void, he had watched them all and waited to see what they did, what they would do and what the consequences would be.

Now he wondered if this knowledge carried over to life among the mortals or if there would be a day when he would no longer know what was happening, would happen.

But at that moment he knew that she would warn him to be vigilant.

"Watch out.", the voice of the woman who had freed him from the void crept up the back of his neck.

She described herself as not a good person. He, on the other hand, knew that she was a product of her circumstances.

If she hadn't been, if she hadn't chosen mercy, he would still be the black-eyed bastard: the Outsider.

"Billie.", he was still getting used to the sound of his own voice in his ears.

Although he now had the appearance of a grown man, his voice was still a little soft, boyish. Not that he didn't like the sound, he just wasn't used to hearing himself once.

In the void, every single one of his words had become an echo in infinity. He had heard himself a thousand times. Sometimes he had spoken to himself like that in an attempt to escape his loneliness.

And yet it had always been just him.

The woman who had quietly crept up on him from behind was dressed in a white coat. She wore her dark hair short, almost the same colour as her skin.

Without giving away any emotion, his gaze travelled over his shoulder to her. Brown eyes looked at him warningly. Her name was notorious in the streets. For all the wrong reasons.

"Meagan, then?", he asked quietly.

A wince flashed across her face as her old name slipped off his tongue.

"Just keep your mouth shut, young one.", she replied quietly and looked around.

Guards patrolled the street they were on. The empire had been peaceful and safe since the reign of the new empress.

Nevertheless, they both had to be careful. He because his face was on display almost everywhere and she because there was still a sum on her head. But that would soon change.

At least that was Billie Lurk's intention.