Lonely Rat Boy

The boy looking at his only friend.

The "Lonely Rat Boy" is a young child living in Dunwall a few years prior to the events of Dishonored, and the focal character of the second chapter of The Tales from Dunwall, The Hand that Feeds. Knowing only fear and loneliness, he was severely abused by adults and older children and used the alleyways to avoid any unwanted confrontation. His only friend was a white rat he kept in his pocket.

During the first year of the rat plague in 1835, he met the Outsider at a shrine in a dark alley, and the strange entity granted him supernatural abilities by branding the child with his mark.

The boy using Devouring Swarm.

Once the boy obtained these abilities, his fear subsided and he became confident enough to confront his tormentors, calling forth a large swarm of rats to devour them. However, he got bitten by one of the rats and contracted the plague, leading to his inevitable death.

Despite the painful circumstances of his demise, weeping blood from his eyes, the agonized boy crawled back to the shrine. His last wish was to thank the Outsider for allowing him to live the short remainder of his life without fear.

Trivia

• According to developer Harvey Smith, the Outsider granted his powers to the boy because he was "pivotal (or potentially pivotal) to history" and was "in a position to affect many people or major events."
• The boy witnessed and was shocked by the suicide of Esmond Roseburrow (the character on whom the first Tale from Dunwall, The Awakening, focused) in 1834, after peering into the man's office from a window.
• Piero Joplin received visions of the boy's horrible death several nights before he started to craft Corvo's Mask, as told in the third chapter of Tales from Dunwall, In the Mind of Madness.