domus perkele

All of his heart lines have a very different tone from your other targets (at least to me), but that one stands out the most. Together with his other quotes about being a paid assassin taken by a man as a child by a man who (we can assume) noticed his "quick hands", and the line about how he can never turn back from the path he chose, it paints a very interesting picture: this is a man who didn't - and still doesn’t - dream of becoming what he is. He was made into this, yes, but at some point, he had a choice to make, and he chose his path of bloodshed.

But there is a different dream in his heart.

We're not told what this dream is. Actually, even if you read his journals, play his DLC, and play DotO, we never learn what Daud actually dreams of.

Does he even know? Does he just dream of doing something - anything - else, or does he have a specific dream in mind? Does he want to own a vineyard? Be a farmer? An artist?

We don't get to know exactly what Daud dreams of. All that we're told is that he dreams of something other than violence.

He was never the man who dreamed of killing the Empress- he just got paid to do it, and you get to see just how much he regrets ever taking that job.

And that's exactly why sparing him doesn’t leave him with a fate worse than death, like it does for all your other targets. Corvo doesn’t need to have Slackjaw shave his head and send him to work in his own mines, or ship him off with his stalker (that was such a fucked up non-lethal method, but that's not the point of this post), or brand him and turn him into a shunned outsider, stripped of his rank and everything he once had. He just... Leaves Daud to deal with his own guilt.

Because Daud never dreamed of bloodshed, or at the very least, he doesn’t dream of it now. He knows that what he did, the path he chose, was wrong. He hasn’t accomplished anything. He was just a killer. That's all he was and all he'd ever be.