The wages of Delilah's coup and the instruments she has used to make it happen are among other things the further empowerment of the hollow, self-centred man that is the Duke. A note found earlier in the game even reveals Delilah's delight at Luca Abele's penchant for luxury and excess, which she seems to regard as appealingly childlike. Indeed, Abele is continuously referred to in comparison to his father or at least in the context of being a younger Duke, a son - rather than in his own right as a leader. The Duke hasn't earned anything he has - it has been given to him by firstly his father and then by Delilah.
More than that, in one of the most heavy-handed pieces of readable metaphor in the game, his leadership is so unfounded, his character so immature, that the structures around him are literally sinking.
"Duke Abele wanted another entrance to his precious vault, and we warned him that was a bad idea, given the foundation. So now, every time the storage room and the external passage flood, we're called in to fix the problem.
"This is a fundamental structural problem - the Duke's house, as it were, is not built on a solid foundation."
Luca Abele's fixation with wealth, all unearned, is literally poking holes in the structures that protect him. Upon exploration you find that beneath the lavish rooms of the palace the basements are indeed flooded, with the dankest parts abutting onto a small shrine to Delilah. Providing the perfect opportunity for Emily or Corvo to enter the warren and put an end to the rat hiding within.
Luca Abele, in contrast to Liam Byrne, Paolo or even Jindosh is relatively unguarded a lot of the time and can often be found alone. He seems quite solitary, much like Dr. Hypatia. The latter had her solitude imposed on her, she was a captive. The Duke on the other hand misses council meetings because he is carousing all night and sleeps through the day. He is uninterested in administrating and seems to be becoming increasingly self-absorbed and isolated.
To support his lifestyle of excess he has built an obnoxious modernised palace on the site of a lighthouse that once stood at Point Abele and served as a military prison. While there has always been a well defended building here, the new Duke resides in a palace as decadent as it is fortified. In the mediterannean setting of 1800s Karnaca this looks for all the world like an internet monopoliser's corporate campus, and in addition to a heavy contingent of guards and a few clockwork soldiers, is filled with the snide, coddled oligarchy who are attending the apparently endless debauchery.
One of the most grotesque targets in Dishonored games, there is an almost perceptible rage here in the depiction of the mark versus his environment and fellow humans. An idle and selfish man with no qualification or readiness to lead (incidental note: The game was released in 2016) here is allowed to use a nation as his bank account and live to excess while old men play dice huddled by a fire in a bin a couple of blocks away. He is reflected in the nobles around him, who play at throwing darts at blindfolded, tied up targets and idle around the gardens and bedrooms as they complain about their staff not working hard enough.
As the game builds to its ending, The Grand Palace leans hard into the Dishonored tradition of tempting you away from Low Chaos. By now you are armed to the teeth with gadgets and instruments of death, springwires and grenades, as well as imbued with many powers from the Outsider. Karnaca is in a state of injustice, and you have the ability to even the scales by removing a few people who really, in their heart of hearts and in the disembodied words of Jessamine, are a net negative, who lie and steal and abuse and leech off the system, keeping everything for themselves and leaving the vulnerable and the poor quite literally in the dust. What's a blade here, a lethal bolt flashing silently out of a dark corner there, a flexing of royal prerogative more direct than anything Emily has ever done from a throne? What kind of ruler might she then be?
Not only are all these decisions ripe for musing, but the fulfilment of them is yours for the asking. This is, in my opinion, not a challenging mission compared to some of the ones in the game's middle section. Once you are through Ravina Boulevard (a final big stretch of Karnacan street to enjoy, rich as ever with interconnecting routes and things to do) and have taken a rail car across the water to the palace itself, the venue is quite porous and there are always plenty of places to hide. Having alighted from the railcar and gone through the guards posted at the palace entrance, Blink or Far Reach will provide easy access to the structure's highest point, where a vent will get you into the elevator shaft and right to one of the locations the Duke might be patrolling. If not, the airy and open layout of the palace will often provide opportunities to voluntarily defenestrate if the heat gets too high and re-enter somewhere more strategic.
Otherwise, you can pick your way through the various floors of the palace or sneak through the gardens and enter the aforementioned flooded storage tunnels, gaining access to the vault and the kitchens. Complicating your infilitration is the fact that the Duke employs a body double, so you won't be sure from a glance whether you have tracked down the right man. Clues from Meagan Foster and picked up around the palace can help - the body double is a smoker for example. Having identified which one is your mark you have a choice. You can kill the Duke on the spot and enjoy some of the more personal ad libs from the protagonists (Emily snarls "Parasite", as she lands the killing blow, while Corvo says "Your father would have been so ashamed of you Luca."). Or you can conspire with the double to supplant the Duke, who will then have his tongue cut out and be imprisoned - a "non-lethal" solution vicious enough to recall the likes of the Pendleton brothers.
Excess, violence, depravity and failure have paved the Duke's path to this moment, giving him a superficially tighter grip on the peoples and economy of Serkonos even as his engagement with official duties evaporates and his very palace sinks and betrays him.
This is also goodbye to Jessamine. An auxiliary objective has you get into the vault where Delilah's spirit has been kept and imbue the Heart with it. This means that in place of Jessamine's usually benevolent murmurs you will now endure the sneers of her half-sister as you complete this mission and travel back to Dunwall to retake the Empire. The final confrontation with Emily's aunt therefore begins in this etheral fashion, a while before the protagonist comes face to face with the usurper.
With Delilah's co-conspirators now off the board your primary antagonist now moves quite directly into focus, and Corvo or Emily set sail back to Dunwall for the game's final chapter.
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