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Paintings Framed in Half-Light

Isa Mari De Leon

Visions pour in.

No mercy from my mind tonight.

I stand in a glade and imagine it drowning in sights unreal. Grass melts. Rocks swirl into twisted faces. Leaves turn to liquid and drip down branches, bleeding into pools.

The moon is a closed eye.

Brush in hand, my ethereal palette emerges.

Memories resurface.

I repaint, relive...

A man burned before me in his own armory.

Around us sweltered a painted fire with flames the color of daybreak. Its golden core beat with pain—with every wound his weapons had ever inflicted. The blaze climbed the walls, but did not catch, shedding neither ash nor smoke and spreading only as far as I willed it.

Yet it flared more vibrantly, more violently, than any real fire.

The man writhed. His senses scorched deeper than bone. He reached toward a weapon rack lined with serrated carvers—Noxian steel with Kashuri handiwork.

Kashuri, the thought arises. Still far, each step farther from Koyehn.

These blades were used to maim and kill. He caused suffering; he deserved to suffer.

Rendering the flames of a forge, I drew answers out of him. Who he worked with, for how long, why. His fury strained through every gasp. My painting thrashed in his eyes, mirroring every drop of wrath.

To make it stop, he offered everything. Money. Arms. Revenge, by his hand. But the only thing I cared about was this moment between us. Every vision that burdened me became his burden. The fire surged from my imagination into his, lightening the weight of my mind.

I kept my art from destroying him. We both now live with the marks of this, but while he chokes within flashbacks of the inferno, I survive in it.

The tide pulls me away. I repaint, relive...

A woman ferried me across troubled waters.

Around us, a golden-drawn breeze—dappled lights with specks of lantern bugs.

We sat across from each other. Gulfweed clambered from the surf and gripped the oars. Water lilies grew from the wellspring of my mind, an offering; I shaped them. The gulfweed took the painted blossoms instead, prying them apart.

The woman’s hands found rhythm. The course was not always like this, she said. She had been forced to carry marauders, arms runners, assassins, all with dark intent that seeped into the channel, which grew sick with chop and murk.

In her voice, a deep-stained guilt.

I listened. I gathered color from my palette and matched the sweeps of her oars, creating lilies and life anew—carps in the plums and oranges of sunset. I inspired her to recall kind memories from beneath layers of pain. Everything that burdened her became my burden.

The canal turned from lashing the pieces within itself to cradling them. The lines of the woman’s eyes furled with gentle joy. Somewhere in our minds, birds sang.

Our steadied thoughts, steadied hands, brought us to safer shores.

There’s light to what lives in my mind, and I can choose to paint that way. But... light always casts a shadow. I repaint, relive...

An artist stood beside me in a Koyehn studio.

Around us, inky blackness broken by candlelight. Far below an open window, the ocean—a violet gorge with seafoam for teeth, consuming itself over and over. The Temple of Koyehn stood for what would become its last night.

“All things must end,” said Jhin.

He watched a candle burning. I looked to the tide.

“I hope you enjoyed your time here,” I said.

He was still as death. “What does a wave feel for the rock upon which it crashes?”

Everything, I thought. Nature is emotional—capricious and harmonious.

“Nothing,” I said, shrugging. “You feel more for Koyehn than that, surely?”

“This place showed me all I desired to see,” Jhin said, “except one, final piece.”

He turned toward me, and I, him. “Which is?”

“Your... painting, Hwei. The truth of it. I know forced performances, and you’ve always hidden something. I’d like to know what.”

My eyes widened. What color they were then, I couldn’t tell. What Jhin found churning within, I dreaded.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m true to myself.”

An eye opens on my canvas, searching for anything from Jhin—some envy, resentment, passion, sorrow... Any feeling to explain him.

When we meet again, I’ll greet him like before. Eat together. Watch as he shifts in a new light. Ask, “Why Koyehn? Why me?” And I’ll paint what I know of him, returning life to his murders, putting colors back on agonized faces—surrounding us with a darkness so bright, it becomes blinding, and so blinding, it becomes freeing.

Art saves me, yet it can shatter me. Sometimes, I think I’m already lost—

“No,” Jhin said. “You are not.”

I remember how he convinced me to reveal my art. But I still paint arms to hold my past self back. Eyes to glower. Mouths to scream. At the same time, the arms push, the eyes behold, the mouths goad.

In past and present, I lift the brush...

I’ve finished tonight’s paintings.

Around me, black and gold—fractures of earth, light emitting from the chasms, songbirds in gilt cages, the infinity of an eye, straining with full veins.

The moon witnesses. Blot everything beneath it—Koyehn, Jhin—and I’m still left with myself.

The vision erupts. In its place, the forest is just the forest, holding itself together.

Tears draw down my face. My palette dissipates.

Awake, I dream of my next piece.
The Princeling’s Lament

Scrape the bench of sunless moss,
And harken to this tale of loss.
A princess lies below the soil,
A king’s pride and joy, a beauty divine.
Now food for worms, her flesh to dine.
Skin once fair, now left to spoil.
A Princeling came, a suitor fair,
To press his cause, to wed the heir.
The marriage feast like none before
was blighted by a deed most foul.
A poisoned cup, the king did howl.
To find a cure, the Princeling swore.
His ship set sail, crossed ocean’s deep,
With knights all pledged to end death’s sleep.
Through tempests fierce and unknown miles,
Drawn by wind from a land undying,
The very storm its name seem’d sighing.
A place men named the Shadow Isles.
Like the hound abroad with bloody scent,
Drawn ever on by forlorn lament,
To a night-veiled isle on no man’s chart.
No wind was heard, no bird nor beast,
Only spirits summoned by death’s priest.
Onward knights to this island’s heart!
Through black-thorned trees on crooked path,
A clash of steel, a cry of wrath.
The Shadow of War wrought bitter defeat,
The Princeling’s men were slain.
He ran in fear; they died in vain,
His love of life too bright, too sweet.
Lost in darkest, haunted night,
Pursued by spiteful wraith and wight.
He chanced upon a moonlit field,
And a ghastly monk assailed by the mist.
“Aid me!” cried he, “With sword and fist!
The spirits are cruel, their hearts unhealed.”
“Here, all men are equal, all sins forgiven,
But pride hath made this land corpse-riven.
The dead we’ll fight, our lives as the prize.
Shepherd them onward, and then come the dawn,
Triumph will teach you secrets long gone,
But vanquished, we fall and then rise.”
They fought as brothers on cursed battleground,
Atop the bones of scholars renowned
‘Gainst spirits in black, with hunger infernal.
Dawn never came, but the battle was done.
The monk and the Princeling had won!
“Speak, fellow! Tell secrets of life eternal.”
The monk told tales of a time forgotten
An ancient queen, now dead and mulch-rotten.
Of her king brought low by sorrow and woe,
Who came to this isle to bring back her life,
But damned the world to endless strife,
Spirits of death and carrion crow.
His magic unleashed a terrible scourge;
Grim prelude to the Deathsinger’s dirge.
Black mist rose up and doomed all to death.
But spirits arose from every dead thing,
Cursed to undeath by this grief-maddened king.
He begged it all end with his very last breath.
A land once blessed, was ripped asunder,
Split with lightning and beaten by thunder.
Phantoms now mutter in graves enshrined.
And banshees throng its haunted streets,
Shrieking their woes of black defeats,
A boundless curse upon all mankind.
The Princeling listened, all aghast,
To hear this tale from the grim outcast.
He spared this ancient king no boon,
But tales of death and grim disaster;
Unmask all, from slave to master.
The Princeling’s lies laid bare by the moon.
The goblet supped by his new wife,
The Princeling poisoned to take her life.
Her father’s wealth and crown he craved;
No cure he wished, but existence deathless,
No succor for his queen, forever breathless;
His soul was dark, his mind depraved.
And yet his bride had one last curse.
A fatal spell of bitter verse.
Justice sought with dying breath,
Set the Spear of Vengeance on the hunt
To punish him for such great affront
And bring about his bloody death.
The mist closed in and called his name,
A huntress aglow in mist-wreathed flame.
Her spears of light pierced his breast,
A cold ground yawned wide and deep,
The Princeling fell to blackest sleep,
Never to wake from his victim’s bequest.
Smothered in darkness, dying in pain,
No crown for his brow, never to reign.
Buried forever in earth’s dark womb,
Heed the price of ambition’s dark call
Be not ensnared by its artful thrall,
The Princeling’s greed was his doom.
A pallid light waxed cold and bright,
Borne up through the earth, his soul took flight.
No reprieve was this, but torment afresh,
The Warden of Chains drawn by his scent.
Dancing to the Deathsinger’s lament.
“Your soul is mine,” said the beast called Thresh.
So heed this fate and learn it well,
Shun the Isles where the dead still dwell.
Seek ye all the things to cherish,
And pass the years in time well spent.
A life full-lived, a soul content.
And know you all are doomed to perish...
Shen

An enigma to the spirit realm, as well as the mortal world, Shen belongs to neither. Although born to one of the most revered families of northern Navori, it was his father’s role as the Eye of Twilight that set his destiny in the Kinkou Order.
As the son of Great Master Kusho, he was immersed in the order’s culture, and its core tenets were as familiar to him as the Ionian sunset. He knew the necessity of Pruning the Tree, the determination of Coursing the Sun, but above all, he learned the wisdom of Watching the Stars. He meditated and studied throughout his childhood, and was considered exemplary by all his teachers.
His closest friend, the only one who could match him in practice bouts, was the young acolyte Zed. They grew up as brothers, often confiding in each other their personal hopes and dreams. Shen could turn to Zed for a fresh perspective on any matter, and the two became known as the Kinkou’s most promising students.
As their skills developed, Kusho brought them on dangerous missions, including a hunt for the Golden Demon plaguing the province of Zhyun. Their search took years, but Shen stayed committed even after uncovering countless gruesome murders. When they at last captured the “demon”, it was revealed to be Khada Jhin, a mere stagehand from a traveling theater. Instead of execution, Great Master Kusho ordered the criminal imprisoned.
Though he and Zed both thought the killer deserved heavier punishment, Shen accepted his father’s decision. He strived to emulate the Eye of Twilight’s dispassion, and so found himself failing to console a bitter and resentful Zed.
Even when Noxian invaders threatened the peace of the First Lands, Shen reluctantly supported Kusho’s inaction. But when Zed abandoned the Kinkou to join the fight, Shen stayed within the temple walls.
Many of the provinces were soon occupied by the enemy. Despite this, Shen focused on maintaining Ionia’s spiritual harmony. So it was, when he was far from home, he felt a jolting imbalance within the Kinkou Order—rushing back, he came upon the survivors of a bloody coup. From them, he learned Zed had raised acolytes of his own, and seized the temple.
Worst of all, Shen’s father had been slain by the man he once saw as kin.
Repressing his anguish, he led the remnants of the Kinkou to safety in the mountains. Shen took up his father’s spirit blade, as well as the title of Eye of Twilight. His role was not to seek vengeance, but to rebuild the order. Following the core tenets, he began to recruit and train others, hoping to restore its strength.
One acolyte in particular showed boundless potential. Shen taught the girl, Akali Jhomen Tethi, to master the arts of stealth and subterfuge. Her mother, Mayym, had stood alongside Kusho as the Fist of Shadow, and it seemed as though her daughter could follow the same path. Even so, Shen found himself forced to urge restraint whenever Akali would seek to strike back at their mortal foes.
When Noxus finally withdrew, many Ionians celebrated the victorious resistance. Others, like Shen, endured the consequences of war—he persisted in his duty, while in private he wrestled with his hatred for Zed, and doubt in his own ability to lead. The years of conflict had taken a heavy toll on the First Lands, and Shen was uncertain whether the rebuilt Kinkou would ever be able to redress the balance.
Indeed, even as Akali became the new Fist of Shadow, he felt her beginning to drift away. In time, she openly denounced his teachings, and left the order.
Shen meditated, watching the stars, and understood that Akali would need to find her own way… and so would the Kinkou.
Sometimes, between unseen struggles in the spirit realm, Shen still contemplates the value of his beliefs. He has never let his emotions stop him from preserving tradition, but the question remains: how long can one man walk two worlds, before the acts of one destroy the other?
True Neutral

“It was no tempest. It was a spirit,” said the fisherman, still rattled by the shipwreck he’d barely survived two nights ago. The man told of his fishing vessel being sunk by a creature, large as a house and quick as the wind.
Shen listened to the tale, silently weighing the facts as presented.
“Show me where it happened,” said Shen.
The man led him to a beach in the bay, where a team of villagers worked to recover the drowned bodies of the mariners. Shen knelt to examine a piece of wreckage. The gashes in the driftwood were deep and savage, the work of powerful claws.
“How many dead?” he asked.
“All but me… Six,” responded the fisherman.
The spirits are strong, thought Shen, digging through the wreckage for any further evidence.
At last, on the edge of a splintered portion of the hull, he found it: a small tuft of gossamer hair. Most people would overlook it, or if they did see it, they’d never believe a creature that could break a ship in half could leave something so delicate. But Shen had seen hair like this before. Any doubts he’d had about the veracity of the fisherman’s tale faded as he watched the fine, silvery tuft dissolve into nothing at his touch.
“A demon,” Shen remarked. “You must have sailed into its path.”
The fisherman nodded grimly. Spirits of all kinds were known to mingle with the physical world, especially in Ionia, where the barrier between realms was thin and passable. The ethereal and material planes were in constant contact, sliding peacefully past one another like oil atop water.
As the Eye of Twilight, it was Shen’s duty to walk between the worlds, ensuring neither side overwhelmed the other. To humans, he was a ghost, vanishing in the space between breaths to reappear many miles away. To spirits, he was a human, flesh and bone who ought never to venture into ethereal realms.
He knelt on the beach to examine one of the corpses that had been recovered. The man had been torn in half, just below the ribs. What was left of his innards dangled from a pale, bloated torso.
“You need not worry. I shall have the monster before nightfall,” said a voice from behind.
Shen turned to see a holy man sent by the local temple. Several acolytes stood around him, carrying an assortment of mystical trinkets and oils. They were beginning a cleansing ritual to root out any spiritual disturbances in the area. The holy man stared at Shen, as if sizing up his value.
“Can we count on your help, sir?” the man asked.
“Balance will be restored,” said Shen with an assuring nod.
He parted ways with the holy man and continued to follow the faint trail of gossamer hair. He thought of the dead seafarers and the cost he’d need to exact from the demon. The words of his father still rang true: “The hardest part is finding the point of balance in all things.” True neutrality, the precise center of all forces at work in the world - that is what the Eye must be able to distinguish.
Enforcing that equilibrium was its own struggle. For the task, Shen carried two blades on his back. One was an Ionian steel saber that could cleave through a person in one blow. The other was a sword of pure arcane energy. It was used for dealing with spirits, and had been passed down through many generations of Shen’s ancestors. He had slain countless demons, ghosts, wraiths, and sprites with it over the years, and fully expected to take one more before the day was done.
At last, Shen came to a secluded inlet, quiet and devoid of human activity. On a sandbar in the shallows lay the demon, its fine, glossy coat shimmering in the dusk. The creature swelled as it rested, engorged from consuming the mortal essences of its victims. Shen crept through the rushes, silently edging toward the sleeping demon. He could see its massive ribcage expand and contract with deep, restful breaths. When he was but a few paces from the sandbar, he drew his spirit blade, readying his strike.
Suddenly, a distressing sound stayed his hand. It was a shrill, ghastly cry, emanating from the very air itself. It sounded familiar, but before Shen could identify the noise, he heard it again. And again. And again, culminating in a chorus of blood-curdling shrieks. These were the cries of dying spirits. Shen’s eyes darted back to the demon, now beginning to stir from its slumber. Shen took one more look at his spirit blade, calmly weighing his options. He then clasped his hands together, carefully focusing his ki, and disappeared in a vortex of crackling energy, leaving the demon alone on its sandbar.
A moment later, Shen reappeared at the site of the shipwreck. All around, smoldering pools of black ooze evaporated into the air, coupled with the lingering reek of terror.
Shen counted the dissipating black puddles, each the remains of a slain spirit. His tally was interrupted as the holy man entered the clearing with his acolytes. One of the men held a cord of flax and silver. Tethered to the other end was a smaller spirit - an imp of no significance. It struggled against the choke of its leash. It wailed as it saw the remains of its brethren.
“Would you care to dispose of this one?” the holy man asked Shen, casually, as if offering him a bowl of soup at dinner.
Shen looked at the sticky, smoldering pools that were mighty beings of the otherworld just moments ago. Then he turned his gaze toward the priest and the wailing imp.
“I am sorry for this, Your Holiness,” he said. He placed his spirit blade back into its scabbard and drew his steel saber instead. It was not the sword he had expected to use that day.
Shield of Remembrance

Anthony Reynolds

Quinn ran through the forest, moving softly and swiftly. It was past dawn, though the sun had not yet risen over the mountain peaks to the east. The light was cold and pale, casting everything in shades of gray. Quinn fogged the air with every measured breath.
There were no paths through the untamed woodlands that spread like a blanket across the foothills of the Eastweald Mountains. Ferns and ivy concealed moss-slick rocks, rotting logs, and wild tangles of roots, but Quinn was more at home here than she was in any city or town, and was not slowed by the rough terrain. Despite her speed, there were only a handful of rangers in Demacia—all of them trained by Quinn herself—who would have had any hope of tracking her, so light was her step.
She caught a flicker of movement to her right, and dropped into the undergrowth, instantly motionless. Her eyes were golden, unblinking, and intense, missing nothing.
For ten breaths she remained still, all but invisible among the brush. She glimpsed movement again, and tensed... until she saw it was a greathorn stag. Big one, too, with a rack of antlers easily two arm spans across. Already its fur was starting to change, turning pale and silvery in anticipation of the rapidly approaching winter.
Some said that encountering a greathorn was a good omen. Quinn was not sure that was true, but she’d take it. These days, Demacia needed as many good omens as it could get.
In recent months, Quinn had been helping the Eleventh Battalion hunt rebellious mages—emboldened by the king’s murderer, Sylas of Dregbourne—through the wildlands of northern Demacia. Her rangers were too few, however, and the Eleventh’s strength did not lie in chasing an enemy that didn’t stand and fight. There had been running battles and skirmishes, but it was like trying to grasp smoke.
Quinn had lost three rangers in the last weeks, and their deaths weighed heavily upon her. Thus, it did not sit well with her that she had been ordered away from the hunt for rebel mages, and tasked with escorting Garen Crownguard and a detachment of the Dauntless Vanguard on some diplomatic mission beyond Demacia’s borders. She was due to meet up with them three days hence, on the south side of the Greenfang Mountains.
It hardly seemed the time for such an exercise, and Quinn would much rather have reassigned this mission to one of the others in her command—Elmheart, perhaps. However, the writ of order, delivered by swiftwing, had named Quinn specifically.
And the seal of High Marshal Tianna Crownguard brooked no argument.
She watched the giant stag a moment longer before pushing herself back to her feet. The greathorn saw her now. It held its ground, unafraid.
“Honor and respect, noble one,” she said, with a nod.
It was a long way to the Greenfang Mountains, but the skies were clear. She was confident she would get to the rendezvous point ahead of schedule.
The sun had finally climbed over the peaks, with golden light filtering through the canopy and dappling the forest floor, when the wind changed. It carried a distant, familiar scent.
Smoke.
A keening cry cut through the morning air. Quinn glimpsed Valor above the canopy, through the branches of the immense firs.
“What do you see up there, little brother?” she breathed.
The azurite eagle circled twice, then struck eastward like a blazing blue arrow loosed toward the rising sun. Without pause, Quinn turned and followed.
A short time later, she stood atop a ridge, where a rare break in the trees revealed a valley below. It was partly cleared, and scattered livestock could be seen in dry-stone partitioned fields. Under other circumstances it would have been a peaceful, picturesque view, but Quinn’s gaze was drawn to the smoke rising from the dark shape of a cabin. Her expression hardened.
She began picking her way down the steep incline, descending into the valley.

Quinn warily circled the smoking cabin. She’d known bandits to light fires like this to lure unsuspecting targets, and so she would not approach until she was certain it was not a trap.
She had her repeater crossbow in hand, bolts loaded. It was a one-of-a-kind weapon, lovingly crafted. It was nowhere near as powerful as a traditional heavy crossbow, but she could wield it one-handed, on the move, and without the need to reload after each shot, which made it worth ten times its weight in gold to Quinn.
She frowned as she came across a series of tracks on the ground. There’d been a lot of activity around this cabin in the last day or so, but it seemed she was alone here now. Quinn approached cautiously, crossbow at the ready.
The cabin was a humble abode, but had been built with obvious care. She pushed open the heavy front door—still smoldering, and hanging off its hinges—and stepped over the threshold.
A simple ceramic vase stood upon a fire-blackened hardwood table, holding a handful of wilted wildflowers. The remnants of hand-sewn curtains, mostly burned away, hung mournfully from window frames. Those curtains had been drawn shut, Quinn noted, and the surviving shutters pulled closed. The fire had started after dark.
On a solid oak door frame, Quinn noticed tiny notches carved into the wood. That brought a memory long forgotten, of Quinn’s parents doing something similar to record the growth of her and her brother.
This was not some rarely used hunting cabin—this was a family’s home.
Chairs and cabinets had been overturned and smashed. Drawers had been ripped open, and their contents strewn across the floor. Nothing of value remained. On the wall above the hearth, Quinn noted the sun-bleached outline of a shield.
As she turned, something in the ashes glinted in the sunlight streaming through a hole in the burned roof. Kneeling, she saw an object—a coin, perhaps?—wedged between the hearth and the blackened floorboards. Quinn holstered her crossbow, and used the tip of her hunting knife to pry it free. Likely, it had fallen down there, and been lost—she’d only seen it because the fire’s heat had twisted the floorboards out of shape.
Finally, it came loose, and Quinn saw it was a palm-sized silver shield that bore the winged sword emblem of Demacia. There were words engraved on its reverse: Malak Hornbridge, Third Battalion. Demacia honors your service.
It was a Shield of Remembrance, given to the families of soldiers who fell in the line of duty. Quinn had delivered more than a few of them to grieving spouses and parents herself.
Pocketing the medallion—it didn’t feel right to leave it amid this destruction—Quinn continued looking through the cabin. In what was clearly the family bedroom, which had escaped the worst of the fire, delicately woven garlands were strung across the rafters above the main bed.
In a corner, a smaller, child-sized bed had been overturned, and Quinn’s eyes narrowed as she knelt beside it. Charcoal markings were drawn onto the floorboards where the cot had once stood. The symbols were barbaric, of a sort not generally seen within Demacia. Bones and small pebbles were placed at intentional positions upon the runes, and she was careful not to disturb any of the lines. She had seen such runes before...
Valor’s piercing call sounded, high above, drawing Quinn away from the strange and unnerving display. Keeping low, she returned to the cabin’s main room, and pressed her back against a wall. With a quick, careful glance, she peered through one of the burned-out windows.
A cloaked and hooded man was approaching the front of the cabin, a rangy, pale gray hound loping along at his heels. The dog gave a low growl, but he silenced it with a word.
Moving soundlessly, Quinn repositioned herself in the shadow behind the smoldering front door. The man stepped inside, then froze, like a deer tensing as it feels an unseen predator’s eyes upon it.
“That you, boss?” he asked the seemingly empty room.
Quinn smiled. “What gave me away?”
The man turned, lowering his hood. He had the look of someone who spent most of his time outdoors, his face tanned and his short beard unruly. Just outside the threshold, the hound whined in excitement. “Don’t see many azurite eagles anymore,” he explained with a grin.
“True enough,” admitted Quinn.
“It’s good to see you, boss.”

Quinn knelt on the ground outside the cabin, ruffling the hound’s ears. It had been over a year since she had last seen the Greenfang warden, Dalin, and his faithful dog, Rigby.
The warden had given Quinn his assessment. He’d arrived at the cabin only an hour before her, and after a quick look around, had set out to speak to those living nearby.
“A woodsman saw a group moving through the trees last night, about half a mile up the valley,” said Dalin, pointing. “The moon was full, else he wouldn’t have seen them at all. Raiders, it looks like.”
“Setting a cabin on fire is not a good way to remain unseen,” observed Quinn. Rigby rolled onto his back, looking up at her with adoring, eager eyes.
“Perhaps they were more concerned about alerting anyone to their approach than remaining unseen afterwards? Or perhaps they lit the fire to draw attention to it, while they slipped off?” Dalin glanced over his shoulder. “Careful now—I think someone’s getting jealous.”
Valor was staring at her, unblinking, from a branch of a dead tree.
“Valor knows he’s my one true love,” she said, looking at the azurite eagle, her eyes smiling, even as she vigorously scratched the hound’s exposed belly. “Has there been much banditry in these parts of late?”
Dalin shook his head. “Been mercifully quiet, until this. The unrest spreading from the capital has got people nervous, but the sight of so many soldiers has driven most of the brigands into hiding. Small blessings, I guess. I hear you and yours have been busy, though, back west. Bad times.”
“Bad times,” agreed Quinn. Her jaw clenched, and she changed the subject. “A soldier’s widow and her child lived here. Anyone know where they are?”
The warden gave her a look, then shook his head with a laugh. “I shouldn’t be surprised you already figured that out,” he said. “The woman’s name is Asta. Her man died fighting mages when everything flared up in the Great City. She lives alone with her daughter.” He glanced back at the cabin, and sighed. “I didn’t see evidence of bloodshed when I looked around here earlier, but it doesn’t seem good.”
“No friends or family nearby who they could be with?”
“Seems not,” said Dalin. “The woman’s foreign-born. Keeps to herself. Her husband was from Lissus, back west. No family in these parts.”
“Foreign-born?”
“One of the independent nations to the east, apparently. No one seems to know exactly where.”
Quinn grunted and stood. She turned around on the spot, considering, then looked back toward the forest. She paced toward the tree line, studying the ground as she went.
“Here,” she said, coming to a halt. Dalin joined her, and she indicated a number of confusing, overlapping scuff marks. “They came out of the forest, and stopped here.”
Dalin dropped to his haunches, nodding. “At first I figured they were watching for the right moment to approach,” he said. “But then I saw these tracks here.”
Quinn circled around the tracks that Dalin indicated, careful not to let her own footsteps obscure them.
“A second set, lighter than the others,” she murmured. “Our widow and her child.”
“My guess is she confronted them—then they looted and burned her cabin.” Dalin’s eyes narrowed. “I couldn’t find the woman’s tracks returning to the house...”
“They don’t,” agreed Quinn, her expression grim. “Looks like they took her with them. Her and the child. See there? The little girl’s footsteps stop. Someone picked her up.”
She looked back at the cabin. “But these raiders didn’t approach the cabin, either. The ones who burned it approached from the other side. It’s possible the raiders split into two groups before their attack.”
Dalin folded his arms, thinking. “There’s something else,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s any truth in it, but it seems at least some folk ’round these parts believe the woman was... different. A mage.”
Quinn thought of the runes drawn onto the floor underneath the child’s cot. They seemed more like archaic superstition than sorcery... though she could not be certain. This was not her area of specialty.
“The local gossip is that the raiders were allies of Sylas,” continued Dalin, “and they came to collect one of their own. It could explain why it doesn’t look like there was a fight, but why burn the cabin?”
Quinn frowned. She was missing something, she was sure of it. “Could be retaliation,” she mused, “for her husband fighting against mages. Perhaps they were looking for some payback.”
“Killing him wasn’t enough?”
Quinn shrugged.
“Whatever the case, I’ll be going after them,” said Dalin. “They’re at least half a day ahead, but if they’re carrying the child, they’ll be slowed.”
Quinn glanced at the sun, judging the time and how far she still had to travel to rendezvous with Garen. It would be cutting it fine, but...
The woman, Asta, had been made a widow by the mage conflict, and it seemed likely she’d been abducted. Quinn could not in good conscience ignore that.
“I’ll come with you,” she declared. “There’s at least five of them, by my count. You’ll need help.”
“Mighty pleased you happened by, boss.”
“Let’s get going, then,” said Quinn. “And don’t call me boss.”
Technically, as a ranger-knight, Quinn was Dalin’s superior, but rigid hierarchy and honorifics had always made her uncomfortable.
“Whatever you say, boss,” Dalin said with a wry grin, knowing exactly how uncomfortable it made her. “C’mon, Rigby! Let’s move!”

Rigby loped alongside his master, tongue lolling seemingly of its own volition, while Valor sliced between the trees, flying low overhead.
The majestic azurite eagle streaked past the two running rangers, tucking his broad wings to avoid branches. In the blink of an eye, he was gone, disappearing into the distance. A few minutes later, Quinn and Dalin found him perched on a branch, waiting. The eagle watched impassively as they ran below him. Only when they were almost out of sight did he launch back into flight, zigzagging at blinding speed, once again shooting by them.
It wasn’t hard to follow the outlaws, particularly with Rigby chasing their scent. There were five of them with the widow, and they’d made no attempt to cover their trail, choosing speed over stealth. The rangers tracked them over a ridge to the north, into a neighboring valley of unbroken forest. The trail then cut due east, following an icy stream that writhed its way down from the mountains.
For hours, Quinn and Dalin ran, closing the distance. The land gradually rose as they climbed higher into the foothills. They didn’t speak, only pausing to check that they were still following the trail. Rigby happily bounded back and forth on these occasions, snuffling through the undergrowth, while Valor watched the dog aloofly.
When the sun was just past its zenith, Quinn stopped, kneeling in the soft loam beside a few boulders. Some moss had been scraped away from one, most likely by a careless boot. Quinn inspected it, and picked something off a flat rock, looking closely.
“They broke bread here,” she said. “I’d say it was only an hour ago. Maybe a little more.”
“We’re getting close,” said Dalin, sitting down and sucking in deep breaths. Rigby was taking the moment’s respite to lap from the nearby stream, while Valor watched. “We’ll overtake them by sundown.”
“Not fast enough,” said Quinn, balling her fists in frustration. “They’ll be over the border by then.”
“You think they’re trying to leave Demacia?”
Quinn shrugged. She pulled a hard trail biscuit from her pack, bit off half, and tossed the remainder to Dalin. He caught it deftly and nodded his thanks. The rations didn’t taste the best—in truth, Quinn could imagine sawdust had more flavor—but they’d sustain them. After a moment, she broke out a second biscuit, and launched it at Rigby. The pale dog snatched it out of the air, jaws snapping, devouring it instantly.
“It’s possible,” she said. “If they were just trying to hide, they’d have done better turning north. There are chasms and ravines up there that would take weeks to scour.”
Dalin chewed his tasteless biscuit thoughtfully. “The closest border crossing’s half a day’s march to the south, though,” he said. “And there’s no way they’d get through. The gates have been locked since the king’s murder. There’s nought but sheer cliffs and watchtowers this way.”
“Unless there’s another crossing we don’t know about,” said Quinn. She glanced down at the dog, now panting beside Dalin. “You think your master can keep up, Rigby, or should we ditch him?”
The hound looked at her quizzically, turning his head to the side.
Dalin snorted. “Funny,” he said. Then, with a groan, he pushed back to his feet.

A short time later, Quinn and Dalin stood on a bluff, overlooking a ravine. A massive rocky spire rose above the forest canopy in the distance.
“There,” said Dalin, pointing.
Climbing around the circumference of the spire was a group of people. It was hard to make out any details—at this distance, they looked like ants—but it was clear that they would reach the border before the rangers.
“If I can get in front of them, I can slow them,” said Quinn.
“The only way you’d be able to do that is if...” started Dalin, but his words trailed off as he saw Quinn staring at him, a half smile on her face.
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

Quinn soared through the air, borne aloft by Valor. The eagle’s bladelike talons were latched tightly around her shoulders, and she squinted against the biting wind as they sailed over the trees.
“Take us around to the north,” Quinn shouted as they approached the spire. She leaned her weight in that direction, and Valor obligingly angled their descent.
The raiders had circled around to the south of the spire and disappeared into the trees, but Quinn didn’t intend to follow their path directly. No, she needed to get in front if she was to slow them long enough for Dalin and Rigby to catch up. Two rangers against five were not great odds, but it was better than confronting them alone.
Valor continued to come down, and Quinn lifted her legs to avoid hitting the highest branches. The spire loomed before them, and Valor banked around its northern flank, gaining a little height as updrafts buoyed them. Then the rocky ground rose rapidly to meet them. Spying a likely place to land, Valor shifted their approach, and angled his wings back to slow their descent.
Two powerful beats of his wings, and Quinn’s feet touched down, ever so gently.
“Thank you, brother,” she breathed as Valor released his grip. Then she was running again, into the cover of the forest. The azurite eagle, unshackled by her weight, took to the air once more.
Quinn leaped over tangles of roots and burst through stands of ferns and hanging lichen. She ran along the length of a fallen tree, using it as a bridge to traverse a cascading waterfall, before bounding off it and charging up the rise on the other side.
This was not her usual, mile-eating pace that she could sustain for hours on end. This was a full sprint, and her heart was hammering in her chest. After racing up the hill, she hurled herself to the ground, concealed among the bracken. Elbowing herself to the edge of the rise, she peered down into the hollow bellow.
A lone figure appeared, bow in hand. It was a man, bearded and bedecked in furs. A bronze torc around an upper arm glinted in the dappled light filtering through the trees, and Quinn glimpsed swirling warpaint or tattoos on his pale flesh.
The ranger-knight instantly knew this was no Demacian rogue mage or bandit. This was no Demacian at all.
The raider paused, surveying the way ahead, and Quinn felt his gaze flit over her. She resisted the urge to crawl back, knowing the movement of the ferns would draw more attention than if she remained motionless.
Seemingly satisfied, the outsider lifted a hand and gestured forward before continuing on. Quinn stayed where she was, waiting as the rest of the group appeared. One of them had a gleaming Demacian shield strapped across his back. That was the shield that had been stolen from above the cabin’s hearth—a shield that had belonged to a noble soldier who’d fallen in battle. Seeing an outsider wearing it as a trophy filled her with a cold-burning anger.
It wasn’t hard to pick out the widow. While the others were bedecked in furs and leather, she was wearing a simple but elegant woolen dress, rolled up to free her legs. A fur shawl was wrapped around her shoulders, and she wore a pair of practical, tall boots. She looked exhausted, stumbling forward with her head down. With a breath of relief, Quinn saw the child, a toddler with a mass of golden curls, asleep in the thick arms of one of the marauders.
The ranger-knight watched them for a moment longer, then crawled slowly backward, a plan formulating in her mind. She knew where they were going, for she’d been here before, years earlier.
In her youth, she and her twin brother, Caleb, had roamed the wilds around their home of Uwendale, several days’ march to the northwest. The pair had often disappeared into the wilderness for weeks at a time, exploring the forests and mountain foothills, hunting for their own food, and sleeping under the stars. Their father had been none too excited about it, but their mother had always encouraged them. She was a big believer in the importance of self-reliance and resourcefulness, and both children had accompanied her on hunts from a young age.
Their father had come around eventually—it probably helped that the family larder was always well stocked with venison and boar after they returned—though he never stopped worrying for them.
And it turned out he’d been right to worry.
Quinn had been here only once, a month before Caleb’s death. And so she knew that if the outsiders continued on their path, they’d have to make their way up through a narrow ravine, half a mile farther on.
Running low and fast, hidden by the crown of the rise to her right, Quinn sprinted on a path parallel to the raiders. She made it to the ravine before they did, and ran up the side. She’d just set herself up at the top of it, her back against a concealing rock, when she heard the first of the outsiders begin his ascent.
Quinn took measured breaths, slowing her thumping heart. She left her repeater crossbow holstered, but drew her large hunting knife. The blade was long and broad, almost the size of a shortsword.
The outsider was good—he made almost no noise as he climbed steadily up the rocky gulch—but not good enough to realize Quinn was waiting for him. As he hauled himself up the final, steep climb, Quinn stepped from concealment. She was to his side, and he didn’t see her until the last moment. He tried to turn, drawing back the string of his bow, but he was too slow. Quinn struck him in the temple with the pommel of her knife, and he dropped without a sound.
She hastily dragged him out of view. He was bleeding, but he was alive. With swift, practiced movements, the ranger-knight bound the unconscious man’s wrists, before yanking them back and tying them to his ankles. Then she resumed her position, back against the rock. She drew her crossbow, and flipped the knife around in her other hand so that its point was down.
With a quick glance, she peered down the ravine before ducking back. Three raiders were climbing the steep rise below, with the widow between them. The one Quinn presumed was their leader—he was bigger than the others, and alone among them wore chainmail under his furs—was at the front. He was the one who bore the Demacian shield upon his back.
Quinn ground her teeth in frustration. There should have been four of them left. Where was the last one? Was he simply acting as a rearguard, or could he be approaching from an unexpected angle? She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. It was too late to change her plan. She’d deal with him if and when he appeared.
As the leader of the outlanders neared, Quinn stepped out in front of him, crossbow leveled at his throat.
It took him a moment to register her presence. His eyes widened and he halted, reaching instinctively for his axe, hanging over his shoulders.
“Don’t,” warned Quinn. She wasn’t sure the man would understand her, but the shake of her head was a universal language, and the outlander’s hand froze.
He was a big man, two heads taller than Quinn, and easily twice her weight, but she had the higher ground, and was unintimidated. She’d brought down far bigger prey in her time.
His hair was straw-colored and long, hanging in elaborate plaits, and his beard, streaked with gray, was bound with bones and stone beads. His eyes were like slivers of slate, and he stared up at her without blinking.
There was a shout of alarm from the raiders half hidden behind his bulk, but the big man barked something over his shoulder in his own clipped, harsh language. He looked past the ranger-knight, searching. Probably trying to see what support she had.
His gaze returned to her. He licked his lips, and Quinn knew he was judging the chances of closing the distance without taking a fatal bolt.
“You speak my language?” asked Quinn. “You understand my words?”
The outlander stared at her for a moment before giving a slow nod.
“Let the woman and child go,” said Quinn, “and we won’t have to see how long it takes you to bleed out from a bolt to the throat.”
The big man snorted in amusement. “You’ve been tracking us? Alone?” His voice was deep and heavily accented. “You may kill me, if you are lucky, but my men will tear you apart. I do not think I will do as you ask.”
“I wasn’t asking,” said Quinn.
The outlander grinned. Two of his teeth were made of gold. “There is steel in you, Demacian. I like that.” His smile dropped abruptly. “Where’s my scout?”
“Alive,” said Quinn.
“Good. He is my brother, by oath. My wife would be angry if I had let him get killed.”
“What’s going on?” the widow called up.
The leader of the outlanders barked a response in his own language, though Quinn did recognize something amongst that garble of words: Asta. The widow’s name.
The woman begged. “Please, I don’t want any—”
“Be silent!” shouted the leader, half turning, his face flushing a deep crimson. When he looked back at Quinn, his expression was angry. “You should not have tried to stop us by yourself.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Quinn saw the fifth raider rising to his knees atop the ridge to her left, bow in hand. Quietly he nocked an arrow and drew the string, weapon leveled at her.
Quinn, still holding the leader’s gaze, gave him a smile. “What makes you think I’m alone?”
There was a flash of blue, moving like a thunderbolt, and the bowman gave out a strangled cry. His arrow, loosed in haste, sailed into the undergrowth, and he fell back, clutching at his bleeding hand.
The widow screamed, and everyone broke into motion.
One of the warriors threw a hand axe, sending it hurtling end over end toward Quinn. She swung aside, dodging it, but that was enough of a distraction for the leader. He sprang forward, swinging his axe off his shoulders. Quinn loosed two bolts in quick succession, but the first missed its mark, slicing harmlessly by his head. The second took the raider in the meat of his shoulder, embedding itself there, but it did nothing to slow his charge.
With a roar, he brought his weapon around in a lethal arc. It was a heavy, double-handed axe, and the strike was meant to hack Quinn in two. She swayed back from the wild swing, then reversed her momentum—she was far quicker than the outsider, for all his power—and stabbed him in the chest. It should have been a killing blow, delivered right to the heart, but the tip of her knife caught in his chainmail, stopping it from sinking deep.
The big man drove Quinn back with a swinging elbow, sending her reeling, then brought down his axe in a heavy overhead blow. Diving to the side, Quinn avoided the strike, and let loose a bolt at close range as she rolled. The bolt plunged into his flesh just above the knee, and the warrior collapsed with a growl of pain.
Quinn was on him instantly, knife at his throat.
That gave the other raiders pause, and they traded glances, unsure what to do. One of them was still cradling the woman’s child, though the infant was now wailing loudly.
The widow scrambled forward on her hands and knees. “No, no, no,” she cried. “Please, don’t hurt him!”
Quinn blinked. “You... know this man?” she asked, looking at the exhausted, tearful woman before her.
“Of course I do,” the widow said. “He’s my brother.”

“My husband was in the capital when the king was murdered,” said the widow, Asta. She held her daughter in her arms, and was gently swaying back and forth, trying to calm her. “He was defending the palace. The mages killed him.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” murmured Quinn, as she bound a length of cloth around the outlander leader’s leg. His name was Egrid. His chest wound was only minor—his chainmail had saved him from worse harm there—and he’d torn out the bolt from his shoulder himself.
The other warriors were sitting on rocks nearby. One had some ugly cuts on his hand, and was staring balefully at Valor, perched on a branch overhead, while the one Quinn had tied up was rubbing gingerly at the side of his head.
Standing near Quinn, a deep frown on his face, was Dalin.
“I met Malak when a diplomatic contingent came to my homeland, six summers back,” said Asta. “In Skaggorn, I was a chieftain’s daughter, but when Malak returned to Demacia, I came with him as his wife.”
Quinn finished tying the bandage, then sat back to inspect her work.
“You are fast, and strong, and you stitch wounds well,” said Egrid with a grin, his golden teeth flashing. “Marry me, and come back to Skaggorn with us, yes?”
Quinn didn’t even dignify that with an answer. “But why try to leave Demacia now?” she asked Asta. “You must have known that would bring trouble down upon you.”
“My people left the Freljord many generations ago,” said Asta, “traveling over the mountains and settling in Skaggorn. Yet the old blood still runs in my veins. My grandmother was a seer, one you would call a mage, or a witch. I do not have that power, but what if my daughter develops the sight? I have heard what is going on. She would be taken from me. The Frost-Bringer knows what would happen to her. I could not risk that, so I sent word to my family by hawk, begging them to get us out.”
“Mageseekers,” Quinn hissed, shaking her head.
She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. If the child manifested arcane powers, the mageseekers would take her. Were she in the widow’s shoes, Quinn would likely have already taken her child far beyond the reach of that insidious organization. She couldn’t blame Asta for what she was attempting.
“You understand we can’t let you go,” said Dalin. “The borders are closed. No one is allowed to leave without express permission from the high council itself. It’s the only way to ensure the traitor Sylas and his associates don’t slip away, and escape justice.”
“My husband died fighting against the traitor!” said Asta. “Everything here reminds me of Malak. Without him, I don’t wish to stay. And the small-minded farmers of our valley hate me. They already think I’m a witch.”
“You didn’t ransack your own home when you left, did you,” said Quinn. It was a statement, not a question. “And you didn’t set it ablaze, right?”
“What? No, of course not.” Asta paused. “Did someone truly do that?”
Quinn nodded. “And the markings under your daughter’s cot,” she said. “They were not of a... sorcerous nature, were they?”
Asta laughed, shaking her head. “A blessing of protection. A mark all Skaggorn mothers make for their children.”
Quinn nodded again, finally understanding. “But that runic blessing might seem like sorcery to those who wouldn’t know any better. Even I was suspicious of it.”
“I was careful to keep the old traditions to myself, but my neighbors were always wary of me,” Asta said. “And with all that’s been happening...”
It seemed clear now that the second set of tracks leading to the cabin had not belonged to any warrior of distant Skaggorn. Maybe the locals were seeking evidence of Asta’s sorcery. If so, perhaps they saw those charcoal runes, and set the house ablaze in a clumsy attempt to burn away what they thought was dangerous magic.
Quinn sighed, shaking her head. On the whole, Demacians were good, honorable people, but fear and distrust were spreading like a plague, and bringing out the worst in the kingdom’s scared citizens. It needed to end.
“I found something that I think you should have,” Quinn said, remembering what she had recovered in the wreckage. She handed over the Shield of Remembrance, and tears appeared in Asta’s eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, clutching the medal to her chest. “I thought it had been lost. It broke my heart to leave without it.”
“I’m sorry, but we cannot allow you to leave,” said Dalin.
“We are leaving, Demacian,” growled Egrid, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. “Do not try to stop us.”
“Egrid, enough!” snapped Asta. “These two rangers are just doing their duty.” She turned to Quinn. “But please, I beg you, at least let my daughter go. She should not have to suffer for something beyond her control. Let her go with my brother, and I will return with you.”
Dalin and Quinn traded a look. The law was firm. No one was allowed to leave Demacia, not Asta, her daughter, or the Skaggorn warriors.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” said Dalin.

“If we let them go, then we are the ones violating the law,” whispered Dalin.
The two rangers walked behind as the group trekked eastward.
“We need to know how they got across the border,” replied Quinn in a low voice.
Dalin looked troubled, but he gave a clipped nod and fell into silence.
It wasn’t long before they reached the cliffs marking the edge of Demacia. The Skaggorn party led them to a secluded location, tucked just out of view of the guard towers to the north and south. Every inch of these cliffs should have been visible to one of the dozens of Demacia’s watchtowers, but clearly this was a blind spot.
Quinn leaned over the edge. The drop was several hundred feet, but heights had never bothered her. She could see pitons hammered into the rock. “You approached the base of the cliff at night, so as not to be seen by the sentries?” she asked.
Egrid nodded. Quinn grunted, impressed.
“Quite the climb to make, even in daylight,” she said. She looked down at the big man’s strapped leg. “Sorry about the knee. Are you going to manage it?”
“Of course! We of Skaggorn are strong,” boasted Egrid. “You are strong, too. You should return with us. The two of us, we would make strong warrior children. Yes?”
Quinn stared at him without speaking, her expression unreadable. Eventually, he shrugged and turned away.
“Worth asking the question,” he muttered. With a shout, he ordered his men to retrieve the ropes, hidden in the undergrowth nearby.
“I thought you just wanted to find out how they crossed into Demacia unseen,” hissed Dalin, taking Quinn aside. “We’ll be breaking our oaths if we allow them to go!”
“I’m uncomfortable with forcing a woman to stay and risk having her child taken simply because of a quirk of her bloodline,” she said, her voice low. “Besides, our first oath is to protect Demacia.”
“And letting them go protects Demacia?”
Quinn flashed him a fierce glance. “If we try to stop them, this plays out in one of two ways,” she whispered. “Either they kill us and leave anyway, in which case Demacia has lost two of its best rangers—or we defeat them, and Demacia gains an enemy, for the people of Skaggorn will know we are holding a chieftain’s daughter against her will.”
Dalin glanced at the big warriors, and conceded the point. “Doesn’t make it right, though,” he muttered. “And still makes us lawbreakers.”
Quinn regarded him. “If you want things to be simple, then you’d be better off in the regular infantry. Things are always more complicated out on the fringes.”
“The laws—”
“The laws be damned,” snapped Quinn. “It does not weaken Demacia in any way to let them go, but it will if we try to stop them.”
“But—”
Quinn rarely enforced the power her rank allowed her... but she did so now.
“Stand down, soldier,” she growled. “I am letting them go. That is an order.”
He stiffened for a moment, then gave her a sharp salute.
“As you will it, ranger-knight.”

The sun was starting to set as the Skaggorn party commenced climbing down the cliff. Quinn waited till they were all on their way—tied to each other, with the widow Asta’s child strapped tightly upon Egrid’s back—before she turned away. As good as their word, Egrid’s men removed the pitons they’d hammered into the stone as they descended.
Quinn had less than three days to get to the meeting point with Garen. She’d be forced to run through the night to make it in time, but had no doubt that she would. She gathered herself, readying for the journey ahead.
Before she left, Quinn paused, glancing over at Dalin, who was sitting near the cliff’s edge, Rigby at his side. He was looking eastward, away from her. They had barely spoken since the Skaggorn began their descent.
“I don’t expect you to feel good about it,” Quinn said, “but letting them go was for the best.”
He looked at her. “I understand,” he said. “Matters just aren’t as straightforward as I’d like them to be, I guess.”
“For some, they are,” said Quinn, shrugging. “But we are rangers.”
The Greenfang warden gave a slow nod, then stood to see Quinn off.
“You watch out for her, Valor, you hear?” he said, addressing the azurite eagle perched nearby. “Demacia needs her.”
Valor clacked his beak in reply.
“Speak to the local garrison,” Quinn said. “See that they build a watchtower here. Best make sure this gap in our defenses is closed for good.”
“Pulling rank on me again, boss?”
Quinn snorted, and scratched Rigby behind the ears. “Something like that.” She looked the warden in the eye. “Stay safe, and stay vigilant, Dalin,” she said. “Demacia needs you, too.”
Then she turned, and started running once more.
The Shuttered Manse

Graham McNeill

She felt the thief coming closer with every careful step he took.
He was skillful, she’d give him that, but her awareness was heightened to degrees no mortal could conceive. His footfalls over the nearby rooftops, though soft and artfully placed, vibrated the stagnant air within her gloomy abode like the plucked string of a lute in a silent temple.
His approach had wakened her from dreams of the ocean, darkness rising up in a tsunami that roared over the world to leave it forever sunk beneath dead black waters. Part of her relished the extinction this wave would bring, even as she knew she had played some role in its coming.
The dream fell away as her multi-faceted eyes opened and she reached out through her every sense. Perceptions colored by scents and sounds, movement felt in the tremors of the air. Still weary and worn thin from her most recent voyage to the mist-wreathed isles, her irritation grew at the thought of having to deal with yet another intruder.
Her cellar lair was folded with shadow, but the heavy barrels, rotted tapestries, and icy floorboards were as clear to her as if daylight were pouring through the shuttered grates.
A whisper of skittering legs echoed throughout the manse, a rustle of hundreds of glossy bodies scuttling from their domains in anticipation of her desires. The dripping walls and sagging ceiling rippled with undulant motion and the gleam of thousands of unblinking eyes.
“Soon, little ones,” she said, her voice smoky and rich with aristocratic tones. “Let me play with this one awhile.”
She felt their appetite for human flesh, sharp with need.
It mirrored her own.
She eased from her resting place, her dreaming form a shifting blend of human and arachnid, extending her slender limbs and drawing the intruder’s myriad scents to her through the surfaces of her tarsal claws. She ran her tongue across needle-like teeth, learning more of him with every inward breath.
A sand-kissed soul—skin of smoke, and the thinnest trace of ancient kings in his blood.
One of the desert-born…
She felt his approach, fully aware of what had drawn him to her shuttered manse on this bitterly cold night. And who had likely sent him.
Like the others before him, he would find only death.
Like the others, Elise would draw him to her before devouring him alive.

Waning moon in a coal-dark sky. Low clouds and cold winds.
Perfect for an endeavor like this.
A bell tolled over the harbor of the capital, and icy winds carried the sound of bellicose Noxian soldiers from distant camps beyond the city’s Watchbell Gate.
Nyam moved over the rooftops with soft and sure footsteps, his loose-fitting tunic and cloak of gray wool making him all but invisible. He kept low, just below the tiled ridges of the buildings, carefully judging every step over the thin layer of snowfall.
A loose tile, a patch of ice—that was all it would take to end this night in death, his body broken on the cobbled street.
But Nyam had plundered tombs sunk deep in the sands of his homeland, and climbed the cliff-temples on the road to Marrowmark in search of treasure. He had evaded traps set in the ruins of kings and gods, so the swaybacked rooftops of Noxus—uneven, high, and filled with pitted hand- and footholds—offered little in the way of challenge to a thief of his skill.
He’d learned to run the sky-roads as a child, weaving over the high roofs of Bel’zhun to avoid roving gangs of children who beat him for the cleft that split his gums and top lip all the way to his nose. “No-Face Nyam,” they’d called him, his birth deformity giving the Shuriman-born and pallid Noxian runts a unifying target for their anger.
Even after he’d stolen enough to have an embalmer sew his lip closed upon his tenth summer, they still mocked him—but those hard, brutal years had served him well. He’d learned to embrace solitude, to love dizzying heights, and to become one with shadows in a land that knew only the golden light of its ancient sun.
But most of all, he’d learned to fight: first with his fists, and then with the obsidian blade he’d taken from the sarcophagus of a body so large, it must have been one of the legendary Ascended. Sheathed across his shoulder, it had been a knife to the dead god, but was a sword to Nyam.
The place his paymaster had spoken of was just ahead, looming like a grand shadow of its former glory, its windows shuttered, and its gambrel roof rotten where tiles had slipped loose and fallen to the streets below.
That’s my way in.
Nyam reached the icicle-hung gable at the end of a roof, and perched at its edge with perfect balance as he uncoiled a length of rope from his belt. He unfolded the hooks of a grapnel and, with practiced ease, cast it toward a gap between a row of cracked chimneys. The hook landed precisely where he had aimed, and he gave the rope a tug.
Satisfied the hook had bedded into the stonework, he slid from the roof.
The cold air cut into him as he swung over, bracing his legs like a spring to bear the impact. His boots were soft, but he winced as the sound echoed throughout the crumbling building like a hammer upon an anvil. Snow fell from the eaves, and Nyam took a moment, listening for any sign that he had been heard.
Nothing. The ancient house was quiet as a tomb.
Hand over hand, he pulled himself up the rope until he climbed smoothly onto the roof.
Nyam coiled the rope and crouched in the shadow behind a chimney. His breath misted the air, and he tugged a thick mitten of drüvask fur from his left hand, reaching up to place a bare palm on the stone.
This chimney had not known warmth in many passings of the moon.
Only a very few chimneys in this district smoked with a hearth fire. Other parts of the capital glimmered, ruddy with firelight. Cookfires, warrior pyres beyond the walls, and braziers set in shrines to the Wolf.
But not here.
This area of the city felt all but abandoned, the empty windows of its black stone structures seeming like they had never known light. Tattered curtain cloth was frozen stiff by the sighing winds funneled through the narrow streets. Far below, only a few candles guttered in window sconces, and he’d seen just a single lantern, hung outside a forlorn-looking tavern doorway.
Pallid moonlight cast its radiance over empty streets, where the snow lay undisturbed. How such a deserted space could exist in a city where every inch of ground was precious was a mystery to Nyam, but this was where his employer had directed him.
The manse of House Zaavan.

Nyam slid slowly down the rope through a wide hole in the roof.
Flakes of snow swirled around him as he descended, diamond motes glittering in the faint moonlight. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the gloom within the manse, seeing that he hung within what appeared to be a grand receiving room with a wide fireplace of gold-veined marble.
Snow-brushed kindling was set in the hearth, and a bucket of frosty coal lay spilled beside it, like the home’s inhabitants had knocked it over in their hurry to leave, and never come back.
Linen-draped furniture was situated around the room: long couches, wide divans pushed up against the walls, and empty chairs. Judging by the icy stiffness of the fabric, Nyam guessed many years had passed since this room had been shuttered.
The parquet floor was strewn with tiles and broken roof timbers, and he carefully placed his leading foot between the debris, testing for creaks and groans. Slowly he let his weight settle, and released the rope.
Nyam pushed back his hood and ran a hand over his shaven scalp, the skin dark and stubbled, tattooed, and pierced with ivory needles like a thorny crown.
He crouched low and placed his palm on the floor, closing his eyes and letting the bones of the manse speak to him. The ancient timbers groaned in the cold like old men turning in their sleep, the walls silent, the house’s breath hanging heavy within, trapped like the air of a plague cave where the afflicted waited to die.
Every instinct told Nyam this house was abandoned, a cursed palace frozen in time.
And yet…
A faint hiss like a thousand whispered voices speaking in unison, a soft sense of motion all around him. A crawling sensation traveled the length of his spine, and he suppressed a shiver, telling himself it was just the cold fingers of the north wind.
He eased his gaze around the room, not letting his eyes fix on any one point, allowing his peripheral vision to catch any movement. He saw nothing, only the swirl of snowflakes and the tiny fluttering of cloth.
But the sense that something else was in here with him wouldn’t abate.
The elegantly written letter had been precise: enter the Zaavan mansion, find the library, and steal the designated artifact. The instructions described a grand library in the eastern wing of the manse, a room entered via tall doors of ebon black, just off the mezzanine above an octagonal atrium.
Nyam rose and moved to the walls, where the timber floor would be less likely to creak with his weight, and edged along them to a wide door at the far end of the room. It hung ajar, and gusts of soft wind sighed through from beyond.
He slid his thin frame through the door, finding himself within a long dining room.
A narrow table ran its length, still set for a lavish dinner, with painted ceramic plates and gleaming silver cutlery laid out in anticipation of guests who would never arrive.
Platters were piled high with frost-dusted fruit and icy cuts of meat. Nyam’s stomach rumbled, reminding him that it had been many hours since he’d eaten. Would such meat be edible, preserved by the cold?
Nyam wasn’t about to try it and find out.
At the center of the table was a domed silver tray, and a sudden curiosity made him want to see what lay beneath.
Nyam reached over and lifted the lid.
And a swirling mass of creatures erupted from a moldering joint of beef, gloss-black and skittering—spiders fleeing the light in their hundreds. None was larger than his thumbnail, and Nyam flinched in horror as they spilled from the edge of the table in a squirming tide.
The tray lid fell from his fingers to the floor.
In the silence of the house, the clang of metal was deafening.
He winced, and his hand snapped to the sword at his shoulder. Cursing his stupidity, Nyam moved swiftly to a curtained window, finding the shadows and becoming one with the darkness.
Stillness was his ally, and he remained utterly motionless, waiting for any sign his foolish mistake had been heard. He strained to hear something amiss—a sullen watchman, or even perhaps the owner of this house.
If anything, the house felt somehow quieter, as though something else was right next to him, invisibly watching and waiting.
His eyes scanned the walls, from floor to cornices.
Nothing.
The seconds became minutes, and finally, Nyam let out a relieved sigh. The house was empty and abandoned, something once grand now reduced to a ruin.
“Dead as a desert tomb,” he said.

Elise crawled from her cellar lair to the ground floor of the manse, moving swiftly along the walls and fluted columns to the mezzanine, each of her multiple limbs in perfect synchrony. Her chittering spiderling host followed in her wake, eager to race ahead and swarm this intruder, but she held them back for now.
They hissed at her restraint like unruly children, resentful at being denied this feast.
Her arachnoid form was as black as midnight, segmented and deadly, with an abdomen patterned with blood-red streaks. Her bladed and slender legs moved lightly, making no sound at all.
She crawled with lithe grace across the mezzanine’s checkerboard-tiled floor, toward the dining room.
A clash of metal echoed from within as her foreclaw reached for the door. She paused, and her scuttling host did so too, gently swaying on their many legs.
The sound unleashed a rush of bitter memories from her past life…
… of pain, humiliation, and bloody vengeance.
A jealous and petty man had almost ended her life in that room.
She remembered her husband’s treacherous poison coursing through her veins, searing her flesh from the inside out and crippling her with agony.
A surge of hate, the flash of a blade…
Gloating eyes now wide with fear…
A flood of red as she twisted the knife in his heart.
Elise pushed the memory away. Even now, centuries later, the pain of that night still lingered. Despite drinking the antidote to the poison, she had drifted near death for weeks after his betrayal. Yet as agonizing as those weeks had been, they had signaled the coming of her rebirth.
As a mere human, she had been beautiful. Now, she was glorious.
Elise paused, savoring the rising tension in the thief—but beneath that, she tasted long-buried fears and a will to survive past torments, which found their echo within her.
Intrigued, she lowered her claw as she heard the thief step closer.
Elise turned from the dining room and swiftly crossed the mezzanine to a set of tall black doors.

Nyam eased open the dining room door, wincing as it creaked.
But if no one had come running at the sound of him dropping the metal tray lid, they weren’t going to come for this.
The door opened into a high-ceilinged atrium, eight sided and rising to a stained-glass dome high above. The mezzanine floor ran around the edges of the atrium, though its timbers had collapsed in several places, and the curving staircase leading down to the vestibule was in ruins far below. Fragments of colored glass lay shattered in the vestibule, and Nyam peered up into the gloom to see the broken portions of the dome had been sealed with some kind of pale fibrous resin or gum.
Thick cobwebs spanned the upper reaches of the atrium, and Nyam saw wet-looking bundles held fast within them, squirming with a grotesque internal motion.
Egg sacs? Captured birds? Nests?
Whatever they were, it was no concern of his. Before long, he’d be out of this place with his prize and en route to a fat purse, a clean bathhouse, and a warm meal.
Directly across from the dining room were a pair of imposing doors of jet-black wood, polished and gleaming like dark mirrors.
“There is the library,” he whispered. “Just as the letter said.”
Nyam slipped across the mezzanine, carefully testing the integrity of the floor with each step before committing his weight. The wood creaked and groaned, but held.
He reached the doors and tested a handle, grimacing in revulsion as his hand came away sticky with a gummy yellow-white residue.
“Mercy of sand,” he hissed, wiping his palm on his britches.
The door clicked open, and Nyam forgot his disgust as he heard a soft sound, like sand spilling over rocks. He couldn’t place what it might be—vermin in the walls, perhaps?
Rats were a common enough sight in Noxus. You couldn’t have this many people living cheek by jowl without them infesting every building. But this wasn’t rats.
Pushing the door wide, Nyam entered the library.
It had once been a place of wonder.
Its shelves were high, crafted with love and care from pale wood with a fine, contoured grain. Every bookcase had been violently emptied—leather-bound tomes, scrolls, and sheaves of paper cast to the floor in disarray, books likely worth a small fortune lying amid ancient scrolls that had been torn like discarded army scrip tokens. Artifacts of strange and unusual design had been smashed to pieces, and statues of onyx and jade lay broken into shards. A swaying black chandelier hung from a slender cord over the center of the room.
And there, at the far end of the chamber, was a cabinet of dark wood and cold iron, from which a soft illumination pulsed.
“There,” said Nyam, picking a path toward the cabinet through the scattered books.
He wondered why anyone would destroy such a treasure trove of wisdom and imagination. This chaos had the hallmarks of someone wreaking havoc in blind fury. Judging by the dust gathered on the embossed covers and gilded spines, that rage had been spent long ago.
He bent to lift a book from the floor, its pages brittle with age. Portions of its thick leather cover bore the same glistening residue from the door handle. He opened it, and saw the harsh, angular script of the old tongue of Noxus, a language only the highborn patricians ever used. Nyam couldn’t read it, and it hurt his eyes trying to follow the crisp writing in the dim light.
Placing the book back on the floor, Nyam pressed on, hearing the soft sound of sand over stone once again. He paused, trying to pinpoint the noise, but it was all around him.
What is that?
Finally, he reached the cabinet, its black wood oddly glistening with a patina of moisture that seemed to be oozing from within, as though something inside was leaking. Careful not to touch the liquid, he bent to sniff it.
Salt and rotten timbers, mulched seaweed, and… old blood?
“Tainted seawater,” he said, puzzled.
He knelt to examine the cabinet from the ground up, looking for any trap mechanisms, his ungloved hands gliding over the wet wood in search of catches, switches, or latches. His awareness of his surroundings faded, all his attention focused on the cabinet and whatever lethal surprises it might have in store. Its doors appeared to be secured by the simplest of locks.
“Surely something so valuable would be protected by more than a pinlock,” he whispered in disbelief. “It is almost as though you wish it to be stolen.”
Nyam ran his fingertips around the handles, then drew a mirror from his pouches and used it to peer within the mechanism of the pinlock. No spring-loaded needle, no glass pellet of lethal gas, nor any inscribed curses or magical trap runes.
Satisfied the lock was just as it seemed, he reached up and slid out one of the longer ivory needles from a pierced fold of skin on his scalp. He pressed it into the lock and gently eased the iron pins from their holes.
With the last pin secured, Nyam slid the needle back into his scalp and flexed his fingers.
His stomach grumbled with a stabbing hunger.
He was suddenly ravenous, ready to tear raw flesh from the bone and drain entire vats of beer. His appetite from the dining room returned tenfold, and for a fleeting second, he considered going back to take one of the cuts of meat from the table.
He pushed the sensation down, shocked at how visceral it had been.
Nyam opened the cabinet, and his stomach again tightened with powerful hunger pangs.
Sitting within was a crystalline hourglass encased in a delicate framework of brass. It stood two handspans tall, and tumultuous clouds of blue light spiraled inside, moving restlessly back and forth, from top to bottom. Droplets of red water seemed to sweat from the smoky glass, forming a glossy crimson pool that was the source of the moisture seeping from the cabinet.
Nyam hesitated to remove the object, knowing it was touched by the darkest of magics.
He pulled his gloves back on and carefully lifted the hourglass. It felt warm, like a roasted shank of meat fresh from a clay oven, and he closed his eyes as his mind filled with bloody horrors…
A slaughterman’s cleaver splitting bone for the pot…
Butchered corpses hung on hooks to drain them of blood…
A toothed maw, feeding a hunger that could never be sated…
Soul lights ripped from the living and the dead…
EVEN IN DEATH, I HUNGER!
Nyam set the hourglass back down, all but overcome by the gut punch of the gory imagery, and disgusted with himself as his craving surged.
“I do not know what you are, but the sooner I am out of here and rid of you, the better.”
He unfastened the clasps securing his cloak and removed it, before swiftly wrapping the hourglass within.
Nyam closed the cabinet and turned to leave.
And his mouth fell open in shock.
Every surface of the library was swathed in glistening strands of web, stretching in taut lines from the bookshelves to the floor. Partially shuttered windows were rendered opaque and sealed to their frames, with scattered books and scrolls submerged beneath undulant dunes of white silk.
The rustling sound of sand over rocks intensified, and Nyam drew his black-bladed sword as he saw the ceiling squirm with thousands of spiders in crimson and jet.
More of them crawled toward him in a black tide, squeezing fat bodies from cracks in the walls and floor, swarming over one another to reach him.
“Rammus be with me,” hissed Nyam. “Protect this son of Shurima…”
A larger motion drew his gaze upward toward the chandelier.
It unfolded from the central point, and a huge, segmented body uncurled to reveal a monstrous spider with a pulsing black abdomen streaked with vivid crimson. Its eyes settled upon Nyam as it lowered from the ceiling.
Even as it descended on its cord of silk, its outline seemed to fold in on itself, reshaping and swelling into a new form like a larva emerging from its chrysalis. The monster’s rear limbs slid around to its back, and its forelimbs twisted and extended to become long human legs.
Its body stretched to assume the curves of a voluptuous woman clad in red and black, in silk and damask. Her skin lightened from midnight to the violet of an ill-fated sunset, and the crimson slash on the monster’s abdomen became a slicked-back mane of blood-red hair.
But it was her eyes, twin pools of ruby light framed by a chitinous crown, that kept Nyam pinned in place.
Her tapered foot touched the ground, and she stepped toward him like a ribbon dancer coming down after a flawless performance in the air.
“That doesn’t belong to you,” she said.
Nyam tried to speak, but his tongue turned to turgid leather, his fingers tightening on the grip of his sword. Her beauty was otherworldly and intoxicating, repellent and achingly desirable all at once.
He craved the embrace of her slender limbs, even as he knew that touching her hideous body would be the death of him. He took a step toward her, trying to quell the rising terror of his wildly beating heart.
She grinned, exposing needle-like teeth wet with venom.
How would it be to have them fasten on my arm, to feel her venom coursing through my veins?
Nyam shook his head, breaking eye contact, the breath he hadn’t known he was holding rushing to fill his lungs as her blandishments and seductions fell away.
“I think it is not yours, either,” he said, finally finding his voice.
“True, but it cost me a great deal to retrieve, so the point is moot.”
“The man paying me is powerful,” warned Nyam.
“And the person that item is promised to is no less so,” said the woman.
Nyam began circling around her, edging toward the black doors. She stepped closer, the spiders parting before her. The hooked limbs at her back flexed as she rolled her shoulders.
“Do you really expect to walk out of here alive?” she asked.
“You think to stop me?” he said, brandishing the sword that had once belonged to a dead god. “I have split skulls of many who stood between me and escape.”
“No doubt. But your tally of death is insignificant when set next to mine. I am the Lady Elise, and you are just the latest fly to wander into my web.”
Nyam bolted, sprinting toward the library doors.
He felt the spiders’ bodies pop beneath his boots, heard the crunch of their hard shells, and smelled the acrid stink of their ichor. He’d hoped to gain advantage with his sudden speed, but now saw how horribly he’d misjudged this woman.
She somersaulted toward the doors, springing from the wall in a graceful arc. A burst of silk spat toward the cloak-wrapped hourglass in Nyam’s hands.
He twisted away, but the sticky web stuck to the edge of his cloak and pulled…
Nyam cried out in fury as the hourglass was wrenched from his grip. It flew back through the air and slammed hard into the wood of the cabinet, the brass frame buckling with the impact. The artifact landed on the spun softness of the webs covering the floor, and rolled onto its side.
“You fool!” said Elise, as a curling wisp of deep blue smoke drifted from a wide crack in the hourglass. “What have you done?”
More smoke was pouring out—thicker, darker, reeking of old blood and fear. It swirled with red lightning, a storm of cold light and hunger.
A terrible outline began to form, broad and bloated, a vast figure in thick plates of rusted and decaying armor. A horned skull took shape, with a fanged maw that creakingly stretched wide with hideous appetite.
“What is that?” Nyam said, terror striking deep into his bones and rooting him to the spot.
“A soulgorger,” said Elise. “A creature of infinite hunger that will feast on your spirit for an eternity. A thing of the Shadow Isles…”
Nyam made the Sign of the Sun across his heart as a host of smaller forms coalesced around the creature—wretched, half-digested spirits with missing arms, dislocated jaws, gouged-open chests, and scooped-out skulls. Tethers of blood-red light bound them to the giant entity that feasted on them even as it enslaved them.
He felt their pain, their horror at being slowly devoured. But more terrible than that, he felt their awful need to save themselves from torment.
“Mortal meat for a feast,” said the soulgorger, its voice like a blunt saw through bone.

“Thief!” Elise cried, hoping to break the spell of terror that lay upon him. “Thief!”
He didn’t respond, paralyzed at the sight of this unnatural specter, a thing so inimical to life that his mortal mind couldn’t accept its existence.
She felt the brutal rawness of the spirit’s hunger, a voracious, single-minded imperative without the refinement of her own appetites.
It disgusted her.
Elise took hold of the thief’s shoulder, and his head snapped up.
“Ready your sword and fight, or we both die,” she said as the soulgorger took a ponderous step forward, a grotesque grin splitting its butcher’s face. “Now!”
Her tone brooked no disagreement, and the thief unsteadily lifted his blade.
The soulgorger raised a meaty arm, and the enslaved abominations flew at them.
The legs at Elise’s back lashed out like reaping scythes, and the thief slashed with his sword. The spirits recoiled, screeching in pain as the weapons cut through them.
Elise didn’t waste the momentary reprieve.
“Run!” she shouted, turning and bolting for the door. The thief followed, hot on her heels, but the slave spirits of the soulgorger were far swifter than she had expected.
Their claws raked living flesh, and the thief cried out as a spirit sliced his shoulder and hip. Cold blue light poured into him, and he stumbled as more of the spirits closed in, tearing at them with icy talons as they fought, side by side, toward the library doors. Elise gritted her teeth against the freezing numbness spreading from each wound, flowing through her like a soporific poison.
“Up!” shouted Elise, dragging him onward. “Move!”
They tumbled through the doors, and she threw him to the floor before turning back to the library. Thousands more spiders were spilling onto the mezzanine from the levels below, scuttling down the walls, and pushing out between warped floorboards.
Elise slammed the library doors closed and said, “Seal the way, little ones.”
The spiderlings flowed up the wall, furiously spinning webs as they went. Sticky swathes of silk clogged the hair-fine gap between the doors, filled the keyholes, and sealed them shut. Pulsing blue light built around the edges of the frame.
The webs were holding for now, but already they were fraying, the resin-like substance running like melting wax. Faint wisps of ethereal mist seeped through the gaps, along with ghostly hands and suggestions of wailing faces. Elise’s own webbing would make for a much stronger barrier, but spinning it would take time and energy she didn’t have.
She bent down, and a handful of spiders crawled onto her extended palms. As she held them up before her face, she pictured what she needed, and they leapt from her hands, disappearing into cracks in the walls.
“Gratitude,” said the thief, breathless with terror. “You saved me—”
“I didn’t do it for you,” snapped Elise, rising to her full height.
“Then why?”
“Because if a soulgorger feeds, it gets stronger,” she said, striding toward the dining room. “Now get up. The web won’t hold for long.”

Elise threw open the dining room door, moving swiftly past the long table where her husband had betrayed her. She hadn’t set foot in here since that night.
The thief was limping badly now, a pallid, deathly light spreading through his body from where the revenants’ claws had pierced him. He didn’t know it, but he was as good as dead.
Truth be told, he had been doomed the moment he had chosen to rob her.
“I miss the sun,” he said, his eyes already glassing over. “The sand…”
“You’ll never see them again,” said Elise. “Unless that’s what awaits you beyond.”
“Beyond?”
“When you die,” said Elise.
“No, I am just exhausted. Wounded…” he insisted, his voice growing faint. “And cold… I have been hurt worse than this and walked away.”
Elise shook her head, and one of the legs at her shoulders stabbed down into his neck.
A spasm of venom pumped into the thief, and he flinched from the sudden hot rush of it, stumbling back and lifting his sword. The blade wavered in his weakening grip, and Elise felt the heat of the magic wrought in the folds of its ancient metal.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
“I gave you a sliver of venom that will allow you to live just a little longer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The touch of the Shadow Isles is death,” said Elise. “Every second your kind spends in that damned place drains the soul, like blood flowing from a cut that can never heal. That touch is now inside you, leeching your life away with every last breath.”
He steadied himself on the table, and Elise saw snaking lines of black spreading across his face.
“No,” he said. “You were touched by the spirits, too.”
“My body is a thing of magic,” she said, “wrought by the venom of an ancient god.”
“You are immortal?”
Despite everything, Elise laughed with bitter humor.
“No, but it’ll take more than a soulgorger to end me,” she said, before whispering, “I hope…”

Nyam followed Elise into the chamber where he had first entered the shuttered manse. His every step was leaden, every breath a battle. It was all he could do to place one foot in front of the other.
So very cold…
He bumped into a sheet-covered chair, and his misted gaze cleared long enough for him to see the dangling rope he had used to descend from the roof.
Do I have strength enough to climb it?
Elise stood beneath the hole in the ceiling, haloed in a moonbeam and beautiful once more. Her skin shimmered with an internal radiance, lustrous and vibrant, her eyes alight with purpose.
“So… beautiful,” he said, his voice sounding as though it came from so very far away. She turned to face him, and his heart beat a little faster.
“What do they call you?” she asked.
“Nyam,” he said, his mind falling back through his life. “No-Face Nyam…”
Her head cocked to the side. “No-Face? Why do they call you that?”
He pulled his lip back to show her the ruin of his cloven gums and poorly sewn scar. She nodded, and reached out to run her smooth fingertips across his cheek and chin.
“We all have our scars, Nyam,” she said, and he felt a strange, invigorating warmth pass into him. “Now ready that fine sword of yours. You’re going to need it.”
He turned in time to see the doors flung open by the soulgorger’s spectral host. They charged in a howling mass of nightmares, screeching with frantic urgency.
Nyam’s heart flared to life like a hearth fire given fresh fuel, and he roared as he swung his sword. The blade bit deep into the smoky depths of their bodies, and their screams were of pain and sweet release. His own pain was forgotten, the ice in his veins melting before the heat of Elise’s venomous touch. He was, once again, a warrior of the sun, ready to fight and die a hero’s death.
Even as he fought, he watched as Elise leapt and dived among the spirits, her speed and agility incredible. His vision grew dull, bleached of color, but her form seemed to blur between blinks, transforming between sinuous human beauty and the lethal elegance of a deadly spider.
Nyam fought all the harder, hoping she might see how brave he was, and that it might please her.
But the fire in his blood could only last so long, and every clawing blow and deathly touch slowed him. Nyam tried to shout his defiance, but his throat felt as though it were thick with frost. His sword was heavy in his hand, but he would not drop it.
He sank to his knees, feeling colder than he could ever remember.
The mistwraiths encircled him, but they weren’t trying to kill him. He felt icy hands hauling him away. He saw them surround Elise, their ghostly limbs dragging her down with sheer weight of numbers. She hissed and spat at them, but to no avail.
Nyam dug deep, reaching for the fire she had given him, but it was utterly spent.
“Elise…” he whispered.

Hot venom furiously coursed through Elise’s body as the wretched host dragged her and the thief before the soulgorger. Its fire kept the deathly touch of the spirits at bay, but she couldn’t sustain it for long.
Back now in the library, No-Face Nyam knelt before the spirits, alive, but only just, his soul all but drained. Despite that, he gripped his black sword as if he might somehow strike one last blow.
The vast specter towered over Elise, its bestial features twisted in monstrous hunger. It knew she was special, that she was more than just a simple mortal, and it was taking its time, savoring the moment before it drained her of life.
More fool you…
“Bright soul meat,” said the soulgorger. “Rich feast!”
“Too bad you’ll never know,” said Elise.
The soulgorger laughed, a growling, wet sound. “You will be a husk in my wake.”
Elise wagged an admonishing finger. “Have you heard the saying that the man with his head in the clouds never sees the scorpion at his feet? No? Well, I always felt it would be better if you swapped out a scorpion for a spider…”
It stared at her in confusion, then reached down to lift her to its terrible maw.
The clawed hand paused before it could touch her.
The soulgorger turned to see the broken hourglass had been lifted from the floor on a taut length of silk, drawn upward by scores of spiderlings. Sick light still wept from the many cracks in the glass, but with every passing second, it dimmed as hundreds of tiny spiders spun their webs across them like weavers at a loom.
“Thank you, little ones,” said Elise, feeling the soulgorger’s power weaken, its sudden fear driving away all thoughts of feasting.
“Now, Nyam!” she cried. “Strike!”
The thief lifted his head, and with the last of his strength drove his sword into the soulgorger’s belly.
The creature loosed a deafening howl, the sound shaking the walls with its fury. The few panes left in the windows exploded, raining glittering daggers of glass to the floor.
“I won’t go back!” it roared.
“Hush, it’ll be over soon,” said Elise.
The soulgorger reached for her with ghostly talons, but the door of its prison was already slamming shut. Its form stretched, twisting in the air as it was pulled back inside the hourglass, along with its enslaved host. Streamers of cold light spiraled around the specter as the other spirits shrieked in terror, knowing they would bear the full brunt of its imprisoned rage. Books and scrolls spun in a whirlwind as the soulgorger fought the inevitable, but it was no use.
As the last crack in the hourglass was sealed with silken webs, the final bar of its prison was set back in place.
The creature’s roar was abruptly stilled, and an empty silence filled the library. Elise let out a shuddering breath.
Nyam’s sword fell from his hand as he sank to his haunches. His chest heaved in shallow gasps, his eyes wide at their unexpected survival.
Elise stepped over the fallen books to where the hourglass still spun on the web, feeling the terrible hunger within—the horror of the trapped spirits, and the ferocious power pressing at the glass. The pressure on the webs was immense, and her spiderlings’ work wouldn’t hold for much longer.
“I’m going to need a stronger vessel than this,” said Elise.

The caverns beneath the towers were cold, pleasingly hung with cobwebs, their walls glistening with moisture. Elise didn’t like going this far beneath the earth, but darkness was the hallmark of the pale woman she was here to meet, and so had to be endured.
As always, their rendezvous was in secret, their communications made by mystic signs and sigils that led Elise through the labyrinthine pathways.
Given the nature of her business, she wasn’t surprised by the woman’s caution.
The Grand General of Noxus was a vengeful and capricious man, whose schemes within schemes were all but impenetrable. Much better to err on the side of secrecy, and believe he had eyes and ears everywhere.
“You have it?” said a voice from the shadows.
Not one of Elise’s many predatory senses had caught so much as a whisper of the woman’s arrival, but she tried not to show any surprise.
“I do,” she said, holding out a silken bag before her.
Pale hands reached from the darkness to take it, the skin almost transparent, with hair-fine blue veins squirming like worms just below the surface.
“The usual payment will be delivered to your manse,” said the woman, her tones old and refined, an accent from a different age. “They will be young and dashing—foolish and devoted, just as you like them.”
Elise felt the now familiar mix of hungry anticipation and self-loathing, but pushed it aside; introspection was not something she relished.
“Excellent,” she said. “I could use a blush of youth again.”
“You are as lovely now as you ever were,” said the woman, reaching into the silken bag and removing the soulgorger’s glowing prison.
A freshly bleached skull, sealed tight with hardened webs of Elise’s own creation.
Perfect in every way, save for the cleft in the bone of its upper jaw.
The Mountain

Mount Targon is the mightiest peak in Runeterra, a towering mountain of sun-baked rock amid a range of summits unmatched in scale anywhere else in the world. Located far from civilization, Mount Targon is utterly remote and all but impossible to reach save by the most determined seeker.

Many legends cling to Mount Targon, ranging from tales of blazing warriors imbued with incredible powers falling from the sky to battle monsters, to fantastical tales of gods and their celestial abodes crashing down to form the mountain. Some legends even go so far as to claim the Mountain itself is a sleeping titan of antiquity.

Like any place of myth, Mount Targon is a beacon to dreamers, madmen and questors of adventure. Those who survive the arduous journey to the foot of the titanic mountain are welcomed as fellow pilgrims by the scattered, tribal communities that have set up nomadic camps around its base.

Here the weary traveller learns of the tribes, such as the Rakkor, who have endured the harsh climate and unforgiving lands around the mountain for millennia. These people are united in their belief that living in the shadow of these cyclopean structures of monumental scale is a true calling of mysterious powers. The origin and purpose of these structures - if such things ever had one - remain a mystery, for mortals can never truly know the minds of the structures’ lost creators. Many faiths find root around the mountain, but all are beholden to the Solari, a sun-worshipping faith whose tenets dominate the land. The Solari high temple sits on the eastern slope of the mountain, reachable only by crossing swaying rope bridges over abyssal canyons, climbing winding stairs weathered into the living rock and traversing whisper-thin ledges cut upon sheer cliffs carved with ancient symbols and vast effigies.

Some brave souls attempt to scale the impossible mountain, perhaps seeking wisdom or enlightenment, perhaps chasing glory or some soul-deep yearning to see its summit. The dwellers at the peak’s base cheer as these brave souls begin their ascent, knowing the mountain will find the vast majority of them unworthy. And to be judged unworthy by Mount Targon is to die.

The mountain’s sheer flanks and the treacherous conditions of its high slopes make it incredibly difficult to climb. Its rocks are littered with the contorted bodies of those who have made the attempt and failed. The ascent is all but impossible, a grueling test of every facet of a climber’s strength, character, resolve, willpower and determination. Some climbers ascend for weeks or months, others for only a day, for the mountain is inconstant and ever-changing. And even for those hardy few who somehow survive to reach the top, the testing is not over. Some who claw their way to the summit do so only to find it utterly empty, an abandoned expanse of ruins and faded carvings beyond human understanding. For unknowable reasons, the mountain has found the climber’s soul lacking.

For a handful of others, however, the summit is said to be veiled in a cascade of shimmering light, through which wonders and far-distant vistas can be glimpsed, the bewildering, tantalizing visions of a mythical domain beyond. Despite attaining their goal of reaching the summit, most fail this last test, turning away in fear from this inhuman realm. Of the rare few who press on, most never return, while others may reappear minutes, years or even centuries later.

Only one thing is certain - those who return are changed beyond all recognition.
The sky around Mount Targon shimmers with celestial bodies; the sun and moons, but also constellations, planets, fiery comets that streak the darkness, and auspicious arrangements of stars. The people living at the mountain’s base believe these to be aspects of long-vanished stellar beings, creatures powerful and ancient on a scale beyond human comprehension. Some believe the power of these Aspects sometimes come down the mountain within the lambent bodies of those climbers found worthy. Such an occurrence is unimaginably rare and amazing tales of their exploits form around such individuals, who only ever appear once every few generations.
It is incredibly unusual for more than a single Aspect to walk the earth of Runeterra at any given time, so the tales of several Aspects manifesting has spread a pall of fear and uncertainty around the mountain. For what threat might be arising that requires the power of so many powerful beings to fight?
Naafiri

In the pitch black Shuriman night, few sounds are as terrifying as the howls of the dune hound. Those who hear their piercing call on the arid wind know to keep a hand on their sword hilt, and their horse well rested, for the ravenous packs that rove these sands will chase whatever game they can find in their desert.

One pack, in particular, is driven by a hunger that is deeper—and more ancient—than that of any mere beast. It is the hunger of a creature who spent ages eating nothing at all.

For centuries, Naafiri remained in a crypt, her spirit bound to an ancient throwing dagger. Unable to move or speak, the weapon lay inert as her soul pondered the past: Naafiri was powerful, having almost led the Darkin. How easily she could have bested any of them in combat to become their rightful ruler... yet how easily she’d been tricked by that awful Aspect, Myisha, and cursed to embody these inanimate steel blades.

Shame and regret consumed her thoughts. If she could get another chance... If she could only find another host. A new vessel.

All she needed was a hand to grip her blade. Just a touch.

At last, the day came when the doors of her tomb burst open. She sensed the sweet relief of a fresh desert wind—her first in ages—and something else... A human presence.

He has come. My host. My sweet, unwitting vessel, thought the Darkin soul.

But the visitor was aware of her magic. He carefully picked up her dagger with metal tongs and placed it onto a thick, lead-lined cloth. Wrapping the blade tightly, he took great care not to touch it and set off across the desert under the late afternoon sun.

Despair overcame Naafiri as she felt the plodding movements of the man’s horse across the sands. Was she doomed to this form, this waking nightmare of impotence, for eternity?

She felt the steps of the horse quickening as sunset approached and sensed the distant howls of the dune hounds carried by the wind.

This was her opportunity.

Without sound or words, the Darkin called out to the beasts, hoping to bring them to this prey—that he might somehow slip. Just a glancing touch of his hand, and the host would be hers. Then she could use him to fulfill the ambitions she had held for so long, and vanquish her regrets.

The hounds appeared, salivating with teeth bared. Naafiri’s captor clung to the wrapped dagger with one arm, keenly aware of what would happen if it came loose. With his other arm, he drew his sword and attempted to defend himself from the pack.

Jaws snapped at the man and his horse from all sides, tearing at them, devouring them piece by piece until nothing remained.

Naafiri felt the world crash into focus as she became overwhelmed by senses. For the first time in ages, she smelled the dry air, which parched her nostrils. The metallic taste of hot blood still coated her mouth. She could see each of the dogs as if from the eyes of a separate packmate.

Confusion set in as she felt her sense of self crumble away. She had become the dune hounds—not one of them, but the entire pack—her shattered consciousness resonating throughout the body of each dog.

It seemed a cruel irony. She had found not one vessel, but dozens, and none of them were useful in her grand ambitions. She resented the hounds—hated their smell, their fleas, and, most of all, their need for companionship.

But, in time, the Darkin’s bitterness subsided as she began to grasp the true nature of her hosts. Though feral, their collective thoughts formed a wisdom all its own. Separately, the dogs would starve. Together, they were an apex predator, feasting on whatever game they fancied. There were no individuals—the pack was the entity that dominated all.

Naafiri realized this concept was not limited to dune hounds. It applied to fish, ants, and humans. It even applied to Darkin.

She thought again of her past: personal grudges and petty agendas tearing the Darkin asunder, which in turn toppled them from their rightful place as the regnant killers of Runeterra.

She knew how to restore them. Now she just needed to find her siblings and share with them the wisdom of the pack.
The Name of the Blade

Ian St. Martin

There is copper in the air.
The tang of fresh blood rises up to me, my back pressed into the shadows while I study her.
As she kills.
She was driven here, a large chamber, decoratively appointed, two exits, but through wide halls and high arched ceilings it was easy enough for me to follow her, and do it in silence. Her pursuers did not, a charging crash of weapons and armor brought to bear against her. To the uninitiated she appears trapped, and a cornered assassin is a dead one, but I know well that her blades are but one of her weapons, and far from her keenest.
I recognize the hidden patterns of her strikes, thought translating seamlessly into action. The subtle movements masked by grander gestures as she adapts to exploit every weakness presented to her. I know the teachings that inform her violence, because they were taught to me as well. Wisdom passed down to only a handful, forging a family of purpose, if not of blood.
It is her birthright, while for me it was earned in darkened alleyways, and the frothing chokes of slit throats. I see her follow the principles of our teachings, and then I see her break them.
Her target appears, and she allows them to see her before the strike comes. There is flourish to the killing. Noise. Arrogance. Wasted energy. Each choice exposes her more, cracking her armor wider, betraying her lineage. My upper lip constricts, desperate to twitch, but I am stone. Succumbing to such weakness would only carry me further from the Edge.
I have seen such ambition before. As a child in the world beneath the empire, I watched the ambitious rise head and shoulders above their fellows, just high enough for all to see them, standing out from the masses. And then I watched the masses butcher them for it.
I learned the sanctuary of shadow quickly, the shield that silence can be, and never forgetting that has kept me alive. I watch her defy them both, blundering to the precipice of failure. And it would not be the first time. I remember—
—the cold of the forest, the glittering frost on the branch where I perched, watching. Waiting for her to appear.
When she did, she was wreathed in the ashen smell of the battle cooling just beyond our view. It clung to her as surely as her failure. There is always a price for failure. That day, for her, I had been made that price.
I planned it all perfectly. I wouldn’t allow myself anything less. The slope of the ground, the strength and direction of the wind whistling through the trees. Her bearing, her garb, her weapons, and her gait. The small, clean blade held in fingers etched with a thousand tiny scars of imperfection. It all passed through my mind, before I was free to unfold. To strike.
There was no sound when I descended. My blade cut air, was interrupted, air again. Blood trailed behind its path, a sluggish bloom of darkest red uncurled into icy air.
My momentum carried me past her, as I planned. I looked back, my mind calm. What trophy would be proof enough? Her blades? A lock of hair? Her eyes?
I turned and saw her standing. She clutched her left eye, blood squirting between fingers, but she didn’t fall. My stomach tightened. A bead of sweat trickled down my ribs, despite the cold. She was supposed to fall after the strike.
The one strike.
She should not be alive. I told her so. The words did not fell her, so I said them again. I screamed them at her.
She answered with the edges of her blades.
We fought, or rather, she fought. She was a blur of red hair and flashing silver, her cuts and slashes propelled by pain, skill, and rage in equal measure. Anger twisted her features, keeping the wound I gave her from closing.
I flowed around her, cold and colorless against her passion. Three times she came close to opening me to the bone, to emptying my lifeblood upon the frosted earth of the forest floor, but emotion betrayed the blows early enough for me to displace myself. The instinct was there, but she did not plan the engagement, and so I kept my blood within me.
I glimpsed an opening, once, where I could have ended her. She would have fallen, for true this time. Nobody would have known of my mistake, nobody but me.
I saw the opening, but I let it pass me by. After my failed strike I would not try a second, and should I have fallen to her, it was deserved. I was now no different than she was.
She watched me as I put my blade away, and she stopped.
She touched her face again, tracing a wound that would never leave her. Breath feathered out from the cold, angry slashes from her nose as she spoke. Her own failure that brought me here loomed over her, and she was resolved to set it right. To atone for it.
I could not bring myself to stand in her way, not anymore. The hypocrisy would be too great. My duty was to return and face judgment, and see what price I had to pay.
Before turning back toward the battlefield, leaving the way she came, she asked me who I was. She did not ask if her father sent me, that much was clear to her—all but the name of the blade he sent.
I did not have an answer for her. My name had never mattered. I told her so, but saw she would not relent. I thought back, remembering the world under the empire then.
Down there, in those final, blood-soaked days before I left it all behind, they called me Talon.
Blood spreads out across the stones from her target, now her kill. I watch her make quick work of the soldiers who remain to challenge her. I imagine myself in the place of the last of them, seeing the openings he does not, before his head rolls from his shoulders and he joins the dead.
For a handful of seconds she admires her work. She is smiling, the pale scar bisecting her left eye flexing. The smile goes cold—does she sense me?—before she disappears down the corridor like smoke.
I wait a moment, two, and then I allow myself to breathe again. Muscles clamped tight for hours loosen a fraction. Only now, with her gone, do I produce the knife.
My fingers are pebbled with a thousand scars, each a single tiny step on my path toward the Edge, that unattainable perfect state I strive for. I spin the knife in a quick, practiced orbit, then again. And again. The blade is clean, the blood that once graced it on that day long since crumbled away, waiting for the day I might be made the price for her failure again.
I call it Katarina.
Nami

A headstrong young vastaya of the seas, Nami uses her mystical Tidecaller staff to reshape the tides and defend her fellow Marai from danger. The first of her kind to leave the ocean and venture onto dry land, Nami faces the unthinkable with grit, determination, and daring mettle.
In the seas to the west of Mount Targon dwells a tribe of vastaya known as the Marai. Long ago, these mermadic creatures discovered a rift in the depths. The rift bore a horrible, creeping darkness which sought to exterminate all forms of life.
At the center of their village, the Marai placed a glowing rock known as a moonstone, which is said to be infused with the celestial magic of the heavens. Its haunting, ethereal light protects the Marai from the creatures that crawl from the abyss. Every hundred years or so, the moonstone’s light begins to dim. At that moment, the tribe chooses their fiercest warrior and bestows upon them the title of Tidecaller.
The Tidecaller must plunge into the icy darkness of the rift, survive the horrors within and retrieve an abyssal pearl. If successful, the Tidecaller rises to shore where a luminous wanderer from Targon’s peak awaits with a moonstone to trade for the pearl. It is an arduous ritual that holds the fate of many in its illusive hands, but the exchange has kept the creatures of the dark contained. In the past, the Marai had sent troops of their most elite warriors to collect the pearl, but they learned the more forces they sent into the rift, the stronger the monsters became, as if it fed on their energy. While an army would be annihilated by the abominations below, a single scout – armed with a legendary Marai staff capable of controlling the tides – could potentially elude the dangers of the deep long enough to escape with the pearl.
Nami had always wanted to be the Tidecaller, but she was impulsive and young. A fierce fighter, she was known amongst the Marai for her stubborn determination, which often got her in trouble. In Nami’s adolescence, the moonstone once again dimmed for the first time in a century. Nami attempted the trial of the Tidecaller. Due to her impulsiveness, however, the elders chose Rasho, a prudent warrior known for his level head in battle, as their Tidecaller.
Rasho dove into the depths of the abyss. A week passed, then another. An entire month the Marai waited for their Tidecaller’s return, but there was no sign of Rasho. No Tidecaller had ever failed to return.
The elders waited and argued while the moonstone grew faint, but Nami knew SOMEONE had to take up the mantle of Tidecaller soon, or all would be lost.
It might as well be her.
Nami grabbed her mother’s bathystaff and plunged into the abyss. After several days, she returned with the pearl, the fallen Tidecaller’s staff, and a look of quiet horror in her eyes. Though furious at her impertinence, the village elders nonetheless admired Nami’s bravery and officially designated her Tidecaller. Nami ascended to the surface and rode the tide to shore to meet the landwalker.
The stonebearer, however, was nowhere to be found. Instead, an elderly woman waited on the beach.
The woman, whose grandparents bore witness to the last Tidecaller exchange, explained that there was no moonstone. The Aspect of the Moon was the only being who could conjure a moonstone, but she had fled Targon.
Nami was unwilling to accept this. She vowed to find the Aspect and retrieve the moonstone. The lives of her people depended on it.
Using the power of the mystical Tidecaller staff to summon a perpetual pool of moving water beneath her fins, Nami took to land to continue her quest.
Determined, the Tidecaller swam into a brand new world.
First Steps

Nobody believed the girl. Even after they’d clothed her and calmed her down enough to speak in complete sentences, nothing she’d said made any sense.
The villagers had seen their fair share of otherworldly things – living at the foot of Mount Targon made this an inevitability – but the child’s story didn’t add up.
She’d described some sort of otherworldly humanoid who had risen from the sea that bordered their village. It sounded like a wanderer: one of the lost, confused celestial creatures who sometimes ventured from Targon’s summit. No one had ever heard of a celestial appearing from the ocean, though. More likely, the young girl was playing games.
But when a woman with crimson eyes swam into their village, held aloft by a pool of water that ebbed and flowed at her command, the villagers realized it was no game.
“Hello,” the stranger said. “I am Nami. I am a Marai, a creature of the blue. I mean you no harm.”
The villagers stared at her, mouths agape. Perhaps they were taken aback by her appearance. That would make sense, considering how unusual they looked to Nami’s eyes: flesh without scales and two backward arms where fins ought to be.
Though they weren’t much in the way of conversation, Nami did have their attention.
“I seek the Aspect of the Moon, for the Aspect has something my people require. Without it, they, and possibly all the world, will succumb to a hungry and merciless darkness.”
The villagers continued to stare at Nami, slack-jawed and mute. Only a sleepy, four-legged beast went unfazed by the appearance of the mermadic creature in the village, as it carried on pulling mouthfuls of dried grass from a wheeled cart and smacking its slobbery gums.
Nami stood in the silence, tapping her staff awkwardly.
“So, if anybody knows where the Aspect is, that would be, erm.” She sniffed, eager to create any noise to break the endless hush that had fallen over the crowd. “Most helpful. To me.”
It was as if the villagers had been frozen in place it was so quiet. Nami looked around the village and saw small, fluttering lights all around. Anchored to small pillars of wax or large, wooden sticks, the lights indeed seemed to be alive, but not sentient. They fluttered in the breeze and crackled with energy.
“What do you call that?” Nami asked, pointing at the light. “It’s lovely.”
An old man in golden robes stepped forward – the people of the oversky insisted on covering themselves, for reasons Nami couldn’t immediately understand – flanked by two sentinels. From the many layers of draped fabric, Nami deduced he must be some type of elder. Or perhaps he was just cold.
“You seek the moon?” he asked. “Is she your friend, or your foe?”
Nami narrowed her eyes. The man’s lip quivered with silent rage. The moon’s Aspect was clearly important to him – but in what way? Did he worship and wish to protect it, or did he consider it an enemy?
Nami weighed the options. Surely, she thought, no one would be so unwise as to make an enemy of the moon itself. She replied:
“Friend, of cour–”
“–HERETIC!” the elder shouted.
“–Fiend! I said fiend! You misheard me!” Nami shouted, but her pleas went unheard as the sentinels shouted orders. Many of the village’s people grabbed their weapons, dipping their spears into round containers of fluid and sparking them alight.
Nami stared at the tips of the spears now flickering with orange light spirits. Their dance was mesmerizing, but radiated heat. Nami suspected touching one would be incredibly unpleasant.
“You will leave this village at once! You spread FEAR and DECEIT, and we will have none of it!” the elder demanded.
Nami stared at them for a moment, her face hard. This was it – her first test as a landwalker. She knew, that if need be, she could defend herself against everyone in this village.
But that wouldn’t get her what she needed.
“I am scared,” she said.
The elder smiled. Nami did her best to ignore it.
“Not of you, mind. I’ve looked into the hungry, hateful maw of darkness and thought I would never feel joy again. Your spears can’t compare to that,” she said.
“And so, I’m not going to leave. Not while my people are still in danger,” she said. She moved forward and planted her staff in the ground.
She moved with such confidence and fearlessness the villagers were taken aback – physically, in one unfortunate case.
A young villager stumbled backward, his spear of heat skittering out of his hands, landing beneath the cart of dried grass. The dancing heat spirit grew taller. It licked the grass, spreading its own energy to the pile of dry hay. Within moments, the entire cart was ablaze with the hot, volatile energy.
The grazing beast brayed in terror and turned away from the blaze. It kicked its muscular legs in confusion, knocking the cart onto its side, launching the burning grass into the air.
The wisps of heat landed on the village’s thatched roofs and spread rapidly, consuming everything in its path with a voracious appetite.
The villagers scrambled to fetch bucketfuls of water from a nearby well. Nami watched in frightened fascination as they hurled the liquid at the hungry spirits. For a moment, their efforts seemed to beat back the spirits’ rage, transforming the flickering glow into a horrible cloud of hissing air that, unlike the rest of the air in the oversky, seemed to expand with weight and form. The hissing smoke swirled as the spirits drank up the water and danced on along the rooftops, turning the blue night orange.
“More water!” the villagers yelled. “Quickly!”
I can help with that, Nami thought.
Nami raised her Tidecaller staff, her knuckles tight.
Focusing her thoughts, the seawater lapping the village’s shore began to collect and vibrate.
Nami tightened her grip and closed her eyes, pulling back her staff to draw the seawater toward her.
The ocean roared. It stretched itself into the air high above the village, a sheer wall of tidal ferocity hovering at the ready. The people screamed.
Nami thrust her staff forward, pointing its headpiece toward the dancing heat.
“Please move,” she shouted to the villagers.
They did.
The wave crashed forward as if to drown the entire village. Just before hitting the ground, the water twirled and twisted into an enormous, turbulent tentacle. It snaked through the air, sniffing out the ravenous trails of heat and rage.
The tendril of ocean water encircled the angry light, coiling around it like a serpent, constricting and squeezing the brightness in a suffocating collapse. With one last smoky gasp, the spirits fizzled, their glow replaced with the quiet blue of night.
Nami exhaled, loosening her grip on the staff. The tentacle of water lost its shape in an instant, and splashed to the ground to the startled delight of onlookers.
The elder and his sentinels dropped their buckets. They turned to Nami, the rage they’d carried moments before now but a memory. They looked upon their visitor with new eyes.
“Ionia,” the elder said.
“What?”
“The moon, look for her Aspect there – it’s a continent. That way,” he said, pointing out toward the sea in the direction Nami’s staff tugged her.
Of course. The moon and the tide were as brother and sister. Wherever the moon went, the Tidecaller staff would be drawn.
“Oh!” Nami exclaimed, her heart flush with hope. “That is – yes. Thank you. Sorry about the, er...,” she said, waving her hand noncommittally at the drenched, dripping village. “Anyway. Thank you.”
Nami raised her staff and a wave reared up from the shore wrapping her in a cocoon of water and carrying her back toward the ocean. The elder called after her.
“Fire!” he shouted.
“What?” Nami asked.
“The lights on our torches, our spears. It’s called fire. It keeps us safe, but it can be...irrational, sometimes.”
“Fire,” Nami said, smiling. “I like it.”
And with that, the Tidecaller returned to the oceans, headed for parts unknown.
Nasus

Nasus’ brilliance was recognized long before he was chosen to join the ranks of the Ascended. A voracious student, he memorized and critiqued the greatest works of Shuriman history and philosophy before he was ten.
However, his passion was not shared by his younger brother Renekton, who tended to bore quickly, and fight with other local children instead. Nonetheless, the brothers were close, and Nasus kept an eye on Renekton, ensuring he didn’t get into too much trouble.
When he came of age, Nasus was welcomed into the prestigious and exclusive Collegium of the Sun. He had the best teachers in the empire, and developed a keen understanding of military strategy and logistics, eventually becoming the youngest general in history. While a competent soldier, his genius lay not in fighting battles, but in planning them.
A deeply empathetic man, Nasus took his responsibilities seriously, always ensuring his soldiers were well provisioned, paid on time, and treated fairly. He guided the emperor’s mortal armies to countless victories, and was respected by all who served beneath him. Sure enough, his brother Renekton also entered military service, and rose through the ranks as a trusted and capable warrior under Nasus’ command.
But despite his triumphs and accolades, Nasus did not enjoy war. He understood its importance—for now, at least—in the empire’s rapid expansion, yet firmly believed his greatest contribution to Shurima was the knowledge they could gather and preserve in the wake of each conquest. At his urging, all the books, scrolls, and teachings of the cultures they defeated were added to libraries and repositories throughout the empire, to bring wisdom and enlightenment to generations still to come.
After decades of dutiful service, Nasus was cruelly struck by a terrible wasting sickness, and his physician solemnly declared that the general would be dead within a week.
The people of Shurima were bereft, for Nasus was their brightest star and beloved by all. The emperor himself pleaded with Setaka of the Ascended Host for the great man’s deeds to be weighed before the Sun Disc.
After a day and night, Setaka’s emissaries confirmed that Nasus would be blessed with Ascension. He would have to undergo the rituals at once, despite his infirmity.
Renekton, now a warleader in his own right, raced home to be with his brother. He was shocked to find Nasus’ flesh wasted away, his bones fragile as glass. So weak was he that, as Sun Disc’s golden radiance streamed over the dais, Nasus was unable to climb the final steps into its light.
Renekton’s love for his brother was stronger than any sense of self-preservation. He carried the weakly protesting Nasus onto the dais, and would willingly accept oblivion.
However, Renekton was not destroyed as expected. When the light faded, not one but two god-warriors emerged—both brothers had not only survived, but flourished. Nasus stood as a towering, jackal-headed avatar of wisdom and strength, while Renekton was a muscled behemoth in the likeness of a crocodile.
Nasus had been gifted powers far beyond mortal understanding. The greatest boon of his Ascension was the countless lifetimes he could now spend in study and contemplation... though this would also eventually come to be his greatest curse.
But he was more immediately concerned by the increased savagery he saw within Renekton. At the siege of Nashramae, finally bringing the city under Shuriman rule, Nasus learned that his brother had razed the grand library and massacred all who stood against him. This was the closest the brothers ever came to bloodshed, facing one another in the rubble, weapons drawn. Only under Nasus’ stern, disappointed gaze did Renekton’s bloodlust dwindle, and he turned away in shame.
War with the rebel state of Icathia changed many of the Ascended. The horrors they witnessed left them hollow, and quicker to anger. Nasus undertook centuries of solitary study as he tried to comprehend what had happened to his immortal brethren, and what it could mean for the future.
When the Ascension of Emperor Azir went terribly wrong, Nasus and Renekton were both far from the capital, and returned with all haste... but they were too late. Over the bodies of countless Shuriman dead, they fought Xerath—that twisted, malevolent being of pure energy who had betrayed Azir—yet were unable to slay him. Filled with rage, and perhaps seeking to atone for Nashramae, Renekton wrestled Xerath into the Tomb of the Emperors beneath the city, bidding Nasus seal them in.
Nasus refused, desperate to find any other way, but there was none. With a heavy heart, he committed Xerath and his brother to the fathomless darkness for all eternity.
Drained of its power by Xerath’s sorcery, the Sun Disc fell, and every remaining god-warrior felt its loss in their immortal heart. The divine waters flowing from the city’s oasis ran dry, bringing death and famine to all Shurima. For a time, the other Ascended tried to hold the fractured empire together, before their countless rivalries led them to fight among themselves. Withdrawing entirely, Nasus bore a heavy burden of guilt, stalking the empty ruins that were slowly being swallowed by the desert, and lamenting everything that had been lost.
Centuries passed, and Nasus all but forgot his former life and purpose... until the moment when the Tomb of the Emperors was rediscovered by mortals, and its seal broken. He did not know how, but he knew Xerath was free.
Ancient vigor reawakened in Nasus, and yet even he was stunned to see Azir reborn, and the Sun Disc raised once more from the sands. Though Xerath was still a grave threat, Nasus knew the new god-emperor would have great need of guidance and counsel in the years ahead.
And hope stirred within him for the first time in millennia. Did he dare believe he might also be reunited with his beloved brother, Renekton?
Ouroboros

Ryan Verniere

Nasus walked at night, unwilling to face the sun. The boy followed in his wake.
How long had he been there?
Those mortals who caught a glimpse of the monstrous vagabond always ran, all save the boy. Together, they wove a path through the bygone tapestry of Shurima. Self-imposed isolation chipped at Nasus’s consciousness. The desert wind howled around their malnourished frames.
“Nasus, look, above the dune sea,” said the child.
Stars guided the pair’s sojourn across the desiccated expanse. The old jackal no longer wore the armor of the Ascended. The golden monuments lay buried with the past. Now a hermit dressed in tattered fabric, Nasus scratched at his matted fur before slowly raising his head to observe the night sky.
“The Piper,” said Nasus, his voice low and graveled. “The season will change soon.”
Nasus put a hand on the boy’s tiny shoulder and looked down into his sunburnt face. There, he saw the soft lines and curves of Shuriman lineage, worn ragged by travel.
When did it become your place to worry? Soon we will find you a home. Wandering between the ruins of an extinguished empire is no life for a child.
This was the nature of the universe. Brief moments unfolded into the endless cycles of existence. The heady philosophy weighed upon him, but it was more than just another stone in his endless tally of self-imposed guilt. In truth, the boy would inevitably be changed if he was allowed to follow. Remorse darkened Nasus’s brow like a thunderhead. Their companionship sated something deep within the ancient hero.
“We can reach Astrologer’s Tower before dawn. But we’ll have to climb,” said the boy.
****
The tower was close. Nasus pulled himself up the cliff face hand over hand, the climb memorized to such perfection that he took great liberties with each handhold, tempting death. The boy clambered up by his side, his agile form utilizing every nook and cranny offered by the blemished rock.
What would happen to this innocent if I gave in to death? The thought troubled Nasus.
Wisps of fog rolled through the crags of the upper cliffs, each threading the narrow rocks like tiny mountain paths. The boy scurried over the top first. Nasus followed.
In the distance, metal clanged against stone, and voices could be heard through the haze — they spoke in a familiar dialect. Nasus was shaken from his reverie.
The well at Astrologer’s Tower occasionally attracted nomads, but never this close to the equinox. The boy stood perfectly still, his fear palpable.
“Where are the fires?” asked the boy.
A horse’s whinny pierced the night.
“Who goes there?” asked the boy. The words rolled through the darkness.
A lantern sparked to life, illuminating a band of riders. Mercenaries. Raiders.
The jackal’s eyes snapped wide.
He saw seven of them. Their curved blades remained sheathed, but the look in their eyes spoke of martial training and guile.
“Where is the caretaker?” asked Nasus.
“He and his wife are asleep. The cool evening prompted them to retire early,” replied one of the riders.
“Old jackal, my name is Malouf,” said another rider. “We have been sent by the Emperor.”
Nasus stepped forward, betraying the briefest hint of anger.
“Does he seek acknowledgement? Then let me give it. There is no emperor in this fallen age,” said Nasus.
The boy stepped forward defiantly. The dark messengers backed away from the lantern. Long shadows obscured defensive stances.
“Deliver your message and leave,” said the child.
Malouf dismounted and stepped forward. He reached a calloused hand into the folds of his shirt and produced a dark amulet bound to a thick, black chain. The geometry of the metal sparked recollections of magic and destruction in Nasus’s mind.
“Emperor Xerath sends offerings. We are to be your servants. He welcomes you to his new capital at Nerimazeth.”
The mercenary’s words fell on Nasus like a hammer on glass.
The boy promptly knelt and snatched up a weighty rock.
“Die!” cried the boy.
“Take him!” said Malouf.
With a heave, the boy hurled the rock through the air, its perfect arc threatening to shatter mercenary bone on impact.
“Renekton, no!” roared Nasus.
The riders abandoned their half-hearted deception. Nasus knew then that the caretaker and his wife were dead. Xerath’s greeting would come in the form of cold steel. Truth began to eclipse illusion.
Nasus reached for the boy. The child tore into shadows of memory that dissipated across the starlit ground.
“Goodbye, brother,” whispered Nasus.
Xerath’s emissaries fanned out, their horses bucking and snorting. The Ascended was flanked on three sides. Malouf did not hesitate, drawing his blade and piercing Nasus’s side with it. Pain rippled through the ancient curator’s body. The rider attempted to withdraw his weapon, but it wouldn’t budge. A clawed hand gripped the blade, keeping it agonizingly buried within Ascended flesh.
“You should have left me to my ghosts,” said Nasus.
Nasus tore Malouf’s sword from his hand, shattering fingers and tearing ligaments.
The demigod pounced on his attacker. Malouf’s body cracked under the jackal’s enormous weight.
Nasus leapt to the next rider, pulling him from his saddle; two strikes ruptured organs and stole the wind from his lungs. His broken form spun off into the sand, a ruined mass of agony. His horse reared and fled into the desert.
“He’s mad!” said one of the riders.
“Not any longer,” said Nasus, approaching the mercenary leader.
A strange fragrance filled the air. Dead flowers spinning on lavender colored threads followed in his wake. Malouf twisted on the ground, the broken fingers of his right hand withered, skin sagging like wet parchment. The barrel of his chest caved in on itself like a rotting spine fruit.
White-knuckled panic overtook the remaining mercenaries. They struggled to keep their mounts under control, if only to retreat. Malouf’s body lay abandoned in the sand.
Nasus turned east toward the ruins of Nerimazeth.
“Tell your ‘emperor’ his cycle nears its end.”
Nautilus

To understand the legend of Nautilus, one must first know the man—for even the tallest of tavern tales agree, he was indeed a man.
Though the waves have washed away the name he was born with, most remember Nautilus as no mere sailor, but as a salvage diver. Just beyond the southernmost reach of the Blue Flame Isles lies a graveyard of ships, rumored lost while searching for a blessed land, looking to trade wealth for immortality. On a fair day, their glittering holds beckon from beneath the surface. Many crews sought divers to collect the lost fortune, and none could match the skill of the quick-sinking hulk of solid muscle that was Nautilus.
With lungs that could steal the air from a galleon’s sails, Nautilus preferred to freedive. Always bringing up plenty of gold or jewels for the crew, the man demanded no special wages—he asked only that the captain toss a coin overboard as they set out, honoring and appeasing the vast ocean. A sailor’s superstition to be sure, but many a sea-fearing crew made such offerings to ensure a safe return.
Years of salvage depleted the easy treasure, each haul becoming less and less, until one day Nautilus’s crew learned that their ship and working papers had been bought out from under them.
The dawn was scarlet the morning the new captain came aboard. Hailing from a foreign port, he brought with him a giant suit of brass and iron. He zeroed in on Nautilus; indeed, he had purchased the command because of Nautilus. It was clear the captain was obsessed with a specific wreck, one shrouded in darkness even on a fair day. The diving armor could withstand the pressures of the ocean floor far longer than any man, long enough to collect what was hidden in the abnormal murk.
The crew agreed working was better than starving, and Nautilus found himself being bolted into the suit, the wooden deck groaning under the load. Panic rose in his throat when he realized that they had nothing to pay the tithe. The foreign captain laughed as Nautilus was lowered into the water. He assured the crew that whatever the Bearded Lady was protecting would make them all rich beyond their wildest dreams. When Nautilus returned to the surface, they would make their silly sacrifice.
As Nautilus sank, the light above dimmed, and all grew quiet, the man’s own breath the only sound echoing in the iron suit. Then something reached out from the depths. He was being pulled down, and for the first time Nautilus felt liquid fear wrap itself around his heart. It was not treasure his captain sought, but some slumbering, eldritch power.
Nautilus grabbed the anchor chain, his last connection to the world above, and hauled himself up even as the thing below sought to drag him down. But the weight was too much. Just as his giant metal fingers were about to breach the surface, the chain snapped. Nautilus screamed within the suit, but none could hear him. He tumbled back into the inky maelstrom, clutching the sinking anchor in desperation. Dark tendrils enveloped him, and he could only watch as the dimming outline of his ship faded away. Then everything went black.
When Nautilus awoke on the ocean floor, he was something… different. The darkness could no longer hurt him. The great metal suit had become a seamless shell around him, concealing the bond that the primordial power had made with his spirit. Trapped in the sunless depths, he could remember only one thing—the new captain’s broken promise.
Nautilus vowed, there and then, that all would pay the ocean’s tithe. He would see to it himself.
Driven ever forward by this thought, he trudged toward the shore. But by the time he reached Bilgewater, years had passed, and he could find no traces of his captain or crew. There was no life to which he could return, no revenge he could take. Instead he returned to the sea, allowing his anger to surface on the greedy, gutting their ships with his mighty anchor.
Sometimes, in the tumble of waves, distant memories of who he was push up above the waterline… but always the man who is Nautilus stays drowned just below the surface.
The Ophidian

Anthony Reynolds

No, no, that seat’s not taken. Pull up a chair, and sink a few, friend... Though that might be a poor turn o’ phrase, given my history. Heh.
Aye, I’ve seen a few shipwrecks. Been in one me self, as it goes, back when I was young like you. Her name was the Ophidian, that ship, pulled down beneath the Jagged Straits. I was the only survivor too, mind. Maybe you buys me a drink, and I’ll tell ye about it.
This? No, this coin’s not for spending, friend. That’s my lucky Kraken, for to pay the Tithe.
The Tithe. Ye know the Tithe. Everyone knows about the Tithe. “Pay the Tithe, or face the ocean’s wrath.”
Oh, by the Bearded Lady... Then you never heard o’ Nautilus, either? The Titan of the Depths?
Barkeep! Pour us a round, barkeep, there’s a good lass. This is a tale that needs an ale, as they say... and my friend here’s buyin’.
Ahh, that’s the good stuff, that is.
‘Twas almost thirty years back, now, returning from a hunt. I was a harpooner, finest shot in the Slaughter Fleets. We’d caught ourselves an axe-fin leviathanaye, one o’ them big, mean boggersand we was haulin’ the beast back to port. It were just before dawn. Bilgewater’s city lights flickered in the distance, beckonin’ us in. There were razorfish and berserker sharks following close by, ‘cos the axe-fin was oozing into the water, see.
And our captain... Well, none of us much cared for him. Untrustworthy sort. He swears blind he paid the Tithe ‘afore we left. “A single gold Kraken,” he said, “for ‘tis all I have to give.”
But none of us seen him throw it over the side, now did we. So, naturally we was suspicious, ‘cos we knew he was a tight-fisted old wharf rat. But on we sailed anyway.
And that was when the Titan hit us.
Without warning, this bloody great anchor comes at us from below. Smashed clean through the keel, up through the main deck. Caught us tight, and started pullin’ us down... Oh, it was chaos, friend. Sailors thrown overboard. The waters churnin’, scavengers feedin’. I grabs the captain, screamin’ at him, “You’re a liar! This is the Lady’s punishment for those as don’t pay!”
The ship was going down fast. But then the planking gave way, didn’ it, and the anchor slid back into the depths. If it had ended then, more of us might’ve got away.
But it weren’t over. Nautilus weren’t done wi’ us yet.
The ship tipped to starboard, right-sudden. It was the weight of the Titan himself, hauling up onto the deck. Perhaps once it’d been a man, but it weren’t no man I saw that night, risin’ from the waves. I has our captain by the throat. “This is your doing!” I roared, as I chokes the bastard, his eyes wide. He can see Nautilus is comin’ for us...
So I shoves the captain away, down the slanted deck, and this thing catches him in one hand, if you can believe it! It was so big, the fingers closed completely around ‘is bodyand the captain weren’t a small man by any stretch.
“There’s your Tithe!” I yells, and jumped overboard.
I dunno how long I was in the water. Must’ve only been seconds, but it felt like an age. But the sea scavengers didn’t get me, Mother Serpent be praised. Pulled myself up onto one of them stone pinnacles, out there in the Straits, an’ I watched the Ophidian sink.
Nautilus still held the captain, squirmin’ and wrigglin’ like a stuck worm, but there were no escapin’ that grasp. The Titan was just standing there, motionless as a statue. I watched them go down, down into the darkness.
Why spare me? Don’t rightly know. Perhaps I was the only one to make an offering. Or maybe Nautilus wanted someone left alive, to tell the tale. But on the darkest Bilgewater nights, when the murder-fogs roll in, ye might hear ‘im wading out from the shallows, slow and steady like, draggin’ that accursed anchor in his wake...
Want my advice, friend? Keep a coin in your pocket, and always pay the Tithe. And don’t trust no captain who says he’s done it, ‘less you seen it for yourself.
After all, ye might not be so lucky as me.
Neeko

Neeko was born on a remote and largely unknown island, far to the east, where the last members of an ancient vastayan tribe remained isolated from the rest of the world. They were called the Oovi-Kat, and could trace their lineage generation by generation back to the legendary Vastayashai’rei—the ancestors of all vastaya.
The Oovi-Kat were peaceful beings, of unrivaled potential. Their harmonious society blended seamlessly with the spirit realm, so that their sho’ma—their spiritual essence—could intermingle with other beings through mere proximity, and even help them mimic other physical forms. No secrets existed between the Oovi-Kat, but few were as curious, resilient, or energetic as young Neeko.
She developed a fondness for games, hiding trinkets and thoughts to see if others could find them. Her inquisitive nature knew no bounds, and she was pure and innocent in her charmed existence.
But it was not to last. Cataclysm loomed on the horizon.
Thanks to the quick thinking and self-sacrifice of the Oovi-Kat elders, Neeko escaped the death of her homeland. She clumsily took the form of a bird, and fled the smoldering destruction, feeling the screams of her people fading into the ethereal gulf between realms.
Days later, desperate and exhausted, Neeko plummeted into the sea. She clung to driftwood, entirely at the mercy of the currents, until an odd silhouette rose into view. She could hear voices carrying over the waves, and so she swam toward the strange structure.
With the last of her strength, she crept aboard what turned out to be a mercantile vessel destined for Harelport. Neeko rested where she could, calling out into the spirit realm for her lost tribe. She felt only scattered, sad echoes in response, and images of towering, dead trees that lay somewhere over a fragile horizon…
When Neeko emerged from the ship into the city, it was a strange and unfamiliar new world. All her senses tingled. Many a creature, even another Oovi-Kat, might be afraid in that situation—but not Neeko. The society bustled with unique personalities, strangers with a vast array of motives and shapes. This was a place of countless stories and experiences, and it entranced her completely.
Before she could get far, she was spotted by a vastayan sailor named Krete. Neeko could not understand all his words, but he demanded to know which tribe she belonged to. Neeko reached out with her sho’ma, mimicking his face and expression to make her peaceful intentions understood, but Krete did not seem to like this at all. Overwhelmed by his darkening thoughts, Neeko fled into the crowd, altering her shape many times until she escaped.
Surrounded by lush, tropical greenery in the hinterlands beyond Harelport, Neeko grappled with her recent experiences. She simply could not understand how anyone might rely solely on words as their singular form of communication. It seemed so… limiting?
Seeking solace, she took on the shape of the sleek jungle cats she encountered among the trees, and tried to run with them. Neeko loved being fast and agile, and their bright, keen eyes reminded her of home—until, quite unexpectedly, the leader transformed into a beautiful, strong, dark-haired woman. After a tense standoff, she introduced herself as Nidalee, and reluctantly accepted Neeko into the group.
Neeko hesitated to entrust the truths of the Oovi-Kat to others, but she felt a deep kinship with Nidalee, because she suspected this bestial huntress might share some forgotten connection with the vastayan race. Their friendship blossomed, and for many months they roamed the wilds together.
But the towns and cities, with all their flaws, still called to Neeko. Her ancestors came to her in dreams, showing her the pale branches of those dead trees, over and over. The trees needed color, to bloom again—of that much, Neeko was certain. She asked her friend to join her on this new journey, but Nidalee could not be persuaded.
Crestfallen, but determined, Neeko set out alone.
Her old life among the Oovi-Kat may be lost forever, but Neeko envisions a magical future—a larger tribe of like-hearted vastaya, yordles, humans, and whatever other creatures might share her dream. As far as she is concerned, everyone has the potential to find a place in her new tribe. She has pledged to seek these souls out, to befriend them, and defend their sho’ma with her life.
To know Neeko is to love Neeko, and to love Neeko is to be Neeko.
The Monster of Kalduga Outpost

Matt Dunn

Neeko was familiar with the shapes of humans, and while they had their quirks—socks for instance… why?—they never struck her as particularly strange. Not until the outpost at Kalduga.
The ugly compound was carved into the cliffs near the outskirts of the jungle by a tribe of humans called “Noxians”. They had inhabited the outpost for a while, it seemed, based on how irritable yet comfortable they seemed performing their daily routines.
Neeko wondered… were they friendly? Did they enjoy cheese breads? There were other questions, too, but these were at the top of her mind when she decided to see for herself.
Under the cover of night, she slinked in and out of shadows until she reached the gate. A single guard stood watch. This was not a problem at all. Neeko loved disguises! Adopting another entity’s shape meant sharing their sho’ma—a complex web of emotions and recent memories.
She reached out with her own sho’ma, feeling for the outer boundary of the guard’s aura, which extended far beyond her body. When her spirit met the guard’s, a name floated to the surface of Neeko’s mind: Ewaii. From across the desert. A flavor-color came next. Burnt-orange bitterness over her lost home still graced Ewaii’s mind, and the blue-salt resentment about her station: the backwater-nowhere outpost with no strategic value, but try telling the commander that. This Ewaii had dark skin and beautiful oval eyes. She was strong, but few took her seriously since she was a “mud-heel”—a simple soldier. Fascinated, Neeko shed her natural, chameleon-like appearance for Ewaii’s shape.
Neeko’s skin swirled as her body morphed. It tickled her, but dizzied Ewaii. She used the guard’s disorientation to slip beyond the gates and into the quiet corridors of the outpost, firmly incognito.
“Ewaii!” a shrill voice cried. “Get back to your post!” The rotund man, his belly poking out from under his breastplate, seemed startled. In the crook of his elbow were several toasted taffa roots and two loaves of crusty bread.
“I heard noises.” Neeko put on her best impression of Ewaii’s voice.
“It’s probably bloody furtails. Better hunt them down. Then we can enjoy some furtail pie.”
“Not furtails!” Neeko did not want to eat those curious, funny little creatures.
“Are you saying there’s an intruder?” The man’s eyes widened.
Neeko did not know the meaning of this word. So she shrugged and nodded yes. This gesture, she figured, could surely lead to little trouble.
“Wilderfolk,” he said. “Could be a scouting party. What are you doing here? Raise the alarm!”
“Where is… alarm?”
“Have you lost your brain, Ewaii? I’ll do it. See the physician when this is over.”
With that, the heavy man scurried off, cramming his snacks into his pocket. But before he was gone, Neeko mingled her spirit’s motes with his, borrowing his shape, shedding Ewaii for this, this… Yubbers?
“Yubbers!” Neeko-as-Yubbers said out loud. That was a fun name to say. Yubbers did not like to be near the frontlines of war, so Kalduga was a quiet and welcome assignment. His strength was in corresponding with the empire. He was now scared—a rubbery, ashy yellow—at the thought of an attack by the wilderfolk. Neeko liked this man, but not the feeling of the masculine sho’ma. Too… not Neeko. Most importantly, she felt Yubbers’ shock of running into another soldier after he had raided the larder. Food was nearby.
As she headed down a hallway filled with doors, behind one of which must be the larder, Neeko heard a commotion out in the main yard. Loud voices shouting. She dashed to the nearest window and peered outside. Real-Yubbers was shouting at Real-Ewaii. Uh-oh.
BOOO-ONG! BOOOOOOOO-ONG! The sound of very loud bells startled Neeko-as-Yubbers.
Every door in the hallway burst open. Several half-dressed Noxians charged out, their eyes blinking away sleep. She tried to avoid the stampede, but was swept along, away from the larder. Neeko-as-Yubbers found herself pushed out into the yard with about a dozen armed soldiers.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Ewaii’s face was stressed and defiant. “I’ve been standing guard all night long!”
“You were in the barracks,” said Yubbers, flanked by two soldiers. “Take this deserter to the brig.” He pointed to Ewaii.
Then it happened. Yubbers saw Neeko-as-Yubbers.
Before Yubbers and other soldiers deduced whether their double vision was the byproduct of the late hour or not, Neeko disappeared into the fog of another person.
This time, it was a warrior named Seda. She was a killing machine, so vicious! Spicy pink! Seda had rushed to the yard so fast she neglected boots. This was fine by Seda—and Neeko—as both liked going barefoot. It reminded Seda of the sun-scorched province where she was born. Agile. Silent…
Just as Neeko was thinking she could enjoy being Seda, Real-Seda leapt at her doppelganger.
The two Sedas wrestled in a ruckus of soldiers, fighting and pulling at each other. When the commotion settled, only one Seda remained. Of course, it was the real Seda, but Yubbers had her placed in chains. Seda pointed out that two Yubbers had been seen and he, too, was placed in chains. Then Ewaii.
This continued for a while. Chains went on. Chains came off. Nobody was sure who was who, and who was not who, and who was lying about not being who they were when they were really someone else. Even the outpost commander seemed uncertain what the source of all the trouble was, and Neeko didn’t take his shape at all! This fact came to light and only fueled more suspicion. Was the commander secretly harboring some monster?
The one thought that everyone shared, Neeko had learned from being everyone, was that no one liked the commander. He was too secretive, and weak-willed. He had lost an important battle and been demoted to, as Ewaii put it, this “backwater-nowhere outpost with no strategic value.” Everyone turned on the commander, and he was the first to die.
The mess only got messier from there. Soldiers screamed and fought and pointed blame. Some believed they were ensorcelled by a soul-eating demon. One veteran ranger told a harrowing tale of a jungle plant-monster that replaced people with mindless copies of themselves, with vines for veins.
Amidst accusations, elaborate quizzes of miniscule facts from times shared in training, and shouts of “Traitor!” Neeko tried to calm the troops.
“What if,” Neeko-as-a-cook-named-Thomsy said, “it is no monster? It is someone who is nice, lost, and a little scared, but just wants to make friends and eat cheese breads and be happy? Yes?”
Everyone in the Kalduga outpost knew at once this was the imposter. Swords came out and the stabbing began. By dawn, only four soldiers remained alive. They stared hollow-eyed at the blood pooled under the commander’s dead body, and at each other. Neeko watched them from the safety of the larder.
“The commander did not want us to abandon the outpost,” Seda said. She knelt down by the body and blessed him with a gesture of her people. “Exile or execution is our future.”
A moment of solemn silence passed through like a haunted, foul wind, despite the floral notes of taffa flowers blooming somewhere nearby.
Yubbers straightened up. “We’ll send a messenger bat to command. ‘The wilderfolk have overrun Kalduga. We do not expect to survive, but we will die for the glory of Noxus.’ Then we abandon the outpost. Leave the bodies where they lay. Seda, you go north. Gurnek will go east. Ewaii west. I’ll head south. If any one crosses paths with another, it is a duel to the death, for one of you—”
Ewaii shot a wary glance at Yubbers. “Or you.”
“—is the beast in disguise.”
The soldiers left an hour later. They did not look back at their abandoned post, or each other, as they went their separate ways, unsure of who was really who.
Humans were indeed strange creatures, Neeko thought.
Nidalee

Far, far from the harsh deserts of the Great Sai, over savanna plains and mountain steppes, lie the great jungles on the border of Ixtal and Shurima. Swathed in mystery, they are home to wild, fantastical beasts, and dense forests blooming with life. But while there is overwhelming beauty to be found there, danger and death lurk nearby in equal measure.

No one knows how Nidalee—in the form of a cub—came to be alone in the heart of the jungle, but it was her cries echoing through the trees that captured the attention of the jungle's fiercest cats: the pakaa.

A mother, roaming with her cubs, approached Nidalee. Perhaps it was her scent, or a mother’s intuition, that led the great cat to accept this strange kit without hesitation, half-leading, half-dragging her back to their den.

Nidalee was raised in the company of the pakaa, who treated her as one of their own—a creature of the jungle. She grew up playing alongside the other cubs, learning to hunt with tooth and claw and to stalk the jungles for her prey. She grew into her role as a member of the pack and as a capable huntress.

Even so, at times Nidalee began to lose control of her own body. Without warning, her paws would change to strange hairless hands and feet, her sharp fangs to blunted teeth. Occasionally she would stumble from the den, delirious with fever, her body caught in a state of half-transformation as she followed the hazy silhouettes of two strange figures—they whispered after her, their voices jumbled but sweet. They brought Nidalee a sense of comfort and warmth, even though her feline family had taught her to be wary of outsiders.

And with good cause.

It was at the height of the summer rains when she first encountered the Kiilash. These vastayan hunters ranged into the forests every season in search of prestigious kills and trophies to show their prowess. Nidalee's mother tried to chase them away, but fell, wounded by their blades and spears.

But before the Kiilash could finish the aging wildcat, Nidalee lunged from the undergrowth, howling with grief and rage. As she tore into them with razor sharp claws and fangs, they rounded on her with even stronger weapons.

But something had changed.

She felt the spirit of another heritage, long forgotten, rise up within her. Transforming from pakaa to something resembling a human, she grabbed a hunter's lunging weapons with cat-like reflexes and nimble fingers and turned it upon her enemies. The Kiilash growled and hissed at this sight, and to her surprise Nidalee found she understood some of their speech.

They cursed her, invoking the name of their Vastayashai'rei ancestors as they retreated from the fight, empty-handed.

Hurling the spear aside, Nidalee held her dying mother close. Her siblings approached, wary of her new form but comforted by her familiar scent. With the passing of their mother they came to accept this shapechanger as their new leader—from that day forth, she vowed to defend her adopted home against any who would seek to plunder it.

Over time, she learned to better control her powers, eventually shifting between both forms with ease. She also became more adept with her new form, learning to take advantage of her surroundings while building traps and weapons unknown to the pakaa, crafting healing salves from honeyfruit, and utilizing seeds and flowers to protect and illuminate her territory. And in the back of her mind, she wondered whether she was the only one of the pakaa who could change their shape.

Perhaps it was a yearning to find others of her kind that led her to the chameleon-like wanderer Neeko, and the two became inseparable for a time. Nidalee delighted in mentoring her inquisitive new companion, and they reveled in exploring the jungle's numerous wonders together, before Neeko eventually departed to follow her own destiny beyond Shurima's shores.

Even now, the dense forests remain the last truly untamed wilderness in the known world, and something of an enigma even to Nidalee. Still, in rare, quiet moments, the huntress finds herself dwelling on her own origins—and her encounter with the Kiilash—and whether she will learn the truth behind any of it…
Human Blood

Meaghan Bowe

A loud crack. The stench of grease, smoke, and powder.
These sounds and smells did not belong to the forest.
The huntress bounded towards the sound, spear at the ready. She followed the acrid scent through the maze of trunks and thick underbrush.
Before long, she came upon a familiar place—a small clearing by an embankment. This was a quiet place teeming with life, split by a shallow stream of fast-running water. The fish were so plentiful, even a cub could catch them with clumsy paws. The calm air was rent by the howls of something, or someone, in great pain.
Nidalee chose a spot behind a thick tree at the stream’s edge, careful to conceal her spear behind its trunk. Just across the river knelt a vastayan male with reptilian features. He clutched at his shoulder, and though he moaned in pain, his eyes were wild with rage. The huntress saw his long tail was caught in a trap. Huge metal teeth had bitten into his scaly flesh.
A human holding a long, ugly weapon loomed over the vastaya. Nidalee stared at the dead, shining wood wrapped around the metal barrel. She had seen these things before. They fired lethal seeds that could easily pierce a target, and these seeds traveled too fast for her eyes to follow.
She stepped out from behind the tree, purposefully crunching dead leaves underfoot. The man turned his head in her direction, but kept his weapon aimed at the wounded vastaya. He could not see her spear.
“My, my. What have we here?” The human looked her up and down, his eyes hungry. “Are you lost, love?”
The huntress knew how to handle his kind. Humans were so often disarmed by her appearance—their eyes saw only the softness of her features. She remained expressionless, carefully gauging the distance between them and adjusting her grip on the spear. Her eyes rested on the weapon in his hands.
He smirked at the wild woman, taking her stillness for fear. “Never seen one of these before? Come have a look. I won’t hurt you,” the man coaxed. He turned away from his prey to hold out his weapon.
As soon as it was pointed away from the vastaya, Nidalee whirled out from behind the tree. She hurled her spear at the human’s torso and dove across the river, enveloping herself in a fierce, feral magic. In a flash, her features shifted—nails hardened into harsh points, skin sprouted flaxen fur, and bones bent into a slender shape.
The man dodged too slowly. The spear cut through the flesh of his upper arm and knocked him onto his back. Nidalee landed on top of him in the lithe form of a cougar, each sharp claw piercing through his thin clothing. She pressed her front paw down on his fresh wound, earning a howl of pain.
The cougar crouched over the man, opening her jaws wide and bringing her sharp teeth against his throat. The human shrieked as Nidalee bit slowly into his neck, just deep enough to draw blood, but not to kill. After a few moments, she released the man’s throat and brought her face into his view, baring her bloodied teeth at him.
Another gust of magic swirled around her, and again she took the form of a woman, her sharp teeth somehow no less menacing. Still crouched over him, she looked down at him through bright, emerald eyes.
“You will leave, or you will die. Understand?”
The huntress did not wait for an answer. She tore a piece of fabric from the man’s shirt, and approached the wounded vastaya. Within seconds, she disarmed the trap around his tail. The moment he was freed, he lunged for the human.
Nidalee grabbed the vastaya’s arm, holding him back. The man, who had been frozen in fear, saw his chance to flee, and hurriedly crawled from sight.
The reptilian wrested his arm from Nidalee’s grip, sputtering and cursing in a language she did not recognize. Then, in a familiar tongue, he demanded, “Why did you let it go?”
Nidalee pointed to where the human had fled, indicating spots of bright red blood. “We will follow him. If there are others, he will lead us to them. If they do not leave, they will die together.”
The vastaya did not look satisfied, but said nothing. Nidalee knelt by the river and washed the cloth she had torn from the man.
“You called it… human.” He spoke with a strange lisp. His mouth was very wide, and his forked tongue flicked out between words.
Nidalee wrapped the damp, clean fabric around his shoulder. “Yes.”
“You are not human?”
“No. I am like you.”
“There is no vastaya like you. You are human.”
Nidalee pulled the fabric tightly around his shoulder, causing him to hiss in pain. She managed to conceal her smile by using her teeth to secure the knot.
“I am called Nidalee. You?”
“Kuulcan.”
“Kuulcan. Tonight, my family hunts. You will join us.”
The vastaya stretched his arm, testing the bandage. It was tight, but did not hinder his movement. He looked up at the huntress, who stood above him with her arms crossed.
Kuulcan nodded.

Percy sat by the fire, his face flushed a deep red—partly because of the adrenaline, partly because of the beer, but mostly because of the embarrassment. He had told his three companions of the wild woman, and they hadn’t stopped laughing. One of them took it upon himself to prance about the fire with his guitar and sing a lewd prayer to the “Queen of the Jungle” while the other two guffawed and danced.
“Keep it down, you damned idiots,” he pleaded, earning an even louder roar of laughter. “She might hear us.”
Tired of the taunting and full of far too much ale, Percy snuck away from his fellow trappers to answer the call of nature. The wound still hurt something fierce, and no amount of drinking could chase away the feeling of her teeth on his throat.
As he refastened his belt, he realized the singing and laughing had stopped. The wind itself had stopped blowing. He could hear no rustling leaves or swaying branches.
Beyond the dim light of their low fire, their camp was surrounded by total darkness. Far ahead past the edge of the camp, something glinted in the shadows. Percy rubbed his eyes and squinted, struggling to see anything in the dark.
All at once, the undergrowth began to heave and creak. The leaves of every fern and tree shook with movement. Countless pairs of eyes opened before him in the darkness, and a chorus of growls and feline hisses deafened him.
Percy recognized the emerald eyes nearest to him. There was no trace of humanity left in them now. The eyes blinked and disappeared, and a voice snarled in his ear.
“You were warned.”
He did not manage to scream before the sharp teeth closed around his throat—and this time they did not stop when they drew blood.
Nilah

A confident and joyful woman who always wears an eerie smile, Nilah’s sudden arrival in Bilgewater has sent the city into an uproar. Her duels with rampaging sea serpents defy the limits of human ability: Racing across the surface of the open ocean with a whip-blade formed from glittering, prismatic water, she scales the great beasts before dramatically slaying them, pausing only to thank her “worthy enemies” for their efforts. Any threat taller than a house is guaranteed to draw her into combat, and the deadlier and physically larger that threat is, the more determined she becomes to challenge and destroy it.

Her strength and origins are shrouded in mystery. Yet the truth, known only to Nilah, is that she once had a different name and lived a very different life.

The precocious child of a large Kathkani family, the girl who would become Nilah was not a warrior at all—rather, she was a lanky bookworm with an interest in myths and legends. Kathkan had known relative peace since its neighbor Camavor’s collapse almost a thousand years prior, and had no further need for great warriors or storied heroes. Or, at least, that’s what Nilah believed.

Wishing the age of heroes had never ended, she collected and obsessed over colorful tales of old—epics of great beasts and shining warriors who clashed beneath the eyes of the gods, back when the world was young and humanity’s enemies were a thousandfold. She read of the mad king Viego and his tragic fall, the genesis of the first dragons, and the foundation of the universe in the Kathkan tradition. Nilah memorized each in turn, knowing in her heart that their color and magic were more than simple fiction.

One story, in particular, was her favorite: The Cycle of Ashlesh.

It spoke of the fantastical Lord of Joy, Ashlesh: A many-limbed beast who menaced the world along with its nine ferocious siblings. Hungering for primal joy, Ashlesh attempted to consume the realm of the gods—but the gods struck the monster down, trapping it deep below the earth in an endless, shimmering lake within the seventh layer of the underworld. There it would be guarded by a mythical order of heroes.

An order of heroes that, after unraveling the story’s many riddles, Nilah realized was beneath her very feet in the heart of the Kathkani capital. Overcome with excitement, she struck out to find this hidden order—to learn its secrets and perhaps even stand among the heroes as an equal...

And then she was gone. All knowledge of the girl she was—her face, her voice, her true name—was erased from living memory. Records curled and evaporated, writing vanished from walls and texts, and words failed on the tongues of her friends and family. It was as though Nilah had never been born at all.

The woman who resurfaced ten years later was a stranger to her homeland, unbound from the world she knew, yet possessed of a strange smile and an unending, ceaseless joy. Whatever happened to her during her long absence, she would not say. Perhaps she met the mythical order after all, and they trained her in the arts of magic and war. Perhaps she stood face to face with the primordial demon Ashlesh, battling it in the apocryphal darkness for a decade before finally emerging triumphant. Perhaps this wasn’t the girl at all, but a pretender wearing her flesh... Or maybe the truth was somewhere in between. Whoever or whatever she was, she began calling herself “Nilah,” the name of the legendary river of fate.

And then her work began.

Possessed of wiry, acrobatic strength, and wielding a liquid blade of incalculable might, she embarked on a conquest of the greatest threats of ancient myth: Grandmother Viper, the invincible progenitor of all Camavoran dragons; Imago, demon of change and scourge of the Carnelian Valley; the mad demigod Nabavelicus, perpetrator of countless atrocities.

Each new foe rises against Nilah in challenge, and each is snuffed out in a ferocious battle of color and fury, dazzling all witnesses.

Nilah's own legend grows with every victory. And with it, an epic tale has begun to take shape, following her journey through strange lands near and far. At her side is the power of Ashlesh itself, which Nilah wields against other evils that might one day threaten the safety of Kathkan. In her heart is the memory of what she has lost, and the knowledge of what is to come, driving her to face greater and greater opponents wherever they might be found.

Whatever happened to that lanky girl who was buried in books, Nilah now faces her future with unbridled bliss. Her mere presence inspires others to fight alongside her, while her deeds ensure that people remember the hero she has become, even if they cannot remember the woman she once was.

Facing the mythological villains of Runeterra with unerring glee, she will challenge the end itself if it means she can protect those who cannot protect themselves.

All stories

Paintings Framed in Half-Light

The Princeling’s Lament

Shen

True Neutral

Shield of Remembrance

The Shuttered Manse

The Mountain

Naafiri

The Name of the Blade

Nami

First Steps

Nasus

Ouroboros

Nautilus

The Ophidian

Neeko

The Monster of Kalduga Outpost

Nidalee

Human Blood

Nilah