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The Winterspike Road

Laura Michet

By evening, the snow had soaked all the way through Maja’s boots. With each step, she could feel icy water slosh from her heel to her toes, like a flaying knife drawn along her foot.
Other soldiers were struggling, too—fifteen miles downhill in waist-high snow wasn’t easy. But the legionaries at the head of the column weren’t limping. Their steps kept the confident rhythm they’d struck since morning, and their watchful eyes were still glued to the horizon.
They probably have better boots, Maja thought. Trifarians are tough, but nobody’s that tough in standard-issue boots.
“Hey,” Zalt muttered. “Holding up?”
Zalt, the only minotaur in the warband, was taller, wider, and older than everyone else. He was plowing a deep trench through the snow on sturdy hooves. Maja was jealous. “Wish I couldn’t feel my feet,” she said. “If I didn’t have feet, no one could make me march.”
“In the last campaign against the Winter’s Claw, I saw a soldier’s foot freeze solid,” Zalt said. “His toes cracked off when he put his boot on. So, wham! General Darius chopped the whole thing off.”
Maja turned her gaze down the mountain. On a bend in the road far below, she could see Darius himself—the Hand of Noxus, Might incarnate. The general’s huge axe gleamed on his back.
“You’re lucky to be here,” Zalt told her. “Darius knows this road better than anyone. He built it during Darkwill’s campaign. And we can help him take it back.” A little lick of anger burned in Zalt’s eye. “Damned Winter’s Claw!”
Cliffs rose sheer on either side of Darius’ mountain road. Looking up, Maja could see the silhouettes of soldiers standing atop them. “The scouts don’t get a rest, do they?” she asked.
“What?”
She pointed. “The scouts.”
“Which scouts?” Zalt asked.
Then he looked up, too.
Whatever curse he bellowed was smothered by the avalanche.
Two curtains of white separated from the cliff tops above them. Almost instantly, they filled the pass. Chunks of hard-packed snow smashed into the Noxian column, swallowing the soldiers row by row as the avalanche raced downhill. Maja braced, but it was like being hit by a charging basilisk. There was tumbling terror, an awful weightlessness—then darkness, and the crush of winter.

Crunch! Someone heaved Maja out of the snowpack. “Get up,” he commanded—a voice ringing like the clash of blades. “Dig them out!”
She shook herself and started to dig. Then she realized: she was digging beside the general himself.
Darius found a cloven foot in the snow. “Zalt!” Maja shouted. She helped the general heave him out.
Maja looked back up the frosty slope: far above, Winter’s Claw warriors were picking through the scattered remains of the Noxian dead. No retreat now, Maja thought.
Darius was counting heads. “Officers?” he called. Two Trifarian legionaries swiftly ran over. “Report casualties. There’s a river over the next ridge. We’ll fortify there.” Darius surveyed the battered Noxian ranks, his expression burning with barely leashed anger. “If you can’t walk, crawl.”

As the pale sun plummeted toward the horizon, Winter’s Claw skirmishers followed the Noxian column all the way down to the frozen river, peppering them with barbed arrows. However, the probing fire didn’t slow down the disciplined Trifarian Legion. Maja’s breath grew ragged as she hurried to keep up with them.
The frozen river was wide and slick enough to make it a dangerous approach for the Winter’s Claw, and by holding the bank, the Noxians knew any attack would have to come from the nearby treeline. In spite of the sporadic fire from the shadows beneath the pines, Darius ordered two snow trenches dug parallel to the bank. Soldiers repurposed shields into shovels, and Maja saw Darius doing the same.
“Remember this,” Zalt said. “You saw the Hand of Noxus digging with the infantry!”
Everyone then sharpened stakes for the outer trench. Darius checked defenses along the line—but stopped at Zalt. “You’re familiar,” he said.
“I fought in the first Freljord campaign, general!” Zalt nodded at Maja. “Told this youngster how much worse it was!”
Darius looked Maja over. “This is your first action,” he said.
Maja wondered how he could tell. “Yes, general.”
“Don’t waste time on fear,” he told her. “Focus on facing the enemy. On putting your blade in their throats.”
Maja wasn’t sure what to say. “Uh—”
Zzzzip. Something parted the air between them, and a javelin lodged in the wall of the trench.
Maja turned toward the treeline. Branches were shaking, blades were shining, and moonlight glinted on polished bone.
“Stand to!” Darius bellowed.
As the Noxians scrambled for cover, and another volley of javelins flew from the trees, Maja saw a soldier stagger, three feet of knotty wood sprouting from his chest.
Darius pushed past Maja and Zalt, arrows pinging off the axe on his back. “Soon. They’ll charge soon,” he told them. His eyes were lit with fierce excitement. “That’s when we’ll strike!”
And just as he spoke, a snarling came from the trees. A pack of six-legged, catlike shadows raced out of the darkness—trained wildclaws, leaping for Noxian throats.
The Winter’s Claw followed.
As Trifarian legionaries rose from the trench to meet them, Maja drew her sword. She saw Darius bring his axe down like a guillotine. She rose, too, ready to fight—when Zalt collapsed beside her.
A javelin was buried in his shoulder.
“Go,” he gasped, but Maja planted herself beside him. Winter’s Claw warriors were on them in an instant, hatchets swinging. Zalt deflected a skull-crushing strike with his good arm, and Maja tripped their attacker—but instead of delivering the killing blow, she turned back to Zalt.
She could save him. She had to!
She pushed Zalt toward the river, away from the fight, and they slithered out onto the ice behind the Noxian line. As Zalt fell to his knees, struggling for breath, Maja had a sudden urge to flee across the river with him.
“Don’t!” Zalt could tell what she was thinking. “A Noxian never flees!”
Maja’s heart seemed to be beating in her throat. She opened her mouth to argue with Zalt—I am a Noxian, I am—but her mouth refused to form the words.
Then Zalt’s eyes widened, and a heavy hand landed on Maja’s shoulder. She knew who it was before she turned around.
“Face the enemy,” Darius growled.
“I—”
“You’re not facing them.” With a flick of his arm, Darius spun her on the ice. “Noxians who flee, die,” he said.
By your hand, Maja knew. By that axe. As she stared, Darius hefted the axe above his head, and for an instant Maja thought, This is it—my execution.
But the moment never came. A flurry of arrows ricocheted off the flat of the blade, falling harmlessly around them, and Darius lowered the axe again. “Noxians don’t run. We win,” he growled. “We chop them to pieces for what they do to us.”
And suddenly, Maja was angry—at the Winter’s Claw, and at herself, and at her fear. With jerking, frozen limbs, she shoved Zalt aside. She heard him grunt as he hit the ice—but she left him there, and Darius did, too. Beside him, lock-step, she ran into the whirlwind of Noxian steel.
Their blades flashed, and Maja swung hers until her muscles burned and her hand was sore from impact after impact. And with each hammering blow, she reminded herself: Live. Win. Chop them to pieces.
By sunrise, the Winter’s Claw had been routed.

When they returned, Darius and Maja found Zalt at the riverbank, his chest prickled with arrows. Dead.
Maja felt numb. She’d been telling herself, Maybe he rallied. Maybe he fought. But he’d just died where they left him.
“I was trying to protect him,” she told Darius. “He’s—He was a good soldier. I was trying to protect him.”
Darius paused. “That was a poor decision,” he said.
Maja startled. “Sir?”
“You should have been fighting alongside soldiers who still had a chance of living.” He turned his gaze to Maja. She shuddered—his eyes were like iron. “Old Zalt was ready to die. But you should have been ready to fight.”
“Y-yes,” she stammered. “I’ll… I’ll be better, sir.”
Darius turned north, toward the dawn-lit slopes of the Winterspike mountains. Maja could see campfires up there. Smoke rising through the trees.
The Winter’s Claw, waiting.
“Then do it fast,” Darius said.
Dead in the Water

Graham McNeill

Red tide out, red tide in.
Hook ’em up, carve ’em true,
Strip ’em down, guts to skin.
But always pay the Lady her due,
Or the Titan of the Deep will come for you!
— from ‘Song of the Slaughter’

It was the stench of Bloodharbor that hit you first.
Like a gut-punch that took the wind right out of your sails.
The stink always got inside you, making you feel like you’d never get it out.
A noisome reek of opened leviathan bellies, dripping entrails you could crawl through, and weeks-old offal sticking to the cobbles like gory mortar left to rot in the sun. Mix that with the shit of ten thousand scavenging seabirds and the piss of the Slaughter Docks’ bloodied workers, and it was a smell strong enough to turn even the strongest stomach inside out.
You could wear a bandanna soaked in enough rum to souse the Bearded Lady herself, and it’d still get you.
Yes, it was awful, but Sarah Fortune loved what it represented.
It was the smell of prosperity, of a plentiful catch, and monster bounties earned.
A red tide meant people with coins in their pockets, ready to spend them all in the quayside taverns, gambling dens, and fleshpots, all of which paid a cut of their takings to Sarah.
Prosperity, yes—by the Bearded Lady, it was just the worst smell in the world.
Her small landing boat eased out into the sludgy water, its passage through the deepening evening lit by a storm lantern swaying from a wrought-iron tentacle at its bow.
Seated in the back of the boat, Sarah draped her hand over the gunwale and let her fingertips carve a path through the fatty layers on the water’s surface, drawing undulant spirals that rose and fell with the red tide.
“Even for you, that’s pretty damn reckless,” grunted Rafen, sweating as he leaned back and forth on the oars. Rafen was an old salt of the islands, with a craggy face weathered by ocean spray and hard winds, and a keen mind the rum hadn’t managed to take the edge off. He was, by turns, her conscience and right-hand man, and had seen pretty much every dark nook and cranny Bilgewater had to offer.
“How so?” asked Sarah.
“There’s ripper fish and flaying lampreys lurking just under the surface.”
“Scared I’ll get my fingers bitten off?” replied Sarah.
“Can’t pull a trigger without your fingers.”
“You worry too much, Rafen.”
“That’s my job, to worry about the things you don’t worry enough about.”
“Like this boat ride out to the Moon Serpent?”
“Exactly,” said Rafen. “I have a saying, and it ain’t steered me wrong none since I heard it at my papa’s knee. If it smells bad, leave it damn well alone, you idiot!”
Sarah shrugged. “Pretty much everything smells bad out here.”
“Maybe so, but that don’t change the truth of it,” said Rafen, glancing over his shoulder into the mist rising up from the water, where the Moon Serpent lurked like a dark secret. “The sea has an evil cast to it this night. Feels like hungry eyes are looking up from the deep.”
“Your bones talking to you again?”
“You mock, but I been listening to ’em for more’n forty years now, and I’m still alive, ain’t I?”
“Let it go, old man,” said Miss Fortune. “It’s a Captain’s Requiem, I have to be there. And if I have to be there in this ridiculous getup, then my second in command has to be there too.”
Said ridiculous getup consisted of a—literally—breathtaking whalebone corset of cobalt blue and golden lace beneath a gloriously long-tailed scarlet frock coat. In addition, she wore linen breeches of pale cream tucked into heeled boots of polished black leather with silver kraken buckles running from ankle to knee.
An absurdly impractical outfit, but in a gathering of captains it didn’t do to look anything less than obscenely wealthy. A poor captain was a weak captain, and like every kind of predator, Bilgewater reavers would ruthlessly prey on the weak.
Rafen hadn’t escaped the need to smarten up, either, and—under duress and threat of a demotion—wore a borrowed suit of sealskin leather, a scaled waistcoat whose buttons threatened to split from the fabric with every pull of the oars, and a stovepipe hat with a pressed tentacle headband.
“I might have to be there, but that don’t mean I got to like it,” said Rafen.
“True, but I need you to watch my back,” said Sarah. “Aligh had a large crew, and with him dead every captain will be circling like a wharf rat in heat. Last thing I need is his old crew going over to a rival captain or falling in with the likes of the Jackdaws or Butcher Blades.”
“Aye, there’s that,” begrudged Rafen. “Lot of powerful captains’ll likely be here to see Aligh off to the Bearded Lady, but do you really trust all of them to abide by the Truce?”
“Not even a little bit,” said Sarah, opening her coat to reveal a pair of exquisite ivory-handled pistols holstered under each armpit. “But it’s not like I’m going in unarmed.”
“They’ll take those off you, sure as eggs is eggs.”
“Please, you think they’re the only weapons I have?” she said, tapping the side of her head.
“Fair enough, but this still feels like a risk.”
“It surely is, but what’s life without a little risk?”
“I’ll remind you of that if this all goes under fast.”
Sarah grinned. “If it does, I promise you can haunt me from our watery grave.”
Rafen made a quick sign of the horns over his heart and shook his head, but returned his effort to rowing. He’d made his point, and Sarah had made sure he knew better than to press her when her mind was made up. Besides, she knew he was right, and there was nothing more irritating than a man who believed he was right.
But in deference to Rafen’s words, Sarah lifted her hand from the surface of the water and flicked the scum from her fingertips. Something toothy broke the surface where it landed and the old man raised his eyes in a told ya fashion.
Behind her, the ramshackle crags of Bilgewater shimmered in the fog, flickering anthills where people—her people—lived upon the flotsam and jetsam the ocean provided. Its structures clung to the rocks and mountains of the island chain like persistent barnacles that neither storm, Harrowing, nor the occasional probes of Noxian war-barques could ever entirely dislodge.
Like Sarah Fortune, Bilgewater was a survivor.
Since Gangplank’s death, she’d fought the unquiet spirits of the Shadow Isles and survived countless attempts on her life. Consolidating her rule over Bilgewater had been a messy, bloody affair, and her grip was still as shaky as an apprentice rigger on their first climb of the ropes. But she was still alive despite the venom—and firearms—aimed at her for putting her head above the parapet.
“Ship ahoy,” said Rafen.
Sarah looked past him to see a looming shape emerging from the rising mist.
Much like its former captain, the Moon Serpent was an old, unsubtle ship; broad in the beam and glowing with the dim light of dozens of hooded lanterns hanging from its many masts. The brigantine’s reinforced timbers were thickly caulked and carved with scales like a snake. Crusted salt in the grooves shone silver in the moonlight, and though its sails were still furled, Sarah knew they were woven from shimmering white cloth that must have cost Aligh a small fortune. Its ramming prow figurehead was a fanged serpent forged from the melted-down cannons of his enemies.
“By the Bearded Lady, I always forget how big it is…”
“She’s a beast sure enough,” said Rafen as the brigantine’s cold shadow fell across them.
“How in the world did a tight-fisted miser like Aligh pay for this?” said Sarah. “That cheapskate bastard never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat. I heard he skipped out on his dues to the ocean, never so much as a drop of rum or a copper coin for the lords and ladies of the deep.”
“And ain’t that yet another reason for me to turn us around and not set foot on its deck,” said Rafen. “If even a bit of that’s true, then this here’s a doomed ship. The ocean needs its due, any captain worthy of the name knows that.”
“I gave a hex-carbine to the waters off White Wharf after claiming Jakmunt Zyglos’s bounty.”
“I remember,” said Rafen with a resigned shake of his head. “You promised that weapon to me.”
“Decent craftsmanship too. Wasn’t a Fortune Manstopper, but it was pretty nice.”
“Now you’re just being cruel.”
“A queen must be cruel only to be kind,” said Sarah with mock affectation, as Rafen eased the boat up to half a dozen others moored beneath a wide cargo net strung from the gunwale. The glossy hull of the Moon Serpent rose up like a black cliff and dark silhouettes moved through the lamplight high above.
“She’s sitting high in the water for such a big ship,” said Rafen, nodding toward the mottled green tide lines on the ship’s black hull as he tied the boat up with a loose slipknot.
“Her holds will be empty and most of the crew will be ashore getting three sheets to the wind on whatever cheap rotgut Aligh left them for his wake,” said Sarah.
“Lucky them,” said Rafen, pulling the oars in from the rowlocks and securing them along the gunwale. “You sure about this?”
Sarah rose and took hold of the cargo net, tipping her head back.
“Not really,” she said. “But when given the choice of going forward or back, a strong woman once told me that it’s always better to go forward, so let’s go.”
Hand over hand, Sarah and Rafen climbed to the Moon Serpent’s deck.

A pair of unsmiling twins in leather breeches and scaled shirts took Sarah’s guns and Rafen’s marlinspike dagger as soon as they clambered over the gunwale. Both women were heavily muscled and angrily sober, no doubt wishing they were ashore partaking in Aligh’s wake-rum instead of forming a skeleton crew for a bunch of captains who would, like as not, dance a jig to see one another dead.
One of the twins wore a helmet made from the skull of a scuttle-crab and matching patchwork armor of boiled shells, while the other had a face covered with tattoos of unblinking eyes. When the latter grinned at the sight of the gun-dame forged pistols, Sarah saw her mouth was filled with teeth prized from a razorscale’s jawbone.
Sarah followed them as they made their way to the raised foredeck, and marked which of the three chests they put the confiscated weapons into—cannonball dent in the right side.
An enormous bronze cannon sat on a carved ebony gun carriage just in front of the chests. The weapon’s flared muzzle was sealed with wax, and the sail-shrouded body of Captain Aligh would be entombed within, pickled in rum, vinegar, and camphor for its journey to the bottom of the sea.
“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said Sarah. “The cannon, I mean.”
“Aye,” agreed Rafen. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see, but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”
“Right…” said Sarah, turning her attention to the broad-shouldered figure standing immobile next to the ship-wrecker. “Lady help us if we ever buck tradition, eh?”
He was swathed in a robe of iridescent scales with a wide-mouthed fish-head hood ringed in razor teeth. He carried a tentacle-wrapped billhook, and Sarah immediately knew him for what he was.
“A rare honor to have a serpent caller at a Captain’s Requiem,” she said.
“Amazing what enough gold krakens can buy you, eh?” replied Rafen.
Within the jagged hood, the serpent caller wore a mask of perforated coral over the lower half of his face, while his eyes and forehead were obscured by a dried-out squid’s body with crudely cut eye-holes through which the priest surveyed the gathered captains.
The wide deck was thronged with a host of Bilgewater reavers in all their finery: long coats, polished boots, tall hats, and archaic pieces of armor that would drag them straight to the ocean floor if they fell overboard. Sarah saw a wealth of gold and silver sigils and medals, Buhru fishhook amulets, and lucky talismans to honor the lords and ladies of the deeps.
Some captains she knew from fighting or drinking—often both—and some she knew only by reputation.
They, of course, all knew her.
With her blood-red hair, creamy skin, and confident swagger, Sarah Fortune would be a hard woman to miss in any circumstance, but on this ship she was a wild rose among poisoned thorns.
“Quite the gathering, eh?” said Rafen.
“Nothing like death to really bring people together,” said Sarah.
Rafen nodded and said, “Now I know how a fat waverider feels when it finds itself surrounded by a pack of hungry longtooths.”
Sarah shook her head. “You have it backward, old man. I’m the longtooth here.”
Rafen didn’t reply as Sarah marched to the ship’s centerline and back, adjusting each stride for the motion of the ship’s deck. Just as every pistol had its own unique character, so too did every ship; its own way to crest the tides and heed the wind. She moved with the anchored ship’s roll and sway, letting the creak and groan of seasoned timbers tell their secrets from her boots on up.
“A shallow-riding wallower,” she said. “Surprising for such a wide-beamed vessel.”
“I like ’em broad in the beam,” said Rafen, instinctively adjusting the width of his stance.
“So I heard.”
“Not as nimble as a cutter,” said Rafen, ignoring her jibe, “but I’ll wager a bottle of Myron’s Dark she’ll hold you tight to her bosom in rough seas.”
“That she will, Rafen,” said a slender woman dressed in a long coat of pale blue, with gold edging at the cuffs and bronze fringed epaulettes. “She’s a grand old dame, right sure. Sank Darkwill’s Glory and even poked a few holes in the Red Noxtoraa before the Mudtown fogs closed in and saved its cursed hide.”
A salt-stiffened bicorn flopped at a rakish angle on the woman’s shaven head, and the state of her eyes—two poached eggs wobbling in a bowl of fish soup—told Sarah she’d been hitting the rum hard already. Her skin had the waxy, yellowish complexion of someone only recently returned from a long sea voyage.
“Captain Blaxton,” said Rafen. “I heard you were dead.”
“Rumors of my death fly around Bilgewater with every sunset,” said the woman. “And with them, men weep, and their wives curse the morn of their disproving. I assure you, I am in the rudest of health.”
She turned to Sarah and gave her an elaborate bow before offering her a hand.
Sarah took it and was instantly on guard. Despite Blaxton’s drunken appearance and feather-light grip, she felt hard-earned calluses and powder burn ridges on the heel of her palm.
“Marla Blaxton, at your service, Captain Fortune,” she said, releasing Sarah’s hand. “Recently returned from a year of raiding the Amarantine Coast, where the sea is clear, the sky blue, and the coastal settlements fat with more gold than a captain could spend in ten lifetimes.”
“How wonderful,” said Sarah. “Why would you ever choose to return from that?”
“Good times can only last so long, you know. The inhabitants of said settlements had some strange ideas about ‘ownership’ and ‘not being dead’. Also, they were able to summon some curious mage-types who turned the sea and sky against me in ways I’d never seen before.”
“Ah, so you lost all your ships,” said Rafen.
“A few,” allowed Blaxton, waving her hand dismissively. “A temporary setback, Rafen. One from which I expect to bounce back any day now.”
“Perhaps with a new crew and a shallow-riding wallower of a brigantine?” suggested Sarah.
Blaxton laughed and said, “Anything is possible,” before giving her another bow and rejoining a group of captains gathered around a leaking barrel of rum by the foremast.
And Sarah’s heart skipped a beat as she saw a face she recognised, an enemy face.
Rafen saw him too and gripped her arm.
“Remember the Truce,” he hissed urgently.
Sarah didn’t answer, too focused on the man before her.
She pulled her arm free and strode toward him, keeping her face expressionless.
Blond hair, tied back in a rough ponytail, a loose strand hanging, just so, over his handsome, clean-shaven features. He looked up and met her gaze, the ice in his eyes frosting at her approach.
“Sarah,” he said, opening his arms to her. “Look, I know we—”
She didn’t let him finish, hammering her fist into his gut without breaking stride.
He buckled like he’d been hit by one of the twenty-four pounder balls, and his handsome face met her rising knee with a sickening crunch of bone.
He flew back and Sarah pounced on him before he could rise, straddling him and reaching for her pistol before remembering it was locked in a chest next to the mainmast.
Cannonball dent in the right side.
Instead of shooting him, she hauled his head up by his collar and cocked her fist back for another punch. He coughed blood, and lifted a forge-crafted hand of whirring bronze cogs, leather straps, and clicking mechanics out in front him.
“Please,” he wheezed through a broken nose and a mouthful of blood.
“Hello, Petyr,” she said. “I told you what would happen if I saw you again, didn’t I?”

Captain Petyr Harker.
The last time she’d seen him, he’d been cradling the splintered, bloody ruin of his hand, the hand he’d always boasted killed the Crimson Blade.
Petyr, along with Captains Crow and Bragg, had conspired to strip her of her hard-won gains in the wake of her killing Gangplank. Both Crow and Bragg were now dead, one from a pistol ball to the head, the other with one lodged in his liver.
Her pistol balls.
Walking out of the gunfight at MacGregan’s Killhouse, she’d promised to take more than Petyr’s other hand if she ever saw him again.

The Truce of the Sinking Soul was a long-standing tradition in Bilgewater.
More of an unwritten rule than a strictly enforced custom, but it allowed rival crews to gather without bloodshed when their captains attended the all too frequent funerals of old sea-legends.
That violent men and women would abide by such an archaic custom always struck Sarah as somewhat quaint, and until now she’d always kept it in the if it ain’t broken… part of her mind.
An iron grip seized her right elbow and pulled her clenched fist back.
Rafen appeared on her left, dragging her off Petyr.
“Easy, captain,” he said. “Easy now…”
Part of her wanted to land another punch, but by the time Rafen had her back on her feet, the anger had gone out of Sarah. She’d made her point, and so let herself be pulled away.
“Upon our last descent,” said a rum-sodden voice in her ear. “All gathered heed this oath.”
“Peace be upon us all,” she repeated automatically. “No harm to body or soul.”
“No shot nor blade, no serpent nor spell,” added Rafen.
“Observe the Truce of the Sinking Soul!” finished Petyr, scrambling away from her.
Sarah let out a long breath, and turned to see who, along with Rafen, had pulled her off.
A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat, fresh octopus-tentacle tie, and glistening stingray flat-cap that was well above the tattered sackcloth she normally saw him wearing.
“Thorne?” she said, shrugging off Rafen’s touch.
“It’s Captain Thorne these days,” he said, spitting a wad of expensive dried-seaweed tobacco to the deck and missing the polished toe of her boot by a finger’s breadth.
Sarah laughed. “You? A captain? Since when?”
Thorne preened, looking like a powder monkey with a freshly stolen mango. “Got me a ship now, and a crew of hearty sea-rats off the back of what you done to Crow and Bragg.”
His breath was like a bucket of rotten clams. Thorne could parade in expensive clothes, but he could never change who he truly was.
“You always were a bottom feeder, weren’t you?” said Sarah. “Now get out of my way.”
Thorne stood aside, and said, “Mark my words, Sarah Fortune, you’ll get what’s comin’ to ya.”
“Promises, promises,” said Sarah, and in two quick steps she was standing over Petyr Harker.
She held her arm out and rippled her fingers, like she was flipping a coin along her knuckles.
“Can I give you a hand?” she said with a grin.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“It is funny,” said Sarah. “Look how I’m smiling.”
Petyr looked at her gloved hand through an eye that was already swollen and purple. Despite the obvious pain of his bleeding nose and winded gut, he grinned.
“If I give you my good hand, are you going to shoot it off?” he asked.
“I’m not planning to, but the day’s yet young.”
He took her hand, and Sarah hauled him to his feet.
“Why are you here, Petyr?” she asked.
“There might not be a Corsair’s Conclave anymore, but traditions need to be upheld, yes?”
“So I keep hearing,” said Sarah, glancing at Rafen.
She pulled a handkerchief from her coat and handed it to Petyr. He nodded gratefully and wiped the blood from his lips and chin before handing it back.
“Keep it,” she said, then nodded admiringly at his new hand. “Nice work. Doesn’t look like Bilgewater craft.”
“It’s not,” said Petyr. “Well, it is and it isn’t. A new apprentice down at Bitterbelt’s forge made it for me. Zaunite lad named Gysbert.”
“Looks expensive.”
“It was.”
Sarah looked him up and down, taking in his tailored clothing, the well-fed cheeks, and the empty scabbard that looked like it might hold a fine blade. Whatever had become of Petyr after losing his hand, he’d clearly bounced back well enough.
“I keep wondering if I should have killed you back at MacGregan’s,” said Sarah.
“I’ve often wondered why you let me live,” said Petyr. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you didn’t kill me, but let’s be honest, I’m just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme.”
Despite herself, Sarah laughed. “That you are, Petyr, that you are. But if you want the truth, I didn’t kill you because killing you would have been Gangplank’s way of doing things, and I always try to be better than he was.”
“And how’s that working out for you?”
“It’s a work in progress,” admitted Sarah as Rafen stepped between them, holding tin mugs hooked over his fingers in one hand, and a large bottle of rum in the other.
“Here,” he said. “If the Truce is holding, and we’re not going to start killing each other, then we might as well have a swig of Aligh’s rum, eh?”
Sarah passed a mug to Petyr before taking one for herself as Rafen poured them all two fingers of the syrupy brown liquid.
“Keep your powder dry and your cutlass sharp,” said Rafen.
“And the world will turn,” finished Sarah, and the three of them touched mugs.
Sarah tipped her head back and took a mouthful, wincing at the gritty, overly sweet taste.
“Oh, that’s bad. That’s really bad,” she said. “You sure they didn’t put Aligh’s body in the rum barrel instead of the cannon barrel?”
“Aligh was known for many things—being a cruel old bastard, a ruthless captain, and a seasoned killer—but one thing he wasn’t known for was his largesse in vittles,” said Petyr, pouring the remains of his rum onto the deck.
“I didn’t know you knew Aligh.”
Petyr shook his head vigorously. “I didn’t. I mean, I knew him by reputation, of course, but it’s not like I ever set foot on the Moon Serpent before today.”
“The man was an enigma,” said Thorne, sidling up to Rafen and holding out his own mug. “A regular man of mystery, but who cares about that? He’s dead, and we ain’t.”
Sarah shrugged and nodded to Rafen, who poured Thorne a generous measure.
“Aye,” continued Thorne. “There’s none here gathered who knows much of the man. They say he never came ashore neither. Always sent one of them vicious twins. So, did you hear how he died?”
“I heard he was stabbed in his sleep by a cabin boy who’d taken one too many beatings,” said Captain Blaxton, arriving mug in hand.
Rafen duly poured her a measure.
“May all your lookouts be sober,” she said, taking a drink. “Ah, some of the good stuff.”
“That’s what you heard?” said Sarah. “I heard he choked to death on a barb-squid that wasn’t quite dead in his dinner.”
Rafen shook his head. “No, that’s just what the cutters on the Slaughter Docks are saying. I heard it from one of the chandlers down the grottoes that he was so drunk he fell overboard. His pockets were so laden with gold that he sank all the way down, straight into the waiting grasp of the Bearded Lady.”
Instinctively, they all looked over the gunwale to the ocean far below.
The waters swirled around the ship, deep and black like a liquid mirror. She saw her wavering reflection, splintered by the water and lapping at the barnacled hull. Hard waves broke against the hull—the kind you saw when something large was coming up from below.
“Told you it had an evil cast to it tonight,” said Rafen.
Sarah let out a breath and tapped her left eye twice with her right thumb, an old sailor’s tradition to ward off evil influences.
“Ach, he was an old man, maybe he just died,” said Sarah. “That’s what old men do best.”
“Fog’s rolling in,” said Blaxton, nodding out to sea.
A chill passed through Sarah as she saw the fog was coming in from the southeast; cold, clammy, and freighted with the smell of the deepest ocean trenches.
“Don’t matter none how the old bastard died,” said Thorne. “All that matters is what happens to his ship and his crew. That’s why we’re all here, ain’t it? Every one of us wants to claim that big prize, don’t we?”
All four captains studied one another, each knowing that was exactly why they were here.
“No one ever found his serpent sigil, did they?” said Blaxton.
“His sigil?” scoffed Rafen. “Like as not, it’s sealed away in that cannon with him. Doesn’t matter anyway, no one pays any heed to a captain’s sigil these days.”
“Maybe they should,” said Sarah. “Maybe there’d be a lot less bloodshed if you could just claim a ship and crew with the previous captain’s sigil.”
“Scared of a little blood, are ya?” grinned Thorne. “Not got the stomach for it, eh?”
Sarah took a step toward him and said, “Truce or not, talk to me like that again and I’ll show you how much stomach I have for bloodshed.”
“Didn’t mean to go upsettin’ ya, Captain Fortune,” laughed Thorne, exposing black teeth and rotten gums. “Just wondering how many of ’em here gathered would have even the slightest hesitation of trying to claim Aligh’s crew if they could get their hands on that sigil…?”
Sarah looked past Thorne at the other captains gathered on the Moon Serpent’s deck, wondering the same thing. Most of them were small fry, with crews that were too green to make a serious play for Aligh’s ship, but the three drinking rum with her… Now that was a motley crew indeed, and any one of them might be a rival she needed to worry about sticking a knife in her back.
Before any of them could say anything in answer to Thorne’s question, Sarah felt the deck shift underfoot, a slow roll and dip.
She reached inside her coat and pulled out a silver coin, flicking it over the side of the ship.
Thorne watched it tumble end over end to the waters, and for a moment she wondered if he might dive in after it.
“Why’d ya do that?” he said. “This ain’t your ship.”
“Someone has to,” said Sarah, as the Moon Serpent’s white sails unfurled. “We’re getting underway.”

The ship sailed eastward out of Bilgewater Bay, taking a gently curving route to avoid the many jagged reefs, treacherous sandbanks, and jutting wrecks that could see a ship foundered. The fog Blaxton had spotted had fully enveloped them now, and the ship sailed in an almost dead silence, interrupted only by the occasional shout between the skeleton crew.
Despite the awfulness of the rum, Sarah, Rafen, Thorne, Petyr, and Blaxton worked their way through the rest of the bottle. After a couple of shots, the sweetness became bearable, and Sarah felt her mood loosening.
With the bottle empty, Rafen threw it overboard and Sarah sent him below deck to find another.
The Moon Serpent sailed onward, deeper into the fog.
More theories as to how Aligh had died were offered, each more ridiculous than the last, and Sarah found herself wiping tears of laughter from her eyes as Petyr finished a preposterous tale of Aligh falling afoul of the Trickster and being led out to sea in a golden narwhal costume only to be carved up by the Bloodharbor Ripper in a tragic case of mistaken identity.
A distant voice, muffled by the fog, called out from the crow’s nest.
“What did he say?” she asked, peering up through the rigging. She held on to the gunwale rail as her vision spun a tad. The rum was bad, but it was strong. Time to ease up.
“I think he said ‘Land ho!’ or possibly ‘Sand Lo!’” said Blaxton, bleary eyed from the rum.
Sarah blinked. “Sand Lo? Why would he say that?”
“I believe it’s a traditional Shuriman greeting,” giggled Petyr, taking another belt of rum.
Sarah fought the laughter bubbling up from her gut as she heard the clatter of iron chains spilling off the deck, swiftly followed by the heavy splash of an anchor hitting the water.
“We’re here,” said Thorne, spitting a viscous wad of tobacco into the sea.
Sarah peered through the mist, seeing a craggy spur of black rock rearing out of the water. Salt crystals glittered in the weak light of the stars.
“Moonshard Reef,” she said. “Why in the name of the Lady’s Beard are we here?”
“Aligh always claimed he was part Marai on his mother’s side,” said Petyr.
“Horse dung!” said Thorne. “The man’s never even seen a Marai, let alone been birthed from one.”
“Makes for an exotic tale though,” said Blaxton. “Mystic origins, magical blood, that sort of thing. Kind of backstory every captain wishes they had. Wish I’d thought of it.”
The thumping of wood on wood halted further discussions, and Sarah turned to see the serpent caller hammering the raised foredeck with his tentacle-wrapped billhook.
In his other hand, he held a flaming torch that burned with a brilliant silver light.
“The sea is this world’s cemetery, and its souls sleep best without monument,” said the serpent caller, his voice a grating hiss through the coral mask. “All other graveyards show symbols of distinction between great and small, rich and poor—but the king, the fool, the prince, and the peasant are all the same to the ocean. Now, fellow travelers of the Sea… heed my words, it is time to pay the ocean its due!”
“About damn time,” said Sarah. “Let’s get this done and go home.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Petyr.

Sarah and the other captains gathered before the wax-stoppered cannon as the serpent caller’s eyes swept over them all. She felt the potency of the rum swimming around her body, and saw a number of the other captains swaying with more than the motion of the ship.
Where in the eight seas is Rafen?
She didn’t want any more rum. She just wanted him here by her side.
The twins who’d met her and Rafen as they came aboard to confiscate their weapons worked a block and tackle over to the center of the deck. An enormous hook on a thick rope loop was lowered and secured to the lifting ring on the cannon just behind the oiled fuse.
“What a waste,” said Blaxton, tears streaming down her face.
“I didn’t realise you and Aligh were close,” said Sarah.
“What? Gods, no! I mean the cannon. That’s an Orban thirty pounder,” said Blaxton. “Probably one of only a handful left in existence. One hit from that would punch a hole clean through a Noxian warship from stem to stern. Crying shame to see it go to waste.”
Thanks to her mother’s teachings, Sarah knew more about pistols and rifles than she did about the intricacies of ship-borne weapons, but even she had to agree the bronze cannon was far too good for the likes of a miserly soul like Aligh. Was that a final insult to those left behind, that his most beautiful weapon would serve as his tomb and never belong to anyone else?
Something niggled about that, though—a nagging feeling she was missing something.
Crab Hat secured the hook to the cannon, then she and her twin stood back as the serpent caller began to speak.
“Captains of Bilgewater, it does my heart proud to see so many of you here today,” he said. “The best and the worst, the scum and the cream of our city’s reaver-kind.”
A few mutters went through the captains at so harsh an opening, but serpent callers were known to be touched by the Bearded Lady, and their ways were unknowable to most people.
“Our fair isles stand at a pivotal moment in their history, and many paths lead into the future, as tangled and inconstant as the many limbs of Nagakabouros, but I have seen the way forward! On many of these paths, I see the peaks and coves of the Serpent Isles ablaze, its people dying as our enemies close in. But on one path, one singular path, I see us proud, stronger than ever, a united people under a great leader!”
Sarah’s brow furrowed. Yes, the serpent callers were a strange bunch, but this was beyond anything she’d heard any of them say before.
“You have gathered here to see Captain Aligh down to the depths, a man whose boots none of you were fit to clean. A man of vision, a man who knew what needed to be done!”
The twins began hauling on the pulley ropes to lift the cannon, their muscles bunching and straining as the rear end of the cannon, gun carriage and all, began lifting from the deck. The barrel tilted downward, and were it not for the waxed stopper, Sarah felt she could have looked right down its length to see Aligh’s dead body.
“You all have failed Nagakabouros! You all have fought and betrayed one another, like Rat Town scum scrabbling over a copper sprat. None of you has the vision to raise a fleet like the ones of old and make Bilgewater ruler of the waves! You all throw your coins and your tributes into the water, and for what? For safety? A blessing? No, it’s a sacrifice you’re offering, a blood price for the ocean to lend you its wrath. But what does the ocean care for copper coins or the smallest fish of the catch? No, for Bilgewater to prosper, it needs a red tide of offerings!”
Sarah surreptitiously glanced around at the other captains to see what they were making of the serpent caller’s lunacy, but clearly the rum had numbed them to just how insane this was. She felt eyes upon her and saw Petyr looking right at her.
He gave her a terse smile, and her unease ratcheted up several notches.
She saw he was easing, half-step by half-step, toward the gunwale.
Sarah looked back down the cannon barrel.
And then she knew.
“Oh no…”
She ran toward the raised foredeck, tearing off her hat and reaching up to pull out twin stilettos masquerading as hairpins. Each was a slender needle of blackened steel with a rounded skull-pommel, and she knew just where to stick them to kill a man stone dead.
“So I offer the sea your blood, your sacrifice!” screamed the serpent caller, tearing off his mask and hood so everyone could see him. So everyone would know who had brought them here to die.
Sarah saw a grey-bearded face, furrowed by old age and aglow with madness. A long scar bisected his leathery face from right eyebrow to left cheek, and the wisps of his beard were twisted into thin braids entwined with pearls and fishhooks.
His eyes were the eyes of a man who never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat.
Who skipped out on the ocean’s tithe on every voyage.
A man she knew from reputation and decades of bloody legend.
“Aligh, you treacherous bastard!” she yelled.
The twins saw her coming, but couldn’t yet release the chains holding the cannon’s rear aloft.
Time slowed for Sarah, her heartbeat like the slow tolling of the bell upon the Widow’s Manse whenever a ship was lost to the ocean. It felt like she was running knee deep in sticky guts in the carving bays of the Slaughter Docks.
“You’re too late, Captain Fortune,” said Aligh.
He swept the torch down to the back of the cannon, and roared in triumph.
She pulled back her hand to throw one of her stilettos.
She knew she wouldn’t make it.
The silver flame lit the oiled touchpaper.
And the world exploded in a deafening blast of fire and thunder.

That she wasn’t dead was Sarah’s first surprise.
Her second was that the Moon Serpent was still afloat.
A cannon that big ought to have holed the ship all the way down to the ocean, and broken its keel.
She couldn’t hear anything, not really. Her ears were filled with a high-pitched whine, maddeningly shrill and muffled at the same time.
She rolled onto her side, wincing as she felt blood streaming down her arm.
A dull awareness of foggy, distant sounds coming from behind made Sarah turn her head.
A scene of utter carnage, worse than anything she’d seen in a long time.
And suddenly she knew why the ship wasn’t sinking. The cannon had been primed with canister shot.
It was a load designed to shred and maim flesh, but leave a vessel intact, and it had worked its lethal power with horrifying potency.
Sarah’s mad dash toward Aligh had carried her mostly clear of the wide fan of red-hot fragments, but the other captains weren’t so lucky.
Men and women lay sprawled on a deck slick with blood.
Those closest to the gun were almost unrecognisable, transformed from living, breathing human beings into scraps of bloody meat. Shorn arms and legs lay scattered in gory heaps, and it was all but impossible to tell which limb belonged to which body.
But not everyone was dead.
Those captains toward the rear of the throng writhed in agony, bleeding from scores of deep lacerations and screaming the name of the Bearded Lady. Sarah could still barely hear them.
She saw Blaxton lying in a lake of blood, her fine blue coat cut to pieces, as if someone had given her a hundred lashes from a barbed cat-o’-nine-tails. Sarah couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive, but she was lying very still. Thorne slithered out from beneath her, and with the luck typical of that lowlife, it looked like he’d escaped the worst of the blast using Blaxton as a human shield.
Rafen! Where’s Rafen?
She couldn’t see him, and could only hope that he’d found a way to survive.
He must have, he’s Rafen. He survives everything, doesn’t he?
Then her eyes settled on a figure lying sprawled against the railings, bloodied, but mostly unhurt.
Petyr Harker.
He grinned, and hate filled Sarah as she knew that somehow, in some way, that smug, conniving sea-slug had known about Aligh’s trap. He had to have been part of setting it up, a glittering, silver-tongued lure for captains who didn’t know him well enough to send him packing.
Sarah saw the deck hatch swing open, and the skeleton crew that had sailed them out to Moonshard Reef emerged with long gutting knives to finish what their vile captain had begun. They moved as if in a languid dream, skewering bellies and cutting throats with sadistic relish.
Anger surged through Sarah, and she sat upright, blinking through tears of pain.
You’re alive, damn it! Do something!
With that thought blazing in her mind, sounds rushed back and her vision cleared.
The screams of the dying drove her to her feet, and she swept up her stilettos once again.
Aligh stood far behind the smoking cannon, arms aloft and surveying his bloody handiwork with the eyes of a zealot. Sarah sprinted toward him again, but this time the twins rushed past their captain to intercept her.
She vaulted over the cannon, and hammered her boots into the face of the twin with the tattooed eyes all across her skull. Razorscale teeth splintered under Sarah’s iron hard boot-heels, and sent the woman flying backward.
Sarah landed lightly and leapt to the side as Crab Hat swung a monstrous, fang-toothed club at her head. It smashed the deck boards to splinters, and Sarah rolled to her feet hammering her daggered fist into the woman’s back. The crab-shell armor was hard and smooth and the stiletto slid clear without penetrating.
The woman wrenched the club from the deck and spun around, the weapon slashing just over Sarah’s head. Her tattooed twin was back up, blood streaming down her face of many eyes, turning it into a hideous grimace. She held a pair of long punch daggers with razor-toothed sawfish blades.
She came at Sarah in a flurry of blows, elbows, and high kicks.
Sarah tried to parry and dodge, only barely avoiding each killing blow. She could hold her own in a fight, but she’d take a pistol over a pair of thin daggers any day. By the time they’d backed up toward the cannon, Sarah’s shirt was soaked in blood and she was seriously reconsidering the wisdom of her plan to fight hand to hand.
From the corner of her eye she saw the armored twin winding up for another strike.
Two to one, this fight would only end badly for Sarah.
Tattooed Eyes slashed her dagger low, and Sarah grunted as it cut a line of fire across the side of her thigh. She dropped to one knee as a reverse stroke came for her throat.
She lifted her arm to parry, and the slashing blade cut straight through the fabric of her coat.
The impact sent searing bolts of pain up Sarah’s arm, but the iron rods specially woven into the back of the sleeve halted the blade before it bit flesh.
Her foe let out a “Ha!” of triumph, but the grin fell from her face as she realised Sarah was unhurt.
“Gedian and Sons, Battle Tailors and War Clothiers,” said Sarah, and hammered her stiletto up through the soft flesh on the underside of her foe’s jaw. Her eyes flew wide in shock, and Sarah saw the black needle of the blade behind her razor teeth as it punched up into her brain.
Sarah rose and kicked the dead body away as her twin screamed in anguish.
Stiletto versus war-club—bad odds. Really bad odds.
Sarah risked a glance behind her.
Cannonball dent in the right side…
This was her chance to even those odds.
The armored twin launched herself at Sarah in fury, her huge, toothed club rising up for a strike. The weapon slashed down in an executioner’s arc, and Sarah dived aside at the last instant.
The iron head of the club smashed the chest behind Sarah apart. She spun inside the twin’s guard and drove her blade into a gap between the plates of crab-shell armor.
The woman grunted and stumbled backward, tearing the weapon from Sarah’s hand.
Sarah turned and began frantically searching through the shattered ruin of the chest, sweeping aside damaged knives, brass-knuckles, and iron-tipped cudgels.
“Come on, come on, where are you…?” she hissed, hearing the scrape of a club being lifted from the deck. A broken handle, a bent blade.
Had one of the twins hidden them somewhere else, hoping to keep them for themselves…?
No, no, no…
And then her palm closed on the smooth, ivory-handled grips she knew better than anything.
Sarah spun the twin pistols into her grip, and snapped the firing mechanism into place.
She twisted and dived to the side, pulling the triggers in a storm of shot.
Crab-shell armor was proof against blades and hooks, but against gun-dame-forged weapons, the tattooed woman might as well have been naked.
Red-hot pistol balls blasted through her armor, and she toppled over the cannon, leaking vital fluids from more than a dozen neat holes.
Sarah rose to her feet and tensed as she felt the roll and sway of the deck change. It was a subtle change, almost unnoticeable, a change in the angle of the anchored ship’s prow as the swell of the ocean shifted…
“Oh, now that’s not good…” she said, as Aligh limped toward her, distraught at the sight of the dead twins.
“You killed them!” he cried.
Sarah fired a shot into each of his kneecaps. “That’s for all the captains you killed tonight.”
Aligh screamed, writhing on the deck. He wept and feebly tried to swing his billhook at her.
Sarah easily batted it aside and jammed a pistol under his chin.
“Any last words?” she asked. “Now this really is your funeral.”
The deck shifted again, and a deathly silence fell over the ship.
Even the wounded seemed to recognize the strange quality of the darkness closing in around them as a deep rumbling sound rose up from the water.
Sarah sensed fearful tremors running through the ship’s timbers.
“What’s happening?” she demanded, jabbing the pistol harder into Aligh’s throat. “What else did you have planned tonight?”
“This is none of my doing,” wept Aligh, and despite his obvious agony, he laughed with the hysteria of a man who knew his time had come. “My bill to the sea is due. And you’re going to pay it with me…”

Sarah had felt something like this in the bones of a ship once before.
Nine years ago, just north of Bilgewater and making the last, hooking sprint to the inner bay. They’d been returning from a bounty run up by Drakkengate and spotted a smuggler running a slimmed-down carrack out of the Ironwater coves, fleeing the Serpent Isles with treasures looted from a Buhru temple.
She still remembered the mournful rumble of the titanic serpent horns as they echoed over the ocean, and the terror as her crew watched an abyssal kraken rear up from the water to smash the carrack to matchwood and drag all aboard to their deaths.
The shift in the deck as the kraken had passed under their ship felt just like this.
She ran to the gunwale and searched the fog and ocean.
The sea swirled around the crags of Moonshard Reef, dark and keeping their secrets. No one knew just how deep it got around here, but any ship that sank out this way was never seen again, never washed up on the isles.
What’s out there…?
And then she saw it.
Two hundred yards out, huge and unyielding, a titan rising from the deep.
The vast dome of its helmeted head broke the water, twin eyes glowing with the orange light of a smelting furnace. The water boiled around it, frothed to madness by a dark miasma surrounding its wavering outline, and leaving an oily slick in its wake.
Its body was huge, encased in plates of corroded iron, looped with chains torn from countless sunken vessels. Across one shoulder it carried a colossal, hook-bladed anchor, dripping with black water and garlanded with rotten weeds from the deepest, darkest abyss.
Sarah’s mind refused to process what she was seeing.
This is impossible.
It was a dark legend come to life, a scare story told around the beer-soaked tables of the wharf-side taverns by drunken rakes hoping for a free drink. She knew its name, had even laughed at the impossibility of its existence.
But here it was, rising from the ocean with booming, ponderous strides.
The drowned tallyman, come to claim the ocean’s due.
Even his name was said to be a curse.
“Nautilus…”

The water exploded as Nautilus hurled his anchor at the Moon Serpent.
A tidal wave made stagnant and rotten by its time in the darkness washed over the ship, as the anchor crashed into the deck. It smashed clear through the timbers, and the ship tilted wildly to port as the impossible weight of it pulled it over.
Sarah fell against the railing and jammed her pistols home in their shoulder holsters as the ship tilted downward. Crew screamed as they slid down the angled deck or were thrown overboard. The anchor ripped clear of the ship’s side, and the ship violently righted itself. Sarah looked up at the sound of splintering masts overhead. Silver sails billowed as the topmast and mizzen snapped like twigs, falling to the shattered deck to crush a dozen men or more.
She struggled to her feet, hearing the groan of a keel bending under stresses it had never been designed to endure. Caulked timbers split and geysers of black water erupted all along the length of the deck.
Sarah turned to Aligh, who clung to the bronze cannon that ought to have served as his tomb.
“You did this!” she yelled, as the looming shadow of Nautilus reared up from the water.
The carved wooden railing smashed to splinters as a massive hand, surely too large to have once been mortal, slammed down on the foredeck. Another swiftly followed, trailing a length of chain that slithered with a black, oily substance.
“He’s not real!” screamed Aligh, his mind undone by the sight of Nautilus. “It was just a story!”
“He looks pretty damn real to me!” shouted Sarah over the cacophony of smashing wood, tearing sails, and terrified screams. Fiery heat washed over her as Nautilus hauled his bulk over the gunwale, and turned his infernal gaze upon her.
She felt the deathly heat of it crawling over her skin, its touch loathsome and invasive, as if the titan of the deeps could see into her very soul.
His titanic weight heeled the ship over again, and Sarah grabbed hold of the looped pulley ropes as the deck tilted crazily. The front of the cannon slid sideways as the block and tackle swung wildly and its knotted end strained to bear its colossal weight. The wooden pegs securing the wheels of the gun carriage in place creaked ominously.
Aligh pulled his way along the cannon toward her.
“I won’t go alone!” he screamed. “If the ocean wants me, I’ll drag you down with me!”
The man was a lunatic, like the crippled sailors raving in Bilgewater’s alleys with a mind destroyed by the foulest rotgut. His fraudulent serpent caller robes had come loose, and dangling from his neck on a leather thong was a silver-and-brass sigil of three intertwined serpents.
Swinging on the pulley, Sarah tried to kick him away, but he had a madman’s strength, clawing at her throat with his free hand. Cracked fingernails drew blood, and she struggled to find purchase as the ship tipped over onto its side, its port side now completely underwater.
Far above them, Nautilus drew back his anchor once again and brought it down like a colossal woodsman’s axe.
Its unnatural mass sheared through the deck amidships, and Sarah heard the thunderous crack of the keel finally splitting. The vessel’s stern rose up sharply, and the sounds of Aligh’s screaming crew echoed in the mist.
On the ocean, we are all equal, went the old saying, but right now Sarah didn’t give a wharf-rat’s shit for those murderous, traitorous bastards.
Let them all drown.
The front half of the ship sprang up with the force of the blow, then slammed back down onto the ocean, tilting back upright as seawater poured into the bow section. The weight of it was dragging the prow deeper underwater with every passing second.
In moments, nothing would remain on the surface.
A body slammed into the deck next to her; Aligh’s tattooed daughter, the one with Sarah’s stiletto still jammed in her brain.
Slicks of black fluid spilled from her mouth and swirled in her eyes.
With a groan of screeching metal, Nautilus reached for Aligh with a massive, corroded gauntlet. His crushing grip fastened on the treacherous captain’s torso and pulled. Aligh held fast to Sarah with lunatic strength, as though they embraced like lovers.
She couldn’t shake him loose.
“All because you wouldn’t pay the damn tithe,” snarled Sarah, as Aligh fought to hold on to her.
“The ocean will take you as well as me!” he screamed.
“Not today,” said Sarah, reaching up and back to grip the skull-pommel of the stiletto wedged in the soft tissue under the tattooed twin’s jaw.
She pulled hard, and the blade slid free in a welter of fluids.
“You want him?” said Sarah, reversing her grip on the weapon. “He’s all yours!”
She rammed the blade into the side of Aligh’s neck, driving it hard through to the other side. His head snapped back and Sarah’s hand flashed out to catch a falling leather thong cut loose from around Aligh’s throat. His grip spasmed, and the metal titan wrenched him back just as the deck hook securing Sarah’s rope loop snapped.
The full weight of the cannon yanked on the block and tackle, lifting Sarah away from the weapon and Aligh. Swinging wildly above the sinking ship, she watched as Nautilus turned and sank back into the ocean, the screaming Aligh clutched in one iron fist.
The water closed over him, a trail of frantic bubbles following Aligh down as Nautilus returned to the darkness below with his bounty. As Aligh was dragged down, Sarah took grim pleasure in seeing the look of terror in his eyes at his fate; condemned to an eternity in darkness without so much as a pauper’s marker to his name.
The Moon Serpent’s prow rose almost vertically in the ocean, and Sarah swung on the rope to reach the jutting, serpent figurehead. Her booted feet caught the silver fangs, and she managed to remain upright as the ship slowly sank into the ocean.
With a moment’s pause, she saw the back half of the boat was almost entirely underwater, with only a few sailors crowded in around the upright stern, so close she could likely have swung over to reach them. One of the survivors was Petyr Harker, and she felt bilious hatred rise in her gorge.
“I did tell you I was just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme,” said Petyr. “Admittedly, I didn’t quite see it turning out like this, but at least—”
Sarah didn’t give him a chance to finish, throwing the rope loop toward him like a lasso, and no harpooner had ever cast so perfect a throw.
The loop settled around Petyr’s neck like a noose, but before he could lift it clear, Sarah drew her pistol and aimed upward.
“Say hello to Aligh on the way down, Petyr,” she said, and pulled the trigger.
The shot smashed the block and tackle straining to hold the cannon’s enormous weight, and it immediately fell into the ocean. Sarah had a fraction of a second to savor the look of horror in Petyr’s eyes before the rope snapped taut and wrenched him from his perch.
His scream was cut short as he hit the water and vanished into the depths as the cannon dragged him all the way down.
Standing atop the serpent figurehead, Sarah watched the Moon Serpent’s stern finally go under in a swirl of foaming water and cracking timbers. The few sailors still clinging to the wreckage paddled frantically on the surface before the suction of the wreck finally pulled them down with it.
Looking down, she reckoned she had a few seconds at best before the prow did the same to her.
“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said a voice behind her, and Sarah smiled.
She looked over her shoulder to see Rafen in their landing boat, soaked to the skin and covered in cuts, bruises, and bites. The storm lamp on the prow bobbed like a welcome beacon of safety.
“Thank you kindly, old man,” she said.
“I meant the cannon,” said Rafen, carefully rowing toward her. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see.”
“Aye,” agreed Sarah, “but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”
“Right indeed,” said Rafen.
“So where in the name of the Bearded Lady did you get to?” asked Sarah, “I needed you on the damn deck when everything went to shit.”
Rafen shrugged and said, “Went below to get another bottle of rum and ran into Aligh’s crew fixing to get a-murderin’. They didn’t take kindly to being discovered and tried to cut my damn head off. Managed to gut a couple with some borrowed steel, but had to jump out of a gunport before they shanked me good. Swam around to get our boat, getting feasted on by all that lives under the surface, thank you very much. But I’m here now, so do you want to get on board or are you planning to go down with the ship?”
“This ship’s captain’s already gone with her,” said Sarah, stepping casually from the figurehead to the landing boat.
With her safely aboard, Rafen rowed them away from the doomed Moon Serpent as the figurehead and its topmost mast finally went under in a swirl of bubbles, rope, and broken spars.
Sarah moved to the back of the landing boat, now seeing she wasn’t the only passenger Rafen had picked up. A bloodied body in a lacerated coat of pale blue, gold cuffs, and frayed bronze epaulettes lay slumped in the landing boat’s bilges.
“Blaxton?” said Sarah. “She’s still alive?”
“Just about,” said Rafen. “She’s a blowhard, but she didn’t deserve to go down with scum like Aligh. Didn’t feel right to leave her to drown, right?”
Sarah said nothing, too exhausted to do more than nod.
“So you going to tell me what in the eight seas happened up there?” asked Rafen.
“You’d never believe me,” said Sarah.
“I’m guessing it was you that sank the ship firing the damn cannon into the deck?” said Rafen.
“Wasn’t me. What happened up there was all Aligh’s doing,” said Sarah, with a look that told him not to ask more.
“Fair enough.”
“Though I did manage to get this.” She opened her palm to reveal a disc stamped with three intertwined serpents of silver and brass.
“Aligh’s sigil,” said Rafen.
“Might not mean much these days, but we’ll see what happens when I show it to the rest of his crew, once they’ve sobered up.”
Rafen grinned. “Well, at least this trip wasn’t a total waste of time.”
Sarah slumped in the back of the boat and watched as the rearing crag of Moonshard Reef began to fade into the mist. She narrowed her eyes as she saw a lone figure climb from the water and shake itself dry.
A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat.
“Thorne,” she whispered. “It’s always the bloody rats that make it out.”
“What’s that?” said Rafen, mid-row. “Someone else made it out?”
“No,” said Sarah, turning away. “No one at all.”
Dead of Winter

Graham McNeill

Even from a distance, Sejuani could see the mammoth was dying, but like everything in the Freljord, it fought to live with every fiber of its being. Half a dozen spears and twice that many arrows jutted from the colossal beast’s matted hide, its russet hair stiff with frozen blood, but still it wouldn’t die.

Its furious bellows shook the mountainside, and Sejuani kept glancing to the lightning-wreathed summit, fearful of an avalanche.

Or something worse…

Purple lightning flared beyond the mountains, silhouetting the toothed peaks and turning them into serrated fangs ripping open the sky.

She and her Winter’s Claw hunters had stalked the mammoth for a week, driving it toward the shallow canyons of the foothills, but each time it broke through their ring of spears and axes to flee higher up the mountain’s pine-shawled flanks.

Of the ten warriors she had set out with, only seven now remained.

Three less mouths to feed.

Sejuani hated having to think this way, because these were fine hunters and fearsome warriors, but Viljalmr the seer was predicting one of the harshest winters in living memory and the Winter’s Claw’s supplies of food were dwindling fast. The mountain herds of Elnuk they would usually raid had already been driven south to the greener lowlands by their Avarosan drovers, and the fish of the Ice Sea were locked below thick pack ice.

She hauled back on Bristle’s reins, pausing to gather her thoughts. The giant drüvask grunted and shook his head in annoyance, the smell of the mammoth’s blood thick in its nostrils. The mounts of her hunters were wary at being this close to a mammoth, but Bristle was eager for a fight.

“Easy there,” she said, loosening the stiffened scarf from across her mouth and feeling the cold on her skin like a slap in the face. “This is not a fight for tusks, but spears and bows.”

“Good to know even Iceborn can feel this svaaging cold,” said a cloaked figure riding next to her. His voice was muffled by the furs wrapped around his face, and all Sejuani could see were his bloodshot eyes. The rest of his face was hidden behind a leather mask wrought in the shape of a roaring bear, its snout formed by thick, overlapping knotwork.

A low rumble built in Bristle’s throat at the man’s nearness, so Sejuani ran a hand through the coarse, wiry hair of his flanks to calm him.

“I feel it well enough, Urkath,” Sejuani replied, “I just don’t gripe about it.”

Urkath nodded up the mountain and said, “How much higher do you think our quarry will go before it turns and fights?”

Some three hundred yards ahead of them, the mammoth trudged uphill through the snow, its steps labored and a trail of crimson staining the virgin whiteness of the landscape.

“It won’t be long,” said Sejuani. “He’s lost too much blood to reach the summit. He’ll turn before the timberline.”

“How do you know?” asked Urkath.

“I don’t,” admitted Sejuani, “but I’m betting he thinks we won’t follow him if he gets higher.”

“Is he wrong? Any higher and we’ll cross into the realm of He Who Stands.”

Even thinking about the Volibear and the Ursine flooded Sejuani’s mouth with the taste of warm blood and the sensation of lightning in her veins.

Images flashed in her mind, sharp, bright, and painfully real. Memories that weren’t hers, sensations she hadn't felt, woven together as though she’d lived them only moments ago.

Fangs and claws ripping flesh from the bone…

Elongated skulls with cold, blue fire burning in empty eye sockets….

A pact and a living city reduced to blackened skeletons of stone and timber…

Slaughtered corpses hung from the withered branches of death-nourished trees…

“Warmother?” said Urkath.

Sejuani tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come, as though a more ancient, primal part of her soul was looking out through her eyes, the part that once ran with the beasts, knees and palms bloody, skin raw and bare, caked in mud.

Urkath reached out and placed a hand on her fur-swathed arm.

“Warmother?” he said again, more urgent this time.

Her hackles raised at his unwanted touch. Saliva filled her mouth as her lips pulled back, baring her teeth, ready to tear his throat out.

Sejuani closed her fist on the spiked pommel of her saddle, hard.

The pain cleared her head and wrenched her back to the present as she let out a shuddering breath.

“You’ll want to take that hand away,” she said, her eyes flashing a pale winter’s blue and her tone icier than the mountain winds.

Eyes watchful, Urkath snatched his hand back and said, “Apologies, Warmother, but to enter the lands of the Lost Ones without their leave… it’s a death sentence.”

A shadow blotted out the low sun before Sejuani could respond, a towering figure of a man wearing the wide-horned helm favored by warriors of the Lokfar.

The coastal peninsula of Lokfar was one of the harshest, most brutally cold regions of the Freljord, and only those with fire in their blood could endure there.

Its warriors were typically rangy, lean, and stoic.

Shedding blood alongside Olaf the Berserker for many years had taught Sejuani that he was none of those things. Even on foot, he was easily the biggest Freljordian she had ever seen, the equal of the mounted Sejuani and Urkath in height. Some said Olaf’s mother must have lain with a troll to grow so big, but they never said it to his face.

He climbed into the teeth of the oncoming blizzard like a man out for a stroll, his powerfully-muscled body made thicker and broader by the furs and iron plates bound across his chest and arms.

The braids of his beard were frozen into spikes of fiery orange and his pale eyes were alight with the prospect of potentially facing what lay at the top of the mountain.

“A death sentence, you say,” said Olaf, striding past them. “I like the sound of that.”

The mammoth sank to its knees within a spear’s throw of the cliffside timberline.

Its blood soaked the snow, and Sejuani almost felt sorry for the beast, coming so close to the border between this world and the terrible things that dwelled in the storms wracking the summit.

She pushed thoughts of sentiment aside. An animal this size would feed the Winter’s Claw for a week—surviving a day, an hour, or even the span of a breath was a victory in the Freljord.

Sejuani slid from Bristle’s back as her hunters dropped to the snow, unstrapping long, thick-hafted spears from their mounts. She reached over her shoulder and unlaced the thongs securing her mighty flail, Winter’s Wrath.

Steeling herself for the pain, she gripped its leather-wrapped haft and swung it around her body, feeling the deathly cold of the True Ice secured at the end of its thick chain. Pale radiance built behind the blue of her eyes, and she exhaled a breath of aching cold.

The flail was a weapon of great power, but it came with a cost.

Glowing lines of hard, crystalline blue formed under her skin, threading the veins of her forearm and reaching up to her corded bicep.

Urkath drew his great longsword, its hilt worked from the jawbones of a rimefang wolf and its blade sharp enough to cut stone. Olaf unsheathed his mighty axes, their blades glimmering with hoar-frost.

“My edges hunger,” said Olaf, his teeth grinding in anticipation. Blood flecked his lips where he’d chewed the inside of his cheeks.

“We do this right,” said Sejuani. “Together. No heroics.”

Olaf grinned and nodded, his eyes glazing over and his mind already sinking into the blood-mist of the berserker.

Sejuani took a step toward the mammoth, lifting the flail and letting the beast see the glimmering cold of its True Ice.

“Get up,” she ordered. “You are a king of the Freljord. You don’t die on your knees.”

The mammoth glared at her and, taking strength from her words, pushed itself to its feet. It threw back its shaggy, tusked head and loosed a ferocious bray of defiance. The sound echoed over the mountains like the Forge God’s legendary Carnyx, a war-horn whose blast could be heard all around the world.

The sound shook snow from the trees, eclipsing the storm raging at the summit.

The mammoth lowered its head and stamped its huge front legs, each as thick as the ironwood trees ringing the rocks at Ornnkaal. Its head swayed from side to side, displaying its jagged, sword-like tusks, each capable of goring a warrior to death with a single blow.

“We will give you a good death, you have my word,” promised Sejuani.

“A glorious death…” grunted Olaf, the words forced out between bloodied teeth, but Sejuani wasn’t sure whose death he meant.

The Winter’s Claw hunters spread out, weapons at the ready. The warriors with the spears flanked the mammoth left and right as Sejuani, Olaf, and Urkath stood before it, meeting its challenge head-on.

With a bellow of rage, the mortally wounded beast charged.

Its speed was ferocious, far faster than should have been possible.

It churned the snow, throwing up great chunks of black rock and bloody ice.

Sejuani and Urkath dove to the side, but Olaf leapt to meet the beast with a bellow to rival that of his foe. His ax struck the mammoth in the center of its head, but bit only a finger breadth before skidding from the thick bone of its skull. With a dismissive flick of its trunk, the mammoth tossed the berserker over its back. Olaf landed hard on the rocks behind, dangerously close to the sheer drop of the cliffs. He came to his feet with a delighted, lunatic laugh.

Sejuani rolled to her feet and swung Winter’s Wrath in a wide, two-handed sweep.

The flail’s True Ice smashed into the mammoth’s back knee.

It faltered, stumbling as the limb buckled beneath it.

The beast crashed to the ground and skidded to a halt, trying to push itself to its feet on a back leg that wouldn’t work. Sejuani’s warriors closed in, ramming their spears into its flanks with the grim, pitiless precision of hunters who had done this many times before.

Thrust the blade, twist the haft, withdraw to a safe distance.

The mammoth roared and surged upright as iron spearheads pierced its body, fresh blood staining the snow. A successful hunt had little to do with glory or honor; it was about exhausting the prey, wounding it and wearing it down until it couldn’t fight back.

Then came the killing.

One of her warriors slipped in the snow, and the mammoth jerked to the side, stamping down with one mighty foreleg. The man’s scream was cut off as he was crushed to gory red paste beneath its massive foot.

The other hunters backed off, chests heaving, looking for an opening to strike again.

The mammoth swung its lethal tusks from side to side, turning on the spot and backing toward the edge of the cliff. Sejauni moved left, keeping the head of her flail in motion. Urkath circled right, sword held high at his shoulder.

Sejuani resisted turning her head as she heard Olaf’s ululating battle cry.

He charged headfirst at the mammoth, his ax flashing silver in the waning light.

The beast lowered its head, tusks ready to gore the berserker to death.

Olaf was deep in the blood-mist, a state of mind that turned him into a ferocious killing machine, a living avatar of death. The mammoth swung its head up and Olaf leapt into the air to grip one of the slashing tusks with his free hand. Using the momentum of the beast’s movement, he swung up and over its head to land on the mammoth’s shaggy back.

His ax hacked down, like a woodsman chopping at a stubborn tree-root.

The mammoth reared up, shaking its body to dislodge the berserker, but Olaf had ridden wilder monsters than this. He gripped a handful of its long hair and laid a flurry of blows upon the mammoth’s back. Seeing his chance, Urkath charged toward the beast, sword raised to cut its exposed throat.

Its trunk lashed around his waist like a tentacle of the boneless creatures that sometimes washed up from the deep ocean on Yadulsk’s shores. The mammoth lifted Urkath into the air before slamming him down on a jutting black rock.

Sejuani heard his spine shatter even over his scream of agony.

Twice more it smashed him against the rock before hurling his body aside.

Urkath’s bloody remains fell to the snow, his body shattered, his arms and legs hideously twisted. Sejuani screamed and sprinted forward as Olaf continued to chop through the beast’s thick hide to its spine.

The beast’s eyes were maddened with pain and fury, but still it saw her coming.

It bellowed and thrust its tusks at her, almost too fast to avoid.

Almost…

Sejuani dropped to the snow and slid beneath the mammoth’s belly on her back. Holding the haft of Winter’s Wrath in one hand, she screamed as she took hold of the chained shard of True Ice in her fist.

The pain was unbearable, as if she’d thrust her hand deep into a fire.

She slammed the shard up into the mammoth’s chest, turning her head from the flaring burst of blue-white fire as it punched deep into its body.

Sejuani slid out from under the mammoth and sprang to her feet. The chained True Ice fell from her numbed hand. Her fingers were black and clawed with frostbite.

The mammoth staggered, its mighty heart freezing in its chest, the blood in its veins turning to ice. Its eyes misted with the white of a blizzard and it staggered like a drunk as it fought to stay upright.

“Olaf, get off!” yelled Sejuani. “Olaf!”

Her voice was hard and commanding, a voice to be obeyed. It penetrated the blood-mist wreathing Olaf’s mind, and he vaulted from the mammoth’s back.

He landed next to her, chest heaving, eyes wide and his ax blade soaked in blood.

Sejuani wanted to speak, but the pain was too great. That was good, she hoped, it meant the hand wasn’t beyond saving. Her fingers throbbed in agony, and she thrust them deep within her furs, doing her best to hide the pain.

The mammoth staggered and swayed, dragging its back leg as its blood grew ever more sluggish and cold. Her hunters closed in, spears poised, but Sejuani halted them with a word. The hunt was over. The beast had its back to the cliff, nowhere to go.

Though the mammoth knew it was beaten, it lifted its head proudly.

It had fought to the last, and Sejuani held her weapon high, honoring its spirit.

The great beast stared her down, caring nothing for the gesture.

Instead, it stepped back and over the cliff.

Sejuani ran to the cliff’s edge and sank to her knees, watching as the mammoth fell thousands of feet down the mountain before landing on a wide expanse of heavy snow.

“Svaag!” swore Sejuani, balling her fists in the snow, heedless of the pain.

Olaf stood over her, leaning dangerously far out over the cliff.

“Ach, we’ll just climb down to carve it up,” he said with a shrug. “The beast saved us the bother of dragging its carcass off the mountain.”

Sejuani sighed, about to agree with him, when she heard a distant cracking sound. A sound babes in arms were taught to recognize.

The sound of breaking ice.

A network of angular black lines spread out from where the mammoth had landed and Sejuani realized the wide expanse of white wasn’t a stretch of tundra at all. It was the frozen surface of a mountain tarn, a lake pool formed in a deep hollow.

The ice splintered into jagged segments and Sejuani watched with a sick sense of horrified inevitability as the mammoth’s body slid beneath the frigid black waters, far beyond their reach.

“Svaaaaaaag!”

Defying all Sejuani’s understanding of the human body, Urkath yet lived.

His ribs were smashed and his spine was splintered into fragments, but he still drew breath as Sejuani and Olaf squatted next to him. Incredibly, he’d managed to prop himself up against the very rock that had destroyed his spine, drawing short, hiked breaths.

“Wolf calls me home…” he said with a pained grin, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Lamb would never think to come for you, Urkath,” said Sejuani, taking his hand. “We are Winter’s Claw. We don’t go meekly into the beyond.”

Urkath nodded. “My sword?”

Olaf pressed Urkath’s weapon into his palm and closed the man’s fingers around its grip.

“The tale of your death will be told at the hearthfires for many seasons,” said the berserker, a melancholic edge in his voice. “I envy you that.”

Urkath coughed a mouthful of blood and said, “I’d gladly… swap fates with you, big man.”

“No,” said Olaf sadly. “I do not think that you would.”

Urkath turned his head, the light fading from his eyes, and said, “The gods… they show me a fine sight… as I die…”

Sejuani followed his gaze to the top of the mountain, where a vivid borealis of crimson and amber had driven away the lightning, a swathe of light painting the night sky that was as beautiful and magical as it was strange.

She saw Urkath’s bloodstained mask lying in the snow and slid it over his now lifeless face.

“Wolf will be here soon,” whispered Sejuani. “Give the old bastard a scare for me.”

They left Urkath there, at the border between the realm of mortals and the Lost Ones.

His body belonged to the Freljord now and his spirit would roam the frozen winds until the cold, atavistic soul of the land found a use for it.

Their mood was grim as they descended the mountain.

To stay on the hunt any longer would be pointless. As it was, they had only scraps to sustain them back to the Winter’s Claw encampment, two days’ travel westward.

Exhausted and with hunger gnawing at her belly, Sejuani swayed in Bristle’s saddle, her frozen hand tingling beneath her furs.

Olaf kept pace with her on foot, keeping his own counsel, his mood dark.

Night closed in as they reached the foot of the mountains and camped in the lee of a titanic menhir. It had once been part of a great stone circle higher up the mountain, but had toppled in a long-ago earthquake. The smooth stone surface was carved with ancient symbols no one could read, and a pair of frozen skeletons lay entwined at its far end, a frosted blade lying within their bones.

Lovers or bitter enemies, who could say?

Dawn brought fresh snows and colder winds coming off the high peaks, as though the mountain itself sought to drive them from its slopes. Their route home took them past the remains of a village that had once stood where the road turned to the mountain pass. Its structures were ghostly tombs now, its inhabitants dead or long gone.

Nightfall on the second day saw them come within sight of the Winter’s Claw encampment.

A few guttering torches marked its edge, and Sejuani’s heart sank to see how few they were now. Not so very long ago, when she had first marshaled her followers, they numbered in the thousands, but hunger and the harshness of recent seasons had forced her to scatter her host.

“How do you fare?” asked Olaf as they trudged toward the beacons of light, the first words he had said since coming off the mountain.

“At last, he speaks,” said Sejuani, irritated at his sullenness.

“Ach, don’t mind me,” said Olaf. “Each time the blood-mist takes me I hope it will be the last time. That I will finally die in glory. And every time it fades, I am sad that I know I am one step closer to dying at peace.”

Sejuani shrugged. “Have no fear, Olaf. With enemies all around us, I promise you days of blood and battle, nights of death and fury.”

Olaf grinned, and his grim countenance vanished like snow before the summer.

“You swear it?”

“I swear it,” promised Sejuani. “But to answer your first question, Viljalmr will take it as an ill-omen that the tribe’s leader returns with nothing to show for her hunt.”

“A pox on his kind,” spat Olaf. “Seers only ever speak in riddles and deliver naught but grim portents. I’d sooner trust a southerner.”

Sensing an opening, Sejuani asked, “Are you ever going to tell me why you went south?”

“No,” said the berserker. “I don’t think I will. Some tales are best left in the past.”

Sejuani ran the stiff brush through Bristle’s fur, letting the anger burning within her after the meeting in the tented longhouse flow from her with every hard sweep. As she’d feared, the seer, Viljalmr, had found great woe in her having returned without meat for curing. Circling the firepit, his cloak of raven feathers glistening in the orange light of the flames, he told the assembled claw-leaders that the coming winter would be the grimmest any of them had known.

Olaf had openly mocked the man, telling him a child could see the same thing.

The other hunting claws had met with little more success—Svalyek’s claw had taken six elnuk from an Avarosan drover who’d waited too long to lead his herd to greener pastures, and Heffnar’s group had found and killed a small pod of horned seals trapped on land after the ocean floes had frozen to the edge of the land.

It wasn’t nearly enough, but it would keep the tribe’s bellies full for a few days.

Fear made the tribe’s blood run hot, and shouting voices clamored to know what she would do, how she planned to keep her people alive until the spring muster. Sejuani had no answer, and angry voices echoed long into the night with ill-formed thoughts on how they should survive.

Some said they should march south to Ornnkaal Rocks and make peace with the Avarosans, but they were quickly shouted down by Gunnak, the most bellicose of Sejuani’s war-leaders. Beating his tattooed chest with his ax, he demanded they take their claws and carve a red path as deep as they could into Avarosan lands to earn a glorious death.

Sejuani had to admit, despite its suicidal futility, the idea of riding into the southern lowlands with blades unsheathed greatly appealed to her. Others said they should try another hunt. After all, wasn’t there still light and food enough to mount one more expedition?

Heads nodded at that suggestion until Hunt-leader Varruki explained there was barely enough food to sustain the hunters, and that everyone would be frozen and starved before they returned.

Quieter speakers said maybe they should disperse the tribe, each family making their own way into the wilds. Smaller groups would be easier to feed after all…

Sejuani had quashed such talk straight away.

She knew it was going to be hard enough to get the full tribe back together in the spring months as it was. Breaking up even further would only tempt each smaller group to turn from the Winter’s Claw to try and forge a new life in the south.

In the Freljord, community was life, and to separate further was to die. No one could endure alone, and only by the combined will of the tribe, even one as harsh and unforgiving as the Winter’s Claw, was survival even possible.

Besides, going south meant a life lived as a prisoner of the fields, of homes built from stone, of tending flocks. That was not the Winter’s Claw way, and would never be their way.

Sejuani would rather die with the blood running hot in her veins and a blade in her hand than stooped and worn down by years of grubbing in the dirt for seeds.

In the end, Viljalmr had marched straight up to her, a brazen threat to her authority.

How were the Winter’s Claw to survive?
Once, she would have struck him down for such open defiance, but his question was fair and everyone gathered in the tent knew it.

Her people needed a leader who could make life and death decisions without fear, so she told the assembled leaders they would have her answer when dawn’s light clawed over the mountains.

Now, brushing the thick hair running down Bristle’s back, she felt the raging storm within her mind finally calming. Grooming the giant beast always soothed Sejuani’s emotions, reminding her of a time when things had been simpler, though part of her knew that life had never been simpler, not really.

She thought back to when she’d brought Ashe to the Winter’s Claw after finding her alone and in exile on the ice. She smiled, remembering how her childhood friend had mistaken Sejuani for one of the Ursine.

Her strokes grew harder as she thought of how Ashe had betrayed them and turned her back on Sejuani during the raid on the Ebrataal. That was the moment Sejuani had known for sure there was no chance of the Winter’s Claw ever making peace with the Avarosan.

Bristle grunted in annoyance, stamping his hoofs in irritation.

“Careful, lass, the beast’s getting unsettled,” said a voice from behind.

Sejuani spun, reaching for the knife at her hip.

A shape lay at the corner of the corral, small and useless looking, like a bundle of rags.

She released her grip on the knife, shocked to see who had spoken.

Lying in a makeshift bed of straw was a wretched old man who should have been left out on the ice to die many years ago. His legs were stumps that ended just above the knee, and his sightless eyes were mottled white like a gull’s egg.

His name was Kriek and he’d once been the seer of Olgavanna’s tribe, farmers and builders who’d refused the call to Sejuani’s banner. So she had sent Urkath’s war-claw to wipe them out and take their herds, their furs, their iron, and their salt. The survivors fled up the slopes of a mountain whose summit seethed with the red rock that flows.

When Urkath returned, it was with Kriek on his back and he’d seemed confused when Sejuani demanded to know why he’d brought them a useless mouth to feed. Urkath claimed the Ursine had driven them from the mountain, speaking of blade-pierced titans draped in bloodied fur and horns, gaping skulls, and fists that hurled fire.

He’d simply said that the mountain had told him to bring the blind man, before dumping him unceremoniously at the edge of the village. Sejuani had given orders that no one feed the seer, that he be left behind for the Freljord to take. But here he was, many months and leagues from that battle, alive and, more confusingly, somehow still with the Winter’s Claw.

“Word is you glimpsed the realm of the Lost Ones on the mountain,” said Kriek. “Don’t envy you that, lass. I saw them once, back when you drove us into Hearth-Home.”

Sejuani put aside her irritation long enough to say, “You didn’t see anything. You’re blind.”

Kriek nodded and said, “Oh, I seen them, better’n any true-shotted archer ever did. White and gold in the clouds, lightning for blood, and voices of thunder. I saw, I did.”

Sejuani peered into the milky whiteness of his gaze.

“Those eyes haven’t seen anything in many a year.”

“True,” said Kriek. “World went white for me on my tenth winter, but some things are best seen without eyes, lass!”

Sejuani tapped the flat of her blade against Kriek’s neck and said, “Call me lass again and I’ll slit your throat right now.”

“Ah, yes, that’s right, you’re no lass, you’re Warmother, ain’t ya? You remember that next time some seer tries to tell you what to do,” laughed Kriek, waving a filthy, gnawed hand at her. “But listen, you know warriors who lose a hand or leg’ll swear they can still feel the cold in ‘em? Same for my eyes. Now I see more’n I ever did before, more’n I ever wished to see. Things you’d gouge your own eyes out with that knife if y’saw the half of them.”

“You don’t know the things I’ve seen,” said Sejuani.

“That’s right,” said Kriek, leaning in. “Ever since that night you and your spirit walker made offerings to the Lost Ones… You sang the oaths, you burned the wood in the death knot, and offered up the weapons and bone, so what do you see? Days of blood and battle, nights of death and fury?”

Just thinking of the slaughter at the city by the river filled Sejuani with a hunger for raw meat, a thirst for marrow sucked from splintered bone.

She shook her head free of the sensations and said, “How are you alive? I told my people not to feed you, to leave you behind.”

“Old Ornn fed me,” said Kriek. “At Hearth-Home, just before your killers came out of the smoke. Lifted me up like a babe and nourished me with a mouthful of broth from his great cauldron. That he did, yes!”

Sejuani sighed. Kriek was clearly mad, but she was more irritated that someone in the Winter’s Claw had clearly been feeding this old fool when their own were going hungry. She went to rise, but the old man’s hand shot out and took her wrist in a powerful grip.

“On my honor, not a scrap of food has passed my lips since your dead man brought me down the mountain,” said Kriek, his lifeless white eyes boring right into her, as though something else stared out from behind them, something infinitely older and wiser. “Never took no food. Nor water, neither! Ornn’s great cauldron seen to that! No company that sups from it ever leaves unsatisfied. One mouthful and your belly don’t growl for a whole turn of the seasons!”

“Ornn’s Cauldron?” scoffed Sejuani. “That’s just a legend. Wishful thinking. It’s one of the lost tales to tell to children.”

“And where d’you think them tales come from but truth!” snapped Kriek. lifting the furs covering his body. “This look like wishful thinking to you?”

Sejuani let out an involuntary gasp at the sight of Kriek’s torso, his flesh ruddy and pink, his belly full and soft with fat. Sejuani was ivory pale, her wrists too slender, the flesh pulled tight over her frame, pressing against the bones for want of meat and fat and fish.

“How…?” said Sejuani.

“I told ya,” said Kriek. “The Great Cauldron of Ornn. Lost Ones stole it from Hearth-Home for spite’s sake. Said Ornn was too soft on mortals, that if they could fill their bellies any time they wanted, they’d get spoiled and weak! So they killed his followers and took it to their mountain, high up where its power now paints the sky with blood-red light. Ornn’s crafty, y’see. His magic’s too wyrd-cunning to stay hidden forever. Even the Lost Ones can’t keep power like that out of sight! Ask that spirit walker friend of yours. If he still remembers he’s a man, he’ll hear the truth of what I say!”

Sejuani shook her head. “Udyr’s gone. He walked into the blizzard. Said he needed time away from the spirits looking to get inside him. Said he needed to find a way to strengthen his will.”

“Then it’s all on you, Warmother,” said Kriek. “What’s it to be? The old ways? Frozen on your knees or your blood soaking warm southern soil? Or maybe try and take back what the Lost Ones stole? You’ve faced them before, so what’s one more time, eh?”

The old man’s story was lunacy, wasn’t it? How could she possibly convince her people to march into the mountain realm of the Ursine on the word of a madman?

The Freljord was a place of dark mystery, where legends walked the ice, and its magic was there in every breath. Some whispered that Ashe had fought her way to the legendary bow of Avarosa, and Sejuani’s own Iceborn powers were proof that magic was woven into the very fabric of the landscape… but still…?

“Why would you help me?” asked Sejuani. “My warriors slew your tribe.”

“Don’t you understand yet, Warmother?” said Kriek, the timbre of his voice deepening, becoming low and melodic. “We are all one tribe and it is long past time you understood that. You think too small, like a fighter only seeing the foe in front of them. You must think like a Warmother, like a queen! There is a season for fighting, a season for leading, and, aye, one for dying. But a time is coming when the sons and daughters of the Freljord must stand together or you will all die, one by one. And the first step on that road is staying alive. Tell me you hear me, daughter of Kalkia.”

Sejuani nodded and said, “I hear you.”

Sejuani left Kriek and Bristle in the corral. First light was breaking over the mountains, and she paused to savor the coming of a new day.

The orange glow of the dying hearthfire was visible within the tented longhouse, where her people waited to hear what she had decided.

Olaf squatted by its entrance, running a glittering whetstone over the blade of one of his enormous axes. He looked up and his eyes narrowed.

“You have the look of someone chewing a nettle,” he said.

“I know what we have to do, but no one’s going to like it.”

Olaf shrugged. “They don’t need to like it. You’re Warmother. You tell them what to do and they do it. That’s how this works.”

“I’ll want you at my side,” said Sejuani.

Olaf rose to his full, towering height, hooking his ax over his shoulder.

“No,” said Sejuani. “Blade out.”

Olaf nodded slowly and said, “You going to tell me your plan before we go in?”

“Remember how I promised you days of blood and battle, nights of death and fury?”

“Aye, Warmother, I do!” said Olaf, his smile as wide as the horizon.

“We’re going back up the mountain,” said Sejuani. “To the realm of the Ursine to steal the Great Cauldron of Ornn from the Volibear.”

“You’re right, they’re not going to like it,” said Olaf. “But I love it!”
Demacian Heart

Phillip Vargas

The boy admired the yellow dormisroot peeking through the frozen soil. It was one of hundreds growing in a tiny patch of vivid color in an otherwise barren landscape. He crouched next to the blossom and inhaled. Crisp morning air and a faint aroma greeted his nose. He reached out to pick the wildflower.
“Leave it be,” said Vannis.
The older man towered over the boy, his blue cloak stirring in the gentle breeze. Marsino stood next to him, holding an unlit torch. The three had been waiting for a while, completely unchallenged.
The younger man smiled down at the boy and nodded.
The boy plucked the flower and stuffed it in his pocket.
Vannis shook his head and frowned. “Your time with the boy has instilled bad habits.”
Marsino flushed at the remark, his smile disappearing. He cleared his throat and asked, “Do you see anything?”
The boy stood and studied the row of houses across the frostbitten field, the weathered dwellings nothing more than dilapidated shacks strewn across a hillside. Shapes and shadows moved past the cast-glass windows.
“There’re people inside,” he said.
“We can all see that,” said Vannis, his tone biting. “Do you see what we’re looking for?”
The boy searched for the smallest hint or impression. He saw nothing but the dull grey of weathered planks and hewn stone.
“No, sir.”
Vannis grumbled underneath his breath.
“Perhaps if we drew closer,” said Marsino.
The older man shook his head. “These are hillfolk. They’ll put a spear in you before you get within twenty paces of their door.”
The boy shivered at the words. The southern hillfolk’s fierce reputation was known back in the Great City. They lived in the untamed edges of the kingdom, near the disputed territories. He glanced over his shoulder and inched closer to Marsino.
“Light the torch,” said Vannis.
Marsino struck his flint, showering the oil-soaked cord with sparks. The pitch erupted in flames and chased away the brisk morning air.
They didn’t need to wait long.
Several cabin doors opened, and a dozen men and women marched toward the group. They carried pikes and axes.
The boy’s hand fell to the dagger at his side. He turned to Marsino, but the man’s eyes were fixed on the villagers.
“Steady, boy,” said Vannis.
The crowd stopped at the edge of the field, their ragged clothing in stark contrast to the royal blue and white finery worn by Vannis and Marsino. Even the boy’s own clothes were better kept.
A slight tingle ran down his spine. He touched Marsino’s arm, attracting his attention, and nodded. The man acknowledged the signal and motioned for him to step back. There was a process to be followed.
An old woman stepped out from behind the crowd. “Do mageseekers burn villages now?” she asked.
“There’s nothing here, move on!” shouted a young man with wild hair, standing next to the woman. The others joined in, jeering and barking.
“Hush!” the woman snapped, elbowing the man in the ribs.
The man winced and bowed his head. The crowd fell silent.
The hillfolk were unlike anyone the boy had seen in the Great City. They didn’t shrink at the sight of mageseekers in their traditional blue cloaks and half-masks of hammered bronze. Instead, they stood tall and defiant. A few fiddled with their weapons, glaring at the boy. He averted his gaze.
Marsino stepped forward. “A bushel of dormisroot arrived in Wrenwall six days ago,” he said, gesturing to the flowers with his torch.
“People sell things. People buy things. Is it different in the city?” the old woman asked.
The hillfolk laughed.
The boy nervously joined in. Even Marsino offered up a weak smile. Vannis remained unmoved. He regarded the crowd, hand on his quarterstaff.
“Of course not,” said Marsino. “But the flower is rare this time of year.”
“We’re good farmers. Good hunters, too,” she said, the smile disappearing.
Vannis fixed his gaze on the old woman. “Aye, but the ground is frozen and there isn’t one among you who’s ever worked a plough.”
The old woman shrugged. “Things grow where they want. Who are we to say different.”
Vannis smirked. “Aye, plants grow,” he said, as he unclipped the Graymark from his cloak. He dropped down on his haunches and held the carved, stone disk over a dormisroot.
The petals wilted and shriveled.
“But they don’t die at the sight of petricite,” said Vannis, standing back up. “Unless you use magecraft to grow them.”
The smiles disappeared from the villagers’ faces.
“The use of magic is forbidden,” said Marsino. “We are all Demacian. Bound by birth to honor her laws—”
“You can’t eat honor up here,” said the old woman.
“Even if you could, your belly’d be empty,” sneered Vannis.
The crowd stirred at the insult and pressed in closer, coming within several paces of the mageseekers.
Marsino cleared his throat and raised a hand. “The hillfolk have always honored the ways of Demacia. Keeping with law and tradition,” he said. “We only ask you do so again today. Will the afflicted step forward?”
No one moved or said a word.
After a moment, Marsino spoke again. “If honor does not compel you, then know we have a boy here that will root out the guilty.”
The crowd focused on the boy. Reproach welled in their eyes as harsh whispers flowed through their ranks.
“So the runt can invoke magic without censure, but not us?” asked the man who had shouted earlier.
The boy shrank at the accusation.
“He works in service to Demacia,” Marsino said, before turning to the boy. “It’s fine, go ahead.”
He nodded and rubbed a sweaty palm on the leg of his breeches before turning to face the hillfolk. Among the dirt-streaked faces stood a singular, radiating presence. A corona of light pulsated and shimmered around the mage.
Only the boy could see this light, and it had been so all his life. This was his gift. This was his affliction.
The rest of the villagers watched with scorn. It was the same everywhere. These people hated him for his gift. All of them—except for the old woman. Her soft eyes simply pleaded with him not to speak.
The boy hung his head and looked at the ground.
They all waited as the moment stretched in silence. He could feel Vannis taking measure, and judging him harshly.
“It’s alright,” said Marsino, placing an encouraging hand on his shoulder. “We keep the order. We uphold the law.”
The boy looked up, ready to point out the mage.
“Don’t say it, boy,” said the old woman, shaking her head. “I’ll accept it. Do you hear me?”
“Enough of this,” Vannis snapped, pushing past him, Graymark in hand.
The radiant light around the mage momentarily dimmed as the crowd closed in.
“Wait!”
“Quiet, boy. You had your chance.”
But it wasn’t the woman who was afflicted.
The boy turned to Marsino. “It’s not her! It’s the other one!” he said, pointing to the wild-haired man standing next to the old woman.
Marsino took his eyes off the hillfolk, attempting to follow the boy’s gesture. But before he could fix on the threat, the man lunged at the mageseekers.
“Mamma!” he yelled as he reached for Vannis. His hands glimmered with an emerald sheen as thorny vines bloomed from his fingertips.
Vannis spun out of the way, swinging his staff in a wide arc, and cracked the mage across the temple with the hefty wooden pole.
The mage stumbled into Marsino, clutching him by the arm. Sharp thorns pierced his sleeve. Marsino recoiled in pain and shoved the stricken man to the ground, dropping the torch in the commotion.
Flames licked the man’s tunic and ignited the tatters.
The old woman screamed and rushed toward her son.
Arms grabbed and pulled her back, holding her as she struggled. The rest of the hillfolk pressed forward, but Vannis held his ground, staff ready.
“Did he touch you?!”
Marsino fumbled with his weapon, finally unhooking his scepter, his eyes glazed and unfocused.
“Marsino!”
“I’m fine!”
“Are there any more?” Vannis yelled.
The boy didn’t answer. He remained frozen, gazing down at the dying mage writhing in the flames. Bitterness rose in his throat, but he choked back the foul taste, refusing to retch.
“Boy!”
He finally snapped to attention. The fire was spreading through the field, creating a wall between them and the mob. He searched the murderous faces behind the growing flames, the heat overwhelming his senses.
“No.”
“Then mount up!”
The boy mounted his pony. Marsino and Vannis quickly followed on their own steeds and the three raced away from the village. The boy turned to look back. The fire roared, and the field of flowers was already wilting.

Vannis had pushed them to ride well into the evening, putting as much distance between them and the hillfolk as possible. It would take three days to reach Castle Wrenwall. Vannis intended to mount a cohort of mageseekers and return. The law must be upheld, he said.
They bedded down shortly after dark, the rocky terrain too dangerous to navigate. The boy was relieved to have his own feet on the ground. Boys from Dregbourne rarely rode horses, unless they stole them from a livery stable, and he’d never been much of a thief.
He took the first watch, sitting at the base of a towering oak, back and bottom sore and stiff from hours of riding. He shifted his body, seeking a comfortable position. After a few minutes, he stood and leaned against the ancient giant. A solitary wolf howled somewhere up in the hills, and a chorus responded in kind. Or perhaps they were braget hounds—he still couldn’t tell them apart.
Distant thunderheads flickered in the night sky, their rumblings so removed they never reached his ears. Overhead, stars struggled to push through drifting billows of gray. A sheet of thick fog settled over the lowlands.
He threw another bundle of wood in the fire. It sent up a burst of embers that quickly died out.
Ghostly voices filled the stillness in his mind. They pleaded and denied a shimmering truth as memories of the burning mage danced in the campfire. He shuddered and turned away.
It had been a gruesome death. But every time those thoughts invaded his mind he pushed them away and replaced them with all the beauty he’d witnessed since joining Vannis and Marsino.
He’d been traveling with the mageseekers for months, seeing the world outside the crowded streets of Dregbourne for the first time. He’d explored the distant hills and mountains he’d once watched from the roof of his tenement. New mountains now stood before him, and he wanted to see more.
Magic had made it possible.
The affliction that once filled him with fear of discovery was now a gift. It allowed him to walk as a true Demacian. He even wore the blue. Perhaps someday he would also don a half-mask and a Graymark of his own, in spite of being a mage.
Faint rustling broke his thoughts.
He turned and found Marsino mumbling in his sleep. Next to him lay an empty blanket roll. The boy’s heart raced at the sight. He searched the treeline for the older mageseeker—
Vannis stood beneath a nearby oak, watching him.
“You hesitated today,” he said, as he stepped out of the shadow. “Made a bad showing. Was it fear or something else?”
The boy averted his gaze and remained silent, searching for an answer that would satisfy the mageseeker.
Vannis scowled, growing impatient. “Go on, say your piece.”
“I don’t understand… what’s the harm in growing dormisroot?”
Vannis grumbled and shook his head. “Every inch given is an inch lost,” he said. “It's true on the battlefield and true with mages.”
The boy nodded at the words. Vannis regarded him for a moment.
“Where’s your heart, boy?”
“With Demacia, sir.”
Marsino stirred once again. His mumbles rapidly turned into moans until the man was struggling against his blanket roll.
The boy walked over and tugged at the man’s shoulder. “Marsino, wake up,” he whispered.
The young mageseeker twisted at the boy’s touch. The moans grew louder until the man was wailing. He shook Marsino again, only more roughly this time.
“What’s wrong?” Vannis asked, looming over him.
“I don’t know. He’s not waking.”
Vannis pushed the boy aside and turned Marsino over. Sweat slicked his brow and temple, matting his dark hair. Marsino’s eyes were open and vacant and shined a cloudy white.
Vannis pulled back the heavy blanket and opened Marsino’s cloak. Dark tendrils of blight marred his arm. To the boy’s eyes, a radiant bloom pulsed beneath the corrupted skin.

They had been riding since before first light.
Vannis and the boy had managed to lift Marsino onto his horse and secured him to the saddle. The young mageseeker had remained in a fever dream as Vannis tied Marsino’s horse to his own and set off.
The boy’s pony struggled to keep the brisk pace Vannis had set—Castle Wrenwall was still over a day’s ride away.
He watched Marsino jostle with every stride. The wounded man threatened to fall over several times, but Vannis would slow down and resecure Marsino in his saddle. Every time the old mageseeker did so, he scowled at the boy before pushing on.
They reached Corvo Pass by mid-morning. Their mounts clambered up the narrow switchbacks carved into the mountainside. It would cut half a day from their travels, but the treacherous path was ill kept and the thick brush slowed them to a crawl.
The boy squeezed his legs and clutched the reins, nervously watching the precarious drop into the deep gorge below. His pony simply trudged along, instinctively keeping them from certain death.
They broke through the thicket into a flat clearing. He watched Vannis push on his stirrups, driving the horses into a canter—Marsino began inching to his right, leaning over much further than before.
“Vannis!”
The mageseeker reached out, but it was too late. Marsino fell over and slammed onto the ground.
The boy reined up and leapt off his mount, rushing to the downed man. Vannis did the same.
Blood streamed from Marsino’s forehead.
“We need to staunch the bleeding,” said Vannis.
The man unsheathed his dagger and, without asking, reached out and cut a long strip of cloth from the boy’s cloak.
“Water,” said Vannis.
The boy pulled his water skin and poured a stream over the deep gash as Vannis cleaned the wound.
Marsino shifted and muttered incoherently in his fevered state. The boy tried following the man’s ramblings but understood only a few words.
“Drink,” he said, pouring drops of water over the man’s dry lips.
The young mageseeker stirred, his tongue lapping at the moisture. He opened his eyes. Ruddy blotches stained the cloudy white.
“Are we… there?” Marsino asked, chest wheezing with every word.
Vannis shot the boy a look. He knew not to say a thing. They were still far from reaching help.
“Almost, brother,” said Vannis.
“Why build… Wrenwall… so far up a mountain?”
“'It's supposed to be hard to reach,” Vannis said, with a brittle smile.
Marsino closed his eyes and chuckled slightly. It soon turned into a cough.
“Easy there, brother,” Vannis said, watching the man for a moment before turning to the boy. “The dormisroot—do you still have it?”
“Yes.”
The boy dug into his pocket, drawing a straw horse, a polished river stone, and the yellow flower. He smiled at the sight, knowing the blossom would help Marsino.
Vannis snatched it from the boy’s hand. “At least you did something right, boy.”
His stomach tightened at the words. Vannis was right. He had faltered, and his friend had paid the price.
Marsino shook his head. “It’s not… his fault… I should’ve been… more careful.”
The older mageseeker remained silent as he picked several petals from the dormisroot.
“Chew on this. It’s not refined, but it will help with the pain.”
“What about… the magic?” Marsino asked.
“It quickened the growth and kept it hardy, but the plant is untainted,” Vannis said as he placed the petals in Marsino’s mouth. He leaned in close and whispered in the younger man’s ear, gently stroking his hair. Marsino smiled, seemingly lost in some memory.
The boy took a swig from his waterskin. A slight shiver ran down his spine. The fine hair on his arms stood on edge.
He turned and walked to the end of the clearing—a verdant canopy of pines covered the lowlands below.
“What is it?” Vannis asked.
“I don’t know…” He gazed down at the valley. Nothing appeared out of place, even the sensation had disappeared.
“I thought—”
He stopped short. Plumes of dark smoke rose in the distance.

The boy stared at the charred and smoldering husks lying in the pasture. The smell of burnt animal flesh hung in the air. His stomach rumbled.
“What do you think did that?” he asked, tending to Marsino. The young mageseeker lay on a makeshift litter made from a blanket roll and lengths of rope.
“Don’t know,” said Vannis. “Stay there and keep watch.”
The older mageseeker inspected the dead cattle. They all bore fist-sized puncture wounds in their thick hides. Vannis prodded one of the scorched cavities with the tip of his stave, measuring its depth. A third of the shaft disappeared.
“Maybe we should go,” the boy said.
Vannis turned to him. “Do you feel anything?”
The boy studied the cattle. Traces of magic radiated underneath the seared flesh. Whatever had killed them was powerful enough to mutilate the immense creatures. A man couldn’t fare any better. Even one with a quarterstaff.
The boy turned his attention to the farmstead. It held a small log cabin, a weathered barn, and an outhouse at the far end. The property was tucked against the hills, surrounded by dense forest. They never would have seen it if not for the smoke.
The sound of footfalls approached.
Vannis spun around and raised his staff.
An old man rounded the corner of the barn. He stopped at the sight of the unannounced visitors. He wore trousers and a tunic fitted for a larger man, and he carried an old, beaten halberd, its edge gleaming and sharp.
“What are you doing on my farm?” The man asked, shifting the grip on his weapon and remaining well outside Vannis’ reach.
“My friend’s hurt,” said the boy. “Please, he needs help, sir.”
Vannis gave the boy a sidelong glance but said nothing.
The farmer looked down at Marsino. The young mageseeker stirred in his litter, lost to a fever dream.
“They have healers in Wrenwall,” the farmer said.
“It’s over a day’s ride. He’ll never make it,” said Vannis.
“A beast prowls these woods. You best ride out,” the old man said, gesturing to the dead cattle.
The boy glanced at the dense treeline. He sensed nothing at the moment, but he remembered the shiver he’d felt earlier. At that distance, it had to be a massive creature.
“What kind of beast? Is it a dragon?”
“Steady, boy.” Vannis said as he stepped toward the farmer. “You have a duty to quarter a Demacian soldier.”
The farmer stood his ground. “You wear the blue… but a mageseeker is not a soldier.”
“Aye, but I was once. Like you.”
The farmer’s eyes narrowed, and he angled the spearpoint of his halberd in Vannis’ direction.
“It’s that pole cleaver,” Vannis said. “A gut ripper of the old Thornwall Halberdiers, if memory serves. Far as I can see, neither it nor this old soldier have lost their edge.”
The farmer regarded his weapon with a faint smile. “That was long ago.”
“Brothers are for life,” said Vannis, softer this time. “Help us. And we’ll hunt your beast down after we’re done.”
The boy glanced down at Marsino. The mageseeker’s eyes remained shut as he drew shallow breaths.
The farmer regarded Vannis, considering the offer. “That won't be necessary,” he finally said. “Let’s bring your man inside.”

Vannis and the farmer carried Marsino inside the cabin. A small fire burned in the firepit and the modest room smelled of cedar and earth. The boy cleared a table standing in the middle of the room, tossing wooden bowls and hardtack biscuits onto a nearby sleeping pallet. The men eased Marsino down onto the wooden planks.
“Who else is here?” Vannis asked, using his dagger to cut off Marsino’s tunic.
“I live alone,” the old man said, examining the wound. The boy could see the blight had spread. Dark tendrils reached out toward Marsino’s neck and heart.
“We have to have cut it out,” said Vannis.
Marsino started to convulse, threatening to fall off the table.
“Hold ‘em down,” said Vannis. The boy pinned Marsino’s legs, using his weight to secure them in place. The man thrashed against the restraint. A heavy boot kicked free and cracked the boy in the mouth. He stumbled back, nursing his jaw.
“I said hold him!” Vannis yelled as he wiped down the blade of his dagger.
He reached for Marsino’s legs again, but the farmer stepped in.
“It’s alright, son,” the man said. “Try talking to him.”
He moved around the table. Marsino’s tremors had eased, but his chest rattled with each ragged breath.
“Marsino?”
“Hold his hand, let him know you’re there,” said the farmer. “It helps with injured animals. Men aren’t much different.”
The boy grasped Marsino’s hand. It felt warm to the touch and slick with sweat. “It’s going to be alright. We got help.”
Marsino seemed to focus on his voice, turning toward the sound, his cloudy white gaze now a deep red.
“Are we in Wrenwall?”
The boy looked at Vannis, and the magehunter nodded.
“Yes. The healers are working on you,” the boy said.
“The dormisroot… it bought me… some time,” Marsino said, squeezing his hand. “You did good… You did good…”
The boy clenched his teeth, fighting back the grief swelling in his throat. He held Marsino’s hand tighter, not wanting to let go.
“I’m sorry, Marsino. I should’ve—”
“Don’t… it wasn’t… your fault,” Marsino said, every word labored and pained. He strained to lift his head. Searching the room with eyes that could no longer see.
“Vannis?”
“Right here, brother.”
“Tell ‘em… tell ‘em it’s not on him.”
Vannis fixed his stare on the boy. “Aye, bad luck is all,” he finally said.
“See…” Marsino said, offering a wan smile. “You don’t need… to carry it.”
Vannis gripped Marsino’s shoulder and leaned in close to the man’s ear. “We need to cut it out, brother,” Vannis said.
Marsino nodded his head.
“He’ll need something to bite on,” said the farmer.
The boy unsheathed his dagger, the carved wooden handle perfectly suited for the task. He placed it in Marsino’s mouth.
“Good,” Vannis said, holding his own blade inches from the wounded arm.
The tendrils slithered beneath the skin. To the boy’s eyes, they radiated a soft, pulsating light the others couldn’t see.
“Stop,” he said.
Vannis looked up at the boy. “What is it?”
Marsino bit down on the dagger’s handle and released a stifled scream. He squeezed the boy’s hand and thrashed against the table until the movement underneath his skin subsided.
The blight stretched across Marsino’s neck.
“It’s too deep,” said Vannis. “I can’t cut it out.” The mageseeker stepped back, unsure of what to do next.
“What if you burn it out?” The boy asked.
“You can’t cauterize that close to the artery,” Vannis said. He turned to the old man. “Do you have any medicinals?”
“Nothing that would help that.”
Vannis gazed down at his injured partner, weighing something in his mind. “What about a healer?” he said, the words no louder than a whisper.
“They would have medicinals, but the closest one—”
“Not that kind of healer.”
The old man remained silent for a moment. “I don’t know anyone like that.”
It appeared Vannis wanted to push the matter, but he bit his tongue and searched the cabin instead.
The boy followed the mageseeker’s gaze. He found a stack of hides in one corner, a netted hammock in another, and a carver’s workbench crowded with dozens of wooden drakes against a wall. Nothing that would help.
“The cattle,” said Vannis.
The farmer blanched at the mention of the dead livestock. “What of them?”
“Did they ever suffer from tinea worm?”
“Yes. We burn it out with a pulvis of lunar caustic.”
“If we cut the source and use a thin band of the pulvis for the rest, it might work,” Vannis said. “Where is it?”
The farmer looked out the window. He seemed to hesitate, perhaps trying to remember where to search in all the clutter.
A deep guttural sound rose from Marsino’s throat. He violently convulsed and teetered toward the edge of the table, dagger clenched between his teeth.
Vannis held the wounded man down by the shoulders. “Where’s the pulvis?”
The farmer wrestled with Marsino’s flailing legs. “It’s in the barn, but—”
Marsino wailed.
“I got it!” the boy said, as he turned and ran outside.

Crisp mountain air rushed past his face as he raced toward the barn, the heat building in his legs and lungs. The barn door was less than twenty paces away when a shiver ran down his spine.
He slid to a stop.
The surrounding forest stood dark and silent. He searched the dense thicket for the slightest hint of magic but found nothing in the brush. Steam and smoke still rose from the smoldering heaps in the pasture. The tingling sensation spread across his back—there was something nearby.
He needed to warn Vannis but knew better than to shout.
Should he go back?
Another agonizing scream erupted from within the cabin. Marsino needed him to be brave.
He took a deep, sobering breath and darted to the outbuilding. His trembling hands fumbled with the latch until he finally got the door open, then he slammed it shut behind him.
A jolt rushed down his spine.
He stumbled back and fell, crashing into a rack of ditching tools. Shovels and spades clattered on the floor.
It was inside the barn.
The boy reached for his dagger but found the sheath empty. He had given it to Marsino. A silvery brilliance radiated from one of the stalls.
He tried to stand, but his legs refused to act. The glow flourished as a shape exited the stall and rounded the corner. He’d never witnessed a light so blinding. It distorted the very air in waves of colors.
The shape approached.
A droning rose in his ears, like an army of nettle bees swarming inside his head. The boy scrambled back, one hand shielding his eyes as the other searched the ground for a weapon. He found nothing.
The world vanished behind a sheet of light and color.
A sound tried to break through the hum as the shape pushed through the radiant glow. His mind struggled to piece it together until a single utterance made everything clear…
“Papa?”
With a word, the entire world resolved back into place.
It was a little girl.
She stared at him, eyes wide in fear. The corona around her flared brighter again. It pulled at the boy, compelling him to reach out and touch its radiance.
“W-Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m… I’m Sylas.” He rose to his feet, holding out his hand. “I won’t hurt you… if you don’t hurt me.”
The girl balled her hands and pressed them to her chest. “I would never hurt anyone…” she said, her gaze falling to her feet. “Not on purpose.”
The boy recalled the cattle in the pasture. He pushed the thought away and focused on the golden-haired child. She seemed tiny and lost, even here in her own home.
“I believe you,” he said. “It’s not always… easy.”
The light around her dimmed, and the pull on him diminished.
She looked up at the boy. “Have you seen my papa?”
“He’s inside the house. Helping my friend.”
She timidly reached out to grasp his hand. “Take me to him.”
He drew back. “You can’t go inside,” he said.
“Is something wrong with papa?”
“No. It’s… He’s helping a mageseeker.”
The little girl recoiled at the word, and the inside of the barn brightened once again. She understood the danger.
“Are you a mageseeker?” She asked, her voice quivering.
The question wrenched at something deep inside the boy.
“No,” he said. “I’m like you.”
The girl smiled. It was genuine and warmed his heart in a way that no praise from a mageseeker ever had.
Another scream came from the main house.
“Papa?”
“It’s my friend. I need to go back,” he said. “Can you hide until we’re gone? Can you do that?”
The girl nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Do you know where the lunar caustic is?”
She pointed to a clay jar sitting on a narrow shelf.

The boy snatched the container and bolted from the barn. Another agonizing wail broke as he approached the cabin. He pushed harder for the last few steps and burst through the door.
“I found it,” he said, holding the jar like a prize in hand.
Silence filled the room.
Vannis was staring at Marsino’s lifeless body. Only the farmer turned toward the door.
There was fear and resentment in the old man’s eyes. It was the same the boy had seen in all those desperate souls trying to hide their affliction.
The old man slowly reached for his halberd, his gaze sweeping from the boy to Vannis, who still hadn’t moved or said a word.
The boy shook his head, silently imploring the man to stop.
The farmer paused and looked toward the barn before looking back at the boy.
He offered the father a reassuring smile.
The old man regarded him for a moment and then rested his weapon against the wall.
Vannis finally snapped from his trance. “What took you so long?” the mageseeker asked.
“It’s not the boy’s fault. Your friend was too far gone.”
Vannis stepped back from the body and sat down on the sleeping pallet.
“The cur is the reason we’re here,” he sneered. “He’s one of them, you know. Pretending to be normal.”
“Your friend didn’t believe so,” said the farmer. “Honor that memory.”
Vannis looked away from Marsino’s body. He fixed his attention on the dozens of carver’s tools and wooden figures strewn about the floor beneath the hammock.
“He was a young fool who felt things far too deeply,” he finally said. Vannis fell into a deep silence after that, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere.
The farmer and the boy joined him in the uncomfortable stillness, unsure of what to do next.
“So it’ll be the two of us hunting the beast, then?” Vannis asked the old man.
“It’s not necessary,” said the farmer. “Tend to your friend. I have a wagon. It’s yours.”
“Doesn’t seem proper to leave you here… alone,” said Vannis. “I’d be abandoning a brother.”
The mageseeker’s voice carried a subtle sharpness that made the boy uneasy. Sorrow transformed into suspicion. The grieving mentor had become the interrogator once again.
“I’ll manage,” said the farmer. “Been doing so since my days wearing the blue.”
“Of course,” Vannis said, smiling.
The mageseeker leapt from the cot, rushed the farmer, and slammed him against the wall—his dagger tip poised inches from the man’s throat.
“Where is it?”
“What?” The farmer asked, his voice trembling and confused.
“Your beast?”
“I-It’s in the woods.”
“Does it bed down in your cabin at night?”
“What?”
“Your hammock,” said Vannis, gesturing to the netted cord. “Spend enough time on campaign and it becomes your best friend.”
Vannis pressed the dagger to the man’s flesh. “So why the cot?”
“It… belonged to my daughter,” said the farmer, his gaze momentarily flicked to the boy. “She passed last winter.”
The boy looked at the sleeping pallet. It was built for a child.
But it wasn’t only the cot. There was a wooden bowl and spoon, and a practice sword too small for a grown man. If he could see through the lie, then…
“Let’s visit her grave,” said Vannis.
“We can’t,” said the farmer, averting his eyes in shame. “The beast took her.”
“Like it took your cattle?” Vannis sneered. “I wager if we search carefully we’ll find it on your farm.”
“There’s nothing here,” the boy said. “We should go.”
“What do you see on that table, boy?”
He stared at Marsino’s body. The bloodstained eyes wide and lifeless. The blighted tendrils had choked off his neck and webbed his face.
“What do you see!”
“Marsino… I see Marsino.” he said, the words choking his throat.
“A mageseeker, boy. One of my own,” Vannis said, anger and pain seeping from each word. “What is he to you?”
Marsino had been the only mageseeker that showed him kindness. He had accepted him as a true Demacian, despite his affliction.
“He was my friend.”
“Aye… and he was killed by a mage,” Vannis said. “This man hides one from us. A dangerous one.”
The boy remembered the intense glow of the little girl and the scorched flesh of the dead cattle.
“What do we do?” Vannis asked.
The boy wiped the corners of his eyes with his sleeve.
“We keep the order. We uphold the law.”

Vannis led the boy and the farmer outside, driving them with his staff. The three stood in the pasture, watching the barn and the outhouse. He jabbed the man in the ribs with the stave.
“Call your daughter.”
The farmer winced at the blow. “She’s not here,” he said. “She’s gone.”
“We’ll see.”
The old man looked at the boy, silently pleading.
“I’ll search the barn,” the boy said.
“No. Let her come to us.” Vannis slammed the farmer’s head with the edge of his staff, driving the man to the ground.
“Come out! We have your father!”
There was no response. No movement. And then the man wailed.
The boy turned to find the farmer tottering on one knee, clutching his temple. Blood pooled underneath the man’s fingers, slicking his hand with blood. Vannis stood over him, ready to strike again.
“What are you doing?”
“What needs to be done,” said Vannis, his face contorted by anger and grief.
A jolt raced down the boy’s spine. And once again, all the fine hair on his arms and neck stood on edge.
The barn door creaked open.
“That’s right, come on,” Vannis said.
Darkness framed the doorway. Tiny footfalls approached. The little girl crossed the threshold and stepped outside. Her panicked eyes fixed on her injured father.
“Papa…” she said, tears cascading down her face.
“It’s alright,” the bleeding farmer stammered. Papa’s just talking to these men.”
They all watched as the child inched toward them, the men were unaware of what only the boy could see.
She glowed like the midday sun.
The power inside her pulsated and shifted colors. It shimmered with a radiance that appeared to bend light itself. She was a living rainbow.
This was his affliction. This was his gift.
He alone could see the fundamental beauty and nature of magic. It lived in this frightened child as it lived in every single mage in Demacia, and perhaps all across the world. How could he betray that? The boy had seen all he needed to see.
“She’s… normal.”
“Are you sure? Look again!”
He turned to the mageseeker. To Demacia, Vannis was a venerated bulwark, guarding against the threat of magic. But to the boy, he was a simple man clinging to tradition.
“You were wrong. We should go.”
Vannis regarded him for a moment, searching for deception. The mageseeker shook his head and scowled.
“We’ll see if she passes the trials,” he said, removing the Graymark from his cloak.
The farmer’s eyes went wide at the sight of the petricite emblem.
“Run, child! Run!” the old man shouted as he leapt to his feet and lunged at Vannis.
The mageseeker moved fast, thrusting his staff into the farmer's midsection. The man staggered back from the blow, creating some distance between the two. Vannis darted forward and drove the stave down onto the man's head. His crown shattered in a bloom of crimson.
The little girl screamed. Her hands crackled with sparks of lightning—this time, for all to see.
Vannis held out his Graymark, capturing the flickering arcs in the stone and suppressing the magic. But the petricite rapidly darkened and cracked, overwhelmed by the little girl's power. Vannis dropped the ruined disk and spun around, swinging his wooden stave at the child’s head.
“No!”
The boy rushed toward the girl, throwing himself between the heavy quarterstaff and the flaring streams of light. The hairs on his arms singed and his fingers blistered as he touched the little mage.
A twisting arc of lightning pierced his hand, and a blazing current rushed through his flesh, contorting his entire body. The boy's heart clenched and all the air inside him rushed out. He gasped for breath but drew only emptiness.
The edges of his vision blurred and the colors drained as deathly magic flooded him. Vannis appeared motionless, staff in mid-swing, like ancient statuary depicting a hero of old. The little girl was also frozen, her tears dull crystals as the radiant glow around her dimmed and faded…
And then his lungs filled with air.
His heart raced, pumping a numbing calmness throughout his body. The blaze inside him remained, but no longer threatened to consume him. Instead, it flowed calmly throughout, and for the briefest moments it felt malleable to his thoughts. Then it suddenly sparked and flared hotter until he could no longer contain it inside.
Light erupted from his hands, and the world disappeared.

Sylas opened his eyes. Three smoldering husks lay strewn on the scorched ground. One of them held a warped and splintered staff in hand. The other two had fallen near each other, their arms splayed and reaching, but forever apart. His eyes welled at the sight of his failure, and regret gripped his heart. He rolled over onto his back and shuddered.
Countless stars stretched across a cloudless firmament. He watched them arc across the darkness and disappear behind a black canopy of trees.
The night sky turned a purple hue before he finally staggered to his feet.
His legs trembled as he limped away from the carnage. He stopped after a short distance, but didn’t look back.
There was no need. Those images would remain with him for the rest of his life. He pushed them from his thoughts and gazed at the spine of mountaintops spanning the horizon.
He had no intention of riding to Wrenwall, or any of their strongholds. No amount of pleading would save him from their punishment. In time, they would seek him out, not stopping until he was brought to justice. After all, the law must be upheld.
But he knew their ways, and Demacia was vast.
The Despoiler of Havenfall

Michael Haugen Wieske

The fog had come in swiftly, eclipsing the afternoon sun over the crossroads. Jonath had tried to find his way between the thick tendrils, the world around him darkened by an impenetrable shroud. Shapes pushed at the fabric of the mist, grasping for purchase. Reaching for him from beyond.
He fumbled with the reins in his hands, trying to find the nerve to do what he had to. So he could mount up and ride for safety.
“Don’t do this, boy. We all have a duty.”
Jonath blinked the fear from his eyes, fixating on the knight slumped over the steed. He had found her like this, still mounted but unable to even right herself in the saddle. Her armor was pierced and slick with blood, although Jonath didn’t know what manner of weapon could have inflicted these wounds. The knight was dying all the same.
In her eyes, he saw judgment—they found him weak. Unworthy. She gripped the reins firmly in one plated fist, pulling him in close.
“We must carry word to the capital. You... the heir must know. Tell Prince Jarvan what is happening here, the garrison cannot hold them off.”
Faint sounds of battle from the south told Jonath that the beings in the mist had reached Havenfall. The air around him grew colder, darker. The inky mist pulsated, inching close. Havenfall’s knights were none of his business. The supposed elite of the crown had never done anything for him. And the people there...
Screwing shut his eyes, Jonath ripped the reins from the knight, trying to ignore her pained gasp as she rolled out of the saddle and hit the ground.
“Protector forgive me,” he whispered, his voice wavering. This was no worse than the other times he’d taken horses, he tried to tell himself as he mounted.
The war steed’s bulk instilled a measure of calm in him. Running a hand down the stallion’s muscled neck, Jonath looked around the crossroads to get his bearings. The eastbound road led to the Great City, with its high walls and countless soldiers. What warning did they need? Surely, whatever foul magic urged the claws and voices in the mist would be no match for the capital’s defense of stone and steel. Just to the south lay Havenfall, his home. Moments ago, he could see its glinting rooftops and rows of masts from where he now stood. Behind the town lay open country, as far as a horse could carry him.
Jonath had spent days beyond count riding across those rolling hills, racing incoming ships along the white cliffs overlooking the bay, letting the sea stiffen his hair with salt, rejoicing in the thrills of unchecked freedom. He’d never kept any he took. He was no thief who deserved to be exiled to the Hinterlands. He borrowed horses, always returning them at the end of his excursions, tired but unharmed.
How will I return this one? If I leave her to—
No. It wasn’t his fault she had gotten in the way of this mist and squandered her chance at survival—for Jonath to take his did not make him guilty of her death. No matter what he did, he had always been deemed insufficient. He had a hand with horses and the will to work, but even his elders—horse breeders and traders—had shunned him for his unwillingness to put the demands of others ahead of his own needs. No use in talent if he couldn’t be relied on, they said. No use in the approval of people who didn’t value true freedom, thought Jonath. Not to mention the garrison, who glorified obedience above all else, sneering at him down gilded lances even when he came to prove his mettle on the recruiting fields.
Well, out in the hills, chasing the wind on the back of an unbroken steed, he was the exemplar. He would outrun this unnatural mist, and lose himself among the ranging herds.
Jonath spurred the stallion, making for the southern path, as time slowed down around him. The stallion flattened his ears, suddenly rigid under Jonath. Whatever had scared it was beyond the natural din of battle, something that didn’t belong here; Jonath felt it, too. Primal fear seized him, squeezing his chest with an unyielding grip. The mist pulled close, then pulsed clear of the crossing, as if limbs within were pulling the veil aside. Jonath heard nothing in the deathly stillness.
Then came the sound of steeled hooves on hard-pack road.
As the veil parted, Jonath made out riders in the gloom. Even though he could hear the mounts at full gallop, the clatter of plate armor, and the whipping of stirrups, the echelon appeared immobile—like a framed tableau of nobles on the hunt, or the crown’s elite on the charge, come at the last second to defend the citizenry against the dangers beyond the border. But these were not Demacian knights, nor saviors from fairy tales. These riders were not here to protect. They were girded in black-iron plate, and an evil light glowed in their motionless eyes. A bannerman carried a still pennant, the beating fabric audible nonetheless. A hornblower, lipless mouth deadlocked around his instrument, sounded the attack.
The mist shrieked. Heeeecaaaariiiim.
It was a name—somehow, Jonath knew. The mist heralded his coming.
It was the name of death itself.
As this realization staggered Jonath, he noticed the rider at the lead. He was gigantic, towering over his retinue, shaking the ground with each unmoving stride. His eyes, bright with inner fire, took in all before them. Even staring ahead, they seemed to bore into Jonath, searing through him, filling him with an ancient dread.
The rider turned his head, and smiled.
Jonath let out a cry, recoiling with instinctual fear. He flailed, kicking back to stay in the saddle, startling his stallion. The mount reared, throwing Jonath to the ground with a dry thud. Galvanized by the shock, the animal bolted into the darkness. Jonath groaned, his head ringing with the impact. He pressed his forehead against the dry earth, dust packing his nostrils with each panicked breath. He wished he could pray away what he would see when he looked up.
“Rise, squire,” a grinding voice said, a smile pulling the syllables taut. “Find your courage... Look at me.”
The words were guttural, each syllable slowly surfacing as if rising from the depths of a furnace. Jonath could not place the accent, but he had heard its mocking tone before. A sting of old spite made him raise his head.
Crudely shod hooves burned the soil where they stood. The rider’s horse seemed to be made entirely of blackened iron, glowing from within with green fire. Jonath’s breath caught in his throat as he saw the rider was not saddled on this unnatural steed—he was fused with it. What was he? Had he come as punishment for Jonath’s crime? The monstrosity laughed, slowly raising an infernal glaive.
Tears ran down Jonath’s face, his mind seizing hold of the only thought it could. Protector forgive me. Protector forgive me.
But the blow never fell. Instead, the monster called one of his ghostly riders closer. The rider, too, was not a horseman at all, but fused at the midriff with the body of a horse. The entire echelon was deformed like their leader. Hecarim gripped the rider’s neck and slowly, effortlessly, ripped his torso from the equine trunk. The rider, trailing green smoke, made no sound, twitching erratically. Where his body had been, there was now the head of a withered, armored destrier.
“We’ll be back for you later,” the leader chuckled as he released the rider’s spirit. The spirit floated mid-air, aimless now that it had been severed from its animal half. The rest of the undying echelon remained utterly motionless, frozen in time.
Hecarim turned his gaze to Jonath.
“I claim this land by decree of King Viego, regent of the Shadow Isles. Let my loyal knights witness that Hecarim, Conqueror of Helia, Grand Master of the Iron Order, honors his foes with a fair fight.” The words twisted around his smirk. “So, find your courage, noble squire, and mount up. War has come.” He presented the reins of the spectral destrier to Jonath.
Jonath took in Hecarim, the tone of his offer betraying it for the lie it was. He looked around him, the echelon of knights looming, immovable rictus grins carved into their skeletal faces. His mind screamed in tune with the whispers behind the veil. Let soldiers deal with these monsters. He grabbed the reins and, with one motion, swung up into the saddle.
The steed’s body was solid yet incorporeal at the same time, the heavy barding hissing where it moved against the beast’s bulk. Where he would sense a horse’s character, Jonath felt only emptiness. Where he should feel a union of kindred minds, he teetered on the edge of a ravenous void. Jonath let his fear take over and hammered his heels into its flanks. He ripped at the reins and turned south, piercing into the wall of black mist...
Hooked nails scoring my skin. Long-dead grimaces accusing me.
...and bursting out the other side into the clear. Ahead, the path was open. The sun was setting over the bay, the sea glittering calmly beyond the cliffs.
Behind Jonath, hollow, furnace laughter echoed through the crossroads.
“Give chase,” he heard Hecarim order.

Jonath clung to the steed, speeding down the path faster than he had ever seen any stallion gallop. In his wake, a thin trail of the unnatural mist lined the packed earth. The sun was setting into the bay, giving way to the deep blue of dusk. It had been a beautiful day for a ride; if he kept its pace, he might see another. Looking up, he saw the Protector’s Shield coming into view in the darkening sky. Jonath’s smile at the constellation turned stale as he heard the long call of a hunting horn.
His heartbeat quickened as he saw thick tendrils of mist closing in behind him. The monstrous Hecarim and his Iron Order rode within. Tendrils of darkness flanked Jonath, and he thought he could see shapes coalescing inside. His mouth fell open in horror, his vision blurring from sudden tears. He could see her nonetheless. The knight he had left to die, now a ghostly form trapped in the mist. She raised an arm that ended in a ragged stump—the hand that had held the reins, missing.
“You have no honor,” she wailed. “You are no true Demacian!”
“Please, no,” Jonath whispered, forcing his gaze ahead. He frantically kicked the steed’s flanks, willing it to get him away from this horror. He glanced down at the reins. The knight’s severed fist was gripping them, yanking the mount into a stall.
“Flee, coward,” the voice echoed from the mist.
Whimpering in anguish, Jonath ripped the reins out of the fist and threw the plated gauntlet toward the riders at his heels.
“So quick to take offense, squire,” Hecarim jeered. “I did not think you had the courage. If you are challenging me to a duel, then I accept. We noblemen have a code to follow, after all.”
Jonath raised his arm in front of his face as Hecarim closed to striking distance, but instead of being beheaded by the glaive, Jonath was engulfed once more in cloying darkness. The faces of the dead surrounded him, their scornful laughter an anthem to their twisted master’s trickery. Jonath spurred his spectral steed, and as he burst from the mist, Hecarim and the riders disappeared from view.
Night had fallen over the coast as Jonath passed the stables at the edge of Havenfall. The sound of battle had stopped, and the approaches to the town appeared largely untouched. He felt a brief wave of relief. He would find soldiers here who could fight. Commander Tyndarid and his garrison would see off the riders on Jonath’s trail—for all his imperious arrogance, the castellan was an indomitable warrior.
Jonath saw war horses, some half saddled and barded, some still tied to their hitching rails near the trough, lay dead. His heart sank.
As Jonath’s destrier carried him further into the settlement, the true horror of the black mist around him became apparent. Jonath slowly turned around. All of this... couldn’t be real. It had to be a figment of his troubled imagination, or some dark sorcery worked by a vengeful hedge mage.
But his eyes told him otherwise.
In the streets, the spirits of newly dead townsfolk lingered above their own corpses, cowering in fear, wailing silently, reliving the instant they were ridden down by the Iron Order. Proud knights of the crown stood mute where they had died battling. As Jonath passed, one by one, spirits fixed their hollow eyes on him. A knight, his killer’s spear still pinning his shield to the shade of his body, made a step toward Jonath. A gasp escaped his lips as he recognized Commander Tyndarid. A group of dead shipbuilders haltingly gained their feet and tumbled toward Jonath in agitation. He kicked his steed and made his escape. A voice inside him whispered that even in death, they knew he didn’t belong.
Wraithlike raiders coursed through the merchant quarters, corralling survivors and putting torches to the roofs of the smithies and trade posts. Green fire engulfed the buildings and cast a deathly light across the square—the thatching and wood somehow remaining untouched by the flames. The townsfolk inside... Jonath looked away as he rode, willing himself not to hear.
By the harbor, fishing boats and river barges lay low against the white-stone pier, scuttled and ablaze. Jonath looked out over the bay, his gaze drawn across the still water by the long, mournful note of a hunting horn. A squadron of spectral riders raced across the calm water in the moonlight, lowering their spears as they neared the last sailship still afloat. The charge hit home, followed by the faint clash of weapons and the cries of sailors dying. The ship disappeared from sight in a mass of writhing fog.
The entirety of Havenfall was under siege—who knew how much of Demacia was affected by this invasion.
Circling his mount, Jonath tried to control his fear and find a way out. Perhaps he should race his own steed off the pier and ride the waters across the bay. He was unable to outpace these deathless monsters, but he might slip away unnoticed and escape this terrible nightmare...
Jonath was brought back to the present by the sound of footfalls. He noticed a gaggle of survivors picking their way through the ruined market square. There were four of them. A pair of brown-haired youths, clearly siblings by their features, held on to short blades, their eyes darting fearfully across the square. They protected an elderly woman who followed in their wake, dressed in the garb of the Illuminators and carrying a steel cudgel. Jonath knew the powerfully built figure at the head of the group—it was the blacksmith Adamar. He held a heavy blade and shield, still unadorned and blackened with the soot of its forging.
“Jonath!” Adamar called out quietly. “We thought we were the last ones left alive. We’re getting away from here. You are welcome to joi—” The blacksmith fell silent as he saw Jonath’s steed. His eyes hardened with fury, and he ushered the others behind him, soot-matt shield held high. “You’re in league with these monsters!”
The old Illuminator placed a hand on Adamar’s shoulder. “Look at his eyes, Ada. He’s just as afraid as we are. He’s not with them.” She addressed Jonath directly. “Get off that abomination, child, and come with us.”
“I wish I could,” Jonath heard himself say. The guilt of his actions washed over him, making his head swim. He saw the dying knight’s face again, accusing him. “But Adamar... he’s right. I don’t belong here, and I don’t deserve your mercy. You don’t know what I did today, who I really am. I am no Demacian.”
“Enough of that. You are Jonath of Ropemaker’s Row, not some stranger. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you pray at the Protector’s shrine after dark. I know your heart wants to lead you back to righteousness. I cannot tell you if it will, but tonight all that matters is survival. There are not many of us left here, and you are one of us. One of the living. Now get off that... thing, and let us leave this place.”
Jonath grabbed the saddle, swinging his leg up to dismount. “Thank the Protector for your mercy—”
Coils of mist ripped open above the town square, spectral riders bursting forth. Hecarim was at the fore, galloping through thin air, swinging his jagged glaive wide. Before Jonath understood what he was looking at, the blade struck the Illuminator in the chest, cleaving her in two. Hecarim’s riders unceremoniously ran through Adamar and the two youths, before cantering to a halt. Like the first time Jonath saw them, they became completely still—their spears held rigidly upright, their banners and pinions frozen, only the sound of their motionless regalia piercing the deathly quiet.
Ever the first of their number, there was Hecarim, hooves scraping the ground, his animal body pacing back and forth, his eyes burning with ancient intellect. Grand Master, conqueror. Despoiler of Havenfall. How was Jonath meant to stand against the might of this infernal warmaster? How was anyone?
Hecarim closed the distance, riding up alongside Jonath until they stood shoulder to shoulder. Slowly, he reached down toward the bridle of Jonath’s borrowed steed, arresting it in place. The Grand Master was taller than Jonath by half.
“You acquitted yourself well today,” Hecarim said, the deep, furnace-roar softened to a growl. His gaze wandered, settling on the moonlit bay behind Jonath. “I have seen kings lose their minds when faced with the Black Mist and the eternal anguish that it brings. Everyone you ever knew perished this night, yet your will to survive remains unbroken. Who else are you willing to sacrifice so you can live? Are you willing to let even your liege die?”
Jonath’s heart pounded, his vision blurred as tears of helpless panic threatened to overwhelm him. Moments ago, Hecarim had slain the last survivors of his hometown, and now he was conversing with him as if they had sparred in some practice duel on the training grounds.
“The... the king is already dead. The crown prince, Protector guide his hand, is next in line, and there could be no one more deserving. I... do not want to put him in peril for my own gain.”
Hecarim remained still for a moment, then scoffed with soured mirth. “In the line of succession, the crown does not always go to the most fitting heir. And what do I care for the frail kingdoms of the living. We all have to make do with the hand fate deals us.”
Up close, Jonath could see the countless pits and scratches in Hecarim’s armor. He could see endless years of conflict scored into the black-iron plates encasing the flames that made up his body, and understood a fundamental truth about this creature... He had been created by war, and he was made for war. He had done nothing but battle for centuries, condemned to relive his worst transgressions. Whatever crimes he had committed in life, this was his punishment.
And he relished every interminable second of it.
Wherever the unnatural mist went, Hecarim and his Iron Order followed—pillaging, killing, and reveling in the atrocities they inflicted on the living. What would become of Demacia if no one stopped this evil? Jonath finally understood something that had eluded him his entire life. Courage wasn’t some unique quality infused into true Demacians at birth, or a measure of his worth to the world. It was a question of realizing what must be done, and choosing to do it no matter what. He felt calm for the first time since the crossroads. He remembered the wounded knight’s dying words, one last time.
There were no soldiers left in Havenfall to warn the crown prince, and soon there might be none left in the entire kingdom. Fixing the Grand Master with his gaze, he pulled the reins from Hecarim’s mailed fist, taking control of the destrier. Hecarim indulged him, his posture changing from introspection to curiosity.
Jonath wheeled, gaining a few paces of distance. “I have seen how you ride down defenseless villagers, reveling in the screams of the helpless. I know you are bound to your basest instincts for eternity, but there is more to you. If a shred of your living self remains, if you have any honor at all, abomination, you will let me pass!”
He collected himself. He knew he would not make it to the Great City, but he was going to try. The bulk of his tireless mount tensed as it sensed what was about to happen. With all his might, Jonath gave it the spurs, and his spectral steed charged. For the first time in his life, Jonath truly believed the words as they sprang from his lips.
“For the uncrowned king! For Demacia!”

Hecarim smirked with delight as the boy charged willingly toward the spears of the Iron Order. The folly of youth had stayed with him until death, a flaw all too common in Hecarim’s experience. But as long as Viego chased his own foolish obsession across the oceans of the world, trailing the Mist in his wake, Hecarim would enjoy the spoils of war.
Around him, as far as he could see, his riders spread terror and death. A cast-iron grin widened across his burning skull.
“If but our hands were not bound by fealty...” he mused, as he watched the last living soul of Havenfall perish.
Destiny and Fate

Anthony Reynolds

Ah, Bilgewater.
It’s a hateful, stinking cesspit of murder and treachery at the best of times… and damn, it’s good to be home.
My back’s to the open ocean as I row out across Bilgewater Bay, so I’m facing the lights of the port city, shining like fool’s gold in the distance.
We’d been running jobs in Valoran, in the City of Progress and its uglier, downtrodden sister, but things started getting hot. And besides, the Prince reached out to us with this contract, and the money was too good to ignore.
Far too good, really, for what looks to me like a wild-eel chase. There’s gotta be a catch—always is—but as I said, the coin on offer weren’t to be sniffed at.
Still can’t believe we’re back. Last time we were here, things got a little, well, explosive.
Sarah Fortune played us all like a fiddle—me, T.F., Gangplank. No one’d ever taken on that gods-damned psychopath like she did. Blew him and his ship to smithereens, with all Bilgewater watching. And T.F. and I, we got a close-up view. Just dumb luck we survived. Of course I hold a grudge against her, but I have to admit, it was mighty impressive what she pulled off. She’s running the place now, from what I hear. Just a few more captains to bring into line, or see to the bottom of Bilgewater Bay. Only a few left who still reckon they can make a play to claim the unofficial throne themselves. Like our old friend, the Prince…
“Can you at least try to keep your mind on the job? We’re drifting off course.”
I glower at T.F. While I’m working up a sweat, the smug bastard’s sitting back, absently flipping cards through his slippery fingers. He’s far too scrawny to be of use on an oar anyway, but him criticizing me while lounging like a fancy Demacian high lord rubs me the wrong way.
The fact that he’s right—current’s pulled us a couple hundred yards south, meaning I gotta row that extra bit harder to get us where we need to be—just riles me even more.
“Feel free to take over any time you want, m’lord,” I growl.
“Can’t,” he says, as he lays three cards face down on the upturned barrel in front of him. “Busy.”
Scowling, I glance over my shoulder to get my bearings. We’re passing through a forest of sharp rocks, jutting out of the ocean like knife blades. ’Course, it ain’t the ones above the surface that are the problem. Just like always, it’s the blades you can’t see that are the real killers.
They’re called the Widow Makers, and they’ve claimed scores of victims over the years. You can see the remnants of the ships that’ve smashed on ’em: broken masts wedged between rocks, shattered planks circling in eddies, rotted boarding nets strung up on razor-sharp pinnacles.
Most of those wrecks are caused by damned fool captains not wanting to pay a Buhru wave-whisperer to guide ’em into port. Not too clever, that choice.
Thankfully, we ain’t trying to navigate the Widow Makers in anything more than ten feet from bow to stern. The leaky rowboat’s name is Intrepid, and I must admit I’ve grown more than a little fond of her since we met an hour past. She’s not much to look at—a bit rusty around the edges, and she could use a lick of paint—but she hasn’t let us down yet, which is something. And she ain’t complained about my rowing.
T.F. turns over each of the three cards, one by one. He frowns, and shuffles ’em back up in his hands. He’s been doing this since we ghosted off the White Wharf. Something in the cards has got him spooked, but I don’t give it any more thought. Tonight’s little paddle into the harbor ain’t gonna amount to nothin’, but we gotta make a show of giving it a solid try. I’m just damn pleased we got half the gold Krakens up front.
Far as I’m concerned, that’s all we’ll be getting, and that’s fine by me. Easiest coin we’ve ever made.
A splash of seawater from my oars slaps T.F. in the face. He stops shuffling his cards and looks up, glaring. “Do you mind?” he says.
Nope, I don’t mind one bit.
“My bad.” I give him a shrug, and keep on rowing.
He takes off his hat and wipes his cheek. Once done, he gives me another glare and puts it back on. Pulls it down low in front, tryin’ to seem all mysterious. Looks like a damn fool to me.
I try to keep the smirk off my face as I dig one of my oars into the water again. Get him good this time, right in the side of the head. Smack.
“Oh, for Luck’s sake,” he snaps, glowering at me. Sticks one finger in his ear and gives it a good waggle. “You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Can’t help it,” I says. “It’s your own fault, tryin’ to look fancy, with your mighty fine coat and your having a bath once a week. Brings out somethin’ mean in me.”
I get him again, perhaps a little more than I intended to. Soaks him to the skin. Infuriated, he starts to stand up, leveling a finger at me, but that just sets Intrepid rocking wildly. He sits down in a hurry, clinging to the sides of the little rowboat, a hilariously terrified expression on his face. For all his show of fanciness, in that moment all T.F.’s cool just got thrown overboard.
I shake my head, chuckling. Still makes me laugh that he’s one of the river folk, one that lived half his life in Bilgewater, no less, and he still can’t swim.
He’s staring daggers at me, his perfumed and carefully oiled hair now hanging limp and dripping like seaweed. I try not to, but it sets me giggling again.
“You’re an imbecile,” he says.
I row on. After a time, the tolling of Third Bell reaches us, drifting across the harbor from Bilgewater.
“We’re here,” T.F. announces, finally, consulting his cards once more.
I look over my shoulder. A jagged rock big enough to be a small island is looming before us, but it doesn’t look much different from any of the others.
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” he replies, sharply. Still annoyed about the water, I guess. “I’ve checked and re-checked. The cards keep telling me this is the one.”
There’s quite a few little tricks T.F. can do with those cards of his. He can use ’em to get in and out of places we’d otherwise never have access to, which is mighty handy when tryin’ to pull off a job. I’ve even seen him hurl a card to make a wagon explode like it was packed with gunpowder. But what he’s been doin’ tonight is proper old-blood river folk stuff. Must say it’s usually pretty accurate.
At T.F.’s direction, I pull Intrepid in close, rowing around to the leeward side of the sheer rock face. The swell rises and falls, threatening to smack us against it, but I keep her steady and drop anchor when T.F. tells me we’re at the right spot.
The rock towers overhead.
“So… How do we get up there?” I ask.
“We don’t,” he says. “The cards tell me the shrine’s inside.”
“I don’t see no cave entrance.”
Then I see T.F.’s grin, and my heart sinks. He points overboard, down into the water.
“You ain’t serious,” I mutter.
Last time we were in Bilgewater, I thought I was gonna drown, chained to a cannon kicked overboard. T.F. saved me, but it was a close thing, and I ain’t too keen to relive the experience.
“’Fraid so, partner,” he says. “Unless you want me going in by my lonesome…”
“So you make off with the loot and claim the rest of those Krakens without me? I don’t think so.”
I ain’t forgotten that this son of a dung-worm has left me high and dry before, running off with the coin and leaving me to face the consequences. Those years locked up ain’t ones I’m getting back.
“I thought you didn’t believe the shrine existed,” says T.F. “If I recall correctly, you described it as a ‘wild-eel chase’, right?”
“Yeah, well, I still think it’s a load of superstitious horse manure, but on the off chance it ain’t, I want my cut.”
He’s the one smirking now, as I start taking off my coat and boots. I make sure my shells and cigars are secured and watertight. Then check and re-check that my big double-barreled shotgun, Destiny—newly forged in Piltover, to my own specifications—is tightly wrapped in oilskins, and strapped snugly across my back. I roll up my sleeves.
“So where’s this tunnel, then?”

I dive in. Hope I ain’t jumping right into a school of frenzied razorfish.
It’s bastard cold and bastard dark, but I kick down, going deeper. Fish and gods-know-what-else dart in front of me, flickering at the edge of my vision.
There. While it’s all dark down here, there’s a patch that’s, well, darker, further below. A tunnel entrance. Guess T.F.’s cards were right. I swim into it, and soon realize the water outside weren’t dark at all, not compared to this. I can’t even see my own hands in front of me. It ain’t too wide, neither—my fingertips scrape the smooth stone on either side with every pull.
Glancing back, I see the little circle of blue marking the tunnel entrance. I reckon I’ve got just enough air to turn around and make for the surface. I go on any further, and I ain’t getting back out that way.
T.F. better be right about this. If I drown down here, I swear, next Harrowing I’ll be back to haunt the bastard.
There’s light up ahead, and I kick off the tunnel floor toward it, thinking I’ve found a way out… but no. It’s just a bastard glowing jellyfish, tentacles drifting like deadly towlines. Ain’t going near that thing.
I swim on, now completely blind. Panic’s slowly rising like a Blood Moon tide. I hit a wall in front, and for a horrible moment I think I’m at a dead end. Instinct kicks in, and I push straight up, searching for air, but all I achieve is smacking my head on the rock above. Hard. The cold numbs the pain, but I reckon there’s blood in the water. Not exactly ideal to be bleeding. Berserker sharks can smell that miles away…
I feel trapped, like a rat in a water-filled barrel. I might drown for real this time.
There’s gotta be a way through. I scrabble around desperately, feeling blindly at the walls. Seems like there’re curving spirals carved in the stone, but that ain’t too interesting right now. The air in my lungs feels like poison, and my strength’s starting to fade when I find the opening.
Kicking through, I suddenly see moonlight overhead. I swim up. Break the surface. Suck in a deep, ragged breath. I’m alive!
Treading water, I take stock of my surroundings. I’m inside a cave, partially open to the sky, with the moon shining down.
I paddle over to a rocky ledge and clamber out. Crabs the size of my head skitter out of my way. They’ve each got one overgrown blue claw, and they’re waving ’em at me like they begrudge my presence here. Well, that’s fine with me. Never liked crabs. Make my skin crawl, they do. Too many legs.
First things first. I unsling Destiny and unwrap her oilskins. In the moonlight I give her a quick inspection, checking the loading mechanism and trigger. Looks good. I load a couple of shells, and suddenly things feel a whole lot brighter. Not much that gives me the fear when I’ve got the good lady Destiny locked and loaded in my hands.
“Took you long enough,” says a voice.
I almost unleash both barrels before I realize it’s just T.F. He’s leaning against a rock, trying to look all detached and suave since he took the easy way in with his cards.
“Damn near shat myself, you stupid bastard,” I growl.
“You’re bleeding,” he says.
I touch my scalp. My hand comes away red. “I’ll live.” Hope I’m right about that.
He might try to play it cool, but T.F.’s still looking at me, and I can tell he’s concerned. I won’t admit it, but I appreciate that.
“Don’t get all excited. I’m fine!” I look around, noting that every inch of the walls is inscribed with curving patterns. Buhru carvings. Takes me a moment to realize what they are.
“That’s a lot of serpents,” I say, stating the obvious.
Huh. Maybe there’s something to this wild-eel chase after all.
“Still think this is nothing but a myth?” T.F. asks.
I just grunt in reply. Even if I am startin’ to come around, I ain’t giving him the satisfaction yet.
See, the thing we’ve been hired to find is a Bilgewater legend, something any sane individual would dismiss as no more real than the Tidal Trickster, or the legends of the Summoners.
The Abyssal Crown.
It’s said that whoever wears the crown commands the Beasts Below. And whoever commands the Beasts Below would control the waters around the Serpent Isles. Control them, and, well, you’d naturally control Bilgewater.
That’s why the Prince is so desperate to get his golden hands on it. Not much Missy Fortune could do to dispute his claim if he was wearing the Abyssal Crown.
“So, where’s the shrine?” I say.
“There’s a passage leading farther in, back over there,” T.F. says, gesturing deeper into the cave. “Perhaps it’s through there.”
“No more swimmin’, I hope,” I mutter.

The “passage” T.F. found ain’t much more than a crack in the rocks. He’s got no meat on his bones and slips through like a flounder. Mine is the more robust—and I daresay, more admirable—physique, and I lose a few buttons tryin’ to squeeze through.
I’m grumblin’ and swearin’ under my breath, cursing that double helping of chowder I scarfed down earlier in the night, when T.F. shushes me, forefinger tapping pointedly on his lips.
With a final grunt I’m through, almost falling flat on my face. Then the smell hits me like a fist. It’s a stink not dissimilar to the vile offal-and-fish-guts reek of the slaughter docks. Makes the eyes water. Brings back bad memories, too.
Moonlight filters down through a gap in the cave ceiling, but it’s still dark. Takes me a moment to register the sheer amount of flotsam and jetsam piled up around the place. It looks like a hoarder’s paradise, with all manner of junk and refuse filling every nook and cranny.
This cavern’s larger than the last, and every part of it—well, every part that doesn’t have random crap heaped up against it—is also covered in Buhru carvings. More serpents. I’m sensing a theme here…
There’s a big old pool of black water to one side, probably connected to the same bastard tunnel that tried to drown me, but there’s no way all this refuse and junk got washed in here. Nah, this was brought here by someone. In truth, there’s a strange kinda order to it, even if it’s the kinda order imposed by a mind twisted like a sailor’s knot.
There’re barrels and boxes, chests, and nets. Fishing tackle and rusted harpoons, lengths of long-rotted rope. Piles of shells and stones are arranged in strange stacks, and jars of fetid liquid and gods-know-what-else are lined up on crude shelves made from driftwood.
A rusted anchor leans against a wall, and a ship’s barnacle-covered figurehead—a buxom lass with a fish tail—is wedged between a couple of boulders. Her flaking paint makes it look like her skin is coming off.
Broken masts criss-cross overhead like crooked rafters. Seaweed hangs from them in long strands, alongside little bundles of slowly spinning fishbones and twigs, tied with twine and hair, and torn ribbons of rotting sails.
And there, in the shadows toward the far wall, half hidden among the bric-a-brac, there’s something that looks an awful lot like…
“You think that’s it?” I whisper.
It’s an altar of sorts, carved straight outta the stone wall. Made to look like a swarming mass of sea serpents—red fins, bile belchers, ebony spine-throats, the lot of ’em. It’s surrounded by hundreds of unlit candles, melted wax everywhere, as well as dozens of skulls from all manner of beasties. More than a few human skulls in there, too.
“The Abyssal Shrine.” There’s awe in T.F.’s voice. He’s always been a superstitious type, being river folk and all. “Yeah, that’s it, all right.”
T.F. starts picking his way over to the shrine. I follow a little more slowly, eyeing the shadows. Feels like about now is when something bad would usually happen. That tends to be the way these things go for us. ’Course, I’m also watching T.F.
“You better not be tryin’ to pocket that crown on the sly,” I growl. He gives me a dirty look, but doesn’t bother replying.
Something catches my eye, then, and I think my heart stops for a second.
There’s an elderly woman lying on a knee-high rock shelf nearby. I almost missed her, scanning right over her before I realized what I was seeing.
“Ah hells,” I breathe. Now my heart’s going again, beating like a Noxian war drum.
She’s on her back, hands clasped in front of her, like a statue of the dead. Actually, by the looks of her, she might well be dead, or damn close. Her clothes are half rotten, and she’s the color of a week-dead fish. Might be the light, or lack thereof, but it also looks mighty like the veins in her see-through skin are ink black.
“There’s, ah, an old lady over here,” I hiss.
T.F.’s at the shrine, giving it the once over. “Huh?” he says absently.
“I said there’s an old lady over here,” I repeat, a little louder, glancing over at her to see if she wakes up. She doesn’t.
T.F. glances back. “What’s she doing?”
“Sleepin’,” I whisper. “Or being dead. I dunno which.” I give her a sniff and almost retch. “But she stinks somethin’ fierce. So probably dead.”
T.F. is making his concerned face, his brows meeting in the middle. He usually reserves that for a really bad hand of cards, or finding a fresh stain on the ridiculously overpriced tailored jacket he got in Piltover.
“I guess… just leave her be, then?” he says.
Brilliant. I change the subject. “Any sign of the crown?”
“No.” He turns back to the shrine. “It should be here…”
I move toward him, to help with the search, when the woman gives a rasping snort behind me. I turn fast, shotgun leveled, but she doesn’t stir. Alive, then.
I look at what I’m doing, and shift my aim toward the sky. What was I gonna do, shoot a sleeping old grandma? No matter how bad she smells, that seems like it would just be inviting a whole shipload of bad luck down upon us.
Turning back, I keep a wary eye on the old bat, just in case. Then I step on something. Something that moves. Something that gives out a muffled shriek.
There’s another person in here, completely buried beneath a pile of rotting sailcloth.
He scrabbles away from me like a cornered dog, panicked eyes wild. By the cut of his clothes and the gold earring, he has the look of a sailor, but one that ain’t had a good feed in a while. It’s then that I see the rusted shackle around his leg, connected to a chain, which in turn is bolted to the wall nearby.
Seeing he’s no threat, I ease Destiny’s barrels up. I nod to T.F., who’d spun around, glowing cards at the ready.
“Easy now,” I say to the captive, holding up a hand. “Ain’t here to do you no harm.”
“Get me out of here,” he whispers, eyes dartin’ between me and the sleeping old woman. “I don’t want to be no sacrifice. Was just sent to look for the crown! Get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out—”
His voice is gettin’ louder as his panic builds. Who knows how long the poor fella’s been chained to a wall down here? Or why?
“Now then, son, keep it down,” I say, trying to be all calm like.
“—get me out of here, get me—”
“Shut him up,” hisses T.F.
“Why you always got to order me around, huh?” I snap, makin’ a show of turning toward my partner in crime and jabbing a finger at him. “I got this, alright? It’s just like when—”
It’s a simple misdirection technique, one I learned from T.F., actually. Get your mark’s attention with a sudden movement, direct their focus where you want ’em to look, and they won’t see the thing you don’t want ’em to see.
Case in point: the prisoner’s frantic gaze shifts to T.F., and he don’t notice me stepping in close ’til it’s too late. I slam the butt of Destiny square into his face. I ain’t tryin’ to kill him, but I want him to have a good long sleep.
I throw a glance over my shoulder, but it seems the old bird didn’t hear anything. Probably stone deaf. Still, the sailor seemed pretty worked up. I’m startin’ to get the feelin’ there’s somethin’ mighty wrong about her…
“Nicely done,” T.F. says.
I give him a nod, and kneel down beside the unconscious captive. He looks a bit familiar… “Think I recognize him,” I say. I yank down his collar, popping a few buttons. Yep, there it is—a small tattoo, a pair of crossed hand cannons. “Yeah, this is one of Missy Fortune’s boys. High-ranking one, too. Reckon she’d pay handsomely to have him back.”
T.F. grunts in amusement. “Seems the Prince isn’t the only one after the crown.”
“Looks like. Wonder if she’d pay better?”
“Need to find it first,” he says.
“What did he say about being a sacrifice?”
Far as I’m concerned, if that old woman is strong enough to overpower Miss Fortune’s man, she’s either got help—which could be close by—or there’s much more to her than it seems. Either way, I ain’t keen to stick around.
“Let’s just get out of here,” I mutter. “This don’t feel good.”
“But we’re so close!” T.F. says. “It’s right here, I know it! Give me a little longer.”
Feels strange, me wanting to cut and run and him wanting to stay. That ain’t the way these things usually play out.
I cast another uneasy glance at the old lady, but give a reluctant nod. “Alright. But be quick.”
T.F. seats himself on the floor, and starts dealing out cards before him, face down, in a symmetrical pattern. I leave him to it, and start poking around, prodding into dark spaces with Destiny’s barrels, and being a bit more cautious of where I plant my feet. I find some old, tarnished coins, and am more than a little surprised to see a few gold Krakens among ’em. I pocket those, sliding a glance over at T.F. to make sure he doesn’t notice.
“You certain it’s here?” I say.
T.F. lifts up a card so I can see it. The picture looks like… well, it looks like a gold crown in the shape of a serpent.
“Don’t think I’ve seen that card before,” I say.
“Nor have I,” says T.F. “It’s never existed, ’til now. The crown’s here. Somewhere.”
I’ll never really understand those cards of his.
I keep searching, but after a while, I get the sense we’re being watched. Can’t say I much like the feeling. I turn around in place, looking into the darkness. There’re flickers of movement at the corners of my vision, but it all goes still when I focus on them. I try to shake it off. Probably just more crabs. Still, it seems like getting out of here would be a good idea, sooner rather than later.
T.F. mutters to himself, then scoops up his cards. He looks around, frowning. “You get the feeling we’re being watched?”
Not just me, then. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. I catch another glimpse of movement, and find my eye drawn to an upturned bucket on the floor.
Did it—did it just move?
I keep focused on it, and after a moment, the bucket does indeed inch along the floor, just a smidge, before stopping again. I reckon I’ve seen a few odd things in my life, but can’t say I’ve ever seen a bucket acting sneaky before.
I take a step closer, leaning down toward it. There’s a hole in the side of it, and it looks like… yep, there’s an eye staring out, right back at me. A big, yellow, staring eye.
“Got you now, you little—” I say, leveling Destiny at it.
Seeing its ruse is up, whatever’s within flips over the bucket and makes a break for it. I almost shoot, before I see it’s nothing but a damn octopus. I hear T.F. chortle as the rubbery thing goes squelching across the cave floor, hauling itself along with a surprising turn of speed.
It’s only got a single eye, and it’s still staring at me as it scoots backward.
“That’s… not something you see every day,” T.F. says.
The gangly green thing flops along to the base of the rock shelf where the old woman sleeps. It reaches up with a pair of tentacles and starts climbing.
“Well, don’t let it wake her up!” hisses T.F.
“What d’you want me to do, shoot it? Don’t you think that might just wake her up?”
T.F. has a card at the ready, but doesn’t throw, probably on account of not wanting to risk hitting the old woman. “I don’t know. Grab it or something!”
“I ain’t touchin’ no one-eyed octopus, Tobias.”
He gives me a look at the use of his real name. “I’ve told you not to call me that,” he says. “It’s Twisted Fate now, all right?”
I roll my eyes. “I ain’t callin’ you that. It’s stupid an’ pretentious an’—”
The old woman gives a shuddering snort, and we cease our bickering instantly. We look over to see the slimy beastie wrapping its tentacles around her face. There’s an unpleasant squelching sound as it pulls itself onto her head, like a grotesque bonnet, and attaches. Its big yellow eye blinks.
“That ain’t right,” I murmur.
Then the old woman sits bolt upright.

Now, I’m secure enough in myself to admit the sound I made when the old lady sat up was perhaps a little more shrill than I’m proud of. But to be fair, T.F.’s cry was even less dignified than mine.
The old woman’s eyes snap open. They’re as white as serpent milk. Blind she might be, but she turns toward us all the same.
“More little rats, sneaking and thieving?” she says. Her voice sounds like, well, exactly how you’d imagine an old sea witch with an octopus on her head would sound. “Naughty rats, nothing here for you, oh no…”
“Now hold on just one moment, lady,” I say, as she swings her legs around and plants her bare feet on the cave floor. I’ve got Destiny leveled at her, but she don’t seem to care. “We ain’t no rats, and we ain’t no thieves. Well, we are thieves, but, well—”
I look over at T.F.
“Help me out, would you?” I hiss.
“We’re looking for the Abyssal Crown,” T.F. says. “If you’d be so kind as to hand it over, there doesn’t need to be any trouble.”
The old witch stands up with the aid of a serpent-headed staff. Didn’t notice that earlier. She turns her blank, cloudy eyes toward us, and gives a toothless smile. “Silly, silly rats,” she says, drooling. “Already drowned. Promised to the Beasts Below, and don’t even know it.”
She slams her staff down on the floor. Reverberations shudder through the cave, and ripples spread across the black water. There’s a clicking sound, like lots of sticks and twigs breaking, and the walls come alive with movement.
Things detach from the surrounding darkness.
Big things.
“Crabs,” I mutter. “’Course it had to be crabs.”
These ain’t normal crabs, though—not that I’d describe anything with that many legs as normal under regular circumstances, but these things are something else. They’re about the size of small wagons, for starters, and they seem mighty intent on ripping us limb from limb.
They come skittering toward us, each waving a giant blue claw. Gotta say, it looks a whole lot more threatening when that claw’s big enough to snip a man in two. More of them break the surface of the water, chittering and snapping, scuttling sideward up into the cave.
“Eat this, you leggy son of a…!” I roar, and unleash both barrels into the first to come at us.
The blast is deafening, and hurls the giant crab backward with satisfying violence. A flash of red, and T.F. sends one of his cards slicing into the middle of a cluster of them. It explodes, catching the lot of ’em in a burst of sorcerous flames.
I reload just in time to pump a shot into another of the skittering beasts, blasting its overgrown claw to pieces. Shards of crab shell and wet meat splatter outward, and the behemoth staggers. My second shell disintegrates its eyestalks and clacking mandibles, and it’s thrown onto its back. Kicks like a damn mule, does Destiny.
One tries to flank T.F., and I give a shout of warning. He dives, sliding underneath a snapping claw, and flicks another card. It hits the creature with a golden flash. The crab goes instantly still, frozen in place. Freshly reloaded, I step up and blast it back into the water in a shower of crab bits.
“We gotta get out of here!” I holler.
“Not without the crown!” T.F. calls back, dodging a claw.
Feels to me like he’s trying to make a point. See, T.F.’s got a history of taking off as soon as things start to look dicey, leaving me to pick up the pieces. But he swears that’s not his way anymore, and I guess he’s willing to die to prove it. Well, that’s just damn stupid. Admirable, but stupid.
“Ain’t no good to us if we’re dead!” I shout.
I take another shot, but one of the damn crabs grabs Destiny in its claw as I squeeze the trigger. It drags my aim off, and I hit the Abyssal Shrine, blasting it apart.
The sea witch—who, I might add, has been cackling away like a fiend this whole time—screeches in fury.
I’m wrestlin’ with the crab that’s got Destiny in its claw. I ain’t releasing my grip, and the crab don’t seem inclined to, neither.
I snarl. “That’s mine, you scuttling—”
A pair of cards slices through the air, taking off each of the crab’s eye stalks. That makes it let go, and it staggers off blindly, bumping into walls and other scuttlers.
I nod my thanks, but T.F. ain’t lookin’. He’s starin’ over at the shrine. Well, where the shrine was. Now it’s mostly a pile of rocks. Seems it was hollow the whole time, and that my wayward shot bust it wide open.
“Well, would you look at that,” I say.
Seems someone was entombed inside. They’re nothing more than dried bones now, sticking out of the rubble. There’s a tarnished crown circling their skull, too, a crown that glints like gold, and is fashioned in the form of a hissing serpent…
I cast a glance over at the witch. She looks mighty displeased with this turn of events. Scowling, she starts to rise up off the floor. For a second I wonder if I hit my head harder than I first thought, and I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m seeing things right.
But I’m not imagining it. She’s now hovering a good two feet off the ground.
“Huh,” I say.
With a snarl, the witch jabs her staff toward us, and a hole opens up in the air. Now, admittedly that doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s the best I got to describe it. The hole’s about the size of a cannonball, at least to start with, but it quickly expands, like a rip in a ship’s hull. A torrent of frigid seawater spills through it, and I go down to one knee as I lose my footing.
There’s movement in the hole as well, and a massive yellow eye appears, iris contracting sharply as it peers through. Looks just like the eye of the octopus thing latched atop the witch’s head, only a hundred, no, a thousand times bigger. I get the feelin’ it’s somewhere deep, deep down in the darkest ocean depths, but here it is, eye-balling us like we’re bait on the end of a line.
Next I know, the eye pulls away, and two giant tentacles lash through the hole. I unleash both barrels, and blow one of those tentacles clean off. It flops to the cave floor, spraying blue blood all over as it thrashes and wriggles. The other one wraps around a giant crab, lifting it easily, and whips it back into the hole.
The old sea witch remains floating in place, with an evil grin. Seems she’s happy to hang back and watch her beast finish us off.
“Get the damn crown!” I bark, pushing back to my feet and fumbling with a pair of fresh shells.
Again the yellow eye races up to the hole, peering through. It looks at T.F., but I shout and wave my arms, and its giant pupil snaps toward me.
A tentacle darts through and wraps around me. Damn near crushes my ribcage as it squeezes and lifts me off my feet. It starts pulling me in, but before I’m dragged through the hole to gods-know-where, I manage to get Destiny up, and level it at the eye.
Seems to me there’s a certain level of intelligence in that gaze, more than one’d expect of a big ol’ sea monster. It sees Destiny and has an inkling of what’s coming, ’cause the eye pulls back, fast. Not fast enough, mind. Destiny roars, barking fire and brimstone, and I hear—and feel—the great beast’s roar of pain.
I’m dropped abruptly to the floor. Water continues to pour into the cave, sending me tumbling head over arse before I’m slammed against the wall. Thankfully, I’ve still got a hold of Destiny—I’m none too eager to head back to Piltover to get another made just yet—but she likely took some water during my little spill.
I come up spluttering. Feels like I’ve swallowed half of Bilgewater Bay. I see T.F. lift the crown off the skeleton, and he gives me a quick nod.
“Now we go,” he says.
I scramble to my feet. Seems like, for the moment at least, the beast behind the hole has backed off, though water keeps pouring through. The whole cave’s knee deep, and refuse and junk are floating around. The giant crabs—those few still here—are milling around, confused as to what’s going on.
The witch’s captive is awake now. He’s climbed up onto a rock, and is staring around him, terrified. Can’t say I blame him. He’s still chained up as well, which ain’t ideal for him with the rising water.
I aim Destiny at the chain and pull the trigger—least I can do is give the fella a fighting chance—but nothing happens. Seems water did get into her workings.
“Sorry, friend,” I say with a shrug.
The witch sees T.F. with the crown, and hisses in fury. She starts floating over toward us, toes dragging in the frigid brine.
T.F. tosses the crown to me, and I awkwardly catch it.
“Why you givin’ it to me?” I have to yell to be heard over the sound of the roaring water.
“Figured you wouldn’t want to let it out of your sight,” he shouts back. “That you wouldn’t trust me to shift out with it.”
I consider that for half a second. Gotta say, I’m a little surprised, and a little impressed. If T.F. keeps this up, I might just have to reassess my opinion of him.
Still, the witch is now focused on me, and it looks like she’s mouthing a curse. As I said, I ain’t the superstitious type, but I ain’t stupid, neither. I toss the crown back to him.
“I trust ya,” I shout. “More or less.”
I take another glance at the witch. Behind her, the big old yellow eye is peeking through the hole again. I feel a moment of satisfaction to see an angry red mark where Destiny bit.
T.F. flicks out a trio of cards, each trailing sorcerous flame, but the witch makes a dismissive gesture. An invisible force knocks them off course, and they fail to hit home. On she comes, floating closer.
She’s smiling her toothless grin now, exposing rotting gums. Seems to reason she thinks she’s got us dead to rights.
“Go, get out of here!” I shout to T.F., even as I swing Destiny over my shoulders. No time to see her wrapped and watertight. If I get out of this mess, she’ll need some tending.
“See you on the other side,” T.F. says with a wink. I believe him, too. Who would have thought?
“Take them, now!” shrieks the witch.
She points her staff at us, and the giant behemoth hurls itself forward, trying to push itself through the hole. A mass of tentacles squeeze out, reaching for us.
Time to leave. T.F. starts doing his thing, cards dancing, focusing on making his exit. Then he and the crown are gone.
My turn. I take a running jump into the dark pool even as tentacles whip toward me. Really hope this does connect to the tunnel I swam through, else that heroic leap’s gonna seem mighty daft.
I hit the water, diving deep, and start swimming. Can’t see anything worth a damn, but the time for caution is long past. If I smack straight into a wall, so be it. Right now that’s the least of my problems.
Thankfully, seems my hunch was right. I swim under a dark rock, blind, and come up on the other side. Back in the first cavern. I can hear the sea witch screeching in rage, echoing around the cave. Any moment, I expect some big damn tentacles to snake through and pull me back.
Sucking in a deep breath, I dive again.

I surface with a gasp. Shoulda been easier coming back, knowing where I was going, but it damn near killed me.
Hands grab me and haul me up. After more than a little swearing and grunting, both T.F. and I flop into the boat, Intrepid.
“Why you gotta be so damn heavy?” he groans.
“Why you gotta be so damn scrawny?” I throw back.
I have no idea if the sea witch or her pets are coming after us, but it don’t seem like a good idea to stick around and find out. I grab hold of the oars and start pulling.

There’s a ship waiting for us, just beyond the Widow Makers. It’s a sleek cutter, built for speed—the Ascended Empress. It’s a gaudy thing, decked out with gold leaf and a cat-headed woman for a figurehead, presumably the aforementioned empress.
“Guess the Prince’s eager to get a hold of his prize, eh?” says T.F, as the cutter turns toward us.
“Seems like.”
Within minutes, the Empress is alongside us. A net’s thrown down, and eager hands haul us aboard once we clamber to the top.
The Prince and his crew are there to greet us. He’s an odd one, the Prince, always has been. Claims to be descended from the lost rulers of the Shuriman sandlands, and waltzes around wearing gold paint caked on his face. Always pays well, though.
“You have it?” asks the Prince. He’s so eager, he’s practically licking his golden lips.
“You got our coin?” I say.
A pair of purses, bulging with Krakens, are thrown at our feet. I stoop down to inspect them. Got a good heft. Like I said, the Prince’s always been one to pay well.
T.F. hands over the crown, and the Prince takes it, full of reverence. “The Abyssal Crown,” he breathes. He stares at it a moment longer, then places it atop his smooth, golden head.
A broad smile creeps across his face. He gives us an appreciative nod, and strides onto the foredeck. He steps up to the bow and leans out, facing the open ocean, and lifts his arms high.
“Rise!” he bellows, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hear my command, oh dwellers of the deep! Rise and come to me!”
The Prince’s crew are watching expectantly. I catch T.F.’s eye, and nod down toward Intrepid.

I really didn’t expect the crown to work—and part of me figured we’d best not be around when I was proved right—but after everything else I’d seen tonight, I wasn’t dismissing the chance that it might. And if it did, well, that seemed like an even better reason to be far, far away. Besides, that old sea witch probably ain’t gonna be too impressed with someone messin’ with her property.
Still, it’s more than a little surprising when the biggest damn creature I’ve ever seen breaches some hundred feet or so off the Ascended Empress’ starboard.
T.F. and I, we’re already half a league away, heading madly for port, but even from here, the scale of the thing is almost impossible to comprehend.
“Huh,” I grunt.
T.F. can’t even manage that. He stands, all fear of tipping overboard momentarily forgotten, and stares, mouth agape, at the distant sea monster.
I can just make out the tiny figure of the Prince, standing on the Ascended Empress’ deck, arms still lifted to the sky.
The beast continues to rise. It could be mistaken for a small island, though to be fair, not many islands have bloody great glowing lures atop their heads, or teeth the length of a ship’s keel, or masses of coiling tentacles, or pallid dead eyes the size of the moon.
Almost lazily, the gargantuan beast reaches out and wraps the Ascended Empress in its tentacles. The cutter lists to the side, cannons and crew falling into the sea. I can still see the Prince, clinging to the foredeck. Then the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw snaps, biting off the front half of the ship, swallowing it whole—along with the Prince.
It’s over in moments. Before Fifth Bell tolls, all evidence of the Ascended Empress is gone, and the great beast has disappeared beneath the surface.
“Huh,” I say again. Don’t think either of us expected that.
After a while, I start rowing. It’s only once we’re tied up at the White Wharf, and are back on solid ground, that we speak.
“Well, that was really… somethin’,” I say.
“It was.”
“Reckon that sea witch is gonna be comin’ after us?”
“I reckon so.”
I grunt, and we both stand in silence, staring back out across the bay.
“Drink?” says T.F., finally.
I suddenly remember those extra Krakens I pocketed in the witch’s cave. Might not be a bad idea to be rid of them sooner than later.
“Drink,” I agree, with a nod. “And it’s on me.”

Sarah Fortune reclines, boots up on the table. She sips from an ornate goblet, making a show of being casual… though hidden unseen in one of her deep coat pockets, she clasps a loaded hand cannon.
A veritable mother lode of old coins, artifacts, and precious gemstones are piled upon the table before her. Even encrusted in verdigris, barnacles, and dried seaweed, it’s clearly enough to buy up half the Slaughter Fleets. Nevertheless, Sarah Fortune pretends to be unimpressed. No need to seem too eager.
“So, in return for my man, and this lot,” she says, gesturing languidly at the treasure, “what exactly is it you want?”
The sea witch stares at her with her blank, milky gaze. The golden eye of the creature affixed to her head, however, blinks.
“Two rats, promised to the Beasts Below,” the witch hisses. “Find them for me, and all this, and more, shall be yours…”
Diana

Diana did not belong on Mount Targon. A group of Solari hunters discovered her swaddled between her frost-claimed parents—strangers to this land, who had clearly traveled a long way. The hunters brought her to their temple, dedicated her, and raised her as a member of the Tribes of the Last Sun, known to many as the Rakkor.
Like all of the Solari faith, she underwent rigorous physical and religious training. However, unlike others, Diana was determined to understand why the Solari act the way they do, and the reasoning behind their beliefs. She spent her evenings digging through the libraries, devouring texts with only pale moonlight to read by. Paradoxically, this pursuit provided more questions than answers, and her teachers’ aphoristic replies did little to sate her inquisitive mind.
When Diana began to notice tomes had whole chapters torn from them, and all references to the moon seemed missing, the teachers assigned harsh punishments, intending to exhaust her into devotion. Likewise, her fellow acolytes distanced themselves from her and her questioning.
There was one shining beacon in these years of confused, frustrated isolation: Leona. The most devout of Diana’s peers, they often found themselves in impassioned debate. Though one never swayed the other in their long and frequent conversations, they developed a close friendship.
Then, one glorious night, Diana discovered a hidden alcove deep within the mountain. Moonlight spilled against its walls, revealing imagery of the sun, of soldiers armored in gold alongside silver-clad warriors, and matching imagery of the moon, atop Targon’s greatest peek. Delighted, Diana raced to share this clear message with Leona—the sun and moon were not enemies after all!
Leona did not react with joy.
She urged Diana to put this heresy from her mind entirely, warning of the punishments that may befall her if she were to voice such thoughts to others. Diana had never seen her serious friend quite so grave.
Frustration gnawed at her. She had reached the end of the Solari’s knowledge, yet not even Leona would take this new discovery into account. What were the Solari hiding? Increasingly, Diana felt certain there was only one place she could go for answers: the top of Mount Targon.
The climb tested her in every way imaginable, and time seemed to stand still as she scaled the peak. To survive, she focused her thoughts on her lone companion, and the answers that would make the Solari better, more whole.
The summit greeted her with the brightest, fullest moon she’d ever seen. After a rapturous moment, a pillar of moonlight slammed into her and she felt a presence taking hold of her, sharing glimpses of the past, and of another Rakkor faith called the Lunari. Diana realized this presence could only be one of the legendary Aspects… and she had been chosen as its host.
When the light dissipated, her mind was again her own. Diana found herself clad in armor, holding a crescent blade, and hair once dark hair now gleaming silver. She turned to find she was not alone—Leona stood at her side, similarly bedecked in shining, golden battleplate, a sunbreak-bright shield and sword in her hands.
Diana was overjoyed to share in this revelatory moment with her friend, but Leona thought only of returning to the Solari. Diana begged her not to, desperate that they face this new future together. But Leona refused, and their disagreement quickly turned into a titanic battle, erupting with moonlight and sunfire.
Fearful of losing herself to the Aspect’s power, Diana ultimately fled down the mountain. But, vindicated in her search, she felt more certain than ever that she had been right to question the Solari’s teachings. It was time to confront them, and show the error of their ways.
Pushing past their Ra’Horak guardians, Diana burst into the chambers of the high priests. They listened with mounting horror as she told of what she had learned of the Lunari… and then they denounced her as a heretic, a blasphemer, and a peddler of false gods. Rage filled Diana, amplified by the Aspect within, and she embraced it in a terrible burst of moonlight. Startled, she fled the temple, leaving a trail of death in her wake.
Now, driven by half-remembered visions and glimpses of ancient knowledge, Diana clings to the only truths she knows for certain—that the Lunari and the Solari need not be foes, and that there is a greater purpose for her than to be a Solari acolyte of Mount Targon.
And though that destiny remains unclear, Diana will seek it out, whatever the cost.
Night’s Work

Night had always been Diana’s favorite time, even as a child. It had been that way since she was old enough to scramble over the walls of the Solari temple and watch the moon traverse the vault of stars. She looked up through the dense forest canopy, her violet eyes scanning for the silver moon, but seeing only its diffuse glow through the thick clouds and dark branches.
The trees were pressing in, black and moss-covered, their branches like crooked limbs reaching for the sky. She could no longer see the path, her route forward obscured by rank weeds and grasping briars. Wind-blown thorns scraped the curved plates of her armor, and Diana closed her eyes as she felt a memory stir within her.
A memory, yes, but not her own. This was something else, something drawn from the fractured recollections of the celestial essence that shared her flesh. When she opened her eyes, a shimmering image of a forest overlaid the close-packed trees before her. She saw the same trees, but from a different time, from when they were young and fruitful and the path between them was dappled with light and edged in wildflowers.
Raised in the harsh environs of Mount Targon, Diana had never seen a forest like this. She knew what she was seeing was an echo of the past, but the scents of honeysuckle and jasmine were as real as anything she had experienced.
“Thank you,” she whispered, following the spectral outline of the ancient path.
It led Diana through overgrown and withered trees that ought to have been long dead. It climbed the slopes of rocky highlands, and passed through stands of twisted pine and wild fir. It crossed tumbling mountain streams and wound its way around sheer slopes before bringing her to a rocky plateau overlooking a vast lake of cold, dark water.
At the center of the plateau was a circle of towering stones, each carved with looping spirals and curving sigils. On every stone Diana saw the same rune that shimmered upon her forehead and knew she had reached her destination. Her skin tingled with a sense of febrile anticipation, a sensation she had come to associate with wild and dangerous magic. Wary now, she approached the circle, eyes scanning for threats. Diana saw nothing, but she knew something was here, something utterly hostile and yet somehow familiar.
Diana moved to the center of the circle and drew her sword. Its crescent blade glittered like diamond in the wan moonlight penetrating the clouds. She knelt with her head bowed, the blade’s tip resting on the ground, its quillons at her cheeks.
She felt them before she saw them.
A sudden drop in pressure. A raw charge to the air.
Diana surged to her feet as the spaces between the stones split apart. The air buckled and a trio of screeching beasts charged her with ferocious speed; ivory flesh, bone-white carapaces of segmented armor and steel talons.
Terrors.
Diana dived beneath a snapping jaw filled with teeth like polished ebony, slashing her sword in an overhead arc that clove the first monster’s skull to its heavy shoulders. The creature fell, its flesh instantly unraveling. She rolled to her feet as the others circled like pack hunters, now wary of her gleaming blade. The creature she had killed now resembled a pool of bubbling tar.
They came at her again, one from each side. Their flesh was already darkening to a bruised purple, hissing in this world’s hostile atmosphere. Diana leapt over the leftmost beast and swung her sword in a crescent arc towards its neck plates. She yelled one of the Lunari’s holy words and incandescent light blazed from the blade.
The beast blew apart from the inside, gobbets of newly-wrought flesh disintegrating before the moonblade’s power. She landed and swayed aside from the last beast’s attack. Not fast enough. Razored talons punched through the steel of her pauldrons and dragged her around. The beast’s chest split apart, revealing a glutinous mass of sense organs and hooked teeth. It bit into the meat of her shoulder and Diana screamed as numbing cold spread from the wound. She spun her sword, holding the grip like a dagger and rammed it into the beast’s body. It screeched, relinquishing its hold. Steaming black ichor poured from its ruptured body. Diana spun away, biting down on the pain racing around her body. She held her moonblade out to the side as the clouds began to thin.
The beast had tasted her blood and hissed with predatory hunger. Its armored form was now entirely gloss black and venomous purple. Bladed arms unfolded and remade themselves in a fan of hooks and talons. Unnatural flesh flowed like wax to seal the awful wound her blade had ripped.
The essence within Diana surged. It filled her thoughts with undying hatred from a distant epoch. She glimpsed ancient battles so terrible that entire worlds had been lost in the fires of their waging; a war that had almost unmade this very world and still might.
The creature charged Diana, its body rippling with the raw power of another realm of existence.
Clouds parted and a brilliant shaft of silver speared downwards. Diana’s sword drank in the radiance of distant moons and light burned along its edge. She brought it down in an executioner’s arc, cleaving plated bone and woven flesh with the power of the night’s illumination.
The beast came apart in an explosive detonation of light, its body utterly unmade by her blow. Its flesh melted into the night, leaving Diana alone on the plateau, her chest heaving with exertion as the power she had joined with on the mountain withdrew to the far reaches of her flesh.
She blinked away after-images of a city that echoed with emptiness where once it had pulsed with life. Sadness filled her, though she had never known this place, but even as she mourned it, the memory faded and she was Diana again.
The creatures were gone and the stones of the circle gleamed with threads of silver radiance. Freed from the touch of the hateful place on the other side of the veil, their healing power seeped into the earth. Diana felt it spreading into the landscape, carried through rock and root to the very bones of the world.
“This night’s work is done,” she said. “The way is sealed.”
She turned to where the moon’s reflection shimmered in the waters of the lake. It beckoned to her, its irresistible pull lodged deep in her soul as it drew her ever onwards.
“But there is always another night’s work,” said Diana.
Draven

Even as an orphan on the streets of Basilich, Draven was headstrong and full of bravado, frequently getting into vicious brawls with older street children and shady underworld thugs. While supremely confident in his own ability—some would say overconfident—it is unlikely he would have survived childhood had it not been for his older brother, Darius, who invariably finished the fights Draven started.
When Basilich fell to the warhosts of Noxus, the brothers came to the attention of a captain named Cyrus, after Draven made an ill-considered attempt on his life. Impressed with their fighting spirit, Cyrus allowed them to join the Noxian ranks.
For years, the brothers fought as part of Cyrus’ warhost—yet while Darius took to this life easily, Draven grew steadily more bored. His martial skill was beyond question, but the daily drudgery of soldiering felt like too much effort for too little reward… and not enough personal glory.
Darius inevitably rose to command his own warband, and Draven joined him. However, if he thought that would be easier, or a way to achieve greater individual recognition, he was sorely disappointed.
Some say Draven chose to leave Darius’ command. Some say he was forced out. Either way, his skills were highly sought after as a champion and duelist, and he was enticed to join a succession of warbands during the occupation of Ionia, before ending up with a fairly respectable contract in the Reckoning pits.
For centuries, the gladiatorial Reckoners had performed a vital role in Noxus—punishing criminals and settling disputes between the noble houses—and Draven was determined to receive the riches, adoration, and renown he felt he deserved. However, with long, protracted wars on many fronts, the spectacle was beginning to lose its appeal for the common citizen. As the attention of the crowds drifted, Draven fell into a slump, spending more and more time in the seedier drinking halls and gambling dens of the capital.
He was washed-up and broke when the former general Jericho Swain found him.
Swain had a plan to reclaim Noxus’ lost glory, and needed Draven’s help to achieve it. Perhaps Swain only enlisted him as a way to ensure his brother Darius’ support after the fact. Regardless, Draven proved integral to Swain’s plan—to depose the Grand General himself, Boram Darkwill.
Standing triumphant with Swain, Draven smiled for the first time in months as the cheers of the Noxian people washed over him.
But duty called. In the days and weeks following this unprecedented coup, many among the noble elite refused to honor Swain’s succession, so they were sentenced to death in the arena.
One condemned man escaped his handlers ahead of his execution. Operating on pure instinct—as was ever his wont—Draven leapt from the high balcony and hurled a pair of axes at the fleeing man, cutting him down in a heartbeat. After a moment of stunned silence, the crowd roared their approval. Draven retrieved his axes, spinning them high in the air, playing to his new fans, and savoring their rapturous applause.
Thus Draven became the Glorious Executioner, turning routine bouts into grand spectacles that drew ever larger crowds.
Soon enough, an enterprising (and diminutive) promoter, tired of paying to house, feed, and train Reckoners only for them to die in front of dwindling audiences, approached Draven with an idea. What if the drama of the classic pit fights could be combined with Draven’s natural showmanship?
The Reckoners quickly became entertainers as much as combatants, each with their own carefully constructed backstory, fighting style, and flamboyant personality. The fights were often bloody—this was still Noxus after all—but far less often ended in death. The rivalries, trash-talking, and intrigue between the best-known Reckoners became the stuff of legend throughout the empire, but none were talked about more than Draven.
For a time he lived the high life, receiving invitations to a never-ending stream of parties and banquets, mixing with the wealthy and influential of Swain’s new Noxus. He even reconciled with Darius, and would occasionally still march out with the warhosts, defeating enemy champions and generals in single combat.
Nevertheless, Draven has started to grow restless once again. He has all that he could have ever imagined, and more, but now dreams of the day when the whole world knows his name.
The Dream Thief

Matt Dunn

The Ice Witch does not sleep in her citadel. She sleeps anywhere, and everywhere, and nowhere. Sometimes all at once.
The cavernous place where she now chooses to lay her body down for a few hours could hold a thousand fortresses. A veritable sea of True Ice stretches from underground horizon to underground horizon. They are not the horizons of the tumultuous world above, but closer—much closer—to an entirely different kind of madness.
She visits this place often, and always by herself, but she is never alone.
Some called them monsters. Some called them gods. Regardless, the vast shadows that slumber beneath the icy blanket can only dream. Lissandra checks in dutifully. Makes sure their bedding is comfortable.
The Watchers must not awaken.
She lost her eyes long ago, so it is her mind that traces their sleeping forms. What she sees has always chilled her beyond the concerns of flesh and bone, so that she no longer shivers at the touch of ice against her skin.
When she is down here, her blindness is a blessing. It is horror enough to feel their presence. To walk in their dreams. To know what it is they desire for this world.
And so, she must keep them dreaming.
One of them has begun to stir. Lissandra sensed it with the last new moon, hoping against hope that it would settle itself once more—but now its abyssal intelligence squirms against the others, growing ever more restless.
She removes her helm. Her ceremonial robes fall around her ankles, and she pads out across the frozen emptiness beyond.
Lissandra splays her fingers across the ice. Her hair hangs over her face, hiding the lines of age, and the scarred ruin of her empty eyes. She learned long ago the secret ways to walk in dreams, to traverse the impossible distances of this harsh land in moments, back and forth a hundred times before each new dawn. Sometimes, she forgets where her physical body is.
Her mind drifts down, now, through the barrier. She muses briefly at the thickness of the True Ice. To place the entire burden of faith upon glass is pure folly, and yet there is no other choice.
On the other side, the Watcher is all teeth and darkness and chittering, frustrated anticipation.
It is bigger than a mountain. Is it one of the small ones? Lissandra hopes so. She has never dared probe the defenses of the largest—the ones that seem able to devour gravity and time itself, eaters of not only worlds, but entire planes of reality. They make her feel very small and insignificant, like a single mote of frost in a blizzard.
She focuses on the great and terrible creature before her.
Its dream becomes hers.
Another Lissandra waits for her there, in the dreamscape. This ageless being towers behind a black sun, the strands of her hair floating into the heavens, her eyes whole, crystal-blue, and shining all with the celestial energies of the world’s final dawn.
She is beautiful. She is a goddess. She is struggling to press the sun down below the horizon.
The fiery black orb fights back, trying to rise again. It burns the goddess’ fingers.
She sees long un-shadows falling over mountains blanketed with frozen ashes. This land is a mockery of the Freljord, devoid of all life and magic…
Life. Life is the key. The living souls of the Freljord, this icy land that Lissandra once offered in sacrifice to the beasts below. She leads the stirring Watcher away from its own dark thoughts, as gently as she can, and tries to soothe it with the dreams of others.

The tribe is split across three camps. It is this way because the Iceborn warmother decrees it so. To hedge against an assassin’s blade, she says, so that none will know in which tent she slumbers.
Glacier underfoot, stars overhead, the priest marks his observations on a fold of cured elnük skin by candlelight, upon an icy outcropping. His hand is steady and bold. He must send his notes each night to the Frostguard Citadel.
He wonders, does power mask paranoia? Does—
He sees his breath, and knows that he is not alone. Shame constricts his throat. Dutifully, he reaches for a strip of cloth to honor Lissandra, greatest of the Three. After all the oaths he spoke, only her gaze could ever bring such a chill to his heart.
“Do not bind your eyes,” she says, emerging from the night’s shadow. Her voice is steady and cold.
“Forgive me,” he says. “I am late. My reports are—”
“It is not your words I seek. You are dreaming. I need you to listen. Listen to the ice.”
The Frost Priest’s eyes widen at what he hears. The ice hungers.
No. Not the ice. Something… beneath it?
“What does it mean?” he asks, but Lissandra is gone.
The priest awakens. He ruminates on the dream. He pledged to serve, freeze, and bleed blindly. He reaches for the strip of cloth, and binds his eyes.
Before dawn breaks, he is miles away from the warmother and her three camps.
And Lissandra drifts away into another’s dream.

Seven ice-hawks take flight across a blue sky, scattering the frost from their feathers. The dismal fang of a mountain looms over a beach of rounded gray stones, descending into the shallows of the sea.
The little girl—no one remembers her name but her—walks alone.
She picks up a crab. It’s black, with square eyes swiveling atop its head. She holds it carefully, its legs tickling the palm of her hand.
She looks up to see a chunk of ice floating in the dark water, carried to land on near-frozen tides. It bumps onto the rocky shore and begins to melt. Inch by inch, it shrinks away to reveal the form of a woman curled in a cradle of ice, a thing born of winter.
The girl drops the crab.
Lissandra arises from the breaking waves like a—
“WITCH!” the girl shrieks. A gale of ice and snow and searing cold bursts from her mouth.
The witch vanishes, and only the little girl crying a blizzard remains.
She wakes with a start beside a dying fire, surrounded by other sleeping children. They are the ones orphaned upon the Freljord’s reddening snow. A stern-looking woman watches over them, an axe strapped to her back. They all know she would die for them.
An ember pops from the hearth, landing in the shabby furs at the girl’s feet.
She touches it with her finger. It freezes solid in an instant.
Already walking into another dream, Lissandra knows to watch this child. She is Iceborn. Perhaps a new weapon for the war to come.
Or a new enemy.

High up in the mountains, it is not the deep cold that has laid this poor traveler low.
It is his own ignorance.
He hunches in a shallow cave. He hums because he can no longer sing the songs of his youth to comfort himself. He cannot bear to inhale the icy air. His beard, white with frost and frozen snot, makes it painful to open his lips, now blue and cracked. He cannot feel his legs, nor his hands. He no longer shivers. He is too far gone.
He has surrendered. The freeze will take his heart, and then it will be over.
It’s not the end he desired. But he feels warm. Free.
“To the fair lands! To the sunshine!” The lyrics slide dully around his brain. Instead of snow and ice, he sees green pastures. He can feel the summer breeze in his hair.
Lissandra approaches the man from the back of the shallow cave. She can see the death in his fingers and toes, spreading slowly. He will not awaken again. This will be his final dream.
She places a hand on his shoulder. No one should have to be alone in their final moments.
“Your people are waiting for you, friend,” she whispers. “Lay down in the long grass. I will watch over you while you rest.”
He looks up at her. He smiles, and nods. He looks younger.
Then he closes his eyes, and drifts away.
Lissandra remains on the edge of his dream, until the dream is no more.

War cries and death screams drag Lissandra south. She can smell blood and fire on the wind, and the sharp tang of angry steel. Grass grows here, where the thaw happens. It is not a sunny pasture, but it is the closest thing that most tribes of the Freljord will ever know.
The dream spins, and distorts. Her knees feel like they will buckle, if that would have any meaning. She steadies herself against the upright timbers of a burning hut.
The flames do nothing. They are not real.
A shadow falls over her.
“Long have I waited for this day, witch!”
Surprisingly, it is one of the Avarosans—a great red-haired brute, his neck bulging with strained arteries. He hefts a notched sword over his head. The bloodlust is plain in his eyes, as he imagines victories he will never see in his lifetime.
Nonetheless, he is ready to deliver the final, cleaving blow to his sworn enemy.
Lissandra has lost count of how many times she has died in someone else’s dream. Each time, a piece of her drifts away, never to return.
No. Not again. Not this time.
Great claws of ice close around her to form a shield, entombing her. The warrior’s blade does not even chip the surface. He staggers back, roaring defiantly as he—
Let him awaken, and believe himself the hero who drove off the Ice Witch. It was only a dream. The Avarosan tribes will fall… just like the treacherous harridan from whom they took their name.
And Lissandra has more pressing concerns.

The eye of the storm is most ferocious in the Freljord.
The gale roars. Lightning flashes. Even snowflakes can draw blood.
Lissandra finds the spirit walker channeling this elemental fury. His trance is much like a dream—a bridge between worlds. The storm is a prayer, a direct line to the Ursine’s demi-god master.
Lissandra would spit. That hateful creature is one of the few memories she could not purge from the Freljord, no matter how hard she tried.
Lightning strikes the shaman multiple times. A toothy maw stretches his jawline. Fingernails blacken into claws. It is neither man nor bear, but something else entirely. All its life will be much like a dream. No sleep. No joy. Only the storm. Lissandra edges closer, looking for anything she can use in the roiling madness.
Then the shaman’s frightful gaze snaps to her, and she finds herself face to face with an avatar of the Volibear himself.
Without thought, Lissandra lashes out with cleaving spikes of True Ice pulled from the earth around them. She tries to snare the creature’s limbs, to slow it for even just—
Dark blood stains the snow. Thunder rolls around the distant peaks. The twisted shaman falls to his knees, his body torn between the shape of what he was, and what he might have become. It is a kindness, really, for his mind is still mostly his own.
Other eyes shine out from the storm. These shapechangers are not the threat they once were. They are a battle for another time.
For now, their delirium will serve well enough.

Lissandra warily circles the Watcher beneath the ice. She can see her own tiny body on the surface above them—her pale, corpse-like flesh is almost as white as freshly driven snow.
The beast is barely aware of her presence. It is like some monstrous, mewling newborn.
In the dreams of the Watchers, there is nothing.
And more nothing. And more nothing. A horizon of nothing, framed by mountains of nothing. Above all that nothing? A sky of nothing, with dense clouds of nothing.
In the face of all of that nothing, Lissandra fights to remain… something.
The abyss yawns around her. She watches the black sun devour her avatar, but no matter how much it pulls into its maw, there is always more for it to eat.
She screams, and explodes into dark fractals that divide into billions of Lissandras—every one of them screaming. Against all the nothing, the sound is barely even a whisper, and yet even that is enough to rattle the dream to its very foundations…
Her barely conscious body traces glyphs on the surface of the True Ice barrier. It is an old spell, born of a fire now long extinguished. She scrawls in spasms and convulsions. Her movements are desperate, jerking, clumsy.
Only a shred of her spirit remains in her body.
And then, in a rush, most of her returns. She vomits watery bile onto the ice, and curls up as it freezes around her.
Below, the writhing shadow sleeps again. It dreams of eating her for a little while longer, and that dream buys it the only measure of peace its kind ever seem to desire.
Peace. It is something Lissandra never experiences. Not anymore.
She dresses herself, and returns to ascend the worn steps. The Frostguard await her leadership and guidance. She will find no peace in this life.
That is a small price to pay, to keep the beasts slumbering.
Dreaming.
Gnawing.

Blistering winds lash the orphaned Iceborn’s cheeks almost bloody. Her nose went numb an hour ago—or was it two? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, because whenever she closes her eyes, she sees the witch.
Silhouetted against the never-setting sun, the woman rides a beast of ice, bone, and dark magic, and dazzles in a gown of freshly-fallen snow. The horned helm that covers her eyes gives the impression of her head rising out into the stars.
Parched black lips part to offer horrific prophecies.
“Reathe, I see you.”
The Ice Witch has never failed to make a dramatic entrance into Reathe’s dreams.
“The darkness grins,” she continues, “and says to me ‘Ice and lies make desperate tools’. I implore my hand to curl into a fist! To pluck out the ever-watchful eye! To impale it upon a spike of ice! Before the wind howls its song only to the widening abyss…”
Reathe’s eyelashes have frozen shut. Now, it hurts to tear them apart. But she must. The longer they’re stuck together, the harder it will be to break them open.
She cries out, and feels hot blood trickle down her cheek. She fogs a piece of ice with her breath, and rubs it until she can see her reflection. The split in the corner of her eyelid is not too bad.
But in that reflection, she sees she is not alone in her sheltered cave.
An emaciated man shivers at the entrance, with early morning light casting its blue tint over his face. Then Reathe realizes this is no fanciful illusion. The man’s skin is blue, and translucent. His movements are haggard and stiff, as though he’s trying to reawaken his failing joints.
“It’s cold,” said the haggardly man. “I knew this as I lay dying.”
Reathe skitters backward on her palms and heels, away from him. “I have no food,” she calls out, hating the fear in her own voice. “Little shelter. There is nothing for you to take from me.”
The man tilts his head.
“I am of no hunger. No shelter shields me. I saw this cave, and you… as her frost clouded my eyes. Our paths are like rivers meeting. I knew this as I lay dying.”
“Died often, have you?”
“Just the once was enough.”
“You…” Reathe hesitates, unsure of herself in that moment. “You saw the witch, too?”
“No. But I hear the witch in my veins… in every moment, with every beat of my once-still heart.”
He holds out his blackened hand to her.
“There are others, little Iceborn. Others we must meet. And there are many miles to tread in each other’s company.”
“And you knew all this as you lay dying?”
“Death reveals much, little Iceborn.”
Reathe stands slowly. Warily. “Who are you?” she asks.
“I am no one anymore. I am but a passenger in my own body. My name is frozen over. But you may call me… Shamble, and I shall call you…?”
“Reathe, of the Narrow-Foot Clan.”
“Then come, Reathe, Iceborn of Narrow-Foot. The others are near.”
She does not move. “And who are they?”

The spires of the Frostguard Citadel rise from the frozen landscape. Waves of magical aurorae—greens, and pinks, and blues—dance in a sky that is almost always night. The stars twinkle eternally here, in the coldest and cleanest air.
Few know how to find this hidden fortress. There are many in this world who would raise an army, and raze it to the ground. Those who do find the citadel rarely leave on their own terms.
Even so, five weary figures trudge down from the rocky mountain pass, through the hidden wound in the very fabric of the Freljord.
They seek the Ice Witch. Like so many others through the centuries, they each met Lissandra in their dreams… but now they each feel something else, deep inside.
Something beneath the ice. Something dark, and empty.
Hungry.
Gnawing.
Dr. Mundo

In the wards of Zaun’s infamous asylum, a single monstrous figure roams the halls. His methods are bold, his bonesaw is sharp, and his patients are terrified. For this man is no doctor at all, except in the fancy of his own mind.
Though his true name has been lost to both time and memory, Dr. Mundo was once an enforcer for one of Zaun's most powerful chem-barons. Known for his boisterous affability, he was remarkably good-natured for a man who made his living off physical intimidation. He was always quick with a familiar nickname and a friendly clap on the back, and often blissfully unaware of the toes he was stepping on. It wasn’t long before he had stepped firmly on the toes of his boss.
Determined to make an example of his underling, the chem-baron had him committed to Osweld Asylum—a place well known for its inhumane treatment and questionable cures. The baron watched with satisfaction as his enforcer was placed in restraints and dragged away to the padded confines of the asylum’s most secure cell.
As months went by, the enforcer suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of his supposed caregivers. Experimental treatments were rendered without concern for the patient's well-being. Nerves were prodded, lobes were severed, and unproved medicines were administered in large quantities. The enforcer began to change, his large frame gaining more muscle by the day. His brain, however, suffered a far worse fate. As he lost all memory of his past life, the enforcer struggled to make sense of the cruel world around him. He looked down at his old restraining jacket—it almost resembled the white coats of the medical professionals that surrounded him.
Misreading the words on his own uniform, he began to assume a new name and new profession for himself.
I must be a doctor, too. Why else would I be in this wretched asylum? he reasoned. And all these other people... must be my patients.
At last, the day came when the chem-baron arrived to discharge his enforcer from the asylum. To his surprise, there was no one to greet him in the lobby. The halls were empty and dead silent, save for the faint, incoherent babbling of a deranged patient in a room at the end of the hallway.
The baron entered the room to a horrifying sight: Scattered across the floor were countless bodies—staff and patients alike, dismembered beyond recognition. Standing above them, a hulking, purple monstrosity blathered unintelligibly as a large blue tongue lolled out the side of its gaping mouth. Muscles bulged grotesquely beneath its undersized garments, and its fist tightened around the handle of a surgical saw. The baron turned pale as his gaze found the face of the monster—and recognized it as his old enforcer.
The enforcer, who recalled nothing of his old boss, saw only another patient in desperate need of treatment. The purple thing lumbered toward the chem-baron, wagging his bonesaw in anticipation. The baron drew his chem-tech pistol and fired. The shot tore through the looming mass in front of him, staggering the monster...
But only for a brief moment.
The hole in the creature's flesh quickly closed as new slabs of muscle rapidly regrew over the wound. The monster paused, eyed the baron quizzically, and uttered, “You sick. Need help!”
Mimicking what he had seen performed countless times by the asylum's former practitioners, the enforcer threw the man on a nearby gurney, strapped his arms into the restraints, and prepared his instruments for surgery. The chem-baron turned pale as he realized the grim fate that awaited him.
The ensuing surgery—like so many before and after it—was not successful. The burgeoning doctor added the remains of his latest patient to the pile on the floor. Though he was saddened he could not save them, he knew he had done all he could. Besides, he would have other chances. Zaun was full of sick people just waiting to be cured. With a smile returning to his face, he left the hospital and set out into the streets to find more patients.
Do No Harm

It has been while, Mundo thought, stroking the massive purple tongue that hung from his mouth like an executed criminal swinging from gallows, since Mundo made a housecall.
He rolled out of his bed (a large wooden box filled with sharpened knives and rusty nails), brushed his teeth (with a nail file), and ate breakfast (a cat). Mundo felt exuberant. He felt alive.
Today was a fine day for practicing medicine.
He spotted his first patient hawking shimmerdrops just outside Ranker’s Limb Maintenance. The man limped around in a circle, shouting at everyone within arm’s length about how shimmerdrops would make their eyes roll into the backs of their heads and how if they didn’t buy some right now, right this second, then they were damn idiots and did you just give him a condescending look? Because he’ll kill you and your family and your family’s family.
Mundo took out his notepad, a tool he often used to mark down observations about his patients, both past and present. The notepad was large, yellow, and imaginary.
Patient exhibits signs of mania, Mundo would have written if he hadn’t been tracing random squiggles in the air with a meaty finger. Possible infection of nervous system via cranial virus, he might have inscribed if he were capable of such multisyllabic thought.
“MUNDO CURE HEAD AND FACE AREA GOOD,” he said to himself.
Rank was just about to pack up his shimmerdrops and head home for the night. He needed to get new shoes. These ones rubbed his feet raw when he walked, and at the end of a long day’s work, hadn’t he earned the soft leather of grayeels?
As Rank was thinking this, a huge purple monster jumped out of the shadows and yelled, “MUNDO HAS RESULTS OF YOUR BLOOD WORK.”
Mundo left his first patient more or less as he found him (save for a few limbs) and took to the Commercia Fantastica, a market specializing primarily in gearwork toys. Though most of the shops were closed, Mundo spied a lone Zaunite teetering to and fro as he stumbled down the path. The Zaunite sang a song of a Piltovan beauty and the shy boy from the undercity who loved her, except he seemed to have forgotten most of the words apart from “big ol’ eyes” and “gave it to her.” An empty bottle dangled from his hand, and he looked as if he hadn’t had a bath in months.
Was this man afflicted by the same disease that had ravaged the shimmerdrop dealer? Was this a virus? An epidemic in the making? Mundo had to act fast.
This was clearly a man in need of medical attention.
“TAKE TWO OF THESE AND TALK TO MUNDO IN MORNING,” the purple monstrosity said as he tossed a bonesaw into the drunk’s back.
Mundo descended into Zaun’s Sump level. If there was a virus going around, chances were it originated here. There must be a patient zero somewhere. If he could just cure the first sufferer of this mystery disease, Mundo knew he could cure the rest of Zaun.
But how was Mundo to find one specific patient in the sprawl of the Sump level? What steps would he take to isolate, quarantine, and fix this most suffering of Zaunites? How would he–-
Mundo heard something. Footsteps, and a rhythmic clang of metal against metal.
He followed the noise as carefully and quietly as he could –- wouldn’t want to spook the patient into running away and infecting even more people –- and found exactly what he was looking for.
A young boy. No older than fifteen, probably, with a shock of white hair and a large metal sword-looking-thing in his hand. He had some sort of hourglass tattooed onto his face. Maybe a warning? A symbol that he was not to be approached under any circumstances?
Mundo knew he’d found him. Patient zero.
It would be a complex operation, requiring skill, planning, a careful eye and–-
“YOU MIGHT FEEL A LITTLE STING,” the creature said, leaping out. His enormous purple form hurtling through the air, massive bonesaw in hand, tongue flapping in the wind.
The boy was surprised, but not unprepared. Anybody hanging out in the Sump knew to be ready for trouble at a moment’s notice, and the kid had plenty of time to prepare.
Nothing but time, in fact.
No two ways about it: this was a troublesome patient.
He refused to answer Mundo’s questions about his medical history, and continued to evade Mundo’s attempts to make him take his medicine. He repeated himself over and over again (perhaps suffering from a case of physical amnesia?) and had no respect for Dr. Mundo’s authority.
The two scuffled over the child’s sickness for what felt like hours. Mundo made what he thought were very salient points about the merits of treatment, but the child constantly evaded Mundo’s attempts to help him.
Mundo grew tired of arguing with the boy. He mustered up one final attempt at treatment, wielding his precision scalpel with the artistry of a Demacian duelist. The words of his medical vows -– “MUNDO FIX ALL THINGS, MUNDO DO MEDICINE VERY HARD” –- ran through his head again and again. His desire to cure this child filled him with purpose and determination.
He swung with all his might.
The treatment was a success.
But then –- somehow –- the treatment reversed itself. Whatever good Mundo had accomplished in his last attempt at a cure was suddenly undone. To Mundo’s utter confusion, the child scurried away, utterly uncured.
Mundo screamed in irritation.
“WHY CAN’T MUNDO SAVE THEM ALL?” he screamed to the sky.
Not every operation was a success. Mundo would be the first to admit that. Still, Mundo tried to focus on the positive: Apart from this most recent patient, Mundo had helped an awful lot of people. He’d done a full day’s work, and now it was time to rest.
As the sun came up, Mundo retired home and tucked himself into bed. Who knew what tomorrow might bring? Another patient to help. Another epidemic to stop.
A doctor’s work was never done.
Ekko

Born with genius-level intellect, Ekko constructed simple machines before he could crawl. His parents, Inna and Wyeth, vowed to provide a good future for their son—Zaun, with all its pollution and crime, would only stifle Ekko, whom they felt deserved the wealth and opportunities of Piltover. Throughout his youth he watched his parents age beyond their years, toiling for too many hours under dangerous conditions in suffocating factories. They earned meager wages while greedy factory owners, and sneering Piltovan buyers, profited immensely from their labor.

It would all be worth it, they reasoned, if it meant their son could one day rise to the city above.

Ekko saw things differently. Beyond Zaun’s flaws, he saw a dynamic place overflowing with energy and potential. Zaunites’ industry, resourcefulness, and resilience stirred a hotbed of pure innovation. They had built a thriving culture from catastrophe, and flourished where others would have perished. That spirit captivated Ekko, and spurred him to a youth of wild invention and innovation.

He wasn’t alone. He befriended scrappy orphans, inquisitive runaways, and eager upstarts. Zaunites tended to eschew formal education in favor of apprenticeships, but these “Lost Children of Zaun” looked to the labyrinthine streets to be their mentor. They wasted time in glorious, youthful fashion—foot races through the border markets, or daring climbs from the Sump to the Promenade. They ran wild and free, answering to no one.

One night, on a solo trek into the rubble of a recently demolished laboratory, Ekko made an astonishing find: a shard of blue-green crystal that glittered with magical energy. Every child of Zaun heard tales of hextech, said to power weapons and heroes alike. Such a thing had the potential to change the world, and now he held a broken one. He scrambled to find more pieces, but the crunching footfalls of teched-up enforcers told him he wasn’t the only one looking. Ekko barely escaped, and returned to his home.

He experimented madly with the crystal. During one less-than-scientific attempt, the gem exploded into a vortex of shimmering dust, triggering eddies of temporal distortion. Ekko opened his eyes to see several splintered realities—and several “echo” versions of himself—staring back in sheer panic amid the fractured continua.

He’d really done it this time.

After some tense coordination between Ekko and his paradoxes, they managed to contain and repair the hole he had torn in the fabric of reality. Eventually, he harnessed the shattered crystal’s temporal powers into a device that would allow him to manipulate small increments of time… at least in theory.

On his name day, his friends badgered him into climbing the ancient clocktower known as Old Hungry, so Ekko brought the untested device along with him.

The Lost Children climbed, stopping occasionally to paint an obscene caricature or two of prominent Pilties. They were near the top when a handhold gave way, sending one of Ekko’s friends tumbling to certain doom. Instinctively—as if he’d done it a thousand times before—Ekko activated his device. The world shattered around him, and he was wrenched backward through swirling particles of time.

Then Ekko was back, watching his friend reach again for the same rotting plank. The plank broke, the boy fell… but Ekko was ready this time, diving to the edge and grabbing him by the shirt. Ekko tried to swing him to safety, but his friend became caught in the tower’s clockwork gears, and—

Stop. Rewind.

Several attempts later, Ekko finally saved his friend’s life. But to his crew, Ekko’s supernatural reflexes had saved their friend before anyone even realized the danger. He told them about the crystal and made them swear to secrecy. Instead, they dared each other to new heights of foolishness, knowing Ekko had the means to pluck them out of danger.

With each trial, and so much error, the time-warping device—which Ekko dubbed the Zero Drive—grew more and more stable. The only limit was how many do-overs his body could take before exhaustion set in.

Ekko’s time-bending antics have made him a person of interest to some of Zaun and Piltover’s most inventive, most powerful, and most dangerous individuals. But his only interest is in his friends, his family, and his city. He dreams of the day when his hometown rises up to dwarf the so-called City of Progress, when Piltover’s golden veneer will be overshadowed by the towering ingenuity and relentless spunk of a Zaun born not from generations of privilege, but from sheer daring. He may not have a plan yet, but he’s got all the time in the world.

After all, if Ekko’s Z-Drive can change the past, how hard can it be to change the future?
Lullaby

It had been a weeklong sort of day.
For Ekko, this was both literal and metaphorical. Everything went wrong and it took forever to put it back just right. First, Ajuna had nearly gotten himself killed trying to climb Old Hungry. The younger boy wanted so desperately to be like Ekko that he vaulted up the side of the clockwork tower at the heart of the sump before any of their friends could stop him. It was the first tricky jump that nearly did the kid in. Good thing Ekko had triggered his Z-Drive. Eighteen times he heard the blood-curdling scream of the boy falling to his death before he figured out how and where to arrest the fall and save his life.
Then, while pillaging a scrap heap with ties to Clan Ferros for bits of tech, a particularly aggressive gang of vigilnauts surrounded him. Big ones, too, covered in augments that made the ugly even uglier. Ekko was surprised at their speed, but less surprised at how they shot to kill. Pilties and their backup didn’t care about the lives of sumpsnipes like him. Good thing the Z-Drive existed to get him out of seemingly inescapable encounters like that one. After a few dozen rewinds, he changed tack and pulled out his latest toy: the Flashbinder. It was meant to explode in a dazzling flash and pull anything not bolted down in toward its center.
But the Flashbinder didn’t work. Well, at least not as intended. It exploded. And that’s when things got interesting. Unlike most of Ekko’s inventions that exploded, the blue-hot magical detonation froze in mid blast. Columns of billowing blue energy fanned out from the epicenter. Bits of the disc’s shrapnel twisted at a snail’s pace along what, at normal explosion velocity, would be a deadly trajectory. Even the spherical blinding flash itself was frozen in space.
And then it got even more interesting. The explosion imploded, reforming itself into the palm-sized Flashbinder, and rewound back toward Ekko, landing square in his palm, as cold as the wind.
Cool, Ekko thought. He rewound the moment so he could throw it at the vigilnauts a few more times. For science, of course.
When Ekko finally got home, his body was tired, but his mind was alert. The apartment was functional – the furniture sparse and with little flourish. Ekko’s room was a little curtained-off nook filled with discarded books, bits of scavenged technology, and hiding spots for the Z-Drive and Flashbinder. Today was one of the rare days both his parents would be home early, and he had something to tell them.
“Mom, Dad.” He practiced to his reflection, which stared back at him from the Z-Drive’s shiny cylindrical surface. “I’m not going to apply to any of the Uppside clans or a snooty Piltie school. I’m staying here with you and my friends. I’ll never turn my back on Zaun.”
The words were filled with the confidence that comes with being alone in an empty apartment, with only walls and reflections to respond. And their response was silence.
He heard the jingle of the keys, muffled by the front door. Without a second to spare, Ekko tucked his Z-Drive under the table and draped a black cloth over it. He didn’t want them worrying about his escapades with an unstable hextech time-manipulation device.
The door opened and Ekko’s parents returned for the first time that night. They looked like strangers to their own son, their jobs aging them even more in the weeks since he’d seen them last together. Their routine was predictable. They’d shuffle home, supply a meager meal purchased with the day’s wages, save the rest of the money for taxes and bribes, then fall asleep in their chairs, chins resting on chests, until Ekko removed their workboots and helped them into their beds.
The bags under their eyes carried enough weight to pull their heads down. Tucked under his mother’s arm was a small paper-wrapped bundle, bound at the ends with twine.
“Hello, my little genius.” His mother expended energy she couldn't afford in an attempt to make the words come alive. Yet her expression in that moment of lightness when she saw her son sitting at the table, waiting, was something no one could fake.
“Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad.” The three of them hadn’t sat at a table as a family in such a long time. He quietly chided himself for not saying something substantial.
His father beamed with pride; then he mock-scowled as he brushed his fingers through his son’s mohawk. Ekko struggled to remember a time when his father didn’t look so old, before the prematurely thinning hair and the deep wrinkles in his brow.
“I thought I told you to cut that hair,” his father said. “It’ll make you stand out in the Piltover academies too much. The Factorywood’s the only place you can look like that. They’ll take anyone. And you are not anyone. How are your applications coming?”
This was the moment. Ekko felt the words he’d practiced swimming up to be spoken. The hope in his father’s eyes gave him pause.
His mother filled that empty moment before Ekko could.
“We have a treat for you.” She set the brown parcel down on the table. They pulled their chairs close to watch as Ekko reached over and untied the knotted twine, straightened both strings, and laid them next to him. He unraveled the butcher paper without a single rip. In the center lay a small loaf of fragrant sweetbread, its crust glazed with honey and candied nuts. The cake was from Elline. She made the finest pastries in all of Zaun, and charged a pretty penny for them too. Ekko and his friends often pilfered her desserts from the rich folk who paid the hefty price without even a tiny hesitation.
Ekko’s head shot up to see his parents’ reaction. Their eyes were beaming. “This is too much,” he said. “We need meat and real supper, not sweets.”
“We would never forget your name day,” his father said with a chuckle. “Looks like you did, though.”
Ekko had completely lost track of what day it really was. Still, the gift was too extravagant. Especially since he was about to shatter their hopes for him. Guilt rose in his throat. “The landlord’ll have our heads if we’re late with rent again.”
“Let us worry about that. You deserve something nice,” his mother said. “Go on, you can have cake for dinner once a year.”
“What are you going to eat?”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“I ate at work,” his father lied. “Cheese and meats from Piltover. Real nice stuff.”
They watched Ekko take a tiny bite of the cake. It was sweet and buttery and the crumbs stuck to his fingers. It was so rich, the taste stuck to his tongue. Ekko went to divide the cake into three pieces, but his mother shook her head. Her soft voice hummed the name day song’s playful melody and he knew they wouldn’t partake. It was his parents’ gift to him.
His father would have joined in singing the name day song if he hadn’t already fallen asleep, slumped in his chair, chin dropping to his chest. Ekko glanced over to his mother, her eyes fluttered closed as the melody was swallowed by her own encroaching slumber.
One future Ekko briefly considered was the Factorywood life and barely living wages for some other city’s benefit, for someone else’s glory. He couldn’t stomach the thought. He remembered fragments of conversations, snippets heard through the filter of infant ears, of his parents’ whispered dreams of inventions, and entrance to the clans. Ideas they hoped would change the world and contribute to a future unwritten by the birth of their son. Ekko knew they saw him as their only hope. But he loved life in Zaun. If he did as they wished, who would take care of them or his friends?
He couldn’t dash their dreams. Not tonight, on his name day. Maybe tomorrow.
Ekko didn’t finish his cake beyond the first bite. Instead he primed his Z-Drive. His home shattered into swirling eddies of colored dust. The thrum of the everyday fell to absolute silence. The moment splintered and encircled him in a vortex of light.
When the fragments of the future reassembled into the past, Ekko’s parents were coming home for the second time that night. It would be followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and so on.
Each time he went back, Ekko didn’t change a single thing; the light in his mother’s eyes, his father’s proud smile as he nodded off. But Ekko fought the edges of sleep to hold onto those stolen moments forever, until finally, he let his mother’s soft voice, and the warmth of their little apartment lull him to sleep.
It had been a weeklong sort of day.
Elise

The Lady Elise was born centuries ago to House Kythera, one of the oldest bloodlines of Noxus, and swiftly learned the power of beauty to influence the weak.
When she came of age, she entertained the courtship of Berholdt, heir to House Zaavan. Their union was opposed by many, since it would strengthen Kythera at Zaavan’s expense—but Elise worked hard to beguile her intended husband, and manipulated her detractors to secure a betrothal.
Unbeknown to her, this political marriage had been planned for many years by shadowy forces working behind the scenes throughout the empire, with Berholdt Zaavan a mere pawn in a much larger game. Even so, it was an unexpected twist that Elise should dominate him so completely, and while he remained the face of his house, it was clear who was in charge. As time passed, his resentment grew.
One evening, over a typically frosty dinner, Berholdt revealed he had poisoned her wine, and demanded Elise withdraw from society and allow him to take up the reins of power. Knowing he would have the antidote about his person, Elise played the role of a remorseful wife, weeping and begging her husband’s forgiveness. Just as it seemed he might be convinced, she snatched up a knife and plunged it into his heart.
Even with the antidote, Elise was bedridden for weeks… and it was then that the Pale Woman approached her.
The enigmatic mistress of “the Black Rose” spoke of a secret society where hidden knowledge and sorcery were shared among those who could be trusted, and kept from those who could not. In truth, the Pale Woman did not care who controlled each of the noble houses, as long as they were sworn to her. Since Elise had killed the thrall Berholdt, she would have to prove her own value, or a more suitable replacement would be found.
Seeing a path to greater power, Elise took to the cabal like few before her. She met often with the most prominent members, trading influence and thwarting her rivals in a complex web of tangled schemes. With the wealth of two houses, there were not many who could oppose her, and she became even more adept at persuading others to do her bidding.
Eventually, she learned of an object that held great significance for the Black Rose—the skull of an ancient warlord known as Sahn-Uzal, rumored to have been hidden long ago in the Shadow Isles. Keen to gain the Pale Woman’s favor, Elise found a desperate, debt-ridden captain willing to bear her and a handful of devotees to the cursed city of Helia. They came ashore on a beach of ashen sand, and were tormented by spiteful wraiths as they searched in vain for the lost vault.
But Elise found something she had not anticipated.
A creature of the long-forgotten past had made its home in the lightless depths beneath the city. This bloated, chitinous monster was the spider-god Vilemaw, and it erupted from the darkness to devour the intruders, before sinking its fangs into Elise’s shoulder. She fell, howling and convulsing as the venom wrought terrible changes upon her body. Her spine rippled with undulant motion, and arachnoid legs pushed out from her flesh.
Finally, breathless with the agony of transformation, Elise turned to find her new master looming above her. An unspoken understanding passed between them in that moment, and she scuttled back to the beach, untroubled by the Isles’ spirits as she weaved in and out of the twisted treeline.
Some weeks later, when her ship arrived back at the Noxian capital in the dead of night, Elise had regained her human form… though she was the only living thing left aboard.
Though no evidence was ever found of the warlord’s skull, the Pale Woman saw Elise’s dangerous new gift for what it was—a means to come and go safely between Noxus and the Shadow Isles. An accord was struck, wherein the Black Rose would provide Elise with endless unwitting sacrifices to offer up to the spider-god, and in return she would recover any artifacts of power she could from those benighted, forbidding shores.
Elise once again took up residence in the neglected halls of House Zaavan, carefully cultivating a reputation as a seductive yet unreachable recluse. Few have ever guessed her true nature, yet fanciful rumors abound—wild tales of her ageless beauty, and a terrifying, voracious creature said to lair in the bowels of her dilapidated, dust-wreathed palace.
Though centuries have passed, whenever Elise feels the summons of her god, she returns to the land of the Black Mist with a hapless suitor in tow, or some other easily swayed soul.
And none who accompany her ever return.
Strand by Silken Strand

The weeks spent on the ocean had made Markus feel dizzy and weak, so he was glad to be back on dry land. The path leading from the basalt shore had a slick, oily quality, making it treacherous underfoot. The crooked trees to either side were wretched, blackened husks that wept yellowed sap from where it looked like some panicked animal had clawed them ragged. Soft light shimmered between the trees, dancing like the corpse candles that flickered over marshland and drew unwary souls to their doom. The branches were hung with what looked like canopies of ragged muslin, and it took Markus a moment to realize they were swathes of cobwebs.
Wiry bracken clogged the undergrowth on either side of the path, rustling with the motion of unseen creatures shadowing their passage through the forest. Perhaps the rats infesting the ship had followed them. Markus had never caught sight of one, beyond a fleeting glimpse of a swollen, black-furred body or the skittering sound of claws on wood. He’d never been able to shake the notion that it sounded as if these rats had a few too many legs than any normal rat should have.
The island’s air was heavy with damp, and his finely tailored tunic and boots were sodden with clinging moisture. He held a scented pomander beneath his nose, but it did little to disguise the stench of the island, reminding him of the charnel pits beyond the walls of Noxus when the winds blew in from the ocean. Thinking back to his homeland, he felt a brief twinge of unease. The revels in the catacombs far beneath the city had been a deliciously illicit thrill, a reward for following the secret symbol of the black-petaled bloom. Within the darkened sepulchers, he and his fellows gathered as devotees.
Where she awaited.
He looked ahead, hoping for a glimpse of the beguiling woman whose words had brought so many of them to this place. He caught a flash of crimson silk and swaying hips before the mist oozing between the trees obscured his sight of her. He’d thrilled to the sermons of her ancient god, and had been overjoyed when he and the others had been chosen to join her on this pilgrimage. It seemed like a grand adventure when they boarded the heavily laden barque at midnight, under the still gaze of the mute and hooded steersman, but being so far from Noxus had begun to dull his enthusiasm.
Markus paused and turned to look back along the path. His fellow pilgrims pushed past, like vacant-eyed cattle en route to the slaughterman’s hammer. What was wrong with them? Behind them came the steersman, gliding over the path as though his feet barely touched it. His robes were undulant with motion and suffocating fear flowered in Markus’s breast at the thought of being near this repellent figure.
He turned away, only to find himself face to face with her.
“Elise…” he said, and the breath caught in his throat. He instinctively wanted to push her away and flee this awful place, but the intoxication of her dark beauty overpowered any thought of rejection. His sense of revulsion passed so swiftly he wasn’t even sure he’d truly felt it.
“Markus,” she said, and the sound of his name on her lips was divine, sending a surge of pleasure down his spine. Her beauty transfixed him, and he savored every detail of her perfect form. Her features were angular and sharp, framed by lustrous crimson hair, like that of a highborn girl he once knew. Full lips and eyes of dark radiance drew him deeper into her web with the promise of raptures yet to come. A cloak of sable secured by an eight-pronged brooch, mantled her rounded shoulders. It rippled with motion, though there was no wind to stir it.
“Is something the matter, Markus?” she said. Her smoky tones soothed his fear like a balm. “I need you to be at peace. You are at peace, aren’t you, Markus?”
“Yes, Elise,” he said. “I am at peace.”
“Good. It would make me unhappy to know you were not at peace when we are so close.”
The thought of displeasing her sent a jolt of panic through Markus and he dropped to the ground. He wrapped his arms around her legs, her limbs slender and alabaster white, smooth and cold to the touch.
“Anything for you, mistress,” he said.
She looked down on him and smiled. For an instant Markus thought he saw something long, thin and glossy shift beneath her cloak. The motion was sickening and unnatural, but he didn’t care. She hooked a sharpened, obsidian-black fingernail under his chin and drew him to his feet. A rivulet of blood ran down his neck, but he ignored it as she turned and led him onward.
He willingly followed, all thoughts save pleasing her vanishing like wind-blown smoke. The trees thinned out and the path ended before a rocky cliff carved with time-weathered symbols that made his eyes sting. A shadowed cave gaped like a vile maw at the base of the cliff, and Markus felt his certainty waver as a sudden sense of dread uncoiled in his gut.
Elise beckoned him inside, and he was powerless to resist.
The interior of the cave was unnaturally dark and stiflingly warm, a clammy, fever heat that reeked like offal swept from a butcher’s block. A voice deep inside was screaming at him to run, to get as far from this hideous place as possible, but his traitorous feet carried him still deeper into the cave. A droplet from somewhere high above landed on his cheek and he flinched at the sudden, burning pain of it. He looked up at the cavern roof, seeing pale, grub-like shapes hanging overhead and swaying with frantic, trapped motion. In the translucent surface of the fresh-spun web, a human face screamed in mute horror against the suffocating, silken net.
“What is this place?” he asked, the veils of deceit woven around him falling away.
“This is my temple, Markus,” said Elise, reaching up to unfasten the eight-pronged brooch at her shoulder and letting her cloak fall away. “This is the lair of the Spider God.”
Her shoulders squirmed as two pairs of slender, chitinous limbs unfolded from the flesh of her back; long, dark and tapering to razored talons. They lifted Elise up as a grotesque, bloated mass shifted in the darkness behind her. Colossal legs heaved its corrupt body forward, the faint light from beyond the cave reflecting on the myriad facets of its eyes.
The vast spider’s bulk was enormous, furred and scabbed with wet, mutant growths. The terror of its nightmarish appearance shattered the last of Elise’s hold on Markus, and he fled toward the cave mouth with her cruel laughter ringing in his ears. Ropes of sticky web struck the rock beside him. Glutinous strands struck his flailing limbs and his pace slowed as he became more and more entangled. He heard the clicking of clawed limbs in pursuit and wept at the thought of her touching him. Yet more strands of her web snared him as something sharp stabbed his shoulder with astonishing swiftness. Markus fell to his knees, paralyzing venom spreading through his body and locking him in a prison of his own flesh.
A shadow fell across him and he saw the mute steersman with his arms outstretched. Markus screamed as the steersman’s hooded robe collapsed, revealing that this was not a man at all, but a writhing nest of innumerable spiders given the semblance of a man. They fell upon him in their thousands, and his screams were choked to muffled grunts as they crawled into his mouth, clogged his ears and burrowed behind his eyes.
Elise swung into view above him, borne aloft by the jointed limbs at her back. She was no longer beautiful, no longer even human. Her features were alight with a ferocious hunger that could never be sated. The looming form of her monstrous spider god lifted Markus from the ground with its razored mandibles.
“You have to die now, Markus,” said Elise.
“Why…?” he managed with his last breath.
Elise smiled, her mouth now filled with needle-like fangs.
“So that I can live.”
Evelynn

Within the dark seams of Runeterra, the demon Evelynn searches for her next victim. She lures in prey with the voluptuous façade of a human female, but once a person succumbs to her charms, Evelynn’s true form is unleashed. She then subjects her victim to unspeakable torment, gratifying herself with their pain. To the demon, these liaisons are innocent flings. To the rest of Runeterra, they are ghoulish tales of lust gone awry and horrific reminders of the cost of wanton desire.
Evelynn was not always a skilled huntress. She began eons ago, as something primordial, shapeless, and barely sentient. This nascent wisp of shadow existed, numb and unroused by any stimulation, for centuries. It might have remained so, had the world not been upended by conflict. The Rune Wars, as they would come to be known, brought an era of mass suffering the world had never known.
As people across Runeterra began to experience a vast array of pain, anguish, and loss, the shadow stirred. The nothingness it had known for so long had been replaced by the manic vibrations of an agonized world. The creature quivered with excitement.
As the Rune Wars escalated, the world’s torment grew so intense that the shadow felt as if it might burst. It drank in all of Runeterra’s pain, which it experienced as boundless pleasure. The sensation nourished the creature, and over time, it transformed into something more. It became a demon, a ravenous spiritual parasite that fed on the basest of human emotions.
When the wars finally ended, the world’s suffering waned, and the demon found itself growing desperate. The only pleasure it had ever known was born of other creatures’ misery. Without their pain, it felt nothing, just as it had in its earliest days.
If the world would not provide the suffering the demon needed to thrive, it would have to make its own. It needed to inflict pain on other beings so that it could experience that elation again.
At first, catching prey was a challenge for the demon. It could move undetected in its shadow form, but to touch a human, the creature needed to manifest as something tangible. It made several attempts to fashion a physical body from its shadow-flesh, but each result was more monstrous than the last, scaring off her prey.
The demon realized it needed a shape that was pleasing to humans, one that would not only lure them right into its claws, but would offer them ecstasy born of their own desires, so that their pain would be that much sweeter.
From the shadows, it began to study those it sought to prey upon. It tailored its flesh to their liking, learned to say what they wanted to hear, and to walk in a manner they found alluring.
In a matter of weeks, the demon had perfected her physique, leading dozens of enamored victims to be tortured to death at her hands. Though she relishes the exquisite pain of each of her victims, she always finds herself wanting more. Each human’s desires are so small, and they always expire too soon. Their pain, too fleeting to give her anything more than tiny morsels of pleasure, is just enough to tide her over to the next feeding.
She yearns for the day she can plunge the world into utter chaos, and she can return to an existence of pure, rapturous ecstasy.
The Tallest Daisy

Evelynn slinked through the teeming streets, the shadows of her body blending seamlessly with the night. Her eyes glinted within the gloom, though only the keenest observer would have noticed. Drunks, sailors, and harlots chatted in a nearby thoroughfare, blissfully unaware they were being watched by a demon in the dark. The demon, on the other hand, saw them all with perfect clarity, and judged them with the most discerning eye.
Evelynn’s gaze settled on a man lying in the gutter, a bottle of beet wine dangling from his hands. Ordinarily, the demon wouldn’t give a second thought to someone in his condition. But she had not fed in days, and she found herself desperate enough to consider the man, if only for a moment. It would be so easy. All she needed was to lure him to one of the numerous alleys far from the glow of the street lamps.
The thought perished as she watched a cockroach scurry across the drunk’s face. This was a man too inebriated to feel. His arousal would be vague and muted, with none of the urgent attraction she loved to see in her victims before she brought them low. She might even flay an entire arm before he mustered a scream.
And that was the problem. Over the course of countless feedings, Evelynn had learned everything about her palate: She preferred—no, needed—her victims to feel every prick, every bite, every bit of flesh she peeled away with her claws. A man in this condition would be dull and unfulfilling, scarcely worth her time.
She dismissed the drunk and continued down the muddy promenade, past the windows of a dank, candlelit tavern. A fat, belching woman threw open its door and stumbled out into the night, grasping a half-eaten turkey leg. For a moment, Evelynn considered the woman, how she might woo her into an embrace, and then into the unspeakable hell that would follow.
The demon watched as the woman wolfed down the rest of the meat, never tasting it. There was something deep inside her, a melancholy that would taint the experience.
Evelynn preferred inflicting the pain herself.
The demon moved on, gliding through the shadows of the town, over two more drunks, past a beggar asking for alms, between a couple in the midst of an argument. Evelynn found them all completely unappealing. Hurting them would be like plucking a flower that had already wilted. She preferred her daisies tall and healthy, for those were the most satisfying to cut down.
A dreadful thought overtook her. Perhaps she’d made a mistake choosing this wretched backwater as her hunting ground. Perhaps, at any moment, the thrill from her last victim might wear off, leaving only the nothingness—that utterly empty space inside her where feelings should be.
And then, she saw him…
The gentleman was positively beaming as he exited one of the high-end pubs. He was dapper without being flashy, and he hummed a jaunty tune to himself as he set off down the street with a bouquet of flowers tucked gingerly in the fold of his arm.
The two lashers on Evelynn’s back writhed with excitement. Even from a distance, she sensed this man was completely content in his own skin. She dashed after the gentleman, taking great care not to lose track of her prey or to alert him to her presence.
He walked for nearly half an hour before finally turning up a long walkway toward a modestly sized, cut-stone manor. At the end of the path, the man stepped through the heavy oak door to his home. Evelynn held her unblinking gaze on the windows of the man’s house as they lit one by one with warm candlelight. A slender, austere woman in a high-necked evening gown entered and greeted the man with a welcoming embrace. She feigned a slight surprise at the flowers he had brought, before placing them in a clean vase, right next to an old bouquet.
The demon’s interest grew.
A moment later, two children, scarcely out of diapers, ran into the room and threw their arms around the man’s legs, their wide grins sparkling with tiny teeth. Though the scene played like the epitome of domestic bliss, Evelynn knew what she would find if she probed just a little deeper.
She waited patiently, watching the candles go out one by one, until only the parlor remained lit. The man was alone, settling into a reading chair to draw on his pipe. Evelynn crept out of the shadows, her dark, wispy limbs giving way to warm flesh. Her demonic lashers disappeared behind her back, revealing a shapely female form, with curves too generous for any eye to ignore.
Her hips waggled softly as she sauntered across the lawn to the window. She was nearly arm’s length from the glass when she saw the man bolt upright from his chair at the sight of her, his pipe nearly falling from his mouth. Evelynn beckoned with a single finger, motioning for the man to join her outside.
The man crept to the front door and opened it tentatively, curious to investigate the strange beauty lurking outside his window. He approached her on the lawn with great apprehension, and greater anticipation.
“Who… are you?” he asked timidly.
“I’m whatever you want me to be,” assured the demon.
As Evelynn locked eyes with the man, she plumbed the depths of his soul and found exactly what she was looking for—that tiny lesion of discontent that festered within even the happiest person.
There it is, she thought. All that he wants and cannot have.
“My family…” the man said, unable to finish his thought.
The demon leaned close.
“Shh. It’s okay,” she whispered in the man’s ear. “I know what you want, and the guilt you feel for wanting it. Let it go.”
She pulled back to find the man hopelessly captivated.
“Can I… have you?” he asked, ashamed of his brazenness, but overcome by a strange desire to take her right there on the lawn.
“Of course, honey. That’s why I’m here,” said the demon.
He touched her face with the tips of his fingers, caressing her cheek. She held his hand firmly to her skin and released a soft, sultry chuckle. This sweet, tender, happy man would be hers tonight. He had so much pain to give, and she would take it all.
From behind them, the shuffling of slippered feet sounded from the open doorway of the house.
“Is everything okay, love?” asked the man’s wife.
“Everything’s going to be wonderful, my darling,” the demon answered for the dumbstruck man.
The deal had become even sweeter, and the prospects more enticing. There was one daisy in full flower to pluck, and one bulb to bloom while it watched.
Ezreal

Born and raised in a wealthy neighborhood of Piltover, Ezreal was always a curious child. His parents were renowned archaeologists, so he became used to their long absences from the family home, often fantasizing about joining them on their travels. He loved hearing tales of high adventure, and shared their desire to fill in the blank spaces on every map.
He was often left in the care of his uncle, the esteemed Professor Lymere. The professor did not enjoy having to wrangle such a rash and unruly child, and assigned the strictest tutors to teach him subjects including advanced cartography, hextech mechanics, and the ancient histories of Runeterra. But the boy had a knack for simply absorbing information, and found studying a waste of time. He passed assessments easily, with little or no preparation, infuriating his uncle and giving himself more time to roam the university grounds. Ezreal took great pleasure in evading the campus wardens, navigating the tunnels beneath the lecture halls as easily as the library rooftops. He even practiced lockpicking, sneaking into his teachers’ offices and rearranging their belongings for his own amusement.
Whenever Ezreal’s parents returned to Piltover, his father in particular would tell him all they had seen, and their plans for future expeditions—none more ambitious and secretive than the search for the lost tomb of Ne’Zuk, a Shuriman tyrant who was said to be able to jump instantly from one place to another. If Ezreal’s father could learn whatever sorcery Ne’Zuk had possessed, he joked that wherever he was traveling, he would simply drop into Piltover for dinner with his son each night.
As the boy grew older, the time between his parents’ visits grew longer until, one year, they did not return at all. Professor Lymere tearfully admitted that they had most likely perished, somewhere out in the desert.
But Ezreal could not accept that. They had been too careful in their preparations. They must still be out there, somewhere…
Abandoning his reluctant studies, the budding explorer would strike out on his own. He knew, if he was ever to find his mother and father, he had to start with the final resting place of Ne’Zuk. He spent weeks secretly gathering supplies from the university—celestial diagrams, translations of runic sigils, guides on the burial rites of Shurima, and a pair of protective goggles. Leaving a note of farewell for his uncle, he snuck onto a supply ship bound for Nashramae.
Following his mother’s meticulous field notes, he crossed the Great Sai with merchant caravans heading south. For many months, he delved into cavernous ruins beneath the shifting sands, relishing the freedom of the unknown, facing unspeakable horrors that guarded hidden chambers. With each step, Ezreal imagined himself following his parents’ path, drawing ever closer to solving the mystery of their disappearance.
Finally, he managed what they evidently had not. Beneath the newer mausoleum of some unnamed emperor, he uncovered the tomb of Ne’Zuk.
The great sarcophagus lay empty, save for a gleaming bronze gauntlet, with a bright, crystalline matrix at its center. As soon as Ezreal laid his hands upon it, the tomb itself seemed to turn upon him, with cunningly wrought traps and wards laid down thousands of years ago. With scarcely a thought, he donned the gauntlet and blasted his way through, even teleporting the last hundred yards back to the hidden entrance before the whole structure collapsed in a plume of sand and masonry dust.
Breathing hard, Ezreal looked down at the gauntlet as it hummed along with his heartbeat. He could feel it siphoning and amplifying his own essence. This, he realized, was a fearsome weapon of a previous age. A weapon fit for a god-warrior of Shurima, and the perfect tool for an explorer.
Soon after returning to Piltover, Ezreal found himself bounding from adventure to adventure. From lost cities to mystical temples, his nose for treasure-seeking led him to places most university professors could only read about on maps, and his reputation began to grow. Naturally, to Ezreal’s mind, these tales rarely conveyed the true scope and scale of his exploits… but they did give him an idea. If he could make a name for himself as the greatest adventurer in the world, then his parents would surely return, and seek him out in person.
From the untamed borders of Noxus and Demacia, to the seedy depths of Zaun, and the frozen wilderness of the Freljord—Ezreal chases fame and glory, uncovering long-lost artifacts and solving the riddles of history. While some may dispute the details of his anecdotes, or call his methods into question, he never answers his critics.
After all, they’re clearly just jealous.
The Elixir of Uloa

Rayla Heide

After hours of trekking through the stiflingly humid jungle, the cool air of this underground crypt is sweet bliss. Sure, potential death awaits at every turn, but so does certain glory.
I step through a stone archway and clouds of dust rise like phantoms, revealing a pathway of circular patterns carved into the rock. This tomb is rumored to be impenetrable, uncrackable, and deadly. No explorer has yet escaped with their life, but then, none of them have been me.
So far I’ve infiltrated miles of labyrinthine tunnels, navigated spike-filled sand traps, crawled beneath swinging blade-pendulums, and wrestled hissing pit vipers. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.
Dozens of lidless stone eyes leer at me from the walls. Well, I’d leer too. I doubt they’ve seen anyone this astonishingly handsome since the last Rune War.
At the center of the room, a crystal vial rests on a pedestal. It shimmers with lambent fluid, casting tiny rainbows on the floor. That’s what I’m here for. Many will dismiss a grandiose tale of bold adventure as pure fiction, but there’s no denying a physical artifact. Collecting legendary treasure proves beyond doubt you’ve conquered the impossible.
The Elixir of Uloa is sought after by cults hoping it will imbue them with immortality, withered dynasties looking to reclaim power, and pilgrims seeking wisdom beyond belief. Quite a lot to promise for a vial whose contents wouldn’t fill a teaspoon.
I know every trap in the book will trigger as soon as I lift it from the pedestal. That’s the nature of places like this. I flex my fingers and the gemstone at the center of my gauntlet glows a satisfying cerulean blue. Now the real fun begins.
I approach slowly. A stone trembles underfoot and I step back to avoid activating a trigger. I pick my way across the room, only stepping on the most immobile stones. As my fingers close over the Elixir, deep cracks split the stone floor of the chamber. I activate my gauntlet, charging it with magical energy. Swirling rays of light overwhelm my vision as I teleport to the archway fifteen feet away. Not a second too soon. Hundreds of knife-sharp stakes cascade from the ceiling, missing me by a hair’s breadth as the entire room collapses into a shadowy crevasse below.
My gauntlet’s power is perfect for tight spots, but doesn’t lend itself to crossing great distances. And takes longer than I’d like to recharge.
A thunderous boom shakes the walls and echoes down the corridor. Sounds like the ancient foundations of this tomb won’t hold much longer, so it’s time to speed things along. I prefer my ground strictly solid, with a generous helping of reliability, so I sprint down the tunnel as widening cracks obliterate the floor behind me.
I chase the directional marks I chalked when I entered the tomb, sliding beneath collapsing archways, leaping over boiling quicksand, and dashing around colossal boulders rolling in to block this ever-narrowing passageway.
The wall to my right splits apart and a barrage of colossal insects tumble through, giant pincers snapping and venom dripping from their jaws. Thousands of red spider eyes gleam with hunger while scorpions scuttle forward with stingers poised. Jungle vermin are a damn nuisance, but I’ve got just the remedy!
I close my eyes for a split second. Energy flows down my arm, jangling my nerves with a pulsating beat as I concentrate power into the gem. I steady my gauntlet and aim it at the largest spider. As the monster opens his jaws I unleash a blazing ray into its mouth, blasting it back into the crawling horde. The smell of burned chitin stings my throat and my stomach churns.
I turn and run, firing blinding beams of light behind me at every twist of the passageway. A slab of rock the size of a house breaks from the ceiling directly overhead. My gauntlet recharges just in time and I reappear ten feet ahead in a whirling spiral of light as the tunnel behind me collapses.
Two toppling pillars fall toward each other and I slide between them a moment before they smash to dust. I dash into a chamber with a floor angled toward the surface.
A sliver of sunlight shines ahead, and I grin as I bolt for it. Freedom is close. The ground shakes with a deafening rumble and I stumble mid-run as the chamber falls apart in front of me. Freedom was close.
Then again, backup plans are a particular specialty of mine.
I ready my gauntlet and concentrate all my energy into the gem. I feel it drawing power from me. My vision blurs and the world seems to tilt as the gem fills with magic. The gauntlet pulses the blue of a clear sky.
I open my hand and a brilliant arc of golden light as wide as the tunnel bursts from my palm. The force of the blast staggers me, but I maintain my focus. The light blazes in a continuous glowing channel, gleaming brightly as it disintegrates everything in its path, leaving a precariously narrow gap. My favorite kind of gap!
I close my hand into a fist and the tunnel darkens once more. The ground lurches unpleasantly, sending me to my knees. I’m so spent I can barely move, let alone stand. Inches from my face, cracks spread across the floor faster than I can track them. Not good. The tomb won’t hold much longer, so I muster my remaining strength and rise, sprinting to what I dearly hope is safety.
I’m losing sight of the sunlight. Another crash - the walls crumble around me. I close my eyes and dive through the hole. Nothing wrong with hoping for a bit of good luck, and I am exceptionally lucky. I hit the ground, roll to my feet and inhale the sweet air of the jungle.
Behind me, the entrance to the tomb caves in completely, releasing a billowing cloud of ancient dust. I brush the dirt from my clothes, toss my hair out of my eyes with a well-practiced flick and walk away.
Another impossible ruin traversed. Another treasure to prove the truth of my daring tales.
And all before lunch.

All stories

The Winterspike Road

Dead in the Water

Dead of Winter

Demacian Heart

The Despoiler of Havenfall

Destiny and Fate

Diana

Night’s Work

Draven

The Dream Thief

Dr. Mundo

Do No Harm

Ekko

Lullaby

Elise

Strand by Silken Strand

Evelynn

The Tallest Daisy

Ezreal

The Elixir of Uloa