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Stains on a Name

John O’Bryan

“I believed in you, Blade Dancer!” the man choked, his lips frothing red. “You showed us the path…”
Irelia held her stance. She looked down at him, this devotee of the Brotherhood, on his knees in the mud. He had been pierced over and over by her blades.
“We could have been strong... United as one people...”
“That is not the Spirit’s way,” she replied. “If that’s what you think, then you are wrong.”
He had come to this village, waiting for the perfect moment before making his move. But he was clumsy and awkward. She had danced around him easily.
He had been determined to kill her. The worst thing was, he wasn’t the first. Irelia’s blades now hovered at her shoulders, following the graceful, circling movements of her hands. One simple gesture, and it could all be over.
He spat blood on the ground, his eyes burning with hatred. “If you will not lead Navori, the Brotherhood will.”
He tried weakly to raise his dagger against her. This man would never be taken alive.
“I believed in you,” he said again. “We all did.”
She sighed. “I never asked you to. I’m sorry.”
Her limbs flowing lithely around her body, Irelia whirled to the side, sending the blades out in a deadly arc. They sliced cleanly through his flesh, as much an act of mercy as self-defense.
A simple turn, just one elegant step, brought the blades back to her, their edges slick with blood. The man’s lifeless body toppled forward.
“May the Spirit bring you to peace,” said Irelia.

Her burden was heavy as she returned to the camp. When she finally entered the privacy of her tent, she released a long, tense breath, and lowered herself to the reed mat.
She closed her eyes.
“Father,” she whispered. “I have bloodied our family’s honor once more. Forgive me.”
Irelia spread the blades out before her—like Ionia itself, they were the fractured pieces of something that had once been far greater, now turned to violent ends. She poured water into a small wooden bowl, and dipped in a rag. The simple act of cleaning the shards had become a ritual, one that she felt compelled to undertake after every battle she fought.
The water slowly turned red as she worked. But beneath the fresh blood, the metal carried much darker, older stains that she could never seem to remove completely.
This was the blood of her people. The blood of Navori itself.
Lost in thought, she began to slide the blades around, slowly reforming them into her family crest. Its three symbols lay cracked before her, representing the Xan name, her home province, and the rest of the First Lands, all in harmony. Her ancestors had always lived by the teachings of Karma. They inflicted no harm on anyone, regardless of circumstance.
And now, here was their seal and crest turned into weapons, and takers of countless lives at that.
She could feel the eyes of her brothers upon her. Even in their eternal rest, at one with the Spirit of Ionia, she feared earning their disappointment, their resentment. She pictured her dear old O-ma too, broken and sobbing, devastated by each kill...
Many times, that thought had made Irelia weep more than any other.
The blades would never be clean. She knew that—but she would still do right by those she had harmed.
She passed many of her followers on her way to the burial grounds. Though they looked to Irelia for leadership, now more than ever, she recognized so few of them. With each winter the faces became less familiar, as the last of the old resistance were replaced by new and more zealous fighters. They came from faraway provinces, and towns she had never heard of.
Even so, she halted often to return their half-hearted salutes and bows, and would accept none of their help in dragging the shrouded body of her dead attacker along the road.
Finding an open patch beneath the blossom-heavy branches of a tree, Irelia set him down carefully, and turned to join in the grief of the widows and widowers, the orphaned sons and daughters.
“I know it is never easy,” she said, placing a consoling hand on the shoulder of one man, who knelt before a pair of fresh graves, “but each life, and each death, are part of—”
He batted away her hand, glaring at her until she retreated.
“It was necessary,” she murmured to herself as she prepared to start digging, though she remained unconvinced by her own words. “It is all necessary. The Brotherhood would grip this land in an iron fist. No better than Noxus…”
Her eyes fell upon an old woman, sat on a simple wooden stool at the foot of the tree, singing a soft lament. Streams of tears had dried on her face. She was dressed plainly, with one hand resting on a grave marker next to her. It was adorned with food offerings for the deceased.
To Irelia’s surprise, the woman halted her song.
“Bringing us some company, are you, daughter of Xan?” she called out. “Ain’t much room left round here. But any friend of yours is a friend of ours.”
“I did not know this man, but thank you. He deserved better than he was given in life.” Irelia took an uncertain step closer. “You were singing one of the old songs.”
“Helps keep my mind off bad things,” said the old woman, tamping down a patch of dirt on the grave. “This is my nephew.”
“I… I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sure you did all you could. Besides, this is all part of the Spirit’s way, you know?”
Her kindly demeanor had put Irelia entirely at ease. “Sometimes I don’t know,” she confided.
The old woman perked up, expecting more. Irelia continued, finally giving voice to the doubts that had plagued her for a long time.
“Sometimes… Sometimes I wonder if I killed our peace.”
“Killed our peace?”
“When Noxus invaded. Perhaps we lost something when we fought back, something we can never restore.”
The woman stood, trying in vain to open a large nut. “Child, I remember peace well,” she said, thrusting one gnarled, knobby finger at Irelia. “Those were good days! Nobody misses peace more than me.”
She pulled a knife from her belt, and began to pry open the nutshell.
“But the world’s a different place now. What worked then don’t work today. No point dwelling on it.”
At last, the shell cracked, and she placed the broken kernel into a bowl on the grave.

“See, there? Used to be able to open these with my hands alone, now I need a knife. The young me would’ve fretted about it, damaging the nut like that. But that me don’t matter, because she don’t have to live in the here and now.” The old woman nodded kindly, then went back to her singing.
For the first time in a long while, Irelia smiled. Within her satchel, wrapped in protective cloth, were the shard-blades of her shattered family crest. She knew it would never be clean, never be whole again.
But they were always ready, and that would have to be enough.
Ivern

Ivern the Cruel was renowned as a fierce warrior, in the latter days of the ancient Vorrijaard. His clan followed the most warlike of the old gods, and would not kneel before the upstart “Three Sisters” like so many others had.
However, the dark sorcery that strengthened their armies was undeniable. Ivern and his kin plotted long and hard to overthrow these hated Iceborn, eventually setting sail into the east—in search of the land where the sun first rose, from where it was said that all magic flowed into the world. If Ivern could seize such power for his own, then he could surely break any foe.
As his fleet sailed over the horizon, they passed out of memory and into myth, for they were never seen in their homeland again.
In truth, Ivern the Cruel landed on the shores of Ionia. After cleaving through a dozen coastal settlements, he and his warriors discovered a sacred grove known as Omikayalan, “the Heart of the World”. And there, in that strange and verdant garden, they met the fiercest resistance. Chimeric beings—half human, half beast—came at them again and again beneath the twisted branches.
Undeterred, Ivern pressed on, until the battered remnants of his expedition reached what the Ionians held so sacred: the legendary God-Willow.
Ivern was transfixed, even as the fighting raged around him. It was a truly colossal tree, dripping with long gossamer leaves that shimmered with golden-green light. It was magic like nothing he had ever felt before, and it was clear these inhuman creatures would die to protect it. Seeking to shatter their resolve, he took up his war axe, and roared with hatred as he struck at the God-Willow over and over again.
The great tree fell. In a riot of life-energy, Ivern the Cruel was instantly undone.
Detached, drifting, he saw the battle was over. The flesh of the fallen fed carrion birds and insects alike, or decayed under bursts of colorful mushrooms. Bones rotted into fertile soil, and seeds within it budded and sprouted into trees bearing fruit of their own. Leaves and petals pulsed like colorful hearts. From the death that surrounded him, life exploded forth in ways too numerous to believe.
Never had Ivern beheld such beauty. Life, in all its forms, was tangled together like an impossible knot that didn’t want to be untied. He wept, and those dewdrop tears fell upon his changed body. He was taller than he remembered, his limbs rough with bark and leaves. The magic of an entirely different world coursed through him. He did not know why, or how, but he was all that now remained of the God-Willow.
With that realization, he heard the bawling of hills, the howling of trees, and the dripping tears of moss. He reflected on the mistakes he’d made, the cruelty he’d visited on others. Remorse washed over Ivern, and he cried out for forgiveness.
When he finally moved, so much time had passed that the world felt… new? The violence and sadness of his former self were mere echoes in his heart. He found he could dig his toes deep into the soil, and commune with the roots, rocks, and rivers. Even the dirt itself had opinions!
Ivern wandered far—across Ionia, and beyond—and the strange magic of Omikayalan followed in his wake. He developed close kinships with creatures great and small, observing their foibles, delighting in their little habits, and occasionally offering a helping hand. He shortened the inchworm’s path, played tricks with mischievous bramblebacks, hugged thorny elmarks, and laughed with wizened elder-fungus.
In one instance, he found a wounded stone golem. Knowing the poor thing’s spirit was fading, he fashioned her a new heart from a river pebble, and the golem became Ivern’s devoted life-friend. He named her Daisy, after the flowers that mysteriously sprouted from her stone body.
Sometimes, Ivern encountered mortals, and many of them were at least somewhat peaceful. They called him Bramblefoot, or Green Father, or the Old Woodsman, and told tales of his strange benevolence. But he was filled with sadness to see how they still took more than they gave, how they could be so cruel and so careless, and he retreated from their company.
If he bore the God-Willow’s legacy, he needed to cultivate humanity—help them watch, listen, and grow. Being mortal once himself, Ivern knew this would be difficult, so he smiled and challenged himself to complete this task before the final sunset.
He knew he would have time.
Gift of Venom

For most people, a hundred years is a very long time. In a century, one could explore the entire world, meet thousands of people, or complete countless works of art. Now, anyone could easily assume that standing in one spot for over a century would be a colossal waste. But during that time, Ivern Bramblefoot accomplished more than any could dream.
For instance, he settled a longstanding dispute between a colony of lichen and their host boulder, helped each generation of winter squirrels find their forgotten autumn acorns, and coaxed a lone wolf to rejoin her pack, despite the fact that they once called her howling “shrill.”
Ivern’s toes burrowed deep beneath the topsoil, curled between vigilant tubers and oblivious earthworms to mingle with the roots of older trees, and the forest around him bloomed. There was much more, of course, but those examples alone are proof enough of a good century’s work.
Things were going swimmingly until the sassafras started murmuring about dark doings on the edge of the forest.
Hunters! they cried through their roots, alarming half the forest.
Ivern knew sassafras to be anxious trees, raising their leaves in panic over the slightest stray saltsnail, and after all, hunting wasn’t so bad, for nothing is wasted or senseless in the cycle of life. But the sassafras had worried the robins, who told the butterflies, and if butterflies knew a secret, so did the entire forest.
So Ivern stood up, and after briefly soothing the clipper ant colony whose ancestral home he had just displaced, he stalked away, shaking off layers of crusty bark. With each flower-blooming step through the forest, the alarm grew more frantic.
Three of them, nattered the squirrels.
Eyes like twin blood moons, gibbered the scuttle-crabs as they hid in the river.
More bloodthirsty than elmarks, proclaimed the elmarks.
The peregrines swore the hunters were after their eggs. The ivory-wreathed chrysanthemum feared for her illustrious petals—that worried Daisy, who loved her flowers dearly. Ivern calmed each of them, and urged them to hide until trouble passed. He pretended not to notice Daisy following him, since she thought herself to be quite sneaky.
He saw an eight-tusked shagyak dead in the grass. Three arrows were thrust deep into the thick hump of muscle at the base of its neck. As a sappy tear escaped Ivern’s eye, a squirrel he’d named Mikkus scampered up the Green Father’s chest and lapped it off his cheek in solace.
“Hunters take meat for food,” Ivern said aloud. “Hunters whittle bone into toys and tools. Hunters sew pelts into garments and tan skin into boots.”
The corpse was missing its eight shimmering, pearlescent tusks. Ivern touched the ground, and a circle of daisies bloomed around the dead shagyak. He saw a baby stonescale viper slithering away. Stone-scale vipers are wise beyond their years.
“Ssssssssafe?” the snake hiss-asked.
Ivern knew snakes were embarrassed by their lisps and for a long time had avoided words with sibilant sounds. He’d challenged them to embrace the words they feared the most, but they took the lesson to heart and now spoke exclusively in words beginning “s.”
Snakes; such overachievers.
“It’s safe now, little one.” Poor thing must’ve witnessed the whole ordeal. “Coil up here and watch the shagyak for me,” Ivern urged the baby viper. “I’ll return once I get to the bottom of this.”
The shagyak horns clacked relentlessly with each step Risbell took, so much so that she had to stop and repack the tusks lest the noise scare off their next kill. Upriver, those horns would earn them a fortune. City people paid well for half-cocked backwater remedies these days.
Niko, the square-jawed hunter with one eye, uncovered another set of shagyak hoof prints. She beckoned behind her to Eddo, the rich city man with the whalebone bow, and grinned. Eddo’s toothy smile and malicious eyes made Risbell, the youngest of the crew, shiver.
Up ahead, in a glade, another eight-tusked shagyak grazed on its very favorite variety of grass. Each of the three hunters approached slowly and quietly, rustling nary a dead leaf.
In rehearsed synchronicity, all three readied their bows and took careful aim. The shagyak’s head was still bent low, as it dined on the soft mulderberries and scullygrass, obscuring the knot of muscles at the base of its neck. When pierced, the hump would keep the blood flowing while the hunters hewed off horns. It was very important that the shagyak still be alive when the tusks were harvested to increase their potency, Eddo said.
Sweat beaded down her neck as she waited for the shagyak to raise its head. Just as the beast’s head swung up, the glade of low scullygrass bloomed impossibly fast, from ankle height to over their heads in a moment. The stalks stretched toward the sun, flowers blooming instantly in an array of radiant petals. A flowering wall of scullygrass completely obscured the shagyak.
Eddo dropped his bow. Niko’s one good eye looked as if it was going to bulge from its socket. Risbell’s arrow errantly soared through the air. She didn’t command her fingers to release the bowstring. She backed up against the nearest tree, terrified.
“I told you these woods were cursed,” Risbell whispered. “We should leave now.”
“I’ve dealt with sorcery before,” Niko said. “I will do this the old way.”
She placed her arrow back in her quiver and pulled a long, mean-looking dagger from her belt.
Eddo did the same. They both beckoned for Risbell to stay put with the tusks as they stealthily disappeared into the wall of grass. She waited and held her breath, but couldn’t even hear their footfalls. One day she hoped to be as silently deadly as her companions. Still, she couldn’t shake the unnerving feeling that the wall of vegetation was a warning to be heeded. Stories her grandmother told her, of the strange creatures of magic that wandered this world, came back to her. Just children’s tales, she reminded herself.
An eerie and unfamiliar sound echoed through the glade. It wasn’t the shrieking of a shagyak, but the heavy sound of rocks smashing into ground with loud, splintery thuds. Whatever caused the sound, it was enough to make Eddo and Niko race out of the brush, running at full tilt. Their skin was pale and their eyes were wide. Then she saw what had caused her companions to flee.
A flower, a simple ivory-wreathed chrysanthemum, was dancing on top of the grass. It was a rather curious sight.
Then Risbell realized it was getting closer. The grass parted, and there stood a behemoth of stone and moss. A living incarnation of granite, massively strong, and moving with rhythm. In the moment it took Risbell to reconcile what was happening, she heard a calm voice calling to the creature.
“Daisy! Be careful. And... gentle!”
Risbell grabbed the satchel of tusks and ran after Niko and Eddo, trying to remember the route that led back to their camp. At each tree, a new wall of grass sprouted up. Something stalked within the grass, rustling through the leaves as it walked, giggling as Risbell spun in circles trying to find her way out. She was alone in a strange forest, and behind every infernal tree lurked more grass, springing up nearly instantly.
Risbell realized she was being corralled the same way grandmother used to herd sheep. Knowing full well that she was walking into a trap, Risbell squared her shoulders and followed the grass.
Ivern watched as the young hunter stepped out of the grassy maze and approached the shagyak’s body. The poor thing looked positively terrified. She clearly had never seen anything or anyone quite like himself before. He tried to be gentle, but humans tended to be so individual in their reactions. Unlike, say, the caterwauling of smug mewlarks.
“Please. Don’t be frightened. Unless that is your natural state. In which case, fright away. I’ll wait. I really don’t mind.”
It wasn’t Ivern’s intention to frighten anyone. But no one can account for another being’s experience.
“Get on with it,” Risbell said. Her voice quavered and her eyes flinched. “I’ve trespassed, I know. I’m at your mercy. Just let it be quick.”
“Be quick?” Ivern shrugged. “Certainly. It didn’t cross my mind that you might have better places to be. Very well then.”
The girl closed her eyes and lifted her chin, exposing her throat. She reached her hand back toward the scabbard at her belt and wrapped her knuckles around the dagger. If he came for her, there would be a surprise.
“But I only want to know why,” Ivern said in a voice filled with merriment. He gestured with his branchlike fingers to the shagyak’s body. His arm stretched longer than it should, to the dead beast’s back, where he lovingly stroked its blood-mottled fur.
Risbell drew her dagger and then felt a sharp pain in her ankle. A cold sensation spread up her leg. When she looked down, she saw the culprit: a stone-scaled viper, the most venomous asp in all the Aulderwood.
Out of anger and instinct, she lashed out at the snake.
“No!” Ivern shouted.
Viney roots sprouted up from the soil and caught her arm, preventing her strike. They wrapped around her wrists and ankles and knees. She dropped her dagger in her struggles to break free.
“I’m going to die!” she cried. The venom’s coldness spread up past her knees.
The serpent slithered to Ivern’s feet and coiled up the outside of his leg, climbing up and around his body until it vanished into his armpit. It emerged from the back of his head, curling around one of the branches, and licked its forked tongue at Ivern’s ear.
“Sssssssorry,” hissed the snake to Ivern. “Ssssstartled.”
“Please,” Risbell said. “Help me.”
Ivern thought for a second.
“Ah yes!” His honey eyes twinkled with an idea. “There’s one thing that loves shagyaks. Especially dead ones.
“And please, forgive Syrus; he’s only recently hatched and doesn’t know how to control his venom. Gave you a full dose, I’m afraid. He’s asked me to tell you that he’s awfully sorry. You startled him and he reacted purely on instinct,” Ivern said. “Now, watch.”
The tree man knelt before the shagyak’s body, closed his eyes, and hummed a deep, earthy tune. His hands were in the soil, fingers splayed out. Twinkling green pops of light cascaded from his rune-carved head, down his arms, and into the dirt. Odd purple mushrooms popped up from the carcass. They were tiny at first; then their stalks rose as rot overtook the shagyak’s corpse. Soon there was only fur, bones, and an army of violet mushrooms.
“Ah, stingsalve fungus,” Ivern sighed. He plucked one delicately. “Always so punctual.”
The vines retracted from Risbell’s body. She collapsed in a heap. Her hands immediately shot to her heart. The icy pangs of stone-scale venom had reached her chest.
“Eat this,” Ivern said, offered the purple mushroom to the dying woman. “It might not taste like salamander dew or sunshine, but it’s not as bad as lippertick apples.”
Risbell had no idea what the strange treeman was on about, but her options were severely limited at that moment. A voice came back to her from the past. Her grandmother’s. Trust in nature; the Green Father never leads you astray.
She grabbed the mushroom from Ivern’s hand. It tasted like bitter tea and mulch; a disappointing final meal. Then the icy grip around her heart thawed and retreated. Within minutes, her legs worked again.
As she recovered, Ivern made her a tincture of odd leaves, tree sap, and water from a spring he’d discovered with his toes. He served it to her in a bird’s nest cup that a peregrine dropped into his hand.
“You’re him, aren’t you? The Green Father.”
Ivern shrugged as if he didn’t know. “You know what we could do here?” he said, turning his attention to the shagyak bones. “Moss always loves to pretty up the place.”
As soon as he said it, a thick carpet of moss crept over the bones. With the mushrooms, what once had been a grisly sight was now beautiful.
“Sheldon would love how beautiful his bones turned out to be. Badgers will use his ribs as shelter from the autumn storms. Nothing is ever wasted,” Ivern said, turning his attention to Risbell. “It seemed so senseless, but it makes perfect sense. If it wasn’t killed, you wouldn’t have lived.”
“We wanted its tusks,” Risbell said. She fixed her eyes on her boots in shame. “Rich people clamor for them. Willing to pay a lot.”
“I remember money. It’s rarely a good motivator.”
“I knew we shouldn’t have killed it. My grandmother used to tell me that if one must kill, one must use all parts to honor the beast.”
“I would love to meet your grandmother,” Ivern said.
“She is gone to the ground.”
“Returning to the soil that which the soil gave is noble.”
“I’m sorry,” Risbell said after a long moment of silence.
“All life is precious.” The gentleness and warmth and forgiveness in Ivern’s voice moved Risbell to tears. Ivern patted her on the head. “I probably couldn’t have handled the whole thing better myself. I’ve so much to remember about humans, and so much too I had forgotten to ever learn.”
Ivern helped Risbell to her feet.
“I must be off now. I promised the tadpoles of Southern Pond that I would monitor their elections for the king of lily pads. It’s quite the contentious race.”
A while later, Risbell emerged from the tree line near the river. After gulping down some water, she dug a hole on the banks and tenderly placed the shagyak tusks inside. She scooped up a handful of dirt and recited the prayers of honor her grandmother had taught her. She repeated this ritual until the horns were buried. Then she bowed her head in reverence and left the site marked as a grave.
From the depths of the Aulderwood, Ivern smiled at the gesture. The shagyak herd would be proud.
Janna

Since ancient times, there have been those who prayed to the winds. From sailors seeking good weather to the downtrodden calling on winds of change, mortals have placed their hope in the tempests and gales that sweep across Runeterra.
Surprisingly, the wind sometimes would seem to answer. Seafarers might spot a bright blue bird just before a healthy tailwind billowed their sails. Others could swear they’d heard a whistling in the air right before a storm, as if to warn them of its approach. As word of these omens spread, sightings of the bird grew more common. Some even swore they had seen the bird transform into a woman. With tapered ears and flowing hair, this mysterious maiden was said to float above the water and direct the wind with a flick of her staff.
The faithful called this wind spirit Jan’ahrem, an ancient Shuriman word meaning “guardian,” for she always seemed to appear in moments of great need. As time went on, she came to be known more simply as Janna.
Her name spread across the Shuriman continent’s coasts, and the seafaring people of Oshra Va’Zaun were her most fervent believers. They depended on calm seas for the trade ships that traveled through their city’s port. Statues and shrines were raised in gratitude for Janna’s benevolence. After the Shuriman empire enveloped the city, these displays of devotion continued… for a time.
When the emperor issued decrees suppressing “false idols,” Janna’s statues were torn down. Yet despite the growing worship of the Ascended god-warriors, many still offered quiet prayers to Janna, for what could god-warriors do to protect ships from storms? These mortals often wore amulets with the image of a bluebird—smaller, more personal tokens in Janna’s honor.
Through all of this, Janna continued to aid the vulnerable who called upon her. In a region rife with upheaval, she remained constant. Those with an eye toward history might appreciate the irony of “winds of change” being the only thing that did not.
After the great empire fell, once verdant lands became a desert as the remaining Ascended brought war and chaos—yet Janna shielded the city, now known as Zaun, from the turmoil.
Over the centuries, Janna watched as Zaun’s ambitions grew. While the city was still a robust trade port, its denizens aspired for more. They dreamed of cutting a canal through the isthmus on which they lived, opening a path that would unite the seas surrounding Valoran and Shurima. The city poured great effort, wealth, and time into the construction. Prayers to Janna waned as mortal dreams focused on mortal machinations.
However, the canal’s excavation made great portions of Zaun unstable. On one cataclysmic day, entire districts on the River Pilt collapsed below the western sea level, and thousands suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives against the clashing currents.
As these unfortunate souls faced their doom, they prayed for salvation. They called out the name of their ancient protector:
Janna.
Though these mortals had seemingly forgotten her until now, Janna did not hesitate to help them. An immense gale swept over the city as she took corporeal form. Impossible walls of air held flooding waters at bay as people fled the drowned ruins of their homes. Ferocious gusts of wind cut through the suffocating smoke from fires caused by the destruction. Yet while she saved many, thousands still perished that day—but all who survived witnessed Janna’s benevolence. Never again would the city’s people forget their savior.
To this day, through the rise of Piltover and the ongoing struggles of modern Zaun, Janna’s faithful wear bluebird medallions and show reverence to the winds. And through it all, Janna stands steadfast by the humble and the meek. Zaunites all know that whether they fight for breath amid the toxic clouds of the Zaun Gray, stand against the brutality of violent chem-barons, or fend off other threats, Janna will not abandon them.
Deep Breath

They think Zaun is where the losers live.
They won’t admit it, of course – they’ll smile through their teeth and pat us on the back and tell us that Piltover would be nowhere without Zaun. Our hard workers! Our bustling trade! Our chemtech that everyone in Piltover pretends they don’t buy, except they constantly do! Zaun is a vital part of Piltover’s culture, they’ll say.
All lies. Obviously.
They think Zaun is where the idiots go. People too stupid to make it in Piltover’s golden towers.
People like me.
I spent months dealing shimmer so I could afford to apply for Clan Holloran’s apprenticeship. I studied every crusty, dog-eared book I could find on gearwork machinery. I built a prototype gearbrace for people with broken or arthritic wrists that increased their mobility. I did everything I could have done to earn an apprenticeship in Piltover. I even made it to the final stage of the vetting process: a face-to-face meeting with Boswell Holloran himself.
They said it was a formality. Just a way to welcome me to the family.
He entered the room, looked down at my Gray-stained clothes, and laughed a strangled, joyless laugh. He said, “Sorry, my boy – we don’t take sump-rats here.”
He never even sat down.
So now I’m back here. In Zaun. One more idiot.
The Gray rolls through the streets, welcoming me back. Most days, it’s thin enough that you can breathe deep without coughing up something wet. Today, though, is what we call a Grayout. You choke with every breath. Your chest feels tight. Can’t see much past your fingertips. I want to run, but I know there’s nowhere to run to. The Gray feels like it’s closing in on me, crushing me, smothering me.
These are the times I pray to Janna.
Not everyone in Zaun believes she’s real, but my mother always had faith. She told me a bluebird hovered outside her window on the day of my birth, and she knew – she knew – it was Janna telling her I was going to be fine.
She was wrong, of course. I wasn’t fine, in the end. Couple of years ago, she – my mother – died while sump-scrapping, and I had to raise myself with the few gears she left me. Then, the usual: couldn’t make friends. Got beaten up a lot. Boy I loved didn’t love me back. Tried to study, tried to think my way up to Piltover. Couldn’t. Figured Janna had forgotten about me.
But I still keep the pendant my mother gave me: a wooden engraving depicting the bluebird she saw. Just in case of moments like these.
So I sit on the wet ground because I don’t care enough to find a bench, and I take out the bluebird pendant I always keep tucked in my shirt, and I talk to Janna.
Not out loud, of course – don’t need people thinking I’m some chem-burnt freak – but still, I talk to her.
I don’t ask her for anything. I just tell her about my day, and the day before that, and how scared I am that I’ll never become anything worthwhile and that I’ll die down here knee-deep in the Sump with nothing to show for it just like my mother, and that sometimes I just want to run away somewhere I can breathe and stop being so frightened and not feel like crying all the time and how I hate myself for feeling like I want to cry because I have it so much easier than some other people, and how sometimes I think about throwing myself into the chem pools of the Sump, just throwing myself in with my mother where I’d let myself sink to the bottom and my lungs would fill with fluid because then it’d be over, at least. I tell Janna I hope she’s okay. I hope she’s happy, wherever she is.
That’s when I feel the breeze caress my cheek. Just a light flutter, but it’s there. Soon, I can feel it blow hair across my face. The wind whistles loud and fast, and soon it’s whipping my coat in the air and I feel as though I’m at the center of a maelstrom.
The Gray swirls before me, pushed up by a breeze that seems to flow from everywhere at once. The fog slowly dissipates, and I can see other passersby on the Entresol level watching it float away.
The wind stops.
The Gray clears.
I can breathe.
Not just small, cautious gasps, but deep breaths that fill my lungs with cold, fresh air. No longer veiled in Gray, the sun shines past the towers of Piltover into Zaun itself.
I can see the Piltovans above, peering down at us. Without the Gray clouding their view, they can see us from their lofty bridges and balconies. I don’t think they like it very much. Nobody wants to be reminded they live above a slum; I see a few scowls.
That’s when I see him again: Boswell Holloran. Holding a sweetcake in his hand, looking down at me again. An expression of disgust on his face, just like before.
I’m so busy staring at his contemptuous face that I don’t notice the presence behind me until her hand is on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she says, and I know without turning who it is.
She squeezes my shoulder, then kneels and crosses her arms in front of my chest, pulling me into a hug.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says.
Strands of her hair fall onto my shoulders. She smells like the air after a long rain.
“It might not be okay now. You might not be okay for a while. And that’s fine. But someday, without knowing exactly when or why or how it happened, you’ll feel happy,” she says. My face is warm and wet and I don’t know when I started crying but it’s a relief, like the clouds are clearing, and I hold her arms and she holds me, just telling me over and over that it’s okay, that she’s here, that things will be better.
I don’t know how long she holds me, but soon I see everyone on Zaun’s Entresol and the balconies of Piltover above are staring.
Before I can say anything, she says, “Don’t think about them. Just take care of yourself. Will you do that for me?”
I try to speak, but instead I just nod.
“Thank you,” she says, and she kisses my wet cheek and gives me one last, quick squeeze.
She rises and glides past me. For the first time, I see her in her entirety – a tall, ethereal figure that I would’ve assumed was from my imagination if she hadn’t just touched me. I notice her long, pointed ears. Feet that don’t touch the ground. Hair flowing in the wind, even right now when there isn’t any. Eyes so blue I feel a little cold just looking at her.
But then she smiles, winks, and says, “You’ll want to watch this next part.”
There’s a massive gust of wind, so fast and sharp I have to cover my eyes. When I open them again she’s gone, but the wind is still blowing. It blows up toward Piltover and its gawking citizens.
It whistles as it picks up speed and strength, and the Pilties run for cover but it’s too late, the breeze hits them full force, sending their frocks sailing and mussing their hair. Boswell Holloran shrieks in terror as the wind launches him off the balcony.
It seems as if he’s about to plummet toward certain death, but another gust of wind shoots up toward him, and his descent slows significantly, as if the wind is guiding him down. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, though. Even though he’s falling with all the velocity of a tumbling leaf, He screams the entire way down. Very high pitched. Very undignified.
His clothes flap upward, smacking him in the face as he descends, until he’s hovering a few inches above a puddle.
“I –,” he begins, before the wind disappears altogether and he plops ass-first into the puddle, ruining what I assume was a very expensive ensemble. He yelps in a mixture of surprise, pain, and irritation, splashing around like an angry child. He tries to get to his feet, only to slip and fall back down all over again. If I’m being completely honest, he looks like an idiot.
And I can’t stop laughing.
Jarvan IV

Soon after King Jarvan III’s coronation, he addressed the people of Demacia. Even though there were still many foes beyond the borders of their proud kingdom, several of the noble families had begun to feud with one another, some even raising private militias to seek the favor of their new king.
This would not stand. Jarvan would not allow such dangerous rivalries to develop, and declared his intention to end the feuding by marriage. His bride, the Lady Catherine, was much beloved by the people—and courtly gossip had long held that the two shared some secret fondness for one another. The bells of the Great City rang for a day and a night in celebration, and by year’s end came the announcement that the royal couple were expecting their first son.
But all joy was forgotten when Catherine died in childbirth.
The infant, named for his father’s line, was declared heir apparent to the throne of Demacia. Torn between grief and elation, Jarvan III swore never to take another wife, and that all his hopes and dreams for the kingdom’s future would live on in his son.
With no memory of his mother, the young prince Jarvan was raised at court, groomed and guarded every moment of his life. The king insisted that he receive the finest Demacian education, learning from an early age the moral value of charity, the solemn burden of duty, and the honor of a life spent in service to one’s people. As he grew, he was also introduced to the history and politics of Valoran by his father’s seneschal, Xin Zhao. Hailing from distant Ionia, this loyal protector taught the prince about the world’s more spiritual philosophies, as well as the myriad arts of war.
During his military training, Prince Jarvan found himself facing a brash youth of the Crownguard family named Garen. The two were of similar age, and became a quick pair—Jarvan admired Garen’s sheer determination and fortitude, and Garen looked up to the prince’s tactical instincts.
When Jarvan came of age, his father rewarded him with the honorary rank of general. While it was not necessarily expected that the heir to the throne would take to the field of battle, Jarvan was determined to prove himself, with or without the king’s blessing. The lands beyond the Argent Mountains had long been contested by the empire of Noxus, creating an almost lawless frontier where foreign reavers and warring tribes threatened many of Demacia’s allies. The prince pledged to bring stability back to the region. His great grandfather had been slain by a foul Noxian brute many years ago, in the first clashes between their nations in the south. Now, that insult would finally be answered.
Jarvan’s armies won victory after victory… but the carnage he witnessed in the outlying towns troubled him deeply. When word came that the Gates of Mourning had fallen, he resolved to drive onward into Noxian territory, against the advice of his lieutenants.
Inevitably, with the battalions spread so thin, Jarvan was encircled and defeated by Noxian warbands before he even reached Trevale.
Refusing to surrender, the prince and a handful of other survivors fled into the forests, only to be hounded for days by enemy scouts. Eventually, pierced through his side by an arrow, Jarvan collapsed into the shade of a fallen tree, where he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was devastated. He had failed his family, his kingdom, and his brothers-in-arms.
Doubtless he would have died there, alone, were it not for Shyvana.
This strange, violet-skinned woman somehow carried Jarvan all the way back to Demacia, to the old castle at Wrenwall, where she proved herself a kind and worthy companion during his days of healing. At first taken aback by her outlandish appearance, the garrison commander could not deny that she had done a great service to the throne in saving Jarvan’s life.
Unfortunately, Shyvana was herself being pursued—by the monstrous elemental dragon Yvva. When the castle’s watchmen spotted the beast on the horizon, Jarvan saw a chance to redeem himself. As Shyvana prepared to meet the beast in the skies in her half-dragon form, the prince limped from his bed to marshal the garrison, and reinforce the walls. He took up his lance, and swore that they would return to the Great City with the head of Yvva, or not at all.
The battle was swift and deadly. When his men were driven in fear from their posts, it was Jarvan who rallied them. When they were wounded, it was Jarvan who directed healers to their aid. The fell creature was slain by Shyvana, but it was the prince’s leadership that had held the line. In that moment, Jarvan saw the true strength of the Demacian people—standing together as one in defense of their homeland, no matter their differences or misgivings. He promised Shyvana that she would always have a place among his guard, if she so chose.
With the dragon’s skull in tow, Jarvan journeyed to his father’s court in triumph, Shyvana at his side. Though the king was overcome with emotion at his son’s return, some of the gathered nobles quietly questioned the wisdom of allowing such a creature to stand with the prince… let alone serve as one of his protectors.
Even so, Jarvan resumed his position within the military, also playing a key role in stately matters beyond the defense of the realm. With his friend Garen now Sword-Captain of the elite Dauntless Vanguard, and Shyvana and the Wrenwall veterans training other border garrisons, the prince felt assured that Demacia could answer any emergent threat.
But the kingdom itself was changing.
The Mageseeker order had gained support among the noble families, leading to widespread imprisonment of anyone in Demacia possessing magical talents. Fear of persecution quickly gave way to resentment, and finally rebellion. When mages attacked the Great City, Jarvan was distraught to discover that his father, the king, had been killed.
Although the prince’s political stance toward mages has hardened significantly since then, he has yet to fully allay concerns over his suitability to rule. As such, he has taken the counsel of many prominent nobles—including Garen’s aunt, High Marshal Tianna Crownguard—and pledged to heed their wisdom and experience in the days ahead.
For he must examine his own conscience and allegiances carefully if he is ever to come into his inheritance, and be crowned King Jarvan IV of Demacia.
Ivory, Ebony, Jasper

Rayla Heide

General Miesar slid an ivory cone across the map. Jarvan wondered at the simplicity of the white piece. No head, no features denoting a face. Just a simple rounded shape, neutral and plain, with no resemblance to the hundred Demacian soldiers it represented.
“If we lead our knights south now, we can attack the argoth head-on before they reach Evenmoor,” said General Ibell, a stout woman with commanding eyes.
“The argoth are fiercest in swarms,” said General Miesar as he paced the length of the tent. “They rely on overwhelming numbers to defeat direct attacks. If we cannot divide them, they will slaughter us long before we reach their queen.”
Jarvan strode to the edge of their tent, parting the fabric and gazing out across the valley. He might have enjoyed the view – morning light made the verdant landscape sparkle with dew, and the village of Evenmoor looked peaceful from a distance. But an ominous gray shape swelled on the horizon as the horde thundered in the distance.
The argoth were not enormous creatures; fighting one alone would be easy enough, but in large numbers, they were subject to the dominating will of a queen, able to move and fight as one vicious unit. This swarm was bigger than any Jarvan had seen before.
Miesar wiped sweat from his brow. “They’ll be here by this evening?”
“Sooner,” said Ibell. “We have an hour, maybe two if we’re lucky, until the argoth overwhelm Evenmoor.”
Jarvan turned back to the map. Ten ebony cones representing the argoth stood at the outer edges of Evenmoor, overshadowing the single Demacian cone. The queen was marked by a smaller figurine of red jasper, right in the heart of the ebony mass.
“Any charge would need to fight through hundreds of argoth to get near her,” said Jarvan, gesturing to the red stone. “What do you propose?”
Miesar halted his pacing. “I’m afraid you won’t like this, my lord, but we could retreat. Surrender Evenmoor. Return on the morrow with forces strong enough to cut through the horde and slay the queen.”
“Leave Evenmoor to the argoth?” asked Ibell. “That’s a death sentence for these people. They will be overrun in a matter of hours.”
Jarvan stared at the ebony and ivory until they merged in his mind’s eye. All he saw was the red queen stone.
Ibell raised her eyebrows. “You see something?”
“A desperate plan,” Jarvan replied, “but it is all we have. We conceal our fiercest fighters within Evenmoor and lay an ambush. With such a small band they won’t anticipate our attack. Then, when the queen is within reach, we strike hard and fast. With her death, the swarm’s unity will be broken.”
“Into the center of the argoth, my lord?” Miesar said. “That, too, may be a death sentence.”
“But we give Evenmoor a chance of surviving the attack,” said Ibell.
“No plan is without risk,” Jarvan said. “I will lead only those willing to join me, and will not engage until our hope of victory is greatest. We bide our time until the eye of the maelstrom is upon us, and then strike from within. With the queen dead, it will be a simple matter to fight our way out.”
Ibell slid a single ivory cone to the village on the map, then moved the circle of ebony pieces forward until they overlapped Evenmoor entirely. The jasper queen stood at its center. With a flick of her finger, she tipped the red stone over. That done, she slid two more white cones to join the fight.
“This is our plan,” said Jarvan. “Ibell and Miesar, you and your troops will lead the second wave.”
“Aye,” said Miesar.
“And you, my lord?” Ibell asked. “Where will you be?”
“I have a queen to kill,” Jarvan replied.
Jax

Saijax Cail-Rynx Icath’un grew up in Icathia, a satrapy of the Shuriman empire. Ever since he was a boy, his father told him of when their home was a proud, independent nation, before it was ground under the heel of Shuriman oppression. He told him of the Kohari, heroes who protected Icathia and its Mage King. The Mage King had resisted Shurima’s conquest, but when he died in battle, his Kohari protectors followed him, committing ritual suicide. The Shuriman emperor displayed the Kohari’s decaying bodies for all to see, and the Mage King himself was impaled above the city gates, his bones left to molder.

Saijax’s father had witnessed this cruel act, and over time he passed down to his son the burning resentment that was growing in every Icathian heart. Even so, Saijax committed himself to the study of arms, learning from Shurima’s weapons masters as well as his own clan’s elders.

After many centuries of Shuriman rule, a massive earthquake struck the coastal province of Saabera. The destruction revealed something hidden deep beneath the earth, something dark and of great power—perhaps strong enough even to overcome Shurima’s god-like Ascended warriors. Saijax was entrusted with protecting the Icathian mages who encountered this discovery… which the guards just barely contained with brazier-staves that blazed with conjured elemental fire. Disturbed, he escorted the mages to the governing council so they could tell of what they’d learned.

They called this power the Void.

Immediately the council recognized its potential, but Saijax saw the doom the Void portended. As a master of weaponry, he knew the danger of using a weapon they could neither fully understand nor safely harness. He regretted that he didn’t kill the mages as they rode from Saabera. He would regret it even more in the days to come.

Confident that the Void could defeat their Shuriman overlords, the council crowned a new Mage King. The Kohari were rebuilt, with Saijax among the first to join their ranks. They triumphed in early engagements, and Saijax even killed one of the vaunted Ascended in battle, watching with pride as its corpse was paraded around the liberated city of Bai-Zhek.

When the Ascended Host approached Icathia, Saijax and his brethren assembled on the front lines. As the two armies churned the earth beneath them into crimson loam, Icathia’s mages and priests deemed the time had come to unleash the Void.

Ruin swept over the land, as Icathians, Shurimans, and even Ascended were unraveled from existence. The city’s walls collapsed as the Void swallowed thousands into cold, silent oblivion.

In moments, Icathia was lost.

Saijax rode to the ruined crater where the Void had been summoned, determined to fall upon his sword like the Kohari of old. But before he could take his life, he saw among the devastation a discarded brazier-stave that he recognized from Saabera—it still blazed with elemental fire that harmed the Void. This flame kindled a spark in Saijax’s heart. He took up the stave and left behind the ruins of his homeland, tending to this “last light of Icathia”, and the hope it represented.

Grieving and ashamed, Saijax Cail-Rynx Kohari Icath’un forsook his old name, and from that day was known only as Jax.

He became a wanderer, traveling across the known world and to places beyond any map. As he bore the elemental fire, Jax’s life extended beyond even the expectations of his long-lived people. Yet the farther he went from Icathia, the lower the flame burned, until it threatened to gutter out once and for all. Jax understood with grim resolution that he couldn’t run from his past. He had a duty to return, and fight. The advance of the Void had been halted by the last surviving Ascended, but its singular threat endured.

For centuries since, Jax has roamed, a vagabond warrior searching for those strong enough to rebuild the Kohari. Though he has fought countless times against beings of great skill, courage, and power, none have yet convinced him that they can march against the coming darkness. The fall of Icathia has plagued Jax with doubt, but one thing remains certain: when the final battle comes, Jax will stand against the Void.

Even if he has to face it alone.
None Shall Pass

Jax sat cross-legged at the center of the bridge with his long-hafted polearm resting on his knees. Demacia had not changed much since he had last traveled this way, but that didn’t surprise him. Its people zealously protected their borders, which had turned them into pretty decent fighters. Well, some of them anyway, he thought, wiping a spot of blood from the softly glowing head of the lamppost. He flicked the droplet over the parapet to the river below and reached into his robe to pull out his third hard-boiled egg of the day. Tapping it on the cobbles, he slowly peeled the shell as he heard the warriors at the end of the bridge try to decide which one of them would face him next.
Jax lifted his mask and bit into the egg. He took a deep breath, tasting sun-ripened crops on the wind and freshly turned earth from the expanse of farmland stretching to every horizon. Jax sighed; to see a realm at peace made him homesick for a land that no longer existed. He shook off the chill of memory, knowing thoughts of Icathia would only distract him. His robes were heavy, but the sun’s warmth didn’t reach the mottled and oddly hued skin beneath. No part of his flesh was visible, which was probably just as well. He wasn’t even sure what his skin looked like anymore.
A cold wind scudded over the snowcapped mountains to the north and a distant storm disgorged rain over distant fields and settlements. Where Jax came from, there was little in the way of clouds, and even less rain. Perhaps the storm would come south and make the cobbles of the bridge slippery. That might make this more challenging for him.
It would also make things more difficult for his opponents. And perhaps that was no bad thing. After all, a warrior worthy of fighting at his side in the battles against the monsters from beyond would need to be adaptable. He heard the clatter of armor and the whisper of a blade cutting air.
“Stand and face me,” ordered a powerful voice.
Jax held up a finger while he finished his egg. He licked his lips then settled his mask back over his face before looking up at the warrior standing before him. The man was powerfully built, broad of shoulder and thick of arm. Armored head to foot in gleaming warplate of burnished steel, he carried a double-edged, hand-and-a-half sword.
And looked like he knew how to use it. Jax approved.
“You seem like a man who can hew ironbirch trees all day and still have energy left for a tavern brawl,” said Jax.
“I’ll not waste words on you, monster,” said the warrior, assuming the same fighting stance all the others had. Jax sighed, disappointed the defeat of the fifteen men before this one hadn’t taught them anything.
“Monster?” he said, rising to his feet in one smooth motion. “I could show you monsters, but I fear you wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone what a real monster looks like.”
He swung his lamppost around to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. Not that he needed to, but he’d been fighting, on and off, for the last four hours and it might make the man facing him feel like he at least had a chance of winning this duel.
“For Demacia!” shouted the swordsman and he attacked with the same tired, predictable strikes all the others had. The man was fast and strong enough to wield his sword in one hand. Jax swayed aside from the first blow, ducked the second and parried the third. He spun inside the swordsman’s guard and hammered his elbow against the side of his helmet. The metal buckled and the man went down on one knee with a grunt of pain. Jax gave him a moment to still the ringing in his head. The man tore off his helm and dropped it to the bridge.
Blood matted the side of his head, but Jax was impressed at how the man controlled his anger. Demacians had always been sticklers for discipline, so he was glad to see that hadn’t changed. The man took a steadying breath and attacked again, a series of blisteringly fast cuts that went high and low, a mixture of sweeping slashes, lighting thrusts and overhead cuts. Jax parried them all, his lamppost in constant motion as it deflected the Demacian’s blade and delivered stinging, bruising ripostes to the man’s arms and legs. He feinted left and hooked his lamppost around the opponent’s legs, putting him flat on his back. He jabbed the butt of his post into the man’s belly, doubling him up and leaving him gasping for air.
“Had enough yet?” asked Jax. “I can swap hands if it makes it easier.”
“A Demacian would rather die than take succor from an enemy,” said the warrior, lurching to his feet. The man’s stoic facade was crumbling in the face of Jax’s mockery, and when he attacked again, it was with a ferocity untempered by discipline and skill. Jax ducked a risky beheading strike and switched to a one-handed grip on his lamppost. He spun his weapon under the man’s sword and rolled his wrist. The Demacian warrior’s sword was wrenched from his grasp and flipped through the air. Jax caught it deftly in his free hand.
“Nice little weapon,” he said, spinning the blade in a dazzling series of master fencer’s strokes. “Lighter than it looks.”
The Demacian drew his dagger and rushed him. Jax shook his head at his foolishness. He threw the sword from the bridge and sidestepped a series of blisteringly fast thrusts. He ducked a sweeping cut and caught a thunderous right cross in his open palm. He nodded toward the river.
“I hope you can swim,” he said, and twisted his wrist, lifting the armored warrior from his feet and flipping him over the bridge’s parapet. The man splashed down into the river and Jax planted his lamppost on the cobbles.
“Who’s next?” he said.
“That would be me,” said a woman dismounting a gray gelding at the end of the bridge. Her horse’s flanks were lathered with sweat, her cloak dusty from a hard ride. She wore a silversteel breastplate, and a long-bladed sword was scabbarded at her hip.
She marched past the men at the end of the bridge and strode toward him, moving with a perfect economy of motion, utterly in balance and supremely confident in her skill. Her features were angular and patrician, framed by dark hair streaked with crimson. Her eyes were cold and unforgiving. They promised only death.
“Who are you?” asked Jax, intrigued.
“My name is Fiora of House Laurent,” she said, drawing her weapon, a dueling saber that gleamed with a perfect edge. “And this is my bridge.”
Jax grinned beneath his mask.
Finally, an opponent worth fighting!
Jayce

Jayce is a brilliant inventor who has pledged his life to the defense of Piltover and its unyielding pursuit of progress. With his transforming hextech hammer in hand, Jayce uses his strength, courage, and considerable intelligence to protect his hometown. While revered throughout the city as a hero, he hasn’t taken well to the attention it brings. Still, Jayce’s heart is in the right place, and even those who envy his natural skills are grateful for his protection in the City of Progress.
A native son of Piltover, Jayce was raised to believe in the principles that made the city great: Invention. Discovery. Not going to Zaun if you could help it. With a knack for understanding machinery, Jayce earned the honor of being the youngest apprenta to ever be offered patronage by Clan Giopara, one of Piltover’s most respected ruling clans. Utterly unsurprised, Jayce took the offer, and spent most of his early years constructing potential hextech devices and designing transformable multi-tools for Piltover’s working class: a wrench that transformed into a prybar, a pickaxe that could morph into a shovel, a hammer that could turn into a demolition beam, if only it had a sufficiently powerful battery. Everything Jayce touched put his contemporaries to shame.
Most things came easy to Jayce, and he could never understand why his peers had so much trouble with what, to him, were simple concepts. As a result, nearly everyone who worked alongside Jayce found him arrogant, dismissive, and unwilling to slow his pace to help his colleagues catch up. As time went on, his patience became shorter, while at the same time, a chasm grew between decorum, charm, and Jayce’s natural demeanor.
Only one person ever managed to match Jayce’s intelligence while also maintaining a healthy indifference to his superior attitude.
His name was Viktor.
The two met at a mandatory Progress Day party, and immediately bonded over how little either of them wanted to be there. They started working together shortly after. Viktor expanded Jayce’s intellectual horizons and challenged many of his assumptions. While Jayce sought to improve humanity via versatile technology, Viktor sought to solve problems inherent to humanity itself, such as physical decay or illogical prejudices. They constantly argued with one another, but their conflicts never got personal – though their methods were different, the two colleagues knew their ultimate goals were very much the same. More than that, they both knew what it was like to be ostracized by their colleagues: Viktor because of his unconventional thinking, Jayce because of his rudeness.
Together, Jayce and Viktor invented a mechanized construction suit for Piltover’s dockworkers – something hearty enough to enhance the wearer’s strength, but light enough that its wearer wouldn’t immediately drown upon falling overboard. However, the two reached an impasse when Viktor’s design for the next version of the suit included a chemtech implant that would increase the wearer’s strength output by tenfold, while also preventing them from getting tired, panicking, or disobeying instructions from their superiors. While Viktor considered this feature a brilliant means of reducing the frequency of construction accidents, Jayce found its indifference toward free will immoral. The two nearly came to blows over the design and ultimately, after Jayce warned the academy of Viktor’s invention, Viktor was stripped of his honors and ostracized from Piltover’s scientific community.
Viktor was the closest thing Jayce had ever really had to a friend, and distraught over their falling-out, went back to working on his own. He grew more insular. His patience toward others grew even thinner.
As Jayce studied in solitude, Clan Giopara’s explorers discovered a raw, blue crystal deep within the Shuriman desert. Though Jayce volunteered to experiment on it (specifically by suggesting the clan’s other scholars wouldn’t be smart enough to get anything out of it), his lack of tact in doing so prompted Clan Giopara to give it to their better-mannered scholars as a form of punishment. Yet, after many months, the scholars reached a unanimous conclusion: the crystal was worthless. A power-drained hunk of rock. The disappointed clan leaders finally handed the crystal over to Jayce, assuming that even he, with his remarkable intelligence, wouldn’t be able to learn anything from it.
Something inside the crystal called to Jayce. No, more than that – it sang to him. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew the Shuriman gem still held mysteries yet to be discovered.
He spent many months running every variety of test on the crystal. He braced it into a cogwheel centrifuge; he superheated it and deep-froze it; he tinkered, and observed, and hypothesized, and beat his head against his copper pantograph. Quite simply, Jayce wasn’t used to working hard: this damned crystal was the first thing that had ever resisted his considerable mental aptitude. For the first time, he realized how his peers must have felt, trying so hard to solve a problem, only to bump against your own limitations. It felt frustrating. It felt unfair.
And it probably felt much, much worse if you were working alongside an arrogant inventor who dismissed your every effort.
Jayce realized that despite how dismissive he’d been toward his fellow scholars, none of them ever gave up. None of them ever stopped seeking the very things that defined Piltover: Progress. Discovery. If they wouldn’t give up, Jayce decided, he wouldn’t either.
And maybe he’d try to be nicer.
Maybe.
Jayce approached the problem from a completely different angle. Rather than trying to experiment on the crystal as a whole, he wondered, why not run more invasive experiments on a smaller shard? Jayce chiseled off a piece of the crystal and suspended it in a liquid alloy. As he sent a voltaic current through the liquid metal, Jayce’s eardrums nearly shattered from the booming baritone note that blasted from the shard. Heat radiated from the crystal and, with a flash, it glowed bright enough to nearly blind him. This was unexpected. This was potentially dangerous. But this was progress. Jayce couldn’t erase the smile from his face as he worked well through the night, into the dawn.
The next day, Jayce was surprised to find his old friend Viktor on his doorstep. Alerted by the massive power spike from the crystal shard, Viktor had a simple proposition.
Since his expulsion from the Piltovan scientific community, Viktor had commenced work on a secret project in Zaun. He’d finally learned how to achieve his dream – how to eradicate disease, hunger, hatred. If Jayce joined him, the two would accomplish more than anyone from Piltover or Zaun could have dreamed of: they’d save humanity from itself.
Jayce had heard a monologue like this before from Viktor. He never liked where it led.
Viktor told Jayce that he only needed one thing for his Glorious Evolution – a power source like Jayce’s crystal. Jayce disagreed, informing Viktor that what he truly needed was a moral compass. Viktor, who had long grown tired of Jayce’s rudeness, leapt upon him, grabbed the crystal and knocked Jayce unconscious with it. When Jayce awoke hours later, he noticed that though the Shuriman crystal was gone Viktor hadn’t seemed to notice or care about the smaller shard.
Jayce knew whatever Viktor was planning, he would only resort to these measures if he were close to completion. Even though he didn’t know what Viktor’s Glorious Evolution consisted of, it probably didn’t have a lot of respect for the free will of others. Without wasting a second, Jayce retrieved the suspended shard and installed it into a massive, transforming hammer – a demolitions invention he’d abandoned years ago for lack of a strong enough battery to power it. Though he had no idea where Viktor might have taken the crystal, he could feel the hextech hammer vibrate, pulling him not north, south, east or west, but down, toward the undercity of Zaun.
The shard, eager to be reunited with the crystal from which it was chiseled, eventually led Jayce to a warehouse in the depths of the sump. Within the cavernous building, Jayce found something horrifying. Dozens of corpses, their skulls sawed open and hollowed out, their brains transplanted into an army of immobile metal soldiers, hooked up to the now-pulsing crystal.
This was the first step in Viktor’s Glorious Evolution.
Jayce’s stride grew less confident as he approached Viktor. He and Viktor had not always seen eye to eye, but this was something else entirely. For the first time, it occurred to Jayce that he might have to kill his old friend.
He called out to Viktor, flinching as the army of robots stood to attention. Jayce asked him to look around – to see what he was doing. Whatever this was – this Evolution – wasn’t the progress they fought for in their youths. He even, to Viktor’s surprise, apologized for acting like such a jerk.
Viktor sighed. He had only two words in response: “Kill him.”
The automatons sprinted toward Jayce, breaking free of the wires connecting them to the crystal and introducing Jayce to another new emotion: panic. He gripped the hammer tight, realizing he’d never actually used it before. When the first golem was within reach, he swung as hard as he could, feeling the shard’s energy surge through his muscles, accelerating the hammer’s movement until Jayce was worried it might fly out of his hands.
It slammed into the automaton, all but exploding it into a hail of metal. Despite the obliteration of their comrade, the other machines didn’t even pause as they rushed at Jayce, trying to pummel him into unconsciousness.
Jayce analyzed the formation of the mechanical wave coming at him and attempted to quickly calculate how to take out the largest number of them with the fewest amount of swings. It was pointless; they were on him before he could swing even once. As he fell to the ground under a storm of their blows, Jayce saw Viktor looking on, not with triumph, but with sadness. He’d outsmarted Jayce and ensured humanity’s future, but he knew that future came at a cost: he couldn’t let his old friend live. Jayce vanished under a sea of swinging metal limbs.
That’s when Jayce, for the first time in his life, decided to stop thinking and just break stuff.
No longer caring for his own safety, Jayce used every last bit of strength he had to break free from Viktor’s automatons. He sprinted to the glowing crystal, and struck it with all of the hextech-enhanced force his hammer could muster, crushing the mystical object.
Viktor cried out in horror as the crystal shattered to fragments, the shockwave blasting them all backward as the army of automatons collapsed lifelessly to the floor. The very foundations of the warehouse shook, and Jayce barely managed to escape before the entire building toppled.
Viktor’s body was never found.
Upon his return to Piltover, Jayce informed his clan masters of Viktor’s nefarious plans. Soon, Jayce found himself a topic of discussion in both Zaun and Piltover alike. Hailed for his quick thinking in a time of crisis, Jayce became a beloved figure (at least, amongst those who hadn’t met him), earning himself a nickname: the Defender of Tomorrow.
Jayce cared little for the adoration of his fellow Piltovans, but took the nickname to heart. He knew that Viktor was still out there, plotting his revenge. One day – maybe someday soon – an awful lot of trouble was headed for Piltover.
And Jayce would be waiting.
A Quick Fix

Any fool could have predicted that Viktor would strike back at some point. If one weren’t a fool, one might predict the exact date and time of an attempted counterattack.
Jayce was not a fool.
He stood in his workshop, bathed in sun rays from his skylight, surrounded by dozens of artifacts of his own genius: Gearwork boots that could cling to any surface. A knapsack with articulated limbs that always kept the user’s tools within easy reach.
Greater than all these inventions, however, was the weapon that Jayce now held in his hands. Powered by a Shuriman shard, Jayce's transforming hextech greathammer was renowned throughout Piltover, but he tossed it from hand to hand as if was any other tool from his workshop.
Three sharp taps echoed from Jayce’s door.
They were here.
Jayce had prepared for this. He'd run experiments on Viktor’s discarded automata. He'd intercepted the mechanical communications. Any second, they’d beat down his front door and try to rip away his hextech hammer. After that, they'd try to do the same with his skull. “Try” being the operative word.
He flicked a switch on the hammer’s handle. With an energetic sizzle, the head of Jayce’s masterpiece transformed into a hextech blaster.
He took aim.
Stood his ground.
Watched the door open. His finger tightened on the trigger.
And he almost blasted a seven-year-old girl’s head off.
She was tiny and blonde and would have seemed adorable to anyone who wasn’t Jayce. The girl pushed the door open and walked in with shuffling, tentative steps. Her ponytail swished to and fro as she approached Jayce. She kept her head down, ever avoiding his gaze. He had two hypotheses regarding why she might refuse eye contact: she was hugely impressed to be in the presence of someone so acclaimed, or she was working for Viktor and about to surprise him with a chem-bomb. Her blushing indicated it was likely the former.
“My soldier broke,” she said, proffering a limp metal knight, its arm bent backward at a perverse angle.
Jayce didn’t move.
“Please leave or you’ll probably die.”
The child stared at him.
“Also, I don’t fix dolls. Find somebody with more time on their hands.”
Tears began to well up in her eyes.
“I don’t have any money for an artificer, and my muh–,” she said, stifling a sob, “mother made him for me before she passed, and–”
Jayce furrowed his brow and, for the first time in quite a while, blinked.
“If it’s so precious to you, why did you break it?”
“I didn’t mean to! I took him to the Progress Day feast and somebody bumped into me and I dropped him, and I know I should have just left him at home–”
“ –Yes, you should have. That was stupid of you.”
The girl opened her mouth to speak, then stopped herself. Jayce had seen this kind of reaction before. Most everyone he met had heard the stories of his legendary hammer and his unyielding heroism. They expected grandeur. They expected humility. They expected him to not be a massive jerk. Jayce inevitably disappointed them.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked.
“Most facets of my personality, so I’ve been told,” he replied without hesitation.
The child furrowed her brow. She shoved the broken doll into his face.
“Fix it. Please.”
“You’ll just break it again.”
“I won’t!”
“Look,” he said. ”Little girl. I’m very busy, and–”
Something flitted across the skylight, casting a quick shadow on the two of them. Anyone else would have assumed it was nothing more than a falcon passing overhead. Jayce knew better. He fell silent. A wry smile spread across his face as he yanked the girl toward his workbench.
“The thing is,” he said, “machines are very simple.”
He lifted a large, thin sheet of bronze and began to hammer its corners with sharp taps. “They’re made of discrete parts. They combine and recombine in clear, predictable ways.” He beat the sheet over and over until it took the form of a smooth dome.
“People are more complicated. They’re emotional, they’re unpredictable, and – in nearly every case – they’re not as smart as me,” he said, drilling a clean hole into the top of the dome. “Now usually, that’s a problem. But sometimes, their stupidity works in my favor.”
“Is this still about my doll, or–”
“Sometimes, they’re so insecure in their inferiority – so desperate to take their revenge – that they make a foolish mistake.” He grabbed a shining copper rod, and screwed it into the center of the dome.
“Sometimes people fail to protect their most precious assets,” he said, nodding at her tin soldier before holding aloft the newly-formed metal umbrella. “And sometimes, that means instead of assaulting my workshop through the more obvious front door, they try to take…”
He looked upward, “...the more dramatic approach.”
He handed her the umbrella, which took all of her meager strength to keep aloft.
“Hold this. Don’t move.”
She opened her mouth to respond, only to yelp in surprise as the skylight shattered above her. Glass bounced off the makeshift umbrella like rain as a half-dozen men leapt down to the floor. Tubes of bright green chems protruded from the base of their necks, connecting to their limbs. Their eyes were dead, their faces emotionless. They were definitely Viktor’s boys, alright: drugged punks from Zaun’s sump level whom Viktor had pumped full of hallucinogens and hypnotics. Chem-stunted thugs who would follow Viktor’s every whim whether they wanted to or not. Jayce had been expecting to see automatons, but Viktor likely couldn’t have gotten so many through Piltover unnoticed. Still, these chem-slaves were just as much of a danger. They turned toward Jayce and the girl.
Before they reached the pair, however, Jayce’s hextech blaster exploded with voltaic energy. An orb of hextech-powered lightning shot out of its core and detonated in the middle of the group. The chem-slaves slammed into the workshop's immaculate walls.
“So much for the element of surprise, huh, Vikto–”
A hulking brute of a machine leapt down amongst the pile of unconscious chem-slaves. It looked, Jayce thought, like a cross between a minotaur and a very angry building.
“Watch out,” the girl yelped.
Jayce rolled his eyes. “I am watching him. Stop panicking. I have the situation well in-ow!” he said, interrupted as the metal beast rammed him in the chest.
The beast sent Jayce hurtling backward. He landed on a rolling cart, his back cracking from the impact.
Grunting, he pulled himself to his feet as the beast charged again.
“That’s the last time you touch me,” he said.
Jayce swung his hextech weapon as hard as he could, transforming it back into a hammer mid-swing. The minotaur lowered its head to ram Jayce again, foolishly ignoring the weapon’s arc.
The hammer found its mark with a resounding crunch. The minotaur, its head caved all the way back into its metal neck, collapsed to the floor. A cloud of escaping steam hissed from its carcass.
Jayce pulled back the hammer again, readying for another attack. He watched the skylight. A few minutes passed. Soon enough, he seemed satisfied the assault was over.
He tried to step back toward his workbench, only to double over in pain, grasping at his stomach. The girl rushed to his side.
“Still hurts where he tackled you, huh?”
“Obviously.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have let him,” she said. “That was stupid of you.”
Jayce raised an eyebrow at the kid. Her eyes widened, unsure if she’d crossed a line. A slow smile crept across his face.
“What was your name?”
“Amaranthine.”
Jayce sat at his workbench and grabbed a screwdriver.
“Gimme the doll, Amaranthine,” he said.
A massive grin broke out on her face. “So you can fix it?”
Jayce smirked at her.
“There’s nothing I can’t fix.”
Jhin

One can travel to nearly any village across Ionia and hear the tale of the Capture of the Golden Demon. Depicted in a variety of plays and epic poems, the cruel spirit’s banishment is still celebrated to this day.

But at the heart of every myth there lies a kernel of truth, and the truth of the Golden Demon is one far different than the fiction.

For years, Ionia’s southern mountains were plagued by the infamous creature. Throughout the province of Zhyun, and even as far as Shon-Xan and Galrin, a monster slaughtered scores of travelers and sometimes whole farmsteads, leaving behind twisted displays of corpses. Armed militias searched the forests, towns hired demon hunters, Wuju masters patrolled the roads—but nothing slowed the beast’s grisly work.

In desperation, the Council of Zhyun sent an envoy to beg Great Master Kusho of the Kinkou Order for help. Charged with maintaining the balance between the spirit and material realms, Kusho was adept in the banishment of demons. Leaving in secret lest the cunning creature be alerted to their intent, Kusho, his teenage son, Shen, and young apprentice, Zed, traveled to the province. They tended to countless families shattered by the killings, dissected the horrific crime scenes, and looked for connections between the murders. Soon, Kusho realized they were far from the first to hunt this killer, and his conviction grew that this was the work of something beyond the demonic.

For the next four years, the Golden Demon remained beyond their reach, and the long investigation left the three men changed. The famous red mane of Kusho turned white; Shen, known for his wit and humor, became somber; and Zed, the brightest star of Kusho’s temple, began to struggle with his studies. It was almost as though the demon knew they were seeking it, and delighted in the torment sown by their failure.

Upon finally finding a pattern to the killings, the Great Master is quoted as saying: “Good and evil are not truths. They are born from men, and each sees the shades differently.” Kusho sought to hand off the investigation, believing now that they sought not a demon, but a wicked human or vastaya, taking them beyond the Kinkou’s mandate. Shen and Zed, unwilling to turn back after all they had sacrificed to bring the killer within reach, convinced him to continue the hunt.

On the eve of the Spirit Blossom Festival in Jyom Pass, Kusho disguised himself as a renowned calligrapher to blend in with the other guest artists. Then he waited. Shen and Zed laid a carefully prepared trap, and at long last, they found themselves face to face with their hated quarry. Kusho was proven right—the famed “Golden Demon” was a mere stagehand in Zhyun’s traveling theaters and opera houses, working under the name Khada Jhin.

After they caught Jhin, young Zed made to kill the cowering man, but Kusho held him back. He reminded his students that they had already broken their remit, and that killing Jhin would only worsen matters. Kusho worried that knowledge of Jhin’s humanity would undermine the harmony and trust that defined Ionian culture, or could even encourage others to commit similar crimes. Despite Jhin’s actions, the legendary master decided the killer should be taken alive and locked away within the monastery prison at Tuula.

Shen disagreed, but submitted to the emotionless logic of his father’s judgment. Zed, disturbed and haunted by the horrors he had witnessed, was unable to understand or accept this mercy, and it is said a resentment began to bloom in his heart.

Imprisoned in Tuula, Jhin kept his secrets, revealing little of himself as many years went by. The monks guarding him noted he was a bright student who excelled in many subjects, including smithing, poetry, and dance. Regardless, they could find nothing to cure him of his morbid fascinations. Meanwhile, outside the monastery’s walls, Ionia fell into turmoil as the Noxian empire invaded, and war awoke the tranquil nation’s appetite for bloodshed.

Jhin was freed from Tuula sometime after the war with Noxus, possibly put to use by one of the many radical elements vying for power of the First Lands near the conflict’s end. He now has access to the Kashuri armories’ new weapons, though how he came to possess such implements of destruction, and what connection he has to Kashuri, is still a mystery.

Whoever his shadowy patrons might be, they have endowed Jhin with nearly unlimited funds, and seem unconcerned by the growing scale of his “performances”. Recently, he attacked members of Zed’s Yanlei order, and mass murders and assassinations bearing his signature “flair” have occurred not only across Ionia’s many regions, but also in distant Piltover and Zaun.

It seems that all of Runeterra might be but a canvas for the atrocity that is Khada Jhin’s art, and only he knows where the next brushstroke will fall.
The Man with the Steel Cane

Odin Austin Shafer

One.
The gun in his hand was simply a tool—but a perfectly crafted one. Gold type was inlaid into the blackish-green metal. It spelled the smith’s name: this detail spoke of its creator’s pride and confidence. It was not a Piltovan weapon—those gaudy things that attempted to function with the minuscule amounts of magic available in those lands. This gun was made by a true forge master. Magic pulsed from its bronze, Ionian heart.
He wiped the gun’s stock a fourth time. He couldn’t be sure it was clean until he wiped it down four times. Didn’t matter that he hadn’t used it. Didn’t matter that he was only going to stow it in the bag under the bed. He couldn’t put it away until he was sure it was clean, and he couldn’t be sure it was clean until he had wiped it down four times. It was getting clean though. Four times makes it clean.
It was clean, and it was wonderful. His new patrons had been generous. But did the finest painters not deserve the finest brushes?
The scale and precision of the new device made his previous work with blades seem insignificant by comparison. Understanding firearm mechanics had taken him weeks of study, but evolving his ki techniques from blades had taken months.
The gun held four shots. Each bullet had been infused with magical energy. Each bullet was as perfect as a Lassilan monk’s blade. Each bullet was the paint from which his art would flow. Each bullet was a masterpiece. It didn’t just cut apart the body. It rearranged it.
The rehearsal at the mill town had already shown the gun’s potential. And his new employers had been pleased with the work’s reception.
He had finished polishing it, but with the gun in his right hand, the temptation was too great. He knew he shouldn’t, but he unpacked the black, eel-skin bodysuit. He drew the fingertips of his left hand across the slick surface of the clothes. The feel of the skin’s oily surface quickened his breath. He picked up the tight, leather mask, then—unable to help himself—slid it over his face. It covered his right eye and mouth. It constricted his breathing and removed his depth perception…
Delightful.
He was putting on the shoulder armor when the bells he’d hidden on the steps leading up to his room sounded. He quickly folded up the weapon and removed the mask.
“Hello?” the maid asked through the door. The lilt in her voice hinted to an upbringing far south of this town.
“You did what I asked?” he said.
“Yes, sir. A white lantern every four yards. A red lantern every sixteen.”
“Then I can begin,” Khada Jhin said as he swung open the door to his room.
The woman’s eyes widened as he exited his room. Jhin was well aware of how he looked. Normally, it elicited pangs of self-conscious loathing, but today was a performance day.
Today, Khada Jhin cut a slender, elegant figure as he walked out with a cane. He was hunched, and his cloak seemed to cover some huge deformity on his shoulder, but a jaunty stride belied this. He forcefully tapped the cane ahead of him as he marched toward the window. He tapped the frame rhythmically—three beats, then a fourth. His gold sparkled, his cream cloak flowed, and his jewels glittered in the sun.
“What… What is that?” the maid asked, indicating Jhin’s shoulder.
Jhin paused for a moment to study the woman’s cherubic face. It was round and perfectly symmetrical. A dull and predictable design. Removed, it would make a terrible mask.
“It’s for the crescendo, my darling,” Khada Jhin said.
From the inn’s window, he had a clear view of the rest of the town in the valley below him. This performance had to be wonderful, but there was still so much work to do. The councilman would be returning this evening—and so far, all of Jhin’s plans for tonight seemed… uninspired.
“I brought some flowers for your room,” the woman said, walking past him.
He could have used someone else to place the lanterns. But he didn’t. He could have changed clothes before opening his door. But he didn’t. Now she had seen Khada Jhin in his finery.
The inspiration he needed was so obvious now. So preordained. There was never a choice. There was no escaping the Art.
He would have to make this maid’s face... more interesting.
Two.
The candied pork glistened on top of the five-flavor broth. The aroma entranced Shen, but he set aside his spoon. As the waitress left, she smiled and nodded in approval. The fat had yet to melt into the broth. Doubtless, the soup was already excellent, but in a moment, the flavor would be at its peak. Patience.
Shen considered the interior of the White Cliffs Inn. It was deceptively simple and rough. The wood weavers had been masters, removing the tree bark and living leaves only where necessary.
The candle on Shen’s table flickered… wrongly. He slid away from the table, retrieving his blades from under his cloak.
“Your students are as quiet as a pregnant worax,” he said.
Alone and dressed like a merchant, Zed entered the inn. Brushing past the waitress, he sat down three tables away. Every part of Shen wanted to dash at his foe, to avenge his father. But such was not the way of twilight. He calmed himself as he realized the distance was too far… even if only by the length of his index finger.
Shen looked over at Zed, expecting to see him grin. Instead, his rival sighed. His skin was sallow, and dark folds hung beneath his eyes.
“Years, I have waited,” said Shen.
“Have I misjudged the distance?” Zed asked wearily.
“Even if my head is cut off, I will still close and strike,” Shen continued, sliding his foot backward and cocking it against the floor. Zed was ten paces and one half of a finger length away.
“Your path’s closer to mine. Your father’s ideals were a weakness. Ionia could no longer afford them,” Zed said. He leaned back in his chair, keeping himself just outside of the range Shen would need to strike a killing blow. “I know that’s not something I can make you understand. But I will offer you a chance for vengeance.”
Shen inched forward to the edge of his chair. “I do not act because of vengeance. You defy the balance. For that, you are damned.”
“The Golden Demon escaped,” Zed said, simply.
“Impossible,” Shen replied, feeling a hollowness that caught in his chest.
“Your father’s greatest victory. And now, again, his foolish mercy has tarnished his legacy.” Zed shook his head. “You know what that… thing is capable of.” Then Zed leaned over the table, well within Shen’s range—his neck intentionally exposed. “And you know that we are the only two people who can get close enough to stop him.”
Shen remembered the first time he’d seen the body of someone killed by the infamous Khada Jhin. His skin prickled from the memory; his teeth clenched. Only his father had been strong enough to still believe a merciful justice could be served.
Something in Shen had changed that day. Something in Zed had broken.
Now, that monster had returned.
Shen put his swords on the table. He looked down at the perfect bowl of soup in front of him. Little droplets of the pork fat’s oil shimmered on its surface, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.
Three.

There was still no sign of Zed. It was disappointing. Very disappointing. He certainly must have sought out his former friend. It was likely Zed was hiding, watching. Jhin needed to be careful.
From the jetty, Jhin looked back to the foreign ship. The tide had come in, and the ship would be leaving in a few moments. He would have to return soon if he was going to perform in Zaun next month. Risk on top of risk.
He stopped to check his reflection in a puddle. From the water, a worried, elderly merchant stared back at him. Years of acting practice combined with his martial training had given him total control of his facial muscles. It was a common face, and he had given it an unexceptional expression. When he walked up the hill, Jhin blended easily into the crowd.
He checked the white lanterns above him, counting the distance. If Zed appeared, he would need them. At the inn on the top of the hill, he glanced at the planters where he had hidden traps. Sharpened steel blades, shaped like flowers. They protected his escape route in case anything went wrong.
He thought of how the metal would slice through the crowd and splash the building’s freshly painted teal walls with red. It was tempting.
He was pushing through the crowd when he heard the village elder speaking to Shen.
“Why would the demon attack her and the councilmen?” the elder asked.
Shen, dressed in his blue outfit, didn’t answer.
Another of the Kinkou, a young woman named Akali, stood beside Shen. She walked to the doorway of the inn.
“No,” Shen said as he blocked her path.
“What makes you think I’m not ready?” Akali demanded.
“Because I wasn’t when I was your age.”
At that moment, a town guard stumbled from the entrance, his face pale and hollow.
“Her flesh, it was… It was…” He took a few steps, then collapsed to the ground in shock.
Against the far wall, the tavern’s owner laughed. Then he began weeping—his face painted by madness. “He saw it. He saw the flower!”
These were not people who would forget seeing Khada Jhin’s work.
Shen scanned the faces of the onlookers.
Clever boy, Jhin thought, before fading into the back of the crowd.
He checked the rooftops for Zed as he walked back to the ship.
The work was inescapable. Together or apart, Zed and Shen would chase the clues he had left. They would follow them back to the Blossom Festival. Back to Jyom Pass. And when they became desperate, then they would have to work together again.
It would be like it had been when they were young. They would huddle together in awe and fear.
Only then would the great Khada Jhin reveal himself…
And his true masterpiece would begin.
Four.
Jinx

While most look at Jinx and see only a mad woman wielding an array of dangerous weapons, a few remember her as a relatively innocent girl from Zaun—a tinkerer with big ideas who never quite fit in. No one knows for certain what happened to turn that sweet young child into a wildcard, infamous for her wanton acts of destruction. But once Jinx exploded onto the scene in Piltover, her unique talent for sowing anarchy instantly became the stuff of legend.

Jinx first gained notoriety through her anonymous “pranks” on the citizens of Piltover… particularly those with connections to the wealthy merchant clans. These pranks ranged from the moderately annoying to the criminally dangerous. She blocked streets on Progress Day, with a stampede of exotic animals freed from Count Mei’s menagerie. She disrupted trade for weeks when she lined the city’s iconic bridges with adorably destructive flame chompers. Once, she even managed to move every street sign in town to new and utterly confusing locations.

Though this unknown troublemaker’s targets seemed random, and her motivation nothing more than pure chaos, her actions always served to bring the city’s orderly bustle to a screeching halt.

Naturally, the wardens attributed some of her crimes to chem-punk gangs from the undercity. Having others get credit for her manic schemes didn’t sit well with Jinx, and so she made sure to make her presence known at every future crime scene. Rumors soon circulated of the mysterious, blue-haired Zaunite girl carrying chemtech explosives, a shark-mouthed rocket launcher, and a repeater gun. Still, the authorities dismissed these reports as preposterous. After all, how could a lowly street punk possibly obtain such lethal ordnance?

Jinx’s bombastic spree seemed endless, with the wardens’ attempts to catch the culprit thwarted at every turn. She began tagging her works of destruction with vivid graffiti, and other taunting messages directed at the city sheriff’s newest ally in the fight against crime, Enforcer Vi.

Jinx’s reputation grew, leaving the people of Zaun divided as to whether she was a hero for sticking it to the arrogant Pilties, or a dangerous lunatic for escalating existing tensions between their two cities.

After months of ever-increasing carnage, Jinx unveiled her biggest plan yet. In her trademark electric pink, Jinx daubed the walls of the Ecliptic Vaults—one of Piltover’s most secure treasuries—with a very unflattering caricature of Enforcer Vi, and the details of her own intention to rob the stores within.

An uneasy sense of anticipation settled on Piltover and Zaun leading up to the promised date of the heist. Many doubted even Jinx would have the guts to show up and risk almost certain capture.

When the day arrived, Vi, Sheriff Caitlyn, and the wardens prepared a trap for Jinx outside the treasury. But Jinx had already smuggled herself inside by way of an oversized coin crate that had been delivered days before. When Vi heard pandemonium erupt from inside the structure, she knew the wardens had been outclassed once again. She burst into the treasury, and the ensuing confrontation left the Ecliptic Vaults a smoldering ruin, and the merry mischief maker Jinx nowhere to be found.

Jinx remains at large to this day, and is a constant thorn in Piltover’s side. Her schemes have inspired copycat crimes among the chem-punks, as well as numerous satirical plays lampooning the incompetence of the wardens, and even a smattering of new colloquialisms throughout both cities—though no one has yet had the courage to call Enforcer Vi “Pretty-in-Pink” to her face.

Jinx’s ultimate endgame, and her obvious obsession with Vi, both remain a mystery, but one thing is certain: her crimes are continuing and growing in sheer audacity.
The Wedding Crasher

Jinx hated petticoats.
Corsets too, but she grinned at how she’d put the space under and within the stolen dress to good use. Her long blue braids were concealed beneath a ridiculous feathered bonnet that was the latest fashion in Piltover. Jinx sashayed between the wedding guests, keeping her smile fixed and trying not to scream at the dead-eyed people surrounding her. It took an effort of will not to grab each one by the shoulder and try to shake them awake.
Jinx had come here to get all explodey on the observatory atop Count Sandvik’s mansion, but when she’d seen there was a wedding underway... well, that was too good an opportunity for mayhem to pass it up. The count had spared no expense in making his daughter’s party a grand spectacle. The cream of Piltover society was here; the heads of the major clans, lauded hextech artificers, and even fat Nicodemus had managed to finagle an invite. The Warden-Prefect looked like an overstuffed poro in his dress uniform, chest puffed out and beady eyes ogling the sprawling buffet table. Music from a small orchestra drifted over the wedding guests, so slow and ponderous it made Jinx want to yawn. She’d take the foot-stomping, spin-around-till-it-made-you-sick music of Zaun any day.
Hexlumens fitted with rotating zoetropes and oddly-angled lenses projected spectral dancers onto the floor that pirouetted and spun to the delight of laughing children who’d never known a moment of hunger, pain, or loss. Mimes and sleight of hand artistes moved through the crowd, delighting the guests with the fingerwork of their card tricks. Jinx had seen better. The sump-snipes of the Boundary Markets would quite literally give any of these performers a run for their money.
Pictures of Piltover’s bigwigs hung on walls paneled with oak and inlaid with geometric copper fretwork. The men and women in the portraits looked down on the people below with haughty disdain. Jinx stuck her tongue out at each and every one of them as she passed, grinning as they tutted and turned away. Windows paned with colored glass patterned the mosaic floor with rainbows and Jinx skipped merrily over every bright square as she made her way to a table heaped with enough food to feed a hundred families in Zaun for a month.
A liveried waiter passed her, bearing a silver tray of fluted glasses filled with something golden and fizzy. She took one in each hand, spinning away with a grin. Flying foam stained the backs of dresses and frock coats of nearby guests and Jinx sniggered.
“Drink up,” she said and knocked back what was left in the glasses.
She bent awkwardly and set the glasses on the mosaic floor, right in the path of oncoming dancers, and burped the opening bars of Vi is a Stupid Fathead, a tune she’d only just made up. Cliques of society ladies turned to sneer at her coarseness, and Jinx covered her mouth in mock, wide-eyed embarrassment. “Sorry, I accidentally did that on purpose.”
She skipped on and helped herself to some weird looking fish-things from another waiter’s platter. She tossed them into the air and managed to catch at least one in her mouth. A few fell into her enhanced cleavage and she plucked them out with the glee of a sump-scrapper who’d found something shiny in the ooze.
“You thought you could get away from me, fishy-fishes!” she said, wagging a finger at each morsel. “Well, you were wrong.”
Jinx stuffed the food into her mouth and readjusted her dress. She wasn’t used to this much up top, and stifled a giggle at what she had stuffed down there. The hairs on the back of her neck bristled, and she looked up to see a man staring at her from the edge of the chamber. He was good-looking in a stiff sort of way and wore nice, formal clothes, but was so obviously a warden that he might as well have had a sign around his neck. She turned and pushed deeper into the throng of guests filling the chamber.
She reached the buffet table and sucked in an impressed breath as she saw the towering wedding cake; a frosted masterwork of pink fondant, whipped cream and lacework caramel. A replica of the Tower of Techmaturgy in sponge, jam, and sweet pastry. Jinx reached out, lifted a ladle from the punch bowl, and scooped out a cave in the sponge. She tipped it out onto the floor, licked the ladle clean and tossed it back onto the table. She saw a number of the guests looking at her funny and bared her teeth in her best, manic grin. Maybe they thought she was mad. Maybe they were right.
Jinx shrugged. Whatever.
She reached down into her décolletage and pulled out four chompers. She stuffed three deep into the hole she’d scooped in the cake and dropped the other in the punch bowl.
Jinx strolled along the length of the table, pulling out another two chompers and depositing them in various dishes. One went in a copper soup tureen, the other replaced the apple in the mouth of a suckling pig. Her dress was a lot looser without the additional baggage upstairs, and as she pulled down the side zipper, Jinx spotted the good-looking man she’d earlier pegged as a warden making a beeline for her through the guests.
“About time,” she said, spotting another four, gussied-up wardens, three women and a man, converging on her. “Oooh, and you brought friends too!”
Jinx reached around to the small of her back and pulled the knot securing the petticoats around her narrow waist. The bottom half of her dress sank to the floor as her corset fell away to surprised gasps of the men and women around her.
Revealed in her pink leggings, ammo-belted shorts and vest top, Jinx ripped off the bonnet and shook her hair loose. She reached down and swung Fishbones up from where it had been concealed beneath her dress, and hoisted the weapon up to her shoulder.
“Hey folks!” she yelled, leaping onto the buffet table and drawing Zapper from her thigh-holster. “Hope you’re all hungry...”
Jinx spun on her heel and fired a crackling bolt of energy down the table to the chomper in the pig’s mouth.
“‘Cause this buffet is to die for!”
The chomper exploded, draping the nearest guests in ribbons of scorched meat and fat. A chain reaction of detonations followed. The tureen blasted into the air to drench scores of guests in hot beef soup. The punch bowl blew up next, and then the climax of the detonations; the wedding cake.
The three chompers inside detonated simultaneously and the towering confection launched into the air like a rocket. It almost reached the stained glass ceiling before it arced over and nosedived back to the floor. Guests scattered as the giant cake exploded on impact, and fondant fragments flew in all directions. Screaming guests ran from the blasts, slipping and tumbling in patches of gooey cream and sizzling punch.
“Seriously folks,” said Jinx, blowing a loose strand of blue hair out of her face. “Screaming helps, not at all.”
She skipped down the ruined buffet table and fired a rocket from Fishbones that blew out the nearest window. Iron bolts from hand crossbows flashed past her to embed in the walls, but Jinx laughed as she leapt through the shattered window frame to land in the garden beyond. She rolled back to her feet and pulled up short. She’d had an escape route sort of planned out, but looking toward the Sandvik Mansion’s entrance, she saw a tall, gleaming ring-rider that looked like it’d be a ton of fun to steal.
“Now, that I gotta try...”
She slung Fishbones over her shoulder and elbowed a host of gawping Sandvik footmen out the way, settling into the disc-runner’s hand-tooled leather saddle.
“So how do you start this thing?” she said, staring at the bewildering array of ivory knobs, brass-rimmed dials and gem-like buttons on the control panel in front of her.
“Time for a little trial and error!”
Jinx hauled back on the nearest lever and hit the biggest, reddest button she could see. The machine throbbed beneath her, spooling up with a rising whine and hum of building power. Blue light spun around the outer edges of the wide disc as the main doors to the mansion slammed open. Stern voices yelled at her to stop. Like that was going to happen! The stabilizer struts retracted into the gleaming frame and Jinx whooped with manic glee as the disc-runner shot away from the mansion like a super mega death rocket.
“See ya!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Awesome party!”
Kai'Sa

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the fearless hunter of the Void known as Kai’Sa is how unremarkably her life began. She did not descend from tribal warriors hardened by generations of battle, nor was she summoned from distant lands to fight the unknowable menace lurking beneath Shurima. Rather, she was just an ordinary girl, born to loving parents who called the unforgiving southern deserts their home. This was where she would spend her days playing with friends, and her nights dreaming about her place in the world.

In her tenth summer, the young girl Kaisa’s destiny would be changed forever. Had she been older, she might have noticed more of the unusual events that had begun to unfold in the villages—every day, her mother urged her stay home, for fear of strangers wandering the land, demanding tribute to dark powers below. Kaisa and her friends did not believe it, until one evening they came upon a pen of sacrificial goats bought from nomad herdsmen. Using the knife her father had given her on her eighth birthday, she cut their tethers and set the animals free into a nearby canyon. It seemed like a harmless prank, until the unthinkable happened. The ground began to quake, flashes of light scorched the sky, and the children ran for their lives.

The Void had been awakened. A great rift split the bedrock, swallowing up Kaisa’s village and everyone in it, leaving nothing behind but sand pierced with twisted columns as black as night.

Kaisa regained consciousness to find herself trapped underground. She was filled with crippling fear, but there was still hope; she could hear the faint cries of other survivors. They called out to each other feebly, repeating their names one by one like a mantra. Sadly, by the third day, hers was the only voice left. Her friends and family were all gone. She was alone in the darkness.

It was only when all seemed lost that she saw the light.

She followed it down.

Along the way, she found meager sustenance. Amid the debris left by the collapse were ragged waterskins, rotting peaches—anything to keep starvation at bay. But, eventually, Kaisa’s hunger was replaced by fear once again. She found herself in a vast cavern, illuminated by an otherworldly purplish glow, and she could see she was no longer alone.

Skittering creatures swarmed in the depths. The first that came for Kaisa was no bigger than her, and she clutched her knife in both hands, ready to defend herself. The voidling horror knocked her to the ground, but she drove the blade into its pulsing heart, and the two of them tumbled deeper into the abyss.

The creature was seemingly dead, but its unnatural skin had taken hold upon the flesh of her arm. The dark shell tingled, but was hard as steel to the touch. In a panic, Kaisa broke her knife trying to remove it. But when the larger beasts came, she used it as a shield to make her escape.

Soon enough, she realized the shell was becoming part of her. As her daily struggle to survive drew out into years, this second skin grew with her, and so too did her resolve.

Now she had more than hope, she had a plan. Fight hard. Stay alive. Find a way back.

She was transformed, from frightened girl to fearless survivor, from prey to predator. For almost a decade, she has lived between two worlds in an attempt to keep them apart—the Void hungers to consume not only the scattered villages of Shurima, but the whole of Runeterra. She will not allow that to happen.

Though she has slain countless Void-constructs, she understands that many of the people she protects would see her as a monster herself. Indeed, her name has begun to pass into legend, an echo of the ancient horrors of doomed Icathia.

No longer Kaisa… but Kai’Sa.
The Girl Who Came Back

Michael McCarthy

“Listen to me,” I tell the little girl who found me here, beside the pit. “I need you to hear me. There isn’t much time.”
She leans forward, without a hint of fear in her eyes. “Tell me what to do.”
I like her. A slight smile breaks across my face, for the first time in what seems like… forever. “Not this,” I say, gesturing to the arrow gripped in her hand. She holds it like a spear.
I was only a child when the Void took me from my family, so I didn’t know any better either. But the rest of them, they were so careless. Sacrifices, offerings, tributes—whatever you want to call them, they were never going to work. It isn’t some god, appeased by gifts and prayers. It just wants to devour everything.
“You want to kill it? You want to destroy it?” I ask her.
She nods.
“Then starve it.”
The sensation of needles on my flesh grows stronger, as if in response to these words. The threatening presence is closing in around us, and my second skin constricts, pulling taut as a bow. I take one last deep breath before they come.
The sand begins to shift, puckering and falling away, like in an hourglass. Eerie pulses of light filter into the sky, as the construct-creatures heave themselves up into the Shuriman night, screeching and drooling. I steady myself, charging the energy inside my shoulder pods.
I grit my teeth, and release it.
Bright blooms of heat and pain find their targets quickly, raining down, stopping the creatures in their tracks, flinging them aside. The air is filled with an acid reek, and the hiss of melting chitin.
Soon there is nothing left of them. I wait for the needles’ itch to stop, but it doesn’t.
The girl is crouched beside me, ready. She probably cannot understand what she is seeing.
“Does it hurt?” she whispers, her hand reaching out for the glowing scales on my arm.
I pull back reflexively. She doesn’t even flinch.
“Sometimes,” I confess.
Not too far away, her village sleeps on unaware, for the most part. Curiosity had no doubt gotten the better of this little girl. So many stories, fables both frightening and fantastical. The voidling beasts hunting in the dead of night, calling to one another.
She just wanted to see for herself. See what lurks beyond the rocks, see the thing her people both fear and adore at the same time.
My skin tightens again. The needles, the constant itch…
I blink. “I’m sorry, you didn’t tell me your name.”
She stands up proudly, still brandishing the arrow. “I’m Illi. I came to protect my family from the monster.” She is no more than ten years of age.
“Well, Illi—sometimes running is the best thing to do.”
“But you don’t run,” she says, narrowing her eyes, “do you?”
A clever one, this girl. I shake my head. “Not anymore.”
“Then I won’t either!” Illi proclaims. Brave as well.
She has no idea what they’re dealing with. None of them do. All these things her people have done to rid themselves of the creatures, they were just ringing the dinner bell.
“You need to tell them, Illi. You need to make them understand. No more dancing beneath the new moon. And no more animals tied to stakes. The Void has no mercy to offer—it feeds or it dies.”
The day I came to understand this, was when I knew I had a chance. Maybe that’s why I survive, while so many others perish.
But survival always has its price. Ever since I found my way back, I’ve been paying it.
“Look…” the girl whispers. “They are coming to find us.”
I don’t have to look. I knew they would come. By instinct, the carapace draws over my face. Illi stares up at me.
“Don’t be frightened,” I say to her in a voice now so twisted and monstrous, it could have the opposite meaning.
“Of what?” she asks. I find myself wearing a smile she cannot see.
There are only a handful of people who’ve ever seen me in the flesh, or whatever it is that now covers my body. All but two of them are dead.
Illi’s people appear to be capable hunters. Only the capable live out here. I can see where she got her bravery. Their torches twinkle in the night.
“Papa!” she calls out to the searching villagers, without warning me. “I found her! The girl who came back!”
They’re heading toward us now, weapons at the ready, fire in their eyes. “Illi!” her father yells, nocking an arrow to his bow. “Get away from that... thing!”
She looks up at me again, confused. For every little girl like Illi, there are ten others who would run the other way. Or worse. I know what most people say about me. I’ve seen their fear scrawled across mud walls, scratched into the canyon rocks.
Beware the girl who came back a monster.
They don’t know a thing about me. To them, I’m just something they do not want to face—a living, walking, fighting embodiment of what they fear most. I guess that’s why they added the mark to my name.
Ten years ago, I was only Kaisa—very much like Illi, hopeful about a future as limitless as the stars in the night sky. That future died the day the Void dragged me down.
The needles are back. Illi releases my hand just as my luminous weapons materialize over my arms. “Go to him,” I tell her. “Go to your father.”
“Illi, run!” her father pleads. He draws back his bowstring with trembling hands.
“No!” she yells, turning to me. “I don’t run anymore.”
I usher her forwards, keeping my eyes trained on the villagers. “No, Illi, you were born a fighter. They will need you.”
After a few steps, she turns back. “What do I tell them?”
“Tell them... Tell them to be ready.”
The Void has taken so much from me, but I refuse to let it take everything. These moments, where kindness and humanity shine through, where innocence and trust extinguish fear—they fill me with hope that we can defeat the rivers of timeless poison that flow beneath the world.
The first time I escaped the abyss, I did it for myself.
Maybe one day, it will be for them.
Monstrous

Graham McNeill

There’s light under the earth, if you know where to look.
If you know how to look.
I don’t need light to see. Not anymore.
My eyes only ever saw in degrees of darkness, but the sight I now have shows me much more than I ever knew was possible. Now, I perceive colors that don’t exist in nature, as well as hues and shades that reveal how the walls keeping the monsters out aren’t solid at all—they’re as thin as a painted backcloth hung by a performing troupe.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t see the things I do, but then I remember that I’d have died a long time ago if I hadn’t adapted to life down here.
And sometimes I wonder if dying would have been better.
The man I’m dragging behind me doesn’t see like I do. In fact, he’s pretty much blind in the darkness. The only light is the faint glow smoldering in the bulbous pods growing out of my shoulders.
Not nearly enough light for human eyes to see clearly, at least not at the speed we’re moving.
He’s scared and stumbling with every step he takes.
Down here he’s nothing, but on the surface he’s a leader, the hetman of a desert settlement.
That’s why I took him. He needs to see the danger of what’s down here, to fully understand how much danger his people are in.
I’m half dragging, half lifting him, which would be hard if it wasn’t for the strength my living armor gives me.
It clings to my skin, all across my body, as if a thousand tiny hooks are digging into my flesh. I’m not even sure where its undulant yet rigid surface ends and I begin, anymore. It used to be painful, and I used to hate the rasping, cat’s-tongue feel of it enfolding me.
But now I don’t mind it at all, because it means I’m never truly alone.
I used to think I could hear it whispering in my head as it grew and spread across my body, but I think that was just my own voice trying to keep me from going mad from pain and loneliness.
At least, I hope that’s what it was.
The rock beneath me is smooth and glassy, made so not by the flow of molten rock, but by the passage of the things that live deep in the earth as they ooze up from below like worms through a rotten honeyfruit.
The people on the surface name this underworld by what it does, by what it is.
Void.
I’ve been down here long enough to know that name doesn’t even begin to capture the true threat and horror of what lurks in the darkness below—of what the Void really is. The monsters that reach the surface to hunt and kill are just the vanguard of what lives beyond, and they aren’t like anything the people above can understand.
If they really knew the truth, they’d never come within a thousand miles of where Icathia once stood, but mortals are so very good at forgetting. The passing of years lessens the horrors of the past. What was learned in blood and suffering now lingers mostly in travelers’ scary stories told around a fire, or in folk traditions. Hang some Pearls of the Moon over your hearth, say a prayer to Nasus to watch over your home, or leave some goats out to appease the beasts’ monstrous hunger.
But the creatures of the Void aren’t like ordinary predators.
When I was little more than a babe in arms, I remember seeing a swarm of pack-hunting kmiros bring down a wounded skallashi. I cried my eyes out, but I didn’t hate the kmiros for killing the gentle giant. It was just their nature. The creatures of the surface kill to eat. They’re hungry, not evil.
The Voidborn will kill you just because you’re alive.
“Please,” begs the man behind me. I’d almost forgotten I had hold of him. “Please let me go.”
He lets out a wracking sob as I stop and press him hard against the wall.
I can’t decide if he thinks I’m going to kill him or let him go.
A violet glow swells around my hands, lambent blades of killing light.
Their sudden appearance shifts my vision and I see the radiant threads of magic in his blood as it flows around his body.
Wisps of it lift into the air with every panicked breath and every tear that rolls down his cheeks. It’s faint, almost nothing, but the Void predators will sense it, and be drawn like sand-flies to dung.
My armored skin wants to feed on him, and I recoil as I realize a part of me wants to as well.
He’s weak, like everyone on the surface. It would be a mercy to just plunge my blades of light into his body than to have his soul be unmade by the monsters below.
No! I protect the people on the surface. That’s why I’m the girl who came back.
I push down the murderous urges of the suit, and the glow fades from my stiffened fingers. I take a shuddering breath, closing them into fists.
My vision returns to normal, and I look around to see we’re not where I thought we’d be.
We’re much closer to the surface than I expected, which makes what I’m seeing doubly dangerous. The rock of the tunnel shimmers like a cave ceiling over an underground lake, rippling with light from a dimension unknown to the races of the surface.
We’re at the edge of a depthless abyss where the boundaries of two realms ebb and flow like the sand seas at Zoantha. It looks like a glowing ocean of sickly light, swirling in a constant state of unraveling and renewal. It churns with titanic energies that sometimes form hideous outlines—like the submerged leviathans said to dwell beneath oceans I’ve only ever heard about in stories.
It’s dangerous to be this close, but I need this man to see.
Soulless, black eyes coalesce to stare up from below.
Spirals of matter take horrid shape.
Hunched spines unfold, grasping limbs stretch, and hooked claws form in the liquid insanity, lunatic evolution weaving translucent monsters into being with shrieking, piercing birth-screams.
They’re here…
“Open your eyes,” I tell the hetman.
My voice is distorted through the molded mask of the suit—a wet, animal snarl that sounds like no mortal tongue. He shakes his head. He can’t understand me.
The words sound like I’m choking on blood.
With a thought, the chitinous plates of my helm peel back, sliding over one another as they unfold like the carapace of an insect retracting its wings.
“Open your eyes,” I say again, and this time he understands.
He lets out a cry of fear as he sees my human face.
What do I look like now?
Am I so different than I was? Do I look like I belong down here?
I have not seen my face in such a long time. I hope it still looks like I remember.
The light swells and he turns toward the abyss.The swarming, growing things within it are reaching up to us, and his eyes widen in fear as he finally sees why I brought him here.
Thousands of chittering monsters, rising from an ocean of madness that reaches to the heart of the world and beyond. I don’t know what it really is or where it comes from.
All I know is that it births an endless horde of misbegotten nightmares that claw their way up through the rock with the implacable urge to kill and unmake the world above.
Their tide is on the rise, and I’m the only one who can stop it.
I lean close to the man and say, “Do you see them? Do you understand?”
He nods in terror and I let him go.

I watch the hetman scramble up to the light of the surface, then turn as I hear the scrape of claws on rock behind me. Arms that would be impossible in nature hook over the edge of the abyss, dragging a monstrous horror of rasping armor plates, bony protrusions, and flesh the color of something stillborn. It’s still wet and glistening from its arrival into this world, but it has infinite malice in the black eyes that ripple to life on its upper carapace. Blade limbs unfold from its pallid belly, and a lipless mouth tears open across its throat, a wide gash of gleaming white fangs and drooling ichor.
Others quickly follow it, smaller, but just as vicious. Their very presence distorts the air, and slivers of dissolving matter rise like black smoke from the rock beneath their claws.
The stink of their nearness is horrifying, and furnace heat spreads throughout my body.
Threat response fills my limbs with power.
Once, I fought such urges, but I understand now that they kept me alive, that they allow me to fight back.
The carapace mask draws down over my face. My vision shifts again.
It used to be jarring, this transition, but now I welcome it.
I see in light. In life and my prey’s vulnerabilities. I am a predator again.
The plates molded to my shoulders shift and reshape as the glowing pods snap up. Blinding light builds within them, and I shriek as a painful flurry of searing bolts streak toward the creatures.
The smaller ones instantly detonate in explosions of purple fluids and unnatural flesh.
Their blood splashes me, and the curved plates of my armor greedily drink it in.
My gorge rises in disgust, even as it nourishes me.
I sprint forward, snapping my arms out and wreathing my hands in blades of light. I vault into the air, pushing off the tunnel wall to blast the larger horror with pulsing streams of violet fire. Its body tears open and tar-black ichor spills out.
It screeches in pain, lashing out with its impossibly angled limbs.
I land in their midst and roll under its blades, rising to a crouch and unleashing another stream of bolts. They burn its flesh with incandescent fury, as though fire conjured from their own kind is more lethal than any other.
I flip backward as its body crashes down, but it’s not dead… whatever that means to the Voidborn.
It draws the blood of the smaller creatures up into its limbs, drinking their very essence. Webs of light and twitching matter knit its flesh together, like a weaver sewing a torn blanket. Its huge bulk convulses, rippling as it reforms wounded flesh and pushes out new limbs, hardening areas of weakness. Burning tendrils of dark light spray from its splitting flesh, cracking like whips against the ground.
Solid rock runs like wax as its very permanence is undone. One lash glances against my knee, and I stumble as a portion of my armor bleeds off in a bloom of black smoke.
I see my skin beneath, bleached of life and vitality, like the blind reptiles that make their burrows beneath the desert crags. It sickens me to see it, but I can’t tell if that’s because the flesh looks dead, or because it reminds me of what I used to be.
The thought has slowed me.
Only for an instant, but that’s enough. The Voidlings and hunter creatures swarm me.
A thing almost twice my size barrels me from my feet. Its claws tear at my chest, its teeth snapping shut over my head. Its teeth cut deep grooves in my faceplate, and I look down its thrashing, tooth-filled gullet as its proboscis tongue seeks a way in.
I jam my fists against its body and blast a torrent of purple fire into its body until it can contain no more. It explodes in a welter of bony cartilage and unnatural meat, and my suit feeds on the unleashed energies of its death.
Claws and teeth slash and bite. I roll aside, more violet flame jetting from my hands. I leap and twist away from their attacks. Sheer weight of numbers works in their favor, and more of the creatures are swarming over the edge of the abyss.
A boiling tide of organic plates, claws and fury that will swiftly overwhelm me.
My shoulder pods erupt with increasingly powerful streams of killing fire, but it won’t be enough to stop them. I don’t know if the Void is capable of hate, but I feel like these monsters hate me. They see me as something of their world, but also as something they must destroy.
I wonder if their perception of me is so different from that of the people above.
They surround me, and I remember the skallashi brought down by the kmiros.
But I am no prey animal. I can fight back.
I spin on my heel, drawing a ring of purple fire around me with my burning fists.
Its power drives them back, giving me space to breathe. I see a path, and take it. I weave through them, leaving a trail of sundered bodies in my wake. My speed is uncanny. I see the creatures around me moving as if they’re in a stupor. They can’t keep up with me, and I kill them with every pummeling blast of flame and every strike of my fire-bladed hands.
Then I’m clear.
Turning, I sprint from the abyss.
Not so fast as to lose them, but fast enough to stay ahead.

I lose track of time.
Down in the dark, that’s easy to do.
I sometimes forget what the sun looks like, or how we used to follow the shadows to know what part of the day we were in.
For someone born of the burning sands to forget the sun makes me want to cry. I have memories of its blazing light reflecting on water, of a golden eye in the sky, and joyous heat filling my chest with every breath.
But they don’t feel connected to me anymore.
It’s like I’m remembering a thing someone told me, not something I knew or felt myself.
I push the memories away.
They’re distractions that’ll slow me down and get me killed.
But I can’t help it. The core of me, the part that’s still a little girl, keeps showing me these things, keeps trying to remind me of who I used to be.
The creatures from the abyss are still after me, filling the tunnels behind me with their screeching, clawing bodies. I’ve been leading them away from where I let the hetman go, drawing them into the deeper desert, back toward the lost land they came from.
I’ve done this many times before, and this won’t be the last time.
I fight and I run, never letting them surround me.
It’s a dance.One that never ends.
Their hunger is palpable. I’ve killed so many of them, but there’s always more.
I try not to think of their endless numbers. To think too much about that would sap my will to fight, and I can’t let that happen. Not while there’s still people in the world above I care about.
Like the sun, their names and faces are drifting further away from me.
But I know they’re still above me. I go there sometimes, just to remember what it feels like to see the sky above me. Or to breathe air that isn’t wet with the bitter flavor of somewhere terrible and utterly hostile. It’s been a long time since I ventured to the surface. The longer I spend there, the more I feel its air start to burn me. I’m afraid I’m becoming more used to the darkness, that the sunlit world above doesn’t want me anymore.
I remember when I met a girl up there.
She was young, like I was once, and she didn’t hate me. She saw what I was and she didn’t run in terror like most people do. She saw who I used to be, but that’s not what most people see.
They see the suit, and feel its primal urge to unmake them simmering behind my eyes.
They can’t help it, and I don’t hate them for it, but it hurts.
It hurts to know I used to be just like them, and now…
Now I don’t know what I am.
But for all that I’ve changed and become something they hate and fear, I’m still holding on to what makes me human. If I can just hold on to the part of me that was a little girl once, I can turn the awful things that have happened to me into something good, something noble.
But I can feel it slipping away.
What will I be when I can’t remember her?

A change comes over the Void creatures.
I sense it almost immediately, a turn in their purpose. It’s hard to know what changes, but it’s clear that their pursuit of me has shifted, like they don’t care about me anymore.
Like they have better target for their ferocious urge to destroy.
A terrible suspicion fills me, and I surge away from the creatures behind me.
My armor makes me faster than them, and I move through the tunnels like a ghost, taking the crooked paths that only I know about. I feel the ferocity of the chase fade as I circle around, climbing back to the surface and feeling the hot tension of the world above.
I’d been trying to keep the monsters close to me, trying to lure them away from the settlements on the surface, but when I emerge into the sunlight through a hidden cleft at the top of a solitary spire of bare rock, I see how horribly wrong I’ve been.
I thought I was leading the monsters away, truly I did.
A giant skull has been set upon a boulder atop the spire, a marker of sorts.
It’s a warning. A sign that these lands are not safe.
I know that’s what it is, because I put it here.
One foot on the skull, I look down at a settlement full of people.
My helm unfolds from over my face, and I see with my own eyes.
Beneath me are neat and ordered streets, running between finely made buildings of sun-baked bricks. At the settlement’s southern end are the silken awnings of a bustling market, and I see a disc of gold on the roof of what I think is a temple. The sounds of laughter drift up to me on the spire.
I smell roasting meat, animal dung, and the heady aroma of spices.
They are the smells of life, the everyday texture of the world above.
For a second I’m transported back to my half-forgotten youth, and the corners of my mouth curl in what might be a smile.
Then I remember what lurks beneath the sands, and the half-formed smile falls from my face.
My heart pounds in my chest and I fight to draw breath.
Don’t they know the danger they’re in?
The inner surfaces of my armor clamp down hard on my flesh, and I sink to one knee with the pain of it. It’s hungry to feed, and I wonder how much of my path has been chosen by me, how much by its design.
My senses are finely tuned to the denizens of the Void.
They’re close, so very close, and rising to the surface. Somewhere out in the desert.
I feel the imminence of a breach like the pressure in the air before a storm.
The mask slams back into place, filling my vision with patterns of light and heat.
I look back to the settlement as I hear the clash of steel, and a shouting voice.
My gaze drifts to a martial field set at the settlement’s edge, where scores of armed men and women are lined up. I watch them, confused as to what they’re doing until it hits me.
They’re training to fight.
A man is shouting at them, filling their hearts with courage and their souls with fire.
I can’t hear his words, but I can see his face as clearly as if he were standing right next to me.
It’s the hetman I dragged below the earth.

I vault from rock to rock as I make my way down to the settlement.
The nearness of the Void creatures is a building pressure in my skull.
It won’t be long before they’re here.
I leap through an animal enclosure, scattering the livestock as they catch my scent, and panic.
The people of the settlement don’t notice me at first. Then I hear the cries of alarm spread as they see my armored form in their midst. I’m heading straight for the hetman, and I already feel anger pounding in my veins.
I showed him! Why didn’t he listen? I took him to see the horrors below. I wanted him to feel the terror of their very existence and to carry that terror back to his people.
But all I’ve done is strengthened his resolve to stand and fight.
Every person that dies here will be my fault. Their blood will be on my hands.
I wanted to prevent this, but I’ve made their deaths inevitable.
Men and women scatter before me, terrified despite the weapons they carry. The hetman’s face hardens. The last time I saw him, he was terrified, but his terror has turned to hate.
His eyes tell me he thinks I’m here to kill him, and maybe I am.
My mask snaps open as I come to a halt before him.
“Why are you still here?” I scream, tasting the hot desert air. Underneath the smells of the settlement, I feel the growing presence of the Void. It’s like biting on a copper coin. “Go!”
“Back, demon!” he snarls. “You are a herald of the beasts!”
For a moment, his meaning is lost on me. Then I understand.
“You think I bring the monsters…?”
“I know you,” he spits, advancing on me. “You are the Void’s daughter. Wherever you walk, the monsters follow.”
I shake my head, ready to throw his accusation back in his face…
Then I wonder if he’s right.
I fight the Voidborn wherever I can, wherever I find them.
I hold my hand up before me, seeing the hair-fine threads of violet light shimmering in the sculpted plates of my armor. Until now, I have always thought it was part of me, that I controlled it, but what if my control isn’t so complete as I thought? I assert my will, and the veins of light fade.
Is it possible? Are the creatures of the Void drawn to me?
No, I would know. I’d know if I was somehow drawing them deeper into the world.
My doubt turns to anger, and the blades of light brighten around my hands.
“I escaped you once before,” said the hetman, raising his sword. “And we will fight the beasts you command.”
“You escaped me?” I say, incredulous. “Is that what you think happened?”
He swings his sword, but I block it easily. He’s not skilled with a blade, and it’s easy for me to dodge his attacks. I circle him as he swings again and again. The townsfolk are gathered around me, screaming at their leader to strike a deathblow. My armor responds to his every attack and their aggression, filling my body with the urge to fight, to kill.
They see the second skin I wear, but they don’t realize how much danger they’re in right now.
Not from the Void. From me.
They can’t see the girl beneath. They don’t want to see her.
It’s easier for them to believe I’m a monster.
I feel anger and betrayal harden my heart to them. Why should I fight to save them? Why do I fight to hold on to my humanity, when it hurts so much to remember all I’ve lost?
Why not just become the monster they think I am?
Wouldn’t that be easier?
But then I look beyond the hetman’s angry face, to the grandparents watching from the doorways of the homes they built with their own two hands. To the young mothers clutching newborns to their breasts. And beyond even them, to the thousand daily displays of love and the small acts of kindness that go unnoticed every day in the world.
That’s why I fight the monsters.
I stand for the people who cannot stand, because there’s no one who fights quite like me.
Because if I don’t stand for them, who will?
And what will be left of the girl who came back if I don’t?
But every war requires sacrifice. I’ve made so many already—now I know I need to make yet another. This time it won’t be me that pays the blood price, but I’ll carry it all the same.
I turn a full circle. Everyone is looking to the hetman. He’s their strength, the only reason they’re still here. He’s filled their hearts with courage and the will to fight an enemy that can’t be fought, can’t be bargained with, and which only gets stronger with every life it consumes.
There’s only one way to end this without everybody dying.
I block yet another clumsy swing, and as his sword goes wide, I spin inside his guard to hammer my light-bladed fists against his chest.
Searing energy pours into him, filling his body with light. His every vein, nerve ending, and bone burns with searing brilliance for an instant before his body explodes.
It’s awful, but I can’t stop now. I feel the nearness of the Void as a terrible, twisting pain in my gut. The texture of the air abruptly changes, and I know the Void has climbed to the world above.
It’s on the surface and it’s coming here now.
I turn away from the molten, disintegrating ruin of the hetman as his body falls to the sand, barely recognizable as something that was once human. People scatter in terror as my shoulder pods slide up and fill with killing light. I feel the fiery pressure build within me, aching for release.
I unleash a salvo of spiraling light, blasting a deserted grain store to blazing rubble. Burning seeds and baskets spill from the ruins. I obliterate the market with more flashing bolts, and the silk awnings rise up like the burning sails of a sand-clipper as they catch light.
Purple-white fire streaks through the settlement and explodes with devastating force. People run screaming as I destroy their homes. They think I’m trying to kill them, that I’m doing this because I’ve become something monstrous, but that’s just not true.
I only destroy buildings my helm’s vision shows me are empty.
I demolish unmanned walls and barricades—anything that might give them hope they have a chance against the Void.
I’m not trying to kill them. I just want them to run.

Night has fallen as I watch from the spire of rock above the burning settlement, one foot braced on the skull I left as a warning marker. The horde of Voidborn climbs toward me in a rush of snapping fangs, misshapen limbs, and inhuman forms.
It sounds like a swarm of voracious insects devouring a harvest crop.
There’s too many to count, almost no way to tell where one beast ends and the next begins. It’s just a mass of teeth and claws. Unbridled destruction given form.
They sense my presence here, and I make no attempt to run.
Because if they’re coming for me, they’re not going after the people of the settlement.
The horizon burns with a sick light that doesn’t belong in this world, and forking traceries of vivid, purple lightning flash up from the sundered ground deep in the desert.
The settlement’s inhabitants have long since fled, leading their animals behind colorful wagons bearing what possessions they couldn’t bear to leave behind. They’re already many miles west, moving in a long column like the dormun-riders of old.
They’ll follow the sand roads to the new-flowing waters, moving on until they can begin again.
And that’s the point. To begin again they need to be alive.
I remember their faces as they looked back at their lost homes. They pointed to me high up on the spire, and cursed me. The memory of their faces still pains me. So full of fear and hatred.
They’ll carry that hate with them, telling stories of the forsaken girl who isn’t a girl anymore. They’ll tell how she killed their heroic leader before destroying their homes. The tale will grow in the telling, as Shuriman tales are wont to do, until I’ll be known as a heartless murderer, a killer of women and children.
The carapace slides back across my face as the first of the monsters scramble onto the ledge. Violet fire sheathes my hands. I feel the familiar rush of excitement as my body fills with heat.
If this is what I need to be to keep my people alive, then so be it.
That’s a burden I’m willing to bear.
I’ll be their monster.
Kalista

In life, Kalista was a proud general, niece to the king of an empire that none now recall. She lived by a strict code of honor, serving the throne with utmost loyalty. The king had many enemies, and when they sent an assassin to slay him, it was Kalista’s vigilance that averted disaster.
But in saving the king, she damned the one he loved most—the assassin’s deflected blade was envenomed, and sliced the arm of the queen. The greatest priests and surgeons were summoned, but none could draw the poison from her body. Wracked with grief, the king dispatched Kalista in search of a cure, with Hecarim of the Iron Order taking her place at his side.
Kalista traveled far, consulting learned scholars, hermits and mystics… but to no avail. Finally, she learned of a place protected from the outside world by shimmering pale mists, whose inhabitants were rumored to know the secrets of eternal life. She set sail on one last voyage of hope, to the almost legendary Blessed Isles.
The guardians of the capital city Helia saw the purity of Kalista’s intent, and parted the mists to allow her safe passage. She begged them to heal the queen, and after much consideration, the masters of the city agreed. Time was of the essence. While the queen yet breathed, there was hope for her in the fabled Waters of Life. Kalista was given a talisman that would allow her to return to Helia unaided, but was warned against sharing this knowledge with any other.
However, by the time Kalista reached the shores of her homeland, the queen was already dead.
The king had descended into madness, locking himself in his tower with the queen’s festering corpse. When he learned of Kalista’s return, he demanded to know what she had found. With a heavy heart, for she had never before failed him, she admitted that the cure she had found would be of no use. The king would not believe this, and condemned Kalista as a traitor to the crown.
It was Hecarim who persuaded her to lead them to the Blessed Isles, where her uncle could hear the truth of it from the masters themselves. Then, perhaps, he would find peace—even if only in accepting that the queen was gone, and allowing her to be laid to rest. Hesitantly, Kalista agreed.
And so the king set out with a flotilla of his fastest ships, and cried out in joy as the glittering city of Helia was revealed to him. However, they were met by the stern masters, who would not allow them to pass. Death, they insisted, was final. To cheat it would be to break the natural order of the world.
The king flew into a fevered rage, and commanded Kalista to slay any who opposed them. She refused, and called on Hecarim to stand with her… but instead he drove his spear through her armored back.
The Iron Order joined him in this treachery, piercing Kalista’s body a dozen times more as she fell. A brutal melee erupted, with those devoted to Kalista fighting desperately against Hecarim’s knights, but their numbers were too few. As Kalista’s life faded, and she watched her warriors die, swearing vengeance with her final breath…
When next Kalista opened her eyes, they were filled with the dark power of unnatural magic. She had no idea what had transpired, but the city of Helia had been transformed into a twisted mockery of its former beauty—indeed, the entirety of the Blessed Isles was now a place of shadow and darkness, filled with howling spirits trapped for all eternity in the nightmare of undeath.
Though she tried to cling to those fragmented memories of Hecarim’s monstrous betrayal, they have slowly faded in all the centuries since, and all that now remains is a thirst for revenge burning in Kalista’s ruined chest. She has become a specter, a figure of macabre folklore, often invoked by those who have suffered similar treacheries.
These wretched spirits are subsumed into hers, to pay the ultimate price—becoming one with the Spear of Vengeance.
Invocation

The sword-wife stood amid the burnt out ruin of her home. Everything and everyone that mattered to her was gone, and she was filled with fathomless grief... and hate. Hate was now all that compelled her.
She saw again the smile on his face as he gave the order. He was meant to be their protector, but he’d spat upon his vows. Hers was not the only family shattered by the oath-breaker.
The desire to go after him was strong. She wanted nothing more than to plant her sword in his chest and watch the life drain from his eyes... but she knew she would never be able to get close enough to him. He was guarded day and night, and she was but one warrior. She would never be able to fight her way through his battalion alone. Such a death would serve no purpose.
She took a shuddering breath, knowing there was no coming back.
A crude effigy of a man, formed of sticks and twine, lay upon a fire-blackened dresser. Its body was wrapped in a scrap of cloth torn from the cloak of the betrayer. She’d pried it from her husband’s dead grasp. Alongside it was a hammer and three rusted nails.
She gathered everything up and moved to the threshold. The door itself was gone, smashed to splinters in the attack. Beyond, lit by moonlight, lay the empty, darkened fields.
Reaching up, the sword-wife pressed the stick-effigy to the hardwood lintel.
“I invoke thee, Lady of Vengeance,” she said, her voice low, trembling with the depth of her fury. “From beyond the veil, hear my plea. Come forth. Let justice be done.”
She readied her hammer and the first of the nails.
“I name my betrayer once,” she said, and spoke his name aloud. As she did so, she placed the tip of the first nail to the chest of the stick-figure. With a single strike, she hammered it in deep, pinning it to the hardwood door frame.
The sword-wife shivered. The room had become markedly colder. Or had she imagined it?
“I name him twice,” she said, and she did so, hammering the second nail alongside the first.
Her gaze dropped, and she jolted in shock. A dark figure stood out in the moonlit field, a hundred yards in the distance. It was utterly motionless. Breathing quicker, the sword-wife returned her attention to the unfinished task.
“I name him thrice,” she said, speaking again the name of the murderer of her husband and children, before hammering home the final nail.
An ancient spirit of vengeance stood before her, filling the doorway, and the sword-wife staggered back, gasping involuntarily.
The otherworldly being was clad in archaic armor, her flesh translucent and glowing with spectral un-light. Black Mist coiled around her like a living shroud.
With a squeal of tortured metal, the spectral figure drew forth the blackened spear protruding from her breastplate — the ancient weapon that had ended her life.
She threw it to the ground before the sword-wife. No words were spoken; there was no need. The sword-wife knew what was being offered to her — vengeance — and knew its terrible cost: her soul.
The spirit watched on, her face impassive and her eyes burning with an unrelenting cold fury, as the sword-wife picked up the treacherous weapon.
“I pledge myself to vengeance,” said the sword-wife, her voice quivering. She reversed the spear, aiming the tip inward, towards her heart. “I pledge it with my blood. I pledge it with my soul.”
She paused. Her husband would have pleaded for her to turn away from this path. He would have begged her not to condemn her soul for theirs. A moment of doubt gnawed at her. The undying specter watched on.
The sword-wife’s eyes narrowed as she thought of her husband lying dead, cut down by swords and axes. She thought again of her children, sprawled upon the ground, and her resolve hardened like a cold stone in her heart. Her grip tightened upon the spear.
“Help me,” she implored, her decision made. “Please, help me kill him.”
She rammed the spear into her chest, driving it in deep.
The sword-wife’s eyes widened and she dropped to her knees. She tried to speak, but only blood bubbled from her lips.
The ghostly apparition watched her die, her expression impassive.
As the last of the lifeblood ran from her body, the shade of the sword-wife climbed to her feet. She looked down at her insubstantial hands in wonder, then at her own corpse lying dead-eyed in a growing pool of blood upon the floor. The shade’s expression hardened, and a ghostly sword appeared in her hand.
An ethereal tether, little more than a wisp of light, linked the newly formed shade to the avenging spirit she had summoned. Through their bond, the sword-wife saw her differently, glimpsing the noble warrior she had been in life: tall and proud, her armor gleaming. Her posture was confident, yet without arrogance; a born leader, a born soldier. This was a commander the sword-wife would have willingly bled for.
Behind the spirit’s anger, she sensed her empathy — recognition of their shared pain of betrayal.
“Your cause is our cause,” said Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance. Her voice was grave cold. “We walk the path of vengeance as one, now.”
The sword-wife nodded.
With that, the avenging spirit and the shade of the sword-wife stepped into the darkness and were gone.

All stories

Stains on a Name

Ivern

Gift of Venom

Janna

Deep Breath

Jarvan IV

Ivory, Ebony, Jasper

Jax

None Shall Pass

Jayce

A Quick Fix

Jhin

The Man with the Steel Cane

Jinx

The Wedding Crasher

Kai'Sa

The Girl Who Came Back

Monstrous

Kalista

Invocation