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“You the marshal?” the river man said, his features an unreadable patina of lowland dust and dried bottlebrush needles, caked together by mud from the bottom of an old lakebed. He stood in the doorway of Lucian's private train cabin, small and large at the same time, dressed in gold-panning rags that had been picked from a dead claim jumper on the outskirts of Progress.

The river man didn't breathe in or out. Didn't have to.

Lucian had heard about them before, the river men, but never seen one up close. They needed moisture or they'd dry out, never venturing far from the mudholes and gulches they spawned in. If a traveler was unlucky enough they’d try to fill a flask with a river man's putrid water, or dig a pan into the silt where one lived. Without warning, it would snap up like an alligator, pulling you into the suffocating muck with wide, earthen arms, and just like that you were gone. Another ghost of the Old West.

“Not anymore,” said Lucian.

Lucian looked at the river man and the river man looked back, the gunslinger comfortably resting against the floral draperies of his cabin. Flecks of light occasionally entered through the curtains as their train rattled along, illuminating the river man's dark, piscine eyes, nearly hidden beneath the earthen cracks in his face.

“I want your badge,” he said.

Lucian nodded. A federal's badge would get the thing past Fort Nox, away from its government monster hunters, and down by way of caravan to the mangrove swamps just south of Bandle. Probably thought it could take up shop there, now that more and more east coasters were settling the low desert. Didn't make the creature's gamble less desperate, but Lucian appreciated when the stakes were clear.

“Must not be many of you left,” said Lucian.

“Ain't too many of anything left,” said the river man.

The boxcar's springs clicked once as they compressed against a couplet of uneven rail lines, and in the instant that the cabin shifted, the river man spread his arms wide, the mud on his face giving way to dozens of needle-sharp teeth as great spines burst from his shoulders. Before the springs clicked again a gunshot rang out, a thin ray of hellfire erupting through the side of the train and into the setting sun, and before the river man hit the floor Lucian's sidearm was already back in its holster.

The creature's head, split down the center and burnt beyond recognition, smoldered with the faint scent of sulfur and blackthorn. Its body contorted on the ground, flame roasting its membranes from the inside, and Lucian straightened his hat as he leaned back into the darkness of his room. The darkness shuddered softly around him, and smiled.

No one came to check on Lucian. No one came to take the dessicated body of the river man. The two traveled in silence together, door open, all the way down to the last stop at Angel's Perch.

And then out to the preacher who spoke with the dead.

Progress had been alive with whispers that this was the lawman what tangled with the devil and lost, and now he was headed up to New Eden to meet with the holy reverend. Both were ill portents in the Old West, so nobody would deny the aims of the man with the grinning shadow. They didn't need another Twin Reeds or Redriver, entire towns swallowed up and gone with some foul twist of happenstance. They needed Lucian out of their settlement and fast, and would give him anything he needed with all speed.

This had been the game ever since his last job with the federals, when they'd sent him out to reckon with the devil himself and drag him back to civilization. They would ‘put the devil on trial’—or that was the play, at least—and prove to the world that the frontier was safe to claim.

Of course, Lucian knew there wasn't just one devil, but the public thought better in singulars. He’d seen how the desert was crawling with strange creatures from every end of the world: demons in clean pressed suits, angels holed up in mountain crags, witches and ghosts and all manner of beast that might cloak itself in moonlight and tear an unsuspecting pilgrim to ribbons. The western natives and their alien weaponry; the skull-faced colossi who fed on ripened flesh; the mechanical men built by human hands, long gone rogue. And always, always devils.

This devil, though, was different. He went by many names—The Reaper, The Slaughter God, Old Turnkey, and Great Horn. He collected souls, or so the stories said, and went from town to town conducting his dark business, tearing the spirits out of the living and leaving their flayed skins behind. A creature of the Old World and demon of the wild frontier who, like his kin, sated his terrible hungers on an endless river of fresh-faced pioneers. Enough so that folks were starting to take notice, and for a government aimed on expansion, folks taking notice was bad for business.

Three marshals were dead at his hands, all told. Lucian had known two of them.

“They call it Thresh,” his handlers revealed. “Think you can catch him?”

Lucian looked over the sketches, noting the monster’s brazen, bovine skull, alight with the flames of all seven hells. He figured the lantern hanging curiously nearby was the source of its power, and if he could get in a clean shot, the fight would be over before it started.

Yet it was never that easy with devils, especially devils with a federal bodycount. He remembered tangling with a particularly nasty specimen near Chuparosa that moved with the speed of a desert storm, kicking up whirlwinds as it went. It was too fast to hit with a bullet, and if it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of his partner, Lucian might not have made it out alive. This hunt required backup.

“Not alone,” said Lucian. “I’ll need Senna.”

“Last stop, Angel’s Perch,” the conductor uttered, so gently it was almost a whisper. The heat of the journey had shriveled the river man’s corpse nearly into rawhide, but in the long shadows of the cabin a worse creature had perched itself upon Lucian’s seat.

It was smoke and fire, teeth and flames, its arms the artillery of a demon general cast up from the bottom of the abyss. It had the rough shape of a man, were a man made from campfire ash, with the glowing sigil of the federal marshals inverted upon its breast. Its legs were the incinerated spires of ancient, burning elms. Its red heart pulsed with the rage of all the earth.

“God,” spoke the conductor, not knowing which god he was invoking. The thing stood on its curious, spindling legs, leaning against the train’s still air. Its face seemed to peel apart, mouth broken in horrific ecstasy, as hellfire illuminated a ragged, mocking grin.

In that moment the ash fell away, and Lucian stepped out from the darkness.

“Sorry, friend,” he spoke. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

The conductor quivered in silence for a long while before Lucian brushed past, down the steel halls of the cabin car and out into the twilit evening. He figured the man would make a good story of it.

Angel’s Perch. A boomtown at the edge of civilization, where the trees grew tall and the air was thick with the scent of honey and wine. No one knew what lay beyond the ring of gargantuan pines at the foot of the mountains west of town, but they did know they had enough guns and men to hold off anything the far frontier could throw at them. Or at least they assumed. The creatures who made a home of Angel’s Perch would only reveal so much about what lay beyond, and no other living thing what had ventured that far west had returned sane, or at all.

Lucian made his way through the Perch’s bustling train station and into the center of town, past no less than three snake oil salesmen, each hucking the artificial magic ointments of the industrial east, and a saloon girl with the body of a cobra. Her milky eyes were hidden behind a veil, lest a paying customer turn to granite before they ever sat down to drink.

Near the mouth of main street, beyond the loggers and lamplighters, the general stores and the brothels, and the reclusive gunsmith rumored to be a fallen deity, there stood the town’s famed saloon. Popular myth held it had been in business since the founding of the settlement, or perhaps even before. It was called The Earthly King: be you man, woman or beast with a fate to outrun, its kingdom was open to you… as long as you had cash to spare.

It was, in many ways, the kind of place where a man might lose himself. But Lucian didn’t have much of himself left to lose, always feeling the tug of invisible strings against the weight of his soul, the shadow grinning behind him. He couldn’t stay for long.

Humans had little knowledge of settlements in the far west, and creatures living in town wouldn’t spill their precious secrets without a fight. The natives, if they spoke at all, would never reveal anything about anything, the few who tolerated settlers busying themselves with their strange machines.

Lucian had to rely on friends. Most could have been counted among the federal marshals, but they didn’t take kindly to demons, and like it or not that was what Lucian was fast becoming. He had to reach even further back, before the government contracts and the cobblestone streets of St. Zaun, to his days as a brash young gunfighter for hire. There he’d met many friends who lived and died with a revolver in their hand, but one figure remained as steadfast and obstinate as always, too big to kill and too old to die. He wasn’t a man per se, but he’d been fighting long before the first ships landed on the continent, and would probably be fighting long after everything else was dust and whispers.

Lucian stepped through the wide-set doors of the King and, for a moment, the bar grew quiet as its unsightly patrons sized up the harrowed stranger. “I’m looking for the longhorn,” he said, and they at once turned back to their card games and beer, the high shrill of an out of tune piano crashing against a dozen incomprehensible hoots and hollers.

Lucian soon spotted the longhorn at the far end of the bar—his massive bulk was hard to miss, even amid the carousing of the King’s clientele. Despite his frame he liked to keep to himself, though it was not uncommon for cocky young fighters to call him out over some perceived slight, hoping to down the beast for fame and glory. This never ended well, and more nights than not a boisterous challenger would have their skull pulverized with a single, swift butt to the head.

Alistar was a minotaur, easily ten feet tall and six feet wide. If you picked a fight with him, you got what was coming.

“Longhorn,” said Lucian.

“Marshal,” replied Alistar.

“I’m making my way to New Eden,” said Lucian.

“Aren’t we all,” replied Alistar, as Lucian sat beside him.

Alistar was old, now—few of his kind remained, and he would no doubt outlive them all. He spent his days as a glorified thug for other, weaker creatures, and his nights on a bar stool built for beings half his size.

The pair gazed solemnly ahead. Not a man came to Angel’s Perch without a reason, and fewer still walked through the doors of The Earthly King unless that reason was dire. It was the drinking hole of renegades and dead men, a drain where the aimless slowly circled downward, and those seeking a final battle spilled their coin before vanishing into the wilderness.

Lucian was heading deep into the uncharted northwest, where no trains ran and vicious gods walked among the trees, seeking a rumor on borrowed time.

Both knew the stakes, and the favor, though none had been asked.

“What do you think she’ll say?” asked Alistar. “When you get there.”

“I don’t know,” answered Lucian. “I don’t rightly know.”

The longhorn sighed into his drink, a thick aluminum tankard about the size of a child. He never had liked long goodbyes.

“Let me draw you a map.”

Lucian had first met Senna at the end of a gun—her gun—during a bloody shootout in one of Buzzard Gulch’s most squalid drinking parlors. Not that shootouts in Buzzard Gulch were uncommon, but this one had involved some fool bounty hunter drawing on an Outsider with his back turned. It got ugly.

The Outsiders, so they claimed, were from everywhere and nowhere at once, creatures in clean pressed suits whose love of gambling had made them infamous among outlaw clans and desperate homesteaders. Beating one meant riches beyond compare, conjured from nothing and guaranteed by an Outsider’s wax seal—itself worth a small fortune. Losing was another matter, as they accepted no wager less than a man’s most deeply cherished possession. Farms, watches, children, souls… a favorite knife—the bet was always steep, even if you didn’t know it yet.

Rumor had it this specimen had beaten Jeremiah James, a millionaire railroad baron Lucian had once done small jobs for. Jeremiah was a giant, and a mean one at that, who’d posted a sky-high bounty the moment he lost whatever dire prize he so foolishly put up for collateral—enough to bankrupt him twice over.

And as almost every gunfighter knew, once a reward swung out of the piss-pot, gully stabbing, prairie-shotgun-ambush fare of Buzzard Gulch’s wanted board and into the realm of jilted industrialists, bounty hunters would come calling. The whole lot of them loved money and killing, and not much else.

The hunter drew with little warning, and instantly the room went quiet. The Outsider sipped his whiskey with a calm that suggested the absence of all intent. Senna, a handful of federal marshals and the longhorn were present, among the town’s usual collection of heavily armed scoundrels and murderers. Everyone waited to make a move.

“Now, friend,” the hunter cooed, her voice sugar tinged with blood, “I know you’ve got what I came for. Turn it over, and everybody walks out the way they came in.”

The Outsider said nothing—his face was as placid as a porcelain doll, unmoved and unperturbed by the threat of his assailant’s twin six-guns. He’d known she was coming the whole time. Probably knew before she even took the job. But in the heat of the low sun, plied with drink at the edge of the world, it was hard to tell who was itching for a fight, and who was just bluffing.

The hunter broke the silence with a bullet, and a heavy round exploded from her pistol and into the center of the creature’s chest. The Outsider’s body billowed outward, the hole rippling black smoke in the shape of crows, and from the smoky mass a great, vicious claw burst into a table of poker players. Cards, chips, and searing blood sprayed across the room as the hunter started unloading.

Lucian drew on the hunter, the marshals drew on Lucian, and the longhorn tore through the bar to get as many pieces of the action as time would allow. Every gun in the place lit up, and as bullets ripped through fastgun and marshal alike, Lucian took cover behind a pool table—where he found himself in quite a different predicament.

“Hello, stranger,” said Senna, her gun squarely aimed at Lucian’s forehead. Her eyes were the color of a gentle prairie, mottled with specks of black, and Lucian almost forgot he was speaking into a loaded firearm.

“Ma’am,” he replied.

“I assume you choose to associate with these upstanding individuals?” she asked, as the lead-riddled body of a barkeep collapsed limply beside them. Black smoke drifted softly out of his mouth.

“Some of them,” Lucian answered.

Senna ducked as another shell ripped past the backside of the bar, taking a chunk of a pool table with it. The motion was so quick Lucian almost didn’t see it—then again, he’d never seen anyone dodge a bullet. Certainly not with such confidence, and Senna had plenty to spare.

She smiled warmly, her badge glinting in the light. The star of a chief marshal, one of the deadliest quickdraws in the known world.

“Well, to each their own,” she grinned, gingerly confiscating Lucian’s pistol. “Don’t worry, I’ll give it back… if you’re not dead when this is over.”

And with two quick shots from cover, she swung back into the fight, leaving Lucian wondering what had just happened.

The rest of the shootout was a blur. At one point the bounty hunter ripped some sort of oil-soaked object from the Outsider’s roiling body and ran out the saloon doors, and the creature went screaming after her. With most of the clientele dead and nobody left to shoot, the survivors went across the street to finish their drinks. Buzzard Gulch never found itself wanting for corpses or liquor.

It was there, the marshals like to say, that Lucian decided to hang up his hat and hunt monsters for the government.

Though they’ll also mention it was less about saving people from beasts, and more about a pretty girl who dodged a bullet with a smile.

The longhorn’s map had been useful, if sloppy. Lucian had followed it on foot for what seemed like a hundred years, further north from Angel's Perch than most living souls would ever dare to venture. Here colors seemed more vivid, the air itself breathed with strange magics, and when Lucian drifted off, he could swear gargantuan creatures lurked just beyond the edge of his vision, watching. Yet Lucian did not feel afraid. He made camp as the sun dipped over the horizon, and steeled himself. The shadow grew strongest at night.

He would sense its evil dragging him downwards, pulling him out of himself. Soon Lucian’s skin would itch and flake away, his mouth twisted into a hungry grin. He would feel the flames, hear the demon whisper in his own voice. He would drown in the crackling inferno of indigo sagelands erupting into a sea of hellfire. And he would feel the anger. The terrible, ageless anger, the shame, the disgust. Hateful bile born the from the darkness of his own soul. Only then would the battle begin—the demon assuming Lucian’s body, while what was left of the man tried to wrestle it back.

Lately, the transformations were beginning to last longer than Lucian liked.

He felt his skin begin to prickle, and watched as it cracked against the cool night air. Lucian rested himself against an old log, as comfortably as he could. His muscles froze in place—awaiting the change, and the struggle, and the promise of morning.

His eyes glazed over. The sky twisted into deep crimson—overtaken by a perpetual sundown, ringed with flame, and the trees around him stood as ghastly totems against thick, otherworldly fog. Only the campfire illuminated the world as it was, the greens and browns of patchy grassland. The change had begun.

Or if not the change, something worse.

Deep in the forest, a train whistle sounded. It rang hollow, a warped and yawning sound that spilled out from the demonic vision’s umber mist. This was something new, a creature Lucian had not prepared to face—and locked in combat with himself, he could not turn or draw. He tried to stand as thick metal legs splintered the primeval woodlands like they were toys, dragging a colossal torso awkwardly behind them. He could not move, nor turn his eyes from the glowing core of hungry coals, or grisly flesh, or smoke from bulbous locomotive valves that lined the shoulders of a long-dead giant.

A devil, Lucian thought. Another devil.

The hulking thing stepped before him, still obscured by fog, and bent its massive legs down until a familiar face leaned into view of the firelight.

“Lucian,” it spoke.

Lucian recognized it—him—instantly. The millionaire, long thought missing or dead, who so many years ago had wagered his own heart in an Outsider’s game of chance.

“Jeremiah?”

The old industrialist chuckled. He was hideously malformed—gone were even the last glimpses of his humanity, replaced instead by infernal steamwork and the gutted skeletons of a dozen ruined cargo trains. His belly swelled with heat of a devil’s furnace, and the campfire between the two travelers seemed to draw towards it, as though Jeremiah were breathing it in.

“I have shed that name, my good marshal,” he spoke, his voice melting over the land as Lucian sat paralyzed before him. “You may call me Urgot now, for that is the name I have taken.”

“I know what you are wondering,” he continued. “Understand that I was laid low in my efforts to civilize this desperate land, and divorced from my plans for a great steel empire. No, I made a mistake of hubris—I took a deal, as you once did… and paid so, so dearly for it.”

The colossus motioned towards where his heart might have been, now nothing but a tangled mass of white-hot copper. The rumors had been true. Jeremiah had died.

“It was not death,” he said, as if snatching the thought from the air. “Though by the time my treasured property was returned, it was far too late to call myself alive. My body was abandoned at the edge of the desert by some… associates… who have come to know the dire price of treachery. Yet as you are aware, there are many devils… and unlike the monster you failed to destroy, I was visited by one with a particularly tantalizing offer.”

Urgot was close now, the campfire pouring endlessly upwards into his stomach. The grinding of a thousand starving gears echoed from somewhere within him, and Lucian imagined a devouring maw, chaining the sky down before swallowing it whole.

“I know you will lose the duel within yourself, marshal. I did. Brought low by my losses I turned to common banditry, and the darkest hollows of my sadly mortal imagination. When you follow me down that trail—and you will—I intend to meet with the creature wearing your body. We have… a great many things to discuss.”

With that, the enormous metal legs pulled Urgot away, until even his illuminated hellmouth disappeared from view. The sky buckled, and broke—bitter sun replaced once more by cold, lightless midnight, and Lucian was alone.

The shadow would claim him soon.

He had to move quickly.

Lucian had been careless.

Forgetting what a devil was, the kind of power one could wield, he and Senna had rushed into an alpine tundra on horseback, determined to take Thresh with a single shot. Lucian was one of the greatest marshals the outfit had ever seen; Senna was the greatest. They were brave, and impetuous, and in love—and Thresh had been waiting for them.

The devil called Thresh was not an ordinary monster of the high frontier. Ravenous and cruel, he had lived for eons before the men of the Old World landed on his continent’s eastern shores.

The cosmic beings who birthed the gods grew old and died, their ancient bodies fell to earth to become the mountains and valleys and primordial seas, but Thresh continued on, his unnatural life sustained by a bottomless, ravenous thirst for destruction. Before spoken word could give shape to his name, all living things knew his face—the skull of a beast, hateful and burning, gazing balefully down upon them. His malice was woven so deeply into his ancient form that it could never be purged, and he walked across the broken bodies of the vast things he had outlived, devouring the souls of their sad and forgotten children.

Lucian didn’t even see his opponent before a razor whip sliced cleanly into his shoulder, knocking him from his mount and crippling his shooting arm. Senna leapt for her lover’s pistol, but she too was struck low by the devil’s power, walls of flame erupting from the earth as laughter echoed from his bleached, lidless skull. His voice rattled within their heads, a deep and primordial howl, and Lucian saw in his mind the beast sinking his blade deep into Senna’s throat. The fight had lasted only seconds, and already Thresh had won.

The devil stood over Senna, flames within his ancient body twisting against the chill air, and he drew a jagged blade from somewhere inside of his ragged, billowing coat. Lucian had seen the skinned corpses of a dozen frontier towns on the way to Thresh’s den, and the piles of twitching muscle where unlucky wagon trains had drawn his hellish gaze. Lucian was prepared for the devil to take him, and always had been—but he would not let Senna share the fate of a young and foolish gunfighter.

And perhaps, momentarily amused after so many years of dark, sumptuous slaughter, that was why Thresh offered him a deal.

Such a simple thing, Lucian had thought. So easy to accept.

His soul for the life of the girl.

Then the shadow took hold, the hate and shame within the young marshal coming alive, hijacking his senses, his body corrupting before Senna’s pleading eyes. The bargain had been struck, the pact sealed. As Lucian’s vision turned to flame, he watched the monstrous devil he had been sent to hunt turn to Senna’s defenseless body—laughing hideously as he ripped out her heart.

The holy reverend of New Eden was little known or understood, but the rumors of his supposed power had spread even as far as the eastern territories. A man who could speak with the dead, as many liked to say, though few did survive the pilgrimage into the unexplored northwest to see if the rumors were true. Those who struck out for New Eden never returned—and now, looking down upon the enclave from a nearby hill, Lucian understood why.

Untouched by the elements and unspoiled by the beasts of the forest, the modest church commune was small and thriving, surrounded by bountiful crops and quaint homes that seemed to swell with life. Children ran across dirt roads as shopkeeps and townspeople passed peacefully by, far removed from demons and Outsiders, gorgons and giants, and the machinations of bandit clans that should have long ago picked every building clean. It was a place from a storybook, bright and clean. Lucian wondered for a moment if he had lost the duel with the demon already, and this was his reward.

He descended from the hill, and the villagers turned to see the newcomer in their midst.

“You’ve come to meet the holy reverend?” asked a fresh-faced young man.

Lucian nodded.

“Then hallelujah, stranger,” he smiled. “You’ve come home.”

No town in Lucian’s memory accurately compared to the sights of New Eden. A bakery filled his nostrils with the scent of fresh bread, as young women danced and fiddlers played in the street. Songs of salvation drifted from mead halls that had never for a moment known the Old West’s violent madness. Ordinary people greeted him as he passed by, offering him food and water, asking where he came from and where he was going.

The demon raged inside him, but in the light of day Lucian could overpower it, control it. And there was something about this place that calmed him, in a way he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

“No one fears death here,” someone spoke. Lucian turned to find a kindly old man, dressed in a modest preacher’s frock, possessing a youthful glint in his now-faded eyes. “A fear of death is a fear of life. We accept death for what it is, and live a life free from the snares of its uncertainty.”

Lucian liked the way the man spoke. His speech lilted softly, like a song.

“I don’t know if I believe that,” replied Lucian.

The man smiled. “Of course.”

He continued on, walking in no particular direction. Lucian followed.

“We live in a land of angels and demons. We see their influence every day, for good or evil, and the calamities they wreak. The world is old, but many of our gods are still alive, watching over their progeny even now.”

He motioned to the center of town, where a picturesque church with white walls and a blue roof stood. The building was immaculate—even the stained glass windows seemed to glow, polished to a radiant sheen. Villagers milled in and out, talking and laughing, as children crowded around their legs. The building could have been erected yesterday.

“And they bestow the faithful with many gifts. The gift of life, the gift of love.”

The man turned to Lucian, a knowing smile upon his face.

“And the gift of death.”

Something rang curiously in Lucian’s ears. It was the way the man said death, the way the sound was shaped by his lips, much like a secret whispered to a lover. The passersby, too, had become still, their eyes closed as if dreaming, and they only opened them again when the odd melody had finished washing over them.

“Meet me inside, when you’re ready,” he said. “They call me Reverend Karthus, and I have so much I want to show you.”

The interior of the church was clean and white—its pews were polished, its pulpit modest. Karthus shooed the rest of his congregation outside, and they looked lovingly at Lucian as they passed. Some whispered a passing “welcome,” others clapped their hands together in quiet reverence. To Lucian, New Eden seemed to be a sleeping child that hadn’t yet awoken to the monsters in the world outside its door. The fact that it stood at all was testament to whatever powers Karthus claimed to possess, real or not.

Deep within Lucian, the shadow raged. He once again felt the itch beneath his skin, the flames bubbling up from some dark corner of his soul, and his mouth twisting into a forceful, mocking grin. But something was different—the creature was frightened, and Lucian couldn’t understand why.

“My, my,” Karthus spoke, a smile still crossing his face. “We can’t have that now, can we?”

The reverend picked up a small, black-bound book, emblazoned with the symbol of a golden key. With a gentle wave and some intangible words, the demon was suddenly silenced—but not before Lucian felt something else, something the creature had not done before. It whispered softly in his ear, the low and crackling whimper of a dying fire.

“They are monsters.”

“In a land of angels and demons, I wonder what you will become?” continued Karthus, resting a faded stole over his shoulders. The reverend then motioned for Lucian to kneel before him, and to Lucian’s surprise, he did.

“Why do you fight this battle? What do you have to gain?”

Lucian did not answer. The light had begun to fade, as New Eden’s hopeful music slowly twisted into a strange, lopsided dirge. Karthus nodded slowly, his smile widening, and Lucian kept his eyes locked ahead. A curious skittering echoed from the floorboards behind him. It was a sound he knew well.

“We give so much of ourselves to fear,” spoke Karthus, his voice growing deeper and darker. “And you have given most of all.”

Energies swirled about the old man—luminescent blues and greens in the rough shapes of friends Lucian had lost, things he had killed. They danced against the rafters of the now decrepit church, its paint peeling away to reveal black, moldering rot.

Lucian sensed the presence of at least a dozen shapes behind him. Some were crouched on all fours, others clambered softly over the warped and ruined pews, and still more waited outside the church, their human disguises melting away. Lucian now knew why the town lay untouched, why its people seemed so good and kind: they weren’t people at all. Or if they had been, they’d been dead a very long time.

Lucian’s hands moved slowly towards his pistols.

The reverend now loomed over him, lifting off the ground as he gripped the book with the golden key, his sermon exploding into a rapturous chorus of overlapping voices: “Our souls will be purified in the cool waters of death! Our broken spirits will be repaired, the things we lost shall be returned!”

The creatures behind Lucian crawled forward, slavering and starved, as Karthus floated ever upwards, his arms outstretched, ascending into the musty air. Images of Lucian’s past twirled all around him, men and women whose deaths played out again and again.

A familiar voice brushed against his ear, almost a word, but not.

“Do you hear her?” asked Karthus.

Lucian listened.

The sound was crackling sage, the ashes of a campfire, the striking of a match. It spoke of Senna’s death, and how Lucian had fallen into despair. For years the ruined marshal had wandered from place to place, dead in everything but name and emptied of all joy. As each day had passed, another small, cruel thing filled his mind, and the shadow had grown wild within him, his inner darkness yearning to seize control. Any offer of peace had to be investigated, no matter how dangerous or foolish.

Lucian had heard of a man who could speak with the dead, and gone without question. He had given himself to a shadow that took the shape of his own monstrous hatred, and allowed it to rule him utterly.

Lucian found himself alone with the demon—away from the church, and far from the streets of New Eden. The two stood apart, facing one another, in a moonlit field of white flowers. Lucian could feel the cool air against his skin. He could see the distant lights of a town, high in the mountains, and the moon hanging low in the sky. Beneath the demon the flowers burned, but the creature stood calmly, its face twisted into a familiar, ravenous grin.

Lucian breathed. So much of himself had been lost to the shadow—to Thresh, and the spectre of the unforgiving west. But he still ruled his own soul, half-corrupted as it was, and the shadow was a part of it—a part of him.

It drew closer, slowly, each step burning more flowers away.

Lucian reached out his hand, and the shadow rested a charred limb upon it. It whispered: “Would you cast your enemies into the fire?”

Lucian was silent. His skin crackled at the shadow’s touch, but he said nothing. It already had its answer.

It whispered once more, now in Lucian’s own voice, as its ashen body bonded with his mortal flesh: “Then we will go together.”

“Do you hear the love you have lost?” Karthus sang.

Lucian drew his pistol. “No.”

His arm elongated, stretching into the hellish cannon of the demon within him, and a ray of unholy flame ripped through Karthus’s forehead. As the preacher’s body fell, Lucian spun around, melting into shadow as a screaming ghoul leapt at him from one of the broken pews. He fired again, obliterating the creature, and launched a third shot into the crowd of its shriveled, wide-mouthed brethren—the fiddlers and bakers, dancers and farmers now shrunken, twisted, and hollow. The bullet exploded among them, blasting their bodies apart, and at once a swelling sea of horrors flowed in through the doors, windows, and broken cracks in the church’s ruined facade. New Eden had risen to greet him.

Lucian’s body gave way to the shadow, and it lifted its arms high as a stream of liquid fire tore through the crowd of monsters. The demon shrieked with joy, its voice melding with Lucian’s own, and it soared into the air as hellfire sprayed in every direction. Burning wood fell from the ceiling as shots tore outward through the church’s brittle walls and across the sprawling wastes of New Eden, setting the town alight. Ghouls shrieked in terror, their hordes turned to flee, but the demon was quick—springing through the crumbling roof and into the delipidated streets, firing the cannons of hell into the creatures’ still-open mouths.

Then, Lucian surged outwards from within the demon’s form, its body bursting into ashen mist. He clapped his pistols together as the undead hordes scattered in every direction. Artificial magics woven into the gunmetal bubbled, their intricate filigrees spiraling outward as the barrels hungrily fused. A concentrated beam of light surged from somewhere within them, cutting across the plains as screaming undead melted beneath its fury.

Soon the light faded, and the metal unwound itself as Lucian scanned his surroundings.

He waited. The shadow within him was quiet now. No more ghouls lept from the burning, derelict homes, or rose from the beds of rotten crops. Karthus lay dead as his church collapsed around him, flames consuming even the memory of his fell magic. Though from the corner of his eye Lucian swore he could see the old preacher, grinning among a crowd of New Eden’s townsfolk, as the burning roof finally caved in over their heads.

The former marshal turned back towards civilization and began to walk, the shadow grinning close behind.

He’d been close to speaking with Senna again. Closer than he’d ever been. But Lucian no longer needed the comforts of old rituals and incantation—he would see his love once more, one way or another, the day he was lowered into the dirt. That was the rightful end of a true and valiant gunfighter. Until then, there were terrible things lurking in the darkness, which could only imagine the demon soon to knock upon their doors.

Out there, somewhere in the wild expanses of the great frontier, Lucian had a devil to kill.

Tamara forces herself to rise early - an easy habit to get into when the earth is your bed and fallen leaves the only blanket. Less so when the mattress is stuffed with goose down and the sheets woven from soft cotton. The curtains are pulled back, and warm light pools on the floor of her third floor boarding room. She’d closed the curtains on her first night in Piltover and had slept two hours past dawn, which worried her so much, she has never closed them since.

Swinging herself out of bed, she strides naked to the window and taps the colored glass with a callused fingertip, black with sooty residue from the workshop. The light shimmers on her skin, her frame wolf-lean and wiry-muscled. Despite that, she rubs a hand across her belly as if fearing it has grown soft. Below her, the cobbled street is already busy with stall-holders setting up to catch Progress Day’s early trade. Colorful bunting to celebrate this auspicious day is strung between every building, giving the narrow street a festive atmosphere so unlike the city Tamara calls home. Cog and key banners of gold and crimson silk hang from the distant towers glittering on the upper slopes of the clan districts. It is there the rivers of gold said to flow through Piltover’s streets have their source.

Tamara grins at the thought and turns from the window. Her room is meticulously tidy, a place for everything and everything in its place. Notebooks are stacked at one corner of her workbench, alongside carefully arranged tools, hex-calipers and folded schemata. Yesterday’s lunch of black bread, cheese and dried fruit sits unopened in muslin wrapping next to her tools. A small metalworking forge is ingeniously built into the brick wall, the fumes carried to the roof via a twisting series of iron pipes. At the center of the desk is a wooden box in which sits the device that has taken her many months of effort to construct, working from the plans etched into rolls of wax-paper she keeps hidden beneath her mattress.

She reaches under her bed for the chamber pot and relieves herself before quickly freshening up with the powders and tinctures provided by her host. She dresses in the rugged clothes of an apprenta; simple leggings, an undershirt equipped with numerous pockets and a wrap-around doublet with an ingenious system of hooks and eye fasteners that can be ripped off with one quick pull. She’d been puzzled at the need for this until Gysbert had blushingly told her it was to make it easier to get off in the event of it catching fire in a workshop.

She checks her reflection in a polished glass mirror hanging on a brass hook on the back of her door, brushing her long dark hair back over her ears and securing it with a leather thong and copper hair-clips. Tamara runs her fingers over her high cheekbones then along the line of her chin, and is satisfied by what she sees. Colette keeps telling her she could do more with her looks, but her friend is young and hasn’t yet learned the danger of being memorable.

Tamara places the wooden box in her shoulder bag, together with the muslin wrapped food and a selection of notebooks and pencils. She’s nervous, but that’s understandable. This is a big day for her, and she doesn’t want to fail.

She removes the chair wedging her door shut and turns the locking wheel to release the bars securing it in place. Compared to where she comes from, Piltover is a safe place, its violent crime rate absurdly low. Its inhabitants are untroubled by the everyday violence of most other cities, but they are not so foolish as to believe they can do without locks on their doors.

Especially in the weeks leading up to Progress Day.

Tamara locks her door and pauses on her way down the stairs to empty her chamber pot in the boarding house’s central chute for the disposal of night-soil. She used to wonder where it ended up, before realizing that shit only ever flows downward. Somewhere below in Zaun, there’s a garden that likely blooms like no other. She places the pot in its assigned cubbyhole for cleaning, and makes her way down the winding screw-stair to the communal dining room. A few of her fellow apprenta are either breaking their fast or frantically tinkering with the devices they hope will finally get them noticed by one of the clans. Tamara places a hand over her shoulder bag, feeling a sense of pride at what she has made. She’d followed the plans exactly, even though the finishing touches went against the grain of her stoic professionalism.

She waves in response to a few weary hellos, but doesn’t stop to talk. Few of them will have slept more than an hour or two a night for the last fortnight, and she will be surprised if some of them don’t fall asleep during their auditions today. She’s out the door to the street before anyone can delay her, and the brightness of the sun pulls her up short.

The high buildings of her street are constructed of square-cut limestone and chamfered timber. Embellished with bronze facings, leaded glass and copper eaves, dazzling sunlight glitters from every surface. The streets are busy and loud, filled with moderately well-dressed men and women moving back and forth. Couriers push between apparitors, victuallers and tallymen, who shout after them and wave their fists. A few vagabond tinkers ply their suspect wares on canvas cloths atop barrelheads, ready to run at the first sight of a warden. Sumpsnipes who’ve hitched a lift on the Rising Howl from Zaun lurk at the edges of the street, scanning the passing trade for someone to cutpurse. These are the younger, inexperienced ones, forced away from the easy pickings of the cross-chasm bridges by the older, stronger kids.

Tamara keeps a wary eye on them as she moves down the street, her steps precise and measured. She has little enough worth stealing, but the last thing she needs today is a sumpsnipe picking something he shouldn’t from her. The smell of roasting fish and fresh-baked Shuriman sunbread from an open dining hall makes her mouth water. Instead, she stops a woman pushing a wheeled barrel encircled by hissing pipes and purchases a hot tisane, together with one of the sugared pastries she has come to love a little too much.

“Happy Progress Day, dearheart!” says the woman as Tamara places a silver gear in her hand and tells her to keep the change. “May the cogs turn clockwise for you today, my lovely.”

The woman’s accent sounds oddly lean and leisurely to Tamara, as if she has all the time in the world to voice what she wants to say, yet it is not uncommon this close to the Boundary Markets: a blend of Piltovan affectation and the looser familiarity of Zaun.

“Thank you,” replies Tamara. “May the Gray never rise to your door.”

The woman taps her head and her heart, a sure sign that she is born of parents from above and below. As much as the citizens of Piltover and Zaun like to pretend they are separate entities, both are far more intertwined than they might openly admit. Tamara wolfs down her pastry and follows the road to its end, exactly twenty steps distant, where it meets the larger thoroughfare of Horologica Avenue. She turns right, finishing her tisane and counting her steps as she crosses each intersecting street. The buildings here are grander than the apprenta quarter where she’s billeted, fashioned from polished granite and ironwork columns.

Many boast flickering chemtech lamps that give the morning air a crisp, actinic flavor. It seems pointless to burn them given the early hour, but Tamara has learned a great deal of Piltover society is dominated by perceived wealth and power - one being a factor of the other. It’s everywhere she looks: in the cut of the clothes people wear, the vividness of the colors and the extent of their publicized philanthropy. Tamara sees numerous couples taking their morning constitutional; well-appointed men and women adorned with subtle augments. One woman wears an implanted cheek-plate with a gem-like hextech loupe over one eye. Her arm is linked with a man bearing a metallic gauntlet that flickers with traceries of light. Across the street, another hunched man in overalls wears what appears to be some form of breathing apparatus on his back - tanks filled with bubbling greenish liquid that vent puffs of atomized vapor.

She sees people look on in admiration and wonderment, but her gaze has been trained to notice what others do not.

The two hextech augments are fake.

Tamara has studied Piltover’s emergent technology closely enough to know what is real and what is not. The cheek-plate is molded silver glued to the woman’s face, and her loupe is nothing more than a lapidary’s lens engraved with a maker’s mark she assumes is fictional. Her beau’s hand is an ordinary bronze gauntlet with glass channels filled with bioluminescent algae scraped from one of Zaun’s cultivairs. Only the breathing apparatus is genuine, and the bloodshot redness of the hunched man’s eyes, combined with the tougher, hard-wearing nature of his overalls, tells Tamara he is from a deep level of Zaun.

She travels from Horologica Avenue to Glasswell Street, along the winding Boulevard of a Hundred Taverns and thence into Sidereal Avenue to Incognia Plaza, where Zindelo’s great sphere sits inactive as it has done since the inventor’s mysterious disappearance last year. Crowds gather around the latticework artifact; gaggles of would-be inventors, artists and pallid, hack-coughed Zaunites who have traveled up-city for the day.

Deep in his cups, Gysbert has told her Progress Day is viewed very differently down in his hometown of Zaun, which he insists was the original City of Progress before Piltover came along. Above, Progress Day marks the moment the Sun Gates opened for the first time, allowing trade to pass easily between the east and west of Valoran. It also marks the moment when taxation on that trade turned the trickle of gold entering the city’s coffers into a fast flowing river. Below in Zaun, it is a day to remember those lost in the geological upheaval that created the east-west passage and submerged entire districts underwater.

One day, two very different perceptions.

Tamara passes through the square, avoiding sprinting pneuma-tube runners as they race to bear messages to their destinations. A promenade courtier, Noami Kimba, waves to her and blows her a kiss. They have met three times in the sultry air of evening, and each time Kimba has offered her a chance to spend the night in her arms. Tamara has refused each time, too busy for any diversions, but if she is able to stay longer than today, she may take her up on the next offer. She makes her way to the plaza’s northern archway as a massively bearded man with metaled shoulder guards and an iron skullcap enters. His arms are pneumatic, piston-driven monstrosities, and Tamara recognizes one of the nameless hierophant cultists of the Glorious Evolved. He grunts at her, before entering the square to harangue passers-by with his zealous blend of theology and techno-sorcery. She leaves him to it and turns onto Oblique Lane, heading toward Techmaturgy Bridge, counting her steps as she goes.

The city opens up before her, revealing the great split that divides northern and southern Piltover. The yawning chasm looks as though it ought to be ancient, the result of natural geological forces, but it came into existence within living memory and nothing natural created it. Man’s hubris and desire to master the elements wrought it. Tamara admires the strength of will it must have taken to enact a plan of such audacity that the splitting of the earth and the destruction of half of Zaun was seen as an acceptable price to pay for future prosperity.

The great tower of the College of Techmaturgy rises arrogantly from the wide canyon, anchored to the upper cliffs by swaying suspension bridges and thick iron cables that thrum like musical strings when the winds blow in hard from the ocean. The main bridge is an arched wonder of steel and stone, thronged with people moving between Piltover’s two halves and cursing the vintners and purveyors of sweetmeats whose rival stalls have created a bottleneck at its center. Revelers still drunk from the night before are shepherded onward by wardens in blue jackets, gleaming boots and checkered trousers. In any other city, they would look ridiculous, but here their gaudy appearance actually seems normal. Sumpsnipes with razor-rings dart through the crowds and more than one reveler will be returning home with what remains of their purse slit and emptied.

The north of the city is where the bulk of the clans have their mansions and heavily guarded workshop compounds. Most of the traffic today is heading in that direction. She sees a good many apprenta making their way across the bridge, each bearing their invention with the care of a mother bearing a newborn babe. She seeks out the familiar faces of Gysbert and Colette, but there are simply too many people to pick out her fellow apprenta. Tamara reaches the end of the bridge, and takes a breath. Normally, she is not scared of high places, but the dizzying scale of the height difference between Piltover and Zaun is breathtaking.

Two statues of robed officials flank the road onto the bridge, one representing the spirit of wealth, the other the essence of honesty. Tamara digs out a bronze washer and places the coin in the outstretched palm of the first statue. The weight of it triggers an internal mechanism and the fingers close over the coin. When they open a moment later, it has gone.

“I always go with the other one,” says a man appearing beside her. He is handsome, dark-haired, and smooth-skinned, which means he is rich. His breath reeks of last night’s shimmerwine. “I find it helps to pay for the things I don’t have.”

Tamara ignores him and carries on her way.

He moves after her, made persistent by the dulled senses of a hangover and too much money in his purse.

“Here, now wait a minute, there’s no need to be rude, young lady.”

“I’m not being rude, I have somewhere to be and I don’t want to talk to you,” she says.

He follows her onto the bridge with a laugh that tells her he sees her as a challenge, someone he thinks he can buy with a few gold hex.

“Aha, you’re an apprenta, aren’t you?” he says, finally recognizing her clothes and seeing the bag on her shoulder. “On your way to the auditions, eh? Hoping to catch the eye of an artificer and be snatched up by one of the great houses, are we?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes,” she answers, hoping against hope that he will hear the brusqueness of her tone and leave her alone. Instead, he increases his pace and stands in front of her, blocking her passage across the bridge. He looks her up and down, as though examining a piece of livestock he’s thinking of buying.

“You’re a fine looking specimen, my girl. A bit bony, but nothing a few meals at Lacabro’s wouldn’t sort, eh? What do you say? It’s Progress Day, everyone should have a bit of fun, eh?”

“I’m not interested,” says Tamara, moving to push past him. “Get out of my way and leave me alone.”

“Now listen here, lass, my name is Cella Allabroxus, and I know a few of the bigwigs on the north side,” he says, continuing to block her way. “Spend the morning with me and I’ll put in a good word for you, make sure your audition gets a bit of a boost, if you know what I mean?”

“No, thanks,” says Tamara, and she can see what’s coming next. He reaches for her arm, but she catches his hand before it makes contact, twisting it around and drawing a surprised gasp of pain from him. If she applies even a fraction more pressure, his wrist will snap like kindling. She uses his pain to maneuver him toward the bridge’s parapet. Her fear of heights quite forgotten, she presses Cella Allabroxus back against the waist-high stonework.

“I asked you nicely to leave me alone,” she says, pressing hard on Allabroxus’s wrist and drawing a whimper of pain from him. “Now I’m asking again, albeit not so nicely. Leave me alone or I will push you off this bridge and when they find what’s left of you spread out over the rooftops of Zaun, they’ll think you were just another drunk who couldn’t walk a straight line over the bridge. Are we clear?”

He nods, in too much pain to speak.

“I don’t need your ‘good word’ or any kind of ‘boost’. I’m pretty damn good at what I do, and I’ll stand or fall on my own, thank you very much. Now smile at me, walk away and go home. Sleep off the wine and remember this moment any time you feel like being discourteous to a lady.”

Cella Allabroxus gasps as Tamara releases his wrist. For a moment she sees he is tempted to retort with something offensive, but she cocks an eyebrow and he thinks better of it. Cradling his wrist, he scurries back the way he came and Tamara lets out a weary sigh. She catches the eye of a sumpsnipe gang loitering on the other side of the roadway and nods in the direction of the fleeing Allabroxus. The footpads take her meaning and race after the man.

“What was that all about?” says a young voice behind her.

The tautness drains from Tamara’s body and she lets a looseness return to her limbs. The cold determination Allabroxus saw falls from her face, replaced with an open smile.

“Nothing,” she says, turning to see Gysbert and Colette. “Just a drunk who thought he’d try his luck.”

“You’re late,” says Gysbert, pointing over the parapet at the dulled metal sides of a mechanized clocktower a hundred feet or so below the level of the bridge. “Look.”

“What are you talking about?” answers Tamara. “I don’t think Old Hungry’s told the right time in years.”

“True,” he says, and though he’s trying to look angry, his eyes speak only of infatuation. “But we agreed to meet before Old Hungry’s shadow was past the Techmaturgy tower.”

He points to where the dark outline of the mysterious clocktower has fallen across the lower laboratory levels of the tower, where greenish-gray fumes leak from hornpipe vents. “See?”

Tamara smiles and puts her hand on his shoulder. He glances down at the point of contact and any anger he might actually be feeling vanishes.

Colette rolls her eyes and says, “Come on, let’s get going. Gysbert might be foolish enough to forgive your lateness, but Clan Medarda won’t. They shut the gates at third bell and they rang the second before we reached the bridge.”

The manor house of Clan Medarda is not far from the northern end of the bridge, but the streets are busy and there will be many others seeking entry to display their creations at the auditions.

“You’re right,” says Tamara, hefting her shoulder bag and patting the device within. “Let’s go and show those rich sons of bitches what we can make.”

The gates of Clan Medarda’s mansion house are imposing creations of tempered steel set in a high wall of alabaster white stone. Bronze busts of its illustrious family members sit in numerous alcoves along the length of the wall, including the clan’s current head, Jago Medarda. Scores of eager apprenta are gathered by the opened gates, each bearing a prized invention they hope will see them secure a contract of servitude with this illustrious house. The politeness on display is endearing to Tamara, with each apprenta being careful not to jostle their neighbor’s creation.

Men in the clan’s colors, armed with swords and pikes, guard the entrance, checking the authenticity of each supplicant’s paperwork before allowing them entry. Tamara watches them as they work, admiring their professionalism and thoroughness. A few apprenta are turned away, their papers incorrectly stamped or fraudulent. They don’t protest, but simply walk away with a resigned shrug.

When it’s their turn, Tamara, Colette, and Gysbert are allowed in without a hitch. Colette had taken it upon herself to ensure their papers were in order, and the youngster is a stickler for details. It’s a trait Tamara believes will stand the girl in good stead in the years to come.

Just as they pass through the gates and third bell rings from the Piltover Treasury building, Tamara feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She has learned to trust this instinct over the years and pauses, as if to adjust the straps of her shoulder bag, looking back to the street. Sitting on the rim of a marble fountain is a woman wearing the loosely tied jacket of a Piltover sheriff, a customized cap pulled low over her shadowed features. One leg is cocked at an angle, her elbow resting atop it as her gaze sweeps the throng of apprenta. There’s a long-barreled rifle over her shoulder, one with what looks like a gleaming gemstone enclosed in a lattice of silver wire. Her gaze pauses on Tamara, who turns away before it can linger too long.

Tamara knows that look: it is the look of a hunter.

The gates shut and she catches up to Colette and Gysbert, who stand in a twenty-strong crowd staring in open-mouthed wonder at what seems at first glance to be a simple carriage. But then Tamara notices the underslung hextech pod and the knot of gold and silver cabling linking it to the front and rear axles. A soft light glows within the pod and Tamara tastes copper on her tongue.

“It’s a self-locomotor,” says Gysbert. “One of Uberti’s designs, if I’m not mistaken.”

“It can’t be,” says Tamara. “She works exclusively for Clan Cadwalder.”

“Not for long, I hear,” says Colette.

“What do you mean?” asks Gysbert.

“Scuttlebut around the workbench says one of Medarda’s agents stole a copy of the schematics,” says Colette, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Rumor has it things got pretty bloody. Bodies all cut up, that sort of thing. Folks are saying Clan Torek are looking to lure her away, but Clan Cadwalder won’t admit anything, of course.”

“Well, they wouldn’t, would they?” says Tamara, as the lacquered black doorway to the manor house opens. “A public admission that their head artisan’s designs were stolen would make them look weak.”

A steward bearing a long black staff and liveried in the crimson and gold of Clan Medarda ushers the hopeful apprenta into the manor house. Tamara hears sighs of wonderment as he leads them through its vaulted antechambers, luxurious reception rooms and grand galleries. The clan’s conspicuous wealth is displayed for all to see in gold-framed portraits that fill entire walls, giant sandstone statues of beast-headed warriors conveyed at enormous expense from Shuriman tombs, and crossed weapons that bear the hallmarks of Ionian design. The floors are gleaming marble flagstones, the grand staircase wide and crafted from the whorled boles of Freljordian Ironwood trees.

Tamara sees that everything in this house is artfully crafted to intimidate and remind the visitor just how little their achievements matter in the face of what Clan Medarda has acquired. She looks up in time to see a woman in a floor-length gray dress and crimson-tasseled pelisse glide being escorted across a mezzanine level by another steward. The heels of her boots click with a strange metallic cadence, and she looks down upon the herd of apprenta with the ghost of a smile creasing her lips as she passes from sight.

Eventually the steward halts their march in a moderately sized waiting room with a herringbone-patterned floor and a Revek clock fashioned from ivory and mother-of-pearl that keeps time with metronomic precision. An imposing set of black-lacquered doors with a hatch at eye level leads onward, but the steward raps his staff on the wooden floor and indicates that they should sit on benches set against each wall.

“When your name is called, enter the proving chamber,” he says. “Move to the lectern and state your name. Give a short explanation of what you will be demonstrating, followed by a brief - and I cannot stress that word enough, brief - explanation of its workings. You will be judged by the learned artificers of Clan Medarda, so assume they know more than you. My advice is to keep your answers short, as they bore easily. If you are successful, take the left door onward. If you are unsuccessful, take the right door onward. That is all. And good luck.”

The steward has given this speech many times before, but Tamara hears sincerity in his last words to them. She places a hand on her shoulder bag, knowing that on any other day, the device within would be enough to secure her a place at any one of Piltover’s clan houses. She shares a look with Gysbert and Colette. Both are nervous, and she is surprised to find her own heart racing. She has spent so long preparing for the Progress Day audition that the thought of stumbling at this last hurdle makes her sick to her stomach. It has been a long time since she felt this way, and she smiles, welcoming the sensation. It will keep her sharp and focused. She reaches over to take Gysbert’s hand and gives it a squeeze. Sweat dapples his brow and he smiles weakly in thanks. Colette is staring straight ahead, scanning the faces on the other side of the room, no doubt wondering who might make the cut and who will fall by the wayside.

The hatch in the black door slides back and everyone tenses. A name is called, and a young girl across from them stands. The door opens from the other side and she shuffles nervously through it. A musty smell of aged wood and charged atmosphere gusts from the proving chamber, and Tamara tries to imagine what it will be like.

Another six apprenta pass through the door before one of their names is called. Colette is first, and she stands with determination, lets out a breath, and walks through the door without a backward glance.

“She’ll be great,” says Gysbert under his breath. “I know it.”

“So will you, Gys,” says Tamara, though she suspects his nerves will likely get the better of him. The kid from Zaun is skilled, but more than just his nerves will count against him in the grand halls of a Piltovan clan.

Two more apprenta are called. Looking at the clock, Tamara sees each audition is getting shorter. Are the learned artisans of Clan Medarda already getting bored? Will that count for or against those yet to demonstrate their devices?

Gysbert all but jumps off the bench when his name is called. He almost drops his bag, but catches it at the last minute, his face red with worry and dripping in sweat.

“Take a deep breath,” Tamara advises him. “You know this stuff. Your work is good.”

“But is it good enough?” he asks.

Tamara thinks she knows the answer, but nods and says, “It is.”

He passes through the door and more apprenta are called until only Tamara remains. The room is empty, but she can’t shake the feeling that she is being watched. When her name is finally called, it is a relief, and she takes a moment to compose herself before turning and stepping through the door into the proving room.

The chamber beyond is circular and illuminated by glowing spheres of glass that float above sconces carved in the shape of outstretched hands, as though giving light to the world. It’s all Tamara can do to suppress a sneer at the rampant self-aggrandizement. It is a lecture theater, with tiered benches rising in concentric rings to the back wall. A plain wooden lectern and workbench sit in the center of the room, and two doors lead onward. Left for success, right for failure.

The tiered benches are capable of holding at least a hundred people, but only five sit before her. Two men and three women, all wearing the crimson robes of masters. They are scratching on great ledgers with gold-plated quills that echo noisily in the chamber’s excellent acoustics. Every one of them bears a genuine hextech augment, and she senses their eagerness to be done.

“Name?” says one of the women without looking up.

“Tamara Lautari.”

“What will you be demonstrating?” asks one of the men. His lips do not move, and his voice grates artificially from a mesh-fronted neck brace.

Tamara sets her bag down on the workbench and removes her creation, an arrangement of wirework struts arranged in a cube with an acid-engraved sphere at its center.

“I call it the Hex-Armillary Amplifier.”

“How do you hope it will function?” he asks again, and Tamara tries not to show how much his mechanically-rendered voice disturbs her.

“By harnessing the properties of a crystal and exponentially increasing its output beyond anything that’s been achieved so far.”

She says the words neutrally, but the arrogance of what she says does not go unnoticed. Every one of the masters now fixes their gaze upon her. They are likely used to hearing grand claims from apprenta, but the confidence in her tone clearly piques their interest.

“And how will you do that?” asks a white-haired man with a gem-faceted eye set in a porcelain plate upon his burn-scarred face.

“The geometries of a crystal are vital, as is the axis upon which it spins,” says Tamara, opening a delicate hatch in the sphere to reveal a precisely engineered cradle. Thin chains, like those of an expensive necklace, hang down, ready to secure a power crystal. “My device reads the speed and angle of spin, adjusting it to achieve optimum power delivery.”

“Absurd,” says a woman with an artificial arm and the penetrating gaze of an academic who has heard every wild idea from her students and dismissed them all. “There is no time in the discharge of a crystal’s power to adjust it with any degree of control. Praveen tried the same thing two years ago and almost brought down half the goldsmithing district.”

“Respectfully, ma’am, I disagree.”

“Your disagreement is irrelevant, apprenta. Can you prove it? Can you demonstrate what you claim?”

“I believe so,” replies Tamara.

“Belief is not the basis of science,” says the woman, as if speaking to a confident but ill-informed child. “Empirical evidence is what is demanded.”

“I can do it,” promises Tamara.

The woman looks unconvinced, but nods and says, “Very well, you may begin.”

A hatch slides open in the workbench beside Tamara. A fretwork stand rises from below, holding a small, faceted crystal of sapphire blue that shimmers with its own internal light.

A hextech crystal.

The crystal is no bigger than her thumbnail, but it is the future.

This is what could make the clans of Piltover rulers of the world if they so desired. Or, if not them, whoever can craft it more efficiently and without the years of work to produce a single item. This crystal has only a low level of power left in it, but it is still immeasurably powerful and outrageously valuable.

She hadn’t anticipated it would also be so beautiful.

“Well, go on then,” says the burn-scarred man. “Dazzle us.”

She lifts the crystal from its holder. It’s warm to the touch, vibrating at a level almost too subtle to detect. It is far heavier than she expects. With exquisite care, Tamara places the crystal within her sphere and fastens it with delicate chains. She checks it is secure and seals her device. The mechanism atop the cube is movable and she twists its interlocking parts to arrange the cardinal points of contact into their engaged positions.

Her device starts to hum as the conduits find a source of power in the crystal, and a soft blue glow emanates from within. Tamara grins as her device spools up. The hum builds and the taste of metal in her mouth grows stronger. It is getting louder now, unpleasantly so, pulsing in waves.

The light spheres around the hall pulse in concert with the rise and fall of the bass thrum coming from her device. It is moving across the workbench, the vibrations jittering it left and right, up and down. Crackles of energy flicker around the sphere, flaring from its upper surfaces like lightning running in reverse.

“Turn it off, Mistress Lautari!”

Tamara reaches for her device, but a whip of blue light lashes out, carving an angry red weal over the back of her hand. She flinches and backs away from her rapidly overloading device.

“I can’t,” says Tamara in dismay. “It’s optimizing too fast!”

She always knew this was going to happen, but she’d hoped the changes she made to the design wouldn’t fail quite as catastrophically as this. A bolt of blue fire arcs out of her machine toward one of the light spheres. It explodes in a shower of magnesium-bright sparks.

Another follows, then three more. Soon the only light is the violent blue glow of Tamara’s crackling device. The woman with the hextech arm stands and makes a fist. With a rush of sliding metal, the entire workbench falls into the floor, which promptly seals up after it. The outline of the trapdoor is briefly limned in light and a hard bang of detonation echoes from far below.

“A safety chamber,” says Tamara, relieved her device didn’t explode a few seconds earlier.

“Yes, Mistress Lautari,” says the woman, sitting back down and picking up her golden quill. “Do you think you are the first apprenta to come before us with a potentially lethal invention?”

“I suppose not,” answers Tamara. She is disappointed, but not surprised. This was always the intended outcome, despite the best efforts of professional pride to sabotage her purpose.

The man with the hextech eye writes in his ledger and speaks without looking at her.

“I think you know which door to take.”

Tamara’s exit from Clan Medarda’s mansion is far less grand than her entrance. The rightmost door opens into a bare stone corridor that winds downward through the rock of the cliffs until it reaches a steel door with enough reinforcement to withstand a siege ram. A heavily muscled enforcer type with hexdraulic arms and a helmet she’s not sure is actually a helmet opens the door. She’s barely through it before it’s slammed shut behind her.

It opens onto a side street lower down the city, one that leads back to the cliffs. Not quite Zaun, but not entirely Piltover. The street is paved with mismatched cobbles and foggy with low lying scraps of the Zaun Gray. Gysbert sits opposite on a crumbling brick wall, the smashed remains of his device lying strewn at his feet.

He smiles as he sees her and says, “It didn’t go well?”

“Not exactly.”

“What happened?”

“It exploded.”

His eyes widen in surprise. He laughs, then claps a hand over his mouth. “Sorry, shouldn’t laugh. Exploded?”

She nods and grins. He laughs again.

“At least all mine did was fall apart,” he says. “Not that it matters. As if Medarda would let a Zaunite into their hallowed ranks!”

She ignores his bitterness and asks, “Have you seen Colette?”

Gysbert’s eyes light up at the prospect of delivering good news.

“I haven’t. I think she made it.”

Tamara lets out a sigh of relief.

“Well, at least one of us got in,” she says. “So… shall we drown our sorrows? It’s Progress Day, after all. I think we’ve earned a few after nearly blowing up the learned masters.”

A figure moves into view, lithe and silhouetted against the light at the end of the street. Others are with her, but they’re clearly deferring to her since she’s the one with the long-barreled rifle pulled tight to her shoulder. The weapon’s muzzle is unwavering, its sights firmly aimed at Tamara’s head. “Sorry, Mistress Lautari,” says the sheriff she’d seen earlier today, “but I don’t think you’ll be getting that drink.”

Gysbert’s protests are brushed aside as the sheriff and her men lead Tamara away. He hasn’t the courage to follow her, and she’s glad of that. She doesn’t want him dragged into this. She’s frogmarched toward the edge of the cliff, and for a wild moment she thinks they’re going to throw her over the edge.

But this is Piltover. They do things by the book here. Back home, she’d already have a knife in her guts or be sailing through the air on a long drop to the spires of the city below. Instead, they turn into a narrow overhanging street that winds along the line of the cliffs toward the great funicular that leads down to the busy wharves on the ocean passage through the city.

“Are you arresting me?” asks Tamara. “What did I do?”

“Really? You’re going to play dumb?” asks the sheriff. “We searched your room and found everything. The hextech journals, the schematics.”

“I’m an apprenta,” says Tamara. “I’m supposed to have schematics.”

They reach an iron-mesh platform attached to a collimated series of rails angled down toward the ocean and docks below. Hundreds of ships throng the wide channel, moored in the shadow of the titanic form of the Sun Gates that allow sea transit from east to west. Some are just passing through, while others berthed offload goods before filling their holds with the bounty Piltover and Zaun have to offer. Tamara sees Freljordian ice-runners, Noxian troop barques, Shuriman grain-galleys and even a few vessels that look suspiciously like they’ve recently sailed from the thieves’ haven of Bilgewater.

Watching over them all are Piltover’s warship squadrons: sleek, ebon-hulled vessels with twin banks of oars and iron-sheathed rams. Rumor has it they’re powered by more than just the strength of their oarsmen and that each is equipped with a battery of powerful hextech weaponry. Tamara doesn’t know if that’s true, but that people believe it is true is all that matters.

She’s jolted from thoughts of warships as three of the sheriff’s men bundle her onto the elevator, holding her tighter and more painfully than they need to.

“Maybe so, but I don’t think many apprenta have such detailed maps of Piltover hidden within their work. I’m Caitlyn, and I’ve walked a beat for more years than I care to count, so I know this city’s streets better than most. And I have to say, you did a damned accurate job. Even Vi could walk blindfold around Piltover with those plans and not get lost.”

“I don’t follow,” says Tamara, as Caitlyn pulls a lever and the angled elevator begins its juddering descent to the city’s lowest levels.

“Yeah, you’re more a trailblazer than a follower, aren’t you?”

“What does that mean?”

The sheriff doesn’t answer, and Tamara shakes her head, her eyes filling with tears.

“Look, I swear I don’t know what this is all about,” she says, her voice cracking and her chest heaving with sobs. “Please, I’m just an apprenta trying to catch a break. Signing a contract with Clan Medarda was my last chance to make something of myself before my father’s money runs out and I have to indenture myself to one of the Zaun Chem-forges. Please, you have to believe me!”

Her pleas fall on deaf ears, and neither the sheriff or her men bother to answer her increasingly histrionic pleas for compassion and understanding as their descent continues. When the elevator lurches to a halt on the dockside, it’s in the shadow of a Shuriman galleon riding high in the water, its holds freshly unloaded. Tamara sees all her worldly possessions stuffed into a metal cart used to haul grain from the holds of such vessels. Her journals and rolled up plans are inside, pages ripped and torn, months of painstaking work discarded like junk. She smells oil and knows what’s coming next. She throws off the grip of the men holding her and falls to her knees before Caitlyn.

“No! Please, don’t,” she weeps. “Please. I’m begging you!”

Caitlyn ignores her and walks over to the cart. She lifts a smoking pipe from a passing stevedore and tips its burning contents into the cart. The oil-soaked paper of Tamara’s books and plans bursts into flames with a whoosh of ignition. The fire consumes them swiftly, burning everything to ash in a matter of minutes. Smoke curls from the remains of Tamara’s work, and she spits at Caitlyn’s feet.

“Damn you,” she snaps. “May the Gray forever be at your door!”

“Nice try,” says Caitlyn, dragging her to her feet. “You’re pretty tricksy with that accent. It’s good, I’ll give you that. Just enough slang, just enough roughness, but I’ve heard every voice in this city, from top to bottom, and yours just doesn’t fit, you know? A little too much of the soot and spite from your homeland to really pull it off.”

“What are you talking about?” protests Tamara. “I was raised in upper Piltover. I’m a Goldview Lass! Born in sight of the Ecliptic Vaults! I swear I’m not lying!”

Caitlyn shakes her head. She’s tired of this game.

“No, your accent’s good, but it can’t quite cover that guttural Noxian superiority,” she says, punctuating her words with a finger jabbing into Tamara’s chest. “And I know what you are. Yeah, I’ve heard the fireside tales of the warmasons, the warriors who sneak into enemy territory and scout it out. You map out the terrain, find the best ways for an army to advance, laying the groundwork for invasion.”

Tamara doesn’t get the chance to deny the accusation as Caitlyn’s men march her up the gangway and onto the galleon. They hand her to two swarthy Shuriman bladesmen, hard-eyed killers who’d sell their own grandmother for half a silver gear.

“You don’t come back to Piltover,” says Caitlyn, resting her rifle in her arms. “If I see you again, I’ll put a bullet in your head. Understand?”

Tamara doesn’t answer. She sees Caitlyn means every word she says.

“Keep her below, then dump her somewhere unpleasant in Bel’zhun,” says Caitlyn to the shipmaster. “Or throw her overboard once you get far enough out, I don’t care.”

The ship is far out to sea by the time they let her up on deck. Too far from land to swim, but Tamara has no plans to get wet. She watches the glittering jewel of Piltover slide away over the horizon, sad to be leaving, but pleased her mission is finally over.

A shame her artfully prepared plans and schematics went up in smoke, but that was always a risk, and she can recreate them from memory. She closes her eyes and runs through the mental exercises that allow her to conjure walking Piltover’s streets at night, counting steps and mentally mapping every junction, street and winding alley.

She ponders which of the breadcrumbs she left in her wake allowed Caitlyn to draw the net around her, but supposes it doesn’t matter now. The sheriff of Piltover is clever, but Tamara has a nagging sensation it wasn’t actually Caitlyn who discovered her. That worries Tamara, as it means there is someone in Piltover she doesn’t know about who has cunning enough to unmask a warmason.

Whoever it was, and no matter how much they might think they know about the secretive Order of Warmasons, there’s one thing they haven’t yet realized.

That warmasons work in pairs and sometimes it pays to burn one to embed another more deeply in foreign lands.

Tamara smiles to herself, already imagining the valuable intelligence Colette will be gathering for Noxus in the heart of Clan Medarda.

She lies back on a bed of empty grain sacks and settles down to sleep.

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.”

A lonely and melancholy soul from ancient Shurima, Amumu roams the world in search of a friend. Cursed by an ancient spell, he is doomed to remain alone forever, as his touch is death and his affection ruin. Those who claim to have seen him describe Amumu as a living cadaver, small in stature and covered in bandages the color of lichen. Amumu has inspired myths, folklore, and legends told and retold for generations – such that it is impossible to separate truth from fiction.

The hardy folk of Shurima agree upon certain things: the wind always blows from the west in the morning; a full belly on a new moon is an ill omen; buried treasure hides under the heaviest of rocks. They do not agree, however, about the tale of Amumu.

One oft-told story links Amumu to the first great ruling family of Shurima who succumbed to a disease that corrupted flesh with hideous speed. The youngest child, Amumu, was quarantined in his chambers and befriended a servant girl who heard his cries through the walls. She regaled the lonely heir with courtly news and stories of her grandmother’s mystic powers.

One morning, the girl brought word that Amumu’s last remaining brother had passed away, making him Emperor of Shurima. Saddened that he had to bear this news alone, she unlocked his door and ran inside to comfort him face to face. Amumu threw his arms around her, but as they touched, he fell back, realizing he had condemned her to the same terrible fate as his family.

Upon the girl’s death, her grandmother placed a twisted blight on the young emperor. In her mind, Amumu had as good as murdered her kin. As the curse took effect, Amumu was trapped in his moment of suffering like a locust ensnared in honeyed amber.

A second tale whispers of another crown prince, one given to bouts of petulance, cruelty, and murderous vanity. In this telling, Amumu was crowned Emperor of Shurima at a young age, and convinced he was blessed by the sun, he forced his subjects to worship him as a god.

Amumu sought the fabled Eye of Angor, an ancient relic entombed in a gilded crypt, said to grant eternal life to whoever looked upon it with an unflinching heart. He hunted the treasure for years with a host of slaves who carried him through labyrinthine catacombs, sacrificing themselves to traps so the emperor could continue without hindrance. Amumu finally reached the cyclopean golden archway, where upon dozens of his stonemasons labored to breach the sealed door.

As the young emperor rushed within, determined to look into the Eye of Angor, his slaves seized their chance and sealed the stone doorway behind him. Some say the child emperor endured in the darkness for years, his loneliness driving him to insanity and causing him to claw at his own skin, which he was forced to wrap in bandages. His life was extended by the power of the Eye as he meditated on his past transgressions, but the gift was a double edged sword, for he was cursed to remain forever alone.

When a series of devastating earthquakes shattered the foundations of his tomb, the emperor escaped with no knowledge of how much time had passed, seeking to undo the suffering he had caused in life.

Yet another story of Amumu tells of the first and last Yordle ruler of Shurima, who believed in the innate goodness of the human heart. To prove his detractors wrong, he swore an oath to live as a beggar until he made one true friend, convinced his people would rally to help their fellow Shuriman.

Though thousands walked by the disheveled Yordle, not one stopped to offer a helping hand. Amumu’s sadness grew until he eventually died of a broken heart. But his death was not the end, for some swear the Yordle still wanders the desert, forever searching for someone who might restore his faith in humanity.

These stories, despite their differences, are woven with parallels. Whatever the circumstances, Amumu is doomed to exist in a broken state of emptiness, eternally alone and friendless. Fated to forever search for a companion, his presence is cursed and his touch is death. On long winter nights when the fire is never allowed to burn low, the sad mummy can sometimes be heard weeping in the desert, despairing that he’ll never know the solace of friendship.

Whatever Amumu searches for – atonement, kinship, or a single act of kindness – one thing is as certain as the western wind at dawn: he has yet to find it.

Rell thought about the Null often.

She didn’t want to, of course. But the thoughts were intrusive and the road was long, and most of the time there wasn’t much to do besides drift back into those unhappy memories as she rode her shifting metal steed from one rumor to the next. Hours and hours of silence, and then, always, killing.

This time, she was far in the outskirts of Noxian territory, following whispers of another Null child being secreted over the border.

“Null.” Rell winced. Even the shape of that word hurt, and she silently swore to herself as she braced against nothing, shaking off the weight of it. Then the pain turned to anger. Then the anger turned to rage.

Noxus had made the Null—and made her. And now, in their immeasurable cowardice, the Noxians couldn’t bear to look. Better to take the Null far, far away, so Noxus could go back to being glorious.

Rell hated this ugly country, filled with its stupid, ugly people. She hated its bleak, strip-mined mountains, their ore gobbled up in Boram Darkwill’s foreign wars. She hated its cracked, rotten soil, used up for ration crops and then left exposed to the wind. Now the only thing that grew anywhere was the green-brown moss that seemed to cake every inch of uninhabited land, populated mostly by carnivorous lizards the size of a house.

What a hideous, naïve place, she thought. So obsessed with its meritocracies, so consumed by constant expansion, that it could not and would not see what it had already become. The Black Rose and their experiments were just a symptom of its deeper sickness. Rell would tear it all down—she’d save the Null, then destroy the Empire brick by brick, even if she had to do it alone. Just like she’d ripped apart the academy.

Then the boulder hit her, and for just a moment, everything was quiet.

Rell had not known many of her classmates long. Most of the promising ones had been forced to fight her in “exhibition matches” to “test her strength”. She didn’t realize until much, much later that whatever shape they were in after, the instructors whisked them away, extracting their magic with essence-absorbing, stone-like sigils and leaving them Null forever.

She remembered some of the kids, but the rest were a pastiche of faces punctuated by extreme pain, from the fights themselves, to the horrific, hours-long sigil grafting process that gave their power to her.

The other students very quickly grew to fear her—hate her, even... and in that way, Rell was always alone.

All save for one.

Gabriel was a boy whose soft eyes and kind voice were not a product of Noxus, but some other far-flung locale that Rell could only scarcely imagine. He understood Rell and had an odd magic that allowed him to shape dirt into tiny fauna—the animals and birds of his homeland, dancing and playing for Rell’s amusement. Though he seemed sad to be so far from his family, the two found comfort in each other’s friendship—Gabriel spending many of his nights comforting Rell as she recovered from the academy’s abuse.

It was simply a matter of time before they would face one another in combat, and while Rell seemed hopeful, Gabriel knew what was coming. Yet for a while, at least, the two could pretend.

Rell awoke to the din of a warband that cautiously approached her, checking if she was dead.

Unfortunately for them, she was not.

Rell rose with the shattered metal plates of her steed, her titanic lance finding her hand as raw, molten ore poured upward from the ground and into the monstrous weapon. Her mount reformed, pulsating with the heat of a thousand furnaces. Raw iron contorted into shape, seizing itself into the jagged silhouette of a stallion, and Rell leapt upon its back.

She counted five opponents, including a minotaur perched on a pile of large, jagged stones—probably the same kind that hit her—and then one more. A thin man in a dusty white coat clumsily tried to escape across the vast nothing of Noxian wilderness.

Instructor Lukas. The man who’d brought Gabriel to the academy, and the man who took him away.

Though Rell would fight anyone who stood in her path, she had a special rule for her old instructors: no questions asked, and no answers given. She wouldn’t make an exception for this one.

Rell’s stallion charged forward as if it had escaped a dark, distant nightmare, and like the hammer of a scorned god, Rell’s lance slammed into the first soldier who stepped in her way. It was a weapon not made for piercing, but for crushing, and as the soldier’s eyes widened in horror, the last thing that went through his mind was his helmet.

A second fighter attempted to impale Rell’s mount, but her spear snapped between its steaming plates, and Rell swatted her far into the distance—a deformed lump of scrap metal and flesh landing several yards away.

Two crossbowmen, now much less confident than before, tried to beat a hasty retreat. Rell leapt into the air, her steed itself forming around her into a thick suit of impenetrable black armor, and she brought herself down upon them as the earth ripped open beneath her boundless rage.

The minotaur’s rocks may have worked in a sortie, but even his great hunks of volcanic stone shattered against Rell’s armor as she slowly marched toward him. A dark knight, utterly unstoppable, who felled the great creature with a single blow.

She turned her attention to her old instructor.

Lukas felt the gentle pull of his former student, before chunks of superheated slag ripped him from the mossy dirt and into a whirlwind of jagged debris surrounding Rell. It was a storm of metal, heat, and hatred, and all he could whimper before the end was a panicked “Gabriel’s at the camp!” Rell crushed Lukas instantly, his broken form pounded so deeply into the ground that even the basilisks would have trouble digging out his corpse.

Then the storm stopped, the slag fell away, and everything was quiet once more.

True to the instructor’s last words, Gabriel was concealed in a tent within a grassy ravine where the ground had given way and created a wide, shallow indentation in the land. The perfect place to hide a camp.

He was dead long before Rell found him. Malnutrition.

Nullification didn’t just steal the magic of its intended victim—it sundered their soul apart, leaving a glassy-eyed husk that didn’t want anything, barely spoke, couldn’t remember, and never dreamed. A small handful had to be fed, but some Rose-aligned warbands simply chose to neglect this task out of resentment for the job.

Rell looked at Gabriel... at the form wrapped in canvas who once made tiny animals leap from the ground to make her laugh when she was in pain. Digging her lance into the earth, she forced its dark metal out of her hand, then upward, then around him until his body was covered. A simple grave to mark her friend’s passing, but an indestructible one decorated with crude animals forever frozen in steel.

She closed her eyes as she rode off, trying to remember Gabriel as he once was, but all Rell could see were the basilisks feasting on the dead, and her fist closing around a pale woman’s throat.

It had been a weeklong sort of day.

For Ekko, this was both literal and metaphorical. Everything went wrong and it took forever to put it back just right. First, Ajuna had nearly gotten himself killed trying to climb Old Hungry. The younger boy wanted so desperately to be like Ekko that he vaulted up the side of the clockwork tower at the heart of the sump before any of their friends could stop him. It was the first tricky jump that nearly did the kid in. Good thing Ekko had triggered his Z-Drive. Eighteen times he heard the blood-curdling scream of the boy falling to his death before he figured out how and where to arrest the fall and save his life.

Then, while pillaging a scrap heap with ties to Clan Ferros for bits of tech, a particularly aggressive gang of vigilnauts surrounded him. Big ones, too, covered in augments that made the ugly even uglier. Ekko was surprised at their speed, but less surprised at how they shot to kill. Pilties and their backup didn’t care about the lives of sumpsnipes like him. Good thing the Z-Drive existed to get him out of seemingly inescapable encounters like that one. After a few dozen rewinds, he changed tack and pulled out his latest toy: the Flashbinder. It was meant to explode in a dazzling flash and pull anything not bolted down in toward its center.

But the Flashbinder didn’t work. Well, at least not as intended. It exploded. And that’s when things got interesting. Unlike most of Ekko’s inventions that exploded, the blue-hot magical detonation froze in mid blast. Columns of billowing blue energy fanned out from the epicenter. Bits of the disc’s shrapnel twisted at a snail’s pace along what, at normal explosion velocity, would be a deadly trajectory. Even the spherical blinding flash itself was frozen in space.

And then it got even more interesting. The explosion imploded, reforming itself into the palm-sized Flashbinder, and rewound back toward Ekko, landing square in his palm, as cold as the wind.

Cool, Ekko thought. He rewound the moment so he could throw it at the vigilnauts a few more times. For science, of course.

When Ekko finally got home, his body was tired, but his mind was alert. The apartment was functional – the furniture sparse and with little flourish. Ekko’s room was a little curtained-off nook filled with discarded books, bits of scavenged technology, and hiding spots for the Z-Drive and Flashbinder. Today was one of the rare days both his parents would be home early, and he had something to tell them.

“Mom, Dad.” He practiced to his reflection, which stared back at him from the Z-Drive’s shiny cylindrical surface. “I’m not going to apply to any of the Uppside clans or a snooty Piltie school. I’m staying here with you and my friends. I’ll never turn my back on Zaun.”

The words were filled with the confidence that comes with being alone in an empty apartment, with only walls and reflections to respond. And their response was silence.

He heard the jingle of the keys, muffled by the front door. Without a second to spare, Ekko tucked his Z-Drive under the table and draped a black cloth over it. He didn’t want them worrying about his escapades with an unstable hextech time-manipulation device.

The door opened and Ekko’s parents returned for the first time that night. They looked like strangers to their own son, their jobs aging them even more in the weeks since he’d seen them last together. Their routine was predictable. They’d shuffle home, supply a meager meal purchased with the day’s wages, save the rest of the money for taxes and bribes, then fall asleep in their chairs, chins resting on chests, until Ekko removed their workboots and helped them into their beds.

The bags under their eyes carried enough weight to pull their heads down. Tucked under his mother’s arm was a small paper-wrapped bundle, bound at the ends with twine.

“Hello, my little genius.” His mother expended energy she couldn't afford in an attempt to make the words come alive. Yet her expression in that moment of lightness when she saw her son sitting at the table, waiting, was something no one could fake.

“Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad.” The three of them hadn’t sat at a table as a family in such a long time. He quietly chided himself for not saying something substantial.

His father beamed with pride; then he mock-scowled as he brushed his fingers through his son’s mohawk. Ekko struggled to remember a time when his father didn’t look so old, before the prematurely thinning hair and the deep wrinkles in his brow.

“I thought I told you to cut that hair,” his father said. “It’ll make you stand out in the Piltover academies too much. The Factorywood’s the only place you can look like that. They’ll take anyone. And you are not anyone. How are your applications coming?”

This was the moment. Ekko felt the words he’d practiced swimming up to be spoken. The hope in his father’s eyes gave him pause.

His mother filled that empty moment before Ekko could.

“We have a treat for you.” She set the brown parcel down on the table. They pulled their chairs close to watch as Ekko reached over and untied the knotted twine, straightened both strings, and laid them next to him. He unraveled the butcher paper without a single rip. In the center lay a small loaf of fragrant sweetbread, its crust glazed with honey and candied nuts. The cake was from Elline. She made the finest pastries in all of Zaun, and charged a pretty penny for them too. Ekko and his friends often pilfered her desserts from the rich folk who paid the hefty price without even a tiny hesitation.

Ekko’s head shot up to see his parents’ reaction. Their eyes were beaming. “This is too much,” he said. “We need meat and real supper, not sweets.”

“We would never forget your name day,” his father said with a chuckle. “Looks like you did, though.”

Ekko had completely lost track of what day it really was. Still, the gift was too extravagant. Especially since he was about to shatter their hopes for him. Guilt rose in his throat. “The landlord’ll have our heads if we’re late with rent again.”

“Let us worry about that. You deserve something nice,” his mother said. “Go on, you can have cake for dinner once a year.”

“What are you going to eat?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“I ate at work,” his father lied. “Cheese and meats from Piltover. Real nice stuff.”

They watched Ekko take a tiny bite of the cake. It was sweet and buttery and the crumbs stuck to his fingers. It was so rich, the taste stuck to his tongue. Ekko went to divide the cake into three pieces, but his mother shook her head. Her soft voice hummed the name day song’s playful melody and he knew they wouldn’t partake. It was his parents’ gift to him.

His father would have joined in singing the name day song if he hadn’t already fallen asleep, slumped in his chair, chin dropping to his chest. Ekko glanced over to his mother, her eyes fluttered closed as the melody was swallowed by her own encroaching slumber.

One future Ekko briefly considered was the Factorywood life and barely living wages for some other city’s benefit, for someone else’s glory. He couldn’t stomach the thought. He remembered fragments of conversations, snippets heard through the filter of infant ears, of his parents’ whispered dreams of inventions, and entrance to the clans. Ideas they hoped would change the world and contribute to a future unwritten by the birth of their son. Ekko knew they saw him as their only hope. But he loved life in Zaun. If he did as they wished, who would take care of them or his friends?

He couldn’t dash their dreams. Not tonight, on his name day. Maybe tomorrow.

Ekko didn’t finish his cake beyond the first bite. Instead he primed his Z-Drive. His home shattered into swirling eddies of colored dust. The thrum of the everyday fell to absolute silence. The moment splintered and encircled him in a vortex of light.

When the fragments of the future reassembled into the past, Ekko’s parents were coming home for the second time that night. It would be followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and so on.

Each time he went back, Ekko didn’t change a single thing; the light in his mother’s eyes, his father’s proud smile as he nodded off. But Ekko fought the edges of sleep to hold onto those stolen moments forever, until finally, he let his mother’s soft voice, and the warmth of their little apartment lull him to sleep.

It had been a weeklong sort of day.

By evening, the snow had soaked all the way through Maja’s boots. With each step, she could feel icy water slosh from her heel to her toes, like a flaying knife drawn along her foot.

Other soldiers were struggling, too—fifteen miles downhill in waist-high snow wasn’t easy. But the legionaries at the head of the column weren’t limping. Their steps kept the confident rhythm they’d struck since morning, and their watchful eyes were still glued to the horizon.

They probably have better boots, Maja thought. Trifarians are tough, but nobody’s that tough in standard-issue boots.

“Hey,” Zalt muttered. “Holding up?”

Zalt, the only minotaur in the warband, was taller, wider, and older than everyone else. He was plowing a deep trench through the snow on sturdy hooves. Maja was jealous. “Wish I couldn’t feel my feet,” she said. “If I didn’t have feet, no one could make me march.”

“In the last campaign against the Winter’s Claw, I saw a soldier’s foot freeze solid,” Zalt said. “His toes cracked off when he put his boot on. So, wham! General Darius chopped the whole thing off.”

Maja turned her gaze down the mountain. On a bend in the road far below, she could see Darius himself—the Hand of Noxus, Might incarnate. The general’s huge axe gleamed on his back.

“You’re lucky to be here,” Zalt told her. “Darius knows this road better than anyone. He built it during Darkwill’s campaign. And we can help him take it back.” A little lick of anger burned in Zalt’s eye. “Damned Winter’s Claw!”

Cliffs rose sheer on either side of Darius’ mountain road. Looking up, Maja could see the silhouettes of soldiers standing atop them. “The scouts don’t get a rest, do they?” she asked.

“What?”

She pointed. “The scouts.”

“Which scouts?” Zalt asked.

Then he looked up, too.

Whatever curse he bellowed was smothered by the avalanche.

Two curtains of white separated from the cliff tops above them. Almost instantly, they filled the pass. Chunks of hard-packed snow smashed into the Noxian column, swallowing the soldiers row by row as the avalanche raced downhill. Maja braced, but it was like being hit by a charging basilisk. There was tumbling terror, an awful weightlessness—then darkness, and the crush of winter.

Crunch! Someone heaved Maja out of the snowpack. “Get up,” he commanded—a voice ringing like the clash of blades. “Dig them out!”

She shook herself and started to dig. Then she realized: she was digging beside the general himself.

Darius found a cloven foot in the snow. “Zalt!” Maja shouted. She helped the general heave him out.

Maja looked back up the frosty slope: far above, Winter’s Claw warriors were picking through the scattered remains of the Noxian dead. No retreat now, Maja thought.

Darius was counting heads. “Officers?” he called. Two Trifarian legionaries swiftly ran over. “Report casualties. There’s a river over the next ridge. We’ll fortify there.” Darius surveyed the battered Noxian ranks, his expression burning with barely leashed anger. “If you can’t walk, crawl.”

As the pale sun plummeted toward the horizon, Winter’s Claw skirmishers followed the Noxian column all the way down to the frozen river, peppering them with barbed arrows. However, the probing fire didn’t slow down the disciplined Trifarian Legion. Maja’s breath grew ragged as she hurried to keep up with them.

The frozen river was wide and slick enough to make it a dangerous approach for the Winter’s Claw, and by holding the bank, the Noxians knew any attack would have to come from the nearby treeline. In spite of the sporadic fire from the shadows beneath the pines, Darius ordered two snow trenches dug parallel to the bank. Soldiers repurposed shields into shovels, and Maja saw Darius doing the same.

“Remember this,” Zalt said. “You saw the Hand of Noxus digging with the infantry!”

Everyone then sharpened stakes for the outer trench. Darius checked defenses along the line—but stopped at Zalt. “You’re familiar,” he said.

“I fought in the first Freljord campaign, general!” Zalt nodded at Maja. “Told this youngster how much worse it was!”

Darius looked Maja over. “This is your first action,” he said.

Maja wondered how he could tell. “Yes, general.”

“Don’t waste time on fear,” he told her. “Focus on facing the enemy. On putting your blade in their throats.”

Maja wasn’t sure what to say. “Uh—”

Zzzzip. Something parted the air between them, and a javelin lodged in the wall of the trench.

Maja turned toward the treeline. Branches were shaking, blades were shining, and moonlight glinted on polished bone.

“Stand to!” Darius bellowed.

As the Noxians scrambled for cover, and another volley of javelins flew from the trees, Maja saw a soldier stagger, three feet of knotty wood sprouting from his chest.

Darius pushed past Maja and Zalt, arrows pinging off the axe on his back. “Soon. They’ll charge soon,” he told them. His eyes were lit with fierce excitement. “That’s when we’ll strike!”

And just as he spoke, a snarling came from the trees. A pack of six-legged, catlike shadows raced out of the darkness—trained wildclaws, leaping for Noxian throats.

The Winter’s Claw followed.

As Trifarian legionaries rose from the trench to meet them, Maja drew her sword. She saw Darius bring his axe down like a guillotine. She rose, too, ready to fight—when Zalt collapsed beside her.

A javelin was buried in his shoulder.

“Go,” he gasped, but Maja planted herself beside him. Winter’s Claw warriors were on them in an instant, hatchets swinging. Zalt deflected a skull-crushing strike with his good arm, and Maja tripped their attacker—but instead of delivering the killing blow, she turned back to Zalt.

She could save him. She had to!

She pushed Zalt toward the river, away from the fight, and they slithered out onto the ice behind the Noxian line. As Zalt fell to his knees, struggling for breath, Maja had a sudden urge to flee across the river with him.

“Don’t!” Zalt could tell what she was thinking. “A Noxian never flees!”

Maja’s heart seemed to be beating in her throat. She opened her mouth to argue with Zalt—I am a Noxian, I am—but her mouth refused to form the words.

Then Zalt’s eyes widened, and a heavy hand landed on Maja’s shoulder. She knew who it was before she turned around.

“Face the enemy,” Darius growled.

“I—”

“You’re not facing them.” With a flick of his arm, Darius spun her on the ice. “Noxians who flee, die,” he said.

By your hand, Maja knew. By that axe. As she stared, Darius hefted the axe above his head, and for an instant Maja thought, This is it—my execution.

But the moment never came. A flurry of arrows ricocheted off the flat of the blade, falling harmlessly around them, and Darius lowered the axe again. “Noxians don’t run. We win,” he growled. “We chop them to pieces for what they do to us.”

And suddenly, Maja was angry—at the Winter’s Claw, and at herself, and at her fear. With jerking, frozen limbs, she shoved Zalt aside. She heard him grunt as he hit the ice—but she left him there, and Darius did, too. Beside him, lock-step, she ran into the whirlwind of Noxian steel.

Their blades flashed, and Maja swung hers until her muscles burned and her hand was sore from impact after impact. And with each hammering blow, she reminded herself: Live. Win. Chop them to pieces.

By sunrise, the Winter’s Claw had been routed.

When they returned, Darius and Maja found Zalt at the riverbank, his chest prickled with arrows. Dead.

Maja felt numb. She’d been telling herself, Maybe he rallied. Maybe he fought. But he’d just died where they left him.

“I was trying to protect him,” she told Darius. “He’s—He was a good soldier. I was trying to protect him.”

Darius paused. “That was a poor decision,” he said.

Maja startled. “Sir?”

“You should have been fighting alongside soldiers who still had a chance of living.” He turned his gaze to Maja. She shuddered—his eyes were like iron. “Old Zalt was ready to die. But you should have been ready to fight.”

“Y-yes,” she stammered. “I’ll… I’ll be better, sir.”

Darius turned north, toward the dawn-lit slopes of the Winterspike mountains. Maja could see campfires up there. Smoke rising through the trees.

The Winter’s Claw, waiting.

“Then do it fast,” Darius said.

“Is anything you just heard unclear to you?”

Tifalenji knelt in darkness. She did not raise her head to the voice addressing her, because the voice was part of that darkness. It filled the chamber, swelling warm and sickly sweet, with a scent like rotting flowers. Such a thing was not particularly remarkable to one whose life was sworn to the weft and wane of runes—even a smith as young as Tifalenji did not question what surrounded her, now.

She knew when to accept that something was beyond her understanding.

“All is clear,” she answered.

“Excellent.”

The darkness rasped, as though drawing in breath. “Your mistress spoke highly of you. Resourceful,” it spoke the word in another voice, the voice of Tifalenji’s teacher, “and those who are resourceful can be of great use.”

Tifalenji swallowed. She felt the air displace, the temperature rise as though the chamber were now filled with people. Daring to look out the corner of her eye, she saw the hems of robed figures lining the walls, ringing her and the source of the voice.

“Watch the moon.” Suddenly there was a pulse of light, reflecting cold and silver against the floor. “See its course, how it turns.”

Her mind raced, considering what lay ahead, the moments available to her spilling away one by one, like grains of sand from an hourglass.

“Remember your task above all else.” A hand extended from the dark, cupping Tifalenji’s chin. “What we have entrusted you to find, to return to us, cannot be replaced.” The hand lifted Tifalenji’s head, and she looked up into a perfect reflection of her own face, grinning with another person’s smile.

“You, however, can be.”

Erath was a son of Noxus. From the first generation of his tribe to be born into the empire, his training had begun the day he took his first steps.

Fortitude. Discipline. Resolve.

He was raised among shepherds, tending flocks and beasts of burden, keeping them well until the time for harvest came. He learned to kill, quickly and cleanly, with the small knife he had been taught to never let leave his side. It was a lesson that would do him credit when the day came that Noxus would call upon him to serve.

He had been taught to kill his enemies, his empire’s enemies, but never to hate them. Because an enemy of the empire was never more than a ceremony away from being a wayward brother or sister, brought forth with honor and purpose into the arms of Noxus to stand beside Erath in the line. To make him stronger.

Kill them until they’re family, his father had once told him, when he showed Erath the dull purple trails of his old campaign scars. Erath had never hated his enemies, but here, looking around at the scope of what surrounded him, without even knowing who their enemy was, he pitied them.

The streets quaked with an endless procession, tens of thousands of soldiers passing down the boulevards and avenues of the Immortal Bastion. A dozen tongues overlapped in the primal shouted rhythm of battle chants, marching calls, and war song. The full unbridled might of the Noxian host was on display, with blades and the hands that wielded them from across the breadth of the empire. Tribal war parties sauntered down the roads, clad in skins and ceremonial dress, followed by tightly regimented cohorts of troops encased in blackened iron plate, and a contingent of brightly uniformed naval soldiers from Shurima.

And more after them, and on, and on.

Countless peoples, but a single empire. The spectacle, the sheer demonstration of strength, stilled Erath’s heart to see it.

Erath’s own tribe was in the midst of disembarking from the riverboat that had ferried them from the plains of Dalamor down south to the capital. He and his comrades had marveled over their oars at the sight of the Immortal Bastion, the towering central monolith of ancient stone visible two days out from their arrival. He looked up from watching his chieftain Yhavi squabble with a gaggle of quartermasters to behold it again, now within the boundaries of the city proper. The sun was trapped behind the trio of enormous towers at the center of the Bastion, locked away like a shining jewel.

The thought of their unknown enemy returned to Erath’s mind, and he smiled. What could stand before this?

Donnis, one of the spearmen, nudged Erath from his thoughts, nodding toward their chieftain who was beckoning Erath over. He quickly moved to stand before Yhavi, who had just been handed a ream of vellum inked with their orders.

“We move soon,” Yhavi began, speaking in their tribal tongue as he looked over their mandate.

“Have they said where the fighting will be, yet?” asked Erath, letting his excitement get the better of him.

“No,” Yhavi frowned, squinting at the Noxian script before looking at the boy. “But it won’t matter to you. You won’t be coming with us.”

“I don’t understand,” Erath adopted his chieftain’s frown. “I’m to be your blade squire.” Erath had won the honor in a blood trial before the tribe departed home. It was Erath’s right to bear Yhavi’s wargear on the battle train, to hone and oil his relic blade on the eve of battle, to arm his chieftain and bind his wounds, and should calamity pass, to see to Yhavi’s body if he fell. If not Erath, then who?

“You shall be a blade squire indeed,” said Yhavi. “Just not mine. You have been seconded elsewhere.” He sensed the confusion in Erath, and his tone hardened. “For Noxus.”

Erath straightened, pushing the questions from his thoughts, his features neutral and firm as he thudded a fist against his chest in salute. “For the empire.”

Yhavi returned the salute, and dipped his head in approval. “We all shall answer when called, blades sharp, minds ready.”

With a deep breath, Erath put his disappointment out of his mind. “I am ready.”

Yhavi’s grim facade cracked, and he offered the boy a warm grin. “I know you are, Erath. He would see you this day and feel pride, I know it.” Erath glanced down for a moment, and Yhavi handed him a small scroll, sealed and tightly rolled. “Proceed to the ninth gate of the Bastion, across the canal just ahead of us. The legionaries will stop you. Show them this.”

Even a mention of the Trifarian Legion made Erath stand straighter. He studied the scroll, brightly bleached paper compared to the rough vellum of his brethren’s mandate. He had never seen paper before. It felt delicate in his fingers.

“It seems fate has its own course for you to walk, enhasyi,” Yhavi favored Erath with the tribal expression for a warrior poised to make his mark on the warpath. He laid a scarred paw of a hand on Erath’s shoulder, before sending him on his way. “Walk it well.”

Erath navigated the bustling throng of a city readying itself for war. For a boy raised in a lonely shepherd’s village, the scale of everything was astounding. Towering monuments and buildings of stone, iron, and glass loomed over streets worn smooth by armies marching to the next campaign. Erath moved along the current of humanity, barely able to lift his arms within the crowd. He had never considered there could be so many peoples, so many languages. It was nearly overwhelming, but he kept his mind to his duty.

Few from the tribe were learned in Noxian, but Erath knew a passable amount of Va-Noxian, the unified spoken tongue, and a paltry understanding of the empire’s formal written language. He knew enough to guess at the signs and engravings to guide him along toward the ninth gate, just up ahead, where he was to report to his new commander.

Shouldering the sackcloth pack holding his kit, Erath reached into his jerkin, passing over the bone pendant he wore around his neck. He laid a reassuring hand on the pendant for a moment before touching his orders, inscribed on the tightly rolled sheet of bleached paper. The value of the tiny thing made his mind race as to who his new leader would be, and how important their mission. He was so lost in thought he didn’t notice falling under a pair of towering shadows cast over the courtyard of the gate.

“Khosis g’vyar!”

A sharp crash of iron froze Erath in place. He looked up from the ground, finding himself staring down the gleaming edges of twin halberds, each longer than he was tall and leveled at his heart. Wielding the spears were monsters of blackened iron plate, capes the hue of fresh blood billowing from their shoulders, glowering down at him from the impassive masks of spiked war helms.

Erath’s breath caught in his throat. Trifarian Legionaries. He noticed then that the gates weren’t barred. These two, of the Noxian warrior elite, they were the bars.

The challenge repeated, thundering from one of the legionaries, somehow deepened and projected to an inhuman degree by his mask. The words were unfamiliar, thick with a strange dialect.

Was it Va-Noxian? Erath squinted, remembering what he had learned. The warrior tilted his head, clearing his throat with a sound like rubble dislodging.

“Where go, little blade?” the legionary rumbled again, in more clipped tones.

Erath exhaled like a drowning man finally reaching the water’s surface, able to understand the words. Still his tongue defied him, thick and still behind teeth he desperately fought to keep from chattering. Slowly, he reached into his jerkin, wincing as he saw the legionaries tense, and produced the scroll.

The warriors exchanged a glance, and one of them, the one who had spoken, shouldered his halberd. He advanced on Erath with heavy, pounding bootsteps, stopping just a pace away from the boy. Erath looked up, barely reaching the man’s chest, and held out his orders.

The legionary plucked the scroll from Erath’s grasp, the paper looking ridiculous in his thick, gauntleted fingers. With a quick squeeze he crushed the seal in his fist, and the scroll unspooled in a small shower of broken bits of red wax. After studying it for a moment, the legionary spun on his heel and hammered the butt of his halberd three times against the polished stone floor, the boom of each impact ringing from the dark archway of the gate.

Within seconds, Erath heard the soft, echoing slaps of sandaled feet approaching. A robed figure emerged from the darkness of the gate, her features hidden in the shadow of a red cowl. She stopped before the legionary, completely unfazed by his menacing, armored bulk, and took the scroll from him.

“You will follow me,” she said to Erath without sparing him a glance, turning and setting off across the courtyard. Erath hurried after her, looking back over his shoulder to watch the legionary plod back to his place beside his fellow guard.

Erath followed the robed woman as they crossed over another canal and wound deeper into the bustling city. They kept to side streets, avoiding the larger boulevards packed with troop movements and hemmed by rows of barrack tents arrayed on either side.

Before long, Erath began to pick up strong scents on the air. Straw, cut grass, dung, smells that were familiar to any shepherd or beast herder. He heard the low baying of animals, some he recognized, many he did not.

The narrow alley they were walking ended, opening up into a wide open square filled with people tending animals. Massive pack beasts grazed on confined plots. Men and women checked pens of sheep and counted chickens in their coops. It seemed to Erath as though the area had served some other purpose, maybe as a park or public garden, but now had been requisitioned and was being used as part of the greater mobilization.

The comfort of familiarity washed over Erath, setting his mind at ease as they stopped before a tent at the periphery of the square. The robed woman returned the scroll to Erath and pulled the flap aside, gesturing for him to enter and disappearing as soon as he had.

Inside the tent the air was cold, and thick with the spicy tang of incense that made Erath’s eyes water. He wrinkled his nose as he stood at the entrance, squinting to try to study the interior. The only light came from a kneeling figure at the center of the tent, her arms weaving a strand of glowing green runes around a sword that hung suspended in the air above her.

Erath watched the magic, entranced by the elegant dance of the runes as they burned themselves into the blade of the sword and vanished one by one. He remembered watching the shamans of his tribe as a child, when they turned the air into fire for their rituals. He avoided staring directly at the symbols, as even out of the corner of his eye they made his teeth itch. The woman turned her head slightly as the last rune winked out, catching her blade as it fell and rising to her feet.

“Reporting for duty,” Erath snapped to attention and saluted. He extended the scroll to her. “My orders.”

The woman ignored him, moving as though in a trance to set her blade on an arming rack. She lit a lantern at the center of the tent, bathing them both in soft, amber light. She was tall, her dusky skin speaking of a home far from the chill northern reaches Erath hailed from. He saw the same green light from the runes flicker once in her eyes, as she glanced at him.

“Literate?”

Erath hesitated. Her Va-Noxian had a lilting, mellifluous accent, far different from the curt and guttural voices he had heard so far in the capital. The woman’s eyes narrowed.

“You are literate?” she asked again. She looked either fatigued or bored, and Erath couldn’t tell which.

Erath nodded. “I know some of the written word, mistress.”

“Did you read this?” she asked, holding up the scroll Erath realized was no longer in his hand.

“No, mistress,” Erath shook his head.

“Good,” she said sharply, tucking the roll of paper into her sleeve. “I am Tifalenji, and from this moment, my word is law to you. Read, think, and do what I say, when I say, and much unpleasantness will be avoided between us. Do you understand?”

Erath saluted again. “Yes, mistress.”

“Once we are clear of the capital, there will be no more saluting.” Tifalenji took up a ledger from a table, thumbing through its contents.

“May I ask a question, mistress?”

She looked up. “Do not make a habit of it.”

“How may I serve?” Erath asked. “What are to be my duties?”

Tifalenji snapped the ledger shut. “I needed someone versed in the care and upkeep of beasts, young and of hearty enough stock. You are from the plains of Dalamor, yes?”

“Yes, mistress,” he fought to keep anger from his voice. He had nearly had to kill his cousin to win his blood trial and become his chieftain’s second, and now he was back to tending beasts? “I was a shepherd there.”

She offered him a thin smile, and Erath could swear he could hear something snarling behind him, just within earshot. “The creatures under your care here may be more… exotic.”

The flap of the tent was thrown open in a snap of whipping canvas. Erath turned, his hand immediately on the grip of his knife.

“I wouldn’t,” said Tifalenji, as Erath discovered the source of the snarling.

Four drakehounds lined the entrance to the tent, sleek beasts of taut rippling muscle, bony carapace, and razor-sharp claws. Erath was told stories as a boy of when the tribes of the plains were brought into the Empire, that the chief of chiefs had been honored with a single drakehound pup, a gift worth more than three wagons of silver. He had never seen one up close, let alone a whole pack of them.

A woman in gleaming war-plate stood behind them, glowering from behind an armored mask. Her hair was a stunning, crimson red, bound at the top of her head and flowing like a crest down her back. The hounds parted as she stepped forward into the tent, a pair to either side.

“Arrel,” Tifalenji inclined her head. “You made good time, tracker.”

Erath beheld Arrel, still unable to imagine someone owning four drakehounds. “Are you of the nobility, mistress?”

Arrel flicked her eyes to Erath, as gray and cold as her armor, then back to Tifalenji.

“Our blade squire,” said Tifalenji to Arrel before looking at Erath. “We don’t send the nobility to Tokogol.”

“The western frontier,” said Erath. “How did you find Tokogol, mistress?”

“Cold,” Arrel grumbled. Her voice was low, her accent severe.

“I see,” Erath nodded. “And your journey here?”

“Long,” Arrel glanced back at Tifalenji. “Does it always talk this much?”

Erath started. “Have I displeased you, mistress?”

“Fourth,” Arrel called. One of the drakehounds snapped forward from Arrel’s side, placing itself between her and Erath. Barely restrained violence radiated from the beast’s muscled frame. Thin strands of saliva descended from its bony mask, pebbled with froth from a growling throat.

“If you had displeased me, blade squire,” said Arrel, “this hound would have made it known to you. And I am not your mistress.”

“Forgiveness,” Erath took a slow step back. “How would you have me address you, then?”

“Unless necessary, I would have that you not.” She tensed, as though speaking this much had made her throat sore. She flicked her wrist, signaling an end to the discussion.

“There is a quartermaster outside gathering our supplies,” said Tifalenji, handing Erath a requisitions order. “Go and find him.”

Erath exhaled, walking carefully around Arrel and her hounds to exit the tent. He heard Arrel ask a question as he left, the same one he still asked himself.

“Why am I here, runesmith?”

“Never seen a basilisk before, eh, boy?”

Erath barely heard the quartermaster, his attention consumed by the great, lumbering beast before him. A giant saurian, the basilisk’s green flesh was hard as iron, and bulging with bands of dense muscle from its tree-trunk limbs to its long, thick tail. It looked to Erath as though it could crush a man into a paste without ever realizing it had done so.

“What are you used to tending?” the quartermaster asked.

“Sheep,” Erath answered.

“Ah, don’t you fret,” the quartermaster clapped Erath on the back. “Just think of him like a big sheep, then. He’s still a baby so you’ll be fine with ’im. Time hasn’t made ’im mean, yet.”

“This,” Erath looked at the man, “is a baby?”

The quartermaster chuckled. “We use the bigguns to break down castle walls, son.”

Erath glanced at the requisitions order the runesmith had given him. Mercifully it was written in plain terms, mostly numbers, and the quartermaster had helped with anything he couldn’t understand. The basilisk would be carrying the better part of an entire campsite on its back, but it looked like they were carrying much more equipment than would be needed for three people, even with Arrel’s drakehounds.

“Everything in order?” Tifalenji appeared behind Erath. He noticed she was fully armored now, with her rune-etched sword on her back and a canvas rucksack at her feet.

“We’re getting him squared away,” replied the quartermaster. “Most everything but the waterskins are loaded, we’ll be takin’ care of that next and you’ll be on your way.”

“Good,” said the runesmith, checking the height of the sun. “We’ll link with the caravans leaving out the south entrance. We need to be on the road and clear of the city before sunfall.”

“The road?” Erath asked. Ever since he arrived at the capital, Erath had watched the armies and warbands of Noxus, including his own tribe, march to embark on great troop ships at the docks. “We won’t be traveling with the others across the sea?”

The runesmith shook her head. “No, we aren’t finished on the mainland, yet. There’s still someone we need to find first.”

They left the organized chaos of the capital behind. The towering silhouette of the Immortal Bastion lingered on the horizon as Erath, Arrel, and Tifalenji joined a massive procession of troops moving east across the southern steppe of Noxus. Like a gargantuan snake of red banners and dark iron they marched, traversing flat plains that reminded Erath of his home, back in Dalamor.

“There’s just too many of us,” a grizzled line sergeant had told Erath, waiting in the ration line as they camped one night. “The capital’s docks are huge and they could run them day and night—and they are—and it still wouldn’t be enough for the full mobilization.”

“That’s why we are going east?” Erath asked.

The sergeant grunted, smiling at his beaten tin cup as it was filled with stew and a hunk of hard brown bread. “While the rest of them get to share a damp boat’s innards with some rats for company, we get to stretch our legs a bit before we split off to berths across the coast.”

“And then where?” Erath nodded his thanks to the cook as he received his own portion. “Where are all of us going?”

“Nobody’s told you?” the line sergeant scoffed. “We’re going to Ionia, boy.”

Erath stumbled to a halt, his food nearly falling from numb fingers. He felt for his chest, finding the lump of the pendant he wore. Ionia.

“You’re holding up the line,” the sergeant frowned at him.

“The last time…” Erath said quietly. “The war. The empire, they levied half the men of my tribe to go fight.” He looked up at the sergeant. “None of them came back.”

“Sounds like you’re gonna get a chance to get some blood back.” The sergeant pulled the collar of his tunic down, revealing a wicked red scar that branched like lightning across his entire chest. “Magic. A lot of us got scores to settle over there, kid, and we’ve been patient. Now it’s time to collect.”

Erath offered the sergeant a thin smile he didn’t feel, and wandered back to his billet, suddenly not feeling hungry anymore.

The march continued on, brisk and uneventful. As the days went on, more segments of the battle train branched off, heading to ports they were assigned to deploy from. Erath continued to feel isolated from his companions, the runesmith Tifalenji aloof and Arrel hostile, so he focused instead on what he had been seconded from his tribe to do, and cared for the party’s hulking basilisk.

Despite the creature’s immense size and strength, the quartermaster back in the capital had been right. Erath found him docile and receptive to his care, something he hoped with time would extend to Arrel’s drakehounds, though he didn’t hang too much hope on that. The pack practically orbited the armored Noxian at all times, totally obedient to their alpha.

Erath had taken to calling the basilisk Talz, the name of his old herding dog when he had been a boy. The lumbering saurian responded to his new name as Erath led him to graze and kept him in line with the convoy.

A week into their journey, the runesmith gathered the party, announcing that while the main body was continuing east, they would be taking their own path down a southern branch.

“We make for the Bloodcliffs,” said Tifalenji, as Erath watched the convoy slowly shrink in the distance, still an unbroken column of Noxian warriors marching to the coast.

“What’s there?” he asked.

“Not what,” answered the runesmith, “but who.”

Erath nodded, remembering Tifalenji had mentioned someone else before. He looked back at the extra supplies loaded onto Talz’s back. “Who is it?”

“A haughty k’naad,” scoffed Arrel, pouring water from a flask into her palm to allow her hounds to drink. First’s ears perked up at the word, which Erath didn’t know but could guess as to its meaning. Arrel sneered at Tifalenji. “We are wasting our time, we don’t need her.”

“I’ll be the reckoner of that,” the runesmith replied flatly. She glanced at Erath, and sighed through her teeth. “Her name is Marit, blade squire.”

“Marit’s quite keen on reminding anyone within earshot that she was of the nobility before the revolution,” grumbled Arrel. “They stripped her family of their estate and power, though she hardly seems to realize that from talking to her.”

Arrel scanned the landscape. “She went on and on about these wondrous lands her family held.” She shook her head. “What a shithole.”

“She is an elite soldier,” countered Tifalenji. “Experienced and battle-tested. She will be an asset, and that is the end of this conversation.”

The road to the Bloodcliffs cut through arid plains and low, sunbaked hills. The heat was a new experience for Erath, far from the fog-blanketed chill of Dalamor. He took care to ration what water they had as they traveled beneath the glaring sun in a cloudless, blisteringly blue sky.

Arrel paused, and Erath patted Talz’s flank to bring him to a halt as he watched the tracker. She knelt, pressing a palm to the earth. “Something’s close.”

From atop Talz’s back, the runesmith drew a spyglass from her belt, extending the brass tube and looking through it. “Riders ahead,” she confirmed. “And they aren’t Noxian.”

Erath looked, seeing two tiny figures as they crested the top of a hill. He was just able to make out that they were on horseback. His pulse quickened, and his hand fell to the leather-wound haft of the short falchion at his hip. After so long on the road, day after day of monotony, the prospect of a skirmish was refreshingly welcome.

“Second, Third,” Arrel called, and the two drakehounds leapt forward.

“Wait,” said Tifalenji, now looking behind them. “There’s more.”

Erath turned, seeing more figures appear behind them, and then to either side. He barely heard the sharp note of a horn, as they descended the hills toward them.

“Raiders,” Tifalenji drew the runesword on her back. “Form a circle, now.”

The ground began to shake, soft at first but steadily climbing to thunder as the horsemen charged. Erath turned to Talz, trying to find some means to root him to the ground in case the basilisk panicked, and recoiled as Tifalenji struck him across the head.

“Focus!” she hissed.

Erath forgot Talz, pulling his falchion and gripping it tightly. He distanced himself from Arrel and the runesmith, trying to cover his third of the tiny perimeter they made. The raiders were in full view now, lightly armored with billowing cloaks and teal banners streaming from the tips of barbed lances.

The Noxians braced for the charge. Emerald fire lit the runes along Tifalenji’s blade. Arrel’s hounds howled.

At the last second, the horses peeled to either side, sprinting in a circle around them. The dust kicked up by their iron-shod hooves grew into a thick, whirling curtain, rising to cut them off from the world. Erath could just barely make out the silhouettes whipping around them.

The air whistled and Erath leapt to one side as a lance embedded itself where he’d just been standing. He heard Arrel bark a command and one of her hounds leapt into the dust. Tifalenji began chanting, the words hurting Erath’s ears as worms of green light shivered across her blade.

“Say-RAH-dech!” she roared, slashing with her blade and sending a wave of jade lightning through the wall.

Erath couldn’t tell if she hit anything. If Arrel’s hound was still alive. Everything was chaos. Noise. A keening wail split the air. The cyclone caging them shuddered. Erath heard something rip, and leapt back as a jet of dark blood burst from the wall of dust, coating his face and chest with hot crimson.

He stood there. Help them, you idiot.

The dust began to settle, and Erath summoned his courage. He focused on a shadow directly ahead of him and charged with falchion raised and the death cry of his tribe on his lips. He sprinted through the stinging grit, and as he opened his eyes he found what stood before him was no horse.

Whatever it was, its rider had a glaive at his throat in an instant.

“Now, now,” came a voice, smooth and cultured. “My dear steed feasted well today but she may yet have room for more.”

The speartip lifted Erath’s jaw, and he followed it up to the speaker. She was a tall, thin woman, her face hidden behind a mask of iron and black leather. A Noxian banner hung from her glaive, while a second tattered standard Erath didn’t recognize was gathered around her shoulders like a cloak.

She rode confidently upon a lithe, bipedal creature, all sleek muscle and lashing tail, somewhere between a lizard and a bird. Its vicious visage bared its blood-stained fangs in challenge. The dust had cleared now, revealing the dead raiders around them in various states of dismemberment.

Erath felt the penetrating gaze from behind the mask, studying him. Her eyes narrowed in amusement as she dipped her glaive to a dead raider, cutting his banner free with a flick of her wrist. Only then did he see the others dangling from her mount as Tifalenji and Arrel approached.

“Arrel, you icy k’naad!” the Noxian exclaimed, striding out confidently to meet the party. “Where did they dig you out of? Last I heard you were hunting bounties in that wretched stink-pit Zaun.” She shivered theatrically. “Like missing teeth, that city. Hideous!”

“Marit,” Arrel said flatly. Erath glanced at the tracker. Even for Arrel, the greeting seemed cold, and he saw something different in the steel grey of her eyes.

“And who are your friends here?” Marit regarded Erath and Tifalenji. “I find it hard to believe you would just happen to be passing through.”

“Hail,” said Tifalenji, dipping her head in greeting. “Your instincts are true enough. We come in the empire’s service. Our mandate.”

The runesmith handed Marit a scroll. The masked woman unfurled it, her dark eyes flicking up to regard Tifalenji several times as she read it.

“Under penalty of death,” Marit read dramatically, before handing the scroll back to Tifalenji. “Well this all seems to be in order. When do we leave?”

“Now,” answered Tifalenji.

“Fair enough,” Marit eyed Erath. “manservant, eh?”

He hesitated. “Uh, I’m a blade squi—”

“You may address me as ‘my lady,’ manservant,” Marit gestured to her mount. “And this is my glorious steed, the Lady Henrietta Eliza Vaspaysian IV of Orogonthis.” She looked at Erath, narrowing her eyes. “But you do appear quite stupid, so I suppose just Henrietta will suffice.”

Henrietta swung her long, muscled neck in Erath’s direction, breathing out a chittering hiss through her gleaming fangs.

“What does she eat?” asked Erath.

“People who get on my nerves,” said Marit as she turned away toward her pavilion. “Tend to her ends, little man, and speak when spoken to.”

Erath opened his mouth to reply, but Henrietta hissed again, and he bit down on his anger.

Together they worked quickly, striking Marit’s camp and loading it onto Talz. The basilisk bore the weight easily, as though he didn’t even notice the added burden. Erath was beginning to understand how a fully grown one could level fortifications.

“Is everything ready to move?” asked the runesmith.

Erath nodded, and she signaled for them to move. Marit leapt up into a polished leather saddle on Henrietta’s back, binding the Noxian banner to her glaive and the second standard around her neck like a cloak.

“Come on then, Talz!” Erath called, urging the basilisk from where it drank and munched on the soft grasses of the watering ground.

Marit cocked her head to one side. “Wait, he named our pack animal?”

“He did,” said Arrel.

Marit scoffed. “Well, I suppose we can use the idiot’s tears to season the meat when we have to eat it on the trail.”

“Those riders,” said Tifalenji, nodding in the direction where she had watched them vanish over the horizon.

“Yes?” Marit leaned down from her saddle. “What about them?”

“Aren’t you concerned they’ll simply go back to raiding in your absence?”

Marit waved her hand. “Nonsense. These are my ancestral lands. If they choose to be good stewards of them then fine, and if they don’t, I’ll just kill them all when I return. Worry gives you frown-lines.”

A few days’ ride took them from the Bloodcliffs. The runesmith kept their pace brisk, having the party sleep in shifts along the trail and only stopping when absolutely necessary. Erath saw her each night, either on the road or at camp, sitting apart from the others with her eyes intent upon the moon.

They skirted east across the base of low mountains before arriving at their port of call at the Drakkengate, at the first light of dawn. Erath found the docks there to be just as bustling as any other, mired in the same organized chaos of armed mobilization that seemed to be taking place over the entire eastern coast of Noxus. Thousands of warriors, and the countless armorers, cooks, builders, menders, priests, and forge-smiths that attended to them, filed into the holds of great troop ships, ready to unfurl immense crimson sails and dip their oars for the voyage across the sea.

Erath set about hunting down supplies as soon as they arrived. While the ships were already provisioned for soldiers and more common animals for the crossing, their party had accumulated a variety of exotic creatures he was now responsible for. Luckily for Erath, the mandate the runesmith carried granted them swift passage through the congested queues and overruled any of the more obstinate quartermasters. Before midday, they were ready to board.

“There,” Tifalenji pointed toward the docks. “That is our ship. The Atoniad.”

Erath’s eyes fell upon the vessel. The Atoniad was a troop carrier of unmistakably Noxian design, from its strong lines and dark iron plating to the tightly bound red sails, eager to be unleashed and carry the ship forward onto the waves. The largest boat he had ever embarked upon was the river skiff that had borne his tribe to the Immortal Bastion, and comparing that to the Atoniad was like comparing a toothpick to a battle axe.

Lines of men and women were already boarding, filing up gangplanks, while other wider ramps admitted animals and pallets of tools, stone, and lumber.

“I don’t see many soldiers,” said Erath.

“We’ll be traveling with mostly laborers and stonemasons,” said Tifalenji. “The Atoniad is bound for Fae’lor, not the main islands.”

“Fae’lor?” Erath glanced at the runesmith. “We go to the great fortress, then?”

“What’s left of it,” muttered Arrel.

Word had reached as far as Dalamor of the tragedy at Fae’lor. Erath had gathered with the tribe around a fire as the shamans relayed how a cowardly band of Ionians had assaulted the Noxian fortress there. In their desperation, they had unleashed magic that was beyond their power to control, wrecking horrific damage to the defenses, there.

A fortnight later, the tribe had received the call to carry their spears to the capital.

All of their spears.

“We embark,” said Tifalenji. She pointed to the wider access points. “Take the beasts and get them aboard, blade squire.”

Erath dipped his head, looking over at Arrel. “Shall I take the hounds as well?”

All four drakehounds glared at Erath. They somehow managed to snarl at him in the exact same pitch, at the exact same time. A chorus of angry jaws.

“They will remain with me,” Arrel snapped a finger and the pack fell silent.

Erath gathered up the reins for Talz. Marit handed over the reins to Henrietta, favoring her steed with a final caress down her jawline.

“Make sure the good lady has her own accommodations,” called Marit as Erath led the beasts toward the ship. “If you put anything else in with her, she’ll be alone soon enough.”

The open air was cold, and sharp with salt spray. Twelve other ships sailed beside the Atoniad in the squadron, their red sails full and taut with a generous wind that at least for now handled the duty of the oarsmen below decks. Gossip aboard amongst bored soldiers had spread the rumor that they had passed through pirate routes at some point the previous night, though few of them could imagine any corsair fool enough to try their luck against a dozen Imperial warships packed from bow to stern with war-edgy killers.

Erath turned from looking out across the squadron as Arrel approached, nearly saluting before remembering he had been told not to. Arrel ignored the awkwardness. She glanced down, noting how tightly the boy held on to the railing. “Your first passage?”

The blade squire nodded. “Three days at sea, and still another three, they say, until we get to Fae’lor.” He waved a hand at the endless span of churning grey waves stretching all the way to the horizon, broken only by the salt-shrouded shapes of the other warships. “I never thought there could be this much water.”

Arrel grunted, noncommittal.

“You were in the war before,” Erath said, uneasy with the subject. “Ionia, what is it like?”

Arrel did not answer him at once. The tracker stared out over the ocean, reaching down to scratch the sleek, leathery skin behind Second’s bony crestmask. She breathed slowly. “It is a place of beauty, and of death.”

“All of Ionia is just one giant jungle raptor with its head cut off,” Marit appeared from behind them, strutting forward to lounge against the railing. “We decapitated it last time, and now it’s just thrashing about, making a mess, too stupid to realize it’s already dead.”

“I’ve hunted raptors,” said Arrel. “And even headless they can still gut you.”

“So it is war, then?” asked Erath. “Another war with Ionia?”

Marit shrugged. “Damned if I know, but the Grand General sure shoved a lot of boots across the ocean just to rattle swords. Just hope he has enough backbone to let us finish what we start, this time.”

Arrel walked away, and Erath looked back at the fathomless expanse of gently crashing waves. “What is the name of this ocean?” he asked.

“Who cares what it’s called?” Marit leaned over Erath’s shoulder before she stalked off. “It’s ours.”

Erath had never been so grateful to see dry land.

The fortress of Fae’lor grew in size and definition on the horizon before them. The Atoniad had made speed in her voyage to the island, but Erath had discovered he was far from suited for a life on the seas. The heaving, rolling motion of their warship had stolen many meals from his stomach, offered to the ocean in the queasy tribute of abrupt sickness. Everything was soaked, coated in a crackling crust of salt that burned his skin.

He had kept below decks for the most part, ensuring that the creatures in his care endured the passage with as much comfort as he was able to offer. Talz seemed fine, eating regularly and spending the majority of the time in his pen, sleeping. Lady Henrietta, however, had required more diligent attention. A nimble and energetic beast, Marit’s steed was clearly unhappy with the confines of the ship. Erath took extra care during her feedings, to ensure he did not become the meal himself, and looked forward to getting Henrietta off the Atoniad where she could stretch her legs.

When the call for land had gone out from the scouts at the ship’s bow, Erath hurried above decks to see. The top deck was crowded with Noxians eager for their own view. At first it was little more than a smudge in the distance, faintly more defined than the hazy stripe where the water met the sky, but the closer they came, the more distinct it grew. Erath glimpsed what appeared to be banks of fog surrounding the island, tinted a ruddy brown that upon closer inspection became red.

Fae’lor was surrounded by Noxian ships.

There were concentric circles of vessels ringing the island, defense pickets that were constantly shifting. The Atoniad was halted by the outermost patrols, a pair of frigates that lashed themselves to the larger vessel with boarding hooks as squads of naval soldiers came aboard.

Erath noted their stern countenances as they inspected the troop ship, weapons in hand as they pored over the captain’s mandate and manifest. They scoured every deck, and the blade squire watched as a trio of robed blood mages studied every soldier onboard, softly chanting as they looked every man and woman in the eye.

“What are they looking for, mistress?” he asked Tifalenji.

“Signs of subterfuge,” replied the runesmith. “Deceptions. Wild magic.”

To Erath it all seemed strange. “But we are all Noxian soldiers, on an imperial ship. Does this not seem paranoid?”

“Patience, boy,” said Tifalenji. “When we dock at Fae’lor, you will understand.”

After they had been over every inch of the Atoniad, a contingent of the soldiery remained aboard while the others returned to their frigate, and the ship was cleared to advance to the next ring of the blockade. The inspections and checks repeated with each checkpoint, the guard detail rotating each time the Atoniad was stopped. Erath had been poked, prodded, and scrutinized so many times that when they finally had the harbor in sight, he questioned whether any of his own comrades trusted him, or anyone for that matter.

And then he got a better look at Fae’lor, and understood why.

The fortress had been gutted. He could make out only echoes of the great ramparts that had once stood at its heart, the formerly impregnable fortifications reduced to shattered remnants that rose from the ground like blackened, broken teeth. But the extent of the devastation went far beyond the walls and towers. The very land itself was broken open, torn apart and ripped out, bearing all the hallmarks of some incredible natural disaster.

The Atoniad drew up to her berth, and Noxians leapt to work both aboard and on the dock as soon as she came to a halt. Craftsmen rushed out to their assigned posts, while raw materials and supplies were offloaded and taken ashore. Erath went below decks, trying to put the shock of the island from his mind as he went about getting Talz and Henrietta off the Atoniad.

Standing out against the herds of livestock and more mundane pack animals, Erath led his beasts up a wide ramp leading from the ship’s hold. Waiting as those ahead of him were processed and allowed into Fae’lor, he stood transfixed as he watched crews descend over the wreckage of another warship like a swarm of furious ants.

Great winches and chains hauled the wreck up out of the water, a piece at a time. Teams scrambled down within, pulling out the pale, bloated shapes of the fallen in droves. She was more than twice the tonnage of the Atoniad, and her hull had been broken in two, like a stick over a man’s knee.

What kind of power could have possibly done such a thing?

Erath thought back to when he stood in the shadow of the Immortal Bastion. The certainty he felt there, seeing the empire marching to war, that there was nothing in creation that could possibly stand against them.

For the first time, seeing what had befallen Fae’lor with his own eyes, he felt doubt creep into his heart.

Finally he reached the end of the ramp, stepping from soaked wood onto cracked rock. The air was thick, humid, and dusty. It smelled of spice, things Erath couldn’t place as he realized, at long last, that he was there.

This was Ionia.

Erath lost track of how long he was standing there, or how the leather of Henrietta’s reins was sliding through his fingers. By the time he was aware of it, Marit’s mount was loping into the camp.

“Hey!” The blade squire started to pursue her, before looking back at Talz. “Stay,” he warned, drawing his knife and pinning the basilisk’s reins to the ground with it before sprinting after Henrietta.

“Whoa,” he called to the roving saurian as she stalked between a line of billet tents. She stopped, her long neck swiveling to regard Erath. Henrietta hissed at him through the gleaming metal of her chanfron, what Marit called “her jewelry.” Enclosing her face and skull, it was part protective helm, part weapon, accentuating her already vicious fangs with sharpened iron blades.

“Easy, my lady,” Erath coaxed, arms wide as he slowly closed the distance between them. “Easy, now.”

“Control that thing!” bellowed a voice from a group nearby. Both Henrietta and the blade squire shot them a hostile glare.

“She’s been cooped up on a ship for days,” Erath barked at the soldiers. He took advantage of Henrietta’s diverted attention and grabbed hold of her reins, wrapping the leather around his forearm. “She needs exercise, you want to be it? Then stay out of the way!”

Erath stared down the soldiers and watched them disperse, only registering after a time that the runesmith was calling for him. He went back to gather up Talz’s reins and guided his charges along, tugging the basilisk forward and holding Henrietta back as he headed toward where Tifalenji waited with Arrel and Marit. He saw new tension in the runesmith’s companions as he approached, a tightness in their postures that hadn’t been there before.

“Take your time,” Marit sneered, snatching Henrietta’s reins from Erath. Arrel squatted down, fingers brushing over the rubble strewn over the ground as her drakehounds orbited her.

“This was old magic,” muttered the tracker. “Something long-sleeping, now roused.”

“Where did you learn to sense magic?” Marit arced a skeptical eyebrow.

“Here,” Arrel answered, barely above a whisper.

“Oh joy,” replied Marit. She glanced at Tifalenji expectantly. “Well?”

“The last member of our expedition is here, at Fae’lor,” the runesmith replied. “We simply need to find her.”

“Just look for a dueling pit,” said Arrel. “She won’t be far from the scent of blood.”

Erath nodded, growing accustomed to gleaning what he could from inferences and cryptic words. “Does she have a beast that I am to care for as well?”

“Oh, manservant,” Marit shook her head. “Teneff? She is the beast.”

Arrel was right. While Fae’lor was in the midst of its reconstruction, it still remained a Noxian military camp. They followed the sound of ringing steel, sharper than the rhythm coming from the forges’ hammers, leading them to where the warriors on the island trained.

Past rows of billet tents were dug a series of shallow pits, each of them occupied by a pair of dueling soldiers. With blunted swords, wooden staves, or bare hands they sparred, but one in particular had attracted a crowd. The party had to muscle their way through the watching soldiers to catch a glimpse into the pit.

Two Noxians circled each other in full war-plate. One wielded a training sword and buckler, the other a heavy iron hook mounted on a length of chain. The soldiers watching cheered the pair as they measured distance and exchanged feints.

The swordsman sensed an opening. He lunged forward, flicking his buckler into his opponent’s face while slashing low with his sword. The other fighter leapt back, just shy of the blade, while throwing her hooked chain to ensnare the man’s shield arm. She whipped her arm down, wrenching the swordsman forward into a brutal headbutt. He dropped to the mire like a stone, blood spraying from a ruined nose.

“That’s first blood to me,” she crowed, and the onlookers erupted in cheers.

“That was dirty, Teneff,” the swordsman snarled, pawing blood from his mashed nose with a wicked laugh. “Let’s make it second blood. I’m not done with you yet.”

“First blood was the agreement,” Teneff repeated, with no compromise in her voice. “We need you in the line, Cestus.”

The swordsman barked out a swear and stood, trudging up out of the pit. Teneff wound her chain around her forearm, looking up to find Erath and the party staring down at her. Her eyes widened in confusion. “Marit? Arrel?”

Marit chuckled. “Still cracking skulls, eh, Ten?”

Teneff spat a gobbet of phlegm onto the ground. “Some of us never stopped,” she said with a grin, taking the hand Arrel offered her to pull her up out of the pit.

Erath backed out of her way as she climbed out. Teneff bore the hallmarks of a shield-breaker, a warrior of the line at home when her enemy was within arm’s reach. Scars crisscrossed any flesh not covered in leather and iron armor, tales of blood and honor etched into her over a lifetime of battle. He wondered how many of the scars she bore were earned here in Ionia.

“The last time I saw either of you,” said Teneff, “we were all—”

“Here,” said Marit. Quiet descended between the soldiers for a few moments. There was a bond between them, Erath could see that clearly. But there was a void there as well, something unspoken, or even missing. He had lived around soldiers long enough to know not to prod.

“Well,” said Teneff, breaking the silence. “If you’re all coming from Valoran, then you’ve been eating ship’s slop for days. Our cook’s no artist, but they’re a damn sight better than that. Come.”

The sun had begun to sink into the horizon, painting the sky in dappled bands of gold, orange, and scarlet, drifting down into indigo. They made their way through the mess tent and then found seats around a fire as the air started to chill. The women talked amongst themselves, of what they had done since last they served beside each other, and of the old wounds endured together. Erath remained silent, and listened.

“And you, boy,” said Teneff, her attention shifting to the blade squire. “You blooded? Fought your principal yet?”

Erath straightened. “I served my principal, yes.”

Her aspect became serious, analytical. “Where?”

“It was a border skirmish west of the Dalamor plains,” Erath answered. “A quick action, pretty light.” He looked to each of them, seeing that his answer had not been enough. This was not the ignorant voyeurism of the civilian, eager to satisfy some fanciful idea of what it was like to fight in a war they would never experience. These were veterans, warriors who may find themselves beside him in the line, needing to know what he had seen and how he had carried himself.

“It was a shallow expansion through a fertile valley,” he continued. “They were big boys, farming stock, but they were brought up to till the soil, not turn it red. Once we got within a rapid drumbeat, running charge, we closed, rolled up their right side double fast. Opened them up quite quickly.”

“Any of them left afterward,” asked Arrel, “to till that soil?”

Erath shook his head. “We tried. After their elders came around, we brought in others to help them take up the work. Harvest needed planting, no time to wait.”

Marit tilted her head. “And how many of those big farm boys did you make the soil red with, eh?”

“Leave it alone,” said Tifalenji.

“I was rearguard,” Erath shrugged. “By the time the lines rotated to me, they were already broken. We mostly just finished off those too wounded to save, and dug graves.”

The memory surfaced in Erath’s mind without asking. Trudging through the aftermath of a broken shield wall, feeling someone take hold of his ankle. Looking down, seeing a man who had taken a spear thrust to the belly, croaking at him in words he didn’t know, but a message he understood clear enough.

Putting his speartip to the man’s throat. The man tilting his head back to accept it.

“When was this?” asked Teneff.

“This past spring,” Erath answered.

“An infant!” exclaimed Marit.

“I said leave it alone,” the runesmith growled. “He’s here to tend beasts, nothing more.”

Marit chuckled, her eyes narrowed in amusement. Teneff eyed Tifalenji. “What of you then, rune-shaper? Where have you served?”

“Far from here,” she answered, and the odd light in her eyes convinced Erath that was as much as they would hear of her experiences.

Sleep was a glorious thing to a soldier. Any span of uninterrupted rest was precious, rivaling a full belly or a pair of well-made boots to a fighting man or woman. Erath had tried to adjust to the endless rolling and pitching of the Atoniad, but sleep had only come to him in fits and starts. Back on solid ground, with his cloak laid out on a flat, dry patch near the animal pens and his duties done, the blade squire rested his head against his pack and savored the prospect of sleeping through the next handful of hours before the early morning feedings came.

It felt as though he had no more than blinked before he heard the voice, sharp and cold as the edge of the knife he felt against his neck.

“Do as I say, in silence, or I will cut your throat.”

Erath opened his eyes. Dawn’s light was still hours away, the moon a thin silver sickle overhead as he was jerked to his feet. His knife had been taken. They walked, Erath careful to keep his movements slow and hands in view as he was led to the edge of the camp.

A huddle of figures stood ahead. He heard the low snarling of hounds as they approached, the silhouettes materializing into Arrel and Marit with the kneeling figure of the runesmith between them.

“What are you doing in Ionia, boy?” demanded the voice as Erath was shoved to his knees beside Tifalenji. He was alert enough to recognize the voice behind him as Teneff’s.

“I—”

“He knows nothing,” said Tifalenji calmly. Teneff lifted the knife from Erath’s throat and rounded upon the runesmith.

“And what do we know about you, eh?” Teneff looked to her fellow veterans. “Documents can be forged, mandates concocted.”

“My mandate is quite genuine,” said Tifalenji, her calm eerie to Erath, “as is the power you are flirting with opposing.”

Marit tilted her head. “Does the boy even know who you say you’re hunting? Who you would have us hunt?”

“He knows what has been necessary for him to know, and nothing more.”

“Then perhaps it’s time he knew,” Teneff looked down at Erath. “You seek a ghost. A warrior who died in honor as a hero to Noxus. Our comrade.” She gestured to Arrel and Marit. “Our sister!”

“She lives,” said the runesmith.

“Lies!” Teneff hissed. “Tell me why I should believe a word from your mouth and not kill you right here?”

“Because the powers to which I answer do not make those mistakes. If they say she lives, then she lives. You all served alongside her in service of the empire. Now the empire commands that we find her, and bring her back to them. My authority supersedes that of the garrisons here, they do not know of our task, nor shall they.”

“What proof do you have of any of this?” demanded Marit.

“Her blade,” Tifalenji sighed. The women stiffened.

“What of it?” hissed Teneff.

“Did you know she tried to destroy it?” asked the runesmith. She drew in a deep breath, and her eyes pulsed emerald. “She failed, and the magic that infused it cried out at the desecration. My masters heard it, and they saw who was responsible, as clearly as if they were standing in the room with her. That is how we know.”

“If she yet lives,” said Teneff, “then she is a deserter, the very crime you now ask us all to commit. The punishment for which is death.”

Tifalenji met Teneff’s withering gaze. “Succeed in this task, aid me in hunting her down and return her for judgment in Noxus, and no censure will befall you. Look into yourselves, all that you sacrificed in this place, and tell me that her treason does not wound you. Tell me you would turn your backs on seeing justice done, and the wayward answer for the life she has led these past years.”

A dark silence hung over the gathering. Tension radiated from Teneff, Marit, and Arrel, the threat of violence balanced on a knife’s edge. Erath fought his nerves, the simmering rage of secrets and the idea he may die here, on Fae’lor, with no inkling at all as to why.

“We will go with you.”

All eyes fell on Arrel, her first words since Erath had been brought to them. Marit rounded on the tracker. “You speak for all of us, now?”

“I do,” Arrel said flatly. She cleared her throat, the effort sounding almost pained to Erath. “Because we are soldiers, all of us. And a soldier does their duty. But more than that, she was a sister to us. And sisters deserve answers.”

Marit glared at Arrel, her dark eyes slits of intensity, but she relented. “Answers,” she repeated.

Teneff gritted her teeth, looking to the other veterans who gave her solemn nods. She hauled the runesmith to her feet by her collar, but did not release her. “At the first inkling that what you have told us here are lies, witch, I will take your head.”

“I speak only the truth,” answered Tifalenji. “And more now that we can tarry no longer than we already have. We must cross into the heart of the First Lands, and we must do so now.”

Tifalenji looked to Erath now for the first time. “What I have said to them bears the same truth to you, blade squire. Go with us along this path, attend and serve, and you will be rewarded.”

“I am a loyal warrior of Noxus,” Erath proclaimed. “I do my duty, and need not shadowy promises or the threat of a slit throat to do it. The empire bids I serve you, so I do. I only ask one question.”

Tifalenji regarded Erath soberly. “Ask it.”

“Who is it?” asked Erath. “Who are we hunting?”

The runesmith drew her sword. “She may call herself something different now, some adoptive name for her new life in the First Lands.”

The runes Erath had watched her etch along the blade leapt from the iron into the sky, like a trail leading off into the dark mystic land that loomed ahead of them.

“But in Noxus, her name was Riven.”

What’s the difference between law and order?

Can you have one without the other? And what does either have to do with justice? Maybe it depends on who you ask. If you asked me, well, the young me, justice comes by cracking skulls.

Guess I’m feeling young today.

It’s still dark when I finally reach the Hall of Law. As is often the case, though not usually so early in the morning, I’m bringing guests with me. A pair of them, two from the seven I had caught vandalizing a row of shops and cafes down on Horologica Avenue. One is snoring from the light tap I gave him, but the other is wide awake, and quite the fan of colorful language.

“Pipe down—you’re disturbing my peace.” I tighten my metal fingers around his collar and nod to his accomplice, slung over my shoulder. “If I were you, I’d take a hint from your friend here.”

“This is brutality,” he hisses. “Where are we? In Noxus?”

“Noxus?” I have to stop myself from laughing. “I wish. If we were in Noxus, I’d be taking you to the Reckoning pits, not a shaming cell.”

The imagery gives him a jolt, and I get a few moments’ quiet before he’s back at it.

“You think you can silence us, but you can’t. We are going to expose your system of oppression and tear it down.”

“And breaking all the windows in a tea room accomplishes this, how? You’re just another bored, spoiled brat, looking for a reason to smash things. You aren’t helping anybody.”

“We’re speaking up for those without a voice!” he snaps. “For the poor and the downtrodden.”

I look at his clothes. New, clean. There hasn’t been a day he’s wanted for anything. “Well, I am one of those poor, downtrodden Zaunites, and my voice works just fine.”

“And now you’re part of the system.” He spits pink onto the street. “Put a few cogs in your pocket and you turn on anything. How do you sleep at night?”

There’s an itch I get, wearing these gauntlets. The urge to feel a ribcage wrap around my knuckles that on some days is damn near overpowering. Try as I might, his words have my blood getting hotter, and my hextech fists begin purring in response, ready for a scrap that’s usually sure to come. But I tamp it down.

“When I’m not rounding up idiots for smashing up tea rooms? I sleep like a baby.”

Mercifully we reach the doors.

“Here, help a poor Zaunite in need.” I use the talker’s head to knock. I confess letting a touch of my frustration slip into the last rap—it’s loud enough to get someone to work the lock from the other side.

“Warden Kepple.” I grin at the blinking face behind the slowly opening door.

“Getting an awful early start, eh, Vi?” he grumbles, pawing sleep from his eyes.

“Injustice never rests, my friend.” I drag my arrests through the door, giving Kepple the quick version of the morning’s events.

“I’ve apprehended two of them,” I finish. “Both suspects are…” I look at each of them, now both snoring in tandem. “Subdued.”

Kepple raises an eyebrow. “Sure seems like it. Sheriff Caitlyn’s already looking for ya, upstairs.”

“I trust you can handle the processing for this pair of recreational revolutionaries, then?”

“I’ll get it logged,” Kepple grunts as I dump one of the punks in his arms, and the mouthy one at his feet.

I flash a smile as I pass him. “You’re an asset to the force.”

Caitlyn’s office is a mess. The creaking wooden desk is smothered, hidden beneath a forest of brass pneuma-tube capsules and the endless forms, messages, and edicts that they contain. The sheriff is lost somewhere in that forest, rummaging through warrants and mandates and the demands of her bosses and the merchant clans. It doesn’t look like she’s left the room in days, leaving me to guess at how short her temper might be as I close the door behind me.

“Sit down,” she says without looking up, still digging around for something.

Straight to it, then.

“What, this about those punks?” I clear off a chair and sit, flexing the mechanical fingers of my right hand and propping my boots up on the corner of her desk. “They’ll be walking around again in a few days. If you ask me, I went easy on them.”

“This isn’t about that,” she answers, each word somehow more tired than the last. “There is something that has been brought to our attention, developments that are… complicated, that we need to look into. It’s about Zaun.”

I see then that it’s not all lack of sleep weighing Cait down. Something’s got her guard up, an apprehension that’s rare in a woman who can put a bullet through a silver cog from three streets away.

“Is it her?” I ask. Can’t keep the acid from my voice.

Cait finally stops hunting around her desk. Those sapphire eyes flick up to me. “No. This is something different. Something new.”

“New,” I repeat, though no more sense comes out of it.

Cait takes a slow breath. “Something is happening in the Sump.”

I cock my head. “That’s pretty damn far from our jurisdiction.”

“Ever since the split,” says Cait, “our cities have existed in symbiosis. Despite appearances, one can’t survive without the other, so a balance must be maintained.”

Split, they call it. Usually a split is clean and even. In this case, some rich merchants got excited about digging a canal, too excited to make sure the land was stable. They put half of Zaun under water. Drowning people in service of commerce, and the way that commerce has been divvied since, is pretty far from clean or even.

“A real easy way to break that balance would be to reach down into lower Zaun and start shaking things,” I point out. “But we aren’t talking about the Promenade here—there’s no overlap in the Sump where we can massage events after the fact and make matters slide.”

Cait sighs. “These are all topics that have been discussed and considered.”

“By who?” I ask. “Care to clue me in?”

“I am able to tell you as much as you need to know, and right now you don’t need to know that.”

“So what does this have to do with us?” I ask, fiddling with an empty pneuma-tube capsule. “What the undercity does is its own business.”

“Not this time.” Cait plucks the capsule from my hand, setting it down as she sits back against the desk. I frown. She isn’t normally this tight-lipped.

“What’s changed, then?”

“We don’t know,” Cait answers. “To find out, we need eyes down there, someone who knows Zaun. That’s where you come in.”

“This is all pretty vague, sheriff.” I shake my head. “What about the barons? You think they’re just gonna sit back and let Piltover send wardens down to their turf and start flipping tables?”

Cait gives me a tired grin. “Is that the big, bad Vi I hear, scared of a few little chem-barons?”

I cross my arms over my chest. “I just like to know who’s going to be looking for my scalp, is all.”

“The barons won’t be an issue.”

“Oh, really?” I raise an eyebrow. “And why is that?”

“Because they’re the ones asking for help.”

I sit up straighter at that.

“You’re right. This is new.” I shake my head. Something is very off with this, and I’m not getting anywhere close to the full picture. “Still a lot of bad blood between the barons and the Wardens. There’s a dozen ways this can go wrong.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much on that account,” she says, “because you won’t be going as a warden. Those kids you tuned up happened to have spawned from Clan Medarda, and their parents want your head.”

She holds up a sheaf of vellum missives. I can make out the calligraphy through the light coming in from the window. From that same window I hear the beginnings of a crowd gathering—an angry one.

“Lucky for you,” Cait says with a smile, “I talked them down. You can keep your head, so long as you’re out of the Wardens. You’re leaving town, going home to reflect and reconnect with your roots.”

“Cute story.” The word home sticks out, whether she meant it to or not. All these years here, guess I’m still a visitor—one who’s getting the boot for doing her job, because someone has enough cogs to think they’re above the law. “Convenient, too.”

“This means you’ll be on your own down there.” The levity drops from her voice. “No backup. And appearances must be kept up. I’ll need your badge, and your hands.”

“Go down to Zaun…” I work the clasps on my gauntlets and take them off. “Don’t know what I’m looking for, only that it’s bad enough that the chem-barons can’t handle it.” I drop the bulky hextech fists on Cait’s desk with a thunk that crushes capsules and scatters papers onto the floor. “And I can’t even bring my hands. This is getting better by the minute.”

“There’s no one else I could trust to do this,” Cait says.

“So you’re really not gonna tell me who’s pulling the strings on this one?” I ask, biting back on my temper. “Not every day I’m asked to provoke an international incident.”

“I’ve told you all I can, Vi. Believe me.”

“You could always come with me,” I say with a grin. “Take a little working vacation to Valoran’s most scenic tourist destination.”

Cait doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t have to. I know she can’t go, but it’s always fun to tease. And it keeps me from punching a hole in the wall.

Dawn settles into morning by the time I reach the Rising Howl. The crowds outside the Hall of Law gave me jeers and a few tossed stones as I left, but they knew better than to get too close. They clung to the Hall where they could stay seen, and keep their teeth in their heads.

It feels strange to walk the city without my gauntlets, my hands still wrapped up from the day before. I left anything that could tie me to the Wardens back at the Hall, anything to tie me to Piltover, really. I’ll need to lay low—I’m far from forgotten in Zaun, and there are plenty of folks whose memories I’d rather not refresh. I’ll go down, see what’s got the barons so spooked, and be back in a few days, tops.

The conveyor fills near to bursting as the conductor whistles herself hoarse and the doors finally lock. Hexdraulic winches loosen their grip on the great chains holding us, and the descent begins. I find a seat on the bottom level of the pod, staring out through the bottle-green window panels as we sink.

The morning light has spilled across all of Piltover, glittering off towers of iron and glass, but only teases the lips of the chasms. The light will reach the Promenade—Zaun’s highest level—but won’t be much more than a glimmer any lower than that.

I shift my boot, seeing a symbol scratched crudely into the floor. Some kind of spider.

The air already starts to slicken as the conveyor slides through the Promenade, and I taste chem fumes and feel a low sting in my nostrils. The new spire comes into view, a giant tower of pale stone and shimmering glass starting all the way down at the Entresol. Mechanicians, laborers, and menials toil in its base levels, synthesizing and refining their hex-crystals before shipping them up to the city above. Of the process, all that remains in Zaun is the concentrated runoff, more dangerous than the Gray by tenfold, at least by the smell of it.

I’m not sure who owns this spire—Ferros isn’t the only player in the synthetic hex-crystal game anymore, though they still make the strongest, purest kind. Word is even chem-barons, like the Poingdestres, are trying to make their own brands of cheap knock-offs, without the merchant clans. But most likely, this spire is yet another joint venture between the barons and the clans.

As we descend to the Entresol, something catches my eye through the window. The conveyor shafts are no stranger to graffiti, but one mark stands out bright and new against the faded tags it’s covering.

A spider.

I look down at the floor. The mark is the same. My eyes go back to the window and I find it again, and again.

I stand up, pressing my back to the wall as the Howl shudders to a stop at the Entresol. The conveyor empties, and more than one pair of eyes look at me with alarm when I don’t exit.

A bell chimes, a signal the Rising Howl is due to depart. The conductor descends the stairs, peering this way and that before spotting me.

“Lift’s going down soon,” she says, the unease clear in her voice. “You’re heading Sumpward, then?”

I take a look around, seeing an empty platform beyond the doors. “Looks like I’m the only one.”

“May not pay to be unique in this regard, dear.” She takes a step closer, pushing her goggles up to her brow. I can see the fear in her eyes. “Sump’s not right these days. Best to stay further up.”

“You know anything about it?” I ask.

The conductor looks down, fidgeting with her sonophone. “Enough not to trifle with it.”

I consider her for a moment. “I think I’ll take my chances.”

She lingers, hoping I’ll have a change of heart, before giving a slow nod and clambering back up the stairs. Soon the Howl begins its slow rumble downward, down to the Sump, where I will see what everyone is so afraid of.

The light gets poorer once you clear the Entresol. Chem-lamps appear fewer and fewer, like fireflies rising up the farther down we go. The light from the Howl itself is enough to see the immediate surroundings of the conveyor, though the worth of that might be dubious.

The Sump has never been pretty. Maybe a long way back, before the Flood turned half of it into a graveyard and the other half became a landfill, it might have been different. But that’s long gone, and from what I see, even compared to what I remember, it’s only getting worse.

Make the wrong enemies, break one too many promises, back a loser with your last cog, you’ll end up down here. Desperate people scratching out a living, safe from those above who won’t stoop to look for them. That makes it almost a haven for them, if not from each other.

The lights flicker out. I stand, walk over to the window, and lean against the railing to glimpse through the green glass. After a few moments, the lights return, bathing the conveyor shaft in enough illumination to show me what’s covering every inch of it.

Spiders. Nothing but spiders.

That same crude mark as before, but where above it was rare, here it has been etched, carved, or sprayed over everything. An unending swarm, as though marching and climbing up from the dark they had already claimed as theirs.

I feel something cold in my stomach, a tiny flare of adrenaline. Whatever it is that Cait sent me down here to find, it has to be connected to this.

“This is as far as I’ll go,” I hear the conductor’s voice scratch from the sonophone as the Rising Howl comes to a halt in a groan of protesting iron. The doors unlock and I peer out at an abandoned platform, the only light a single chem-lamp pulsing faintly at the far end. I step onto the platform and the doors lock fast behind me, the conveyor already rising as I look back at it over my shoulder. Soon it’s just one more firefly, rising from the chasm.

There’s no such thing as silence in Zaun, even down in the Sump. I hear steam coughing out of corroded pipework, factories and scrapyards growling in the distance… and a trio of voices muttering in the dark.

The spider symbol crawling all over the conveyor shaft is on the gangers, too, splashed on threadbare clothes, still raw and red on their faces and necks from new tattoos. They’re armed, and making no effort to hide it. One has a chain, another a length of pipe. I see the dull sheen of a tarnished blade in the hand of the last.

They’re young, young enough not to recognize me. Whatever gang this is, these are new pups, the most likely to do something stupid in order to prove themselves.

“You lost?” one of them says, the one holding the knife.

“Can’t say that I am,” I answer, playing off a bored calm as I take in every detail. Posture, health, temperament. I know in a few seconds which of them take the orders and which one gives them. Which are most likely to run, and who is willing to spill blood.

I make to pass them. The blade flicks out ahead of me, catching the yellowed light from the chem-lamp.

“I think you are.” He looks me over. “Tell me, sister, have you come to hear the Voice?”

I take a slow quarter step to keep all three of them in view. “Whose voice might that be?”

Knife wrinkles his nose. “Believers and pilgrims would know, and that’s all who’s welcome here.”

“Time to turn around and go back home, sun-stained filth.” Another of them spits. He gets a hissing chorus of agreement from his mates.

I could probably get more out of them. The name of their gang, who this Voice belongs to, how exactly they have the whole of the Sump running scared. But the urge to lay hands on them wins out.

“Boys, boys.” I shake my head, smiling. I make a fist, and my knuckles crack loud enough for them to hear. “I am home.”

A quick side glance to each other and they rush me. My eyes go to weapons, flicking from blade to chain to pipe to see who I need to drop first. The air tastes like ammonia and grease as the tension cracks open.

Adding a splash of blood won’t hurt.

I throw the first punch, forgetting I had left my hands behind. Wear them long enough, and you get used to the power a pair of hextech Atlas fists can give you. When my knuckles find the side of Knife’s skull, I feel something flex sideways, between my fingers. The pain is sharp and immediate, making me hesitate enough for the pipe to swing in low and take me in the ribs.

The third circles, chain lashing my legs, but my focus is on the blade. My punch had sent him to all fours. A knee to the jaw and he sprawls.

I snatch hold of the chain, wrenching the ganger holding it into a headbutt. His nose mashes flat against my forehead. He topples, clutching at his face. The whistle of the pipe makes me duck, throwing its owner off balance, and I add to his momentum to send him crashing into a wall.

Pipe springs up to his feet, and freezes. His eyes dart from me to Knife, back to me, then to Chain. The pipe pings as it hits the ground, almost drowning out the pounding of his boots as he runs for it. I lunge after him, but I’m stopped cold by a spike of pain in my ribs squeezing my lungs shut. I let him go.

Knife and Chain aren’t worth the trouble. I snap the blade beneath my boot and fling the weapons off the platform, ignoring my ribs as I start making my way deeper into the Sump.

They say that when something’s hurt and on the run, it heads back to what’s familiar. A nest or warren, some kind of sanctuary where you know you’ll have some walls to put around you.

Precious few sanctuaries in the Sump, for me at least. There might have been a handful of places I could go, but now everywhere I look there’s that mark, the spider that’s swallowed everything. I need somewhere to catch my breath, and down here there’s only one place I can think of.

I’m hazy on when and how I first ended up at Hope House for Foundling Children. I haven’t thought about the orphanage in awhile, but I still know the way by heart. You always remember how to get home, even if you ran away from it.

I stay out of the open, keeping to shadows and side streets to avoid any more encounters. I watch clots of gangers moving around, every one of them armed, but no chaos. They aren’t breaking or wrecking a thing down here.

Why smash up what you already own?

My hand is getting distracting, joining my ribs with a sharp poke each time my heart beats. I can feel it swelling up under the wraps, not broken but damn near close. I just pull them tighter.

Round a corner and there it is, Hope House, in all its dull, crumbling glory. It was far from in good shape when I left it, and the years since haven’t been any kinder. I’m amazed it’s still standing. For a second I’m a kid again, coming home banged up from a scrap or a heist. I can’t keep the smile off my face seeing it.

Kids chase each other around the front of the building, the faster, healthier children outpacing those with a missing limb or wheezing through third-rate esophilters. They see me coming and scatter. Trust is a hard thing to come by this far down, one of the first lessons the abandoned are forced to learn.

One of them makes for the front door. He hurries up the worn steps leading to the entrance, nearly stumbling face first before reaching it. His fist pounds on the door until it opens, and a young woman looks down, too young to be his mother, but old enough to be responsible for him.

“Now what did I tell you about playing on those stairs?” she scolds, thumbing away a smudge of grime from the boy’s cheek. “I’ve told you they’re tricky, and if you’re not careful, one of these days—”

“One of these days,” I say, stopping at the foot of the steps, “you’ll collect a crack in your skull.”

Her eyes go wide. I knew her voice the second I heard it, and it’s enough to sting my own eyes a touch. My mind fights to reconcile the young woman standing there with the shy little girl I once knew.

“I used to have to warn a little girl here about that all the time.” I smile. “She was trying her hand as a tumbler, when her head wasn’t buried in a book.”

“Gave up on the tumbling,” she replies, gently guiding the boy through the door before stepping outside and closing it behind her. “But I still like to read, when I can find the time.”

“Roe?” The first stair creaks under my weight as I place a foot on it. “Is that you? Can’t be.”

“It’s me.”

I climb another stair. “You can’t be Roe. Roe’s just a kid, barely reaches my hip. Look at how you sprouted.”

“Nobody stays a kid down here for long,” she says. “You should know that better than anyone.”

Another stair. “It’s good to see you. Been a long time.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks down. “I’m not the one who went anywhere.”

I stop my climb, and take a step back. The hurt is clear in her voice. When I left, she was just a kid, one I had looked after from the day she first showed up at Hope House. I had never let her run with me, kept her clear of the scraps and the stealing and the gangs. I protected her.

And then I left.

“Heard you’re with the law now,” Roe says, leaning back against the door.

“You see a badge anywhere?” I spread my arms out wide. “I was a warden for a little while, yeah, but we’ve gone our separate ways of late.”

“Seems to happen a lot.”

I dip my head. “Hey, if you wanna brawl, we can brawl. You’re old enough now.”

Despite herself, a thin smile slips through.

“Maybe. Can it wait until I get back?” Roe asks. “I’m gonna go in just a moment.”

“Go where?”

Roe looks back toward the door, then to me. She is silent for a moment, considering me. I glance at her and notice a pin on her collar, little more than an etching on a chip of scrap metal. It’s of a spider.

“Have you ever heard the Voice?”

I leave with Roe, walking through the crumbling neighborhoods toward the gathering. I listen to her talk about her life, learning about this new person she’s blossomed into. The shyness is still there, and she’s still smart from all those nights I saw her with her head hidden in books, but there’s more to her now. There’s conviction in her, an intensity that shines in her eyes.

I stick to asking questions, skirting around mentioning what I’m doing down here. All the talking starts a coughing fit that nearly doubles me over.

“What?” Roe laughs. “Spent too long up out of the Gray, huh?”

“I took a pipe to the ribs.” I wince, pressing a hand to my side. “A message of welcome from your friends when I stepped off the Howl.”

Her smile dulls. “We all want the same thing. An end to the oppression. Liberation from the barons and the clans. Clean air. Just not everybody agrees on how we should get there. Most are coming from life in the gangs, so they’re on edge. There’s great people here, kind people who just want a better future for us.”

I’d spent years in Piltover, walking among those who saw Zaun as nothing but a prison, a wasteland, an underworld. Piltover looked down and saw Zaun’s eyes looking back at them, and they either pitied them or hated them—or tried to speak for them, like that punk I arrested.

“They certainly seem preferable to the lot I’ve met already,” I say.

Roe nods. “I’ll show you.”

The closer we get, the more people we see. There are all kinds, young and old, members of rival gangs who were out to slit each other’s throats only weeks ago, all walking together. Every one of them has the spider on them, on a patch or tattoo or on a pin like Roe’s. They’re filing into an old factory with only three walls upright, and no ceiling, waiting in patient lines to gain entry.

We reach the door, barred by a pair of brutes. They are armed, one augmented with a claw of burnished iron, but they know each person by name, greeting them warmly as they come in.

“Roe, my sister, you are welcome,” one of them says, his voice low and soft despite his aggressive bulk. He then looks to me. “But this one, no.”

“Let her in,” Roe tells them. “She’s with me.”

“She is sun-stained,” says the other, lifting his chin with a sneer. “Not to be trusted.”

They want to turn me away for the joke of a tan I’ve gotten upstairs in Piltover, not because I joined the Wardens. These guys must be new.

“She has come to hear the Voice. I vouch for her, Togg.” Roe stares the guard in the eye, not backing down. “Get out of the way.”

The pair convene, muttering, before turning back to us. “The Voice is for all to hear, so you are welcome, too. But we will be watching.”

I feel their eyes on me as we step inside, and the static’s enough to have me taking in the room for ways out if this goes wrong. The place is a wreck, full of holes and collapsed masonry. If things turn red, I can get out. The only question is whether Roe will run with me, or after me.

There’s no pomp or ceremony. No music or votive candles, no dish passed hand to hand for contributions to the cause. There’s just a mass of people, surrounding a mound of rubble in the center where a man sits, calmly waiting.

“Is that him?” I whisper to Roe. “The Voice?”

She nods. I look over at him, this man who conquered the Sump, and I don’t understand.

He’s young, barely older than Roe, little more than a kid himself. Scrawny and gaunt, he has the look of a ganger in his eyes, eyes that have seen his share of horror. But there’s a strange warmth there, too, like he has a secret to tell, just to you. The last of the assembly enters, and the Voice begins to speak.

“I see many new faces.” His voice is gentle, almost quiet, though it carries to every ear. “You are all welcome here. Each one of us found our own way to this place, countless paths leading to where they become one. Know now that you are no longer alone.”

I scan the crowd. All are hanging on his every word. I wonder how many have never had those words spoken to them before. The rejected and abused, the forgotten, seen as people for the first time.

“We all bear scars,” the Voice continues. “The marks of the lives we’ve had to live, our trials and our suffering. The world has done all it can to beat us down, to convince us to stay there and be grateful for what little we have. That has been the reality here for far too long, and it is time that changed.”

Murmurs of affirmation wash over the gathering. You don’t need to have worked as a warden to feel the tension ratcheting up. The Voice is dredging up wounds, making them raw again. He isn’t lying—these people have borne more than their share of hurt, but I can see the game he’s playing, hidden beneath that truth.

“How long have their boots been on our throats?” His voice begins to rise, its edge sharpening. “The chem-barons. They use our home to build their wealth, and what do we get from it? We get poison in the air we breathe, in the water we drink. Sickness, pain, death—is this what we deserve?”

“No!” The crowd is angry now, playing right into his hands. I glance at Roe beside me, and see the same rage on her and every other face. Maybe it’s the contrarian in me, but I feel like they should have found a theater to hold this performance.

“I say, no more,” growls the Voice. “No more will we weep for brothers and sisters too weak to stand, or watch our children’s lives waste away. The barons will pay for what they’ve done, but more than that, we will bring justice to those they truly serve.”

Here it comes.

The Voice stabs an accusing finger skyward. “The corrupt merchants in that city towering over us. A city where the sun shines so bright it blinds them to the crimes they have committed here. The pain they have caused you, and the ones you love. They hide in that blindness, because they think it will protect them. But it will not, not after he arrives.”

Awed whispers fill the room, like he has just spoken of a god. Roe brushes a tear from her eye. They’re all drawn in, but nothing about this feels right, and I’ve yet to trust a word that’s come from this Voice.

“Who is he talking about?” I ask, but Roe nods back to him as he continues.

“I am his Voice, and we are all of us his sons. I have seen his face. I have heard his words and survived his test. He laid his hands upon me as his chosen, to seek out his flock and make ready for his return. That day is soon to dawn, my brothers and sisters. Not one of retribution, but of justice.”

“And who will pay the blood price for that?”

Silence descends. All eyes turn to me as I find myself standing.

“What are you doing?” Roe hisses, tugging at my hand.

Damn my temper. Vi, you’re a terrible spy. Well, no going back now.

“I’ve heard this kind of talk before,” I say, both to the Voice and the crowd. “Glib talkers who prey on the pain of the wronged and the dispossessed. They rile them up in the name of justice, when all they want is to see their puppets dance, because they want to be a god.”

The Voice listens, without any change to his patient facade. “I have not seen you here before, sister. You are new to our ways—none can fault you for not seeing them clearly.”

“I see clearly.” I glare at him. “I see a cult getting whipped up to spill blood. I see a liar promising freedom and prosperity, but putting armed thugs at every entrance to his territory.”

“They are what will win our freedom,” he answers plainly. He looks me over. “If our brothers attacked you, then I am sorry. You must understand that a dog can only be kicked so many times before he bites back. We’ve waited and we’ve waited, but now there is another way.”

He walks down from his mound of rubble, slowly approaching with his arms spread wide.

“I see much pain in you, a hurt you keep hidden behind your eyes. I see a child of Zaun who has strayed from her rightful home. Piltover has its corruptive mark all over you. You think strength lies in helping our oppressors to change, but they won’t ever change. You have strength, strength that could be used to help liberate these people.”

He certainly has a way with words. I realize I’ve made fists, and exhale to slowly release them. As much fun as making a crater out of his head would be, I wouldn’t last five seconds after.

“Whatever pain I have is mine.” I thump a fist against my chest. “I carry the weight of the choices I made. I don’t push them onto others. I don’t make scapegoats, and I don’t believe the wrongs done to me justify my inflicting them on someone else.”

The Voice looks down, chuckles softly before meeting my gaze again. “He would like you. But, if this is not your path, then leave now, and no harm will come to you. Return, though, and I can make no promises.”

I glance down at Roe, at every face staring at me. “I’ll go, and so should all of you. There is no one coming, no great being to deliver you. All I see is a man, looking for lost people to do his bidding.”

Again that soft smile, almost sad and without a hint of malice. “No, my child. He is very real. And soon enough, you won’t have to rely on my words to know that.”

True to his claim, no one touches me when I leave. Not even a threat. I don’t hear a harsh word until I am clear of the place, and Roe catches up to me.

She cuts me off. “Who do you think you are?”

“I—”

“You left,” Roe snaps. “Years pass, and all of a sudden you just walk back in and think you know what’s best for me?”

“I heard enough. You can’t tell me you actually believe all of this.”

“What’s so hard to believe? That there’s someone out there who gives a damn about what happens to the Sump?”

I take a deep breath. “I know a demagogue when I hear one, Roe. They talk, and they say anything to spin folks up, but in the end it’s never their hands that get bloody. He’s manipulating all of you.”

“He’s trying to help us.” She shakes her head bitterly. “Do you even remember what it’s like down here? You got out, but the rest of us aren’t so lucky. We stay separate and alone, and nothing will ever change. He’s going to set us free!”

“How?” I try like hell not to sound like a warden just now. “And how many are going to be left alive when it’s done? Do you know what he plans to do? If you know something, Roe, please, it is very important that you tell me.”

Something changes in her eyes. “Why? Who are you going to tell it to? Why are you even here?”

“I want to understand what has happened.” I raise my hands, trying to walk back the suspicion curdling our talk. “What is happening now, so that I can keep two cities from falling apart.”

Roe laughs, but it comes out as half a sob. “You’ve been in the sun too long. You’ve lived up there for all these years, you say you care, but what the hell have you done for us?”

“Roe.”

“Just name something,” she presses. “One single thing you’ve done to help these people, to help me, instead of keeping us all locked where we are.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

It’s a simple question, but it hits me like a knife in the gut. A child might ask it, trying to figure out why the world doesn’t make sense.

“Forget it. Go back up. You don’t belong here. He’s coming, Vi, and then you’ll see. All of you up there will see.”

“Who?” I grip her shoulder. “Roe, who is he?”

Her expression goes cold. “Everyone knows who the Voice is talking about. Everyone but you. It’s the Dreadnought.”

“Dreadnought?”

It’s night up in the Promenade. Cait’s left behind anything that might make her stand out, to be recognized as a sheriff of Piltover in the bustle of where the two cities touch.

“Mean anything to you?” I ask.

Cait shakes her head once. “I’ll do some digging, see what I can turn up. What else can you tell me?”

I explain all that I had seen. The marks on every wall. The complete control over the Sump. The Voice’s words when they gathered.

“They are organized,” I tell her, “and they are angry. It’s not a matter of if this boils over, but when.”

“Okay.” She takes a breath, processing. “And when it boils over, do we know where, or how?”

“I don’t know.”

Cait’s voice changes with the next question. It’s lower, quieter. “Have you heard any of them mention hextech?”

“Hextech?” I frown. “What does that have to do with—”

“Hextech,” she repeats, locking my gaze to hers. “You hear anyone start talking about gems, crystals, magic, that is news I need to know immediately.”

A question surfaces in my head, one I don’t want to ask, but will stay lodged there until I do. “Do you already know what you’re looking for, Cait?”

She looks at me. “We’re on the same side here, Vi.”

“And what side is that?” The fact she has to say such a thing puts me even further on edge. “It isn’t just the barons involved with this, is it? We’ve watched them feud with the gangs for years, and never lifted a finger. Suddenly there’s a new player on the scene that the barons can’t keep on a leash, and now you’re talking about hextech. The clans get spooked about their margins, so they need us to go down and keep Zaun in line?”

Cait doesn’t answer. My blood’s up, and I push out a slow breath. “Guess I’ll have to find out myself.”

“I told you what I could, what you needed to know.” She looks me over, her eyes falling on my hand. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ll manage.” I stand, and start walking.

Dawn’s light doesn’t reach this far down. The flickering chem-lamps make a poor substitute as I climb the steps to the front door of Hope House, where that little boy sits, alone.

“Hey,” I say softly. “Remember me? I’m Roe’s friend. My name’s Vi. What’s yours?”

Both of us are careful as I close the gap. He’s pouting, cheeks flushed and arms crossed over his chest. “Yulie.”

“Yulie,” I say, stopping a few stairs shy of him. “Do you know where Roe is, Yulie?”

He nods his head. “She’s gone.”

Something goes cold in my stomach. “Gone where, Yulie?”

The boy looks at me, the hurt making his eyes shiny in a grimy face. “She came home mad. Then she left with some of her friends.”

“Now, Yulie, this is very important.” I reach out, very slowly, and place a hand on the stair he’s sitting on. He watches me, but doesn’t flinch away. “Do you know where they went?”

“She said they were done waiting.” Yulie sniffles. “I wanted to go, but she said I had to stay here.”

“Where did they go?” I try to keep my voice soft so as not to spook him, but I’m getting impatient.

“The new tower.” Yulie nods up toward the Entresol. “She told me they make the magic rocks there. I asked if she would bring me one, and she promised that, when she got back, she’d have enough for everyone.”

I’m already running.

It takes time to make it up to the Entresol, but once I’m there, I know where to go.

The spire. A symbolic and literal image of the common Zaunite’s oppressors. It spans both cities, but while all the sweat and blood are shed in Zaun, most of the money is spent in Piltover. At the very tip of the spire is a dome, where the merchant clan’s representatives lord over the workers below.

What a sight will greet them today, if they bother to look down. To see the base of their tower turned red with blood.

The ground is already thick with dead when I arrive. Piltover may be the destination for the hex-crystals, but the chem-barons get their cut for having the spire on their turf, and they make sure they have enough brutes on hand to keep the factory secure.

The cult must have run at the gates, dragging down the guards like a tide. I see corpses from both sides littering the way. The security force had chemtech weapons, training, and experience, but they couldn’t stop a wall of fanatics, armed with little more than blunt objects and the chance to get a little payback.

The gates have been thrown open, and I see men and women that I recognize from the gathering, hauling crates and inspecting racks of round metal canisters. I keep my distance, blending into the crowds. I find my way to where most of them are massing, around a pile of crates seized from the spire. I can’t see Roe anywhere.

Standing atop the crates is the Voice. His face is bloodied and bruised, his clothing torn. He looks like he had been in the thick of the fighting. Using a pry bar, he levers open the nearest crate, revealing racks of small, gleaming blue stones.

Synthetic hextech crystals.

“This is a momentous day!” The Voice holds up one of the crystals in triumph. “Behold, the instrument of our freedom. For so long we have given everything, and received nothing in return. Today, with these, we will balance those scales, and take what is rightfully ours!”

His celebration is interrupted by the terrible screech of metal against stone.

All eyes turn upward to the walls of the spire, where a dark shape can be seen descending in a great shower of dirty sparks. Even from a distance it is enormous, an entire arm replaced by a massive cannon, the body perched upon a multitude of splayed mechanical legs, segmented and ending in sharpened claws gouging deep wounds into the spire. As it gets closer, I can see that the top portion is vaguely human, pallid flesh fused to metal and lambent green medical tubing, but the legs belong to a monster.

Or a spider.

Dreadnought. I hear the name flicker through the crowd, whispered like a prayer.

I had believed that the Voice was deluded, or a charlatan. That the creature was something he had conjured up to rally an army for himself. But he is real. Things have suddenly become far more dangerous.

The Dreadnought crashes down to the ground, making impact in a cloud of dust and rock splinters. The people fall to awed silence, parting before him as his clicking spider legs bring him to loom over his prophet.

“You’re here,” the Voice says, an ecstatic whisper. “You’re finally here.”

“Indeed, my witness.” His true voice is thunder, rendered through furnace iron. “I am here.”

I push into where the onlookers are thickest, my eyes darting, going from searching for Roe to watching what is unfolding. The Voice leaps down from the crates, his hands full of hex-crystals.

“Mighty Dreadnought,” the Voice says, beaming, “I offer these, hard won with the blood of your children. The key to our liberation.”

The Voice pours the crystals into his master’s flesh hand, stepping back in preparation for praise.

“Why do you bring these before me?” The Dreadnought tilts his hand, and the crystals spill to the ground.

Silence. Then: “I don’t understand,” the Voice stammers, watching the priceless gems scatter into the dust.

“That is clear.”

“We’ve won you a fortune. With these we can buy weapons, armies.”

“You think as they do.” The Dreadnought says it like an accusation. He looks out to the crowd. “Hate Piltover for what they have become, but revere their forebears. Industrious, committed, those people possessed the strength to harness the magic within our world, and bend it to their will. Truly they were mighty.”

I can feel the crowd’s confusion, because I share it. Of all the things they expected their savior to say, I can’t imagine it was this.

“Yet over time, the tool they had forged bore more weight. It became a crutch, and then it became their master. They have made themselves into slaves. They awoke so shackled to these gems that in their absence, the civilization they had inherited would end.”

He turns to the Voice. “Wealth is a vice—it is not strength. The boy I found that day appeared worthy. Was I mistaken?”

Unease sweeps over the crowd. We all become very aware that nearly every facet of the Dreadnought is lethal, bladed, and weaponized as his hand cups the Voice’s jaw.

“I was chosen,” the Voice pleads. “That day. You spared me.”

“Indeed.” The monster nods slowly. “Though I am not infallible. I can only seek out my failures, and correct them.”

The Voice screams, a sharp, short sound. A yelp of agony and it’s over. The Dreadnought discards the body, immediately forgotten.

“I am Urgot,” the creature says, turning to address the crowd. “And I have heard you, Zaun. The whispers of your hearts, the things you have hoped and dreamt for me to be. The names, the titles. A liberator. A god. I speak before you now to say that I am none of these things. I am greater. I am an idea.”

Every person there flocks to him, ringing his monstrous form like a congregation. He reaches for one of the metal canisters, and I notice dozens more of them within the gates. “I am a reflection of this world, an echo of the great contest between strength and weakness waged in each of our souls, with every breath we draw. I cannot be a god to you—that offering is not within my power. What I can offer you is a test to learn if you bear the strength needed to be your own god.”

A sick feeling creeps up my spine. Urgot gestures to the medical tubing linking his mechanical body to the mask covering his mouth and nose, and holds up the canister. It’s covered with warning sigils: toxic, poison.

“What lies within this metal shell is the very air I have come to breathe. I took it in, and conquered it, for true liberation comes from within. That is the message we will take to our enemies, our would-be oppressors.”

Urgot scans the crowd. “Who among you has the strength to follow me? To take this misery within yourself, and endure?”

Every one of them sinks to their knees, yearning to be baptized.

“Urgot!” they roar. “Urgot! Urgot!”

“Very well.” Urgot closes his hand over the canister’s safety valve, pale fingers forming a claw. “Let us see.”

The gas bursts out from between Urgot’s fingers as he crushes the valve. He tears a rent in the canister, and a green cloud rushes out to envelop his followers. I’m near the back, away from the greatest concentration of it, but almost immediately people begin to die.

“Roe,” I whisper, pushing through the crowd as panic begins to set in. Men and women collapse, pinkish froth boiling from lips and noses. I find a breather mask discarded by the wreck of an equipment shed, and pull it on as I feel the air begin to claw at my throat.

Visibility devolves into a putrid greenish haze. I see silhouettes all around me, shivering and thrashing and toppling over. I have to find Roe. I have to get her out. I have to find her.

And I do.

She is kneeling with a group of others, tendrils of mist rolling up their chests as it finally reaches them.

“Roe!”

She looks up, seeing me. The shy little girl I used to know. Roe stares me in the eye, vision clear with absolute belief, and breathes in.

“No!” I skid to her side. Her skin begins to blacken, dark webs of corrupted veins filling with poison. She gags. Bloody foam rings her lips. I tear the breather mask from my face, trying to press it to hers. Roe spends the last of her strength fighting me, even as she sags to the ground. Her conviction, that ironclad belief, never leaves her eyes until the life does.

Less than half of them are still alive when the cloud finally dissipates. Many of the survivors are those who are half augmented, their jaws bracketed in clunky brass esophilters and prosthetic windpipes. My mouth tastes like blood and burnt sugar. Tears cut through the grime on my face.

“Arise.” Urgot lifts a hand, and his army clambers to their feet. “Those who have passed the test bear the right, and the duty, to grant that trial to the world.”

He turns his eyes to the peak of the spire. “For too long have they been separated from the full fruits of their labor. It is time we return it to them.”

Urgot had sealed the spire, his followers opening every canister inside the air-filtration system. The toxic mist is coiling up the tower like a sickly green snake to fill floor after floor with choking, paralyzing death.

I had managed to sneak in before they locked the gates. My heart pounds as I climb the stairs toward the top, clutching the breather mask to my face. I don’t know how many dead I pass on the way, but a feeling settles in my gut that I may join them before this day is done.

If that’s the cost of a reckoning, then I’ll pay it.

It’s a race now. The cult and their monstrous leader are swarming up to reach the dome. The men and women at the peak are clan folk, and if they die, so will many more from both cities. The symbiosis, that fragile peace, will end, and those waiting for an excuse to use violence will finally have one. That’s not a fight Zaun ever wins.

I’m ready to give my life to see that prevented, to protect these people so that the true innocents might be spared. But when I throw open the doors to the clan’s sanctum, all I see makes me want to hate them.

The peak of the tower is a shimmering glass dome, painted in painstaking detail to resemble a clear, clean sky. Opulence is heaped upon opulence, from the richly appointed furnishings to silver trays of sugared fruit. The clan representatives here do not reside in a laboratory or workspace—they are in a palace.

I hurry toward the knot of frightened Piltovans, trying to suppress my anger, when a familiar face steps forward from their midst.

“Cait?”

The sheriff tips her cap. “Up here in the Promenade, it can get murky where Zaun ends and Piltover begins. Sometimes you just aren’t sure where your jurisdiction is.”

I tell her of what has happened, of what is coming.

“Well, then.” She produces a bulky case and hands it to me. “You’re going to be needing these.”

The gauntlets purr as they come to life. I make a fist, my aching bones a memory as I wait for the scrap that’s coming. Toxic mist tumbles in, immediately stinging the eyes and biting the lungs. Several of the clan folk begin to vomit.

Cait’s face goes stony and her rifle snaps up high, faster than I can track. I hear the shot and the ring it leaves in my ears. I feel the air tear as the bullet strikes the reinforced glass of the dome.

Cracks radiate out from the hole left by the bullet, rushing across the surface like lightning. The dome shatters. Colored glass rains around us, spinning and slicing. The pressure change lashes at the gas, whipping it out of the tower.

It buys us a second to breathe, but no longer. The mist fills the entrance, darkening as cultists skulk through. They pace and rattle their weapons, but hold back, waiting.

The doorway darkens again, this time entirely. It solidifies into Urgot’s titanic silhouette as he arrives, stooping to enter the dome’s bucolic splendor, his followers parting before him.

Urgot watches the gas dissipate and chuckles, a sound like gravel and slipping gears. “You think you have denied these people their test? That you have denied yourselves? No. I shall deliver it to you, and after you are destroyed, I shall deliver it to them.”

Cait grips her rifle, the hextech crystal in its chamber pulsing with rose-tinted light. She looks over her shoulder at the Piltovans behind her. “Get clear, now. Take the bridge to the Promenade. We’ll handle this.”

Energy dances across my gauntlets as I crash them together. “Behold!” Urgot cries, gazing at me. “Such precious weapons. Your masters give you strength, but underneath you are broken. Weak.”

“I don’t need these to be strong.” I laugh, bitter and quick. “I won’t need them to break you. They’ll just make it more fun.”

“I saw you with the girl.” Urgot gives a slow nod. “You cling to two worlds, child of Zaun. The day will come when you will have to choose.”

“I’m tired of listening to you talk.” My rage finally slips. “I’m tired of doing anything other than beating you to death for what you did.”

I can’t tell if the fight lasts seconds or hours. I only remember it in flashes. Crushing metal. Ribcages wrapping around my knuckles. Thunder from Urgot’s cannon-arm, stitching explosions. The sound of blood, fizzing and popping as it cooks on my gauntlets.

Between Cait and me, we whittle down Urgot’s followers, until it’s only him left standing, a metal monster of fire and bullets and slashing chains. It’s unclear who will leave the broken dome alive, until Cait sees an opening with her bola net.

Urgot roars as it envelops him, pinning his arms to his sides and distracting him just long enough for my charge. I put everything into the blow, sending him teetering off the edge of the dome. But I won’t let him fall, not yet.

I gather up the end of the net, straining against his appalling weight as my boots slip and skid to the edge. I want to look him in the eye once more, before I drop him.

“Let’s see how fast a spider flies.”

“Wait!” I hear Cait shout behind me.

“This ends here, Cait,” I hiss.

Cait stops beside me, a metal spar in her hands. “True strength is being able to choose whether you use it. You let him die now, you make us no different than he is.”

She threads the spar through the net to pin Urgot to the tower. I don’t want to listen to her. I want justice. But I know it won’t replace what he has taken.

I spit, and hammer the spar into the ground.

It would take a very generous perspective to call the stacks of wind-blown rock just off the isthmus islands. Barren and lashed by salt-spray, they’re far from any place someone would want to make their home. Seems a few generations back, someone in a position of authority in Piltover agreed, and built a prison there.

After my reinstatement into the Wardens, I told Cait that I trusted her to see that Urgot would be transported and interred to the letter. I was headed for the Sump, to visit Hope House and use these heavy hands to build instead of break. But I think she saw what it meant to me, and she wanted me here to see with my own eyes that he would face justice.

“I know this was difficult for you,” Cait says. “But I wanted you to see the end result of all that you did. So you know that you made a difference.”

Difference. The word catches in my throat, and my head fills with the image of all those people, suffocating on the poison left in the wake of progress.

“Putting him away, we saved both Piltover and Zaun a lot of chaos.”

“Do you ever think that something better might come out of that chaos?”

She looks at me, sighing softly. “Maybe, or maybe something even worse. A lot of people would have to die for anyone to find out, and I can’t let that happen. So we fight, and we do what we have to, to keep things together. That’s what the law does, what we do. We preserve order.”

Law. Order. Can you have one without the other? And what does either of them have to do with justice? If you had asked the younger me, she might have had an answer. Ask me now, and I’m not so sure anymore.

“Urgot’s following will wither,” Cait says. “Ambitious folks will fracture it, looking for power. They’ll be too busy fighting each other to give us any trouble.”

“You weren’t there, Cait.” I shake my head. “Not like I was. You didn’t see the numbers, the commitment. We aren’t finished with them, not by a long shot.”

We’re standing on a gantry overlooking the cell block. Cells flank us on either side, the cages cleared as wardens and prison guards bring Urgot down a central passage to his new home, an immense tube of reinforced iron running from floor to ceiling like some gigantic piston.

Urgot is in chains. He makes no move to resist as the procession reaches his cell.

“How much of him can we remove before he dies?” Cait asks me, loud enough for the Dreadnought to hear. “I bet most of him.”

“Step forth and test your theory, then.” Urgot’s eyes glimmer. “Unless all you have brought with you are idle threats.”

“Let’s speak plainly.” Cait slings her rifle. “You exist here on our sufferance alone. You will eat when we tell you, sleep when we tell you, breathe when we tell you. Nothing more, nothing less. Deviate from this in any way, and I will have you destroyed. Is that clear?”

Urgot laughs. “You believe you have the power to destroy me? You don’t. You never did. That is a door that will never be open to you.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll just have to settle for closing this one.” Cait nods to a technician. He throws a switch and the tube descends over Urgot, clanging to the floor and locking fast.

I can still hear him laughing through the iron as we walk away. I pause at the door to the cell block, looking back over my shoulder, a dread I can’t shake sneaking up my spine.

Urgot didn’t look like a prisoner to me.

He looked like a spider, waiting patiently in his web.

The prisoner stands tall, his ankles chained to a wooden post, his wrists bound together with coarse rope. Blood trickles down his cheeks onto his black Noxian tunic, leaving small red puddles by his bare toes. Above him, the sky paints patches of gray against blue, unsure of its true colors.

A fence of tall jagged stakes surrounds the prisoner. Nearby soldiers run from tent to tent. Their hurried steps kick up dust, leaving grime on their boots they will be sure to clean before they face their commanders. The prisoner knows this, having observed their disciplined behavior over the past days. It is unlike any he has ever seen.

Around the camp, bright navy banners ripple in the wind, displaying the image of a sword dividing two spread wings—the sigil of Demacia.

Not long ago these were the black and crimson banners of Noxus. The prisoner remembers his orders: to reclaim Kalstead for the glory of the empire.

He failed.

And he knows the consequences. War does not forgive failure. This is the truth he is prepared to accept. For now, he awaits his fate. The first time he was held prisoner, he lost his home. This time, he will lose even more.

He closes his eyes as more memories flood his mind. There were two men, he recalls. His master he knew—he had turned a lost boy taken from his home into a fighter fit for the Reckoner arenas. The other was a stranger, claiming to represent the empire’s best interests. After they shook hands, he was sent west, under the shadow of the Argent Mountains, to Kalstead.

There were no goodbyes, no well wishes. But, he was not alone. Others like him shared a name, “soldiers-of-misfortune” as they were called back in Noxus. Ragtag groups of fighters sent to deal with tasks unworthy of a veteran warband’s attention. Not many had a say in the matter, their masters too willing to sell their talents to the military for the right price.

“You don’t look like you’re from Noxus,” a voice calls out, breaking the prisoner’s moment of reflection.

He opens his eyes and sees a Demacian man standing outside the enclosure. His garb is a mix of navy and brown fabric covered by chainmail, and a shortsword hangs by his waist. He has the bearing of a leader, the prisoner decides, but a junior one.

“What’s your name?” the soldier calls.

The prisoner thinks. Will his answer decide his fate?

“Xin Zhao,” he replies, his voice rough and dry.

“What?”

“Xin. Zhao.”

“That doesn’t sound like a Noxian name,” the soldier wonders aloud. “Noxian names are tough, like… Boram Darkwill.” He says the two words with a shudder.

Xin Zhao does not reply. He doubts this conversation is worth having before his coming execution.

“Come along, shield-sergeant,” says another Demacian. The young officer’s severe look commands the sergeant’s attention. She wears silver armor with gold trim adorning her shoulder pauldrons. A cape of vivid blue falls down her back.

“Don’t bother conversing with Noxians,” she advises. “They do not share our virtues.”

The sergeant bows his head. “Yes, Sword-Captain Crownguard. But if I might ask…”

The captain nods.

“Why is this one being kept by himself?”

She glances at the prisoner, her blue eyes stern with contempt.

“This one ended more lives than the others.”

Xin Zhao wakes to the sound of horns. He sits in the mud kicking his numb feet at the damp soil. Pressing his back against the post, he snakes himself up to a standing position and sees the sergeant from the day before approach, accompanied by four others dressed in similar attire. They open the gate to the enclosure and the sergeant walks through first, carrying a tray holding a bowl of hot soup.

“Morning. I’m Olber, and this is my watch unit,” the sergeant says. “Here’s your breakfast, Zen Jaw.”

Xin Zhao watches him set the tray on the ground. Who knew someone could mispronounce two syllables so cruelly?

A Demacian guard cuts through the rope binding Xin Zhao’s wrists with practiced motions. The sergeant and the others stand by, their hands resting on the hilts of their swords.

“Well, go on and eat,” Olber says.

Xin Zhao picks up the bowl. “They sent five of you.”

“We do as the captain orders,” Olber explains. “She’s a Crownguard, after all. They protect the king himself.”

The guards nod along and turn to each other.

“Aye, her father saved the last Jarvan at Storm’s Fang,” one mentions.

“Which Jarvan was that?” another asks.

“Second. We’re on the third one now.”

“That’s King Jarvan the Third,” Olber interjects. “Your king. And mine. You oughta show some respect, given he personally rode out here with us.”

They think highly of their king, Xin Zhao notes. While the soldiers continue to banter, he drinks his soup, one sip at a time, as he listens to their conversation. They speak of how foolish the Noxians were to venture this far west, of how easy it was for them to come to Kalstead’s aid, and of how their triumph was one achieved in the name of justice.

We were sent here to die, Xin Zhao realizes. He grips the empty bowl so tightly it cracks, the wood coming apart in his hands.

The Demacians turn their attention. Olber looks at Xin Zhao. “Hands.”

Xin Zhao offers his palms facing upward.

“You sure took a beating,” Olber remarks, tying new rope around Xin Zhao's wrists. The guards gather around. They see scars everywhere, running like rivers up and down his skin. Xin Zhao follows their gaze. He can no longer tell which scars came from which match. There were so many that he fought, and so few he cared to remember.

“Those aren’t recent wounds,” one of the guards observes.

“You’re right,” Xin Zhao says. His voice, clear and strong, grabs their attention. For a moment, they stand still, looking at him like he is no longer just another prisoner.

“What’d you do back in Noxus?” Olber asks.

“I fought in the arenas,” Xin Zhao answers.

“A Reckoner!” a guard exclaims. “I’ve heard of you savages. They fight to the death in front of thousands!”

“I’ve never heard of no Reckoner named Zen Jaw,” another mutters.

“Maybe he wasn’t a good one? Maybe that’s why he’s here, all beaten and tied up?”

“Hold on,” Olber chimes in. “Don't you Reckoners use different names in the arena?”

Xin Zhao almost smiles. This Demacian is smarter than he lets on. It is known, even outside the empire, that Reckoners often choose inventive titles. Some opt for the extravagant. Others have something to hide. For Xin Zhao, it was to remember the life he had before it was taken away.

“Viscero,” a guard says, holding an unfurled piece of parchment. “That’s what the other Noxians called him.”

Olber snatches the parchment. He examines it. A few long seconds pass before he looks up at Xin Zhao. “You're the Reckoner.”

Silence. Thin streaks of sunlight cut through the gray sky.

“Viscero,” Olber repeats, his voice tinged with awe. “The one who never lost.”

The guards look to each other. Then, together, they stare at Xin Zhao, their eyes now lit with recognition.

“I know you!” says a guard.

“Didn't you beat a minotaur?” says another.

Olber raises a hand to halt the idle chatter. “Why'd you say your name was Zen Jaw?” he asks.

Xin Zhao sighs. “Once I became a Reckoner, there was no more Xin Zhao. There was only Viscero.” He looks down at his bound wrists, at his chained ankles, and then back at the Demacians. “In the time I have left, I’d rather live by my real name.”

“But what’s a famous Reckoner doing fighting Noxus’ border wars?” Olber asks again.

“I was bought out,” Xin Zhao replies, “by the military.” He finds explaining all this rather strange. For so long, he had assumed his final moments would pass by quickly, in the arena, by spear or sword—not with a hot meal and questions about his past.

Is this fate offering its last sympathies?

Olber appears troubled. “You didn't have a choice,” he says.

Xin Zhao shakes his head.

“You have family left in Noxus?”

Xin Zhao thinks for a moment, then shakes his head again. He wonders if he has any family at all, anywhere.

“Well, I guess you're off to a new beginning.” Olber nods at a guard who pulls out a key and starts unchaining Xin Zhao from his pole.

Xin Zhao tilts his head, curious. “What do you mean?”

Olber smiles. “Let’s get you dressed.”

Xin Zhao sits upright in the new tunic given to him. The Demacian fabric feels soft on his skin. He looks about the tent, counting the straw beds and the empty bowls of soup. Remarks of gratitude fill his ears. He recognizes the earthy voices. They come from others who, hours ago, were prisoners like him.

One by one, they rise from their beds and thank the healers who mended their wounds. Armed Demacians enter the tent. Xin Zhao watches the prisoners be escorted out. He knows them well, having marched alongside them to Kalstead. On their journey, they spent much of their time trying to best each other in individual feats of strength, with the victors celebrating their might and the defeated left in shame. Those especially vocal would boast aloud how many Demacian soldiers they planned to kill. That was before they came face to face with a real army.

There was no battle. Maybe the Noxian military would have fared better, with its legions and siege weaponry, but they were not the military. They were conscripts, untrained in the ways of formal combat, facing a unified kingdom. Within hours, Kalstead cheered for its saviors.

We were sent here to die, Xin Zhao reminds himself. And yet, as fate would have it, they still lived. Not by the will of Noxus, but by that of Demacia.

Fate flows like the four winds, his elders had once said, and no man can know its course until he sails it.

An old healer walks by. Her pale robe matches the others working in the tent. “How are you feeling, child?” she asks.

“I'm fine,” Xin Zhao replies. “Thank you.”

“Do not thank me. Thank the king. It was by his royal decree that all prisoners be cared for.”

“The third Jarvan?” This king, again. How can one man inspire so much?

“Yes, our great Jarvan the Third,” she corrects him. “He granted you the opportunity to begin anew. To find peace.”

Xin Zhao looks down at the floor with his hands folded. Viscero could always find a place in the arena. And elsewhere, the peoples of Valoran would embrace him for his strength, that much he is certain. As for his birthplace—the First Lands beyond the sea he has not seen for decades—it is as foreign to him now as any distant fantasy.

Where could he find peace? Would he want it?

No, his chance at peace died long ago, when he took his first life and was rewarded with an extension on his own.

Xin Zhao turns to the healer. “I have one question, if I may.”

“What is it, child?”

“This king of yours. Who is he?”

The healer chuckles. “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

Xin Zhao walks behind Olber with four guards surrounding him. As they trudge through the camp, he peers into the passing tents, seeing Demacian soldiers pack their belongings and captains plan for their next deployment. Rumors tell that somewhere, not a week’s march away, another battle against Noxus is imminent. Xin Zhao ponders if that is where these people will head, following a trail of turmoil, righting wrongs wherever they go. They seem to serve a higher calling, something stronger than strength, and perhaps more valuable.

He imagines how that might feel, to be so clear in your convictions you would sacrifice your own life for them. There were times in the arena when his life meant nothing. Now, it is worth an audience with a king.

“Looks like you’re the last one,” Olber says, stopping the escort and pointing ahead.

Xin Zhao follows the sergeant's finger and spots a tent larger than all the others. The same bright navy banners grace its roof. Guards in gleaming armor stand in parallel lines outside its entrance. He sees a man, bearing Noxian tattoos on his face and neck, shuffle out carrying a small bag. The man bows his head multiple times before he is led away by one of the guards, and immediately, another Demacian steps in to fill the empty space.

“That's the king's tent,” Olber says. “We are to stay here. You go in, kneel, accept the provisions granted to you by the king, and then we'll collect you.”

The sergeant smiles. “The king said once you're in front of him, you're a free man… but you’ll still need us when you’re out. Captain Crownguard runs this camp, and she’ll not have enemy combatants walk alone. Not ‘til they leave Kalstead for good.”

Xin Zhao gives a knowing nod, and heads toward the tent.

“The king welcomes Viscero!”

The voice that hails him is deep and proper. Xin Zhao walks forth. Once inside, he kneels on his right leg and bows his head low. The floor is covered in cloth embroidered with depictions of winged knights and helmed warriors.

“You may look up,” another voice comes. Xin Zhao lifts his head and identifies its source. It is a man, not much older than himself, sitting on a raised oaken chair. He wears radiant, gold-plated armor embellished with ebony spikes. Atop his head is a crown adorned with jewels. By his right hand lies a great steel lance, its edges sharp like the teeth of some magnificent beast.

This is their king, Xin Zhao realizes. His eyes linger on the man for a second longer, sensing the air of majesty about him, paired with a raw physical presence he had not expected.

To the king's left stands Sword-Captain Crownguard, just as stoic as when Xin Zhao first saw her.

To his right, dressed in a royal tunic is a little boy. He sits on an oaken chair of his own with his small leather boots dangling over the edge. It is impossible not to notice the king’s likeness in him, both having strong noses and square jaws. Two additional guards surround these three, each holding a spear pointing upward.

“Viscero is quite an unusual name,” King Jarvan III says. “What is its origin?”

Xin Zhao peers downward, wondering how he should respond.

“You will speak when the king addresses you,” the sword-captain commands.

“At ease, Tianna,” the king says with a wave of his hand. “He is surely shocked by the events of these past few days. We would be right to offer this man his time, would we not?”

The sword-captain opens her mouth only to close it without a word, choosing instead to give a curt nod.

“It is a reminder of my home,” Xin Zhao answers.

“Oh, is that so?” the king says, intrigued. “I have studied much of Noxus, yet I have never heard of a place called Viscero.”

“It is not so much a place, but a memory… albeit one that changed meaning in Noxus.”

“Ah,” the king says, looking briefly at his son, “memories of one’s childhood are such—”

“But it is not my real name.”

“You dare interrupt the king?” the sword-captain roars. Her hand clutches the hilt of her sword.

Xin Zhao bows his head. Then, he hears laughter, hearty and full. Again, the voice of Jarvan III.

“You are the first one today to have caused Tianna such grievance,” the king says. “It is her inaugural battle leading the Dauntless Vanguard, though it was not much of a battle, I am sure you would agree.”

He pats the shoulder of the young prince, who has stayed quiet, attentively observing his father. “Please,” the king says. “Tell us your story, Viscero, whose real name has not yet been revealed to me.”

Keeping his gaze low, Xin Zhao takes a breath. “My birth name is Xin Zhao, given to me by my parents who I have not seen since I was a boy. They may be alive, or dead—I do not know.”

He swallows hard. “The place I was born is known as Raikkon, a coastal village in the First Lands, which the people here call Ionia. My childhood was spent on a fishing boat named Viscero, helping the elders with whatever they needed. Life was simple, peaceful… until the marauders came in their red and black ships.”

He closes his eyes for a second. No Demacian speaks.

“We didn’t stand a chance. I was taken. After months on the sea, I found myself in Noxus. Everything was… towering, oppressive, harsh. There was none of the natural beauty that filled my home.”

Xin Zhao thinks he hears hushed sounds of agreement. A resonant murmur, a tiny voice whispering.

“As any lost boy would, I did what was needed to survive. Things I’m not proud of that got the attention of those with power. They recognized my strength, and turned me into a fighter. From there, Viscero was reborn—as a Reckoner.”

He sighs as his voice grows soft. “I killed many, many foes. Some whose real names I didn't even know. The more I killed, the louder the crowds cheered, ‘Viscero! Viscero!’ as their gold filled the pockets of my masters. I thought that would be how I lived out my days, fighting in the arena for the thrill of others. That is, until Noxus offered my masters more gold than the arenas could ever bring.”

Xin Zhao’s shoulders slump. “That was all it took for me to end up here. Your soldiers know the rest.”

Jarvan III is quiet. Everyone waits for him to speak.

“You have lived quite the life,” the king finally says. He glimpses at his son before looking back at Xin Zhao. “Thank you for sharing with us your journey. It makes me, and all of Demacia, proud to be able to release you from the bonds of Noxus.”

The king nods toward one of the guards, who brings out a linen pouch and sets it down before Xin Zhao. It jingles with coin.

“This is the blessing of Jarvan the Third,” Captain Crownguard declares. “There is enough gold there to last you one week’s worth of travel. Know that you've erred to invade lands protected by the kingdom of Demacia, but as a show of good faith, our king has granted you a second chance. Use it well.”

Xin Zhao glances at the pouch. He does not budge. Is it that simple? Take this bag and walk out of here—in peace? Just now, he spoke more honestly about himself than he has ever done, to a stranger who could have ended his life with the wave of a hand.

However, that stranger cared to listen. And through that, he became a stranger no more.

There is no peace for me, but maybe there can be a cause?

“Well,” Captain Crownguard says, pointing two fingers toward the exit.

Xin Zhao lowers his head. “I have one request, if I may.”

“Speak,” the king says.

“I wish to join your guard.”

“Absurd!” Captain Crownguard shouts. The guards strike the ends of their spears against the ground in accord.

The king lets out a soft chuckle and turns to his sword-captain. “What an interesting proposition.”

“Surely, you can't—” Captain Crownguard begins, before she is silenced by her king’s hand once more.

“Let the man explain himself,” Jarvan III says with a grin. “I wish to hear his reasoning.”

Xin Zhao raises his head. His eyes meet the king's. “You have shown me mercy and honor,” he begins. “Two things I never knew until now. All my years in Noxus, I spent fighting for a cause not my own, and during that time I knew of only two truths. Victory meant survival and defeat meant death. That was what I learned, seeing other fighters fall in the arena or disappear never to be seen again after too many losses. But you and your people fight for something else. Something more.”

A breeze ruffles the tent. Two small leather boots shuffle. Xin Zhao clears his throat.

“And I'd rather die fighting for honor than live out my days regretting that I never made that choice.”

Jarvan III leans forward. All others know to remain quiet.

“You speak well,” the king replies. “Better than some of my own advisers, truth be told. Still, my wards endure years, decades even, of training. How am I to believe you are capable?”

Xin Zhao stares at the king, at the prince, at Captain Crownguard. A part of him knows what he could say; another knows what he could do. Is it his choice to make?

No.

Fate has made its choice.

He grabs the coin pouch and throws it at the sword-captain, hitting her in the face. While she recovers, he sweep kicks the guard to his left, knocking him to the floor. Xin Zhao snatches the Demacian’s spear, swinging it in a circle to trip the other guard to his right. His body moves on instinct, fluid and swift as his mind pretends he is back in the arena. With one final twirl of the weapon, he jabs it forward at Jarvan III, its blunt end stopping inches short of the king's throat.

The young prince gasps. The king's guard gather themselves. Soldiers rush in as the sword-captain draws her blade.

Xin Zhao falls to his knees. He lays the spear down without a sound and offers his neck. Finely crafted steel weapons touch his skin.

Tension fills the room. All eyes lock onto Xin Zhao, whose own eyes are closed, at peace, ready to accept whatever comes next.

The king straightens his cloak. “Stand down,” he commands. “My father once said Noxus wasted its talent in those arenas. Now I see the truth in his words.”

“My king,” Captain Crownguard begs. “He tried to kill you!”

“No, Tianna,” the king replies. “He showed me how I could be killed. Even in front of my own trusted guards.”

“My deepest apologies,” Xin Zhao says. His voice is calm and measured, a quiet tide not yet ready to flow ashore. “It was the only way I thought to demonstrate myself.”

“And demonstrate you did,” the king says. “To me, and these warriors of Demacia. It appears they could learn a thing or two from you.”

“I will not have the king’s guard be sullied by a prisoner!” Captain Crownguard exclaims.

“When this man entered my sight, he was a prisoner no more.” The king stands from his chair. “Demacia was founded long ago, by good people who sought refuge from the evils of this world. This man's story reminds me of those tales of old, of great Orlon and his followers. The very ones my father once told me.”

His gaze falls on the prince, who looks back, amazed. “My son, my life’s joy,” the king says, “how happy I am that you are here to witness this moment. To see for yourself why we must uphold our virtues, so others may aspire to do the same. Do you understand?”

“Yes, father,” the prince says, his voice small but firm.

The king steps forward. “Xin Zhao, you have touched me with your life and your courage, a rare thing I have not felt in some time.” He bends down to help Xin Zhao to his feet. “Though you may not have been born a Demacian, I shall allow you to travel back with us, to my kingdom, where you will then prove yourself and your loyalty as my personal guard.”

Xin Zhao feels the king's sturdy hands grip his shoulders.

“Do not take this opportunity lightly.”

Xin Zhao looks Jarvan III in the eye. And for the first time, in a long time, he feels joy, washing over his body like the waves that once carried Viscero free.

The night air is chilly this far north of Kalstead. There is still a week or so before he will gaze upon the walls of the Great City of Demacia, Xin Zhao thinks as he walks outside his tent. A familiar face stands by the entrance.

“Still awake?” Olber says.

“I'm going for a walk. Won't be long.”

Strolling through the camp alone, Xin Zhao takes in the spirit of his new allies. They are an orderly lot, quick to aid one another and ensure safety among their ranks. Seeing their disciplined manner brings a smile to his face. He rounds a corner to look up at the crescent moon when he feels a sudden force pulling him down.

His body collides hard against the ground.

After blinking a couple times, he regains his senses and realizes he has been dragged inside a dimly lit tent. The sword-captain glares down at him. Beside her stand fearsome soldiers dressed in heavy warplate.

“You may have won the king's favor, but you are no Demacian in my eyes,” she states.

As Xin Zhao stands on his feet, she unsheathes her sword. Like the pride following their lioness, those around her do the same.

“I will be watching you,” she warns. “Should anything happen to the king while you are sworn in his service—”

With two hands, Xin Zhao clasps the flat sides of her blade. “Take this as my oath to you.”

Tianna Crownguard looks on, stunned, as he pulls the sword’s tip toward his own throat.

“Should anything happen,” Xin Zhao says. “You may kill me.”