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The moon looms over the towering slopes of Mount Targon, distant, yet impossibly close.

Born during a rare lunar convergence, when the physical moon was eclipsed by its reflection in the spirit realm, Aphelios and his twin sister, Alune, were celebrated as children of destiny by those of Targon’s Lunari faith.

Mirroring the celestial event that heralded their birth, the two children knew they had been marked by fate—Aphelios physically gifted like the moon of stone, and Alune magically like its spiritual reflection. Zealously devout, they grew up within a faith of mystery, reflection, and discovery, and embraced darkness not just out of belief, but as the only thing that could keep them safe.

The Solari who ruled Targon considered the Lunari heretics, driving them into hiding until most forgot the Lunari even existed. The Lunari were left to the shadows, dwelling in temples and caves far from the Solaris’ sight.

The pressure to be exemplary weighed heavily upon Aphelios. He practiced tirelessly with mystical moonstone blades, spilling his own blood in training so he could spill that of others to protect the faith. Intense and vulnerable, he bonded deeply with his sister in lieu of any other friendships.

While Aphelios was sent on increasingly dangerous missions to protect the Lunari, Alune trained separately as a seer, using her luminous magic to reveal hidden pathways and truths by the moon’s light. In time, her tasks required her to leave the temple where they were raised.

Without Alune, Aphelios’ faith wavered.

Desperate for purpose, he undertook a ceremonial journey into darkness where Lunari were said to discover their paths—their orbits. He followed the moon’s light to a pool where rare noctum flowers bloomed beneath the water’s surface. Though poisonous, the flowers could be distilled into a liquid that opened him to the night’s power.

Drinking the noctum’s essence, Aphelios felt so much pain that it numbed him to everything else.

Soon after, an ancient temple, the Marus Omegnum, began to come into phase from the spirit realm for the first time in centuries. Lunari from across the mountain gathered, emerging from hiding to witness the balance of power shift as celestial cycles in the heavens turned.

The fortress accepted only one occupant, gifted in magic, each time it appeared. This time it would be Alune, her orbit guiding her to the temple. Aphelios, usually asking for nothing, requested to attend the event.

But as the fortress passed through the veil in a luminous display of magic, a harsher radiance filled the night. Somehow, the Lunari had been discovered even as the celestial cycles turned in their favor.

An army of Solari descended upon them.

All seemed lost, the Solari purging the Lunari heresy with fire and steel. Even Aphelios was beaten, his moonstone blades shattered on the ground, blood spilling from his lips as he reached for the noctum…

But as the battle raged, Alune traveled deeper into the temple—and when she reached its heart, her full potential unlocked. Through the noctum, Aphelios could feel Alune’s power embrace him… and he could hear her voice. With a whisper, she pushed magic into his hands—a replacement for his blades solidifying into moonstone.

Like the moon of stone and its spiritual reflection, Aphelios’s skill and Alune’s magic converged.

Those Solari would not live to see the sun again.

As her power flared, Alune pushed the temple, and herself within, back into the spirit realm where it would remain safe from the Solari. From inside, amplified by the temple’s focusing power, Alune was able to project her magic anywhere, so long as it found a focus—like the poison coursing through Aphelios’ veins.

Only now did they understand their destiny. Aphelios would hollow himself out with pain, but would become a conduit for the moon’s power. Alune would live alone, isolated in her fortress, but she would guide her brother, able to see through his eyes.

Together, they would be the weapon the Lunari needed, bound by pain and sacrifice. Only apart could they be together—their souls brushing across the veil, distant, yet impossibly close, converging into something they could not understand.

To protect the survivors of the attack who retreated back into the shadows of the mountain, Aphelios’ training as an assassin has been given reach by Alune’s magic—his blades now an arsenal of mystical weapons, perfected by Alune over the course of many missions together.

Now that the power balance of Targon is shifting, and the Solari know the Lunari still endure, Aphelios and Alune are needed more than ever.

Night had always been Diana’s favorite time, even as a child. It had been that way since she was old enough to scramble over the walls of the Solari temple and watch the moon traverse the vault of stars. She looked up through the dense forest canopy, her violet eyes scanning for the silver moon, but seeing only its diffuse glow through the thick clouds and dark branches.

The trees were pressing in, black and moss-covered, their branches like crooked limbs reaching for the sky. She could no longer see the path, her route forward obscured by rank weeds and grasping briars. Wind-blown thorns scraped the curved plates of her armor, and Diana closed her eyes as she felt a memory stir within her.

A memory, yes, but not her own. This was something else, something drawn from the fractured recollections of the celestial essence that shared her flesh. When she opened her eyes, a shimmering image of a forest overlaid the close-packed trees before her. She saw the same trees, but from a different time, from when they were young and fruitful and the path between them was dappled with light and edged in wildflowers.

Raised in the harsh environs of Mount Targon, Diana had never seen a forest like this. She knew what she was seeing was an echo of the past, but the scents of honeysuckle and jasmine were as real as anything she had experienced.

“Thank you,” she whispered, following the spectral outline of the ancient path.

It led Diana through overgrown and withered trees that ought to have been long dead. It climbed the slopes of rocky highlands, and passed through stands of twisted pine and wild fir. It crossed tumbling mountain streams and wound its way around sheer slopes before bringing her to a rocky plateau overlooking a vast lake of cold, dark water.

At the center of the plateau was a circle of towering stones, each carved with looping spirals and curving sigils. On every stone Diana saw the same rune that shimmered upon her forehead and knew she had reached her destination. Her skin tingled with a sense of febrile anticipation, a sensation she had come to associate with wild and dangerous magic. Wary now, she approached the circle, eyes scanning for threats. Diana saw nothing, but she knew something was here, something utterly hostile and yet somehow familiar.

Diana moved to the center of the circle and drew her sword. Its crescent blade glittered like diamond in the wan moonlight penetrating the clouds. She knelt with her head bowed, the blade’s tip resting on the ground, its quillons at her cheeks.

She felt them before she saw them.

A sudden drop in pressure. A raw charge to the air.

Diana surged to her feet as the spaces between the stones split apart. The air buckled and a trio of screeching beasts charged her with ferocious speed; ivory flesh, bone-white carapaces of segmented armor and steel talons.

Terrors.

Diana dived beneath a snapping jaw filled with teeth like polished ebony, slashing her sword in an overhead arc that clove the first monster’s skull to its heavy shoulders. The creature fell, its flesh instantly unraveling. She rolled to her feet as the others circled like pack hunters, now wary of her gleaming blade. The creature she had killed now resembled a pool of bubbling tar.

They came at her again, one from each side. Their flesh was already darkening to a bruised purple, hissing in this world’s hostile atmosphere. Diana leapt over the leftmost beast and swung her sword in a crescent arc towards its neck plates. She yelled one of the Lunari’s holy words and incandescent light blazed from the blade.

The beast blew apart from the inside, gobbets of newly-wrought flesh disintegrating before the moonblade’s power. She landed and swayed aside from the last beast’s attack. Not fast enough. Razored talons punched through the steel of her pauldrons and dragged her around. The beast’s chest split apart, revealing a glutinous mass of sense organs and hooked teeth. It bit into the meat of her shoulder and Diana screamed as numbing cold spread from the wound. She spun her sword, holding the grip like a dagger and rammed it into the beast’s body. It screeched, relinquishing its hold. Steaming black ichor poured from its ruptured body. Diana spun away, biting down on the pain racing around her body. She held her moonblade out to the side as the clouds began to thin.

The beast had tasted her blood and hissed with predatory hunger. Its armored form was now entirely gloss black and venomous purple. Bladed arms unfolded and remade themselves in a fan of hooks and talons. Unnatural flesh flowed like wax to seal the awful wound her blade had ripped.

The essence within Diana surged. It filled her thoughts with undying hatred from a distant epoch. She glimpsed ancient battles so terrible that entire worlds had been lost in the fires of their waging; a war that had almost unmade this very world and still might.

The creature charged Diana, its body rippling with the raw power of another realm of existence.

Clouds parted and a brilliant shaft of silver speared downwards. Diana’s sword drank in the radiance of distant moons and light burned along its edge. She brought it down in an executioner’s arc, cleaving plated bone and woven flesh with the power of the night’s illumination.

The beast came apart in an explosive detonation of light, its body utterly unmade by her blow. Its flesh melted into the night, leaving Diana alone on the plateau, her chest heaving with exertion as the power she had joined with on the mountain withdrew to the far reaches of her flesh.

She blinked away after-images of a city that echoed with emptiness where once it had pulsed with life. Sadness filled her, though she had never known this place, but even as she mourned it, the memory faded and she was Diana again.

The creatures were gone and the stones of the circle gleamed with threads of silver radiance. Freed from the touch of the hateful place on the other side of the veil, their healing power seeped into the earth. Diana felt it spreading into the landscape, carried through rock and root to the very bones of the world.

“This night’s work is done,” she said. “The way is sealed.”

She turned to where the moon’s reflection shimmered in the waters of the lake. It beckoned to her, its irresistible pull lodged deep in her soul as it drew her ever onwards.

“But there is always another night’s work,” said Diana.

Among the Rakkor tribes that dwell upon Mount Targon, the sun is sacred, and none venerate it more than the Solari. Children are raised from birth to honor it, and even to shed blood for it, until its Aspect returns, heralding a grave threat they all must face.

Leona was one such child. She took to the Solari faith as naturally as breathing, finding solace and warmth within its rigid structure. This manifested through her rapid achievement of excellence, her peers envious of her capability, willpower, and devotion. None doubted she would one day become one of the Ra’Horak, the holy warriors of the Solari.

Though Leona flourished, she could not help but see her masters struggle with their most exasperating student, an orphan named Diana. Her curiosity was welcomed at first, but soon the teachers began to perceive Diana’s questions as challenging the Solari ways. Leona watched Diana suffer punishment and isolation—but where others saw insolence, she saw a lost soul devoted to a search for meaning.

Leona found her purpose in the Solari teachings, and resolved to share it with Diana as even the most dutiful teachers forsook her. The two would debate late into the night, with Leona hoping to persuade Diana that everything she could ever want was there in the faith, waiting for her to accept it. Though she failed to win Diana over, Leona did find a friend.

One night, Diana confided a secret to Leona. She spoke of discovering a hidden alcove in the mountain, an ancient place where the walls were etched with depictions of strange symbols and forgotten societies. When Diana mentioned climbing the summit of Mount Targon to learn more, Leona urged her to stop. Seeking to protect her from the ire of the other Solari, Leona made Diana promise to abandon this search. Reluctantly, Diana agreed.

Time passed, and the two never spoke of Diana’s discovery again. Leona believed her friend had finally come to her senses.

Her belief was shattered late one night, when she glimpsed Diana slipping out of the temple. While her first instinct was to tell the elders, Leona thought instead of protecting her friend, wresting her back from the edge. Resolved, Leona set off after Diana…

To the summit of Mount Targon.

The ascent was a trial unlike any Leona had ever endured, straining every fiber of her being to its limit, and beyond. Her training, willpower, and concern for Diana was all that drove her on. The unblinking eyes of bodies frozen into the mountain's slopes watched her climb, their own journeys forever incomplete, but not even they could deter her.

After what seemed an eternity—and much to her own amazement—Leona reached the peak.

Exhausted, she beheld an uncanny landscape, and found Diana engulfed in a coruscating column of silver light. Leona saw her friend’s silhouette writhing in agony, the air rippling with her screams. Horrified, Leona rushed to her aid, when a golden radiance slashed down from the heavens to envelop her.

The sensation was indescribable, but rather than incinerating Leona, the illumination coursed into her, suffusing her with incredible power. She clung to her consciousness, fighting the current seeking to sear away her very being.

Ultimately, her indomitable will triumphed—and with that control came understanding.

With control came understanding. Leona was forever changed, imbued by the Aspect of the Sun. Destiny had selected her, and it was her duty to protect the Solari in the times to come.

It was then that Leona saw Diana, clad in gleaming silver war-plate, a strange reflection of the golden armor she discovered herself now wearing. Diana begged Leona to join her, to seek out answers the Solari could not offer. Leona demanded they return home, and present themselves for the priests’ judgment. Neither conceded, and they finally felt the weight of the weapons in their hands.

Their combat was swift, a blistering clash between sun and moon, ending with Diana’s crescent blade at Leona’s throat. But, rather than delivering the killing blow, Diana fled. Devastated, Leona descended Targon and hurried to her elders.

When she arrived, she found slaughter. Many Solari priests and their Ra’Horak guardians were dead, seemingly slain by Diana’s hand. The survivors were awed by the presence of two Aspects now in their midst, and Leona was committed to helping them navigate this new reality—the guiding light to her people, just as the sun had always been.

She has sworn to find Diana, to preserve the dominance of the Solari... but also to help her old friend control the Moon Aspect’s power before it destroys her.

Nobody believed the girl. Even after they’d clothed her and calmed her down enough to speak in complete sentences, nothing she’d said made any sense.

The villagers had seen their fair share of otherworldly things – living at the foot of Mount Targon made this an inevitability – but the child’s story didn’t add up.

She’d described some sort of otherworldly humanoid who had risen from the sea that bordered their village. It sounded like a wanderer: one of the lost, confused celestial creatures who sometimes ventured from Targon’s summit. No one had ever heard of a celestial appearing from the ocean, though. More likely, the young girl was playing games.

But when a woman with crimson eyes swam into their village, held aloft by a pool of water that ebbed and flowed at her command, the villagers realized it was no game.

“Hello,” the stranger said. “I am Nami. I am a Marai, a creature of the blue. I mean you no harm.”

The villagers stared at her, mouths agape. Perhaps they were taken aback by her appearance. That would make sense, considering how unusual they looked to Nami’s eyes: flesh without scales and two backward arms where fins ought to be.

Though they weren’t much in the way of conversation, Nami did have their attention.

“I seek the Aspect of the Moon, for the Aspect has something my people require. Without it, they, and possibly all the world, will succumb to a hungry and merciless darkness.”

The villagers continued to stare at Nami, slack-jawed and mute. Only a sleepy, four-legged beast went unfazed by the appearance of the mermadic creature in the village, as it carried on pulling mouthfuls of dried grass from a wheeled cart and smacking its slobbery gums.

Nami stood in the silence, tapping her staff awkwardly.

“So, if anybody knows where the Aspect is, that would be, erm.” She sniffed, eager to create any noise to break the endless hush that had fallen over the crowd. “Most helpful. To me.”

It was as if the villagers had been frozen in place it was so quiet. Nami looked around the village and saw small, fluttering lights all around. Anchored to small pillars of wax or large, wooden sticks, the lights indeed seemed to be alive, but not sentient. They fluttered in the breeze and crackled with energy.

“What do you call that?” Nami asked, pointing at the light. “It’s lovely.”

An old man in golden robes stepped forward – the people of the oversky insisted on covering themselves, for reasons Nami couldn’t immediately understand – flanked by two sentinels. From the many layers of draped fabric, Nami deduced he must be some type of elder. Or perhaps he was just cold.

“You seek the moon?” he asked. “Is she your friend, or your foe?”

Nami narrowed her eyes. The man’s lip quivered with silent rage. The moon’s Aspect was clearly important to him – but in what way? Did he worship and wish to protect it, or did he consider it an enemy?

Nami weighed the options. Surely, she thought, no one would be so unwise as to make an enemy of the moon itself. She replied:

“Friend, of cour–”

“–HERETIC!” the elder shouted.

“–Fiend! I said fiend! You misheard me!” Nami shouted, but her pleas went unheard as the sentinels shouted orders. Many of the village’s people grabbed their weapons, dipping their spears into round containers of fluid and sparking them alight.

Nami stared at the tips of the spears now flickering with orange light spirits. Their dance was mesmerizing, but radiated heat. Nami suspected touching one would be incredibly unpleasant.

“You will leave this village at once! You spread FEAR and DECEIT, and we will have none of it!” the elder demanded.

Nami stared at them for a moment, her face hard. This was it – her first test as a landwalker. She knew, that if need be, she could defend herself against everyone in this village.

But that wouldn’t get her what she needed.

“I am scared,” she said.

The elder smiled. Nami did her best to ignore it.

“Not of you, mind. I’ve looked into the hungry, hateful maw of darkness and thought I would never feel joy again. Your spears can’t compare to that,” she said.

“And so, I’m not going to leave. Not while my people are still in danger,” she said. She moved forward and planted her staff in the ground.

She moved with such confidence and fearlessness the villagers were taken aback – physically, in one unfortunate case.

A young villager stumbled backward, his spear of heat skittering out of his hands, landing beneath the cart of dried grass. The dancing heat spirit grew taller. It licked the grass, spreading its own energy to the pile of dry hay. Within moments, the entire cart was ablaze with the hot, volatile energy.

The grazing beast brayed in terror and turned away from the blaze. It kicked its muscular legs in confusion, knocking the cart onto its side, launching the burning grass into the air.

The wisps of heat landed on the village’s thatched roofs and spread rapidly, consuming everything in its path with a voracious appetite.

The villagers scrambled to fetch bucketfuls of water from a nearby well. Nami watched in frightened fascination as they hurled the liquid at the hungry spirits. For a moment, their efforts seemed to beat back the spirits’ rage, transforming the flickering glow into a horrible cloud of hissing air that, unlike the rest of the air in the oversky, seemed to expand with weight and form. The hissing smoke swirled as the spirits drank up the water and danced on along the rooftops, turning the blue night orange.

“More water!” the villagers yelled. “Quickly!”

I can help with that, Nami thought.

Nami raised her Tidecaller staff, her knuckles tight.

Focusing her thoughts, the seawater lapping the village’s shore began to collect and vibrate.

Nami tightened her grip and closed her eyes, pulling back her staff to draw the seawater toward her.

The ocean roared. It stretched itself into the air high above the village, a sheer wall of tidal ferocity hovering at the ready. The people screamed.

Nami thrust her staff forward, pointing its headpiece toward the dancing heat.

“Please move,” she shouted to the villagers.

They did.

The wave crashed forward as if to drown the entire village. Just before hitting the ground, the water twirled and twisted into an enormous, turbulent tentacle. It snaked through the air, sniffing out the ravenous trails of heat and rage.

The tendril of ocean water encircled the angry light, coiling around it like a serpent, constricting and squeezing the brightness in a suffocating collapse. With one last smoky gasp, the spirits fizzled, their glow replaced with the quiet blue of night.

Nami exhaled, loosening her grip on the staff. The tentacle of water lost its shape in an instant, and splashed to the ground to the startled delight of onlookers.

The elder and his sentinels dropped their buckets. They turned to Nami, the rage they’d carried moments before now but a memory. They looked upon their visitor with new eyes.

“Ionia,” the elder said.

“What?”

“The moon, look for her Aspect there – it’s a continent. That way,” he said, pointing out toward the sea in the direction Nami’s staff tugged her.

Of course. The moon and the tide were as brother and sister. Wherever the moon went, the Tidecaller staff would be drawn.

“Oh!” Nami exclaimed, her heart flush with hope. “That is – yes. Thank you. Sorry about the, er...,” she said, waving her hand noncommittally at the drenched, dripping village. “Anyway. Thank you.”

Nami raised her staff and a wave reared up from the shore wrapping her in a cocoon of water and carrying her back toward the ocean. The elder called after her.

“Fire!” he shouted.

“What?” Nami asked.

“The lights on our torches, our spears. It’s called fire. It keeps us safe, but it can be...irrational, sometimes.”

“Fire,” Nami said, smiling. “I like it.”

And with that, the Tidecaller returned to the oceans, headed for parts unknown.

Diana did not belong on Mount Targon. A group of Solari hunters discovered her swaddled between her frost-claimed parents—strangers to this land, who had clearly traveled a long way. The hunters brought her to their temple, dedicated her, and raised her as a member of the Tribes of the Last Sun, known to many as the Rakkor.

Like all of the Solari faith, she underwent rigorous physical and religious training. However, unlike others, Diana was determined to understand why the Solari act the way they do, and the reasoning behind their beliefs. She spent her evenings digging through the libraries, devouring texts with only pale moonlight to read by. Paradoxically, this pursuit provided more questions than answers, and her teachers’ aphoristic replies did little to sate her inquisitive mind.

When Diana began to notice tomes had whole chapters torn from them, and all references to the moon seemed missing, the teachers assigned harsh punishments, intending to exhaust her into devotion. Likewise, her fellow acolytes distanced themselves from her and her questioning.

There was one shining beacon in these years of confused, frustrated isolation: Leona. The most devout of Diana’s peers, they often found themselves in impassioned debate. Though one never swayed the other in their long and frequent conversations, they developed a close friendship.

Then, one glorious night, Diana discovered a hidden alcove deep within the mountain. Moonlight spilled against its walls, revealing imagery of the sun, of soldiers armored in gold alongside silver-clad warriors, and matching imagery of the moon, atop Targon’s greatest peek. Delighted, Diana raced to share this clear message with Leona—the sun and moon were not enemies after all!

Leona did not react with joy.

She urged Diana to put this heresy from her mind entirely, warning of the punishments that may befall her if she were to voice such thoughts to others. Diana had never seen her serious friend quite so grave.

Frustration gnawed at her. She had reached the end of the Solari’s knowledge, yet not even Leona would take this new discovery into account. What were the Solari hiding? Increasingly, Diana felt certain there was only one place she could go for answers: the top of Mount Targon.

The climb tested her in every way imaginable, and time seemed to stand still as she scaled the peak. To survive, she focused her thoughts on her lone companion, and the answers that would make the Solari better, more whole.

The summit greeted her with the brightest, fullest moon she’d ever seen. After a rapturous moment, a pillar of moonlight slammed into her and she felt a presence taking hold of her, sharing glimpses of the past, and of another Rakkor faith called the Lunari. Diana realized this presence could only be one of the legendary Aspects… and she had been chosen as its host.

When the light dissipated, her mind was again her own. Diana found herself clad in armor, holding a crescent blade, and hair once dark hair now gleaming silver. She turned to find she was not alone—Leona stood at her side, similarly bedecked in shining, golden battleplate, a sunbreak-bright shield and sword in her hands.

Diana was overjoyed to share in this revelatory moment with her friend, but Leona thought only of returning to the Solari. Diana begged her not to, desperate that they face this new future together. But Leona refused, and their disagreement quickly turned into a titanic battle, erupting with moonlight and sunfire.

Fearful of losing herself to the Aspect’s power, Diana ultimately fled down the mountain. But, vindicated in her search, she felt more certain than ever that she had been right to question the Solari’s teachings. It was time to confront them, and show the error of their ways.

Pushing past their Ra’Horak guardians, Diana burst into the chambers of the high priests. They listened with mounting horror as she told of what she had learned of the Lunari… and then they denounced her as a heretic, a blasphemer, and a peddler of false gods. Rage filled Diana, amplified by the Aspect within, and she embraced it in a terrible burst of moonlight. Startled, she fled the temple, leaving a trail of death in her wake.

Now, driven by half-remembered visions and glimpses of ancient knowledge, Diana clings to the only truths she knows for certain—that the Lunari and the Solari need not be foes, and that there is a greater purpose for her than to be a Solari acolyte of Mount Targon.

And though that destiny remains unclear, Diana will seek it out, whatever the cost.

The waters were eerily still at night. Their surface was so undisturbed, one might mistake it for dark glass mirroring the starlit skies above. Moonlight bathed everything in cold, silver light, though its radiance was slowly dying.

The moon was being suffocated. The sky between it and those who looked upon its beauty had been overtaken by questing tendrils of shadow that branched across the night like living, malevolent storms. Their like had been seen many times before, and many were the souls carried off within them into fathomless torment, but never had they grown so large, or reached so far.

For all their horror, the world had grown used to Harrowings, tempests of darkness teeming with monstrous wraiths that emanated from the horrid Shadow Isles. Those in their path learned how to watch for the signs, how to survive their wailing fury, and how to mourn those taken by them. But what was happening now, what was reaching up to swallow the sky, was something different.

Almost like there was some unseen hand guiding it.

Tonight, though, one could still glimpse the world and the stillness of the sea. Tonight, its perfection was marred only by tiny islands of splintered wood, torn cloth, and the bobbing forms of the newly dead.

Tudre tried not to look at them. In the first hours after their doomed flight and the desperate struggle to abandon the ship, he had screamed himself hoarse, calling out in hope that anyone else might have survived. But it was in vain. He was alone.

And so Tudre marshaled his remaining strength to cling to a hunk of driftwood, and resist the icy waters seeking to carry him down to their lightless depths. He could almost hear the deep calling up to him to join all the others, her silver tongue carrying the promise of sleep, if he would just draw her water into his lungs.

The sea had numbed his legs, but Tudre willed himself to move them. He shut out the clarion call of despair that tugged at his boots with the gentle comforts of death. Tudre had not reached this far in life through submission, and he would not start now.

He just had to get to land. Tudre had sailed with all speed to make for Fallgren, a small island off the Valoran mainland. They had gotten so close—it couldn’t be far.

Though exhaustion and the cold blurred his vision, Tudre caught movement out of the corner of his good eye. He focused, revealing it to be a scrap of oiled vellum drifting close to the splintered sanctuary he held fast to. Tudre peered at it. The marks and ink on its surface were marred and smeared by water, yet still intelligible.

It was a piece of their navigation chart. Scrawled onto it was a rough, timeworn map of trade and shipping routes and measurements of maritime distance. The names of known places, and even a few secret ones. Crude drawings of clouds with faces, breathing out gusts from between their lips to mark the best lanes where the winds might bless a ship with speedy passage, for those who dared—

“You’re insane.”

Tudre snorted, reaching up to catch the swinging lantern that was the cabin’s sole source of light. The seas were getting rougher, and he had no time to suffer his quartermaster’s nonsense.

“Gettin’ soft in yer old age, Mister Bowsy?” Tudre grinned his big, cunning grin as he baited the old corsair next to him. “No shame if ye are. Y’can tell me, though do me a kindness and say so now. I would need someone else in your spot, to keep the crew in line.”

“I ain’t scared.” Bowsy steadied himself to spit a wad of phlegm onto the deck through the gap made by a missing tooth. “But I see sense. This’ll get us killed, skipper. And I ain’t the only one who thinks so.”

“We go fast, we get rich.” Tudre stabbed a finger down at the old map set on the table before them. He swept aside a tiny puddle that had collected on it from a drip above their heads, and then traced a route denoted in dull red ink. “Every other ship around is docked, crews actin’ like they be back on dear ol’ mum’s teat. But commerce ne’er sleeps, Mister Bowsy. Think on what’s sittin’ out there, unguarded! We make a run, we can get what they’re all too craven to collect.”

“They’re tied to dock because it’s a damn Harrowing.” Bowsy crossed his thick, tattooed arms over his chest. “Biggest anyone’s seen, mind you, even the oldest ones. Whatever’s out there ain’t worth bein’ swept up in that, I’m tellin’ ya!”

Tudre straightened, finding some of the red ink had come off the map to stain his finger. He stared his quartermaster in the eye. His voice dropped, settling into the colder tone that meant the discussion had run its course. “Anyone wants out can go, no repercussions. Less hands means a greater stake for those with the grit to be going out. And we are going out, make no mistake.”

Bowsy tried, one last time. “At least let it be put to a vote. Let the crew have their say in it.”

“Not this time.”

Tudre’s good eye bored into the quartermaster, unyielding. Bowsy held his gaze for a moment that stretched into another, but no further. He looked away.

“Now.” Tudre’s grin returned, full and cunning. “You in or not?”

Shaking his head, Tudre tried to banish the memory from his mind, but the effort left him dizzy. The unwelcome remembrance held fast despite his efforts, clinging behind his eyes like pitch. Or as though something was holding it there, forcing him to see.

He felt a strangeness fall over him then, almost like mist curling up off the water. A sailor’s life was fraught with omens and ill portents, gut feelings and lucky breaks. Tudre had long become attuned to a world that existed side by side with his own, and every now and then the walls between them thinned. It was happening to him now, like a dull throb. An insistent sense of dread and anger, seeking to work guilt into his bones. But he’d have none of it.

“Boat’s made fer sailin’, ask any man,” Tudre wheezed through chattering teeth. “I done that run dozens o’ times. See a chance at fortune, ya take it. Can’t live this life if ye ain’t the darin’ sort!”

Tudre’s words bore the hallmark bravado he had carried so well in his life, a bounty of natural grit and ruthlessness that had seen him not only rise to captain his own ship, but keep it. The high seas were unkind to the weak, as was Bilgewater and any big port whose doors he had ever darkened. Pass on an opportunity, and you might look back and see it was the last chance you had to hold onto your stake, or keep your guts in your belly.

But out in this night, and this cold, there was no one to be cowed by his speech. Only the dread that rolled up from the deep. It persisted, undiminished.

“Land is close,” Tudre told himself. “It has t’be.”

Tudre had not realized he was moving. His hunk of driftwood lived up to its name, lazily edging forward into a tangled field of debris. The corsair looked over the floating collection of scraps and splinters, but found no better means to keep from drowning. There was a bolt of sailcloth among it, but Tudre knew it would prove more a hazard than a savior. He had seen more than one panicked sailor ensnared by such in a storm, as good as chains if the winds and spray carried them over the side.

Concern creased Tudre’s weathered features as the sailcloth came closer. He put out a hand, trying to push it away, but his arm sank into it to the elbow, stealing his balance. He snarled through clenched teeth, fighting the sails—

“Hold fast!” Tudre bellowed, trying to raise his voice above the storms. “Secure that line!”

He couldn’t tell if anyone could hear him as he moved about, shouting orders. Rain and spray and shadows lashed the deck, the sails, the crew. Gales roared over and around them, not with wind but with voices. A howling choir of the harrowed damned had befallen Tudre on the last leg of his run. His ship was fast, but not fast enough to stay ahead of it.

Their hold was swollen with treasure. Goods pilfered from coastal stores, trade ships at anchor, all of it easy taking as their keepers had abandoned their posts to flee the Harrowing. That fortune was slowing them now. Bowsy would have admonished Tudre for not believing him, if he hadn’t been the first man plucked up by the darkness bearing down on them.

“Skipper!”

Tudre whirled around, hearing the boy Flir and seeing him grappling with a bolt of sail. Flir was fighting desperately to lash the sail to the mast, to keep it from stripping and snapping loose, but he was losing that fight.

Tudre locked eyes with Flir, the boy pleading for his help as the oiled cloth whipped and defied his every attempt to secure it to a spar of timber. Tudre weighed going toward him, but then saw splinters fly from the base of the spar, and all doubt fled.

“Skip—”

The timber snapped, carrying Flir up into the roiling dark. Tudre saw his eyes, wide in terror as he flew into a cloud of twisted faces and outstretched, clutching hands. A heartbeat later the boy vanished, just one more scream added to the choir.

“Better him than I,” Tudre snarled against the silent accusation of the sea. He felt the pressure of it inside his skull, the feeling of being watched even though he was alone.

The sailcloth tangled around his forearm, holding tighter the more he tried to escape.

“Better him,” he repeated, glaring down at the scrap of sail clinging to his hand, “than I.”

Why? The cloth encircling his wrist seemed to ask.

Tudre shivered, but not from the cold. The mind was playing tricks now, beaten and worn out and desperate as he was. He tried to yank his arm free, but stopped midway as he nearly lost hold of the driftwood.

“Because I be the damn captain!” Tudre spat. “’Tis my ship, and my charge. Mine’s a duty to every lad and lass aboard, not just Flir the boy. I run off to aid him, get snatched up too, what then? What becomes of the rest of me crew, without me there?”

For a moment, anger got the best of Tudre. He twisted, pulling his arm back sharply, and the sail finally relinquished its hold. But it swung him around, putting his back to the driftwood, and it was another second until his grip left him and he was under the water.

Silence rushed over him, and shocking cold. Tudre flailed for a few heartbeats before asserting control over himself. He was a seasoned man of the sea, not some green deckhand. He looked up, seeing the surface just above him, and tried to pump his arms, his legs, to raise himself back up. But he couldn’t move.

It was more than just tired muscles numbed by cold. Tudre’s good eye flicked this way and that, seeing only faint silhouettes in the waning moonlight. More debris, the lighter bits of a ship that had yet to settle down into the inky deep. And bodies. Bodies of women and men who called him captain.

Who relied upon you...

The words struck Tudre, a feeling rather than a sound.

... and you betrayed them.

Tudre broke free of whatever had been holding him, panic lending the strength he needed to surface. He gasped for air, twisting about in search of the driftwood. He spotted it and grabbed hold, embracing it like his first love.

It was only then, as his fingers sought purchase on its slick shape, that Tudre realized what it was. It was part of a lifeboat. One of the lifeboats—

“Into the lifeboats!” someone was screaming. “Abandon ship!”

There were things on board the ship now. Wretched, horrible, blighted beasts that had detached from the storm like lice shed from a dog. They stalked through the torrent without effort, undisturbed by the chaos as they butchered Tudre’s crew with fang and claw.

Tudre and his mates had earned monikers over their careers. Privateers, merchants, businessmen, all true, but just as true were pirates, corsairs, reavers. They were not strangers to violence, and every one of them walked the decks with more weapons strapped to them than they had hands to carry.

But they fell to the wraiths like wheat before the scythe. Men and women Tudre had seen brawl, hunt great leviathans of the deep, fight in the vanguard of boarding actions braving cannon and steel, begged like children to monsters that couldn’t understand a thing like mercy, much less provide it. All they provided was the severance of body and spirit.

Tudre punched and shoved his way through the mass of panicked faces crowding around the few leaky lifeboats the ship had. Several had been left behind at port to reduce weight so they could load more spoils, and now men and women packed the tiny wooden craft, far more than the boats could carry.

“Make way!” Tudre cuffed a shipmate aside, swinging one leg onto the closest lifeboat.

“Hold!” a man called out from the bow of the lifeboat. “This one’s full up! Any more, and she’ll roll us all down below.”

“Cast off!” said Tudre, fingers tightening on the hilt of the cutlass at his waist.

“Can’t risk it with this many on ’er now!” the man replied.

Tudre put a hand on the back of the man’s neck, pulling him close as though to whisper a secret in his ear. Instead the captain’s cutlass found his gut, steel bursting out the man’s back in a welter of blood rendered black by the madness swallowing them all. In one smooth motion, Tudre withdrew his blade and pitched the lifeless body over the side.

“There,” he hissed. “One body fewer. Now cast off!”

“I be a survivor,” Tudre argued, though the strength was missing from his words. “The strong live on, and the weak die. I chose life, a chance at it, for everyone in that boat, rather than capsizing it and leaving all to drown. They at least had the chance.”

He didn’t know who he was trying to convince anymore. The sense of guilt that had become a voice was now many, thundering in his mind like broadside cannon.

... you did this...

... our lives forfeit...

... your greed...

... killed us all...

... murderer...

... turncoat...

Tudre lowered his head, resting his brow against the wreckage of the lifeboat, buckling under the weight of their silent condemnation. “Stop.”

The moon’s light was nearly gone. Tudre looked up, seeing a faint blurred strip on the horizon. His soul flared with delirious hope.

“Land,” he gasped.

Nervous, hysterical laughter bubbled from Tudre’s lips, overcome with relief and the prospect of seeing the sun rise over another day. The laughter stopped abruptly, when something jostled him from behind.

He noticed then the dark shapes all around him. He could have sworn none of them had been near just moments before. Yet here they floated, bobbing gently, the still flesh of his crew surrounding him.

“I never did you ill,” said Tudre, his voice shaking. “Anythin’ we did was for yer fortune as much as mine. All of you knew the risks. You’d have done the same as me!”

The voices assailing Tudre seemed to emanate from the corpses. Their cries buffeted him, stripping his nerves bare.

“Stop!” he pleaded. “I beg ye!”

But they would not cease. They merged into a single terrible chorus, repeating a single word like a dirge to drive down and bury in Tudre’s heart.

BETRAYER!

“No!” he screamed in denial, the sound carrying over the lightless water.

As one, the spirits of Tudre’s crew sat up, peeling away from their bodies. Flir, Bowsy, all of them staring at him with slack faces and clouded eyes. No sound left their blue lips, but Tudre’s head was filled to bursting with their rage.

“No,” he wailed, screwing his eyes shut. “Just leave me be!”

Suddenly the driftwood sank a fraction, as though under added weight. Tudre forced open his eyes, and found himself staring up into the face of death.

It was a woman, tall and lithe, standing atop the driftwood with a balance that was as effortless as it was impossible. Where her flesh should have been was instead smoldering, spectral blue energy. She was clad in battered armor and a helm with a long, black plume. A trio of spears had been driven through her chest, and she had another gripped in her hand.

The sight of her turned Tudre’s insides cold and leaden. Everyone knew the legends, the whispered things a man could laugh off as stories meant to scare children. Stories of an avatar of revenge, appearing wherever injustice had been done and voices cried out for vindication.

They cried out for Lady Vengeance, and with spear in hand, she would answer with damnation.

Tudre’s crew came closer, the woman’s eerie light reflected in their blazing, sapphire eyes.

“No,” Tudre pleaded, as the sight before him, cutting him off from the promise of land ahead, wrenched away the last of his resolve. “I was only tryin’ to make me way in this world. My crew didn’t deserve their fate, no, but nor do I deserve this. You don’t know what it be like, leading those in your command to their doom, to be responsible for the damnation of their very souls!”

Sudden life was brought to her cold, unreadable features, almost as if there was a sound in the distance that only she could hear. The woman glared down at Tudre, boring into the core of him. Rage twisted her face in a rictus for an instant, and then it was gone.

Slowly she lowered her spear, resting it just under Tudre’s throat. She pushed, though not with enough pressure to pierce his flesh and impale him. Just enough to separate him from the driftwood, and push him under the water.

Tudre’s mind screamed to fight, the urge to survive willing him to rise, but he could not. The spear tip at his throat held him beneath. Tudre looked up at that shimmering, dispassionate visage. Lady Vengeance had come for him at last.

The voices had all gone silent. His crew sank down with him, closing around him like fingers making a fist. All light faded. Tudre finally succumbed to the deep, and drew her into his lungs. The last bubbles slipped from his lips as he drifted lower into the darkness, and he went down, just in sight of land.

Sivir watches leaves fall outside her window, and sips tea flavored with rose petals. The liquid dances gently across her tongue. Its petals are delicate, pink, and soft. The air is still, and the sky is gray, and beneath Sivir’s thatch floor lies hard earth, grounding her upon a single and unnassailable reality.

It is the dirt and the grass and the homes and the villagers she has been accustomed to for the majority of her life—here, in her small dining room, in her small cottage, in the small village of Sugiru. The world, she believes, cannot be a mirror. It is rigid. Concrete.

Sivir’s world is a reflection of nothing.

She avoids looking at the corner of the room.

There is an object there, now. Perhaps it was there before. Perhaps it will be there tomorrow. A golden ring of immaculate, intricate design—or a monstrous wheel whose spokes are sharpened to a wire-thin killing edge. It is a compass, a star, a weapon, a key. It was buried once, someone told her, and now it is not.

Hours pass between Sivir and the golden ring. She drinks tea flavored with rose petals, her cup never emptying as it rises and falls from her lips. Day never breaks, and the leaves outside her window never cease to fall. Hours become days. Days become years. Sivir grounds herself in her small dining room, in her small cottage, in a small village on a tiny island far out to sea, her vision locked in place, her muscles screaming.

Sivir steals a glance at the corner of the room. The ring has begun to widen.

Every synapse in her body freezes. The wheel’s empty center collapses into an ocean of liquid night. Framed with gold, a starless nothing stretches outward beyond an infinite, black horizon. An old fisherman, his shape stark within the ring’s abyss, awaits Sivir’s living eyes as they rise to meet his own. He grins, his mouth blooming into hundreds of teeth.

The fisherman turns to cast his spear into space, each step ponderous, and the needle arcs endlessly upward, then down beneath the surface of glistening, obsidian waters. The ring continues to expand as ichor pours from its center. It fills the room, it fills the cottage, it bursts from the windows and doors. The ring slices into the roof of Sivir’s home, cutting the building’s facade from its foundation, cutting the cliff face it is stood on from the island itself. As she crashes into the sea, Sivir is reflected against the absence of nothing beneath her, the nothing all around her, and she watches the fisherman as his line catches on something, deep below their feet.

Steadily, surely, he begins to drag it towards them.

Sivir runs her finger across the edge of the golden ring. There is no pain as the cut opens, merely a sigh, a release. Sivir studies her blood as it sinks into the metal—a deep, blossoming vermillion that seems to stretch along its surface, down its labyrinthine engravings towards the ever-spreading emptiness at its center. The ring retracts; the portal closes, and the darkness burbles meekly before it is banished.

Sivir drinks tea flavored with rose petals, and watches the leaves outside her window. The clouds begin to dissipate as morning turns to day, and the trees slowly settle against the wind. Blood is smeared along the side of her cup. Black fluid trails along her floor.

It is three days before the rise of the blood moon, and a pair of twin girls has vanished along the beach at night. The day stretches. Sivir remembers how the elders wailed, how their cries punctured the evening air, and how their elaborate burial rites filled the waves with sputtering paper lanterns—an old tradition intended to guide lost souls home. The girls’ bodies were never recovered.

Sivir watches the ring as it rests against the corner of her home.

It is silent. Sated, for now.

It took Sivir hours to dig the ring out of the woods. She hadn’t even known to stop until it almost cut her hand in half, its gleaming edge jutting from the foot of an old stone. When she looked up the day had fully passed, and it wasn’t clear how or why she had found herself there.

Sivir took it into the village, maybe? It is hard to recall. Her memories seem distant, unfamiliar, as though they rest at the bottom of a clear lake she can’t breach. Sivir takes the ring to the other side of the island and buries it with sand. Sivir takes the ring to the sea throws it in.

The ring always returns. Resting quietly against the dusty corner of her home, hungrily awaiting only her. And when Sivir gazes into it, the ring opens again and again, the old fisherman locking eyes with her against a still, atramentous midnight, and he begins to pull some nameless horror up from the bottom of the world.

Sometimes Sivir thinks she is dead. She rubs her thumb along the matching shell bracelets in her pocket in those moments—each one small and delicate—and finds in some half-remembered nightmare a pair of girls, hand-in-hand, drifting crimson against the moonlit sea.

Sivir lives on a coastal road overlooking a small archipelago, on the far edge of a quiet island. She is remote enough from Sugiru to enjoy respite from its daily squabbles, and close enough to be accepted as a part of its community. When Sivir looks over the cliffs she sees herself smashed against the rocks below. A different Sivir will look up from the beach, her hands black with the blood of hundreds of people.

Sivir awakens on a bed made of cotton and straw, on the second day before the rise of the blood moon. She peers down the hall at still another Sivir, clutching the golden ring so tightly that her fingers hang by fleshy threads. Her free hand carries a horned, wooden half-mask emblazoned with the visage of a demon, and she begins to place it over her face. Sivir closes her eyes, and when she opens them she is alone.

Sivir’s memories often overlap. Great lengths of time vanish behind her, and recently she has begun to find herself standing outdoors, gazing upwards at a blank and yawning sky. She walks through the village and greets its inhabitants; she walks through the forest and savors its quiet. She looks at her feet and finds the lacerated skull of a man she saw only an hour before, but when she shakes herself awake he stands in front of her at the harborside, brow furrowed in concern. Sivir imagines her hands wrapping around his neck, and ripping his throat out with her teeth.

Her fingers stretch and bend, her bones piercing through flesh in blighted indigos and reds. Great horns burst from her skull; her skin cracks apart as the chrysalis of her mortal body finally gives in, finally gives way to the true body beneath, and she howls through her single flaming eye as sad, small creatures run for safety. She moves against the turning of the world, her feet pounding across time as serrated claws cut through tiny, gnawing, pleading things. She peels the walls off a building and falls upon the craven figures inside, drinking in their screams as thick rivers of blood pour past her monstrous shadow and into the sea.

Sivir finds herself suddenly on the beach, rubbing dead girls’ shell bracelets between her fingers.

The night creeps in softly. Moment by moment, the sun’s rays vanish beneath a blanket of cold stars, and Sivir stands before the black static of the ocean, its lightless waves roiling against her reflectionless mirror world.

The fisherman’s spear sings across a vast emptiness. Light and sound fail as he casts his line, its heft sinking down into the bottomless chasm above which he stands. His is a sea without end, twin reflections of an infinite nihility, the grave of a lost and nameless epoch. He smiles with the hunger of an ancient shark.

His hook sticks fast, and he begins to pull a great shape up from far below.

Inch by inch, second by second, a mountainous silhouette emerges from beyond the edges of the fisherman’s black horizon. It is a tower, a fortress, a sun; thick ichor sloughs from it without end, a great wall of impenetrable darkness dragged along from some forgotten pelagic abyss. The spear tears loose from the object’s surface, a wooden mask impaled along its tip.

One day before the night of the blood moon, Sivir places the mask over her face.

Sivir is Sivir, and Sivir is not.

In the red light of the blood moon, Sivir walks the paths of a long-deserted Sugiru, clutching the golden ring in one hand, and a mask in the other. Her muscles twitch at the slightest sound. Her organs pop unnaturally, pebbles washed smooth by the timeless advance of a biological sea.

All around her are bodies. A thousand broken dolls, their arms outstretched in hideous ecstasy, frozen in some grotesque invocation of long-absent patrons, house gods, and ancestor spirits. These victims are a delicate garden—these offerings, their curled palms, are the blossoms of a dark and sumptuous harvest given in the name of entities too terrible to understand. Some aren’t completely dead, and their fingers grasp gently at nothing.

The blood moon descends.

It is larger than Sivir imagined it—too large, looming as a great crimson sphere over her lost and rudderless island. It casts no reflection against the sea, for it has no equal; it shadows the true moon and devours it whole, its hunger colossal, unending, unquenched.

Sivir drops the wooden mask and the golden ring. She falls to her knees beneath this mirrored cradle, its center a bounding main of beating wings and boiling, rippling blood. A great figure stirs within: the lone demonic progeny of humanity’s twinned soul, a great demon in the shape of a man, sliding from his womb of light as the moon’s embryonic shell breaks open. The massive figure falls into the waves—a wicked blade in his hand, wings flapping with the sound of cracking glaciers. Buried once, and now not.

Briefly, Sivir imagines the leaves outside her window, and tea flavored with rose petals, and a small cottage on a small island that seems now so, so small. She imagines the girls by the sea, their shattered bodies floating past the reflection of some pale, inadequate pretender, and the dark whispers of an ancient, unnameable thing, standing before her in the bloodstained night.

She raises her head, and imagines the world as a mirror.

The moon caresses Sivir’s two faces, and envelops them.

A headstrong young vastaya of the seas, Nami uses her mystical Tidecaller staff to reshape the tides and defend her fellow Marai from danger. The first of her kind to leave the ocean and venture onto dry land, Nami faces the unthinkable with grit, determination, and daring mettle.

In the seas to the west of Mount Targon dwells a tribe of vastaya known as the Marai. Long ago, these mermadic creatures discovered a rift in the depths. The rift bore a horrible, creeping darkness which sought to exterminate all forms of life.

At the center of their village, the Marai placed a glowing rock known as a moonstone, which is said to be infused with the celestial magic of the heavens. Its haunting, ethereal light protects the Marai from the creatures that crawl from the abyss. Every hundred years or so, the moonstone’s light begins to dim. At that moment, the tribe chooses their fiercest warrior and bestows upon them the title of Tidecaller.

The Tidecaller must plunge into the icy darkness of the rift, survive the horrors within and retrieve an abyssal pearl. If successful, the Tidecaller rises to shore where a luminous wanderer from Targon’s peak awaits with a moonstone to trade for the pearl. It is an arduous ritual that holds the fate of many in its illusive hands, but the exchange has kept the creatures of the dark contained. In the past, the Marai had sent troops of their most elite warriors to collect the pearl, but they learned the more forces they sent into the rift, the stronger the monsters became, as if it fed on their energy. While an army would be annihilated by the abominations below, a single scout – armed with a legendary Marai staff capable of controlling the tides – could potentially elude the dangers of the deep long enough to escape with the pearl.

Nami had always wanted to be the Tidecaller, but she was impulsive and young. A fierce fighter, she was known amongst the Marai for her stubborn determination, which often got her in trouble. In Nami’s adolescence, the moonstone once again dimmed for the first time in a century. Nami attempted the trial of the Tidecaller. Due to her impulsiveness, however, the elders chose Rasho, a prudent warrior known for his level head in battle, as their Tidecaller.

Rasho dove into the depths of the abyss. A week passed, then another. An entire month the Marai waited for their Tidecaller’s return, but there was no sign of Rasho. No Tidecaller had ever failed to return.

The elders waited and argued while the moonstone grew faint, but Nami knew SOMEONE had to take up the mantle of Tidecaller soon, or all would be lost.

It might as well be her.

Nami grabbed her mother’s bathystaff and plunged into the abyss. After several days, she returned with the pearl, the fallen Tidecaller’s staff, and a look of quiet horror in her eyes. Though furious at her impertinence, the village elders nonetheless admired Nami’s bravery and officially designated her Tidecaller. Nami ascended to the surface and rode the tide to shore to meet the landwalker.

The stonebearer, however, was nowhere to be found. Instead, an elderly woman waited on the beach.

The woman, whose grandparents bore witness to the last Tidecaller exchange, explained that there was no moonstone. The Aspect of the Moon was the only being who could conjure a moonstone, but she had fled Targon.

Nami was unwilling to accept this. She vowed to find the Aspect and retrieve the moonstone. The lives of her people depended on it.

Using the power of the mystical Tidecaller staff to summon a perpetual pool of moving water beneath her fins, Nami took to land to continue her quest.

Determined, the Tidecaller swam into a brand new world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only one thing is certain - those who return are changed beyond all recognition.

The sky around Mount Targon shimmers with celestial bodies; the sun and moons, but also constellations, planets, fiery comets that streak the darkness, and auspicious arrangements of stars. The people living at the mountain’s base believe these to be aspects of long-vanished stellar beings, creatures powerful and ancient on a scale beyond human comprehension. Some believe the power of these Aspects sometimes come down the mountain within the lambent bodies of those climbers found worthy. Such an occurrence is unimaginably rare and amazing tales of their exploits form around such individuals, who only ever appear once every few generations.

It is incredibly unusual for more than a single Aspect to walk the earth of Runeterra at any given time, so the tales of several Aspects manifesting has spread a pall of fear and uncertainty around the mountain. For what threat might be arising that requires the power of so many powerful beings to fight?

Like most who rise to notoriety in the twisting, salt-crusted labyrinth of Bilgewater, Sarah Fortune has no shortage of blood on her hands…

Beloved daughter of the renowned gun-dame Abigale Fortune, Sarah spent much of her happy childhood in the forge of their island settlement just off the coast—learning to file wheel locks, set trigger pulls, and even cast batches of custom pistol shot. Her mother’s skill in crafting firearms was legendary, and her bespoke handguns were to be found in the collections of many a wealthy merchant captain.

But oft-times, they were coveted by those with more meager means, and darker hearts.

One such individual was an up-and-coming Bilgewater reaver, known to his crew as Gangplank. Cocksure and certain of his power, he demanded a pair of Fortune pistols the like of which no other man could hope to possess. A reluctant deal was struck, and a year later to the day, Gangplank returned. With no intention of paying for the work, he had masked his face with a grimy scarf. He was there to take the guns by force.

Abigale had crafted two masterpieces, twin hand cannons of exquisite workmanship and pinpoint lethality—indeed, she declared, too fine for the likes of him. She could see the brutish thug that Gangplank had become. Enraged, he seized the pistols and gunned her down with her own creations before turning them on her husband, and young Sarah too. Then, out of nothing but spite, he set the workshop ablaze and smashed both pistols on the cobblestones, to wipe the Fortune legacy from the face of Runeterra completely.

Sarah awoke to agony. Her wounds were grave, but she managed to crawl from the burning ruins with the remains of the two pistols clutched to her chest. In time, her body healed, but waking nightmares and night terrors would torment her for many years to come.

Even so, she endured. She was determined to have vengeance. She rebuilt her mother’s pistols, and learned all she could of the masked murderer who had since declared himself the new reaver king of Bilgewater, and forced even the most influential ship captains to honor his claim.

No matter. When Sarah faced him again, she would be ready.

Taking a ship to Bilgewater Bay, she killed her first man within minutes of setting foot on the crooked timbers of the quayside—a drunken pirate with a gallon of Myron’s Dark in his belly, and a price on his head. Sarah dragged his corpse to the bounty board officials, before tearing off a dozen more warrants and heading off into the city.

Within a week, every one of them was settled, and those with the misfortune to be hunted by Sarah were either dead or in chains. She quickly earned a reputation in the taverns and gambling dens, becoming known only as “Miss Fortune”. Gangplank would never see her coming. What was one more bounty hunter on the streets of his city?

In the years that followed, tales of Miss Fortune’s exploits spread far and wide, each more fanciful than the last. She drowned the leader of the Silk-Knife Corsairs in a barrel of her own stolen rum. She took the Syren from a captain who learned the hard way what it meant to slip a hand where it wasn’t wanted. She tracked the insane Doxy-Ripper to his lair in the belly of a half-dismembered leviathan down on the slaughter docks, and shot him in the back as he fled.

In spite of all this, Gangplank was far too powerful to confront openly, with the fierce Jagged Hooks crew always at his side—but Miss Fortune knew just killing him would never be enough. Only his abject humiliation, and the burning to ash of all he had stolen, would satisfy the girl who had died on the floor of her mother’s workshop.

And so, little by little, she began to surround herself with a small but loyal cadre of allies that would eventually help her lay her demons to rest.

Miss Fortune risked everything to make her move against Gangplank. Plots within plots saw his ship, the Dead Pool, blown to flaming wreckage in the harbor, and the tyrannical reaver king overthrown. Best of all, everyone in Bilgewater saw him fall. It was everything Sarah could have hoped for, exactly as she’d planned.

And it was over in moments.

With Gangplank gone, the other rival captains quickly descended into fighting amongst themselves for control of the city. What little semblance of law there had been was gone in an instant, with countless innocent civilians caught between the warring crews. Reluctantly, Miss Fortune stepped up—as captain of the Syren, and backed by her own people, she brokered an uneasy truce that has somehow held to this day.

But little is ever really permanent in the port city, and Captain Fortune still finds herself having to impose her own brand of order on every reaver, ganglord, and distant threat that comes her way.

The real battle for Bilgewater has only just begun.