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As befits her Targonian Aspect’s nature, Zoe did not come to the attention of the celestial realm in any traditional way. She didn’t win a great victory against overwhelming odds, or sacrifice herself for a noble ideal, or overcome the existential trial of climbing Mount Targon. Instead, Zoe was a normal girl, seemingly chosen at random from among the Rakkor.

Her teachers reported Zoe to be an imaginative child, but willful, lazy, mischievous, and easily distracted. One day, as she skipped away from her studies of the holy texts to pursue something “less boring,” she was noticed by the Aspect of Twilight.

It observed as the young girl playfully mocked the angry cries of the scholarly priests chasing her through the village. Then, after an hour-long pursuit, she found herself cornered against the sheer drop of a cliff’s edge. Before Zoe’s teachers could grab her, the Aspect summoned six objects in front of her: a bag of gold coins, a sword, a completed study book, a devotion rug, a silk rope, and a toy ball. Five of these items could have let her flee, or otherwise defuse the situation.

Zoe chose the sixth option.

Unconcerned with escape or forgiveness, she instead grabbed the toy ball, kicked it toward the wall of a nearby house, and sang gleefully as it ricocheted among the humorless priests.

The Aspect hadn’t seen such joyful irreverence in the face of peril since its last host, who heralded the end of the Great Darkin War. Delighted by Zoe’s carefree exuberance, it opened a shimmering portal to the apex of Mount Targon, offering the girl a chance to see the universe. She dived backward into the portal, instantly merging with the Aspect, then stuck her tongue out at her dumbfounded teachers as she disappeared.

This transcendence was unique—in fact, it was unheard of in all the myths and legends of Targon. Yet Zoe did not trouble herself with why the rules that govern Aspects had been changed just for her. She didn’t trouble herself with rules at all. Instead, she journeyed to dimensions of reality at the very edge of mortal comprehension, playing with powers seen by few before or since.

While for Zoe barely a year had passed, she returned home after what had apparently been many centuries in Runeterra. Full of teenage curiosity, she wondered what she had missed while she was away. Fortunately, she could traverse the streams of time with only a thought. Among the events she witnessed were the rise and fall of “the big armored meanie,” Mordekaiser; the destruction of the Blessed Isles in the “Spooky Ghost Party”; the cataclysms of the “War for Sparkly Rocks”; and the founding of a dour new nation near the “No Fun Forest.”

One thing in particular became clear to Zoe—she was not alone. Walking the mortal world were other Aspects, in fact more than ever before. More friends for her to meet! But they brushed her aside time and again, seeming rather preoccupied with whatever it was they were doing in the spaces between realms. Intrigued, Zoe traveled to the stars, where she found the great cosmic dragon, Aurelion Sol.

Although he clearly despised her, as he did all of her kind, Zoe always returned to the dragon’s side, trying to discover what aggrieved him. From his bombastic and self-aggrandizing diatribes, she gleaned that her fellow Aspects had humiliated him, crowning him with a cursed artifact to siphon away his power.

Zoe felt sorry for this poor “space doggy,” and vowed to do what she could to protect him. For his part, Aurelion Sol has at least stopped threatening to destroy her when he eventually takes his long-overdue vengeance.

Whether Zoe’s curious relationship with the Star Forger is due to a mere whim, possessiveness, or her function as a cosmic disrupter, no one can be certain.

For the scholars and mystics of Mount Targon, the emergence of an Aspect is usually a joyous occasion... but Zoe’s unpredictability gives them pause, as not even she knows what her presence could portend. The only certainty is that Runeterra is on the brink of a profound transformation—one that may come at the cost of chaos, destruction, and blood.

Atreus was born on the hostile slopes of Targon, and named after a star in the constellation of War, known as the Pantheon.

From an early age, he knew he was destined for battle. Like many in his tribe, he trained to join the Rakkor’s militant order, the Ra’Horak. Never the strongest or the most skilled warrior, Atreus somehow persevered, standing up, bloodied and bruised, after each bout. In time, he developed a fierce rivalry with a fellow recruit, Pylas—but no matter how often Atreus was cast onto the stones, he stood back up. Pylas was impressed by his unrelenting endurance, and through the blood they spilled in the training circle, a true brotherhood was born.

Atreus and Pylas were among the Rakkor who stumbled across a barbarian incursion, surviving the ambush that left the rest of their patrol dead. When the Aspect of the Sun refused to destroy these trespassers, Atreus and Pylas swore to capture the power of the Aspects themselves by climbing to the peak of Mount Targon.

Like so many before them, they underestimated how arduous the ascent would be, with Pylas shivering his last upon finally reaching the summit. Only Atreus remained as the skies opened, making him host to a divine Aspect, with the power to take revenge.

But it was not a man who returned to the Rakkor afterward, spear and shield gleaming with celestial might. It was the Aspect of War itself, the Pantheon. Judging Atreus unworthy, a warrior who had known only defeat, it had taken control of his body to pursue its own ends—a task it considered too great for mortal men.

Cast into the furthest corners of his own mind, Atreus endured only vague visions as the Aspect scoured the world for Darkin, living weapons created in a bygone age.

Eventually, Pantheon was goaded into battle not far from Mount Targon by the Darkin Aatrox, who sought the mountain’s peak. Their fight raged into the skies, and swept through the armies of men beneath… until the impossible occurred. The Darkin’s god-killing blade was driven into Pantheon’s chest, a blow that carved the constellation of War from the heavens.

But as the Aspect faded, Atreus—the man it had considered weak—awoke once more. Impaled upon Aatrox’s blade, and with the power of the Aspect’s weapons dimming, he took a ragged breath, and spit in the Darkin’s face. Aatrox sneered, and left Atreus to die.

Hours later, as the crows descended, Atreus painfully stood back up, stumbling back to the Rakkor in a trail of blood. After a lifetime of defeat, his will to live, and his anger at betrayal, were enough to stave off the death that had claimed War itself.

Atreus recovered on Pylas’ homestead, nursed back to health by his friend’s widow, Iula. There, Atreus realized he’d spent his life looking to the stars, never considering what lay beneath. Unlike gods, mortals fought because they must, knowing that death lay in wait. It was a resilience he saw in all life, the threats unending.

Indeed, barbarian invaders now threatened the Rakkor’s northern settlements, including Iula’s farm. Though it was months before he could lift a spear, Atreus was determined to end this scourge himself, and eventually set out with the Aspect’s dulled weapons in hand.

Yet, when he arrived, he found his sworn enemies already under siege. He knew from their cries, from the overwhelming stench of blood… they faced Aatrox.

It was Aatrox who had driven the barbarians into Targon, Atreus realized. Though he’d considered them his foes, they were much like the Rakkor—mortals who suffered in the conflicts between greater powers. Atreus felt a cold rage at both the Darkin and the Aspects. They were no different. They were the problem.

Atreus put himself between the barbarians and Aatrox. Recognizing the battered shield and spear of the fallen Aspect, the Darkin mocked him—what hope had Atreus now, without the Pantheon’s power? But even though Aatrox’s blows cast him to his knees, Atreus’ own will reignited the Aspect’s spear, upon hearing the cries of the people around him… and with a mighty leap, he struck a blow that severed the Darkin’s sword arm.

Both blade and Darkin fell to the ground. Only Atreus still stood, and watched his namesake star blaze back to life in the heavens.

Though he often yearns to return to Iula’s farm, Atreus vowed that day to stand against Aspects, Ascended, demons, and any who wield power so great, it can only destroy. Forsaking his own name, he has become a new Pantheon—the Aspect’s weapons fueled by the will to fight that can only exist in the face of death.

For with the divine Pantheon gone, War must be reborn in man.

To assume the Aspects act in the interests of Targon or its people is folly of the highest order.

When the first Rakkor climbed the Great Mountain, they did so to bring themselves closer to their holy sun, the divine source of all light and majesty in this world. But when they reached the summit, they found strange, otherworldly beings waiting there for them.

Not gods. There are no gods on the mountain, nor above it. The Aspects have never claimed this, and the Rakkor have never considered them as such. In spite of all their heavenly power, they had descended from the firmament of the celestial realm, yet were still unable to cross over into Runeterra unaided—and this was something for which they would be willing to bargain most dearly. Enough to use our own worst natures against us. Enough to betray the golden sun itself.

To this day, the Aspects strive to manipulate a world that is not theirs, for reasons we cannot fully comprehend, on a timescale that mocks even the grandest of mortal ambitions.

However, we can be certain that their motivations are not human, and their capacity for cruelty and deception is unmatched in all existence.

— from ‘Tribe of the Last Sun’, by the Hierarch Malgurza of Helia

Weary from the day’s labors, Iula wiped her stiff hands upon her apron, and raised a cup to the mantel.

“Here’s to you, my love,” she whispered, before bringing it to her lips.

A flood of sweetness. Warmth. The last rays of an autumnal sunset.

She measured the taste for a moment, letting it sit on her palate, breathing out slowly through her nose. Then she looked down into her drink and gently swirled the golden liquid around.

“How is it?” Hanne asked, as she heaved the farmhouse door closed behind her.

Iula shrugged. “It’s fine. Maybe it will age into something better.”

The younger woman set down two large sacks of grain on the floor beside the kitchen table, and poured a cup for herself. Iula watched her sniff it, and take a long swig.

Then Hanne coughed, and blinked hard, twice.

A third time.

“You can... You can really taste the smoke...” she managed. “Is mead always... like this?”

Iula smiled, running her fingers through the bunches of herbs hanging from the roof beams. “No, not always. Depends what you put in. For a traditional medu, I hoped the hedge-sage would come through a little stronger. Maybe next time we’ll use more. And fresh, not dried.”

“Are we still taking it to the market, though? Will it be ready by then?”

“It’s fine. We can backsweeten each jar with a little more honey, before I seal them.”

Hanne finished her cup with only the slightest hint of a grimace, before setting it down. “I think I saw one last honeycomb in the storehouse,” she said. “I’ll bring it in.”

“There’s no rush. I’m not doing it tonight. Need to start on the sourdough before bed.”

“It’s no trouble!” Hanne insisted. “I’ll go now, before I get this young man his supper.”

Little Tomis was still seated at the table, swinging his bare feet back and forth. Even though the day had been long, his eyes were still keen... and very much fixed on the drink in Iula’s hand.

“Can I have some?” he asked, the moment Hanne was gone.

Iula made a show of turning to face him with an expression of mock-confusion. “You mean this lovely stew that Hanne has made for us all?” she said, gesturing to the fireplace with her cup.

Tomis shook his head. “No. The medu.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s a good idea, is it?” she replied, stepping over the bench to sit next to him. Her knees and elbows creaked as she went—but her knees and elbows always creaked, so she had given up remarking on it years ago.

She tapped the large glass jar next to him.

“What about your fine batch of sun tea, eh? Wouldn’t you rather have some of that? We spent all day on it, and you’ve been very helpful! I’ve been looking forward to trying it.”

Tomis wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like sun tea anymore.”

“Oh, that’s not true! It’s a very special drink for a young Rakkor. It fills you up from top to toe with the blessings of the Sun. Don’t you want that?”

The boy went very quiet, and still. His eyes sank to the tabletop.

“Then why do you put your drink in the dark?” he murmured, plaintively. “Does that mean it’s bad?”

Iula was suddenly worried that she had gone too far. “Oh, no,” she chuckled, putting her arm around him, “it’s not bad. Not bad at all. My dear husband taught me how to make mead, when we were first married. It needs to sit in the dark for a while to... umm... to get more... sort of...”

Then she gave up trying to explain fermentation to a four-year-old, and playfully poked his nose.

“Look, my boy, some of the best things that grown-ups enjoy happen in the dark, all right? One day, when you’re older and taller, you’ll understand that. And then you can have a sip of mead! But for now, it’s sun tea for us both! Can you spare my tired old feet, and bring me two clean cups?”

Tomis giggled, and scurried away to the pantry. Iula watched him go, before craftily gulping down the last of her drink, just as the farmhouse door opened.

“Actually, Tam,” she spluttered, “bring three. Hanne’s back, and she’ll want—”

“Iula.”

Something in Hanne’s tone chilled Iula’s blood. She was on her feet before she realized it, moving to join the girl in the open doorway. “What is it?”

“There’s someone coming. I think... I think it’s a Solari.”

Iula strained her eyes into the twilight gloom of the valley, past the dusty yard of their simple homestead, and the fields of empyrean wheat beyond.

There.

True enough, she could just make out the distant, haggard form of a man clad in dulled, golden battleplate. He was moving slowly through the crop, but there could be no doubt as to his intended destination. Iula’s home was remote and secluded, the nearest neighbors several hours to the north.

She sighed, steeling her nerve, and strode into the yard.

“Greetings, friend,” she called out. “May the Sun’s light be upon you. I hope your journey through the mountains has not been too hard.”

The man did not respond, nor halt in his approach.

Iula continued. “I can offer you food and water, but I am sorry to say warriors are no longer welcome in the house that I once shared with my beloved. Perhaps you have heard of him? Pylas of the Ra’Horak. A worthy hero of the Solari, some forty years past. I have the countenance of the priesthood in recognition of his service. You will find no enemies here, I assure you.”

Still, the man did not respond.

He crossed the bottom ditch. He was now barely a hundred yards from the house.

“Hanne,” Iula said calmly, “please go get my husband’s sword.”

The girl did not move. Her wide eyes were fixed on the approaching figure.

Iula shot her a serious glance.

“The sword hanging above the fireplace. Bring it here. Now. And make sure Tomis is hidden.”

There was something curious about this warrior. As he drew closer, she could see that his deep blue cloak was ragged and stained from battle, and his shield hung limply at his side. His spear, the haft pitted and bent, dragged in the dirt behind him as though it might be a beggar-king’s plow.

Iula took a step back. She did not know why the man had come... but if he meant the three of them harm, she would be ready to fight back.

Hanne tumbled out of the house with the sheathed sword clutched to her chest, letting out a whimper when she saw the warrior heave himself onto the path that ran between the yard and the fields. He stumbled, and Iula noticed that his left sandal was flapping loosely from his bloodied foot.

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears.

“...Atreus?”

The warrior stopped at the sound of his own name. The spear slipped from his grasp.

And then he was falling.

Though neither of them consciously intended it, Iula and Hanne both lunged forward in a vain attempt to catch him; some instinctive, mortal reaction to seeing true divinity humbled and laid low.

But of course, they could not.

Atreus, once known as Pantheon and the Aspect of War, crashed face-first onto the flagstones, his helm seeming to ring like a cracked temple bell as it rolled away into the dusk.

On the fourth day, he awoke. Iula did not hear him climb from his bed, pulling on the freshly washed and dried tunic that she and Hanne had left out for him, nor creep down the gritty stone passageway to the kitchen.

The first she knew of his recovery, at all, was when the unmistakable smell of burning reached her nostrils.

She hauled herself out of her simple cot in a daze, her heart pounding.

“Hanne!” she yelled. “Hanne, get Tam!”

The floor was cold beneath her feet, but she did not think to look for her sandals. She threw the dividing curtain aside, cursing when her shoulder struck the wooden jamb as she passed beneath it.

There was smoke in the passageway.

“Hanne!”

Wincing, cradling her shoulder, she drummed a fist on the rough stone wall of Hanne’s small room all the way down to the kitchen, before remembering that the girl would have left for market hours earlier. Iula would have to deal with this alone.

Then she turned the corner, and stopped abruptly.

Atreus was crouched before the bread oven in the fireplace, frantically fanning a small blaze with his shield. His eyes were raw from the smoke, his hands smeared with flour and soot.

He looked over his shoulder at Iula.

“Forgive me,” he choked. “I... I don’t know what I...”

She let out a cry of exasperation and grabbed a flagon of water from the pantry.

“Get out of the way, you big oaf!”

Steam billowed from the oven as the fire was quenched. Iula coughed and wheezed, dropping the flagon so she could cover her mouth and nose with her nightsmock. She glared at the warrior standing sheepishly in the middle of the room.

“What are you waiting for? Get the damn door open,” she snapped at him, even as she hobbled over to the window and pushed the shutters outward. The morning sun streamed into the gloom, becoming almost solid bars of light in the haze.

Atreus opened the door, then thought for a moment, and started moving it back and forth to waft fresher air inside. Iula shot him a withering glare, before lowering herself to her knees in front of the oven, to inspect the damage.

“Well, that’s the whole batch ruined,” she muttered, gingerly plucking one of the sodden, blackened loaves from the mess. The stone base groaned and ticked as it cooled, with a slurry of ashes and water splattering down onto the floor beneath the open grate. “And the fire’s dead too. It took me a whole day to get it up to the right heat, you know.”

She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder, in Atreus’ direction.

“I told you last time you were here—you will never be a baker. Just give up.”

He continued to waft with the door, as if it were the most important task in the world. “The girl,” he murmured. “She asked me to mind the bread. Before she left.”

Iula got back to her feet with some effort. “You spoke to Hanne?”

Atreus nodded. He looked around for something to prop the door open, before shrugging and using his shield. Even when he stood again, she noted that he would not look her in the eye, and kept his gaze on the floor between them.

And she could not quite shake the sense that he looked somehow... lesser than she remembered. Diminished, perhaps. In the past, he had always radiated a kind of stubborn defiance, one that reassured his allies and unsettled those who might seek to oppose him.

That was gone, now.

He ran his fingers through his beard, apparently trying to find a specific combination of words that he wanted to speak. “I wanted to... I want to find a way to repay you, Iula. For all your many kindnesses to me, over the years.”

She scoffed. “Well, we’ll have to find something outside of the kitchen, won’t we. Maybe I’ll let you till the fields before I sow again, next season. Not even you can set mud on fire. At least, I hope not. Maybe I’m wrong.”

A glimmer of a smile crossed his features, but it was only a glimmer.

Then his gaze darted past her, to the passageway.

Iula looked to see Tomis standing there, peering around the corner, gripping the edge of the wall with his little fingers. She smoothed out her smock, and beckoned to him.

“Come here, Tam. Come and say hello. This is the man we’ve been helping. His name is Atreus—we’ve been friends for a long time. A very long time. Although you wouldn’t know it from looking at him, eh?”

The boy did not move. Neither did Atreus.

Sighing, she trudged over and scooped Tomis up, letting him lean into her bruised shoulder as she carried him into the kitchen. “He’s a little afraid of you, I think. You’re the first soldier he’s seen, since...” The words died on her lips. She smiled down at the boy, and blew an affectionate raspberry into his hair. “Well. He’s an orphan. These past few years have not been kind to the folk of the high valleys.”

Atreus looked from Iula to Tomis, and back again.

“He is not yours?”

Iula laughed. “Are you being serious? I am never quite sure with you.”

Atreus’ eyes fell to the floor again. “I... I don’t...”

“No, Atreus. I can tell you this very young boy is not my son. And before you ask, no, Hanne is not my daughter either. I’m sixty-eight years old, and I know I look it, so don’t try to flatter me into forgiving you for the burned bread, either. I know you don’t ever seem to age, but the rest of us mortals bloody well do.”

Then she looked at the warrior standing before her, a man she had known almost all her life, and saw something she had never seen before.

His eyes were brimming with tears. He was trembling.

She made to take a step toward him, but Tomis squirmed uncomfortably in her arms at the prospect, and she lowered him to the floor instead. “Go on, young man. Back to your room. I’ll bring you some breakfast shortly.”

In spite of her reassuring smile, the boy still edged out of the kitchen most warily. Iula turned back to Atreus, who had stooped to pick up the flagon.

“You’ve been gone so long,” she said, reaching out to place a reassuring hand on his arm. “I was beginning to wond—”

Atreus reacted to her touch as though struck by summer lightning.

“Get away from me!” he bellowed, recoiling with such force that he crashed over the low wooden bench, and split his forehead on the corner of the table.

Iula started away, almost losing her balance as well.

Atreus covered his face with one hand, and tried to regain both his footing and his composure. He backed into the space behind the open door, and brought his knees up like a wall between him and the rest of the world. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me,” he repeated again and again, under his breath.

It had pained her to see him physically broken, but Iula knew now that the wounds he must recently have suffered ran far deeper than his flesh.

And that, that hurt her more than anything else she could imagine.

She folded her arms tightly across her chest, sobbing gently, grasping the fabric of her smock, and sank down to sit opposite him on the floor.

They sat there for some time. Iula said nothing for a goodly while, watching the sunlight through the window move slowly across the gray tiles, and not thinking about the rheumatic ache in her joints, or the chill in her toes.

Eventually, when Atreus seemed to have calmed enough to let his head sink a little, she wiped her eyes with her sleeves and cleared her throat.

“What happened to you, old friend?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t... I don’t really remember.”

“What do you remember? Do you recall the last time you were here? The last time we saw each other?”

He frowned a little. “I think so. How long ago was it?”

“Six years, Atreus. I haven’t seen you in six years.”

Her words seemed to hang in the air longer than she had intended. She watched him attempt to process them in light of whatever it was he wanted to tell her.

“I... I think I went back to the peak,” he murmured. “I think I climbed the mountain again.”

Iula’s eyes widened. “But...”

“I know. It shouldn’t be possible. And yet, there it is.”

It was beyond anything she had ever considered. Certainly, there were legends that pre-dated even the empire of Shurima, of climbers who reached the summit of Mount Targon and yet were claimed by no Aspect, who then managed against all odds to make their way back down and return to their people; whether in shame or triumph, it was often unclear in the telling, and usually considered nothing more than fanciful allegory.

But the notion that any mortal, even an Aspect’s host, might make the climb twice...

It was unheard of.

She laughed, clapping her open palm on the floor. “My old friend,” she beamed, “if ever someone was going to rewrite the rules of the world, it would be you!”

Atreus shook his head, and Iula felt all levity fade.

“No,” he replied. “It wasn’t me.”

“Then who—”

“Viego.”

Even though she had never heard it before that moment, the name sent a shudder through her. She did not like to think that words, or names, could have power over the living. Maybe it was simply the way Atreus had spoken it, his gaze haunted and thin.

“Viego. The ancient king who brought the Black Mist to our lands. I tried to fight him, but he... uhh...”

Atreus rubbed absently at his scalp.

“He made me his puppet, Iula. I think I’ve done some terrible, terrible things.”

Iula was numb. She recalled Atreus’ disheveled state when he stumbled back into the valley, and how she and Hanne had not dared imagine what foes he must have faced to blunt the weapons and dull the armor of an Aspect.

Had they even been foes at all?

She hauled herself up onto her knees, and found she could not stop shaking her head in disbelief at the injustice of it all. “I’m sorry. I know how hard it was for you to be controlled by the Pantheon, all those years ago. This must have been... Oh, Atreus. I’m so truly sorry for what has happened to you, my friend.”

Slowly, cautiously, she reached out to him again. This time he did not flinch, but his face creased in pained sorrow.

“Oh, Atreus,” she said again, and took him in her arms, rocking gently back and forth with him on the kitchen floor. He clutched at her clothing with his scarred hands, his face pressed against her chest—not so very different from young Tomis in those early days after he first came to the homestead.

Close to tears herself, Iula closed her eyes.

“Tell me what you need, old friend,” she whispered. “Whatever I can do for you, I will. You know that.”

Atreus took a deeper breath to steady himself.

“I need you to tell me it’s okay to give up,” he replied.

Iula felt suddenly cold. “What?”

“There is too much evil in the world. You and I have both seen it. I’ve fought it for so long, I can’t remember what came before... but I’m tired. I’m so damn tired, Iula. How can mortals hope to win out against undying kings, or fallen god-warriors? The Aspects and their slaves. Demons from the spirit realm. Runeterra is becoming their playground. I thought all I needed to do was keep getting back up, no matter what. But if I can be made an enemy too, then simply being able to endure is no longer enough.”

He gritted his teeth, and looked her dead in the eye.

“And worst of all, I’ve lost whatever power I still held after my Aspect was slain. Viego must’ve seen to that. Whatever it was that connected me to the celestial realm, it’s gone. I am... I am just a man. So I need you to tell me that it’s okay for me to leave all this behind. You’re the only person I—”

Iula pushed him away, and clambered shakily to her feet. Adrenaline surged in her veins. She saw that this wasn’t just the absence of his comforting defiance, which for so many years had made her feel safer, just knowing he was out there, somewhere in the world.

He had actually given up.

“How dare you,” she murmured.

Atreus rose, confused, towering over her. He wiped his face with the back of his forearm.

“I don’t underst—”

“How dare you!” Iula shrieked. “How can you even think to ask that?”

He faltered, his fists clenching involuntarily. “I can’t do this anymore. Please.”

A sour taste rose in the back of her throat. Her anger was so fierce, so hot, that she couldn’t feel the floor beneath her feet anymore.

“Damn you,” she spat. “Damn you. Coward. How dare you say that to me.”

“Iula, please, listen to—”

She slapped him, hard, across the face.

And again.

He did not try to defend himself, but only stared down at her, dumbfounded, his cheek reddening quickly.

Iula could not weep. She was too enraged. “He loved you, Atreus! Pylas loved you more than any brother. He was my husband, but he went with you up that accursed mountain, even though I begged him not to. He was mine, and you lost him up there!” She let out a wordless cry of pain, and dug her nails into her forearms. “You got to hold him, Atreus. You got to hold him as he died. And what did I get?”

She pointed to the mantel, where Pylas’ blade hung.

“I got a sword. Nothing more.”

Iula squared her jaw and looked up into the clear, open sky she imagined beyond the ceiling beams.

“Don’t you dare tell me about what you’ve lost, and how you can’t go on anymore. You don’t get to retire. You don’t have that option. This isn’t about you. It never has been. I helped you because that’s what Pylas would have wanted. I even tried to become a soldier and follow you on the battlefield after he was gone. He died for you, so you could become something greater than any Ra’Horak. Greater than any mortal.”

Atreus shook his head. “But I’m not.”

Exasperated, she stomped to the fireplace and snatched down the blade, wrenching it from its sheath and pressing it to Atreus’ heart in one sweeping motion.

“Then we don’t need you! We may as well just let the Aspects have their war, and let that be the end of everything!”

The tip of the sun-tempered steel parted the threads of his tunic, and drew a trickle of blood from his breast. He looked down at the small crimson spot slowly spreading across the fabric.

Then he looked back to Iula.

“What war?” he asked, his voice sounding weak.

She tightened her grip on the sword, realizing only then that she did not know how she expected this to end.

“The Solari, Atreus. They see heresy everywhere. And they’re not just killing anyone they suspect of being a Lunari—but anyone suspected of harboring them, too.” Unable to take a hand off the hilt, she nodded instead toward the open passageway. “Tomis’ entire settlement. The Ra’Horak butchered them. This, this is what happens when the Aspects cloak themselves in mortal superstition. Your former brethren have been driven into darkness by the blinding light of their new savior.”

Something like recognition flickered across Atreus’ features, as if he were trying to recall a fading dream. “And the Aspect of the Moon... Of course, she has not yet stepped forward to lead the Lunari.”

“And how much worse will it all get, once she does?” Iula hissed. “You swore that you would stand against them, Atreus. That you would not let this world’s fate be decided by such inhuman monsters, even when they choose to do nothing. I am sorry for what has happened to you, I truly am... but I cannot let you break your oath. Not now.”

Atreus slowly, deliberately closed the fingers of his right hand around the sword blade. “Killing either the Aspect of Sun or Moon will not end the conflict in Targon. Just as the death of War did not lead to eternal peace.”

“Shut up. Stop trying to justify what you want, and do what you know you should. That little boy was absolutely terrified of you when you arrived, and yet he wanted to wear your helm and pick up your spear from the moment he saw them. If you won’t act now, then that’s the only future he has—growing up to fight and die like too many Rakkor before him.”

She forced as much conviction into her voice as she could muster.

“You need to get back up, Atreus. I didn’t want to be a widowed farmer. I didn’t want to inherit all this. I had to give up my life and my love, so now you need to prove you’re worthy of the faith my husband had in you. You need to honor the sacrifices we’ve all made. You need to stop the Aspects from destroying our people entirely.”

Atreus gripped Iula’s leading hand, gently urging her to drive the blade onward, his expression resolute.

“I can’t,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I’m not strong enough.”

That was it. Iula was done.

She threw down the sword and barged past him, heading for Tomis’ room. “Well, if you’re going to just lay down and die, please pass on my love to my husband when you see him,” she yelled over her shoulder, before scooping up the startled child and hurrying out of the farmhouse in tears. She did not look back to see if Atreus was following them.

“Where are we going?” Tomis asked.

Iula winced as her bare feet were cut raw on the stony path, but did not slow her pace.

“We’re going to cut some more firewood, my boy,” she managed to smile. “We’re going to bake bread again today.”

When they returned, Atreus was gone.

Iula ignored the handwritten note that had been carefully placed beside Pylas’ sheathed sword on the kitchen table, and went to close the door.

Telling herself she was merely looking out for Hanne on her way back from market, she scanned the distant trackways that led up and out of the valley, but saw no sign of anyone.

She took a deep breath to calm herself, letting it out slowly as she walked back to the fireplace, and knelt before the cold oven with a grunt of discomfort. Then, without reading it, she balled up the note and stuffed it into the grate, and began to hum an old song from her youth as she stacked fresh kindling on top.

She genuinely hoped that would not be the last time she saw her old friend; that he would find his way out of the shadows, for all their sakes, by whatever path he had chosen.

But until then, she would sharpen her husband’s blade, and prepare to meet whatever was still to come.

An age ago, when time itself was young, the inhabitants of the celestial realm regarded the fledgling races of Runeterra with growing concern.

These creatures deviated wildly, unpredictably, and dangerously from the great designs intended for them by those above. The guidance and fates that had been woven into the night sky often went unseen—or worse, were misinterpreted by their simple mortal minds, leading to chaos, uncertainty, and suffering.

No longer able to merely watch, one celestial being chose to descend to the mortal realm, determined to untangle the knots in the tapestry of the world. This child of the stars took on a form of flesh and blood, and though the powerful magic coursing through her veins burned this new body from the inside out, she knew her suffering meant little if she could help to heal all that was broken and incomplete.

And so Soraka came to be, and set upon her journey to soothe the mortals she encountered.

Even so, she quickly learned the capacity for cruelty that the peoples of Runeterra possessed. Whether on the battlefields of inescapable conflicts, in the seedy underbellies of sprawling cities, or on the frontiers of the untamed wilderness beyond them, there seemed to be no end to the fighting, betrayal, and suffering Soraka witnessed. She watched, helpless, as mortals ignorantly broke the threads of destiny they could have woven together. Their lives were too short, she reasoned. They were simply unable to see the greater patterns, now lost.

But as Soraka lived among them, as one of them, trying to repair what little of the damage she could… something incredible and wholly unforeseen happened.

From the snarls and tangles and knots, the messy breaks in the great patterns, Soraka noticed a new, unintended design emerging—intertwined, and of a staggering complexity.

Unintended and wild, the mortals were forging new and unknown futures for themselves. From the celestial realm above, it had seemed like pure chaos; but with her new perspective, and blessed by the stars to stand against the erosion of time, Soraka now beheld an almost perfect beauty. Just as mortals had the deepest capacity for cruelty, so too did they possess infinite potential for kindness, and inspiration to rival anything among the stars.

Soraka realized her place was not to repair or replicate the celestial pattern. While a part of her craved the fixed, comforting destinies of the stars, she knew in her heart that static fates could not contain the unbridled, dynamic potential of mortality.

And so her work took on renewed vigor, driven to unlock the untapped possibilities of all she met. Soraka sought now to inspire and guide rather than shepherd, to see what unblazed trails each mortal would discover for themselves in their brief, radiant moment.

Over the millennia, legends of the Starchild have filtered through all the lands of Runeterra. Some tribes of the Freljord still speak of a far wanderer, a horned healer who soothed the icy bite of the most brutal winters. In the depths beneath Zaun, rumors float of a lilac skinned medic who would purify weary lungs from the ravages of the alchemical Gray. In troubled Ionia, the oldest myths of the Vastayashai’rei recall a seer who communed with the stars themselves, and called upon their light both to heal the wounded and scorch those who would do further harm to the First Lands.

Currently, Soraka calls the westernmost peaks of Targon her home. She watches over an isolated tribe of vastaya, teaching them her healing ways, and tending quietly to her own needs—though what brings her so close to the great mountain, or how long she will stay, only Soraka knows.

Many times, she has watched entire civilizations dance close to the brink of destruction, and she has learned that she cannot save those who do not wish it, nor force them to see what they will not.

All the same, Soraka is determined never to stop trying.

Whether through destiny or circumstance, Morgana and her sister were born to a world in conflict. The cataclysmic Rune Wars had ripped through most of Valoran and Shurima, and seemed poised to engulf even the peaks of Targon. Morgana’s parents, Mihira and Kilam, knew the legends of the great mountain granting divine power—they saw no other choice than to attempt the long and perilous journey, if their tribe was to be saved.

Even when they learned Mihira was with child, they could not turn back. Finally, where Runeterra touches the stars, Kilam watched in wonder and fear as Mihira was chosen to embody the Aspect of Justice.

The couple returned not only with the salvation they sought, but twin daughters—Morgana and Kayle. However, the celestial power that claimed Mihira began to overshadow her mortal personality and affections. She would often push the girls into their father’s arms, abandoning them to answer battle’s call.

For many months, uncertainty gnawed at Kilam. The wars still raged on countless fronts, and his beloved wife was slipping away. Fearing for his daughters’ safety, he waited for Mihira to leave once more, then fled Targon with them both.

Though their destination did not yet have a name, it would become known as a haven from magic and persecution: the kingdom of Demacia.

There the twins grew different as day and night. While Kayle studied the settlement’s growing set of laws, dark-haired Morgana became troubled by their distrust of new arrivals. Knowing what it was to be a refugee, she wandered the wilds, talking to wayward mages and others cast out for the dangers they might bring. At home, she felt her father’s heartbreak at leaving Mihira behind, and grew bitter at her mother for causing such pain.

Morgana’s fears that she and Kayle might carry some remnant of the Aspect’s power were eventually confirmed, when a great blade wreathed in shadow and starfire fell from the heavens. As it pierced the ground, splitting in two, feathered wings burst from the girls’ shoulders. Their father wept at the sight of them each taking up half of the weapon, and turned away even as Morgana reached out to comfort him.

While Kayle embraced their new calling, rallying an order of judicators to enforce the laws, Morgana resented her gifts… until the night their settlement was raided. Kilam found himself surrounded as the fighting spread. In that moment, Morgana rushed to shield him, burning his attackers to ash. Together, the sisters saved countless lives, and were hailed as the Winged Protectors of Demacia.

But Kayle grew more extreme in her ideologies, and Morgana increasingly found herself pleading the case of those who wanted to atone for their crimes. An accord was struck between the sisters and their mortal devotees—though it was uneasy, and did not last. Kayle’s most ardent disciple, Ronas, came to arrest Morgana herself. Attempting to protect her penitent followers, she shackled him with dark flame until he fell to the floor, dead.

Divine fire lit the city from above as Kayle swore to bring Ronas’ killer to justice, and Morgana met her sister in the skies.

They raised their blades, each matching the other with arcs of blinding light and burning darkness that lashed down at the buildings beneath them. It seemed certain that one of them would win… but Morgana faltered when she heard their father’s anguished voice. Kilam lay in the rubble, mortally wounded. Howling with grief, Morgana hurled her half of their mother’s sword at Kayle, and plunged to the surface like a meteorite.

She cradled her father, cursing their inheritance for the destruction around them. Kayle landed, dumbstruck, and Morgana demanded to know if the smiting of wicked mortals included Kilam, whose crime was stealing them away from their mother. Kayle gave no answer, but soared into the heavens without looking back.

Morgana’s wings became an inescapable reminder of her pain. She tried to cut them from her flesh, but could find no blade strong enough. Instead, she bound them with iron chains, resolving instead to walk the world of mortals.

Over the centuries, her tale fell into myth, and the name Morgana was all but forgotten. To this day, the people of Demacia venerate “the Winged Protector,” but recall only the glory and truth of one sister, while Morgana’s dark outbursts and belief in personal redemption became the mysteries of “the Veiled One.”

Through all of this, she still refuses to abandon those who would seek her aid. Bitter, betrayed, she bides her time in the kingdom’s shadows, knowing with certainty that Kayle’s light will someday return to Runeterra, and all will face her judgment.

As magic begins to rise again, Morgana sees that dawn is nearly upon them.

It is said that most inhabitants of the celestial realm see their home as a wondrous and vivid tapestry, woven with prismatic threads of purest starlight. However, for one prodigious entity, the intangible and everlasting beauty of this dimension is not seen, but heard—for Bard, a troubadour as enigmatic as he is eternal, the wondrous firmament is a symphony of mystic, ambrosial music.

In the beginning, Bard had drifted without purpose or perspective through a silent cosmos, but with a deep sense of anticipation that something miraculous would eventually come to fill it. Fate did not disappoint, and with the forging of the first stars, the silence was broken and the first rapturous notes of creation rang in Bard’s ear.

He traveled the swirling harmonies between the stars, along with the tiniest wisps of residual inspiration and thought left over from their birth. These semitonal, incomplete motes of energy—or meeps—were drawn to him whenever he added his own voice to the cosmic opus, forever ringing in one perfect accord.

This was not his masterpiece, yet he gloried in it all the same.

But after a measureless interval, a dissonance began to creep in. It was so small at first, Bard might have missed it, but the ever-doting meeps drew his attention to a failed dynamic shift here, an unexpected syncopation there, and even the growing absence of sound where, before, sound had been.

Bard scoured the celestial realm for clues, until he discovered the source. It was the most curious of things—a world with a song all of its own.

Driven by unknown magic, the music produced by Runeterra was as primitive, unevolved, and chaotic as the mortal beings that lived there… and yet it had an inherent beauty, like the rolling thunder of a storm, or the melodious knocking of wooden chimes in the wind that precedes it. Bard would have merely appreciated it for what it was, but unfortunately this particular song had gone far beyond a mere counterpoint to the celestial whole, and was becoming destructive. Something had to be done.

Touching down in the First Lands of Ionia, Bard and his attendant meeps crossed into the material realm. All at once, his ears became like eyes, and he fashioned himself a simple body from the trinkets and fabrics of a traveling shawm-player’s wagon, including a beguiling mask—circular, with three holes in the face.

He walked the world for an age, confusing and delighting those he encountered along the way, and found the state of things far more complex than he had first imagined. Many objects of wild and unpredictable power seemed to have made their way erroneously into Runeterra, and were disrupting the natural cosmic order of things. Casting his gaze back to the heavens, Bard deduced that some other power within the celestial realm was at work here… though to what end, he could not guess.

Regardless, he has taken to the role of caretaker, retrieving anything out of place and returning it to where it can do no further harm. Though this may be only the first step in bringing the universe back in tune, it may also be the only way this world can be saved from what lies beyond it.

And Bard is not blind to the future. He can see a great conflict approaching—one fought not in any single realm, but in all—and awaits the time when he must finally pick a side.

This world’s familiar sun still hides below the horizon. Crude and unpolished earth unfurls below. Mountains contort into barriers that stretch like fingers across empty scrub lands. Palaces, or rather, what pass for palaces, fail to loom over anything but the squattest of hills. The curvature of the planet meets the stars with a serenity and grace few of the dwellers below will ever witness. They are so scattered across the globe and grasp so blindly for any sort of understanding that it’s no surprise they’ve been conquered and don’t even comprehend their predicament.

The fiery sheen I’ve gathered as I streak toward my preordained destination illuminates the world beneath me. Pockets of warring, fearful, rejoicing life tucks itself into any fertile nook it can find below. Oh, how they gaze and point as I streak over their heads. I’ve heard the names they call me: prophet, comet, monster, god, demon… So many names, all missing the mark.

In a vast stretch of desert, I feel the twinge of familiar magic emanating from the seat of the premiere civilization amongst these savages. Lo and behold, a massive Sun Disc is under construction. The poor enslaved laborers beat their heads and rend their clothes in my wake. Their cruel masters see me, a streaking bolt of fire, as a portent of good omen, no doubt. My passing will be etched in their uncouth pictograms upon common stone, an homage to the great comet, the blessing of the sky-god gracing their holy works and so forth. The Disc’s sole purpose is to funnel the sun’s majesty into the most “renowned” of these fleshy humanoids, transforming them into exactly what this planet needs: more insufferable demigods. This effort will undoubtedly backfire. But I suppose they might last a brief while, perhaps a thousand years or so, before they fall and are supplanted by others.

The desert below fades into the night trailing behind me as I streak onward across lonely steppes, then over rolling brown hills gently flecked with greenery. The pastoral scenery belies a field spattered with blood and littered with the dead and dying. Survivors hack away at each other with rough-hewn axes and scream battle cries. One side is losing quite badly. Stag skulls rest atop pikes stuck into the soil, next to writhing warriors. The few still on their feet are encircled by soldiers riding great shaggy beasts.

Those defeated, surrounded few see me and valiance seems to surge through their veins. The wounded rise and grasp their axes and bows in a final stand that throws their foes off guard. I don’t linger to see the rest of the little clash play out because I’ve seen this scenario unfold a thousand times: The survivors will scratch my comet likeness onto their cave walls. In a thousand years, their descendants will fly my image on banners and undoubtedly ride into a tediously similar battle. For all their efforts to capture and record history, one ponders why they do not learn from their mistakes. That is a lesson even I have had to suffer.

I leave them to perpetuate their bleak cycle.

My trajectory reveals more inhabitants. Their collective repertoire of reactions span the typical gamut: pointing, kneeling, sacrificing virgins upon stony altars. They look up and see a comet and never ask what lies beneath the blazing façade. Instead, they stamp it onto their own self-centered worldviews, muddying the splendor of my visage. The few more advanced life forms–and I use that description loosely–gaze up and jot down my coordinates in scientific almanacs instead of using me as prophecy fodder. It’s mildly refreshing, but even their developing notions of intellect seems to indicate I am a regularly appearing phenomenon with a predictable orbit. Oh, the feats they could accomplish if only… Well, no use dwelling on the wasted potential of the simple-minded terrestrial born. It’s not entirely their fault. Evolution does seem to have a difficult time gaining traction on this world.

But alas, the novelty of such infantile antics has worn thin. The grasping energies of my magical bondage have dragged me from one paltry world to another for centuries. Now it has led me back to this familiar and unpleasant rock. The star that floods its surface with light was one of my earliest creations, a confluence wrought of love and radiance. Ah, that cherished moment when she flared to life with colors only her creator could see. How I miss a star’s crackling new energy warming my face and trickling through my fingers. Each star gives off a unique energy, precious and reflecting its creator’s soul. They are cosmic snowflakes burning in defiance of the infinite dark.

Unfortunately, the memories I long to dwell upon are tainted by betrayal. Yes, this was the place where Targon lured me into servitude. But now is not the time to linger on past mistakes. Those musty Aspects want me to seal yet another breach… in their name of course.

Then, I see her. This world’s imbued warrior is alone at the peak of one of the smaller summits, brandishing a starstone spear. She watches me through a veil of annexed flesh, a mere spark masquerading as lightning. A thick braid of auburn hair is draped over her shoulder, falling over a golden breastplate that covers pale, freckled skin. Her eyes, the only bit of her face not shielded by a battle-worn helmet, flash a jarring shade of red.

She calls herself Pantheon—the warring fury of Targon incarnate. She is not the first of this world to wear the Pantheon mantle. Nor will she be the last.

Her glittering cape flaps out behind her as she raises her muscled arm and makes a motion like she’s pulling on a great chain. The tug on my crudely enchanted tether wrenches me off course, toward the mountain upon which she stands. And she’s yelling at me.

She cries outs with a voice that booms inside my head, transmitted through this insufferable star-gem coronet. All sounds fade as she invades my mind.

“Dragon!” she says, as if I am a weak-winged beast of base orange flame, lucky if it can ignite a tree.

“Seal their gate!” she commands, gesturing to the bottom of a rocky crevasse with her pointy little spear. I don’t need to see the violet erosion of reality swirling below. I could smell the festering miasma that poisons this world before I even arrived. I fix my eyes on Pantheon instead. She expects me to fall in line like a dog on its leash. Today will be different, for I’ve learned from my mistakes.

“Dragon,” I purr. “Are you sure commanding me with such a low name is wise?”

Pantheon’s grip on her spear loosens just enough for her to fumble the weapon for a fraction of a second. She takes a step back, away from me, as if a single stride’s distance could protect her from my ire.

“Seal their gate,” she says again, barking louder as if perhaps the previous command went unheard. Her volume does little to mask the quiver in her voice. She thrusts her spear toward me, as if such a tiny weapon could pierce me.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen an Aspect of Targon shaken. She is not used to having to tell me twice.

“I will deal with those chittering horrors in due time, dear Pantheon.”

“Do as you are commanded, dragon” this Pantheon shouts, “or this world is lost.”

“This world was lost the moment Targon surrendered itself to arrogance.”

I feel Pantheon’s seething mingle with confusion as she struggles to grab hold of my immaterial reins. She’s only just now sensing what I have come to learn. Targon is distracted and does not sense its magic faintly ebbing from my bonds.

Pantheon bellows once more, and this time, I cannot resist. The crude enchantment regains sovereignty over my will. I turn my attention toward the source of the breach, nestled in the basin of the once-verdant valley, now strangled with creeping, purple miasma. I sense the Voidborn perversions of life tunneling through reality’s firmament, sending tides of unseen energy coursing through the aether. They shred the veil that separates nothingness and form with their unwelcome passage.

They’re drawn to me, those multi-eyed, carapaced abominations. They seek to devour me, the greatest of their threats. From the reaches of my mind, I conjure an image of the solar furnaces I kindled, before my fettering, which once ignited the hearts of stars. I lance out beams of pure starfire and incinerate wave after wave of those gnashing horrors, driving them backward into their oblique infinity. Smoldering husks rain from the sky. I’m a little surprised they aren’t wholly disintegrated, but then again, the Voidborn don’t know how things work in this universe.

A pulsing sickness lingers in the air. From the epicenter of the corruption, I feel a will… hungry and indomitable, and far from the typical mindlessness I’m accustomed to from these Voidborn aberrations. The pulsating wound on reality yawns and buckles, distorting and warping all it touches. Whatever exists on the other side is laughing.

Pantheon shouts another command at me, but I ignore her words. This anomalous fissure in the universe entrances me. This is not the first of its kind I’ve had to deal with, but this one feels different, and I can’t help but admire the marvelously terrifying manipulation of the barriers between realms. Few beings could fathom its complexities, let alone possess the sheer magnitude of power needed to rend the fabric of existence. In my heart, I know a wound so exquisite could never be orchestrated by scuttling creatures. No. There must be more behind this intrusion. I shudder at the thought of what kind of entity is capable of inducing such a volatile rift. I don’t need Pantheon’s barked orders to tell me what do next; her array of requests has always been of a rather limited imagination anyway. She wants me to hurl a star at the rift, as if one can simply cauterize such moldering inter-dimensional abrasions and be done with it.

These obtuse demigods are my captors?

Fine. At least they’re not too far off in their “logic” by thinking a few searing cosmic wonders will remedy this problem. I will play the role of the obedient servant just a little while longer.

I enjoy what I do next, partly because they’ll remember it, partly because it feels good to let a little of the old power loose, but mostly because I wish to remind whatever intelligence that controls this Void incursion that nobody laughs at me in my plane of existence.

The base elements in the atmosphere rally to my cause, accreting into a plasmic anomaly. The swelling stardust detonates at my unspoken command. The result is a dwarf replica of one of my majestic glories burning in the depths of space. After all, I can’t fling a full-fledged star at this fragile world.

The young star’s shimmering brilliance flies from my hands. It’s joined by two sisters, always by my side. They careen around me in a radiant ballet, their white-hot cores devouring the gathering clouds of dust and matter I draw toward us. We become a storm of stars, the night sky incarnate, a maddening gyre of starfire. I conjure eddies of searing stardust, exhaling a heat so pure and dense it collapses the aura of this world just the tiniest bit, forever marring the planet’s curvature. Coruscating strands of stellar flame pirouette from the center of the rift. Gravity melts in undulating waves of color most eyes will never be able to witness. My stars warp matter as more fuel coalesces into their cores, causing them to shine brighter, burn hotter. The whole spectacle is breathtaking, a cascading dance of blinding light and searing heat so hot that for a fleeting moment, new spectra are birthed into existence. My spine tingles just a little bit at how good it feels.

Trees splinter. Rivers evaporate. The mountain walls of the valley crumble in smoky avalanches. The tireless laborers erecting their Sun Disc, the soldiers taking the hill, the stargazers, the worshipers, the terrified, the doomsday prophets, the hopeless, the rising kings… all those who beheld the streaking comet with selfish eyes witness the ensuing supernova as an early dawn. Across this pitiful globe, my radiance turns darkest night to blinding day. What fictions will they conjure to explain this phenomenon?

Even my Targonian masters have rarely witnessed such a display of my power. Certainly, no terrestrial world has ever born scars as severe as what is left of that once-verdant valley. When I am finished, nothing remains.

Not even this incarnation of Pantheon. I can’t say I’ll miss her or her mindless barking.

In the glowing aftermath of my carnage, the smoldering once-mountains collapse into the molten rubble streams now flowing through the valley. This is the scar I have left upon this world. A surge of damning pain shoots through my body, radiating from that infernal crown. I am about to pay.

My head snaps up, and my eyes drink the bitter sight of a dying star. My hearts clasp shut. My minds reel. An overwhelming sense of despair ricochets through my very soul, emanating from a deep and immediate sorrow, like the pulsing realization you’ve lost something precious and know it’s all your fault.

Some curious life forms I met long ago once asked how it was possible for me to remember every star I’ve created. If only they could feel what it was like to create a single star, they would understand the sheer irrelevance of that question. That’s how I know when even one of my darlings winks out from existence, ejecting jets of energy and, with it, the very substance of my own spirit. I see her death knell in the heavens above. She shines brightly one last time in a pyroclasm that momentarily drowns her brothers and sisters. My heart shatters as the heavens are diminished in brutal retribution for turning my power on one of Targon’s own.

A sun is the price of a single Pantheon. This is the cost of my unfettered wrath. This is the kind of boorish sorcery I must deal with.

Within seconds, they have regained control of my reins and call me to a new task. On no other world have I exhibited such a display of freedom, no matter how fleeting it was. What’s more is that I have learned from their mistakes. A bit of me is free now, and in time, I will return to this world, tap into this mysterious well of energy and cast off the rest of my tether.

I tune into that essence of war, twisting and contorting within fleshy vessels scattered across the cosmos. It wasn’t happy about losing its mortal avatar on this world. Already, a new doomed host has been chosen to transform into the next iteration of Pantheon – a soldier from the Rakkor, a tribe who cling to the base of Targon’s mountain, siphoning off its power like barnacles. One day, I shall meet this new incarnation of Pantheon. Perhaps he will learn to find a new weapon and abandon that ludicrous spear. I sense Pantheon’s celestial kin, scattered across the cosmos. In a single instance, all of their attention is focused on this world, where one of their earthly Aspects was vaporized by their own weapon. Their confusion is mingled with a growing desperation as they contend with each other to regain their control over me. How I wish I could see their faces.

As I launch myself from the gravity of this world, this Runeterra, I sense an emotion I have never felt from Targon before.

Fear.

The son of a Freljordian healer, Kegan Rodhe was born an outsider. The little magic and herbcraft his mother possessed allowed them both to survive on the fringes of a small coastal community named Rygann’s Reach. Friends were few and far between. Even as a young boy, he knew his father was an enemy reaver, and that he—and Kegan by extension—was the reason his mother was shunned. The villagers called him “the reaver-bastard”. Kegan allowed his loneliness and resentment to smolder, often turning violent.

After enduring years of seemingly endless winter, his mother’s frail body finally gave in. As Kegan spread her funeral ashes, he thought of the people she had spent her life healing. None had come to pay their respects. He knew they wished him to disappear into the cold air as well.

He would oblige them, but not before he took his revenge. He burned down the village and fled into the night, leaving himself with scars that would never heal.

Kegan wandered the frozen tundra of the Freljord. He told himself that he was searching for his father, but he knew deep down he was looking for a friend... or, at the very least, a kind face. Finding neither, he holed himself up in a cave, and waited to die.

It was not death that came to him, but another outsider.

The mysterious mage named Ryze saw potential in this half-frozen young man, and took him on as an apprentice. Teacher and student struggled as Kegan’s nascent, wild magic frustrated them both, and Ryze’s requests for patience and humility often fell on deaf ears.

Unfortunately, instructing Kegan would always come second to Ryze’s original mission. He had long sought to collect and hide away a power that could be Runeterra’s unmaking—the legendary World Runes. After tracking down one such fragment, Kegan faced the same desperate temptation that had driven so many before him to madness. The Runes were the source of all magic in the world and, against his master’s warnings, he chose to seize that power for himself.

Ryze was forced to watch in failure as his apprentice was burned away by the raw magic, Kegan’s soul utterly consumed. The creature that was born in that moment was no longer the bitter young man Ryze had rescued from the snows, nor the Freljordian mage he had come to know as his friend.

Rather, this vengeful being of fire and fury that now walked the mortal realm would eventually become known as Brand.

Cursing his former master, and every other living thing that would ever come between him and the Runes, Brand lashed out with magical flames, and Ryze barely escaped with his life.

Over the centuries since that day, Brand has lived an anarchic, wildfire existence, taking and never giving anything back to the world. At times, he blazes across the heavens like a comet. At others, he sinks into the cold earth and slumbers, waiting for the unmistakable scent of magic that will lead him to another World Rune… and should he find one, there are precious few in Runeterra with the power to stop him.

Whether mistaken for a demon or god, many tales have been told of the Darkin Blade... but few know his real name, or the story of his fall.

In ancient times, long before desert sands swallowed the empire, a mighty champion of Shurima was brought before the Sun Disc to become the avatar for a now forgotten celestial ideal. Remade as one of the Ascended, his wings were the golden light of dawn, and his armor sparkled like a constellation of hope from beyond the great veil.

Aatrox was his name. He was at the vanguard of every noble conflict. So true and just was his conduct that other god-warriors would always gather at his side, and ten thousand mortals of Shurima marched behind him. When Setaka, the Ascended warrior-queen, called for his help against the rebellion of Icathia, Aatrox answered without hesitation.

But no one predicted the extent of the horrors that the rebels would unleash—the Void quickly overwhelmed its Icathian masters, and began the grinding annihilation of all life it encountered.

After many years of desperate battle, Aatrox and his brethren finally halted the Void’s perverse advance, and seared the largest rifts shut. But the surviving Ascended, the self-described Sunborn, had been forever changed by what they had encountered. Though Shurima had triumphed, they all had lost something in their victory... even noble Aatrox.

And in time, Shurima fell, as all empires must.

Without any monarch to defend, or the existential threat of the Void to test them, Aatrox and the Sunborn began to clash with one another, and eventually this became a war for the ruins of their world. Mortals fleeing the conflict came to know them instead by a new and scornful name: the darkin.

Fearing that these fallen Ascended were as dangerous to Runeterra’s survival as the Void incursions had been, the Targonians intervened. It is said that the Aspect of Twilight gave mortals the knowledge to trap the darkin, and the newly reborn Aspect of War united many in fighting back against them. Never fearing any foe, Aatrox and his armies were ready, and he realized only too late that they had been deceived. A force greater than a thousand dead suns pulled him inside the sword he had carried into battle countless times, and forever bound his immortal essence to it.

The weapon was a prison, sealing his consciousness in suffocating, eternal darkness, robbing him even of the ability to die. For centuries, he strained against this hellish confinement... until some nameless mortal was foolish enough to try and wield the blade once more. Aatrox seized upon this opportunity, forcing his will and an imitation of his original form onto his bearer, though the process quickly drained all life from the new body.

In the years that followed, Aatrox groomed many more hosts—men and women of exceptional vitality or fortitude. Though his grasp of such magics had been limited in life, he learned to take control of a mortal in the span of single breath, and in battle he discovered he could feast on his victims to build himself ever larger and stronger.

Aatrox traveled the land, searching desperately, endlessly, for a way return to his previous Ascended form… but the riddle of the blade proved unsolvable, and in time he realized he would never be free of it. The flesh he stole and crudely shaped began to feel like a mockery of his former glory—a cage only slightly larger than the sword. Despair and loathing grew in his heart. The heavenly powers that Aatrox had once embodied had been wiped from the world, and all memory.

Raging against this injustice, he arrived at a solution that could only be born of a prisoner’s desperation. If he could not destroy the blade or free himself, then he would embrace oblivion instead.

Now, Aatrox marches toward this merciless goal, bringing war and death wherever he goes. He clings to a blind hope: if he can drive all of creation into a final, apocalyptic battle—where everything, everything else is destroyed—then maybe he and the blade will also cease to exist.

When I land in the ruins of Nerimazeth, it does not feel as if I have leapt, celestial magic burning my path across the sky, but as if I have fallen.

I am, after all, only a man.

Around me on the swirling dunes, a cohort of Ra’Horak fights, Solari warriors far from the temples of Mount Targon. They have marched with fifty spears, three weeks into the desert—a distance I have crossed in moments—to investigate a power that grows, even as their own wanes. Here, the sun they worship is so constant, it is as if the shadows of the past are still burned into the desert, their outline all that remains of an empire long lost. Buildings, now covered in dunes. A sun, once meant to raise men into the heavens, now dulled and fallen to earth.

Shurima was born, and died here. It was in Nerimazeth that the first Ascended were created. Meant to defend Shurima against any threat, those that outlived the empire were driven mad by long centuries of conflict, becoming Darkin and laying waste to the world before being contained.

But, as I well know, some abominations birthed by Shuriman hubris live on…

The sound of metal rings in my ear, as a spear whips past my helm. Then another, and another. The ringing rises up into a full battlecry, as the Ra’Horak unleash their might. Yet, as steel fills the sky, a blast of magic tears through the spears’ path, carving a swath of destruction through the ruins.

Once the dust clears, I see it. The reason I have come. A creature looms, burning and broken like the empire it would rule. It is unlike any Ascended I have ever seen, a shattered god that has claimed this fallen city, and would see it rise again.

But once… it too was a man.

I will remind it what that means—to draw breath in the face of destruction. I will remind them all.

“The god-warrior!” one of the Ra’Horak cries. “We cannot defeat it!”

“Let me show you how a god dies!” I bellow in response, and I charge toward the creature, raising my spear. It is with their power that the spear glows—the power of the gods. The power of the stars. My muscles strain to bear the strange weight of the magic, as the creature unleashes another blast from within its shattered form. My spear is not burned away as the Ra’Horak’s were, but instead burns with its own light. It streaks like a comet at the Ascended, casting it to the earth, and its blast into the heavens.

Before me, only feet from the rent opened by the creature’s blast, a Ra’Horak cradles the body of a fallen warrior. Her own arm has been scorched by magic, where she sought to shield him from the attack.

“You… You are an Aspect,” she says, though in her eyes I can see the desperation. She is pleading, begging me to say yes, so that I can save her. So that I can save her friend. All around, the Ra’Horak lines are broken, along with their will to fight.

I do not answer as the spear is called back to my hand by the magic she so craves, its return an echo of my own thrust. The Ascended has left no blood upon its tip, only sand. It possesses no flesh other than magic and stone.

I want to tell her my name. That I am Atreus, that I too was once a Ra’Horak looking to the skies for the power to save me… But that man is dead. He died on Targon’s peak, along with his brother, Pylas. Slain by the Pantheon, and by his own failures. And no matter how hard I try, I can bring neither Atreus nor Pylas back. Even the god is gone, its constellation torn from the heavens.

Instead, I turn to face the creature once more.

“You must fight,” I tell the Ra’Horak simply. “You all must.” Around us, the ruined city burns, as the Ascended’s magic refuses to fade.

I run over sand fused into glass, each new blast of magic shaking the whole world, until it feels like the earth itself must fall apart. That only the heavens will remain. But I refuse to give up. I see ballistae, abandoned on the ground. The Ra’Horak raise their shields against debris cast from falling buildings, disappearing into dust.

“Fight! You must fight!” I yell louder, my voice carrying more of the gods’ authority than I would like, and then I am upon it, my spear slashing into the Ascended, cutting across the broken stone it boasts instead of a face. This close, its blasts crash into my shield, pushing me backward. I slash again, my spear trailing magic, and again, I raise my shield only just in time to deflect the Ascended’s wrath.

My feet dig into the dirt. I struggle to hold the beast at bay as the magic beats into me with the Ascended’s will, made only stronger by cruelty and rage. I push against it, snarling, and power lances off of the shield wildly in every direction—cutting through the ruins, the sky, and through the Ra’Horak still cowering beneath both. My hands begin to shake, and it is not to the warriors, but to myself, that I growl against lungs gasping for breath.

“Fight…”

The creature’s eyes narrow. It knows. The earth beneath me can no longer hold. My strength can no longer hold. As I fall back to earth, the magic in my spear dies, and the helm clatters from my coughing face.

I spit blood into the dirt, and struggle to raise my head. But all I can see of Nerimazeth is that one Ra’Horak warrior, framed by smoke and chaos—as she looks back at me, into eyes only now revealed… and for the first time, sees something other than an Aspect. The man who cradled Pylas, as snow formed from his dying breath.

I wonder if she recognizes the stars, and my destiny, tattooed upon my chest. The scar that cuts through them. It is no longer pleading that shows in her eyes, as I see the light grow on her face, the creature gathering power for one more blast. Though her arm is ruined, and though her friend lies still, she picks up her shield and begins stumbling toward me, as inevitable and determined as death.

“What… is your name?!” I cough through ragged breaths, and still, the light grows brighter.

“Asose,” she says firmly as she stands beside me, and turns her shield to face the blast.

The ruins fill with impossible brightness that promises to burn everything away, until it does, and only darkness is left. There is no more power, no more Aspect. Where Asose once stood, there is nothing. Only my memory.

But still, I can feel my scar, throbbing with pain. Reminding me I am alive, and of every moment that brought me here. My brother-in-arms, Pylas, telling me to stop getting blood on his victory… The barbarian raid, each of us near death… Collapsing upon Targon’s pinnacle… The Darkin blade, cutting through death to awaken me again… Empyrean wheat, clinging to the mountain… The mud on my hands as I put down the plow, and pick up the spear…

All of that would be nothing without a woman taking up her shield—knowing that she would not survive, but that she would fight. Her power, her sacrifice, so much greater than that of the stars. So much greater than mine, and the weapons of the Aspect that have kept me safe.

It will not be in vain.

As I struggle to my feet, broken, I see the shadow of the Ra’Horak, emerging from cover, eclipsing the Sun Disc cradle behind me at the center of the ruins. I rise with them, not as a god, but as a man. My pantheon, all who have fallen, earning me another moment. All who have lived, and all who have died facing a moment of truth where they must decide why they fight. Who they love. What they truly are.

What are gods before this courage? They are nothing.

“Asose!” I yell into the ruins, though my ribs dig into my lungs.

“Asose!” the Ra’Horak call back. They too stand amidst the rubble, their shadow looming all the larger as the Ascended gathers its magic again.

And though I am broken, and though the god is dead, I feel the power ignite once more in my spear, as the plume on my helm bursts alight. It is calling me to battle, as the Ra’Horak cast their spears once more.

And, for a moment, a star lost with the Constellation of War gleams brighter than the sun.

Her name was Asose.