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“I don’t understand,” General Granth mutters, nervously trying to smother the light from his lamp. “There’s nothing here. It’s a dead end.”

He stands at the threshold, framed by the dark stonework against the deeper darkness beyond it. He does not see the open gateway before him, nor the angular Ochnun inscriptions that surround it. He does not see the fragments of bone that litter the flagstones beneath his boots.

I smile, playing my part. “It is the simplest of things,” I tell him, “to hide in plain sight.”

The general turns, confusion and frustration written clearly upon his face. “Don’t play games with me, cousin! Do you have any idea what I’m risking, being down here? Or what would happen if we’re caught? These districts are forbidden, by order of the council—there are Legion patrols everywhere!”

This, at least, is true. Ever since the usurper Swain seized control, he has kept the Immortal Bastion locked down. Officially, it is to protect the Trifarix against reprisals from those noble houses that opposed its creation.

Unofficially, he is daring men like Brannin Granth to expose themselves as his enemies.

“But they would not doubt your loyalty,” I reassure him. “A hero of the Gates of Mourning, no less. You are to be honored by command of the Grand General himself. What can they say to that? If we were spotted, you would not even need to run.”

His expression darkens. “Oh, you don’t run from the Trifarian Legion…”

I do not need to hear this thinly veiled propaganda again. In little more than a year, Swain has built a certain mystique around himself and the Hand of Noxus, and those that serve them both. It is a brilliant scheme, though it fills my heart with hatred to admit it.

Even so, I let Granth have his moment. It is why we are here.

His eyes fall to the ground. “We didn’t win the Gates of Mourning—the Legion did. That’s why Swain won’t attend the triumph. He knows we need not even have been there, damn him. He insults us with this pomp and ceremony, in front of all Noxus!”

I nod, laying a hand on Granth’s shoulder. “And that is why we will make him pay for everything he has done. You are a true Noxian, anyone can see that. I have told the others all about you, and they wish to meet you for themselves. She wishes to meet you.”

“I can’t meet anyone, cousin, if we can’t get inside.” He glances around. “Doesn’t the Black Ro—”

I recoil. “Do not use that name. It makes you sound like… well, as you said. Like you don’t understand.”

Pushing past him, I stride through the yawning mouth of the gate. He almost drops the lantern in surprise, seeing the entrance now, for the first time. Stumbling after me, Granth checks to make sure we are not being followed, then squints into the shadows of the passageway.

“Is it true?” he hisses. “What they say about her, is it true?”

I do not slow my pace. “Come. Find out for yourself.”

The Immortal Bastion is not a monument, as most Noxians believe. Nor is it merely a fortress, in the sense that the old tribes knew it.

The stone around us almost thrums with power, though Granth is mostly oblivious. I have seen it countless times, through the centuries—he knows something is not right, but feels it only as a lethargic drag on his limbs, and a whispering itch in the back of his brain. Few mortals last long when they are this close to the source. To his credit, he still has his wits about him, enough to reach for his dagger when a robed figure emerges from the gloom.

…I pass both of us, coming in the other direction. I look tired.

No matter. This will be concluded soon enough.

Granth eyes me suspiciously until I disappear from sight, then ambles to the side of the person he knows as his cousin.

“Hadrion, who are these people?” Granth asks, as more anonymous figures come and go. “I don’t recognize any of them. Are they the allies you spoke of, among the other houses?”

I sigh. It is disappointing that the finest military minds often cannot see what is right in front of them. “They are sympathetic to our family’s plight,” I reply, keeping the disdain from my voice. “We, all of us, are committed to the downfall of the usurper, and the restoration of the throne. It is better that you do not know their names, or their faces.”

He scoffs. “But how can we work together, if we—”

The words die on his lips as we turn the last corner.

We stand at the edge of the great well of souls, plunging down into the bedrock of Noxus, far deeper than the physical dimensions of the Bastion should even allow. A roiling miasma of cold blues and jealous greens swirls in the distance beneath us, underlighting the three bridges that span the gap.

There, between them, suspended against the madness, is a frightful, hulking silhouette that every Noxian knows only too well. A husk of lifeless armor depicted in every history book, and a thousand defaced statues scattered across the old city.

Granth takes half a step back. “It can't be…” he murmurs. “It… It can't…”

His voice is cracking. His eyes glisten with tears. I lean in over his shoulder, to whisper behind his ear.

“Do you see the truth of it, now? The truth behind the great empire of Noxus? So has it been for centuries, since the days of the first kings—no Grand General, no emperor or tyrant, can stand unless the mistress of the Immortal Bastion allows it. Many are those who would serve, though few prove worthy.”

I gently pluck the lantern from his trembling fingers, and guide him away from the sight that has so transfixed him, toward the veiled alcoves that line the passage on either side.

“Swain must fall. Our cabal is utterly committed to this, above all else, and we will sacrifice whatever we must to achieve it.”

On some level, Granth knows what he will see even before I pull back the shroud.

It is the dessicated body of his cousin, Hadrion. The younger man’s features are frozen in a deathly rictus, yet there is an unmistakable sense of peace about it.

“Your house was singled out most unfairly during the coup, Brannin Granth. Your father and his brothers were stripped of all they possessed, simply for remaining true to Boram Darkwill at the end. Hadrion gave his life gladly in pursuit of revenge. Will you honor that debt, and join us now, too?”

Granth sinks to his knees, looking up at me with fresh eyes. “You. You are her. You are the pale woman.”

He does not even flinch when a second pale woman appears at my side. We speak with the same voice. “I am everywhere. I am everyone. You know only what you need to know, and see what I want you to see.”

Jericho Swain is not the only one who can exaggerate his own legend.

A third pale woman steps out behind Granth, and then a fourth. Even so, he bows his head to me, no doubt convinced he finally understands. He does not need us to point out the empty alcove beside his cousin’s.

“With all my heart,” he swears, “and every drop of my noble blood, I will serve you, my lady. I will not rest until the pretender Swain is dead.”

This naive fool thinks he will be the one to land the killing blow. I will let him think that, for it suits my purpose, which is merely to probe the Grand General’s defenses.

I trace the sigil of the cabal in the air above Granth’s head, marking him as my own. None who can see it will interfere with the plots we shall soon devise. “Rise then, proud son of the Noxii. Your pledge is heard and accepted. Together, we will be victorious, and your name will be celebrated as the savior of an empire.”

The Lady Elise was born centuries ago to House Kythera, one of the oldest bloodlines of Noxus, and swiftly learned the power of beauty to influence the weak.

When she came of age, she entertained the courtship of Berholdt, heir to House Zaavan. Their union was opposed by many, since it would strengthen Kythera at Zaavan’s expense—but Elise worked hard to beguile her intended husband, and manipulated her detractors to secure a betrothal.

Unbeknown to her, this political marriage had been planned for many years by shadowy forces working behind the scenes throughout the empire, with Berholdt Zaavan a mere pawn in a much larger game. Even so, it was an unexpected twist that Elise should dominate him so completely, and while he remained the face of his house, it was clear who was in charge. As time passed, his resentment grew.

One evening, over a typically frosty dinner, Berholdt revealed he had poisoned her wine, and demanded Elise withdraw from society and allow him to take up the reins of power. Knowing he would have the antidote about his person, Elise played the role of a remorseful wife, weeping and begging her husband’s forgiveness. Just as it seemed he might be convinced, she snatched up a knife and plunged it into his heart.

Even with the antidote, Elise was bedridden for weeks… and it was then that the Pale Woman approached her.

The enigmatic mistress of “the Black Rose” spoke of a secret society where hidden knowledge and sorcery were shared among those who could be trusted, and kept from those who could not. In truth, the Pale Woman did not care who controlled each of the noble houses, as long as they were sworn to her. Since Elise had killed the thrall Berholdt, she would have to prove her own value, or a more suitable replacement would be found.

Seeing a path to greater power, Elise took to the cabal like few before her. She met often with the most prominent members, trading influence and thwarting her rivals in a complex web of tangled schemes. With the wealth of two houses, there were not many who could oppose her, and she became even more adept at persuading others to do her bidding.

Eventually, she learned of an object that held great significance for the Black Rose—the skull of an ancient warlord known as Sahn-Uzal, rumored to have been hidden long ago in the Shadow Isles. Keen to gain the Pale Woman’s favor, Elise found a desperate, debt-ridden captain willing to bear her and a handful of devotees to the cursed city of Helia. They came ashore on a beach of ashen sand, and were tormented by spiteful wraiths as they searched in vain for the lost vault.

But Elise found something she had not anticipated.

A creature of the long-forgotten past had made its home in the lightless depths beneath the city. This bloated, chitinous monster was the spider-god Vilemaw, and it erupted from the darkness to devour the intruders, before sinking its fangs into Elise’s shoulder. She fell, howling and convulsing as the venom wrought terrible changes upon her body. Her spine rippled with undulant motion, and arachnoid legs pushed out from her flesh.

Finally, breathless with the agony of transformation, Elise turned to find her new master looming above her. An unspoken understanding passed between them in that moment, and she scuttled back to the beach, untroubled by the Isles’ spirits as she weaved in and out of the twisted treeline.

Some weeks later, when her ship arrived back at the Noxian capital in the dead of night, Elise had regained her human form… though she was the only living thing left aboard.

Though no evidence was ever found of the warlord’s skull, the Pale Woman saw Elise’s dangerous new gift for what it was—a means to come and go safely between Noxus and the Shadow Isles. An accord was struck, wherein the Black Rose would provide Elise with endless unwitting sacrifices to offer up to the spider-god, and in return she would recover any artifacts of power she could from those benighted, forbidding shores.

Elise once again took up residence in the neglected halls of House Zaavan, carefully cultivating a reputation as a seductive yet unreachable recluse. Few have ever guessed her true nature, yet fanciful rumors abound—wild tales of her ageless beauty, and a terrifying, voracious creature said to lair in the bowels of her dilapidated, dust-wreathed palace.

Though centuries have passed, whenever Elise feels the summons of her god, she returns to the land of the Black Mist with a hapless suitor in tow, or some other easily swayed soul.

And none who accompany her ever return.

The earthquake had struck Terbisia at dawn, the earth bucking like an unbroken colt and splitting apart in gaping fissures. Lux rode Starfire through the toppled ruin of the defensive barbican, the thirty-foot high walls of sun-bleached stone looking like Noxian siege engines had bombarded them for weeks. She guided her horse carefully between fallen blocks of masonry, heading to where a makeshift infirmary had been set up within a blue and white market pavilion.

The scale of the devastation was unlike anything Lux had seen before. Terbisia’s buildings were crafted from hard mountain granite and Demacian oak, raised high by communal strength. And almost all of them had been completely destroyed. Dust-covered men and women dug through the shattered ruins with picks and shovels, hoping to find survivors, but instead, dragged corpses from the debris. Entire streets had simply vanished into the many smoking chasms now dividing the town’s districts.

Lux dismounted as she reached the pavilion, and pushed inside. She wasn’t a healer, but she could fetch and carry or simply sit with the wounded. She’d thought that seeing the scale of the devastation would prepare her for the suffering within the tent.

She was wrong.

Hundreds of survivors pulled from the wreckage lay on woolen blankets. Lux heard mothers and fathers crying for lost children, wives and husbands clinging to their dead loved ones, and, worst of all, bewildered, glassy-eyed orphans wandering lost and afraid. Lux saw a surgeon she recognized in a blood-stiffened apron washing his hands in a pewter bowl and made her way toward him.

“Surgeon Alzar,” she said. “Tell me how I can help.”

He turned, his eyes haunted and rheumy with tears. It took a moment for recognition to penetrate the fog of his grief.

“Lady Crownguard,” said Alzar, giving a short bow.

“Lux,” she said. “Please, what can I do?”

The physician sighed and said, “Truly you are a blessing, my lady, but I would spare you the horror of what has happened here.”

“Spare me nothing, Alzar,” snapped Lux. “I am Demacian, and Demacians help one another.”

“Of course, forgive me, my lady,” said Alzar, taking a fatigued breath. “Your presence will be a boon to the wounded.”

Alzar led her toward a young man lying stretched out on a low pallet bed near the back of the pavilion. Lux gasped to see the horror of his wounds. His body was broken, all but crushed by rubble, and his eyes were bound in bloody bandages. From his stoic refusal to show pain, she guessed he was a soldier.

“He dug a family from the rubble of their collapsed home,” said Alzar. “He rescued them, but kept looking for survivors. There was a second quake, and another building fell to ruin on top of him. The rubble crushed his lungs, and shards of glass put out his eyes.”

“How long does he have?” asked Lux, careful to keep her voice low.

“Only the gods know, but his time is short,” said Alzar. “If you would stay at his side, it would ease his passing into the arms of the Veiled Lady.”

Lux nodded and sat beside the dying man. She took his hand, feeling her heart break for him. Alzar smiled gratefully and turned back to helping those he could save.

“It’s so dark,” said the man, waking at her touch. “Gods, I can’t see!”

“Steady now, soldier. Tell me your name,” said Lux.

“It’s Dothan,” he said, wheezing with the effort.

“You’re named for the hero of Dawnhold?”

“Aye. You know the story? It’s an old tally against the savages.”

“Trust me, I know it well,” said Lux with a rueful smile. “My brother told it all the time when we were children. He always forced me to play the Freljordian corsairs while he played Dothan, defending the harbor single-handedly against the skinwalkers.”

“I tried to be like him,” said the young man, his breathing labored and his voice growing faint. A rivulet of blood leaked from beneath the bandage like a red tear. “I tried to live up to my namesake.”

Lux held his hand in both of hers.

“You did,” she said. “Alzar told me what happened. You’re a true Demacian hero.”

The lines on Dothan’s face eased a little, his breath rattling in his throat as his strength began to fail.

“Why can’t I see?”

“Your eyes,” said Lux slowly. “I’m so sorry.”

“What... what’s wrong with them?”

“Surgeon Alzar told me you have shards of glass in them.”

The man drew in a sharp breath.

“I’m dying,” he said. “I know that... but I should... have liked to behold the light of... Demacia... one last... time.”

Lux felt the magic stir within her, but whispered the mantra taught to her by the Illuminators to keep it from rising too close to the surface. Over the years, she’d learned to better control her power, but sometimes, when her emotions ran close to the surface, it was hard to keep the energies contained. She looked around and, satisfied no one was watching, placed her fingertips on the bloody bandage covering Dothan’s eyes. Lux eased the numinous radiance of her magic down through the man’s skull to the undamaged parts of his eyes.

“I can’t heal you,” she said, “but I can at least give you that.”

He squeezed her hand, his mouth falling open in wonder as Demacia’s light shone within him.

“It’s so beautiful...” he whispered.

I was young and unafraid, heart aflame with the sort of righteousness that cast out all shadows of doubt, on the day I first met Barrett Buvelle.

He watched from beside the throne of the young King Jarvan III, crowned only a fortnight earlier, as I marched into the Hall of Valor as soon as my name had left the crier’s lips. Both young men seemed interested, briefly—I know I was attractive at that age, though I did everything in my power to quiet that beauty—but the young king seemed mostly bored and tired of dealing with discontent noble families.

Jarvan waited for Barrett to whisper something in his ear before he continued. I could only see Barrett in silhouette on his left side, as his body was angled toward the king. As then, as always. “Lestara Demoisier,” Jarvan said, his voice strong and clear, echoing through the vast hall of petricite and marble. “What brings you here today?”

“Your failure.”

That got their attention, as I recall. Jarvan raised his eyebrows until they disappeared beneath his crown. Barrett, eyes wide, put his hand around his liege’s shoulder in a tight grip.

“My failure?” Jarvan asked with a mixture of confusion and amusement. “My failure in what? Not a fortnight ago was my coronation, what could I have possibly failed at since then?”

“You have been king for a whole two weeks and you have not yet addressed the plight of those beneath you.”

He rolled his eyes, thinking he knew my mind. I am sure there were many girls in those days who petitioned the king, in the hopes of elevating their own status and that of their families, and he must have tired of it. “I cannot further ennoble the Demoisiers without cause, as I have told countless other petitioners this day If you serve your country well in battle—”

“I do not speak of the nobles.”

Barrett turned to face me full for the first time with astonishment writ across his face. I still remember the gleam of his armor, stamped with the prestigious Buvelle seal right in the center of his chest. It shone like diamonds. Like his eyes.

“Then of whom,” Jarvan asked, curious, “do you speak?”

That was the opening I had been waiting for. I cleared my throat before continuing, as I knew I had much to say. I began by untucking my necklace from my blouse, revealing the lit-candle symbol of the Illuminators. “Your subjects,” I said, my tongue full of acid. “There are those in Demacia with neither home nor livelihood, and you have failed them in neglecting to provide it, even as you broker peace between the feuding nobility. There are good people, honest people who live in the streets, or slip into barns to get out of the rain at night, or go hungry for days on end because every scrap of food they collect goes to their children. If you truly seek what’s best for your kingdom, you will make them your priority... not those who already have more than enough.”

There was only a moment of dumbfounded silence from both men before Barrett let out a full belly laugh that bounced off the walls and echoed through the throne room, finally settling into my burning red ears. The embarrassment sat in the pit of my stomach like a stone.

He moved toward me then. I stepped back, wary, but he was fast. He took my hand in his and said...

Well. Regretfully, I can’t recall exactly what he said. My memory can be so clear about certain moments in my life, and so hazy with regard to others. The essence of it was that he would do what he could to personally oversee a project to house every ailing Demacian. Jarvan III gaped at his friend, as he had obviously not approved a single word of this man’s promises to me.

But Barrett never said he would do something unless he meant to commit himself to doing it properly. So he merely looked at his childhood friend until the king nodded his assent. “There should have been assistance offered to these people long ago,” the king said, looking at me with new respect. “Thank you for bringing this discrepancy to my attention. Lord Buvelle and I will get started on these plans posthaste.”

Flushed, I stared at my hand in Barrett’s, his fingers gently encircling mine. I knew who he was, of course, even then. The young king’s right hand. The man who knew the king’s heart better than any other. The man for whom the king would kill, and the man for whom the king would gladly die.

“It only pains me that it has taken us so long,” Barrett Buvelle said with a smile, “to do what was so obvious to you, Lestara Demoisier.”

That was the first time I heard him speak my name.

The last time was just over six weeks ago.

And I will never hear him speak it again.

I have been three weeks a widow, but still it has not felt... real.

Barrett’s absences, when he is called to minister to the soldiers, have always been long. Three months, usually. Kahina and I would sometimes visit him at the front, helping him distribute food and supplies and good cheer to the Demacians risking their lives on our behalf. But not often.

This time, it still feels as though he could walk back into our home at any moment, sorrow lacing his brow for what those young soldiers must go through, for the families they will leave to mourn them when they lay down their lives for their country.

He was a chaplain. He was never supposed to die in battle.

Barrett was not the only person to lose their life, of course. I am told that the battle was unwinnable. Even the Dauntless Vanguard fell before the might of Demacia’s enemies. Unthinkable, until it happened. How fitting that the place my husband and so many others died is known as the Gates of Mourning.

He wanted to hold the funeral as soon as Barrett’s body was returned to us. I told Jarvan that he needed to honor the late High Marshal first, that he could not let his love for my husband cloud his duty to those who served him with their swords and souls. Truly, though, it is because I could not bear how dreadfully real it would all become.

But funerals cannot be put aside forever. Today, I must find the strength to say goodbye.

The first four times Barrett asked me to marry him, I had said no.

“Why,” I asked, pained for him, “would you keep asking when my answer remains the same?”

“It is precisely because your answer remains the same that I must keep asking,” Barrett said with that patient smile I had come to love so deeply in the years since we had first met. He had led me to the gardens beside the palace, with the clear sky and the lilies dancing in his eyes. A more romantic setting than the first three, I admit.

“You know why I cannot accept.” I had promised myself from a young age that I would join the order of the Illuminators to help those in need, giving them shelter, providing food and work, listening to their stories, perhaps even learning some of the healing arts to help ease their pain. The Illuminators seemed to truly embody the values I had been taught as a Demacian, and all of my time spent with them had opened my eyes and my heart to the idea of a lifetime of service. And while there were lay Illuminators who were able to balance their good works with the needs of a family, those who dedicated their lives fully to the order lived a monastic existence and did not marry. This had been my intention.

“Indeed I do.” Barrett understood this about me, through our many conversations about injustice and how it could be corrected. But he had never given up on the idea that love could conquer all, even a stubborn girl’s desire to do good.

And his persistence, not just in asking for my hand but in consistently showing me through his deeds that his love for me was true, was beginning to wear on my determination. For I had come to love him as well—accidentally on my part, though through no small effort on his—and each refusal I made weighed heavily on my heart. It was all too easy to see the beautiful life I could lead with this man if only I allowed it.

My hands shook and my eyes burned as I turned from him. “You need to start looking elsewhere for a wife, Barrett, or all the kind women will have made their match already.”

“I will not marry if it cannot be to you.”

“Your family will never allow that to happen,” I said with a mirthless laugh. There was no future I could foresee in which the Buvelles did not force Barrett to marry, if only to sire an heir.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course I do.”

“And do you trust that I love you?”

“Yes. You have made that quite clear.”

“Then let me be clear about something else.” He paused. “I would appreciate if we could speak on this while... looking at one another. If that would be all right.”

I shook my head, knowing that if I looked at him right now, I would burst into tears.

“Very well.” I could hear him take a few deep breaths, presumably rolling his shoulders and attempting to relax. “My family has amassed a great deal of wealth and influence over the centuries. If you were to ask it of me... I would dedicate all of it to the good works you wish to do. To support the people of Demacia. All of them.”

My breath caught in my throat. The entire Buvelle fortune, dedicated to the benefit of the less fortunate? That would go far beyond anything I could hope to achieve with the Illuminators.

I wheeled around, suddenly incensed that he would put a price on my acceptance. “But you would not do this if I refuse to marry you? That does not make you an honorable man, Barrett, it makes you a conniver.”

Barrett blinked at me in confusion. “When did I say that you would have to marry me for such a thing? All I require to do it, is that you ask it of me. That you guide my hand, help me to understand where I could do the most good. ”

I stared at him, all of my anger dissipating like smoke. Barrett had just committed his life to me, while requiring nothing from me. And his word was truly his bond—if he said it, he meant to do it.

How could any man be like this?

He smiled again, gentle, with love in his eyes. “But I admit that I would enjoy it better with you in my life.”

And so he asked a fifth time.

And this time, I said yes.

At my request, Jarvan III had held a funeral for the High Marshal first, with citizens and soldiers coming in from all across Demacia to watch the late Purcivell Bronz be interred with the other heroes in the Hall of Valor. The streets had been lined with mourners, and Bronz had been sent off with much respect from the people he had served.

The city is not large enough to contain all the people who have come to mourn my husband.

The inns are filled. There are thousands of tents outside the walls, filled with those whose lives have been touched in some way by my husband’s good works. The funerary march has changed routes twice, winding through the streets and around the walls, so that all have the chance to touch his casket and weep.

The only thing keeping me grounded are the hands of my girls, one on each side, gripping mine steadily. I can feel their heartbeats through their palms, reassuring me that they are both alive and well and here.

Usually the throne room is filled with all of the mourners who have come to pay tribute to the fallen, but the king has had to be selective with those allowed in today. He has generously offered that the Hall of Valor be open to the public for the next week, but today it is a smaller crowd within. I recognize nearly all the faces, though I would not call most of them friends.

Nobles. Highborn. Important political figures.

Jarvan has allowed, at my behest, an Illuminator to lead the service. Mistress Myrtille, a renowned healer and a mentor to my daughter Kahina, recites out the familiar poesy:

A flame that once burned brightly has been doused.

We mourn its light, the warmth it gave us.

But though all we see is the smoke,

Remember that no light ever truly goes out.

Not when it has enkindled others

To shine brightly, to burn with passion.

Their warmth is in others, and their light still burns

As long as we honor their spark that we each hold.

The words do not bring comfort, but they are easy to say after decades of repetition, and so I say them.

I must admit, I do not pay close attention to the service. Instead, my eyes continue to wander to the cinerarium. Barrett’s armor has been refashioned to hold his ashes, as is the custom for all those who die in battle. I can picture him in those gleaming pauldrons, though I cannot imagine him inhabiting it now. It appears far too small to hold the man I knew, now. Perhaps he is not in there at all.

It feels as though no time has passed, yet it is time for the eulogies.

“Lord Buvelle was a great Demacian.”

“A skilled warrior.”

“Humble servant of the crown.”

“A safeguard of tradition.”

My face flushes red with anger. Barrett hadn’t fought in a battle in nearly thirty years, and he was more interested in aiding the Demacian people than in “safeguarding” the traditions of the noble families. Most of the people who stand to speak, do so as if they have never met Barrett, only heard of him from afar, even though I know many of them saw him nearly every day. How could they know him so little?

Yet none of these accolades feel more false than those offered by Eldred of the Mageseekers.

“Lord Buvelle was, at his core, dedicated to ridding Demacia of its worst ills.”

Eldred was no friend to my husband in life, yet he speaks as though he knew Barrett’s heart. And even though I know Barrett was indeed committed to improving Demacia, it is not in the way that Eldred means to imply.

My husband was never fearful of mages. Indeed, we both unknowingly welcomed one into our home and our family, and we would never allow her to be taken from us. Sona, our adoptive daughter, sits beside me today, her tears falling silently as she averts her gaze from the Mageseeker.

“He saw the horrors that threaten to devour Demacia from within, and he dedicated his time and efforts to supporting organizations that would eat away at that rot,” Eldred says with an eelish smile. “And his support meant the world to those of us whose lives revolve around securing Demacia’s future.”

It stings to hear my husband so misrepresented.

Jarvan III is the last to speak before the family. He catches my eye from the dais, still clutching Barrett’s ragged blue tabard, and speaks his words directly to me.

“Barrett Buvelle was as a brother to me. Without him... I would not be the man I am today. The leader I am today. I am not ashamed to say that I would be a more thoughtless man. A more reckless man. A man who could love deeply but struggled to put that love into word or deed. But his friendship changed me, helped me be the husband and father and king that I am today. Barrett touched the soul of every person he met, and made them better for it.”

“Finally,” Sona signs to me, “someone is speaking of Father as he actually was.”

It’s true. I knew that if anyone would do so today, it would be Jarvan.

“That he has been ripped away from us, when he had so much more to give this world, is simply unbearable. He was not a man for whom war was easy, but he was a man who made war easier by giving freely of his time and love to the Demacians who fought for their country. And for it... for this love, for our country and our countrymen, he was stolen from us.

“So I swear, by the swords of the Winged Protectors, that I will hold responsible those who took him from me. From all of us. If it takes me a lifetime, so be it, for my love for him did not die with him. It will die with me.”

It feels as though my heart has been plunged into ice water. The king stares at me for another moment before nodding very slightly, the way Barrett used to when he made a promise. I realize that he believes this is what I want, too.

Applause rocks through the room, echoing and echoing and growing louder. The whole hall is filled with bloodthirsty people, willing to send more Demacians to die for... for what? Revenge? False justice?

This is not what Barrett would have wanted.

Before I know it, Kahina is helping me stand, gesturing toward the dais. She looks at me with those same piercing eyes her father had and offers a quick smile. “You can do this, Mother,” she signs to me. “I am here for you.”

“We both are,” signs Sona. My sweet girls. Two gifts that my husband and I were able to give each other, and the world.

My throat is raw, and my voice comes out as a ragged whisper. I cough and try again to limited success, but the din of the room has quieted.

“I do not have the words to tell you about how much my husband cared for the people of Demacia,” I say, willing my voice to remain steady. “Instead, I will do as he would have done, and show you.” I look around at the highborn people surrounding me, with the same fire in my words that I had the first time I had stood in this room. “I am donating the Buvelle residence within the Great City to the people of Demacia, in my husband’s honor. It will become a library, populated with our own private collection, for any Demacian to use at any time.”

A ripple of murmured shock spreads throughout the room. Other nobles do not allow the ordinary citizenry to peruse their book collections. Indeed, I imagine the thought that anyone could educate themselves to be distasteful to some. Barrett and I, however, first discussed the library years ago, and he loved the idea of providing for the Demacian people beyond the basics for survival.

It is the least I could do to honor him, especially when others tried to honor him so poorly.

“Our daughter Sona has composed a song in memory of her father that she would like to play. Sona?”

Sona stands, her etwahl strung across her back, and trades places with me at the dais, where the etwahl’s wooden stand is already in place. As I sit beside Kahina once again, my husband’s cinerarium now in my arms, Kahina whispers in my ear, “He would have loved this. It is the right thing to do.”

“I know it is,” I say, and squeeze her hand as Sona plays the first few notes on her instrument.

It takes only six measures before her song has moved everyone within the Hall of Valor to tears.

“It would only be for a few months,” the Illuminator finished breathlessly. “Would you be able to help sponsor the welfare of these children while they are in our care?”

Barrett and I looked at one another. “I think we can do a bit more than that,” Barrett said with a smile. “How many of these war orphans are there?”

“We are caring for nine, though two of them are ill and they might not last the week. One of them also doesn’t speak, and we aren’t sure yet if that’s something we can heal.”

“Can you spare one of your healers until they are well again?”

“Well... yes, that should be doable.”

“Then bring them all here,” Barrett said, nodding. “We have the room and the resources to help these children, and you’ll be able to focus on finding them families to stay with long-term.”

The Illuminator thanked us profusely for opening our home. We had never housed so many children before, and never from outside Demacia. But Demacians are not the only people in the world, which means they are not the only people worth helping when they are in need.

I remember Kahina became terribly excited, and she spent time researching Ionia with her tutors to see if there was any way we could make the children more comfortable. Any holidays we could celebrate together, things like that. Barrett and I did what we could to ready the rooms, and worked together to prepare an enormous first meal for them all.

When the children arrived, we realized that none of them spoke Demacian. So Barrett and Kahina took it upon themselves to find another way to communicate, one that involved a lot of pointing and hand gestures and facial expressions. I heard the house ring with laughter that evening.

But I wandered away when I heard music. I couldn’t think of where it could be coming from, so I followed it throughout the house, checking room by room to see what I could find.

Then, I saw her. Sona. Her face so serious, playing an instrument three times her size, swaying in time with her own music. She started when I entered the room, but she didn’t stop playing.

It was the most beautiful music I had ever heard.

Barrett found me there, leaning back against the doorframe, sometime later in the evening. “Lestara? Is everything...” He lost his train of thought as soon as the music hit him.

All too soon, the small girl stopped playing and stared back at us with enormous eyes. Barrett and I exchanged glances. Then, he waved at the girl. Just a little wave, to say hello.

She smiled, and her smile was as bright as the moon. She waved back shyly, then walked over and sat just in front of us.

“I think this is the girl they said couldn’t speak,” Barrett said gently.

“I don’t think she needs to.” I remember feeling like I knew everything about her, just from listening to her play. It had felt like a conversation, one that went deeper than words.

Barrett looked back at me. After a moment, he smiled and gave me a small nod.

We hosted those nine orphaned children for about three months. Eight of them left.

Sona stayed.

The funeral reception is held in the gardens beside the Citadel of Dawn, among the lilies where I had said yes to Barrett’s offer of marriage and where we had finally sworn ourselves to one another as husband and wife. It feels like that was so long ago. It feels like it was yesterday.

My daughters sit beside me as we receive endless noble mourners. They keep me from drifting off too far into my own memories, though it is hard to stay rooted to the present.

A young woman with a trained azurite eagle perched on her shoulder approaches. I immediately recognize her as the one who saved Barrett’s life a couple years ago, and lost her own brother in the battle. I stand and grasp her hands tightly between my own. “Thank you, Quinn,” I whisper, “for giving me two more years with him.”

She blushes, embarrassed. “I... It was nothing.”

“It was not nothing. It was everything. Please, if there is anything I can do for you, you only have to let me know.” I wait for her while she wrestles with whether she would like to tell me, if this is the appropriate time. “Please. I want to help you, any way that I can.”

It takes some coaxing, but finally Quinn comes to her point. She aspires to become a knight, and asks haltingly if I would speak to the newly appointed High Marshal on her behalf. “Of course,” I tell her as I stand. She and my daughters both begin to say that I do not need to go right now, but I am quietly happy to have something else to think about today. Something to do.

Tianna Crownguard has not approached me and my daughters yet. Instead, she stands beside her betrothed and listens to him speak with nobles from other houses about his hopes for expanding the Mageseekers. None of them look particularly interested, but a Crownguard’s presence makes Eldred’s words worth listening to, I suppose.

Both Crownguard and Eldred turn as I approach and offer their own condolences. She even embraces me, as though she is not part of the reason my husband is dead. “Tianna,” I say after she has let go of me, “there is a young woman over there, Quinn, who wishes to speak with you.”

“My dearest Lestara, today of all days you should not have to worry about serving others,” she says. “Let others serve you, for once.”

“If you are offering, then I would like to suggest that the best way you could serve me would be by speaking to the young woman. She saved Barrett’s life, once.”

Crownguard purses her lips, shamed. She had been the sword-captain of the Dauntless Vanguard during the battle of the Gates of Mourning three weeks earlier, but she’d had to resign in order to stand any chance of being named the next High Marshal. It was her Vanguard who had failed to keep my husband safe, failed to keep Purcivell Bronz safe. How she had been given a higher command, I cannot pretend to understand.

“We will speak of business another day,” she says coolly.

I am not so easily deterred. “Certainly, Tianna. When?” She mumbles something about returning to the front within the week. “Then I shall have to pay you a visit in the next few days, my dear. Tea?”

To her good fortune and visible relief, one of her polished warriors pulls her away to discuss strategy or some other convenient matter. In her absence, Eldred sidles up beside me. “A library is such a generous offer to make to the Great City,” he says with a light smile.

“Yes, my husband was a generous man.”

“I am interested in seeing what your collection holds.”

I roll my eyes. “The Mageseekers will not find any book of magic within my estate, of that I can assure you.”

“Ah, but descriptions of magic can be dangerous, too, Lady Lestara.” His smile is gone now, replaced with a stony expression meant to distract from the fanaticism in his eyes. “And some books tend to reference magic with a... shall we say, a treacherous lack of judgment. Sorcery deemed morally gray, instead of the evil we know it to be. And we can’t let that corrupt the minds of the Demacian people into believing that magic is... some sort of neutral force.”

“Are you suggesting that the Mageseekers audit my collection before the library opens?” I cannot believe the gall of this man. The Mageseekers do not have the power to make those sorts of demands, especially not of the nobility. “Because I am still Lady Lestara Buvelle, head of the Buvelle family until my daughter claims the title. With all the history behind that name, I don’t believe the king would—”

“Necessitate it? Oh, but didn’t you hear?” His smile is back, and I just want to slap it off his face. “It was Noxian mages that brought down the Gates of Mourning. Who is it that you think the king wants to punish?”

“The Noxians.” I say it firmly, but doubt creeps into my mind.

Eldred confirms these doubts with a shake of his head. “The mages.”

I had wondered for some time about Sona’s instrument, but it became clear after a few years that there was more to it than beautiful music.

And I did not know how best to tell Barrett.

We had never kept anything from one another, and I knew he did not fear and hate mages the way that some others in the nobility did. But I did not know how he would react if I told him that I suspected our daughter used magic.

It took months before I felt like I knew what to say. It was before bed, a week or so before spring would become summer, on a warm and peony-scented night.

“Barrett.”

“Hm?” He was paging through the Illuminators poesy book, as he often did when it seemed like he would need to go speak with soldiers at the front soon.

“I need you to know that, as much as I love you, I would leave you if you ever did anything to hurt our daughters.”

Barrett dropped his book on the floor. “What?” he asked, astounded. “What have I done to make you think that I would ever—”

“I just need you to know it,” I said. “You would never see me or our daughters again, for the rest of your life.”

He frowned. “Has something happened?”

I remember leaning over and lifting his book off the floor, smoothing the pages out where they had bent. I needed something to do with my hands, and somewhere to look that was not my husband’s face.

“I believe that Sona uses magic.”

“...Oh.”

His face, when I glanced up at him, was unreadable.

What had I done? Had I endangered my daughter’s life? Had I destroyed my marriage?

He turned to me, a look of wild fear in his eyes. I had never seen him afraid like this before, and I did not yet know what it meant.

“How...” he asked, his voice breaking. “How can we keep her safe?”

I had never loved my husband more than I did in that moment.

The entire day has left me drained, and my daughters help me to my feet as the last of the noble guests trickle out of the gardens.

“Should we take you home?” Sona asks. I can tell she’s worried about me, she’s been doting on me all day, but I know the grief has been taking its toll on her as well.

I shake my head. “No. I... I want us to say goodbye. Just the three of us. Before we leave.” Before the throne room is opened to the public tomorrow and the throngs of mourners crowd the space too much for any semblance of privacy.

Kahina nods and goes off to find the king. Jarvan, of course, says that we can have as much time as we need. “I’ll be just outside the doors if you need me,” he says. I’m touched by this offer—the king has only ever offered to stand guard for one man, and now that man is ash. His love for Barrett, it would seem, extends to Barrett’s family as well.

I kneel beside the carving that seals his resting place. On the outside is a detailed relief of his face in profile, his name, and the Buvelle family crest. The official images, the ones that commemorate him to all of Demacia forever. But I know that on the inside, facing his ashes, is a picture Kahina scribbled out when she was a child. It is Barrett, beside two men on horseback, giving them each a water cask and a new pair of boots. A child’s drawing of a man she loved very much.

Kahina kneels beside me and kisses my cheek. “I have been thinking of how I want to honor him.”

“You honor him by living as the wonderful woman you’ve grown to be,” I say, pressing my lips to her forehead.

But she pulls back from me and lets her hands fall to her lap. “I’m serious, Mother.”

Frowning, I gesture for her to continue. I don’t know what I expect her to say, but it’s clear that she does not expect me to be happy about it.

With a long look at her father’s tomb, Kahina says, “Father’s commission needs to be filled.”

“...He was a chaplain.”

“And so shall I be. Sort of.”

“I don’t understand, Kahina.”

She takes a deep breath, which does not calm the worry in my stomach. But then she smiles, radiant. “I have decided to join the Illuminators as a knight.”

I gasp. I can’t help it.

Knightly Illuminators may do their good works in battle, coming to the aid of Demacia when they are needed. In times of peace, they are devoted entirely to the cause of bettering the kingdom.

So devoted that they neither marry nor hold titles. Not a problem for most who join, but for Kahina, the intended inheritor of the Buvelle name...

“That... is wonderful, my love. Wonderful news.” I hug her tightly and try not to let her see the worry I know has settled onto my face. “Your father would be so proud of you, as I am.”

It is true. He would be.

Sona touches the petricite seal to Barrett’s tomb, and I see that she is shaken by this news as well. Kahina joining the Illuminators would mean that Sona is the only remaining heir.

And as an adopted child, especially one of Ionian rather than Demacian blood, that could prove difficult for her.

Especially if the Mageseekers gain the sort of power Eldred seems to be anticipating.

What would happen if things got too dangerous for her to remain within Demacia? Barrett and I discussed the possibility while he was still alive, but neither of us ever thought it would truly come to be an issue. The Mageseekers have never been well-loved or admired, but with Eldred wedded to Tianna Crownguard, that might not matter for long.

I don’t know how long I sit there considering both of my daughters’ futures, but all too soon they are ready to leave. I tell them that I will stay behind, to go home without me.

I am still not ready to say goodbye.

Jarvan III steps into the hall, and I cannot tell if I am annoyed or relieved. “Lestara? Are you still here?”

“I am.”

Quietly, he comes to kneel beside me. He is a tall man, but the weight of his grief has bent his shoulders. I have never looked at Jarvan and thought of him as old, but now I can see his age clearly.

“I remember,” he says, breaking the silence, “the first time I met Barrett. As a boy.”

I have heard this story many times over the years, but always from Barrett’s perspective. I wonder how the king’s account will differ.

“I was angry at another child, a boy who worked in the stables. I think perhaps I had lost in some game or another, something of no real importance, and I was throwing a tantrum the way small children do. I was yelling so fervently that I’m told my face was turning purple.” He laughs at this, though there is still no joy on his face. “And Barrett came up to me and started in on me, asking me what made me think this poor stable boy deserved my abuse, with that damned smile of his.”

“The one where he’s being so patient with you.”

“Exactly. The worst sort of thing for a six year old to see, when he’s crying so hard he can’t breathe. So I start shouting at him instead. ‘Do you know who I am?’ And he just patiently answers that of course he does, and he would have expected better of me than that.” He shakes his head, and I swear I can see tears on his cheeks. “He impressed me then. Didn’t care that I was a prince, just thought that I should have been better. That calmed me down, and when the tears stopped I asked him his name.” This smile is real, full of the love for this boy in a memory. “As I said before, he made me a better man.”

I can feel my own tears starting again, hot behind my eyes. “Did he?”

“What do you—”

“Barrett would not want his death avenged.”

Jarvan knows I’m right. I can tell because his face loses every bit of color. “Not everything we do is what the dead would have wanted from us,” he says, voice tinged with sadness and steel. “But the living have to go on finding ways to live. Ways to move forward.”

I know there are things I could say to him, but none that would get him to change his mind. Jarvan III is a man who, like my husband was, is as good as his word. He will do what he chooses once he has decided to do it, and nothing can stop him from it.

So we sit there together in silence for a little while longer. I stand, wishing that I could have had more time alone with my beloved, but the king shows no sign of moving and I don’t care to sit beside him any longer.

As I start toward the doorway, though, I hear Jarvan speak again. “You made him a better man, Lestara. I hope you know that.”

“I do. He never failed to tell me so.”

Suddenly, the King of Demacia stands and wraps me in a tight hug. I can feel him start to shake as he tries to hold back more sobs.

This is the moment it hits me.

Barrett is gone. He’s really gone.

My own tears start to fall, and soon I’m gasping for air, unable to breathe. It feels as though all of the breath has been wrung from my body, and all I have left is burning tears.

We cry in each other’s arms, unable to speak for the hideous grief that chokes us both. I cannot let go or I would fall to the floor.

I don’t know how long we stay like that. Seconds, minutes, hours. But eventually my breath comes back to me, and I stand there and breathe, feeling Jarvan calm as well.

“I’m having trouble remembering things about him,” Jarvan whispered. “It’s like my mind always trusted that he’d be there, so there was no reason to... to catalogue his laughter, or remember the exact way he’d say something profound. But I... I need some of his words, Lestara. Something that will allow his voice to echo in my mind again. Please.”

I think for a moment, but... the things I remember best about him are not memories I want to share with Jarvan III. They are mine, moments between Barrett and me that are my own treasures.

So I shake my head. “I don’t remember his words, not exactly.” Then, for the first time in three weeks, I feel myself start to smile. It feels foreign to me now, but I still remember how to do it somehow. “But I remember what he did, and how he made me feel. And that’s all anyone can hope to leave behind. It’s the only legacy that matters.”

Far from the Citadel of Dawn, Sona dragged her trunk out from beneath her bed, trying to keep from waking her sister sleeping down the hall, and began emptying her closet. Almost all of it was the things she would wear when performing, and very little of it was particularly practical. Certainly it was not the usual attire for a runaway teenager. But if she was going to support herself away from home, she would need her music and her performance skills to do it.

In the three weeks since her father had died, things already felt so different in Demacia.

She knew that the war the king wanted to wage would not be against the Noxians. It would be against people like her... and Sona was all too aware that her mother could not protect her the way that her father could, as the king’s best friend.

So she was leaving. Leaving before anything else could go wrong. Leaving before anyone could stop her.

Or so she had hoped. Sona heard the front door open—that would be her mother, finally returning home. She can’t stop me, she thought as she ran her hand along the side of her etwahl. I can make sure she doesn’t.

Lestara took one look through Sona’s door and nodded, her hands settling comfortably and easily into the signs as she told her daughter in no uncertain terms, “I’m coming with you.”

Sona chased after her mother as she strode toward her own bedroom. “Mother, you don’t even know where I’m going!” she signed frantically as soon as Lestara could see her hands.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going with you. I’ll pack my things now, we’ll leave within the week.”

“Mother—”

Lestara gave her daughter a sad smile. “Sona. When have you been able to talk me out of anything once I’ve set my mind to it?”

And with that, she walked away.

Sona didn’t realize she was crying until she looked out her window and felt the cold night air across her face.

This isn’t fair, she thought. I don’t want to leave. This is my home.

But was it? Was it still? With her father gone, could it ever be again?

As she often did when she did not know what else to do, Sona sat down at her etwahl and began to play.

The mournful melody drifted out through her window echoing down the streets of the Great City, through the Citadel, even past the walls. Those who heard it did not know why they began to weep.

But Sona knew.

They cried for the death of a man without equal.

And they cried for the country he had once bettered with his presence, now forever changed in his absence.

Sona knew. And so she wept, and she played.

Look, I should be clear—I didn’t want anything to do with “the dread lord,” or whoever Januk was talking about. I was just trying to sell this stupid little vial to the guy who asked me to get it for him. Should have been easy.

But when you’re me, nothing goes your way for long.

My way. Whatever.

Januk was a red-bearded Freljordian transplant, with deep pockets and big appetites. Unknown to his employers, his private residence was filled with relics and artwork, half of it raided illegally from tombs or other museums, and he loved to dine amidst his collection. As some of the pieces would attest, we’d worked together several times in the past, and he only betrayed me twice. Well, two and a half times, if I’m counting when he blew my cover after we had already salvaged the wreck of the Echelon Dawn…

To Januk’s credit, payment was never a problem, which vastly diminishes my ability to hold a grudge.

“Ezreal,” he said, pushing his plate aside. There were flecks of lamb in his teeth. “Did you find it?”

The it he was referring to was to the Elixir of Uloa. And yes, I had indeed liberated it from a trap-strewn hovel in the jungle near Paretha. I pulled the bone and crystal vial from my satchel. It was cool in the palm of my hand.

“Got what you’re looking for right here,” I said, holding up the vial. “Interesting container. My best guess would be pre-classical Shuriman.”

The spoonful of viscous liquid inside it shimmered in the moonlight. Januk’s eyes widened.

I decided to ramp up the drama. “I tell you what, though—this here isn’t just any ordinary ancient serum. It’s a load bearing ancient serum. The whole place crumbled around me. I barely escaped with my life.”

“The Elixir…” Januk’s voice took on a reverence I had never heard before. “A single drop can quench the soul for a thousand years… Give a man skin as tough as petricite…”

He went to grab it with his greedy hands. I pulled it out of reach.

“Not so fast, Januk.”

“Right, right, right,” he muttered, fumbling for his desk drawer key. “Payment. We agreed sixty thousand.”

“And full accreditation in the Guild, remember?”

I’d been denied entry to plenty of things, in my time. Bars, schools, even a Sona recital… but the Piltover Explorers Guild was the one that stung the most, considering the number of times I’ve risked my neck in the field. Ingrates.

Januk was scowling. “The Guild aren’t particularly fond of you, Ezreal. Can’t say I blame them, having worked with you in the past.” He poured himself some amberwine from a decanter and took a swig. “You left me to rot in that Noxian prison camp…”

“That was payback. For the Echelon Dawn.”

“Which was payback for the map.”

“Which was payback for… something else you did.” I gritted my teeth. “Probably.”

I was getting antsy. I readied myself to make a quick exit.

“Come on, accreditation was half the deal,” I reminded him. “If you don’t want to honor it, I can always find another buyer.”

His boisterous laugh broke the tension. “Why do you think I continue to do business with you? It’s because I like you. We have history, and history is always good for business.” He finished his drink. “Let me fetch the letter from my study. One moment, please.”

Buyers keeping payment in their studies? Oldest trick in the book. He’d probably return aiming a flintlock at my pretty face.

To kill time, I perused his collection of artifacts. There were some I had procured on his behalf. Then my eyes fell on something I had not seen before. Something new—a stone bell, roughly the size of a housecat. Its base was adorned with strange writing. I stepped closer to inspect it.

“It’s Ochnun,” Januk called out. “The language of the dead, composed beyond the mortal veil, and spoken only by those in the afterworld.”

I was getting some serious backstabby vibes, so I spun around.

Januk didn’t have a flintlock. He had two flintlocks.

“I am sorry to inform you, Ezreal, that the Guild has once again denied your application.” He stepped closer, into the light. “The dread lord will rise again. And the Elixir will make it happen.”

A dread lord? Great. I was so close this time…

My gauntlet’s charge rose. Anger is a wonderful arcane motivator. Use it or lose it, I always say.

I raised my arm. Januk fired his pistols. It was magic versus lead shot.

Surprise! Magic won. Magic always wins.

The dull metal slugs burned white-hot in the face of my blast, and winked into silvery vapor on the other side. But with double-crossers, one must be doubly careful, so I quickly charged my gauntlet again. There was a slight fizzle, then a pop, and then I was standing right behind Januk. Teleporting short distances doesn’t really take a lot out of me, so I put my gauntleted hand to the back of his big, stupid head before he could turn around.

“Drop the guns, Januk.”

“Already one step ahead of you.”

Oh, I did not like the sound of that. I glanced down. Sure enough, the pistols were at his feet.

Did I mention Januk was strong? Because he is super strong. He grabbed my gauntlet in one hand, yanked me over his shoulder with the other, and slammed me bodily through his work desk. The damn stone bell jabbed into my spine. I saw white, and splinters. Lots of little splinters.

Januk kicked me in the ribs for good measure. He twisted the Elixir of Uloa out of my shaky grip, pulled the stopper, and drank deep.

“Your pathetic gauntlet will do nothing to an immortal! The Elixir is—”

“Fake,” I croaked. “Almost the right hues, though.” I held up another, far less remarkable looking vial. “This is the real Elixir. You just drank sand wasp venom, out of a cheap souvenir trinket vessel.”

Januk peered into the empty vial, his face scrunched up like he’d tasted sour milk. In fairness, sour milk would have been a lot better for his digestive system.

I winced as I pulled myself back to my feet. He had kicked me unnecessarily hard, but at least he spared my face.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t stray too far from a lavatory for the next few days,’ I added.

He threw the fancy casing to the ground, doubled over, and groaned. Sand wasp venom hits hard and fast. “You… petulant little… I’ll get you… for this…”

I shrugged, then raised my gauntlet and fired another blast of magical energy at the wall. The masonry cracked, melted and exploded outwards. Papers flew everywhere. I picked up the bell, and crouched by Januk’s new window.

“Always a pleasure, ” I said. “I won’t charge you for the, uhh… remodeling.”

I hopped out through the hole, scampered down the masonry and leapt across to a nearby rooftop. I wanted to be far away from Januk as quickly as possible, for lots of reasons. Admittedly, the sand wasp venom was the main one—it was not going to be pretty in that place by morning.

As I ran, I took a closer look at my latest acquisition. Whatever else it was, the Ochnun bell was definitely touched by some darker energy. Once the Explorers Guild got a load of this piece, I’d be a shoo-in for accreditation. With a party in my honor, perhaps? After all, I had just single-handedly kept some dread lord from rising.

And in the end, that’s usually all that matters.

“You should have killed her.”

My brother settled two cubes of sugar neatly in a slotted spoon suspended on the fine lip of his teacup. His gleeful attention turned to the pouring of the tea. The wrinkles on his face pulled back into a smile and a delighted giggle escaped as he watched the shapes melt and fall into each other. Unable to flee, the last remnants of sweetness collapsed under the dark brew.

“Lady Sofia will not be a problem,” I said.

Stevan batted a hand in the air, annoyed. “Today maybe, but tomorrow? Emotions fester if left unchecked, sister.” He looked up at me, questioning. “Better to snuff the spark before it sets the house on fire, no?”

“I have spoken to the Arvino’s principal intelligencer—”

“You intelligencers and your deals. I still say she betrayed her house and should pay for it with her life—”

“There may come a time for that,” I said, softening my tone. “But I have made the agreement. Adalbert will see she stays out of trouble. She is his responsibility.”

My part in the discussion was over. Stevan leaned back in his chair with a look of begrudging acceptance and picked at the blanket laid over his lap.

“That man could use another pair of eyes installed in his head,” Stevan harrumphed quietly. In Stevan’s view, it was never about the pursuit of a solution, just the end result. For my brother, the fixes I doled out could make many problems in Piltover disappear. Rarely did he consider the choices leading up to those decisions.

I held my cup in one hand and let the other drift absently to my hip, taking comfort in the grapple line spooled there. Stevan was partially right. End results were nice, but I much preferred the chase.

I watched Stevan through the steam of my drink. He pursed his lips as if deciding something. The pressure whitened the skin on his chin and highlighted the age spots that crept up past the silk wrapped around his neck.

“There is something else,” I said.

“Am I that obvious, sister?”

I think he would have blushed if his weak pulse had allowed it. He smiled painfully instead and pulled a folded piece of paper and a beaded chaplet from a drawer in the desk between us. Stevan rolled his wheeled chair back, coughing with the effort. On the chair, he turned small levers, the modest effort driving little cogs that drove bigger cogs, until the clockwork mechanism pushed the wheels toward me, and him with it.

“Lady Arvino’s short-lived engagement was not the only thing uncovered during this mess,” he said. “This was found on one of the Baron’s men during the clean up.”

I set my cup down in its pale saucer and took the scrap of paper and chaplet he offered. I shifted the balance of the blades beneath me, and their sharpened points dug deeper into the rich carpet.

The edges of the note were charred, and a greenish hue wicked through the paper from the ragged singe. The chaplet had been well loved; the facets of the glass prayer stones were burnished and smooth.

“Camille.”

My brother only said my name like that when he was serious. Or when he wanted something. I unfolded the note, a waft of Zaun’s acrid unpleasantness rising with it. I took in the strong lines. The diagramming was neat and orderly, the flowing script precise. My eyes found the artificer’s mark just as Stevan confirmed it.

“If Naderi has returned—”

“Hakim Naderi is gone.” The words fell from my mouth, a reflex.

It had been more than just years since the crystallographer had served as lead artificer for our house, it had been a lifetime.

Stevan contemplated his next move. “Sister, you know what this is.”

“Yes.” I looked down at the paper; the diagram mirrored the mechanical and crystalline construction that pulsed within my chest.

I held my own heart’s design.

“We thought them all destroyed. If this exists, others could as well. I could finally be free of this chair,” he said. “To walk about my house as the master of his clan should.”

“Perhaps it is time to let another take on the responsibility of clan master,” I said.

It had been many years since Stevan had been able to navigate the halls on his own. Something his own children and grandchildren never let him forget. This wasn’t just a piece of paper and a string of prayers. For Stevan, this was a map to immortality.

“This is only one schematic,” I continued. “You believe if we uncover the rest of Naderi’s designs, our artificers will be able to recreate his work. There would still be the question of how to power it—”

“Camille. Please.”

I looked at my brother. Time had not been kind to a body born frail. But his eyes, after all these years, his eyes were still like mine, the Ferros blue. That deep cerulean couldn’t be watered down by age or ailment. His eyes were the same luminous color as the hex-crystals lighting the drawing I held before me. His gaze pleaded with me now.

“You and I, we have led this house to greater success than Mother and Father ever dreamed,” he said. “If your augmentation can be repeated, this success—our success, Camille—it can go on forever. This house will ensure the future of Piltover. Indeed, we will ensure progress for all of Valoran.”

Stevan always had a flair for the dramatic. Coupled with his weaker constitution, it had been difficult for our parents to deny him anything.

“I am not the intelligencer for all of Valoran. I may find nothing.”

Stevan gave a relieved sigh. “But you will look?”

I nodded and gave him back the schematic, but kept the chaplet, tucking the twisted loops into my pocket. I turned to leave the study.

“And Camille? If he’s alive, if you find him—”

“It will be as it was before,” I said, stopping my brother before he could unearth more of the past. “My duty, as always, is to the future of this house.”

The late afternoon crowds near the North Wind Commercia still swarmed in anticipation of the Progress Day revels. The people’s faces were flushed with the effort of making ready for the city’s annual observance of innovation. However, it was not they, but a foreign trader tottering from drink that revealed my second shadow.

“By an Ursine’s frozen teat,” the trader said, frustrated with the press of the crowd. He pushed away those who had stopped to assist him. “I need no help.”

Piltover’s worker bees thrummed around us, all except for one blonde drone at the edge of the square. I kept her in view as I leaned down to the trader in front of me.

“Then get up,” I told him.

The Freljordian looked up at me. His annoyance had him reaching for the carved tusk dagger at his waist. I met his glare and watched it slip down past the hex-crystal in my chest to my bladed legs. The man released his grip on the knife.

“There’s a good boy,” I said. “Now get out of my way.”

He nodded dumbly. The trader backed away, and the mercantile hive mind of Piltover broke and reformed around him as he stumbled his way across the street. Only my shadow escort remained still, watching me from a distant market stall.

I continued through the crowds, the people parting easily before me. When the opportunity presented itself, I ducked into a blind alley and fired my barbed grapple lines into a high wooden cross brace above the corridor. I drew myself up into the darkness above and waited.

A moment later, my escort entered the alleyway. Her clothes were layered and nondescript enough not to draw attention in the promenade levels of Zaun, but the ornamented whip at her side said Piltover, or at least a very generous sponsor. I let her walk a pace forward into a shaft of light that would blind her. Once she was in position, I dropped in behind, the tips of my blades slipping neatly into the cobblestone gristle.

“Did you lose something, girl?” I said, letting a low growl roll over my whisper.

Her hand crept toward the black leather handle of her whip. She was tempted, but good sense seemed to win out.

“It seems I’ve found it.” The girl raised her open hands to her shoulders. “I bring a message.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“From your brother, ma’am,” she said.

Stevan’s drama was going to be the death of someone if he wasn’t careful.

“Give it here.”

The girl kept one hand up and used the other to pull a small note from her tightly cuffed sleeve. The wax seal carried the Ferros sigil and Stevan’s personal mark.

“Move more than an eyelash, and I will slit your throat,” I said.

I opened the note. I could feel my annoyance rise like a fever. Stevan had taken it upon himself to hire me a helper. In case my inquiry stirred up any “lingering sentimentality” that prevented me from seeing to my duty.

I told myself he meant well, but even after all these years, it seems he did not trust me with Hakim. It was cowardice to hide these feelings behind his lap blanket and not tell me this to my face before I left.

“I should kill you for delivering the insult,” I said, weighing her response. “Your name.”

“Aviet.” She kept her hands and voice even. She was young, not even an augmented finger.

“And you took this assignment knowing the possible consequence of my irritation?”

“Yes, milady,” she said. “I hoped if I pleased you, there might be a more… permanent position within your house.”

“I see.”

I turned my back to her and began walking out of the alley, giving her an opportunity to come at me if that was truly her intention. I could hear her exhaled breath and a raspy jangle as she brushed the coiled steel of the whip at her side. Her footsteps followed.

“Do we have a destination, milady?”

“Church,” I said, patting the chaplet in my pocket. “Keep up.”

The First Assemblage of the Glorious Evolved was technically still within Piltover, but only just. Here, past the Boundary Markets, the pernicious odors of the city below outweighed the celebratory smell of roasting meats and sweet cakes. The Zaun Gray rolled in like a low tide. It lapped at one’s legs and condensed along soot-covered merchant awnings into puddles of clouded muck.

I turned to the girl. “You will stay here.”

“I’m to follow you,” Aviet said. “Your brother’s—”

“You will stay here,” I said again, leaving no room for argument. My patience for my brother’s game was thinning. “The Glorious Evolved are fervent believers. They do not take kindly to the unaugmented.”

I looked over my new assistant, daring her to respond. Aviet shifted her weight slightly to her back foot. She still itched for a fight, to prove herself, but was unsure if this was the moment.

I smiled. “There’s time enough for that later, girl.”

The entry of the old building gave way to a dim foyer set back from the main hall by an iron lattice. Through the diamond patterns of welded metal, several clusters of yellow-orange therma lamps illuminated the congregation. The 50 or so people there murmured in rolling unison, giving the impression that a great machine breathed beneath them. Velveteen fabrics in dark colors were draped over the parts of their bodies that were still flesh, while their metal arms and augmented legs were exposed to the warm light. Here, high-end augmentations mixed with those of a more utilitarian function. Piltovan or Zaunite, it didn’t matter to the Glorious Evolved. These designations were secondary to their higher pursuit. In the center of the group, a young woman with mechanical elbows reached out to a man with a sleek metal jaw.

“The body is frail,” she said to the man. “The flesh is weak.”

“The machine drives us forward,” the group responded together. The words echoed in empty air above them. “The future is progress.”

I hadn’t come to bear witness. I kept to the shadows, ignored by the augmented flock, and continued my search.

I heard the soft gurgling of Brother Zavier’s esophilter before I saw the man. His balding head was tucked down to his chest as far as his breathing apparatus would allow. He was kindling a few spark lights on the corners of the side chapel’s altar.

Watching over him was an imposing figure outlined in cold lead and frosted glass. The Gray Lady, holy patron of the Glorious Evolved. The stained-glass window glowed from within, lit eerily by the arc lamps outside.

I approached the shrine. There were jars of organs. Single eyeballs floated like pickled eggs. Bundled offerings were wrapped in linen, some of it fine, some of it oily and ragged. A few flies buzzed among the discarded pieces of the congregation. One of the wrapped bundles moved. A little plague rat poked its nose out shortly after, daring me to take away its prize. The gauze of the newfound treasure caught on the edge, and the rest of the bundle tumbled away, revealing a desiccated finger. The rat scampered down, but Brother Zavier shooed it back into the darkness.

“Camille,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice underneath the wet burble. “Have you come for contemplation?”

“Information, brother.” I pulled the chaplet from my pocket, the glass beads tangling with the wire chain.

Brother Zavier turned to face me. His eyes were also under glass, magnified like those in the jars, although unlike those, his darted with life. I handed him the chaplet.

“Where did you find this?” He shook his head as he inspected it and then clucked his tongue. “Never mind, I should know by now not to ask those questions.”

He went back to attending his votive lights. “Several weeks ago, I met a man carrying this. He came to light a spark and ask her favor for the coming Progress Day.” Brother Zavier nodded toward the figure depicted in the window. The Gray Lady’s cloak was a mosaic of ash-violet glass, oxidized cogs, and blackened pistons. Her epithet was often invoked when an inventor felt at a loss due to inability or failure. Hers was a blessing that often required sacrifice.

“He had the tanned skin of the desert dwellers. Older than the usual foreign apprentas who pursue the auditions,” Brother Zavier continued.

“Do you know which clan he sought?”

“He said he was staying at a pay house near Clan Arvino.” The factory hum of the congregation fell away. “This evening’s testifying is over. My duties call.”

Brother Zavier patted my hand. He gathered his dark robes and made his way back to the main hall, leaving me to my contemplations.

Hakim had returned, but had not sent word. Not that the last conversation we shared had detailed how best to reach one another. I picked up the brittle finger from the floor and placed it back with the other offerings. It annoyed me, the idea of him petitioning like an ordinary apprenta. Hakim was spheres above Clan Arvino’s artificers. Through the cut-glass triangles and diamonds of the side chapel’s window, I could see Aviet standing beneath a streetlamp. She was still following orders… for the moment.

My indulgent silence was broken by a shuffling scrape, small, but much larger than a rat. I felt the hex-crystal in my chest vibrate in anticipation as I turned to face the threat.

“Are you her?” a small voice asked.

From the darkened corner near a metal bench, a little girl stepped forward. She could not have been more than six or seven.

“Are you the Gray Lady?” she asked again. Closer now, my hex-crystal pulse slowed, lighting her face in a soft, blue glow. In one arm, she carried a bundle wrapped in gauze, all too similar to the ones stacked behind me. The opposite sleeve of her dark dress hung empty.

Balanced as I was, I towered over her. I knelt down, bringing my face to her level, and gently touched the metal bench to arc some of the crystalline energy off my fingers. The girl watched the anxious spark reflect in the polished metal of my blades.

“Did you give up your legs for Progress Day?” she asked.

The Glorious Evolved celebrated the old Zaunite tradition of sacrificing something personal for Progress Day in the hopes the next iteration of invention would be better. It was a practice that could be traced back to the old days of the city, when the people of Zaun had to face rebuilding their lives after the devastation of “the incident.” The wealth and growth of Piltover on top of those scarred ruins served as evidence to many that the tradition had merit.

I looked at the little girl. It was not my legs that I had given up on a Progress Day long ago, but something far more dear.

“I chose these,” I said. “Because they better served my purpose.”

The girl nodded. The blue light between us had dimmed, but I could still see the black spider veins on the little fingers that clutched her bundle. It was rare for the blight to affect one so young in this part of the city. The Glorious Evolved often took in the sick, seeing the removal of dying flesh as a key to transforming a person’s life and faith through technology.

“Brother Zavier said it gets easier,” she offered.

“It does,” I told her.

The physicker attending her had been remiss his duty. The girl should have had both arms taken at once. I’m sure the surgeon explained away that lack of courage when holding the knife as a kindness, but waiting would do the girl no favors. If she did not have the other arm cut away soon, those spider veins would creep closer to her chest, eventually blackening her heart. The chances were slim she would live to see the next Progress Day.

The young girl bit her lip, hesitating before the next thought. In that moment, my eye caught movement through one of the larger stained-glass panels. I stood and watched several dark shapes approach. Aviet was no longer alone.

I stepped into the dim corridor to make my way outside.

“Do you miss them?” the little girl called out.

I didn’t turn back. I knew the girl’s hopeful face wavered like the row of spark lights on the altar. I knew because I remembered my own trembling doubt. So many years ago, Hakim had demanded of me a similar question. My heart? Him? Would I miss any of it? I touched my hex-crystal augment, assuring myself it still vibrated evenly. Just to the right of the Ferros sigil’s angular engraving I felt a small, fluid lettering. It was the mark of Hakim Naderi.

“No,” I lied.

Aviet was ready to fight, her blonde hair lit up like a halo under the streetlight. There were five men circling her like dock sharks. Their utilitarian augmentations cut jagged shapes in their silhouettes.

“Give us that pretty thing, and maybe we won’t kill you slow like,” the smallest one slurred loudly, eyeing the whip in Aviet’s hand. All the vexations of the day compounded, from Stevan’s brotherly chiding to my new unnecessary companion to the thought of Hakim having returned. I could feel the pent-up energy crackle down my spine, impatient to find release. A pompous miscreant and his dog-eared crew would do nicely.

“You didn’t say please,” I called out.

The mouthy one with the twitching nose looked up. “Ay, boys,” he said. “No worries now. Looks like there’ll be more than enough to go around.”

“Nice of you to join us, milady,” Aviet said.

“Yes, we was about to indulge in a little Progress Day remuneration,” one of the big ones with a copper augmentation said. His twin-sized partner tugged the brim of a dirty woolen cap over his fluid-filled eyepiece and sneered. “Your Grace.”

My arrival had distracted them, allowing their circle to become lopsided and a small breach to open up.

It was more than enough.

Speed and decisive thinking have always been my most cooperative allies, and I sprinted in toward the break, catching the lanky one across the shoulder with a long sweep. My bladed leg cut through the dirty tweed, a line of darker red blossoming quickly in the cloth, but it was the arcing blue of the subsequent hex-crystal energy that knocked him unconscious.

The chubby one and the one with the Sump accent took to Aviet, while the tall ones approached me. I let a dark smile spread across my face; after so much contemplation, this was exactly what I needed.

My two dance partners were not amused. Both had heavyset shoulders as thick as the double bells that rang out over the Iron Sand Commercia. They still had not decided who would approach first, and their indecision was my opportunity. I would take them both.

I stepped in toward the one with the eyepiece, letting my back leg rake down the coiled tubes of his copper-plated brother. He had misjudged my reach and scrambled to reconnect the sliced hoses to a sputtering chempump. A low swipe rendered his partner’s leg useless from the knee down. I waited a moment for the copper one to come back with his working arm. They always thought they could outmaneuver the second strike.

They were always wrong.

“Now collect your broken bits, and get out of my sight,” I told him. His brother was already limping into the shadows, his worthless leg dragging in the muck.

The metal of Aviet’s whip rang out in the alleyway. There was another wire-taut snap, and sparks rained down on the chubby one as he cowered, his face to the cobbles, tears streaking his grime-covered cheeks. That was only four.

I looked around. The rodent-faced one with the oversized ego was missing. I found him slinking back toward the Assemblage Hall.

The barb of my grapple line sunk deep in the angled stone above the hall’s entrance. I dropped in quickly on my Sump rat, tucking his and my weight together into a tidy roll.

When we came to a stop, I was on top. His fetid breathing was fast and shallow.

“Did you really think you could run?” I asked, low and even.

His head shook out a terrified no, but his greasy hand fingered a stick knife at his belt. He squinted from the blinding radiance of my hex-crystal so near his face. He was desperate to drive the knife into my thigh, anything to get me away from him.

“Go ahead,” I whispered.

His eyes widened in surprise, but he didn’t let my permission linger long. The tip of his knife pierced the dark leather, but went no further, stopped by the metal of my leg. Surprise registered on his face just as his hand slipped down with the force of the blow, driving the flesh of his closed fist along the edge of his own blade.

He did not swallow his scream like the others, and it rang out on the damp stone of the buildings.

I looked up as it echoed from the Assemblage Hall. The stained-glass window of the Gray Lady towered above us. A small face was pressed to the colored glass, watching.

I leaned in and let the blade at my knee almost kiss the fluttering pulse in the neck of the man beneath me.

“Hunt here again, and I will end you,” I promised.

Realizing he had been granted an extra life, my prey pulled himself away in an awkward crab walk. Once there was enough distance between us, he got up, clutching his dripping red hand, and ran for some dark hole to lick his wounds.

I could hear Aviet winding the metal of her whip.

“I heard you didn’t have a heart under all those mechanics,” she said, her interest sparked. “Perhaps the rumors are mistaken.”

“Mind your manners, girl,” I told her coldly as I walked out of the alley. “Or I’ll mind them for you.”

The Boundary Markets and the Assemblage Hall were always steeped in shadows, overwhelmed by so much progress towering above them. But it had truly become night by the time we reached the pay house nearest Clan Arvino. After some proper encouragement, the innkeeper became quite generous with his detailed ledger, although his handwriting left much to be desired. Naderi was either somewhere in the basement or on the third floor. I left Aviet to the cellars, while a grapple line gave me access to an open window on the third floor.

The small forge at the back of the room had burned down to embers smoldering under a crust of ash. I crouched through the window and stepped inside. The room was dim, with only a single lamp lighting a small desk. But it was the man asleep at the desk that caught my breath, the curls of dark hair and the desert-tanned skin. The vibration of my hex-crystal stuttered. Perhaps he, too, had stalled time for himself.

“Hakim,” I called out softly. The shape at the desk moved, waking slowly from sleep. He stretched with the grace of a cat and turned. The young man wiped the sleep from his eyes in disbelief. He was so much like Hakim it hurt.

But it was not him.

“Mistress Ferros?” He shook himself more awake. “What are you doing here?”

“Have we met?” I asked.

“No, not exactly, milady,” he said, almost embarrassed. “But I have seen your face often.”

He went back to his desk and shuffled some papers, pulling out one that was slightly older and more worn than the others. He handed it to me.

The lines were strong, the inkwork neat and orderly, and the shading precise. It was Hakim’s work, but it was no diagram. Instead, it was a drawing of my face. I couldn’t recall posing for it. He must have sketched it from memory after working in the lab one night. My hair was down. I was smiling. I was a woman in love.

The sting was so sharp, I couldn’t help but take a breath. I didn’t say anything to the young man in front of me now. I couldn’t.

“It could have been drawn yesterday, milady,” he said, filling the silence.

He meant it as a compliment, but it just magnified the acres of time that stretched on in my mind.

“My uncle carried this with him until he passed.”

“Your uncle, he’s dead?”

“Yes, Hakim Naderi. Do you remember him?” he asked.

“Yes.” The word stuck in my mouth and wrapped itself around a selfish question I had carried for far too long. One I was never sure if I wanted the answer to. If the pain of memory was to overwhelm me with a thousand little cuts, better to open them all at once and be done with it. I looked at the young man who looked too much like Hakim. “Tell me, did your uncle ever marry?”

“No, milady,” he said, unsure if he was going to disappoint me. “Uncle Hakim said that to love your work was more than we could ask for in life.”

I had wept all my tears long ago, and so there were none left to come to me now. I picked up the stack of papers and set the drawing of my face on top. The lines of ink wavered in the blue light of the machine that replaced my heart. What I was. What I gave up. All the sharp-toothed sacrifice that made me who I am today. All of it was rendered in painstaking detail. I could hold the past, but never have it again.

“This is all of it? All of the work?” My words came out a dark whisper.

“Yes, milady, but…” His voice trailed off in disbelieving horror as I set the bundle on the banked coals and blew gently. The oiled parchment ignited and quickly burned a red-orange. I watched the past bubble and darken until nothing but cinders and dust was left. It was the young man that pulled me back to the present.

Hakim’s nephew shook his head slowly, his disbelief palpable; I understood how the shock of losing so much so quickly could be overwhelming. He was numb. I escorted him down the stairs to the street below. He adjusted the leather satchel on his shoulder and stared at the cobbles.

He looked back to me; the air of defeat was replaced by one of growing fear. Having been so lost in my own past, I took less notice of the shadows on the street. I barely heard the metallic jangle of wire. The lash of the whip came fast, binding my arms to my side.

“That’s far enough, milady,” Aviet said. Her voice was smug. I watched her look Hakim’s nephew over.

“Is this what my brother paid you for?” I had suspected as much. Aviet had been watching for an opportunity all evening. My distraction at finding Hakim’s nephew seemed as good an opportunity as any.

“Yes,” she said. “All of us.”

Two big men stepped onto the cobbles, their repaired augmentations catching the streetlight. The chubby one and his little rat-faced counterpart followed behind. They were the same men from the alley behind the Assemblage Hall. The chubby one shoved a knife at Hakim’s nephew, while the other smiled his rodent smile and bound and gagged the young apprenta.

The juggernaut with the newly connected chemtubes stepped forward. His fingers twitched, eager to return the violence I had visited on him earlier.

“Mind the crystals, Emef,” Aviet said. The whip tightened, and I felt metal cuffs close around my wrists. She walked around to stand next to Hakim’s nephew. “We’re to collect them and Naderi, or no one gets paid.”

Was all of this for my brother’s jealousy? I knew Stevan felt the tide of years slipping away and saw me standing near immortal in all of it. But he truly had no idea the cost of my duty to the family. Could he not see what it would cost him now?

“And the rest?” the copper man asked, smiling at me as if he were about to tuck into a Progress Day feast.

“All yours,” replied Aviet.

“It was nice of you, Your Grace, to demonstrate your talents earlier,” he said as he pulled his augmented arm back into a fist. He obviously felt no need to hide the telegraph when facing a bound opponent. His grin widened. “It will make this go much quicker.”

The metal knuckles connected with my jaw. He expected me to fight it, but instead, I let the punch take me down to a knee. The inertia forced his heavily augmented arm to come down to the ground with me. I tasted my own blood on my lips, but it was he who was off balance for the moment. The rest of the gang’s prattle went silent.

“You haven’t seen all my tricks,” I said as I stood.

The energy of my hex-crystals coursed through me, the power building up like a wall. The juggernaut’s brother attempted to step in, bringing his own augmented fist down on the glowing buffer. The shield popped and hissed, but held. It was my turn to smile.

Aviet grabbed the trailing handle of the wire whip, hoping to shake me free of the energy field. She yanked hard to pull me off balance. She had no idea how long I’d lived my life on a knife’s edge.

My hands still bound, I leapt forward into a spinning kick, slitting the throat of the second juggernaut and coming down to impale the first. The tail of the whip snaked out of Aviet’s hand. She called to the two who still held Hakim’s nephew.

“Abandon the job, and I’ll kill you both.”

“Do you still think I have a heart now?” I asked her, her two goliaths lying dead at my feet.

Aviet was unsure, but stood her ground.

“I am the sword and shield of Clan Ferros,” I told her, ice enunciating every word. “My brother seeks to kill me to extend his brittle life for a few more selfish moments. His desires have betrayed his duty and our house.”

I felt the crystals pulse faster.

“And you will not live to see the morning,” I said.

I channeled the crystal’s energy for a moment, building its intensity until the shield that had once surrounded me became an electrified prison. There would be no escape.

I leapt into the air, higher than before, and came down hard, shattering the metal that bound my wrists and the cobbles between us. The force of the impact knocked over Aviet, her two remaining thugs, and Naderi’s nephew. The street had ruptured in a crater, and dust hung in the air. The fight Aviet had been looking for since we met, to prove herself to my brother, was not going as planned. The heels of her leather boots scuffed the stone of the street, her body announcing her retreat before even her mind had fully agreed to it. I read her fear as she stood facing me. Whatever my brother had told her of me, she had sorely underestimated. Aviet saw that any trace of the mercy I carried before had been boiled away by the full revelation of my brother’s betrayal.

I stepped forward and let my back leg arc around. I leaned into the blade as it connected. Aviet struggled to keep what was in her belly from spilling out, but it was a futile effort. I made short work of her last two goons, and the alley behind the pay house was quiet again. I picked up Aviet’s blood-soaked whip from the street.

The nephew of Hakim Naderi had backed himself against a wall in his panic. The young man’s breath was coming in panting waves through the dirty cloth that gagged him. I approached him as you would an animal you didn’t wish to startle. I untied the bindings at his wrists. I offered him my hand, and his fingers trembled at my touch. As soon as he was set upon his feet, he let go.

He had seen the violent face of my duty, what I could never bring myself to show Hakim, and I had let it happen. The softhearted woman I once was had truly been burned away, leaving only a cold darkness and gray ash.

“The tests,” he said, his chin quivering with a different kind of terror. The reality of the evening was coming to bear as he realized none of this was a dream. “What am I to show the artificers tomorrow?”

“You studied under your uncle?”

“Yes. He taught me everything, but the designs—”

Hakim’s nephew knew his options, either come to work for me or give up his life’s work. My position as intelligencer would not allow the knowledge he possessed to fall to another house. In his frightened eyes, I saw his innocence of the world sacrificed. I was a murderous savior and a dark protector. In this moment of cruel understanding, I had become his Gray Lady, a steel shadow to be feared and venerated.

“You will build them better tomorrow,” I said.

Unable to process his thoughts into words, he nodded his head and stumbled into the night. I prayed he would rebuild his resolve before the dawn. Otherwise, there would be nowhere to run that I could not catch him.

I stood and looked out over the balcony of my brother’s study. A chilled breeze ruffled the pennants that hung from the eaves of the house. The entire city stretched out before me.

The doors to the study opened, and for a moment, I could hear the preparations for tomorrow’s influx of apprentas. In those voices and quickened steps, I heard the years behind me unfolding, all of them too similar to separate. All of them save two: The one where a handsome man from the Sands danced away with my heart. And the one where I demanded the same man carve it away.

How often had Hakim come here with me between those two slivers of time? The breeze that teased the pennants would catch the curls of his hair as he stood on the balcony. “Such promise,” he would say as his eyes danced over the glittering towers of the city, the glow of Zaun lighting the buildings from below, “such a delicate machine, all these parts working together.”

I told him what my father told me, that this was the promise of progress, the promise of Piltover. It moved our city forward, but, I cautioned, one ill-shaped gear could threaten it all. One cog that rejected its role could destroy the entire machine.

Stevan’s chair creaked along the carpet. My fingers ached for the curls of Hakim’s hair or even the solace of the chaplet’s polished glass in my pocket. Instead, I coiled Aviet’s whip into tighter circles in my hands. Hakim so wanted to draw me out of this darkness, only realizing too late that my work, my duty to my family, was something I could no more cut away than my own shadow.

“Camille?”

I said nothing, unable to tear my eyes from the fragile view and my even more fragile thoughts of the past. The clockwork mechanism ticked, and the wheels of Stevan’s chair brought him up behind me.

“You’ve returned,” he said. “Aviet?”

I tossed Aviet’s whip on the woolen blanket laid over his lap.

“I see.”

“She served her purpose,” I said.

“That being?” For having sat so long in that chair, my brother was an artful dancer. He plucked at the wire of the whip.

“To remind me of mine,” I said.

“Your purpose?” Stevan’s initial nervousness slipped into agitation. He knew he would die tonight. He had been caught, and he couldn’t run, especially from me. His only consolation was to try and wound me just as grievously before his time expired. Bound as he was by his frailty, the only weapons left to him were words.

“Your duty is to me,” he said. “Just as it was to our father.”

Duty. My father. The right words could cut more deeply than a knife.

“You are here to serve me,” he growled.

“No, I swore to serve this house.” The oath I had taken pricked fresh in my mind, the oath of all intelligencers. I repeated it now without effort or remorse. “To this house, I will be true and faithful, putting its needs before my own. To this, I will commit mind, body, and heart.”

They were the same words I told Hakim the night I had ended things between us. I could not be his, for I had promised myself to another.

“That duty of intelligencer was meant to be mine.” Stevan’s voice wrenched me back to the present. He gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles whitened. “You swore an oath to our father, and what did you do? He died because you were not strong enough. And then you nearly deserted this house. For what? Love? Attention? Where was your duty then?”

He spat the words in the space between us. These spider veins, this blight, I had let it fester far too long. What kindness had I shown this house in ignoring his madness?

“I cut out my heart for the family. For you, Stevan,” I said. “I have given all that I am. After all these years, can you say the same?”

Stevan sputtered like a wet spark, desperately trying to flare to life, but knowing there was little left to catch fire.

“Father just gave this to you, but I was the one who spent my entire life proving to him I deserved it,” he said. Disgust weighed on his words. My brother’s anger ran faster, the toxicity poisoning the air like a chem spill. “You may see me as your betrayer, but you are the one responsible, sister. If you could be trusted to make the right decisions, I would not have to step in.”

I had let him become this monster. I tolerated his grim plots and motivations all because I was unwilling to face a future without him, a future where no one remembered the woman I was. If I had been stronger in my resolve, I could have ended this years before. I had chiseled away parts of myself, but in all that time, I never had the courage to cut away the piece I knew would blacken our house.

“That night, I would have run away with Hakim if you had not made the effort to remind me of my duty,” I said.

He had come to me, bloody and broken, forcing me to confront a reality where I had abandoned my charge. Even when I discovered the truth years later, that he had been behind his own attack, I had been relieved. On the brink of a decision clouded by sentiment, my brother had given me the hard push that let me separate honor from emotion. I knew that, without it, I might have given up who I was meant to be. It was his dark encouragement that let me take on fully the mantle I wore now.

I moved toward him and let my fingers rest on his shoulder. I could feel his aged bones beneath the rich silk and parchment skin. The vibrations in my chest built. Stevan looked up at me, the blue of his eyes hardening like chips of broken glass as the energy around my augmentation grew.

“You have always been my responsibility, brother.” The chill in the air entered my words. “Stevan, I will fail you no longer.”

I could feel the charge electrifying the hair at the back of my neck. I let my hand drift from his shoulder to the edge of his face. The boyish lock of hair that fell over his temple had thinned and disappeared years ago. The spark arced through my fingertips and enveloped Stevan.

It didn’t take much to push his heart over the edge, the atrophied muscle that drove my brother to such dark places finally seized in his chest. His eyes closed, and his chin sagged in my hand.

The vibration of the crystals in my chest slowed to an even rhythm. I turned back to face the city. Tonight’s cold would settle in her metal bones, but tomorrow, she would continue to push forward, to pulse with life. To progress.

Such a delicate machine.

All eyes in Fortune's Glory were on Twisted Fate. He felt the gambling hall's many patrons regarding him with a mixture of envy, vicarious excitement, and spiteful longing for him to lose everything on the turn of the last card.

Beyond the avarice common to dens of chance, Twisted Fate felt a singular purpose at work here, a noose being slowly drawn around his neck. The cards were twitching in agitation, warning him of danger. He knew he should fold and get out before whoever was hunting him sprang their trap, but the opportunity to make a pauper of the man across the table was too enticing to forego.

He grinned at his opponent, a greedy merchant whose fortune was built on the whipped backs of enslaved miners. The man's robes were expensive: Freljord furs, hand-tooled leather, and Bilgewater sea charms. Every finger boasted a ring of blood gold worth more than most men would see in a lifetime. Aromatic smoke drifted from clay pipes to hang over the fortune in coin, jewelry, and deeds lying between them like a pirate's treasure horde.

Twisted Fate nodded toward the merchant.

“I do believe it's your call, Master Henmar.”

“I am aware of the rules, river rat,” said Henmar, as Twisted Fate ran his tattooed fingers in a repeating spiral pattern on the backs of his cards. “And do not think any of your fancy sleight of hand is going to distract me into making an error of judgment.”

“Distract you?” said Twisted Fate, exuding laconic confidence in every gesture. “I declare, I would never stoop to such a low and dishonorable ruse.”

“No? Then why is it your eyes keep darting from the table?” said Henmar. “Listen closely, I have negotiated with the best of them, and I know the tell of a desperate man when I see it.”

Twisted Fate gave a sly grin, swapping the cards between his hands and theatrically doffing his wide-brimmed hat.

“You're sharp, sir. I can see that,” he said, sweeping his gaze across the gathered crowd. The usual collection of hangers-on; men and women hoping that whoever won might be generous to those nearby. The cards trembled as Twisted Fate's eyes fell upon certain individuals and he felt his mouth fill with the rancid flavor of sour milk. He’d long learned to trust that reaction as a sign of imminent bedlam.

There. A man with an eye patch and a flame-haired woman. They were almost certainly armed and well aware of his slippery nature. Did he know them? Probably not. Were they working for Henmar, protecting his assets? Unlikely. A man like Henmar would make it obvious who he'd brought. Bounty hunters then. The cards were growing ever more alarmed in Twisted Fate's hands. He slipped them together and placed them flat on the table.

“You have a look that tells me you know you have already lost,” said Henmar with the tone of a man who believes everyone to be his inferior.

“Then what say we make this a little more interesting, sir?” replied Twisted Fate, spreading the cards in a fan and watching as the hunters eased closer. “Care to double down?”

“Are you able to cover that much?” asked Henmar suspiciously.

“Easily,” said Twisted Fate, locking his gaze with the merchant and lifting a heavy pouch of coins from the voluminous pockets of his long coat. “Can you?”

Henmar licked his lips and snapped his fingers. A flunky behind the merchant handed him a matching bag of coins. The patrons of Fortune's Glory gave a collective moan as it was added to the gold heaped in the middle of the table. Wars had been waged for less coin than was at stake here.

“You first,” said Henmar.

“Always,” agreed Twisted Fate, flipping over his cards as the bounty hunters made their move.

The man with the eye patch lunged at him with a capture collar. The woman shouted his name and drew a matching pair of pistols.

Twisted Fate kicked the underside of the table, spinning it into the air in a shower of coins, cards, and parchment. The pistols fired with deafening roars, blasting fist-sized holes in the table. The capture collar snapped closed, but when the smoke cleared and the screams stopped, Twisted Fate was nowhere to be found.

Henmar rose to his feet, his face twisted in outrage as he searched in vain for his opponent. He looked down at the broken pieces of the table and the color drained from his face.

“Where is the money?” he yelled. “Where is my money?”

Five cards fluttered face-up to the floor of Fortune's Glory.

A winning hand.

The horrifying specter now known as Thresh was once a simple, if troubled, man. In an age history has all but forgotten, he was a lowly warden of an order devoted to the gathering and protection of arcane knowledge. This order was established on the Blessed Isles, which were hidden and protected from the outside world by magical pale mists.

The masters of the order acknowledged Thresh’s long years of service, and tasked him with the custodianship of certain hidden vaults beneath the city of Helia. It was there that a vast, secret collection of dangerous artifacts was kept under lock and key. Incredibly strong-willed and methodical, Thresh was well suited to such work… but even then, his penchant for cruelty had been noted by his brethren. While it had not yet manifested in murderous ways—at least, none that could be proven—he was shunned by many.

It became clear he had been given a job that kept him away from others, preventing him from gaining the recognition he felt he deserved. Solitary years in the darkness took their toll, and Thresh grew ever more bitter and jealous as he patrolled the long halls with his lantern-stave, and only his own resentful thoughts for company.

His moment of opportunity came when the armies of a mad king managed to pierce the veiling mists, and arrived unbidden upon the shores of the Blessed Isles.

Secretly, Thresh delighted in the slaughter that followed. The invading king was obsessed with resurrecting his dead queen—and Thresh willingly led him to the fabled Waters of Life.

None but the most senior members of the order had ever been permitted to enter the hidden catacomb that housed the Waters. Now, with the king’s greatest warriors at his back, Thresh laughed as the guardians of that sacred place were cut down before him. Finally, he believed, he would get what he had long deserved.

Only those who were there could say what truly occurred when the king lowered the lifeless corpse of his wife into the Waters, but the aftermath would shake the whole of Runeterra.

A catastrophic blastwave of dark energy surged outward, engulfing Helia and spreading rapidly across the rest of the Blessed Isles, and the white mist that had once protected them turned black and predatory. Every living thing in its path perished in an instant, and yet their spirits could not move on, caught in a horrifying new existence somewhere between life and death. Thresh himself was among the first to be claimed… but while others screamed in anguish at their fate, he reveled in it.

He arose from this cataclysm, this Ruination, as a spectral monstrosity, relishing the chance to torment others without fear of reprisal, and unfettered by the limits of mortality.

Over the decades and centuries that followed, his supernatural appearance slowly changed to match the malice and cruelty that had always festered in his heart. To his amusement, Thresh came to realize most other spirits trapped within the Black Mist retained only fragments of their former selves—even the strongest of the foreign invaders, such as Hecarim or Ledros—while his power continued to grow.

Driven by spite to prey upon those he perceives as lesser souls, Thresh’s favorite victims have always been those who will suffer the most from his attentions. No matter how strong their resolve, resilience, or faith, he strives to break them as slowly as possible, by learning their fears and weaknesses, and toying with them to the very end. Only when their lives lie in tatters, their loved ones taken from them, their sense of purpose lost and their last glimmer of hope snuffed out, do Thresh’s hooked chains finally drag them into his undying grasp.

Even so, death brings no merciful release, for he tears out the souls of all he kills—imprisoning them within his accursed lantern, to be unwilling witnesses to his depredations for all eternity.

Only a single soul has ever escaped him.

Senna, one of the hated “Sentinels of Light”, died a futile death after facing Thresh in some forgotten eldritch vault. Her distraught husband, Lucian, then pursued the cruel spirit for years, becoming singularly obsessed with the hunt, letting his grief and rage consume him almost entirely. To Thresh, it was delectable.

However, before he could finally claim Lucian’s soul, a vengeful blow split Thresh’s lantern open, and freed Senna from it.

Intrigued by the obvious strength of their mortal bond, he has decided to allow them this small and insignificant victory, knowing all too well that the game of light and shadow they all play is still far from over…

Galio’s legend begins in the aftermath of the Rune Wars, when countless refugees fled from the destructive power of magic. In the west of Valoran, a band of these displaced people were hounded by a vicious band of dark mages—exhausted from days without rest, the refugees hid among the shadows of an ancient, petrified forest, and their pursuers suddenly found their magic to be ineffective.

It seemed the fossilized trees were a natural magic-dampener, and any sorcery used within them would simply fail. No longer helpless, the refugees turned their swords on the dark mages and drove them from the land.

Some decided that this sanctuary from magic was a gift from the gods, others saw it as a fair reward for their terrible journey, but all agreed this should be their new home.

As years passed, the settlers crafted items of protection from the enchanted wood. Eventually, they found it could be mixed with ash and lime to make petricite—a material with a powerful resistance to magic. It would be the foundation for their new civilization, forming the walls of the new kingdom of Demacia.

For years, these petricite barriers were all the Demacians needed to feel secure from the threat of magic within the borders of their homeland. In the rare event that they needed to settle a conflict abroad, their military proved fierce and formidable… but when their enemies employed sorcery, Demacia’s roaming army had little recourse. Somehow, they needed to take the security of their magic-dampening walls into battle.

The sculptor Durand was commissioned to fashion some manner of petricite shield for the military, and two years later the artist unveiled his masterpiece. While it was not what many were expecting, the winged statue Galio would become vital to the defense of the nation, and serve as a symbol of Demacia across Valoran.

Using a system of pulleys, steel sledges, and countless oxen, they would pull the great stone figure to the battlefield. Many would-be invaders simply froze at the sight of the awe-inspiring silhouette looming before them—the titan who “ate magic” inspired a kingdom, and terrified those who opposed it.

However, no one thought to consider what exposing the statue to such unpredictable energies might do…

Demacia had been mired in battle with enemy forces in the Greenfang Mountains. A skilled order of warmages, known as the Arcane Fist, bombarded the Demacians with crackling bolts of raw, mystical power for thirteen days. Those who had survived this long felt their morale dwindling, and huddled close to Galio. Just when their spirits could be brought no lower, a slow, deafening rumble shook the vale, as if two mountains were grinding against each other. As a great shadow grew above them, the Demacian soldiers steeled themselves for death.

A deep voice bellowed from above. To the Demacians’ astonishment, the sound came from the colossus at their backs—Galio was moving, and speaking, entirely on his own. Somehow, the accumulation of absorbed magic had given him life. He threw himself in front of the Demacians, shielding them from attack after attack, absorbing each fresh bolt into his massive, stone frame.

Then Galio turned, bounded up the mountainside, and crushed every last one of the Arcane Fist into the craggy soil.

The Demacians cheered. They were eager to thank the petricite sentinel that had saved them… but as quickly as he’d come to life, their fearsome protector had ceased moving, returning to his pedestal, just as before. Back in the Great City, this bizarre tale was told in hushed tones by the few who had survived the Battle of the Greenfangs, and was usually received with silent incredulity. That day passed into legend—perhaps a mere allegory of ancient days to help people through hard times.

Certainly, no one would have believed that the colossus continued to see all that transpired around him. Even while immobile, Galio retained consciousness, longing to experience the sensations of battle once again.

He watched mortals pass beneath him, paying him tribute year after year. It puzzled him to see them disappear one by one as time rolled on. Galio wondered where they went when they vanished. Perhaps they were sent away to be mended, as he often was when he returned from war?

As the years slipped by, Galio began to realize the sorrowful answer to his question—unlike himself, the people of Demacia could not be repainted, or have their damage easily repaired. Mortals were frail, ephemeral creatures, and he now understood just how badly they needed his protection. Fighting had been his passion, but the people were now his purpose.

Even so, Galio has been called to battle only a handful of times in all the centuries since. Demacia has begun to look inward, with magic becoming rarer in his world than it once was, and so the petricite colossus remains dormant, observing the world through the murk of his waking dreams. The statue’s greatest hope is to be blessed by a magic so powerful that he will never be forced to sleep again.

Only then will Galio be able to truly serve his purpose: to stand and fight as Demacia’s protector, forevermore.

She felt the thief coming closer with every careful step he took.

He was skillful, she’d give him that, but her awareness was heightened to degrees no mortal could conceive. His footfalls over the nearby rooftops, though soft and artfully placed, vibrated the stagnant air within her gloomy abode like the plucked string of a lute in a silent temple.

His approach had wakened her from dreams of the ocean, darkness rising up in a tsunami that roared over the world to leave it forever sunk beneath dead black waters. Part of her relished the extinction this wave would bring, even as she knew she had played some role in its coming.

The dream fell away as her multi-faceted eyes opened and she reached out through her every sense. Perceptions colored by scents and sounds, movement felt in the tremors of the air. Still weary and worn thin from her most recent voyage to the mist-wreathed isles, her irritation grew at the thought of having to deal with yet another intruder.

Her cellar lair was folded with shadow, but the heavy barrels, rotted tapestries, and icy floorboards were as clear to her as if daylight were pouring through the shuttered grates.

A whisper of skittering legs echoed throughout the manse, a rustle of hundreds of glossy bodies scuttling from their domains in anticipation of her desires. The dripping walls and sagging ceiling rippled with undulant motion and the gleam of thousands of unblinking eyes.

“Soon, little ones,” she said, her voice smoky and rich with aristocratic tones. “Let me play with this one awhile.”

She felt their appetite for human flesh, sharp with need.

It mirrored her own.

She eased from her resting place, her dreaming form a shifting blend of human and arachnid, extending her slender limbs and drawing the intruder’s myriad scents to her through the surfaces of her tarsal claws. She ran her tongue across needle-like teeth, learning more of him with every inward breath.

A sand-kissed soul—skin of smoke, and the thinnest trace of ancient kings in his blood.

One of the desert-born…

She felt his approach, fully aware of what had drawn him to her shuttered manse on this bitterly cold night. And who had likely sent him.

Like the others before him, he would find only death.

Like the others, Elise would draw him to her before devouring him alive.

Waning moon in a coal-dark sky. Low clouds and cold winds.

Perfect for an endeavor like this.

A bell tolled over the harbor of the capital, and icy winds carried the sound of bellicose Noxian soldiers from distant camps beyond the city’s Watchbell Gate.

Nyam moved over the rooftops with soft and sure footsteps, his loose-fitting tunic and cloak of gray wool making him all but invisible. He kept low, just below the tiled ridges of the buildings, carefully judging every step over the thin layer of snowfall.

A loose tile, a patch of ice—that was all it would take to end this night in death, his body broken on the cobbled street.

But Nyam had plundered tombs sunk deep in the sands of his homeland, and climbed the cliff-temples on the road to Marrowmark in search of treasure. He had evaded traps set in the ruins of kings and gods, so the swaybacked rooftops of Noxus—uneven, high, and filled with pitted hand- and footholds—offered little in the way of challenge to a thief of his skill.

He’d learned to run the sky-roads as a child, weaving over the high roofs of Bel’zhun to avoid roving gangs of children who beat him for the cleft that split his gums and top lip all the way to his nose. “No-Face Nyam,” they’d called him, his birth deformity giving the Shuriman-born and pallid Noxian runts a unifying target for their anger.

Even after he’d stolen enough to have an embalmer sew his lip closed upon his tenth summer, they still mocked him—but those hard, brutal years had served him well. He’d learned to embrace solitude, to love dizzying heights, and to become one with shadows in a land that knew only the golden light of its ancient sun.

But most of all, he’d learned to fight: first with his fists, and then with the obsidian blade he’d taken from the sarcophagus of a body so large, it must have been one of the legendary Ascended. Sheathed across his shoulder, it had been a knife to the dead god, but was a sword to Nyam.

The place his paymaster had spoken of was just ahead, looming like a grand shadow of its former glory, its windows shuttered, and its gambrel roof rotten where tiles had slipped loose and fallen to the streets below.

That’s my way in.

Nyam reached the icicle-hung gable at the end of a roof, and perched at its edge with perfect balance as he uncoiled a length of rope from his belt. He unfolded the hooks of a grapnel and, with practiced ease, cast it toward a gap between a row of cracked chimneys. The hook landed precisely where he had aimed, and he gave the rope a tug.

Satisfied the hook had bedded into the stonework, he slid from the roof.

The cold air cut into him as he swung over, bracing his legs like a spring to bear the impact. His boots were soft, but he winced as the sound echoed throughout the crumbling building like a hammer upon an anvil. Snow fell from the eaves, and Nyam took a moment, listening for any sign that he had been heard.

Nothing. The ancient house was quiet as a tomb.

Hand over hand, he pulled himself up the rope until he climbed smoothly onto the roof.

Nyam coiled the rope and crouched in the shadow behind a chimney. His breath misted the air, and he tugged a thick mitten of drüvask fur from his left hand, reaching up to place a bare palm on the stone.

This chimney had not known warmth in many passings of the moon.

Only a very few chimneys in this district smoked with a hearth fire. Other parts of the capital glimmered, ruddy with firelight. Cookfires, warrior pyres beyond the walls, and braziers set in shrines to the Wolf.

But not here.

This area of the city felt all but abandoned, the empty windows of its black stone structures seeming like they had never known light. Tattered curtain cloth was frozen stiff by the sighing winds funneled through the narrow streets. Far below, only a few candles guttered in window sconces, and he’d seen just a single lantern, hung outside a forlorn-looking tavern doorway.

Pallid moonlight cast its radiance over empty streets, where the snow lay undisturbed. How such a deserted space could exist in a city where every inch of ground was precious was a mystery to Nyam, but this was where his employer had directed him.

The manse of House Zaavan.

Nyam slid slowly down the rope through a wide hole in the roof.

Flakes of snow swirled around him as he descended, diamond motes glittering in the faint moonlight. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the gloom within the manse, seeing that he hung within what appeared to be a grand receiving room with a wide fireplace of gold-veined marble.

Snow-brushed kindling was set in the hearth, and a bucket of frosty coal lay spilled beside it, like the home’s inhabitants had knocked it over in their hurry to leave, and never come back.

Linen-draped furniture was situated around the room: long couches, wide divans pushed up against the walls, and empty chairs. Judging by the icy stiffness of the fabric, Nyam guessed many years had passed since this room had been shuttered.

The parquet floor was strewn with tiles and broken roof timbers, and he carefully placed his leading foot between the debris, testing for creaks and groans. Slowly he let his weight settle, and released the rope.

Nyam pushed back his hood and ran a hand over his shaven scalp, the skin dark and stubbled, tattooed, and pierced with ivory needles like a thorny crown.

He crouched low and placed his palm on the floor, closing his eyes and letting the bones of the manse speak to him. The ancient timbers groaned in the cold like old men turning in their sleep, the walls silent, the house’s breath hanging heavy within, trapped like the air of a plague cave where the afflicted waited to die.

Every instinct told Nyam this house was abandoned, a cursed palace frozen in time.

And yet…

A faint hiss like a thousand whispered voices speaking in unison, a soft sense of motion all around him. A crawling sensation traveled the length of his spine, and he suppressed a shiver, telling himself it was just the cold fingers of the north wind.

He eased his gaze around the room, not letting his eyes fix on any one point, allowing his peripheral vision to catch any movement. He saw nothing, only the swirl of snowflakes and the tiny fluttering of cloth.

But the sense that something else was in here with him wouldn’t abate.

The elegantly written letter had been precise: enter the Zaavan mansion, find the library, and steal the designated artifact. The instructions described a grand library in the eastern wing of the manse, a room entered via tall doors of ebon black, just off the mezzanine above an octagonal atrium.

Nyam rose and moved to the walls, where the timber floor would be less likely to creak with his weight, and edged along them to a wide door at the far end of the room. It hung ajar, and gusts of soft wind sighed through from beyond.

He slid his thin frame through the door, finding himself within a long dining room.

A narrow table ran its length, still set for a lavish dinner, with painted ceramic plates and gleaming silver cutlery laid out in anticipation of guests who would never arrive.

Platters were piled high with frost-dusted fruit and icy cuts of meat. Nyam’s stomach rumbled, reminding him that it had been many hours since he’d eaten. Would such meat be edible, preserved by the cold?

Nyam wasn’t about to try it and find out.

At the center of the table was a domed silver tray, and a sudden curiosity made him want to see what lay beneath.

Nyam reached over and lifted the lid.

And a swirling mass of creatures erupted from a moldering joint of beef, gloss-black and skittering—spiders fleeing the light in their hundreds. None was larger than his thumbnail, and Nyam flinched in horror as they spilled from the edge of the table in a squirming tide.

The tray lid fell from his fingers to the floor.

In the silence of the house, the clang of metal was deafening.

He winced, and his hand snapped to the sword at his shoulder. Cursing his stupidity, Nyam moved swiftly to a curtained window, finding the shadows and becoming one with the darkness.

Stillness was his ally, and he remained utterly motionless, waiting for any sign his foolish mistake had been heard. He strained to hear something amiss—a sullen watchman, or even perhaps the owner of this house.

If anything, the house felt somehow quieter, as though something else was right next to him, invisibly watching and waiting.

His eyes scanned the walls, from floor to cornices.

Nothing.

The seconds became minutes, and finally, Nyam let out a relieved sigh. The house was empty and abandoned, something once grand now reduced to a ruin.

“Dead as a desert tomb,” he said.

Elise crawled from her cellar lair to the ground floor of the manse, moving swiftly along the walls and fluted columns to the mezzanine, each of her multiple limbs in perfect synchrony. Her chittering spiderling host followed in her wake, eager to race ahead and swarm this intruder, but she held them back for now.

They hissed at her restraint like unruly children, resentful at being denied this feast.

Her arachnoid form was as black as midnight, segmented and deadly, with an abdomen patterned with blood-red streaks. Her bladed and slender legs moved lightly, making no sound at all.

She crawled with lithe grace across the mezzanine’s checkerboard-tiled floor, toward the dining room.

A clash of metal echoed from within as her foreclaw reached for the door. She paused, and her scuttling host did so too, gently swaying on their many legs.

The sound unleashed a rush of bitter memories from her past life…

… of pain, humiliation, and bloody vengeance.

A jealous and petty man had almost ended her life in that room.

She remembered her husband’s treacherous poison coursing through her veins, searing her flesh from the inside out and crippling her with agony.

A surge of hate, the flash of a blade…

Gloating eyes now wide with fear…

A flood of red as she twisted the knife in his heart.

Elise pushed the memory away. Even now, centuries later, the pain of that night still lingered. Despite drinking the antidote to the poison, she had drifted near death for weeks after his betrayal. Yet as agonizing as those weeks had been, they had signaled the coming of her rebirth.

As a mere human, she had been beautiful. Now, she was glorious.

Elise paused, savoring the rising tension in the thief—but beneath that, she tasted long-buried fears and a will to survive past torments, which found their echo within her.

Intrigued, she lowered her claw as she heard the thief step closer.

Elise turned from the dining room and swiftly crossed the mezzanine to a set of tall black doors.

Nyam eased open the dining room door, wincing as it creaked.

But if no one had come running at the sound of him dropping the metal tray lid, they weren’t going to come for this.

The door opened into a high-ceilinged atrium, eight sided and rising to a stained-glass dome high above. The mezzanine floor ran around the edges of the atrium, though its timbers had collapsed in several places, and the curving staircase leading down to the vestibule was in ruins far below. Fragments of colored glass lay shattered in the vestibule, and Nyam peered up into the gloom to see the broken portions of the dome had been sealed with some kind of pale fibrous resin or gum.

Thick cobwebs spanned the upper reaches of the atrium, and Nyam saw wet-looking bundles held fast within them, squirming with a grotesque internal motion.

Egg sacs? Captured birds? Nests?

Whatever they were, it was no concern of his. Before long, he’d be out of this place with his prize and en route to a fat purse, a clean bathhouse, and a warm meal.

Directly across from the dining room were a pair of imposing doors of jet-black wood, polished and gleaming like dark mirrors.

“There is the library,” he whispered. “Just as the letter said.”

Nyam slipped across the mezzanine, carefully testing the integrity of the floor with each step before committing his weight. The wood creaked and groaned, but held.

He reached the doors and tested a handle, grimacing in revulsion as his hand came away sticky with a gummy yellow-white residue.

“Mercy of sand,” he hissed, wiping his palm on his britches.

The door clicked open, and Nyam forgot his disgust as he heard a soft sound, like sand spilling over rocks. He couldn’t place what it might be—vermin in the walls, perhaps?

Rats were a common enough sight in Noxus. You couldn’t have this many people living cheek by jowl without them infesting every building. But this wasn’t rats.

Pushing the door wide, Nyam entered the library.

It had once been a place of wonder.

Its shelves were high, crafted with love and care from pale wood with a fine, contoured grain. Every bookcase had been violently emptied—leather-bound tomes, scrolls, and sheaves of paper cast to the floor in disarray, books likely worth a small fortune lying amid ancient scrolls that had been torn like discarded army scrip tokens. Artifacts of strange and unusual design had been smashed to pieces, and statues of onyx and jade lay broken into shards. A swaying black chandelier hung from a slender cord over the center of the room.

And there, at the far end of the chamber, was a cabinet of dark wood and cold iron, from which a soft illumination pulsed.

“There,” said Nyam, picking a path toward the cabinet through the scattered books.

He wondered why anyone would destroy such a treasure trove of wisdom and imagination. This chaos had the hallmarks of someone wreaking havoc in blind fury. Judging by the dust gathered on the embossed covers and gilded spines, that rage had been spent long ago.

He bent to lift a book from the floor, its pages brittle with age. Portions of its thick leather cover bore the same glistening residue from the door handle. He opened it, and saw the harsh, angular script of the old tongue of Noxus, a language only the highborn patricians ever used. Nyam couldn’t read it, and it hurt his eyes trying to follow the crisp writing in the dim light.

Placing the book back on the floor, Nyam pressed on, hearing the soft sound of sand over stone once again. He paused, trying to pinpoint the noise, but it was all around him.

What is that?

Finally, he reached the cabinet, its black wood oddly glistening with a patina of moisture that seemed to be oozing from within, as though something inside was leaking. Careful not to touch the liquid, he bent to sniff it.

Salt and rotten timbers, mulched seaweed, and… old blood?

“Tainted seawater,” he said, puzzled.

He knelt to examine the cabinet from the ground up, looking for any trap mechanisms, his ungloved hands gliding over the wet wood in search of catches, switches, or latches. His awareness of his surroundings faded, all his attention focused on the cabinet and whatever lethal surprises it might have in store. Its doors appeared to be secured by the simplest of locks.

“Surely something so valuable would be protected by more than a pinlock,” he whispered in disbelief. “It is almost as though you wish it to be stolen.”

Nyam ran his fingertips around the handles, then drew a mirror from his pouches and used it to peer within the mechanism of the pinlock. No spring-loaded needle, no glass pellet of lethal gas, nor any inscribed curses or magical trap runes.

Satisfied the lock was just as it seemed, he reached up and slid out one of the longer ivory needles from a pierced fold of skin on his scalp. He pressed it into the lock and gently eased the iron pins from their holes.

With the last pin secured, Nyam slid the needle back into his scalp and flexed his fingers.

His stomach grumbled with a stabbing hunger.

He was suddenly ravenous, ready to tear raw flesh from the bone and drain entire vats of beer. His appetite from the dining room returned tenfold, and for a fleeting second, he considered going back to take one of the cuts of meat from the table.

He pushed the sensation down, shocked at how visceral it had been.

Nyam opened the cabinet, and his stomach again tightened with powerful hunger pangs.

Sitting within was a crystalline hourglass encased in a delicate framework of brass. It stood two handspans tall, and tumultuous clouds of blue light spiraled inside, moving restlessly back and forth, from top to bottom. Droplets of red water seemed to sweat from the smoky glass, forming a glossy crimson pool that was the source of the moisture seeping from the cabinet.

Nyam hesitated to remove the object, knowing it was touched by the darkest of magics.

He pulled his gloves back on and carefully lifted the hourglass. It felt warm, like a roasted shank of meat fresh from a clay oven, and he closed his eyes as his mind filled with bloody horrors…

A slaughterman’s cleaver splitting bone for the pot…

Butchered corpses hung on hooks to drain them of blood…

A toothed maw, feeding a hunger that could never be sated…

Soul lights ripped from the living and the dead…

EVEN IN DEATH, I HUNGER!

Nyam set the hourglass back down, all but overcome by the gut punch of the gory imagery, and disgusted with himself as his craving surged.

“I do not know what you are, but the sooner I am out of here and rid of you, the better.”

He unfastened the clasps securing his cloak and removed it, before swiftly wrapping the hourglass within.

Nyam closed the cabinet and turned to leave.

And his mouth fell open in shock.

Every surface of the library was swathed in glistening strands of web, stretching in taut lines from the bookshelves to the floor. Partially shuttered windows were rendered opaque and sealed to their frames, with scattered books and scrolls submerged beneath undulant dunes of white silk.

The rustling sound of sand over rocks intensified, and Nyam drew his black-bladed sword as he saw the ceiling squirm with thousands of spiders in crimson and jet.

More of them crawled toward him in a black tide, squeezing fat bodies from cracks in the walls and floor, swarming over one another to reach him.

“Rammus be with me,” hissed Nyam. “Protect this son of Shurima…”

A larger motion drew his gaze upward toward the chandelier.

It unfolded from the central point, and a huge, segmented body uncurled to reveal a monstrous spider with a pulsing black abdomen streaked with vivid crimson. Its eyes settled upon Nyam as it lowered from the ceiling.

Even as it descended on its cord of silk, its outline seemed to fold in on itself, reshaping and swelling into a new form like a larva emerging from its chrysalis. The monster’s rear limbs slid around to its back, and its forelimbs twisted and extended to become long human legs.

Its body stretched to assume the curves of a voluptuous woman clad in red and black, in silk and damask. Her skin lightened from midnight to the violet of an ill-fated sunset, and the crimson slash on the monster’s abdomen became a slicked-back mane of blood-red hair.

But it was her eyes, twin pools of ruby light framed by a chitinous crown, that kept Nyam pinned in place.

Her tapered foot touched the ground, and she stepped toward him like a ribbon dancer coming down after a flawless performance in the air.

“That doesn’t belong to you,” she said.

Nyam tried to speak, but his tongue turned to turgid leather, his fingers tightening on the grip of his sword. Her beauty was otherworldly and intoxicating, repellent and achingly desirable all at once.

He craved the embrace of her slender limbs, even as he knew that touching her hideous body would be the death of him. He took a step toward her, trying to quell the rising terror of his wildly beating heart.

She grinned, exposing needle-like teeth wet with venom.

How would it be to have them fasten on my arm, to feel her venom coursing through my veins?

Nyam shook his head, breaking eye contact, the breath he hadn’t known he was holding rushing to fill his lungs as her blandishments and seductions fell away.

“I think it is not yours, either,” he said, finally finding his voice.

“True, but it cost me a great deal to retrieve, so the point is moot.”

“The man paying me is powerful,” warned Nyam.

“And the person that item is promised to is no less so,” said the woman.

Nyam began circling around her, edging toward the black doors. She stepped closer, the spiders parting before her. The hooked limbs at her back flexed as she rolled her shoulders.

“Do you really expect to walk out of here alive?” she asked.

“You think to stop me?” he said, brandishing the sword that had once belonged to a dead god. “I have split skulls of many who stood between me and escape.”

“No doubt. But your tally of death is insignificant when set next to mine. I am the Lady Elise, and you are just the latest fly to wander into my web.”

Nyam bolted, sprinting toward the library doors.

He felt the spiders’ bodies pop beneath his boots, heard the crunch of their hard shells, and smelled the acrid stink of their ichor. He’d hoped to gain advantage with his sudden speed, but now saw how horribly he’d misjudged this woman.

She somersaulted toward the doors, springing from the wall in a graceful arc. A burst of silk spat toward the cloak-wrapped hourglass in Nyam’s hands.

He twisted away, but the sticky web stuck to the edge of his cloak and pulled…

Nyam cried out in fury as the hourglass was wrenched from his grip. It flew back through the air and slammed hard into the wood of the cabinet, the brass frame buckling with the impact. The artifact landed on the spun softness of the webs covering the floor, and rolled onto its side.

“You fool!” said Elise, as a curling wisp of deep blue smoke drifted from a wide crack in the hourglass. “What have you done?”

More smoke was pouring out—thicker, darker, reeking of old blood and fear. It swirled with red lightning, a storm of cold light and hunger.

A terrible outline began to form, broad and bloated, a vast figure in thick plates of rusted and decaying armor. A horned skull took shape, with a fanged maw that creakingly stretched wide with hideous appetite.

“What is that?” Nyam said, terror striking deep into his bones and rooting him to the spot.

“A soulgorger,” said Elise. “A creature of infinite hunger that will feast on your spirit for an eternity. A thing of the Shadow Isles…”

Nyam made the Sign of the Sun across his heart as a host of smaller forms coalesced around the creature—wretched, half-digested spirits with missing arms, dislocated jaws, gouged-open chests, and scooped-out skulls. Tethers of blood-red light bound them to the giant entity that feasted on them even as it enslaved them.

He felt their pain, their horror at being slowly devoured. But more terrible than that, he felt their awful need to save themselves from torment.

“Mortal meat for a feast,” said the soulgorger, its voice like a blunt saw through bone.

“Thief!” Elise cried, hoping to break the spell of terror that lay upon him. “Thief!”

He didn’t respond, paralyzed at the sight of this unnatural specter, a thing so inimical to life that his mortal mind couldn’t accept its existence.

She felt the brutal rawness of the spirit’s hunger, a voracious, single-minded imperative without the refinement of her own appetites.

It disgusted her.

Elise took hold of the thief’s shoulder, and his head snapped up.

“Ready your sword and fight, or we both die,” she said as the soulgorger took a ponderous step forward, a grotesque grin splitting its butcher’s face. “Now!”

Her tone brooked no disagreement, and the thief unsteadily lifted his blade.

The soulgorger raised a meaty arm, and the enslaved abominations flew at them.

The legs at Elise’s back lashed out like reaping scythes, and the thief slashed with his sword. The spirits recoiled, screeching in pain as the weapons cut through them.

Elise didn’t waste the momentary reprieve.

“Run!” she shouted, turning and bolting for the door. The thief followed, hot on her heels, but the slave spirits of the soulgorger were far swifter than she had expected.

Their claws raked living flesh, and the thief cried out as a spirit sliced his shoulder and hip. Cold blue light poured into him, and he stumbled as more of the spirits closed in, tearing at them with icy talons as they fought, side by side, toward the library doors. Elise gritted her teeth against the freezing numbness spreading from each wound, flowing through her like a soporific poison.

“Up!” shouted Elise, dragging him onward. “Move!”

They tumbled through the doors, and she threw him to the floor before turning back to the library. Thousands more spiders were spilling onto the mezzanine from the levels below, scuttling down the walls, and pushing out between warped floorboards.

Elise slammed the library doors closed and said, “Seal the way, little ones.”

The spiderlings flowed up the wall, furiously spinning webs as they went. Sticky swathes of silk clogged the hair-fine gap between the doors, filled the keyholes, and sealed them shut. Pulsing blue light built around the edges of the frame.

The webs were holding for now, but already they were fraying, the resin-like substance running like melting wax. Faint wisps of ethereal mist seeped through the gaps, along with ghostly hands and suggestions of wailing faces. Elise’s own webbing would make for a much stronger barrier, but spinning it would take time and energy she didn’t have.

She bent down, and a handful of spiders crawled onto her extended palms. As she held them up before her face, she pictured what she needed, and they leapt from her hands, disappearing into cracks in the walls.

“Gratitude,” said the thief, breathless with terror. “You saved me—”

“I didn’t do it for you,” snapped Elise, rising to her full height.

“Then why?”

“Because if a soulgorger feeds, it gets stronger,” she said, striding toward the dining room. “Now get up. The web won’t hold for long.”

Elise threw open the dining room door, moving swiftly past the long table where her husband had betrayed her. She hadn’t set foot in here since that night.

The thief was limping badly now, a pallid, deathly light spreading through his body from where the revenants’ claws had pierced him. He didn’t know it, but he was as good as dead.

Truth be told, he had been doomed the moment he had chosen to rob her.

“I miss the sun,” he said, his eyes already glassing over. “The sand…”

“You’ll never see them again,” said Elise. “Unless that’s what awaits you beyond.”

“Beyond?”

“When you die,” said Elise.

“No, I am just exhausted. Wounded…” he insisted, his voice growing faint. “And cold… I have been hurt worse than this and walked away.”

Elise shook her head, and one of the legs at her shoulders stabbed down into his neck.

A spasm of venom pumped into the thief, and he flinched from the sudden hot rush of it, stumbling back and lifting his sword. The blade wavered in his weakening grip, and Elise felt the heat of the magic wrought in the folds of its ancient metal.

“What did you do?” he demanded.

“I gave you a sliver of venom that will allow you to live just a little longer.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The touch of the Shadow Isles is death,” said Elise. “Every second your kind spends in that damned place drains the soul, like blood flowing from a cut that can never heal. That touch is now inside you, leeching your life away with every last breath.”

He steadied himself on the table, and Elise saw snaking lines of black spreading across his face.

“No,” he said. “You were touched by the spirits, too.”

“My body is a thing of magic,” she said, “wrought by the venom of an ancient god.”

“You are immortal?”

Despite everything, Elise laughed with bitter humor.

“No, but it’ll take more than a soulgorger to end me,” she said, before whispering, “I hope…”

Nyam followed Elise into the chamber where he had first entered the shuttered manse. His every step was leaden, every breath a battle. It was all he could do to place one foot in front of the other.

So very cold…

He bumped into a sheet-covered chair, and his misted gaze cleared long enough for him to see the dangling rope he had used to descend from the roof.

Do I have strength enough to climb it?

Elise stood beneath the hole in the ceiling, haloed in a moonbeam and beautiful once more. Her skin shimmered with an internal radiance, lustrous and vibrant, her eyes alight with purpose.

“So… beautiful,” he said, his voice sounding as though it came from so very far away. She turned to face him, and his heart beat a little faster.

“What do they call you?” she asked.

“Nyam,” he said, his mind falling back through his life. “No-Face Nyam…”

Her head cocked to the side. “No-Face? Why do they call you that?”

He pulled his lip back to show her the ruin of his cloven gums and poorly sewn scar. She nodded, and reached out to run her smooth fingertips across his cheek and chin.

“We all have our scars, Nyam,” she said, and he felt a strange, invigorating warmth pass into him. “Now ready that fine sword of yours. You’re going to need it.”

He turned in time to see the doors flung open by the soulgorger’s spectral host. They charged in a howling mass of nightmares, screeching with frantic urgency.

Nyam’s heart flared to life like a hearth fire given fresh fuel, and he roared as he swung his sword. The blade bit deep into the smoky depths of their bodies, and their screams were of pain and sweet release. His own pain was forgotten, the ice in his veins melting before the heat of Elise’s venomous touch. He was, once again, a warrior of the sun, ready to fight and die a hero’s death.

Even as he fought, he watched as Elise leapt and dived among the spirits, her speed and agility incredible. His vision grew dull, bleached of color, but her form seemed to blur between blinks, transforming between sinuous human beauty and the lethal elegance of a deadly spider.

Nyam fought all the harder, hoping she might see how brave he was, and that it might please her.

But the fire in his blood could only last so long, and every clawing blow and deathly touch slowed him. Nyam tried to shout his defiance, but his throat felt as though it were thick with frost. His sword was heavy in his hand, but he would not drop it.

He sank to his knees, feeling colder than he could ever remember.

The mistwraiths encircled him, but they weren’t trying to kill him. He felt icy hands hauling him away. He saw them surround Elise, their ghostly limbs dragging her down with sheer weight of numbers. She hissed and spat at them, but to no avail.

Nyam dug deep, reaching for the fire she had given him, but it was utterly spent.

“Elise…” he whispered.

Hot venom furiously coursed through Elise’s body as the wretched host dragged her and the thief before the soulgorger. Its fire kept the deathly touch of the spirits at bay, but she couldn’t sustain it for long.

Back now in the library, No-Face Nyam knelt before the spirits, alive, but only just, his soul all but drained. Despite that, he gripped his black sword as if he might somehow strike one last blow.

The vast specter towered over Elise, its bestial features twisted in monstrous hunger. It knew she was special, that she was more than just a simple mortal, and it was taking its time, savoring the moment before it drained her of life.

More fool you…

“Bright soul meat,” said the soulgorger. “Rich feast!”

“Too bad you’ll never know,” said Elise.

The soulgorger laughed, a growling, wet sound. “You will be a husk in my wake.”

Elise wagged an admonishing finger. “Have you heard the saying that the man with his head in the clouds never sees the scorpion at his feet? No? Well, I always felt it would be better if you swapped out a scorpion for a spider…”

It stared at her in confusion, then reached down to lift her to its terrible maw.

The clawed hand paused before it could touch her.

The soulgorger turned to see the broken hourglass had been lifted from the floor on a taut length of silk, drawn upward by scores of spiderlings. Sick light still wept from the many cracks in the glass, but with every passing second, it dimmed as hundreds of tiny spiders spun their webs across them like weavers at a loom.

“Thank you, little ones,” said Elise, feeling the soulgorger’s power weaken, its sudden fear driving away all thoughts of feasting.

“Now, Nyam!” she cried. “Strike!”

The thief lifted his head, and with the last of his strength drove his sword into the soulgorger’s belly.

The creature loosed a deafening howl, the sound shaking the walls with its fury. The few panes left in the windows exploded, raining glittering daggers of glass to the floor.

“I won’t go back!” it roared.

“Hush, it’ll be over soon,” said Elise.

The soulgorger reached for her with ghostly talons, but the door of its prison was already slamming shut. Its form stretched, twisting in the air as it was pulled back inside the hourglass, along with its enslaved host. Streamers of cold light spiraled around the specter as the other spirits shrieked in terror, knowing they would bear the full brunt of its imprisoned rage. Books and scrolls spun in a whirlwind as the soulgorger fought the inevitable, but it was no use.

As the last crack in the hourglass was sealed with silken webs, the final bar of its prison was set back in place.

The creature’s roar was abruptly stilled, and an empty silence filled the library. Elise let out a shuddering breath.

Nyam’s sword fell from his hand as he sank to his haunches. His chest heaved in shallow gasps, his eyes wide at their unexpected survival.

Elise stepped over the fallen books to where the hourglass still spun on the web, feeling the terrible hunger within—the horror of the trapped spirits, and the ferocious power pressing at the glass. The pressure on the webs was immense, and her spiderlings’ work wouldn’t hold for much longer.

“I’m going to need a stronger vessel than this,” said Elise.

The caverns beneath the towers were cold, pleasingly hung with cobwebs, their walls glistening with moisture. Elise didn’t like going this far beneath the earth, but darkness was the hallmark of the pale woman she was here to meet, and so had to be endured.

As always, their rendezvous was in secret, their communications made by mystic signs and sigils that led Elise through the labyrinthine pathways.

Given the nature of her business, she wasn’t surprised by the woman’s caution.

The Grand General of Noxus was a vengeful and capricious man, whose schemes within schemes were all but impenetrable. Much better to err on the side of secrecy, and believe he had eyes and ears everywhere.

“You have it?” said a voice from the shadows.

Not one of Elise’s many predatory senses had caught so much as a whisper of the woman’s arrival, but she tried not to show any surprise.

“I do,” she said, holding out a silken bag before her.

Pale hands reached from the darkness to take it, the skin almost transparent, with hair-fine blue veins squirming like worms just below the surface.

“The usual payment will be delivered to your manse,” said the woman, her tones old and refined, an accent from a different age. “They will be young and dashing—foolish and devoted, just as you like them.”

Elise felt the now familiar mix of hungry anticipation and self-loathing, but pushed it aside; introspection was not something she relished.

“Excellent,” she said. “I could use a blush of youth again.”

“You are as lovely now as you ever were,” said the woman, reaching into the silken bag and removing the soulgorger’s glowing prison.

A freshly bleached skull, sealed tight with hardened webs of Elise’s own creation.

Perfect in every way, save for the cleft in the bone of its upper jaw.