LoL Universe Indexing and Search

Snow falls all morning, blanketing the earth in fresh coats of white. One by one, feathery flakes trickle from the sky, gently at first, and then rapidly in unison. Soon, the howling blizzard muffles all sounds save for a peculiar racket coming from a nearby cave, where a shock of orange and blue bounces up and down, left to right.

Gnar bustles about, annoyed at the world. He has been drawing in the snow under the shelter of rock and stone, but nothing appears the way he imagines. Gripping a bone boomerang almost the size of his torso, the young yordle curses at the ground.

“Shubbanuffa!” says Gnar. This means one of two things. Either he believes the snow is being uncooperative, or he wants some sweetmilk. No one can say for certain.

With a jump and a skip, Gnar tumbles from one unfinished sketch to another, each depicting similar scenes. There they are, bands of carefree yordles living happily among the tribes of the frigid north. Sometimes, wild beasts stand a head above his kin. Other times, Gnar himself towers over everyone else. These little differences do not faze him. Instead, his wide eyes fixate on his boomerang, his paw guiding it to trace out a grand shape with long, sweeping strokes.

“Onna legga,” Gnar mutters to himself. This means he wishes not to be distracted. In the past, others have confused this with “Oga lagga,” meaning he would very much enjoy a hug.

Placing the boomerang in his mouth to free up his paws, Gnar leans downward. His claws pick away bothersome specks of dirt. His nose sniffs the ground, searching for any stray pests daring to deface his work. Pleased with the results, Gnar somersaults back to take a wider look.

The powdery snow paints the picture of a one-eyed monster with tentacles the size of mountains.

“Wabbo!” Gnar cheers, as his boomerang drops from his jaw. The monster is the right amount of scary—just as he imagined. With one arm, it slices through an entire herd of elnük. With another, it holds a whole bundle of elkyr, like sticks.

“Ganaloo mo,” Gnar grumbles. Upon further inspection, it appears his elnük look too much like elkyr. This will not do. As he moves to touch up his piece, he stops. His large ears perk, their violet insides twitching with vigilance.

Footsteps approach in fours from outside his cave. Perhaps it is the monster, and perhaps it has come to express its discontent with how it is being portrayed.

Grasping his boomerang, Gnar stands upright on his two hind legs. “Nakotak!” he declares, ready to face his rival once more. In truth, he is thrilled. Ever since he woke up from that long nap, he has wondered where the monster took his friends. Finally, he is about to get some answers.

But what trespasses into his cave sees with not one eye, but two.

And rather than tentacles, it has legs, stout and stocky. Coarse fur covers its entire body, forming a frosted mane to crown its head and back. Its scarred face appears worn and bitter, marked by two ivory tusks and a stiff, pudgy snout.

This is a strange-looking creature, Gnar thinks to himself.

As the giant drüvask boar lumbers inside, it sees only the comfort of stone overhead. Its sighs are deep, its breath strands of mist fogging the chill air. The beast’s hooves shake the ground beneath, stirring up snow like splashes of milk. After a few heavy steps, all of Gnar’s art is ruined.

“Raag! Wap!”

Gnar’s boomerang strikes the boar right between its eyes. The dazed beast shakes its head, blinking hastily as it lets out an angered growl. Gnar pants in a frenzy, wielding his prized weapon up high, enough for the boar to identify its source of pain.

Like thunder and lightning, the cave booms twice with roars of rage.

Tumbling out come the boar and a positively enormous yordle. Grown to a size larger than even his foe, Gnar pummels the intruder with his now massive, fisted hands. His wrath fuels every punch, jabbing blow after blow into the boar’s thick hide.

The fight seems to end as quickly as it began, until the savage beast somehow wrangles its hooves under Gnar’s chest to kick him away. The colossal yordle collapses next to his cave, bundles of snow rising as he lands. With his spiny back exposed, his head woozy, Gnar hears repeated huffs and puffs, and the clatter of those same bullish hooves scraping faster and faster on the wintry soil.

The blizzard wails, louder than before, as though the Freljord is bracing itself for the coming loss of one of its own.

“GNAR!” the hulking yordle bellows, leaping away from the boar’s charge. In a flash, he slams his bulky arms against the beast’s behind, sending it forward to crash into the rocky wall of the cave’s entrance.

A stunted screech pierces the wind. Frozen rocks crumble onto the boar, now lying still.

Gnar trudges toward the beast, his breath short and rushed. He nudges its limp body with his foot. There is no resistance.

He decides it has fallen asleep, but remains perplexed why its eyes are open. Curiously, the snow around the boar turns a deep red. All of this seems quite odd, and yet, it is not the first time this has piqued Gnar’s interest.

His memory flickers with similar images. Before the long nap, he would see different tribes yelling gibberish as they threw pointed sticks at one another. Their game looked at once exciting and exhausting, and Gnar would watch them until enough of one side fell asleep on red snow. They must have been awfully tired, just like this strange, tusked yordle.

Thinking of those bygone days makes Gnar quiet. He remembers waking up from the long nap, believing the world took away everything he ever knew. His breath slows, his shoulders slump, his feet shrinking until even he would not believe that he stands in his very own footprints from mere seconds ago.

The small yordle dashes into his cave to retrieve his boomerang, hugging it with all his might. It is the one thing that did not leave him after the long nap.

For a moment, Gnar glances at the boar. It rests out in the elements without a whisper. Setting his boomerang lightly on the ground, he skitters back into the storm.

The blizzard surges on. Gnar is not bothered, but maybe, the slumbering beast is. With his tiny paws, he gathers all the snow he can, and carefully places it atop the boar.

It is sleeping after all, and it will need a blanket.

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

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

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

Zoe chose the sixth option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The jungle does not forgive blindness. Every broken branch tells a story.

I've hunted every creature this jungle has to offer. I was certain there were no challenges left here, but now there is something new. Each track is the size of a tusklord; its claws like scimitars. It could rend a man in half. Finally, worthy prey.

As I stalk my prize through the jungle, I begin to see the damage this thing has wrought. I step into a misshapen circle of splintered trees. These giant wooden sentinels have stood over this land for countless ages, their iron-like hides untouched by the flimsy axes of anyone foolish enough to attempt to cut them down. This thing brushed them aside like they were twigs.

How can a creature with this level of strength disappear so easily? And yet, even though it has left this unmistakable trail of destruction, I have been unable to lay my eye upon it. How can it appear like a hurricane then fade into the jungle like the morning mist?

I thrill in anticipation of finally standing before this creature. It will make a tremendous trophy.

Passing through the clearing, I follow the sound of a stream to get my bearings once more. There I see a small shock of orange fur, crouching, waiting. I spy on it from a distance. A tiny fish splashes out of the stream and the creature scrambles for it, diving gleefully into the rushing water. To my joy, I realize it's a yordle. And a hunter, at that!

This is a good omen. The beast will be found. Nothing will escape me.

The yordle's large ears perk up and face toward me. He runs on all fours with a bone boomerang in hand, quickly stopping in front of me. He babbles.

I nod in appreciation at the young yordle and venture onward. I traverse the difficult terrain with ease, trying to pick up any sign of my quarry. As I try to pick up his scent, a distraction. I'm startled by strange chittering. The yordle followed me. I cannot allow him to disrupt my hunt. I face him and point into the distance. He looks at me quizzically. I need to be more insistent, good omen or no.

I rear back and let out a roar, the wind whipping the yordle's fur and the ground rumbling beneath us. After a few short seconds, he turns his head and, with what I think could be a smile, he holds up his small boomerang. There can be no further delay. I snatch the weapon out of his hand and expertly throw it into a tree, impaling it high amongst the branches. He turns and scrambles for it, jumping frantically.

I barely get ten paces when a roar shakes me to my very spine. The deafening crack of stone and wood echoes all around. Ahead, a giant tree crashes across my path. The bone weapon of the yordle juts out from its trunk.

An unearthly growl rises behind me.

I've made a terrible mistake.

My, that’s quite the haul ye have, there! Won at the tables, was it? Well, here’s to your very good health. Cheers.

Oh, no, I’ll not be rollin’ the dice with ye. Not a gamblin’ man no more, or so I tells me self. There were a time, though... What happened? The River King happened, that’s what. Aye, Two-Coats, that old devil Tahm Kench. He’s what happened.

I was bilge-poor, beg your pardon, and livin’ in a flophouse. Had nothin’ to me name, not ‘til a single gold Krakenaye, this one ‘erecome into my possession. I could tell you how, but you’d call me a liar, heh.

So, with this one coin, what I oughta done was pay me debts, and find a new crew to join. I was a harpooner, see. Shoulda put aside whatever was left for the future. Been responsible, like. Harpoonin’s a harsh life, even for a younger man.

But that’s when the River King found me. “Why work someone else’s ship,” he says, “slavin’ away, riskin’ your life for next t’ nothin’, when ye might ‘ave a ship o’ your own?” I just had to think bigger, like. O’ course, one Kraken won’t buy a ship, but ‘e had an answer to that, didn’t he.

Dice. One good throw o’ the bones, an’ I’d ‘ave enough to start me own little operation. Others could do the danger work, while I sits back, nice and plum, enjoyin’ the profits. An’ after a few more drinks, you understand, that crooked devil’s advice starts to make a lot o’ sense to my ears. So, blinded by greed and possibility, I went along wi’ it.

That night were a blur. I awoke well after noon the next day, me head fairly poundin’! Had no idea where I wassome fancy bawdy-house, as it turns outbut on the dresser were me previous night’s winnings... more than enough to purchase me self a ship! Ah, but the River King, ‘e’d given me a taste for somethin’ more. Why should young Lars content his self with a single ship, when he could ‘ave a fleet? Just needed to chance me hand a few more times...

That’s Bilgewater. There’s riches to be had, if you’re willin’ to risk everything, over and over.

With old Two-Coat’s arm around me, I was led from the dice tables to other halls of avaricefrom backroom card games to gamblin’ and bettin’ parlors, high and low. I spent a fortune, lost a fortune, then made it all back again. Around and around in that allurin’ spiral I went. I was feelin’ the hunger, the yearning, and it was pullin’ me down like a whirlpool.

Years passed, an’ somewhere along the way, I’m ashamed to say I forgot what I was doing all this for. I forgot who I was. I had it all, but it never were enough. I wanted more.

And then I started losin’ big. That made me double-down, go for broke, all-or-nothin’, looking for the big stakes to put me back on top. Pretty soon, I was in a worse state than I’d been to start with. Sleepin’ in the gutter, catching rats to eat if I were lucky. I begged, borrowed and stole from everyone who’d ever shown me any kindness. Lost all me mates, chasing the dream.

‘E feeds on misery, see, does Tahm Kench. As old as sin, ‘e is, and older than Bilgewater by far. Been ‘round from the start of things, gorgin’ his self on the desperation what comes with the greed and sorrow in men’s hearts. I mean, I’d done it to me self, but it were him what give me the means. Ye might say, ‘e took me to the cliff’s edge, but I were the numpty what threw me self off, beg your pardon, and that old glutton revelled in me despair.

Came to me once more, ‘e did, when I was at me very lowest, drinkin’ from puddles, havin’ sold me own leg to be used for chum. In the darkest night, whisperin’ an’ cajolin’, ‘e pressed this gold Kraken back into me hand, with a knowin’ wink.

‘Twere the same one I’d ‘ad back at the start! It were this damn coin what started me on that wretched path! Eh, ‘e opened his mouth up wide, and says, “It’s not too late, Lars. Never too late. Come with me, an’ we’ll find you a fortune again...”

Even after everythin’, I was tempted. ‘Course I was! But no. I resistedMother Serpent knows how. Two-Coats only laughed. Said he’d be there when I changed me mind.

And, sure enough, the temptation’s still there, now, every day.

So here I am. Friendless. Broke. All the best years of me life behind me, wasted in those lost decades. Can’t remember most of it, neither, so I’ve no idea if I even enjoyed me self.

Anyways. Enough o’ my ramblin’. There’s a lesson to be learned, ‘erekeep your purse strings tight, and never, ever make a deal wi’ the River King. Ye’ve always got more to lose...

The Butcher Blades had hung the Jackdaw from a rusted marlinspike through his jawbone and left him for the quayside scavengers. This was the seventeenth murdered ganger the hooded man had seen tonight.

A slow night by Bilgewater's standards.

At least since the Corsair King had fallen.

Red-fanged wharf rats had already eaten most of the hanged man's feet and were perched on stacked kreels to tear at the soft meat of his calves.

The hooded man kept on walking.

“Help. Me.”

The words were wet, squeezed up through a throat clogged with blood. The hooded man spun, hands reaching towards the weapons slung on his wide belt.

Incredibly, the Jackdaw was still alive on the bone-handled spike. The Hooks stuck it deep into the wooden frame of a loading crane. No way to get the Jackdaw down without tearing his skull to splinters.

“Help. Me,” he said again.

The hooded man paused, considering the Jackdaw's request.

“What for?” he said at last. “Even if I get you down from there, you will be dead by morning.”

The Jackdaw carefully lifted his hand to a concealed pocket in his patchwork jerkin and removed a golden Kraken. Even in the dim light, the hooded man saw it was genuine.

The scavengers hissed and raised their hackles as he approached. Wharf rats weren't large, but meat as warm as this wasn't a prize to be surrendered lightly. They bared long, needle-like fangs, spitting diseased gobbets of saliva.

He kicked one rat out over the water. He crushed a second underfoot. They snapped and bit, but nimble footwork kept any from tasting his flesh, his every movement smooth and precise. He killed another three before the rest scattered to the shadows, sullen eyes glaring red in the darkness.

The hooded man stood beside the Jackdaw. His features were hidden, but the light of a rogue’s moon suggested a face that no longer smiled.

“Death is here for you,” he said. “Embrace it, safe in the knowledge I will ensure it is final.”

He reached into his coat and withdrew a glittering spike of silver. Two handspans long and engraved with curling symbols spiraling along its length, it resembled an ornate, leather-worker's awl. He placed the tip under the dying man's chin.

The man's eyes widened and his hand scrabbled at the hooded man's sleeve as he looked out over the vast expanse of ocean. The sea was a black mirror shimmering with the glow of myriad candles, quayside braziers and lamplight warped through salvaged glass from a thousand cliffside-hulks.

“You know what lurks over the horizon,” he said. “You know the horror it brings. And yet you tear at each other like rabid beasts. It makes no sense to me.”

He turned and hammered the heel of his palm against the flattened haft of the awl, driving the spike up into the man's brain. A last corpse rattle and the Jackdaw's pain ended. The gold coin fell from the dead man's fingers and rolled into the ocean with a soft splash.

The man withdrew the spike and wiped it clean on the Jackdaw's ragged shirt. He returned it to the sheath inside his coat and removed a golden needle and a length of silver thread dipped in waters drawn from an Ionian spring.

Working with the skill of one who had performed this service many times before, he sewed the man's eyes and lips shut. As he worked, he spoke words taught to him a lifetime ago, words first ill-spoken by a long dead king.

“Now the dead cannot claim you,” he said as he finished his work and replaced his implements.

“Maybe not, but we ain't leaving empty-handed, sure we ain't,” said a voice behind the hooded man.

He turned and pulled back his hood to reveal skin the color and texture of aged mahogany, cheekbones that were angular and patrician. His dark hair was bound in a long scalp-lock and eyes that had seen horror beyond measure surveyed the newcomers.

Six men. Dressed in aprons of blood-stiffened leather cut to display limbs of corded muscle wrapped with tattooed thorns. Each carried a serrated hook and wore belts hung with a variety of meat-workers’ knives. Petty thugs made bold by the fall of the tyrant who'd ruled Bilgewater with an iron fist. With him gone, the city was in chaos as rival gangs sought to carve out fresh territories.

Their approach hadn’t been stealthy. Hobnailed boots, offal-stench and muttered curses had announced their presence long before they'd revealed themselves.

“I don't mind a coin going to the Bearded Lady, sure I don't,” said the biggest of the Butchers, a man with a gut so prodigious it was a wonder he could get close enough to a carcass to gut it at all. “But one of ours killed Old Knock John there, fair and square, sure they did. So that gold serpent there was ours.”

“Do you want to die here?” asked the man.

The fat man laughed.

“You know who you're talking to?”

“No. Do you?”

“Go on then, tell me so I can carve it on the rock I'll use to sink your bones.”

“My name is Lucian,” he said, whipping back his long frock coat and drawing a pair of pistols wrought of knapped stone and burnished metals unknown to even the most reckless alchemists of Zaun. A bolt of coruscating light punched the fat Butcher from his feet with a scorched hole where his grotesquely swollen heart had been.

Lucian's second pistol was smaller, more finely crafted, and fired a searing line of yellow fire that cut another of the Butchers in half from collarbone to groin.

Like the wharf rats before, they fled, but Lucian picked them off one by one. Each burst of light was a killing shot. In the blink of an eye all six Butchers lay dead.

He sheathed his pistols and pulled the coat back around him. Others would be drawn by the sound and fury of his work, and he had no time to save these men’s souls from what was coming.

Lucian sighed. It had been a mistake to stop for the Jackdaw, but perhaps the man he had once been was not entirely lost. A memory threatened to surface and he shook his head.

“I cannot be him again,” said Lucian.

He isn't strong enough to kill the Chain Warden.

Olaf’s frostscale hauberk was covered in blood and viscera. He grunted as he swung his axe one-handed. Bone sheared and muscle parted before the weapon, its blade quenched on a bed of True Ice deep in the farthest reaches of the Freljord.

Bearing a spitting torch in one hand, he waded through the dripping innards of the Krakenwyrm, hewing deeper with every swing. It had taken him three hours to reach this far; cleaving through its enormous glistening organs and dense bones.

True, the beast was already dead, skewered a week ago after a month’s long chase down from the north. Over thirty harpoons cast by strong arms and broad backs from the deck of Winter's Kiss pierced its scaled hide, but it had been Olaf's spear that finally ended its fight.

Killing the beast in the heart of a churning storm outside Bilgewater had been exhilarating, and for one brief moment – as the ship heeled over and almost tossed him into the beast's maw – he'd thought this might be the moment he would achieve the glorious death he sought.

But then Svarfell the helmsman, curse his mighty shoulder, centered the rudder to right the ship.

And, sadly, Olaf had lived. Another day closer to the terror of dying peacefully in his bed as a greybearded ancient.

They'd berthed in Bilgewater, hoping to sell the carcass and strip it of battle trophies; vast teeth, black blood that burned like oil, and titanic rib-bones fit to roof his mother’s hall.

His fellow tribesmen, exhausted from the hunt, were sleeping aboard Winter's Kiss, but Olaf, ever impatient, could not rest. Instead, he took up his glittering axe and set to work in dismembering the colossal monster.

Finally he saw the beast’s inner maw, a ribbed gullet large enough to swallow a clan whole or crush a thirty-oar Longreaver in a single bite. Its teeth were chiseled fangs like obsidian boulders.

Olaf nodded. “Yah. Fit to ring a hearth circle of the wind-walkers and the readers of bones and ash.”

He jammed the spiked base of the torch into the meat of the Krakenwyrm’s flesh and set to work, hacking at the jawbone until a tooth came loose. Hooking the axe to his belt, Olaf lifted it clear and set it upon his shoulder, grunting at the enormous weight.

“Like a Frost Troll gathering ice for his lair,” he said, making his way out of the beast’s innards, wading knee-deep in blood and caustic digestive juices.

Eventually he emerged from the giant wound in the Krakenwyrm’s rear and drew in a lungful of slightly fresher air. Even after the innards of the beast, Bilgewater was a rank soup of smoke and sweat and dead things. Its air was heavy with the smell of too many people living packed together like swine in a midden.

He spat a rank mouthful and said, “The sooner I am in the north the better.”

The air of the Freljord was so sharp it could cut you to the bone. Every breath here tasted of rancid milk and spoiled meat.

“Hey!” shouted a voice over the water.

Olaf squinted through the gloom, seeing a lone fisherman rowing out to sea beyond a line of floating water markers hung with dead birds and bells.

“That beast just shit you out?” shouted the fisherman.

Olaf nodded and said, “I had no gold to pay passage on a ship, so I let it swallow me in the Freljord and bear me south.”

The fisherman grinned and drank from a cracked bottle of blue glass. “I’d sit and listen to that tall tale, right enough!”

“Come to the Winter’s Kiss and ask for Olaf,” he shouted. “We’ll share a keg of Gravöl and honor the beast with songs of doom.”

The air around the White Wharf usually smelled of gull-crap and rotten fish. Today it tasted of scorched meat and woodsmoke, a flavor with which Miss Fortune was coming to associate with ever more of Gangplank’s men dying. Ash darkened the sky and reeking fumes drifted westwards from burning vats of rendered leviathan blubber on the Slaughter Docks. Miss Fortune's mouth felt greasy, and she spat onto the crooked timbers of the wharf. The water below was scummed with residue expelled by the thousands of corpses sunk beneath the water over the years.

“You and your men had a busy night,” she said, nodding toward the smoke rising from the western cliffs.

“Aye, that we did,” agreed Rafen. “Plenty more of Gangplank’s men going under today.”

“How many did you get?” asked Miss Fortune.

“Another ten of his Cragside lads,” said Rafen. “And the Boneyard Scallys won’t be bothering us again.”

Miss Fortune nodded in approval and turned to look at the ornate bronze cannon laid on the quayside.

Jackknife Byrne lay inside the barrel, finally dead from the gutshot he'd taken on the day everything changed; the day the Dead Pool exploded in full view of Bilgewater.

A gunshot meant for her.

Now it was time for Byrne to go down among the dead men and she owed it to him to be there to see him go under. Around two hundred men and women had come to pay their respects; her own lieutenants, Byrne's old gang members, and strangers she thought might be former crewmen or curious gawkers hoping to see the woman who'd brought down Gangplank.

Byrne said he'd once run his own ship, a two-masted brigantine that was the terror of the Noxian coast, but she only had his word for that. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't, but in Bilgewater, more often than not the truth was far stranger than any tale spun by the city’s many chanty-men.

“I see you got them fighting each other out on the Slaughter Docks as well,” said Miss Fortune, brushing particles of ash from her lapels. Long red hair spilled from beneath a tricorn hat and gathered on the shoulders of her formal frock coat.

“Yeah, wasn’t hard to turn the Rat Town Dogs and Wharf Kings against each other,” said Rafen. “Ven Gallar's always had his eye on that patch. Says Travyn's boys took it from his old man a decade ago.”

“That true?”

“Who knows?” said Rafen. “Don’t matter, no-how. Gallar would say anything to get control of that part of the docks. I just helped him along.”

“Not much left to control over there now.”

“No,” agreed Rafen with a grin. “They pretty much killed the hell out of each other. Don't reckon we'll get trouble from either of them gangs any time soon.”

“Another week like this and there won't be any of Gangplank’s people left alive.”

Rafen gave her a strange look and Miss Fortune pretended not to notice.

“Come on, let's get Byrne sunk,” said Miss Fortune.

They walked over to the cannon, ready to roll it into the sea. A forest of wooden markers dotted the scummed surface of the water, ranging from simple wooden discs to elaborate sculptures of sea wyrms.

“Anyone want to say anything?” said Miss Fortune.

Nobody did, and she nodded to Rafen, but before they could tip the cannon into the water, a booming voice echoed over the wharf.

“I bring words for him.”

Miss Fortune turned to see a giant of a woman clad in colorful robes and acres of fabric striding down the docks towards them. A posse of tattooed menfolk accompanied her; a dozen youths armed with tooth-bladed spears, wide-mouthed pistols and hooked clubs. They swaggered like the cocksure gangers they were, standing with their priestess like they owned the docks.

“Seven hells, what's she doing here?”

“Did Illaoi know Byrne?”

“No. She knows me,” said Miss Fortune. “I heard that her and Gangplank used to...you know?”

“Really?”

“So the scuttlebutt goes.”

“By the Bearded Lady, no wonder Okao's men have been giving us such a hard time these last few weeks.”

Illaoi carried a heavy stone sphere that looked as if it weighed about as much as the Syren's anchor. The towering priestess carried it everywhere she went, and Miss Fortune assumed it was some kind of totem. What everyone else called the Bearded Lady, they called something virtually unpronounceable.

Illaoi produced a peeled mango from somewhere and took a bite. She noisily chewed the fruit with her mouth open and looked down the barrel of the cannon.

“A Bilgewater man deserves a blessing of Nagakabouros, yes?”

“Why not?” said Miss Fortune. “He's going down to meet the goddess, after all.”

“Nagakabouros doesn't live in the depths,” said Illaoi. “Only foolish paylangi think that. Nagakabouros is in everything we do that moves us along our path.”

“Yeah, how stupid of me,” said Miss Fortune.

Illaoi spat the fibrous mango pit into the water and swung the stone idol around like a giant cannonball, holding it up in front of Miss Fortune.

“You're not stupid, Sarah,” said Illaoi with a laugh. “But you don't even know what you are, what you've done.”

“Why are you really here, Illaoi? Is this about him?”

“Ha! Not even a little bit,” snorted Illaoi. “My life is for Nagakabouros. A god or a man? What choice is that?”

“None at all,” said Miss Fortune. “Bad luck for Gangplank.”

Illaoi grinned, exposing a mouthful of pulped mango.

“You're not wrong,” she said with a slow nod, “but you still don't hear. You let a razor-eel off the hook and you ought to stamp on its neck and walk away before it sinks its fangs into you. Then your motion will be gone forever.”

“What does that mean?”

“Come and see me when you figure it out,” said Illaoi, holding out her hand. Nestled in her palm was a pendant of pink coral arranged in a series of curves radiating from a central hub like a single, unblinking eye.

“Take it,” said Illaoi.

“What is it?”

“A token of Nagakabouros to guide you when you’re lost.”

“What is it really?”

“Nothing more than I say.”

Miss Fortune hesitated, but too many people were gathered for her to openly offend a priestess of the Bearded Lady by refusing her gift. She took the pendant and removed her tricorn to loop the leather thong around her neck.

Illaoi leaned in to whisper.

“I don’t think you're stupid,” she said. “Prove me right.”

“Why do I care what you think?” said Miss Fortune.

“Because a storm is coming,” said Illaoi, nodding at something over Miss Fortune's shoulder. “You know the one, so you best be ready to turn your prow into the waves.”

She turned and kicked Byrne's cannon from the dock. It splashed down hard and sank in a froth of bubbles before the fatty surface residue reformed, leaving only its bobbing marker cross to indicate who was below.

The priestess of the Bearded Lady marched back the way she had come, towards her temple in the cliff-crater, and Miss Fortune turned her gaze out to sea.

A storm was brewing way out in the deep ocean, but that wasn't where Illaoi had been looking.

She'd been looking towards the Shadow Isles.

Nobody ever fished Bilgewater Bay at night.

Piet knew why, of course; he’d known these waters all his life. The currents were treacherous, hull-splitting rocks lurked just below the surface, and the seabed was littered with the wrecks of ships whose captains had not accorded the sea its proper respect. But, more importantly, everyone knew the spirits of those drowned at sea were lonely and wanted others to join them.

Piet knew all this, but still needed to feed his family.

With Captain Jerimiad’s ship burned to cinders in the crossfire between Gangplank and Miss Fortune, Piet had no work and no coin to pay for food.

He’d drunk half a bottle of Scuttler’s Scrumpy just to pluck up the courage to push his boat out onto the water tonight, and the prospect of sharing a drink with the giant Freljordian helped steady his nerves.

Piet took another slug from the bottle, tugging the scruff of hair on his chin, then pouring a measure over the side to honor the Bearded Lady.

Warmed and numbed by the liquor, Piet rowed past the warning buoys and their dead birds until he came to a stretch of ocean where he’d had some luck the previous night. Jeremiad always said he had a nose for where the fish were biting, and he had a feeling they’d be gathering where the remains of the Dead Pool had drifted.

Piet pulled in the oars and stowed them before finishing off the Scrumpy. Then, making sure to leave a last mouthful in the bottle, he tossed it out to sea. With tired, drink-addled fingers he baited his hooks with grubs he’d scooped from a dead man’s eye and tied his lines to the gunwale cleats.

He closed his eyes and bent over the side of the boat, placing both hands in the water.

“Nagakabouros,” he said, hoping that using the natives’ name for the Bearded Lady might grant him a bit of luck, “I ain’t asking for much. Please help this poor fisherman and spare him a few morsels from your larder. Watch over me and keep me safe. And if I die in your embrace, keep me down among the dead men.”

Piet opened his eyes.

A pale face stared back at him, wavering just below the surface. It shimmered with cold, lifeless light.

He cried out and jerked back into his boat as, one by one, his fishing lines were pulled taut. They spun his boat around as thin coils of mist rose from the water. The mist thickened swiftly and soon the light from Bilgewater’s cliffs was lost to the darkness as coal-dark fog rolled in from the sea.

A cacophony of once-dead birds squawked from the warning markers, followed by the clamor of bells as their convulsing bodies swung the buoys back and forth.

The black mist...

Piet scrambled for his oars, fumbling in terror to fit them to the rowlocks. The mist was numbingly cold, and lines of necrotic black threaded his skin at its touch. He wept as the grave’s chill frosted his spine.

“Bearded Lady, Mother Below, Nagakabouros,” he sobbed. “Please guide me home. Please, this I beg of-”

Piet never finished his plea.

A pair of hook-headed chains erupted from his chest, droplets of vividly red blood streaming from their tips. A third hook punched through his belly, another his throat. A fifth and sixth gouged his palms and pulled them down hard, pinning Piet to his boat.

Agony surged through him and he screamed as a figure of purest malice emerged from the black mist. Emerald fire haloed its horned skull, and sockets gouged by vengeful spirits burned as they savored his pain.

The dead spirit was robed in ancient black vestments, and rusted keys scraped at its side. A chained corpse-lantern moaned and swayed with monstrous appetite from its clenched fist.

The glass of the infernal lantern opened to receive him, and Piet felt his spirit tear loose from the warmth of his flesh. The wails of tortured souls shrieked from its depths, maddened by their unending purgatory. Piet fought to keep his spirit within his body, but a spectral blade scythed and his time in the world was ended as the glass of the lantern snapped shut.

“A wretched soul you are,” said the reaper of his life, its voice like gravel on a tombstone. “But only the first to be claimed by Thresh this night.”

The black mist rippled, and the silhouettes of malefic spirits, howling wraiths and ghostly horsemen swelled within.

The darkness boiled across the sea and swept onto land.

And the lights in Bilgewater started to go out.

Miss Fortune snapped the barrels of her pistols shut and laid them down on the table next to her short-bladed sword. Scores of frantic bells and shouts of alarm echoed from the panicked city below; she knew well what they signified.

The Harrowing.

In defiance of the incoming storm, she’d kept the shuttered windows of her newly-acquired villa open, daring the dead to come for her. Muttering winds carried their hunger and a cold that settled bone-deep.

Perched high on Bilgewater’s eastern cliffs, the villa had once belonged to a hated gang leader. In the chaos of Gangplank’s fall, he’d been dragged from his bed and had his brains bashed out on the cobbles.

Now it belonged to Miss Fortune, and she’d be damned if she’d go the same way. She reached up and ran a fingertip around the curves of the pendant Illaoi had given her at Byrne’s sinking. The coral was warm to the touch, and though she didn’t truly believe in what it represented, it was a pretty enough bauble.

The door to her chamber opened and she let the pendant drop.

She knew who was behind her without turning. Only one man would dare enter without knocking.

“What are you doing?” asked Rafen.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Like you’re about to do something damned stupid.”

“Stupid?” said Miss Fortune, placing her hands on the table. “We shed blood and lost good people to bring down Gangplank. I’m not going to let the Harrowing just-”

“Just what?”

“Take this place from me,” she snapped lifting her pistols and jamming them into their custom tooled hip-scabbards. “And you’re not going to stop me.”

“We’re not here to stop you.”

Miss Fortune turned to see Rafen at the threshold of her chambers. A score of her best fighters waited in the vestibule beyond, armed to the teeth with a mixture of muskets, wheel-lock pistols, clanking bundles of clay splinter-bombs and cutlasses that looked like they’d been looted from a museum.

“Looks like you’re about to do something damned stupid as well,” she said.

“Aye,” agreed Rafen, walking over to the open window and slamming the shutters closed. “You really think we’d let our captain go out to face that alone?”

“I almost died bringing Gangplank down, and I’m not done yet. I don’t expect you to go with me, not tonight,” said Miss Fortune coming to stand before her men and resting her hands on the carved walnut grips of her guns. “This isn’t your fight.”

“Course it bloody is,” said Rafen.

Miss Fortune took a breath and nodded.

“There’s every chance we won’t live to see morning,” she said, unable to keep the hint of a smile tugging at her lip.

“This ain’t our first Harrowing together, Captain,” said Rafen, tapping the skull pommel of his sword. “And I’ll be damned if it’s our last.”

Olaf was in sight of the Winter’s Kiss when he heard the screams. He ignored them at first – screams were nothing new in Bilgewater – but then he saw men and women running from the quayside in terror, and his interest was piqued.

They scrambled from their boats and fled for the crooked streets as fast as they could. They didn’t look back and they didn’t stop, not even when a shipmate tripped or fell into the water.

Olaf had seen men run from battle, but this was something else. This was naked terror, the kind he’d only ever seen etched on the frozen corpses spat out by glaciers where the Ice Witch was said to dwell.

Shutters were slamming shut all across the wharf and the strange symbols he’d seen on every door were frantically being dusted with white powder. Enormous winches were lifting timber structures formed from bolted-together hulls of ships high up the cliffs.

He recognized a tavern-keeper who ran a drinking den where the beer was only slightly stronger than troll piss and waved to him.

“What’s going on?” shouted Olaf.

The tavern-keeper shook his head and pointed to the ocean before slamming his door. Olaf set the Krakenwyrm’s tooth on the stone wharf and turned to see what all the fuss was about.

At first he thought a storm was coming in, but it was just thick black sea fog, albeit fog that approached with unnatural speed and fluid motion.

“Ah, now,” he said, unhooking his axe from his belt. “This looks promising.”

The feel of the weapon’s battle-worn leather grip was pleasing in his callused palm as he passed it from hand to hand, rolling his shoulders to loosen the muscles.

The black mist swept over the farthest ships and Olaf’s eyes widened as he saw spirits plucked from the blackest nightmares writhing in the mist. A towering dreadknight, a monstrous chimera of warhorse and man, led them alongside a black-clad reaper limned in green fire. These lords of the dead left the spirit host to their sport on the quayside as they flew into Bilgewater proper with predatory speed.

Olaf had heard the natives speak in hushed whispers of something called the Harrowing, a time of doom and darkness, but hadn’t expected to be lucky enough to face it axe in hand.

The host of the dead tore into the wallowing galleys, merchantmen, and corsair ships with claw and fang, ripping them apart like an ursine with its snout in a fresh kill. Sailcloth tore and rigging lines snapped as easily as rotten sinew. Heavy masts splintered as boats were tossed into one another and smashed to kindling.

A host of screaming wraiths flew into the Winter’s Kiss and Olaf roared in anger as the Longreaver’s keel heaved and split, its timbers freezing solid in a heartbeat. The boat sank as swiftly as if its hold were filled with rocks, and Olaf saw his fellow Freljordians dragged below the water by creatures with cadaverous limbs and fish-hooked mouths.

“Olaf will make you wish you had stayed dead!” he yelled as he charged along the wharf.

Spirits boiled up from the ocean, icy claws slashing towards him. Olaf’s axe sang out, cleaving a glittering arc through the host. The dead screeched as his blade sundered them, its True Ice edge more lethal than any enchantment.

They howled as they died a second time and Olaf sang the song he’d written for the moment of his death with lusty vigor. The words were simple, but the equal of any saga told by the wandering poets of the ice. How long had he waited to sing these words? How often had he feared he might never get the chance?

A shimmering mist of snapping jaws swarmed him, specters and things of mist. Webs of frost patterned his hauberk and the deathly touch of voracious spirits burned his skin.

But Olaf’s heart was mighty and it fired his blood to heights of fury unknown to all but the berserker. He shrugged off the pain of the wraith touch, feeling reason recede and fury build.

Crimson froth built at the corners of his mouth as he bit the inside of his cheeks raw. He roared and swung his axe like a madman, caring nothing for pain, only that he slew his enemies.

That they were dead already meant nothing to him.

Olaf drew his axe back, ready to strike another blow, when a deafening crash of splintering columns and roof beams erupted behind him. He spun to face this new foe as a blizzard of smashed wood and stone cascaded onto the quayside. Bladed shards sliced his face and fist-sized chunks of stone pummeled his arms raw. Rendered fats and animal fluids fell in a rank drizzle as a horrendous groaning issued from the black mist.

Then he saw it.

The spirit of the Krakenwyrm arose from the remains of the Slaughter Dock. Titanic and filled with fury, its ghostly tentacles lifted into the air and smashed down like thunderbolts hurled by a wrathful god. An entire street was smashed to ruin in the blink of an eye and Olaf’s berserker fury surged as he finally beheld a foe worthy of claiming his life.

Olaf raised his axe in salute of his killer.

“Ya beauty!” he yelled and charged to his doom.

The woman was beautiful, with wide, almond shaped eyes, full lips and the high cheekbones common to Demacia. The portrait in the locket was a miniature masterpiece, but it failed to capture the depth of Senna’s strength and determination.

He rarely looked at her picture, knowing that to carry his grief too close to his heart made him weak. Grief was a chink in his armor. Lucian could not allow himself to truly feel her loss, so he snapped the locket shut. He knew he should bury it in the sand of this cave beneath the cliffs, but could not put her memory below the earth as he had her body.

He would shut the grief away until Thresh was destroyed and Senna’s death avenged.

Then, and only then, would Lucian mourn his lost wife with tears and offerings to the Veiled Lady.

How long had it been since that terrible night?

He felt the bottomless abyss of sorrow lurking in ambush and viciously suppressed it as he had so many times before. He drew on the teachings of his order, repeating the mantras he and Senna had been taught to close themselves off from emotion. Only then could he reach a place of equilibrium that would allow him to face deathly horrors beyond imagining.

The grief ebbed slowly, but it remained.

He’d opened the locket only reluctantly, feeling a growing distance between himself and Senna’s memory. He found he could no longer recall the exact sweep of her jawline, the smoothness of her skin or the precise color of her eyes.

The longer his hunt went on, the further away she felt.

Lucian lifted his head, letting the breath ease from his lungs, forcing his heartbeat to slow.

The walls of the cave were pale limestone, gouged from the cliffs upon which Bilgewater was built. The motion of water and the stone picks of the natives had crafted a labyrinth beneath the city few knew of or even suspected existed. The pale rock walls were etched with looping spirals, rippling waves and things that might have been unblinking eyes.

He’d learned these were symbols of the native religion, but whoever had carved them had not visited this place in many years. He’d found it by following the secret symbols of his own order, symbols that would guide him to places of refuge and succor in any city of Valoran.

Only dim reflections of light shimmered on the roof of the cave, but as his eyes followed the spiral of carvings, a shimmering radiance spread from his palm.

Let me be your shield.

Lucian looked down, the memory of her words as clear as though she stood next to him.

The locket glistened with lambent green flame.

He looped the chain of the locket around his neck and swept up his twin relic pistols.

“Thresh,” he whispered.

Bilgewater’s streets were deserted. The bells from the ocean were still ringing and cries of terror echoed from below. Rat Town was completely covered by the Black Mist, and howling storms raged over Port Mourn’s desolation. Fires burned all along Butcher’s Bridge and a shimmering fog clung to the cliffs above the Grey Harbor.

The people in the upper reaches of the city hid in their homes and prayed to the Bearded Lady that the Harrowing would pass them by, that grief would fall upon some other poor unfortunate.

Warding candles of ambergris burned in every window, shimmering through bottle green sea-glass. Burning roots of Empress of the Dark Forest hung from doors, shutters and nailed up planks.

“People really believe in the Empress?” asked Miss Fortune.

Rafen shrugged, his mouth a thin line and the creases around his eyes pulled tight as he searched the gathering mist for threats. He pulled out a smoldering length of identical root from beneath his shirt.

“It’s all about where you place your faith, isn’t it?”

Miss Fortune drew her pistols.

“I have faith in these and in us,” she said. “What else are you carrying?”

“This cutlass has kept me safe through six Harrowings,” he said, tapping its pommel again. “I offered up a bottle of ten year old rum to the Bearded Lady and this knife here was sold to me by a man who swore its edge was purest sunsteel.”

Miss Fortune glanced at the scabbarded knife, certain without even seeing the blade that Rafen had been swindled. The workmanship around the quillons was too poor to be Demacian, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.

“What about you?” he asked.

Miss Fortune patted her pouch of pistol shot.

“Every one’s been dipped in Myron’s Dark,” she said, loud enough for every one of her thirty-strong company to hear. “If the dead want a fight, we’ll meet them with spirits of our own.”

The oppressive gloom made it hard to laugh, but she saw a few smiles and that was about as much as she could expect on a night like this.

She turned and pushed down into Bilgewater, descending crooked stairs cut into the rock of the cliffs, crossing secret bridges of half-rotted rope and threading forgotten alleys that hadn’t known the tread of feet in years.

She brought them out into a wide square on one of the floating wharf-shanties, where swaying dwellings leaned together as though their twisted eaves whispered to one another. Every façade was a mishmash of driftwood, and patterns of frost clung to the skewed timbers. Frozen winds blew through the patchwork dwellings, freighted with sobs and screams from afar. Flaming braziers hung from hundreds of mast-lines strung between buildings, smoking with strange herbs. Pools of water rippled with reflections of things that weren’t there.

Most days this was a thriving marketplace, packed to the gunwales with stalls, rattling meat-vendors, drink-hawkers, merchants, pirates, bounty hunters and surly flotsam washed in from every corner of the world. Just about everywhere in Bilgewater had a view of this place, which was just how Miss Fortune wanted it.

Mist clung to every outcropping of timber.

Discarded figureheads wept frozen tears.

Mist and shadows gathered.

“Cutpurse Square?” said Rafen. “How did we get here? I ran this place as a wharf-snipe. Thought I knew every way in and out like any good little thief.”

“Not every way,” said Miss Fortune.

The counting houses on either side were silent and dark, and she resisted the impulse to look through the torn sheets of flapping canvas nailed over porthole windows.

“How do you know these routes and I don’t?”

“Lady Bilgewater and I are two of a kind,” said Miss Fortune, her gaze narrowing as black mist seeped into the square. “She whispers her secrets to me like an old friend, so I know her every hidden wynd and jitty like you never will.”

Rafen grunted as they spread into the empty square.

“What next?”

“We wait,” said Miss Fortune as they reached the center of the square, feeling terribly exposed.

The black mist twitched with things moving in its depths.

A disembodied skull of ghostly light stretched from the darkness, empty-eyed and with sharpened teeth. Its jaw stretched wider than any natural bone structure would allow and a keening wail built in its gullet.

Miss Fortune’s bullets punched through each of its eye-sockets and the skull vanished with a shriek of frustration. She twisted the wheel-lock on each pistol and ingenious mechanisms within reloaded each one.

For a moment, all was silent.

Then the black mist erupted in a screeching howl as the spirits of the dead surged into the square.

For the second time this evening, Olaf cut his way inside the dead Krakenwyrm. He wielded his axe like a crazed woodsman, hewing left and right with gleeful abandon. The beast’s vast limbs were insubstantial as mist, yet the ice of his blade clove them like flesh.

Tentacles flailed and slammed down on the stone of the wharf, but Olaf was fast for a big man. Slow warriors didn’t survive in the Freljord. He rolled and slashed with his axe, severing a suckered length of limb that faded from existence as it was parted from the monster’s body.

Even in the grip of the red shroud, Olaf saw the creature’s skull in the thrashing chaos of phantom limbs surrounding him.

Its eyes were afire with the enraged spirit of its life.

A moment of sublime connection passed between them.

The beast’s soul knew him.

Olaf laughed with joy.

“You see the taker of your life and we are now bonded in death!” he roared. “Mayhap if you kill me, we shall battle forever in the realms beyond mortal ken.”

The prospect of eternal war against so mighty a foe poured fresh strength into Olaf’s aching muscles. He charged towards the creature’s maw, caring nothing for his pain as each brush with the Krakenwyrm’s tentacles burned his skin worse than the splinter-winds of the Lokfar coast.

He leapt into the air, axe aloft.

He looked glorious death in the face.

A tentacle whipped out and lashed around his thigh.

It swung him around in a dizzying arc, lifting him high into the air.

“Come then!” bellowed Olaf, punching his axe skyward in salute of their shared destiny. “Unto death!”

A wraith-creature with grasping talons and a mouth of icy fangs lunged from the swirling mass of spirits. Miss Fortune put a bullet through its face and it vanished like smoke in a gale.

A second shot and another spirit vanished.

She grinned through her fear as she spun into cover behind a weather-worn stone bollard of the River King to reload. On impulse, she leaned over and gave his toothy grin a kiss.

It’s all about where you place your faith.

Gods, bullets or her own skill?

The grin fell from her face as one of the pistols jammed with a grinding crunch of metal. Her mother’s admonishing words arose from the dark recesses of memory.

“That’s what you get when someone else mixes your powder, Sarah,” she said, holstering the gun and sliding her sword from its sheath. She’d looted it from the captain of a Demacian galiot running north up the Shuriman rust-coast, and it was as fine an example of the artificer’s art as any she’d seen.

Miss Fortune spun from cover, firing her loaded pistol and slashing her sword through the mist creatures. Her shot plucked another specter from the air and her sword’s edge bit as if cutting flesh and bone. Did the spirits of the dead have a physical component to them that could be hurt? It seemed unlikely, but she was wounding something inside them.

She didn’t have time to think too hard on the matter and suspected that whatever power she’d tapped into would be undone if she did.

Men and women screamed as the howling storm of dead spirits filled Cutpurse Square, slashing with claws that froze their blood or reached into chests and sundered hearts with terror. Seven were dead, maybe more, their souls wrenched from their fallen corpses to turn on their comrades. Her heroic band fought with blades and muskets, shouting the name of the Bearded Lady, their loved ones, and even heathen gods of faraway lands.

Whatever works, thought Miss Fortune.

Rafen was down on one knee, his face ashen, breathing like a wharfside doxy after a long shift. Scraps of mist clung to him like cobwebs and the smoldering root around his neck burned with a fierce cherry red glow.

“On your feet, this fight isn’t done!” she said.

“Don’t tell me the fight’s not done,” he snapped, pushing himself to his feet. “I’ve been through more Harrowings than you could wrap a dead rat’s tail around.”

Before Miss Fortune could ask exactly what that meant, he leaned to the side and fired his pistol at something behind her. A conjoined spirit of wolf and bat screeched as it was banished, and Miss Fortune returned the favor as a spirit form of grasping hooks and snapping fangs lunged at her second in command.

“Everyone down!” shouted Miss Fortune, plucking a pair of splinter bombs from her belt and lobbing them into the howling mist.

They detonated in a deafening explosion of fire and smoke. Wood splinters and fragments of stone ricocheted. Broken glass fell in a glittering rain of daggers. Acrid fog filled the square, but it was man-made and entirely bereft of spirits.

Rafen shook his head and worked a finger in his ear.

“What was in that bomb?”

“Black Powder mixed with essence of copal and rue,” said Miss Fortune. “One from my special stash.”

“And stuff like that works against the dead?”

“My mother believed in it,” she said.

“Good enough for me,” said Rafen. “You know, we might just make it through-”

“Don’t say it,” warned Miss Fortune.

The mist began coalescing throughout the square, first in thin tendrils and wisps, then in glowing outlines of monsters; things with conjoined legs, fang-filled jaws, and arms that ended in hooks or pincers. The spirits they thought they’d killed.

Reforming, returning.

What was it folk said about plans and the contents of a privy?

“Turns out the dead are pretty hard to kill,” said Miss Fortune, trying not to let her fear show.

She’d been naïve to think petty trinkets and blind faith were enough to face the spirits of the dead. She’d wanted to show the people of Bilgewater they didn’t need Gangplank, that they could forge their own destiny.

Instead, she was going to get herself killed and leave the city to be torn apart.

A bass rumble rolled through the square. Then another.

Percussive thunder strikes, rising in a stalking storm.

It grew to become pounding hammerblows upon an anvil. Faster and louder until the ground shook with its violence.

“What in the nine deeps is that?” said Rafen.

“I don’t know,” said Miss Fortune as the outline of a spectral horseman in midnight plate emerged from the mist. He sat atop a strangely proportioned warhorse and his helm was worked in the form of a snarling demon.

“A dread knight,” said Miss Fortune.

Rafen shook his head, his face drained of color.

“That’s no knight,” he said. “That’s the Shadow of War…”

Paralyzing terror rippled through Miss Fortune’s company at the mention of this eternal nightmare of killing rage and endless fury.

The Shadow of War.

His name was once Hecarim, but no one knew if that were true or some ancient taleteller’s invention. Only fools dared recite his dark legend around the hearthfire, and even then only after enough rum to sink a Noxian war-barque.

As the Shadow of War emerged further from the mist, Miss Fortune saw he was no mere horseman. Cold dread settled upon her like a shroud at the sight of the monstrous creature.

Perhaps Hecarim had once been a knight, man and horse separate entities. But rider and mount were now one, a single, towering behemoth whose only purpose was destruction.

“They’re all around us,” said a voice.

Miss Fortune risked looking away from the armored centaur to see a whole host of ghostly knights, their outlines lambent with pellucid green radiance. They leveled lances or drew swords of dark radiance. Hecarim swept out a hooked and terrible glaive, its killing edge erupting with green fire.

“You know any secret ways out of here?” asked Rafen.

“No,” said Miss Fortune. “I want to fight that bastard.”

“You want to fight the Shadow of War?”

Before Miss Fortune could answer, a hooded figure leapt from the rooftop of a grain store and dropped into the square. He landed gracefully, a storm coat of worn leather splayed behind him. He carried two pistols, but they were like no weapons Miss Fortune had ever seen on her mother’s gun-table; bronzed metalwork braced around hunks of what looked like carved stone.

Light filled the square as he loosed searing bolts from each pistol in a fusillade that put the destruction of the Dead Pool to shame. The man turned in a tight spiral, marking targets and picking them off with whip-fast motion. The mist burned where his bolts struck, and the ghostly wraiths screeched as they were consumed.

The mist withdrew from Cutpurse Square, taking Hecarim and the death knights with it. Something told Miss Fortune this was but a temporary respite.

The man holstered his pistols and turned to look at Miss Fortune, throwing back his hood to reveal darkly handsome features with haunted eyes.

“The thing about shadows,” he said. “Bring enough light and they disappear.”

Olaf was not happy with this doom.

He hoped men would speak of his epic battle with the Krakenwyrm, not this ignoble fall to his death.

He hoped someone might have seen him charge the sea beast.

He prayed at least one observer had seen him lifted high into the air by its ghostly tentacle, then fled before seeing him hurled away like an unworthy morsel.

Olaf crashed down through the roof of a building bolted to the side of the cliff. Maybe it was a ship’s hull? He fell too fast to make it out. Crashing timbers and earthenware tumbled with him in his headlong plunge through the building. He glimpsed astonished, shouting faces flash past him.

Olaf smashed through a floor. A support beam drove the wind from him as he tumbled down Bilgewater’s cliffs. He bounced from an outcrop of rock and went headfirst through an open window, crashing out again through yet another floor.

Angry curses followed him down.

He spun out into a trailing forest of ropes and pulleys, flags and pennants. He thrashed as he fell, tangling his limbs and weapon. Fate was mocking him, wrapping him in a folded shroud of canvas sailcloth.

“Not like this, damn it!” he roared. “Not like this!”

“Who are you and where can I get a pair of guns like those?” said Miss Fortune, offering her hand to the new arrival.

“My name is Lucian,” he said, warily taking her hand.

“Damn glad to know you, friend,” said Rafen, clapping him on the back as if they were old shipmates. Miss Fortune saw Rafen’s familiarity made Lucian acutely uncomfortable, like he’d forgotten how to be around others.

His eyes scanned the edges of the square, his fingers dancing on the grips of his pistols.

“You’re a welcome sight, Lucian,” said Miss Fortune.

“We should move.” he said. “The Shadow of War will return.”

“He’s right,” said Rafen, giving her an imploring look. “It’s time to get inside, batten down the hatches.”

“No. We came out to fight.”

“Look, I get it, Sarah. We won Bilgewater and you need to fight to hold onto it, to show everyone you’re better than Gangplank. Well, you’ve done that. We went out into the Black Mist and we fought the dead. That’s more than he ever did. Anyone who risks lookin’ out a window is gonna know that. Hell, even the ones who ain’t looking will hear about it. What more do you want?”

“To fight for Bilgewater.”

“There’s fighting for Bilgewater and then there’s dying for Bilgewater,” said Rafen. “I’m all up for the first, not so much the second. These men and women followed you down into hell, but now it’s time to climb back out.”

Miss Fortune faced her company of fighters, every ragged, cutthroat one of them. None of them could be trusted not to sell their own mothers for a shiny trinket, but they’d done everything and more she’d asked of them. Venturing out into the Black Mist was just about the bravest thing any of them had ever done and she couldn’t repay that by leading them to their deaths for the sake of her vengeance.

“You’re right,” she said, taking a breath. “We’re done here.”

“Then may fortune follow you,” said Lucian, turning away and drawing his strange pistols once again.

“Wait,” said Miss Fortune. “Come with us.”

Lucian shook his head. “No, there is a mist wraith I need to destroy. The one they call Thresh, the Chain Warden. I owe him a death.”

Miss Fortune saw the lines around Lucian’s eyes deepen and recognized the expression she’d worn ever since her mother’s murder.

“He took someone from you, didn’t he?” she said.

Lucian nodded slowly, and said no more, but his very silence spoke volumes.

“This clearly isn’t your first tussle with the dead,” she said, “but you won’t survive the night if you stay out here alone. I’m guessing that might not mean much to you, but whoever this Thresh took from you, they wouldn’t want you to die here.”

Lucian’s eyes flicked downwards, and Miss Fortune saw a silver locket just visible round his neck. Was it her imagination or a trick of the mist that made it shimmer in the moonlight?

“Come with us,” said Miss Fortune. “Find somewhere safe till morning and you’ll live to do it again.”

“Safe? Where is safe in this city?” said Lucian.

“I think I might know a place,” said Miss Fortune.

They left Cutpurse Square and were traveling west up towards the Serpent Bridge when they found the Freljordian. He hung from a crooked spar like a shrouded corpse on a gibbet. Unlike most corpses, however, this one was thrashing like a landed fish.

A splintered pile of debris lay scattered all around him, and Miss Fortune looked up to see how far he’d fallen through the cliffside dwellings.

A long way was the answer, and that he was still alive was nothing short of a miracle.

Lucian leveled his pistols, but she shook her head.

“No, this one’s actually on the right side of the grave.”

Muffled cries came from within the shroud, curses that would get a man beaten to death in a host of different lands, shouted in a thick, Freljordian accent.

She placed the tip of her sword against the canvas and sliced downwards. Like a newborn sea-calf pulled from a ruptured birth-sac, a hugely bearded man spilled onto the cobbles. The reek of fish guts and offal clung to him.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet, brandishing an axe with a blade like a shard of diamond ice.

“Which way to the Slaughter Docks?” he said, weaving like a drunk. He looked around, confused, his head a mass of lumps and bruises.

“Ordinarily I’d tell you to follow your nose,” said Miss Fortune, “but I’d be amazed if you’ve any sense of smell left.”

“I’ll kill that Krakenwyrm ten times over if I have to,” said the man. “I owe it a death.”

“Lot of that going around tonight,” said Miss Fortune.

The Freljordian named himself Olaf, a warrior of the rightful mistress of the ice, and, after shaking off his concussion, declared his intention to join them until he could fight the most dangerous spirit within the Black Mist.

“Do you want to die?” Lucian asked him.

“Of course,” said Olaf, as though the very question was the height of foolishness. “I seek an ending worthy of legend.”

Miss Fortune left the madman to his dreams of death. So long as he swung that axe in the right direction, he was welcome to join them as they pushed onwards.

Three times the mist closed in on them, and each time it took an unlucky soul from their company. Spiteful laughter echoed from the sides of buildings, the sound of a whetstone over rusted steel. Ranks of carrion birds cawed from rooftops in anticipation of a flesh banquet by the light of the moon. Welcoming lights danced in the darkness of the mist, like beguiling corpse-candles over sucking marshland.

“Don’t look at them,” warned Lucian.

His warning came too late for one man and his wife. Miss Fortune didn’t know their names, but knew they had lost a son to ocean-ague less than a year ago. They walked from the cliffs following a vision in the lights only they could see.

Another man took his hooked hand to his throat before his friends could stop him. Another simply vanished into the mist without anyone seeing him go.

By the time they reached Serpent Bridge, their company numbered less than a dozen. Miss Fortune couldn’t feel sorry for them, she’d told them not to come with her. If they’d wanted to live forever, they should be shuttered behind closed doors and protective carvings, clutching spiral talismans of the Bearded Lady and praying to whatever gave them solace.

But against the Harrowing, even that was no guarantee of safety.

They’d passed countless homes smashed open with splintered shutters and doors hanging limply from leather hinges. Miss Fortune kept her eyes fixed forward, but it was impossible not to feel the accusing gazes from the frozen faces within or sense the terror of their last moments.

“The Black Mist will have its due,” said Rafen as they passed yet another charnel house, the families within cold and dead.

She wanted to be angry at such acceptance of horror, but what good would that do? After all, he was right.

Instead, she focused on the hazed outline of the structure across the bridge. It sat in the center of a gouged crater in the cliff, as if some mighty sea creature had taken a vast bite from the rock. Like most places in Bilgewater it was constructed from the ocean’s leavings. Its walls were driftwood and branches from faraway lands, its windows the scavenged remains of ships swept up from the seabed. It had a peculiar quality of possessing not a single straight line anywhere in its construction. The curious angles gave it a sense of being somehow in motion, as if it might one day choose another place to set down temporary roots.

Its spire was likewise crooked, fluted like the horn of a narwhal and topped with the same spiral symbol Miss Fortune wore around her neck. A shimmering light wreathed the icon, and where it shone the darkness was held in abeyance.

“What is that place?” asked Lucian.

“The Temple of the Bearded Lady,” she said. “The House of Nagakabouros.”

“Is it safe?”

“It’s better than staying out here.”

Lucian nodded and they set off across the winding length of the bridge. Like the temple it approached, the bridge was an uneven thing, its cobbles undulant like something alive.

Rafen paused at the crumbling parapet and looked down.

“Getting higher every year,” he said.

Reluctantly, Miss Fortune joined him and looked over the edge.

The docks and Rat Town were smothered beneath the Black Mist, and even the web of gun’dolas was barely visible. Bilgewater was choking in the grip of the mist, its tendrils seeping ever deeper into the city. Screams of terror drifted upwards, each one a life ended and a fresh soul for the legion of the dead.

Rafen shrugged. “A few years from now there won’t be anywhere in Bilgewater beyond its reach.”

“A lot can happen in a few years,” said Miss Fortune.

“This happens every year?” asked Olaf, one foot perched on the parapet with a reckless disregard for the dizzying drop.

Miss Fortune nodded.

“Excellent,” said the Freljordian. “If I am fated not to die this night, I will return here when the Black Mist rises again.”

“It’s your funeral,” replied Rafen.

“Thank you,” said Olaf, slapping an enormous palm on Rafen’s back, almost knocking him from the bridge. The Freljordian’s eyes widened as a host of ghostly tentacles rose from the mist, uncoiling to smash down on the dwellings of Rat Town.

“The beast!” he cried.

And before anyone could stop him, he vaulted onto the parapet and hurled himself from the edge.

“Mad bastard,” said Rafen as Olaf’s dwindling form vanished into the mist below.

“All the ice-dwellers are mad,” said Miss Fortune. “But he was madder than most I’ve met.”

“Get everyone inside,” said Lucian.

She heard the urgency in his voice and turned to see him facing a towering figure in stitched black robes hung with hooked chains. Sickly green light wreathed the specter as it lifted a swaying lantern in one pallid hand. Fear touched Miss Fortune, fear like nothing she’d known since she’d watched her mother die and stared down the barrel of the killer’s gun.

Lucian drew his pistols. “Thresh is mine.”

“He’s all yours,” she said, and turned away.

Her gaze was drawn upwards as shadows closed around the temple. The breath caught in her throat as she saw Hecarim and his death knights at the crater’s ridge.

The Shadow of War raised his fiery glaive and the ghostly horsemen urged their hell-steeds downward. No mortal rider could make that descent, but these were riders of death.

“Run!” shouted Miss Fortune.

The end of the bridge thickened with noxious green light. The Chain Warden hid his corpse features beneath a rotted hood, but the light of his lantern hinted at the remains of ravaged flesh, gaunt and drained of all emotion, save sadistic relish.

He moved softly, like all his kind. Pained moans sighed from his robes as he moved. Thresh lifted his head a fraction, and Lucian saw the glint of too-sharp teeth widen in a grin of anticipation.

“Mortal,” said Thresh, rolling the word around his mouth like a sweetmeat.

Lucian knelt, reciting the mantra of clarity to steel his soul for the battle to come. He had prepared for this moment a thousand times, and now that it was here, his mouth was dry, his palms slick with sweat.

“You murdered Senna,” he said, standing and lifting his head. “The only person I had left in the world.”

“Senna...?” said Thresh, the sound wet and gurgling, as though squeezed from a throat once crushed by a hangman’s noose.

“My wife,” said Lucian, knowing he should not speak, that every word was a weapon the wraith would turn against him. Tears blurred his vision as grief washed away every preparation and every shred of logic. He lifted the silver locket from around his neck and snapped it open, needing the wraith to understand the depth of all he had lost.

Thresh grinned, his needle teeth glinting as he tapped the glass of the lantern with a yellowed nail.

“I remember her,” he said. “A vital soul. Not yet barren and cold. Ripe for torment. Hope for a new life. It bloomed in her, you know. Fresh, new, like a spring flower. All too easy to pluck and ruin those with dreams.”

Lucian lifted his pistols.

“If you remember her, then you will remember these,” he said.

The toothed grin never faltered beneath the ragged cowl.

“The weapons of light,” he said.

“And light is ever the bane of darkness,” said Lucian, channeling every scrap of hatred into his relic pistols.

“Wait,” said Thresh, but Lucian was done waiting.

He loosed a pair of blinding shots.

A conflagration of purifying fire engulfed the Chain Warden and his howls were music to Lucian’s ears.

Then the howls changed to gurgling laughter.

A nimbus of dark light faded around Thresh, drawn back into his lantern and leaving him utterly untouched by the fire.

Lucian fired again, a storm of radiant bolts, each perfectly aimed, but every one wasted. Each shot dissipated harmlessly against a shimmering haze of dark energy from the lantern.

“Yes, I remember those weapons,” said the wraith. “I tore their secrets from her mind.”

Lucian froze.

“What did you just say?”

Thresh laughed, a wheezing, consumptive rasp.

“You don’t know? After all the reborn order learned of me, you never once suspected?”

Lucian felt cold dread settle in his belly. A horror he had never acknowledged for fear he would go insane.

“She did not die,” continued Thresh, holding up his lantern.

Lucian saw tortured spirits twisting in its depths.

Thresh grinned. “I ripped her soul out and kept it.”

“No...” said Lucian. “I saw her die.”

“She screams still inside my lantern,” said Thresh, drifting closer with every choked-out word. “Her every moment of existence is sweet agony. Listen...can you hear her?”

“No,” sobbed Lucian, his relic pistols falling to the stones of the bridge.

Thresh circled him, chains snaking from his leather belt and slithering over Lucian’s body. The hooks cut into his storm coat, seeking the soft flesh beneath.

“Hope was her weakness. Love her undoing.”

Lucian looked up into Thresh’s ravaged features.

His eyes were voids, dark holes into emptiness.

Whatever Thresh had been in life, nothing now remained. No compassion, no mercy and no humanity.

“All is death and suffering, mortal,” said the Chain Warden, reaching for Lucian’s neck. “No matter where you run, your only true legacy is death. But before then, there is me.”

The breath hammered in Miss Fortune’s throat as she ran for the temple. Her lungs fought to draw breath, and her veins felt sluggish with ice. Coils of enervating mist reached up to the rock of the temple, drawn by the presence of the two lords of the unliving. Brilliant flashes of light flared behind her, but she didn’t look back. She heard the thunder of hoof beats on rock, seeing sparks above them in the darkness.

She imagined the breath of ghostly steeds on her neck.

The space between her shoulder blades burned hot where she expected the stabbing thrust of a spectral lance.

Wait, how can they make sparks when they’re ghosts?

The absurdity of the thought made her laugh, and she was still laughing as she slammed into the warped timber doors of the temple. Rafen and her ragged band were already there, hammering fists and palms against the door.

“In the name of the Bearded Lady, let us in!” he yelled.

He looked up as Miss Fortune joined him.

“The doors are shut,” he said.

“I noticed,” she gasped, wrenching the pendant Illaoi had given her. She placed her palm flat on door, with the coral pressed hard against the wood.

“Illaoi!” she shouted. “I’m ready to stamp on that damn eel’s neck. Now open the bloody door!”

“Eel?” said Rafen. “What eel? What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” she snapped, battering her palm bloody against the wood. “I think it was a metaphor.”

The door swung outwards as if it had been unbarred the whole time. Miss Fortune stepped back to allow her fighters inside first, and finally turned around.

Hecarim reared up and swung his fiery glaive for her skull.

A hand grasped her collar and hauled her backward. The tip of the weapon sliced an inch from her throat.

She fell hard on her backside.

Illaoi stood in the doorway, holding her stone idol out before her like a shield. White mist clung to it like corposant.

“The dead are not welcome here,” she said.

Rafen and the others hauled the door shut and dropped a heavy spar of seasoned oak into place on the rusted anchors to either side. A huge impact slammed into the door.

Wood split and splinters flew.

Illaoi turned and walked past Miss Fortune, still sprawled on a mosaic floor of seashells and clay fragments.

“You took your sweet time, girl,” she said as Miss Fortune climbed to her feet. The temple was filled with at least two hundred people, maybe more. She saw a wide cross section of Bilgewater’s denizens: its native population, pirates, traders and assorted sea-scum, together with travellers unlucky or unwise enough to seek a berth so close to the Harrowing.

“Is that door going to hold?” she asked.

“It will or it won’t,” said Illaoi, heading towards a many-tentacled statue at the centre of the temple. Miss Fortune tried to make sense of it, but gave up when her eye kept getting lost in the many spirals and looping curves.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have,” said Illaoi, setting her idol in a concave depression in the statue. She began moving in a circle around the statue, beating a rhythmic pattern on her thighs and chest with her fists. The people in the temple joined her circling, beating palms against bare skin, stamping their feet and speaking in a language she didn’t understand.

“What are they doing?”

“Giving some motion back to the world,” said Illaoi. “But we will need time.”

“You’ll have it,” promised Miss Fortune.

Lucian felt the spectral hooks bite deep into his flesh, colder than northern ice and twice as painful. The Chain Warden’s hand closed on his throat and his skin burned at the wraith’s touch. He felt his strength drawn from him, the beat of his heart slow.

Thresh lifted him from the ground and held his lantern aloft, ready to receive his soul. The moaning lights within swirled in agitation, ghostly faces and hands pressing against the glass from within.

“Long I have sought your soul, shadow hunter,” said Thresh. “But only now is it ripe for the taking.”

Lucian’s vision greyed at the edges, feeling his soul peel away from his bones. He fought to hold on, but the Chain Warden had been harvesting souls for countless lifetimes and knew his craft better than any.

“Struggle harder,” said Thresh with monstrous appetite. “Your soul burns brighter when you fight.”

Lucian tried to speak, but no words came out, just a soft stream of warm breath that carried his soul.

A glittering scythe floated in the air above Lucian, a murder-soaked reaper of souls. Its blade shivered with anticipation.

Lucian...

That voice. Her voice.

My love...

The murder-edge of Thresh’s blade turned, angled to better part soul from flesh.

Lucian drew back his breath as he saw a face resolve in the glass of the lantern. One among countless thousands, but one with more reason than any to push herself to the fore.

Full lips, wide, almond shaped eyes, imploring him to live.

“Senna...” gasped Lucian.

Let me be your shield.

He knew what she meant in a heartbeat.

The link between them was as strong as it had been when they hunted the creatures of shadow side by side.

With the last of his strength, Lucian reached up and snapped the locket from around his neck. The chain glittered silver in the moonlight.

The Chain Warden saw something was amiss and hissed in anger.

Lucian was faster.

He spun the chain like a slingshot, but instead of loosing a lead bullet, he lashed it around the arm holding the lantern. Before Thresh could shake it off, Lucian drew the silver awl from its sheath in his long coat and plunged it into the specter’s wrist.

The Chain Warden screeched in pain, a sensation he had likely not felt in millennia. He dropped Lucian and thrashed in agony as the myriad souls trapped in his lantern suddenly found a means to strike back at their tormentor.

Lucian felt his soul snap back into his body and drew in heaving gulps of air, like a drowning man breaking the surface.

Hurry, my love. He is too strong...

His sight returned, clearer than ever before. Lucian snatched his pistols from the ground. He caught the briefest glimpse of Senna’s face in the lantern and etched it on his heart.

Never again would her face grow dim in his memories.

“Thresh,” he said, aiming his twin pistols.

The Chain Warden looked up, the voids of his eyes alight with outrage at the defiance of his captive souls. He held Lucian’s gaze and extended his lantern, but the rebellious souls had dispelled whatever protection it once offered.

Lucian fired a blistering series of perfect shots.

They burned through the Chain Warden’s ghostly robes and ignited his spirit form in a searing inferno of light. Lucian marched towards Thresh, his twin weapons blazing.

Shrieking in agony, the Chain Warden retreated from Lucian’s unending barrage, his wraithform now powerless to resist these weapons of ancient power.

“Death is here for you,” said Lucian. “Embrace it, safe in the knowledge I will ensure it is final.”

Thresh gave one last howl before leaping from the bridge, falling like a burning comet to the city below.

Lucian watched him fall until the Black Mist swallowed him.

He slumped to his knees.

“Thank you, my love,” said Lucian. “My light.”

The temple walls shook with the violence of the assault. Black mist oozed between ill-fitting planks and through cracks in the scavenged glass of the windows. The door shuddered in its frame. Grasping claws of mist tore at the wood. Screams echoed as a howling gale battered the mismatched timbers of the roof.

“Over there!” shouted Miss Fortune as a host of mist-creatures with burning red eyes poured through a broken section of wall that had once been a series of tea-chests from Ionia.

She leapt into the midst of the wraiths. It felt like jumping naked into an ice hole cut in a glacier. Even the lightest touch of the dead leeched warmth and life.

The coral pendant burned hot against her skin.

She slashed her looted sword through the creatures and felt the same bite she’d felt before. Her bullets might be useless against the dead, but this Demacian blade hurt them. They fell back from her, screeching and hissing.

Could the dead know fear?

It seemed they could, for they fled the sword’s glittering edge. She didn’t let them go, stabbing and slashing the mist wherever it poured in.

“That’s it! Run!” she yelled.

A child screamed and Miss Fortune sprinted over as the mist reached to claim him. She dived and snatched the boy in her arms before rolling to safety. Chill claws plunged into her back, and Miss Fortune gasped as numbing cold spread through her limbs.

She stabbed behind her and something dead howled.

A woman sheltering behind an overturned pew reached for the boy and Miss Fortune let him squirm to safety. She pushed herself to her feet, weakness spreading through her body like a raging infection.

Everywhere was gunfire and clashing steel, deathly howls and screams of terror.

“Sarah!” shouted Rafen.

She looked up to see the oaken locking bar securing the door split along its length. Rafen and a dozen men had their backs braced against the bludgeoning assault, but the doors were bulging inwards. Cracks spread and grasping hands of mist reached inside. A man was snatched backwards and his piteous screams were abruptly cut off as he vanished into the mist.

Another had his arm ripped off as he reached to help him.

Rafen spun and rammed his dagger through the gap.

Clawed hands tore the useless weapon from his hand.

A howling body pushed itself in through the disintegrating door and plunged its hands into Rafen’s chest. Her second in command roared in pain, his face draining of color.

She staggered over to him, her strength all but gone. Her blade hacked through spectral arms, and the creature shrieked as it vanished. Rafen fell into her, and they collapsed back into the nave together.

Rafen gasped for breath, his features as slack as hers.

“Don’t you die on me, Rafen!” she wheezed.

“It’ll take more than the dead to kill me,” he grunted. “Bastard thing just winded me.”

Glass broke somewhere up above. Coils of black mist coalesced overhead, a boiling mass of snapping teeth, claws and hungry eyes.

Miss Fortune tried to get to her feet, but her limbs burned with exhaustion. She ground her teeth in frustration. Barely a handful of her company remained, and the people sheltering in here weren’t fighters.

The dead were getting in.

Miss Fortune looked back at Illaoi.

The priestess was surrounded by her people, all of them still circling the statue and performing their fist-thumping, palm-slapping ritual. It didn’t appear to be achieving anything. The strange statue remained unmoving and impotent.

What had she expected, that it would come to life and drive the dead back like some clanking iron golem from Piltover?

“Whatever it is you’re doing, do it faster!” shouted Miss Fortune.

A section of the roof ripped loose and spun off into the tempest surrounding the temple. A swirling column of spirits boiled inside and touched down like a tornado. Wraiths and things that defied understanding spun from the unliving vortex to fall upon the living.

Finally the door gave out and exploded inwards, the timbers dry and rotted by the touch of the dead. The skirling blast of a hunting horn filled the temple, and Miss Fortune’s hands flew to her ears at its deafening echoes.

Hecarim rode into the temple, crushing the men who’d been bracing the door with their bodies. Their souls were drawn up into the Shadow of War’s flaming glaive, and the cold fire of its edge illuminated the temple with loathsome radiance. His death knights rode at his back, and the spirits already within the temple drew back in recognition of Hecarim’s terrible glory.

“I said the dead are not welcome here,” boomed Illaoi.

Miss Fortune looked up to see the priestess towering over her, stout and majestic. Pale light clung to her limbs and sparkled on the stone tablet she held in trembling hands. Veins stood out like hawsers on her neck, and her jawline was taut with effort. Sweat ran in runnels down her face.

Whatever Illaoi was doing was costing her greatly.

“These mortal souls are mine,” said Hecarim, and Miss Fortune felt herself recoil from the iron syllables of his voice.

“They are not,” said Illaoi. “This is the house of Nagakabouros, who stands in opposition to the dead.”

“The dead will have their due,” said Hecarim, lowering his glaive to point at Illaoi’s heart.

The priestess shook her head.

“Not today,” she said. “Not while I still move.”

“You cannot stop me.”

“Deaf as well as dead,” grinned Illaoi as a swelling radiance built behind her. “I didn’t say I was going to stop you.”

Miss Fortune turned and saw the spiraling statue bathed in blinding radiance. White light smoked from its surfaces, and shadows fled from its touch. She shielded her eyes as the light billowed outwards like writhing tentacles and where it met the Black Mist it stripped it bare, exposing the twisted souls within. The sinuous light pulled the dead onwards, purging the baleful magic that cursed them to undeath so very long ago.

She expected screams, but instead the unbound dead wept with joy as their souls were freed to move on. The light spread over the cracked walls of the temple, and as it touched her, Miss Fortune cried out as the deathly numbness in her flesh was banished in a rush of heat and life.

The light of Nagakabouros closed on Hecarim, and Miss Fortune saw his fear at the thought of what transformations it might work upon him.

What could be so awful that it was better to remain cursed?

“You can be free, Hecarim,” said Illaoi, her voice strained to the limits of endurance by what she had unleashed. “You can move on, live in the light as the man you always dreamed of being before his grief and folly remade you.”

Hecarim roared and swept his glaive at Illaoi’s neck.

Miss Fortune’s blade intercepted it in a clashing flare of sparks. She shook her head.

“Get out of my city,” she said.

Hecarim’s blade drew back for another strike, but before the blow could land, the light finally pierced his veil of darkness. He bellowed in pain and fell back from its burning touch. The dark rider’s outline shimmered, like two picture box images wavering in candlelight on the same backcloth.

Miss Fortune caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall rider, armored in silver and gold. A young man, handsome and proud with dark eyes and a future of glory ahead of him.

What happened to him?

Hecarim roared and galloped from the temple.

His death knights and the darkness went with him, a shrieking host of tattered spirits following in their wake.

The light of Nagakabouros spread over Bilgewater like the coming dawn. None who saw it could ever remember so sweet a sight; the first rays of sunlight after a storm, the first hint of warmth after a bitter winter.

The Black Mist withdrew before it, roiling in a churning maelstrom of panicked spirits. The dead turned on one another in a frenzy, some fighting to return from whence they had come as others actively sought out the light’s release.

Silence fell as the Black Mist drew back over the ocean, drawn to the cursed island where it claimed dominion.

True dawn broke over the eastern horizon, and a cleansing wind blew through the city as the people of Bilgewater let out a collective breath.

The Harrowing was over.

Silence filled the temple; the utter lack of sound a stark contrast to the mayhem of moments ago.

“It’s done,” said Miss Fortune.

“Until the next time,” said Illaoi wearily. “The Black Mist’s hunger burns like a sickness.”

“What did you do?”

“What I had to.”

“Whatever it was, I thank you.”

Illaoi shook her head and put a powerful arm around Miss Fortune’s shoulder.

“Thank the goddess,” said Illaoi. “Make an offering. Something big.”

“I will,” said Miss Fortune.

“You better. My god dislikes empty promises.”

The veiled threat rankled, and for a moment she thought of putting a bullet through the priestess’ skull. Before she could do more than inch her hand to her pistols, Illaoi crumpled like a ripped topsail. Miss Fortune grabbed for her, but the priestess was too enormous to hold upright alone.

They went to the seashell floor together.

“Rafen, help me get her up,” she said.

Together they propped Illaoi up against a broken pew, grunting with the effort of shifting her colossal bulk.

“The Bearded Lady rose from the sea...” said Rafen.

“Don’t be stupid all your life,” said Illaoi. “I said Nagakabouros doesn’t live under the sea.”

“So where does she live?” asked Rafen. “In the sky?”

Illaoi shook her head and punched him in the heart. Rafen grunted and winced in pain.

“There is where you find her.”

Illaoi grinned at the obliqueness of her answer and her eyes drifted closed.

“Is she dead?” asked Rafen, rubbing his bruised chest.

Illaoi reached up and slapped him.

Then started snoring like a stevedore with lung-blight.

Lucian sat on the edge of the bridge and watched the city emerge from Black Mist. He’d hated Bilgewater on first sight, but there was a quality of beauty to it as the sunlight bathed its myriad clay-tiled roofs in a warm amber glow.

A city reborn, like it was every time the Harrowing receded.

An apt name for this dread moment, but one that carried only a fraction of the sorrow of its origins. Did anyone here really understand the real tragedy of the Shadow Isles?

And even if they did, would they care?

He turned as he heard footsteps approaching.

“It’s kind of pretty from up here,” said Miss Fortune.

“But only from up here.”

“Yes, it’s a viper’s nest alright,” said Miss Fortune. “There’s good people and bad people, but I’ve been making sure there’s a lot less of the bad.”

“The way I hear it, you started a war,” said Lucian. “Some might say that’s like burning down your house to kill a rat.”

He saw anger touch her, but it passed quickly.

“I thought I was making things better for everyone,” she said, straddling the parapet, “but they’re only getting worse. I need to do something about that, starting now.”

“Is that why you were out in the Black Mist?”

The woman thought for a moment.

“Maybe not at first,” she said. “I let a razor-eel off the hook when I killed Gangplank, and if I don’t take hold of it and get it back on, it’s going to bite a lot of the good people.”

“A razor-eel?”

“What I mean to say is that when I brought the Pirate King down, I had no idea what would happen when he was gone. I didn’t much care,” she said. “But I’ve seen what’s happening down there without someone in control. The city’s tearing its own throat out. Bilgewater needs someone strong at the top. No reason that someone can’t be me. The war’s just starting, and the only way it’ll end quickly is if I win it.”

The silence between them stretched.

“My answer is no.”

“I didn’t ask anything.”

“You’re going to,” said Lucian. “You want me to stay and help you win your war, but I can’t. Your fight isn’t my fight.”

“It could be,” said Miss Fortune. “The pay’s good and you’d get to kill a lot of bad people. And save a lot of innocent souls.”

“There is only one soul I need to save,” said Lucian. “And I won’t save it in Bilgewater.”

Miss Fortune nodded and held out her hand.

“Then I’ll say farewell and good hunting,” she said, standing and dusting her britches. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. Just know that you can lose yourself to revenge.”

Lucian watched her limp back to the sagging ruins of the temple as the survivors within emerged, blinking, into the daylight. She thought she understood what drove him, but she hadn’t the first clue.

Vengeance? He was far beyond vengeance.

His beloved was held in torment by an undying wraith, a creature from ancient days that understood suffering like no other.

Miss Fortune did not understand even a fraction of his pain.

He rose and lifted his gaze out to sea.

The ocean was calm now, an emerald green expanse.

People were already moving down on the docks, repairing ships and rebuilding their homes. Bilgewater never stopped, even in the aftermath of the Harrowing. He scanned the forest of swaying masts, looking for a ship that wasn’t too badly damaged. Perhaps one desperate captain could be persuaded to take him where he needed to go.

“I am coming, my light,” he said. “And I will free you.”

The fisherman grunted as he worked the stern-windlass to haul the big man from the water and onto his boat. The rope was frayed and he sweated in the cold air as he worked the crank.

“By the bristles of her bearded chin, you’re a big bastard, right sure ye are,” he said, snagging the big man’s armor with a gaffing hook and pulling him around over the rolling deck. He kept a wary eye out for predators, above and below the surface.

No sooner had the Black Mist withdrawn over the horizon than scores of boats put out to sea. The waters were awash with plunder, and if you weren’t fast, you ended up with nothing.

He’d spotted the floating man first and had already fought off six sewer-jacks trying to reach him. Damned if wharf-scum like them were going to steal this ocean bounty from him.

The big man had been drifting on a bed of what looked like the remains of a giant Krakenwyrm. Its tentacles were pulped and bloated with noxious gasses, which was all that had kept the big man’s armored form afloat.

He dropped his catch to the deck and laid him out along the gunwale before casting an appraising eye over his body.

A heavy iron hauberk of ring and scale, rugged, fur-lined boots and, best of all, a magnificent axe tangled in the straps of his armor.

“Oh, yes, make a few Krakens out of you, me beauty,” he said, dancing a happy jig around his boat. “A few Krakens indeed!”

The big man coughed up brackish seawater.

“Am I still alive?” he asked.

The fisherman stopped his happy jig and slid a hand towards the long knife at his belt. He used it to open fish bellies. No reason he couldn’t use it to open a throat. Wouldn’t be the first time a salvager had helped someone on their way to the Bearded Lady to claim a prize.

The big man opened his eyes.

“Touch that knife again and I’ll cut you into more pieces than that damned Krakenwyrm.”

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.

A hulking figure trudged through the waist-deep snow of the canyon, lumbering uphill with a purposeful gait that dared the blizzard to stop him. He left a deep trench in his wake, heavy clawed feet ripping up the loose shale beneath the snow with every step. Howling winds billowed his patchwork cloak of stitched-together hides, and the figure pulled it tighter around his body.

Even among trollkind, Trundle was huge; his muscles like rocks rolling beneath thick blue skin that was the texture of leather left out under the desert sun. Not that Trundle had ever seen a desert, but he knew what one was.

The Ice Witch had told him about a place beyond the southern mountains where the sun burned you red, and the snow was like little bits of gritty rock that got all up in your nethers and didn’t melt.

Sounded a bit far-fetched to Trundle, and what was the point of snow that didn’t melt?

He carried a giant leather sack slung over one massive shoulder, bulging with the carcasses of elnük, drüvasks, feral hogs, and clumsy mountain goats. It had been more days than he had fingers since he’d left his cave, and the meat was starting to give off a deliciously ripe stink, and the blood pooling inside had frozen black and solid.

Soaring cliffs of ice reared up to either side of him, blue like an ocean wave that had suddenly frozen in place. Maybe they had, Trundle didn’t know. The Ice Witch had told him about a long ago time when magic did all sorts of mad things to the world, so maybe he was walking through a rolling ocean at the top of the world right now. He liked that idea, and wondered if he’d see any skeletons of sea monsters this far north.

Sea monsters in ice, yes, that’d be a good story to tell when he got back. Didn’t matter if it wasn’t true. Most trolls didn’t have much rattling around in their skulls anyway, and would believe pretty much any tale he told.

He stopped thinking so hard for now.

He was going to need all his best thinking later.

This wasn’t his territory, there were more ways to die up here than he could count, and he could count a lot higher than any other troll he knew.

He might fall into a crevasse, get swallowed by a riddling ice-wyrm, or get cooked in the pot of one of the wild troll clans that lived up this way. Bigger than most other trolls, they didn’t have the good sense to know they needed a king to be in charge of stuff and didn’t give an elnük’s fart for titles.

They’d rip his arms and legs off for a snack if he tried to be all fancy.

Which made the need for this journey all the more strange, because he’d heard stories of a giant troll called Yettu who was going about telling the other clan-trolls that he was the troll king. Trundle had needed to bash a few heads together when some uppity trolls heard those stories and got to saying stupid stuff out loud. Stupid stuff like, if anyone could call themselves king, then why did they give Trundle the biggest share of the food and do what he told them?

Yeah, something needed to be done about this Yettu before things got out of hand.

Just because he’d newly thought of becoming a king like Grubgrack and the other ancient troll lords, didn’t mean anyone else got to think like that!

The wiry hairs on the back of Trundle’s neck tingled, like he was being watched.

He couldn’t see them yet, but he could smell the stink of their ripe bodies hidden beneath the snow ahead. Any troll that called himself king didn’t get to stay that way for long without having a sense for when blood was about to be spilled.

He kept going, walking all casual, like he was just out for a morning emptying of his guts. He pretended like he was having a big, wide-fanged yawn as he scanned the lumpy snowbanks ahead of him.

Hard to see much of anything through the swirling blizzard and howling winds.

There, two humps of snow that were just a bit too big and too regular to be natural.

Also, he could see a foot sticking out of one, and a tuft of hair from the other.

Trundle grinned a wide, gap-toothed grin and shook his mane of ragged red hair free of frost.

Then he reached under his filthy, patchwork cloak to grip the frozen haft of his faithful war-club, unhooking it from his belt. He trudged onward, making sure to look like he was struggling against the fierce wind and driving snow.

A pair of long fingers with long, yellowed nails poked through the snow of the mound to his left. They slipped back into the mound, and a pair of yellow eyes appeared, staring right at him.

Trundle waited until he was a club’s length away from the mound before hauling out Boneshiver. Instantly, the temperature dropped, and icy cold stabbed into his hands as the eternal ice frosted the air around him. The club was an enormous chunk of True Ice mounted on an obsidian handle, and it had never failed him in battle.

The eyes inside the mound widened in surprise as Trundle sprang through the air and slammed his giant club down into the snow with a satisfying crunch.

A troll with greenish skin like mossy tree bark rose unsteadily from his hiding place, the back of his skull a smashed-in crater. He waved a stone-bladed sword at Trundle, but his knitted brow and cross-eyed glare told him he was trying to decide if he was dead or not.

“I fink I’m dead,” said the troll.

“I think you’re right,” said Trundle, and the troll toppled over into the snow.

The second ambusher leapt out with a throaty roar, lifting a giant stone club over his head and slamming it down where Trundle had been standing a moment ago. It looked puzzled there wasn’t a dead troll on the end of its weapon. And in the span of time it took for him to notice the only dead troll was his fellow ambusher, Trundle had a meaty fist wrapped around his throat.

He lifted the troll from the ground, a middling-sized thing with a rust-brown hide covered in gnarled lumps and sprouting tufts of wiry hair from its armpits and nethers.

“Right then, you rascal!” said Trundle cheerfully.

“You supposed to be dead,” gurgled the troll. “I meant to hit you with me club.”

“I saw that,” said Trundle, squeezing the troll’s neck until his face turned a pretty shade of purple. “But turns out I’m alive, and looks like you and your friend here got the dungy end of the stick, don’t it?”

Trundle dropped the troll, who fell to the snow with a rasping wheeze of breath.

“This is King Yettu’s land,” gasped the troll. “Whatcha want ’ere?”

Trundle held Boneshiver close to the troll’s head, who grunted in pain from the nearness of its icy power.

“My name’s Trundle, the Troll King, an’ I want you to take me to Yettu,” he said.

The troll with the rust-brown hide was called Sligu, and he led Trundle through the blizzard toward a series of dots in a glacier that looked like cave entrances. Sligu wasn’t the chattiest of trolls, but after a couple of encouraging taps from Boneshiver he discovered a whole lot of things he wanted to say.

Trundle knew trolls were, by and large, not exactly imaginative, so when Sligu described Yettu as a mountain with eyes, a fighter with fists like boulders, and a belly as deep as a ravine, he began to get an idea of what he might be up against.

“So where does he get off on calling himself a king?” asked Trundle.

“He heard you was walkin’ about calling yourself king and that everyone gave you all the best food first,” said Sligu. “Soon as he ’eard that, it was king this and king that all the time!”

“I thought you northern trolls hated titles like that?”

“We do, but Yettu said if it were good enough for a warmskin southern troll like you, then he wanted to be a king as well. And once he killed all the uvver clan-chieftains who said he weren’t no king, it didn’t seem too clever to not agree wiv ’im.”

“He killed them all?”

“Yeah, punched the chief of the Rock-Eaters’ head right off his neck,” said Sligu. “Flew right over to the next valley, so it did.”

“Not bad,” said Trundle, wondering how far he could punch a head.

“And then he smoked out trolls of Ice Cave Glacier and took their lair.”

“How’d he do that?”

“Ate a load of cave mushrooms and elnük dung, then blocked the cave entrance and let loose a bum-ripper down their air hole.”

“Clever,” said Trundle. “Nasty, but clever all the same.”

“And then he ate the biggest troll of the Night Soilers from the knees up.”

“Why the knees?” said Trundle. “There’s good eating on feet.”

Sligu shrugged, and a tiny rodent poked its head out from the dense knot of fur at the back of his neck with an annoyed squeak. “Dunno. I fink ’e said summat about them being too smelly. Said even a midden-licker wouldn’t touch ’em.”

“Nice ’n’ crunchy, feet are,” said Trundle, taking a sidelong glance at Sligu’s. Wide and flat, just the way Trundle liked them, with good, crusty-looking toenails.

“More of a fingers troll meself, but I likes a good foot too,” agreed Sligu.

Trundle prodded the troll with Boneshiver, and said, “You was telling me about Yettu.”

“Oh, right, so I was,” continued Sligu. “Well, he ’eard about the big troll horde you ’ad, and wanted one for ’imself. Someone told ’im only a king could have an army, so figured he needed to be a king.”

“Does he have a crown?”

“What’s a crown?” asked Sligu.

“It’s like a spiky hat that tells everyone you’s the king.”

“A hat does that? It’s magical, like?”

“I think some of them are,” said Trundle.

“Oh, well, then yeah, he’s got a crown.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“He told us he got it from an ice-wyrm’s belly wot he walked through like a big smelly tunnel, but my mate, Regi, says it looks like he made it from some teef and antlers wot he found in a dung pile.”

Dung pile or not, Trundle wanted a look at that crown now. Couldn’t have some wannabe king saying he was better than Trundle just because he had a bigger crown!

“How far is it to Yettu’s cave?”

Sligu pointed a crooked finger up toward a blue-sheened glacier at the end of the canyon that looked like it had been crudely carved to resemble a giant troll’s head. The giant icy face was the second biggest thing Trundle had ever seen, with giant eyes that still managed to look beady and cunning, fat lips and jutting tusks below a giant, warted nose.

“That supposed to be Yettu?” asked Trundle, trying not to sound impressed.

Sligu nodded. “Yeah, but they ’aven’t quite got his nose right.”

A winding series of rocky paths and bone-scaffolds offered a treacherous path up the sheer face of the glacier.

“Right, let’s get to climbin’ then,” said Trundle.

The sun was going down over the edge of the canyon by the time Trundle and Sligu reached the entrance to Yettu’s cave. That entrance was through the wide nostril of the carved head, and the water dripping from the icicles inside it had a peculiar greenish color.

A pair of wild trolls stood guard, carrying giant bone axes, and naked but for helmets made from hollowed-out drüvask skulls.

They were big, all right, orange-skinned and wiry, birds’ nest hair sprouting from the empty eye sockets of the dead animals. Both were bigger than Sligu—who Trundle was now beginning to realize must have been chosen as a sentry because he was skinnier and sneakier than the rest.

If these boys were this big, how big might Yettu be…?

“Who goes dere?” said the first guard.

“It’s me, Sligu.”

“Which one?”

“Your brother, dung-for-brains.”

“Oh, that Sligu,” said the guard. “Why you not say so? What you want?”

Sligu jerked a yellowed thumb in Trundle’s direction and said, “This one’s ’ere to see Yettu.”

“No one get to see Yettu,” declared the second guard, his beady eyes like two lumps of coal.

“He’ll want to see me,” said Trundle.

“Me? Who’s Me?” said the second guard. “Is it you?”

Trundle tried to follow the guard’s logic, but gave up when it began to hurt his brain.

“I’m Trundle,” he said. “Trundle the Troll King.”

“I heard of you,” said Sligu’s brother. “You not from here.”

“You’s a clever one,” said Trundle.

The troll shook his head and waved his axe at the beady-eyed guard. “He clever one.”

Trundle whacked the clever, beady-eyed guard over the head with Boneshiver, and turned back to Sligu’s brother. The troll took one look at the glittering mass of True Ice that used to be his fellow guard, and Trundle could almost hear the rocks in his brain grinding together as his eyes went back and forth between the club and its owner.

Knowing a troll’s thought processes could take a while, Trundle swung the large sack down from his shoulder and held it open before Sligu’s brother. An irresistible stench of maggoty meat and rank, coagulated blood wafted from its ragged neck.

The troll licked his lips, and thick ropes of yellow saliva drooled between his jutting tusks.

Trundle reached into the sack, lifted out a dripping hunk of meat and handed it over.

“You get come in,” said Sligu’s brother with a hungry smile.

Sligu’s brother, it turned out, was also called Sligu, so Trundle came up with the bright idea of calling one Big Sligu, and the other Little Sligu. Even the guard he’d bashed over the head would be able to tell one from the other now, if he forgot he was dead and got back up.

Big Sligu led him deeper into the glacier, a sparkling network of smooth tunnels carved deep into the ice. No trolls had cut these passageways, but something about them didn’t strike Trundle as being natural. He got a gripey, magical feeling from them, the same as he had when he’d been deep in the frozen maze beneath the palace of the Ice Witch.

They passed caves with spiky roofs of ice and filled with trolls of all shapes and sizes. Trundle couldn’t help but notice that most of those shapes and sizes went from just really big all the way to massive.

Trundle quickly lost count of how many trolls he saw.

“You northern trolls are a big bunch,” he said.

Big Sligu nodded. “Lots of monsters here. Want to eat trolls. Only big trolls live.”

Trundle took a better look at Little Sligu, wondering how he’d managed to survive, guessing there was maybe more going on inside his head than most. Amongst trolls that wasn’t saying much, but cleverness was something a cunning troll like Trundle noticed.

Maybe he might take Little Sligu back with him. Didn’t do to leave clever trolls alone for too long. Sligu might only be little, but sooner or later he might get some big ideas.

Eventually, Big Sligu led them into a gigantic cavern deep in the heart of the glacier. A beam of moonlight speared into the cavern through a hole in the roof that made the towering walls of ice shimmer with dancing lights and ghostly shapes. Trundle thought it looked pretty until he remembered how Yettu had won these caves, and tried not to imagine his warty backside pressed through that hole and disgorging the foggy contents of his guts.

“Big trolls hang out here with king,” said Big Sligu.

A lot of very big trolls indeed were gathered around a gigantic blue rock covered in slimy moss and knots of what looked like taiga grass.

Except it wasn’t a rock.

It was a troll, and somehow it managed to get even bigger when it turned around, catching wind of the sack Trundle was carrying.

Yettu was nearly twice the height of Trundle, his rangy arms like tree trunks and his legs like even bigger tree trunks. His head was like a boulder that had rolled down from a mountain top, gathering up all the frozen moss and gorse along the way before landing on an even larger boulder. A long black-bladed knife of smooth stone from the steaming haunches of a fire mountain was sheathed across his chest in a fold of his skin.

He stared at Trundle the way a pack of rimefangs looks at a fat elnük with a limp.

Trundle had planned to smash Yettu’s head in with Boneshiver the moment he came face to face with him. Looking at the northern troll’s giant head, he decided against it. Between Yettu’s skull and Boneshiver’s True Ice, Trundle wasn’t sure which would come out best.

Time for a new plan…

“You got meat,” said Yettu with a rumbling, gravelly voice.

“I got meat,” said Trundle, reaching into the bag and hauling out the stinking remains of a curling-horned mountain ram. Yettu’s eyes widened and he snatched the carcass from Trundle’s hands to stuff it whole down his gullet.

Yettu wiped his blood-greasy chin and belched.

“You Trundle?” he asked. “One who says he troll king?”

“Yes.”

Yettu reached out and lifted Trundle’s patchwork fur cloak.

“This far north too cold for you, little troll?” said Yettu, and the trolls around them grunted with laughter, the sound like avalanches colliding in slow motion.

Trundle shrugged. “Troll King gotta look good, right? I suppose you’re Yettu then?”

“Who else I be? You see any other troll here wearing a crown?”

Trundle took a closer look at the great mass of moss on Yettu’s head, now seeing that woven into the wiry thatch of thorny briars and ice were various bloodstained animal bones, horns, and antlers.

It looked like an upside-down storm cloud spitting bolts of bone lightning back at the sky.

“So that’s what a crown looks like,” he said.

Yettu nodded and stomped toward Trundle.

“You not so big,” said Yettu, tapping a thick finger on Trundle’s matted red hair. “I ’erd you was biggest troll ever. That you scraped your head on the sky and could drink seas.”

“That was a good one. I made trolls tell that one wherever they went,” said Trundle. “Did you hear the one about how I used the tallest tree in the Big Green Forest for a toothpick? Or the one where I ate a mammoth for breakfast and then used its skull for a bath?”

“What is bath…?”

“It’s when you… Never mind,” said Trundle. “Or the one where I jumped over the southern mountains in a single leap to wrestle the Whitestone Giant? That I broke his tail across my knee and took it home to dig out the inland sea at Rakelstake? That’s my favorite.”

“You fight giants a lot,” said Yettu.

“It’s the only way to get a good fight,” answered Trundle.

“You come here to fight me?” said Yettu with a grin, putting up his fists that were, as Sligu had mentioned, like giant boulders. The other trolls made a rough circle around them and began stamping their feet, just waiting for Yettu to bash him good.

Time for a plan so cunning it would make the Ice Witch’s hair melt.

“Fighting ain’t always done with fists,” said Trundle.

“Yeah, sometimes I kicks things to death,” agreed Yettu.

“That ain’t what I mean,” said Trundle, tapping a curling, yellowed claw to his forehead. “If you’re a king, a real king, you gotta use this.”

Yettu nodded. “Headbutts. Yeah. I likes them too, I do.”

“I mean the thing inside your head,” sighed Trundle. “The brain that does your thinking!”

“Brain?”

“It’d be a battle of wits,” said Trundle, then, under his breath, “Lucky for me it looks like you’re unarmed.”

“How do we fight wiv our squishy brains?”

Trundle grinned a toothy grin and upended the sack to spill out the rest of the animal carcasses between them in a stinking red pile of fur, bones, and rotten meat.

“An eating contest!” said Trundle.

“’Ow’s that usin’ our brains?” asked Yettu with a confused look at his trolls.

“You’ll see,” promised Trundle.

More meat was brought up and placed in the pile between the two seated troll kings. Giant hunks of flesh torn from the bellies of giant sea creatures, ribs from hairy mammoths, slithering piles of rotten fish, giant wings from the flightless birds of the tundra, entire elnük heads, and squirming heaps of wriggling body parts that Trundle was glad he didn’t recognize.

As well as food, giant stone bowls of frothed liquid were brought out, stuff that made the hairs in Trundle’s nose curl up. The stench was like the cracks in the earth around the mountains that spouted smoke and fire, and Trundle had a feeling it would taste worse than the amber water the squishy folk of the south called beer.

Truly this was a feast fit for a king, but only one of them could walk away from it.

“We just eat?” said Yettu.

Trundle nodded. “Eat and eat. First one to die loses. Last troll standing is the real king.”

Yettu grinned and said, “You got some good stories, Trundle, but you only got little belly. Real king needs the biggest belly, and Yettu’s bigger and meaner. Once ate two whole mammoths when yawned and didn’t even notice.”

The trolls around the two kings oohhed.

“That so?” said Trundle. “Well, I once drank so much that when I had to pass water I made the sea at Rakelstake.”

The trolls aahhed.

Yettu’s brow furrowed and his eyes rolled around their sockets as he tried to dredge up a memory from only a few moments ago.

“Wait, you said you dug land to make sea at Rakelstake…”

Trundle retorted without missing a beat. “Dug it out to make a hole big enough to pee in.”

The heads of the trolls around them went back and forth as the two troll kings exchanged boasts, each one more outlandish than the last.

Finally, Trundle said, “Just before I came here, I climbed yetis’ mountain and took a bite of the moon.”

The trolls laughed at this outrageous boast until Trundle pointed up at the crescent moon shining down through the hole in the cavern’s roof. Every troll’s head lifted to follow his pointing finger, and they muttered among themselves with a newfound respect.

While they were looking up, Trundle stuffed the now empty sack beneath his patchwork cloak and pulled it tight around his body.

“No more stories,” growled Yettu. “We eat.”

Trundle nodded, and the feast began.

He began by tearing the meat from a giant rib, making sure it was picked clean before cracking it open over his knee and sucking out the marrow within. Yettu wolfed down the flank of a drüvask, chasing it down with a hearty mouthful of the frothed liquid in the stone bowls.

“Drink!” commanded Yettu. “Not feast without frustbogga!”

Trundle took a proffered bowl and swilled it down in one, chugging gulp. His eyes watered at the noxious flavor of it, somewhere between corpse-blood swamp runoff and the red rock that flows. It burned his throat as it went down, and he felt it light a fire in his belly he knew was going to wreak havoc on his backside when he was forced to empty himself out.

He forced a smile and said, “Not bad. I’ve had stronger.”

Yettu grinned, seeing the sweat on Trundle’s brow, and leaned forward, grease dripping from his chin. “I see fire in belly. Burn you up, little troll.”

In response, Trundle picked up a crawling hunk of whale meat and devoured it in three giant bites. He spat the gristle and bone aside, and hungry trolls pounced, fighting for the splintered scraps.

Yettu tilted his head back and slid an entire Aurma fish down his throat, smacking his lips together as its tail disappeared into his gullet. Trundle scooped up handfuls of meat and guts, stuffing them into his mouth with relish and chewing the meat to paste before swallowing.

On and on they ate, their audience cheering with every rotten mouthful of food and every bowl of frustbogga they drank. The mountain of meat seemed to get no smaller, no matter how many chunks they ate. Yettu popped a shovel-like handful of tiny skulls into his mouth, crunching them and rolling the pieces around his mouth like they were some kind of delicacy.

“Found these when boat made of trees wrecked on sea,” said Yettu. “Lots of little people all dead and going to waste.”

Trundle didn’t mind eating the meat of the small people, but tried to avoid it where he could since most of them didn’t have much in the way of eating on them and their brittle bones got stuck between his teeth.

Another carcass of ribs and meat was washed down with frustbogga, and he knew he was going to pay for this feat on the way home. The northern king stuffed his face with the furry meat of a mammoth, but Trundle saw the telltale signs of a full belly in the redness of Yettu’s face and the slowed pace of his eating.

Trundle, too, was feeling the effects of so much meat and frustbogga.

Yettu belched, a belly-rumbling roar that shook snow from the ceiling and sent a bunch of giant icicles falling from the roof. Trolls jumped out of the way, and Trundle used the distraction to lift the neck of the food sack beneath his patchwork cloak up under his fat and blood-soaked chin.

He looked up and saw Little Sligu staring at him. The clever little troll must have seen him hide the sack under his cloak. Little Sligu gave him a slow nod and Trundle grinned, leaning forward to grab yet more meat and bone. He shoved it toward his mouth, but instead of eating it he tipped most of it down his front and into the sack. He took his time, taking slow bites here and there, all the while stuffing entire wings, heads, and racks of blackened ribs into the sack until it was full and he could fit no more in.

Trundle’s belly rumbled and he belched a stinking cloud of yellowed gas.

“Full yet?” said Yettu, chewing on a leg bone of something long and heavy.

Trundle slapped his bulging midriff and shook his head.

“Full? Me?” he grinned through a mouthful of crunching bone and dripping fat. “I’m just getting warmed up. When do we get properly started?”

The other trolls laughed, and Yettu roared at them to shut up.

“I king here!” he yelled. “Not him.”

Trundle grinned. Yettu was king here because he was the strongest, meanest, and hungriest troll, but Trundle knew that kind of king was easy to topple.

But the cunningest of kings? That kind of king could stay king forever.

Trundle leaned back and yawned, stretching like he was ready to go for a nap.

“Hey,” he said, holding his hand out to Yettu. “Can I borrow that big knife of yours?”

Yettu eyed him suspiciously through red-rimmed eyes swimming in grease.

“What for? Fink you gonna cut me?”

“Nah, just got to make room for next course.”

The northern king gripped the stone handle of his knife and pulled it from the flesh of his chest. He tossed it over the remaining mound of bloody meat, and Trundle caught it in his sticky palm. For a weapon of trolls, it was surprisingly well made and wickedly sharp.

Trundle pushed himself carefully to his feet, holding the bulge of his cloak and letting out a thunderous fart that swiftly cleared the space behind him.

Then, he took Yettu’s knife and sliced it across his cloaked belly.

He let out a convincing groan of relief as the vast quantities of food he’d stuffed into the sack spilled out around his feet in an avalanche of chewed meat, gnawed bones, and fragments of half-eaten gristle.

“Ah, that’s better,” he said, handing the knife to Little Sligu with a sly wink, who returned the blade to Yettu. The big troll stared in amazement at Trundle as he lifted yet another handful of meat and stuffed it into his mouth.

Yettu looked from the knife to Trundle, and rose to his full height with a roar of laughter.

“You gonna let him beat you like that?” said Little Sligu.

Yettu shook his head.

“Nobody beats me,” he snarled, and plunged the knife deep into his own stomach.

The northern king sliced the razor-sharp blade across his belly and lifted the bloody knife high with a triumphant grin.

“Yettu make room for food too!”

Trundle watched the northern king’s grin fade as his belly yawned open like a second mouth and all the half-digested food he’d just eaten came spilling out in a torrent of his own blood and coiled guts.

“Something wrong?” asked Trundle, pulling the skeleton of a fish carcass from his throat.

Yettu tried to answer, but his mouth just flapped as his innards continued to pour from his opened belly. The knife dropped from his hand and his knees buckled.

Yettu sank to the ground, trying in vain to hold the sliced flaps of his belly together.

“That don’t feel good…” he said, before falling face first into the mound of meat.

Little Sligu came forward and Trundle eyed the smaller troll with a mixture of suspicion and respect.

“Now I think I know how a little troll like you’s managed to survive up here among all these big boys,” said Trundle. “You’re clever.”

“A bit,” said Sligu with a modest shrug.

“Maybe you should come back down south with me,” suggested Trundle in a tone that made it clear it was anything but a suggestion.

“Yeah,” said Little Sligu, looking around at the other trolls. “Change of scenery might be nice.”

“Then you knows what you got to do now, yeah?”

Little Sligu lifted Trundle’s arm.

“Trundle is winner!” shouted the clever little troll. “True king of trolls!”

So I was walking through this little plaza off the library district in Nashramae—super dusty, flagstones older than empires, and usually pretty quiet. Having just out-negotiated those dumb human merchants in the Grand Marketplace, I was feeling good. I’d been all “You want how much for that teapot?!” and “There’s no way that’s an authentic Ascended-age mace with that iconography!”

But a whole day around mortals was enough for me. If I had to hear another cheery “Water and shade to you!” greeting, I was gonna get heated.

Anyway, I’d almost gotten my cart full of treasure to my stall, thinking how great it’d be to get back in my junkyard, when whammo! I was flat on my backside.

I jumped back on my feet in a heartbeat, surrounded by mortals again. But these were younger humans, a bunch of ’em, and most of ’em were laughing at the scrawny kid who’d slammed into me and my cart. He was trying to pick himself up off the ground and onto the sorriest excuse for a mech I’d ever seen—a board with wheels—and he wasn’t laughing. Just kept apologizing.

“Sorry, Obujan!”

I said, “Do I look like your grandfather?” This kid didn’t have my winning smile, or my razor-sharp cheekbones, and his ears weren’t even furry, so there was barely any family resemblance.

Anyway, the laughing kids had a ringleader: a nasty-looking boy wearing an oversized Noxian-style tunic and iron-capped boots. He said, “Where d’you think you’re rolling, armadillo-bug?”

My hackles went up until I realized he was talking to the scrawny kid. But still, that’s a pretty mean thing to say!

This ringleader didn’t stop there. He was all, “You’re Shuriman trash, Anaktu. You’re ugly and you can’t even walk.” He pointed at my broken cart. “The empire doesn’t need useless things. We should throw you with the rest of the garbage on this old man’s pile of junk.”

Now I was seeing red. Steam right outta my ears. So I got up in the big bully’s face—well, up in his knees—and I said, “Hey, kid. You better apologize.”

He scoffed with his stupid face, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, old man. I’m Kesu Rance. Son of Governor Rance! Walk away, or we’ll clear this plaza of all its trash!”

Of course, I walked.

I mentioned my stall, right? Shuttered, overlooked, and full of bric-a-brac that’s way too good to ever sell to humans. It’s a cover—a front—for where the portal back home appears once I set things up juuuuust right.

So I wasn’t walking away from this bully. I was walking to my stall. Not to escape, obviously—I was walking to an especially large, tarpaulin-covered, metallic form…

Meanwhile, Kesu was so busy monologuing to his club-wielding amateur thugs about being the strong future of Shurima that he didn’t even notice me until I was blocking out the sun from the cockpit of the sweetest of bipedal mechs, my beloved Tristy.

“Walker and shade to you, Kesu.”

Oh, his face! Kid looked like I’d harpooned him!

I hadn’t, of course. That comes later.

Now, I’m an unbiased storyteller, so I’ll mention Tristy might have had an ever-so-slight malfunction around this point. Barely worth noting, really, but in the interest of tellin’ you everything, there was… a hiccup. A hesitation. A stoppage.

Tristy and me were the definition of intimidating, but that hitch was making some of those older kids bold, and one of them bashed my mech’s leg with a club! “You’re just a dumb old man with a dirty pile of junk. There’s only one of you against all of us,” she said, swinging her hand to indicate about a dozen armed, angry-looking snots.

And then who should roll up—still piloting the worst mech ever—but the scrawny kid, Anaktu.

While I applied percussive maintenance to Tristy’s precision mechanisms, I noticed he’d grabbed the “one hundred percent authentic” Ascended-age mace from my cart. I’d have to have a chat about personal property with my “grandson” later.

Anyway, Anaktu yelled, “He’s not alone!”

But Kesu just laughed and tried to kick him! The little guy pivoted on his rolling board and swept the mace under Kesu’s other leg, and whack! The bully went down hard.

With a shout, Anaktu took the fight to the rest of ’em. Surprised ’em, too, because within seconds, he’d gotten two big ones backed into a corner. Too bad he didn’t see Kesu coming at him from behind with the torn-off handle of my cart, ready to clonk him.

But Anaktu wasn’t alone either.

Tristy sprang back to life, and bam! I was zooming across the plaza. We skidded to a stop, kicking up dust, and I pulled the trigger.

Zap!

Remember that harpoon I mentioned? Yeah, I electro-harpooned that cart handle mid-swing. I’d like to see a certain other yordle pull off a demonstration of extreme marksmanship like that!

And Kesu? He toppled into the dust. Anaktu heard the commotion and spun around. Gave me a big smile.

“Obujan!”

“Yeah, yeah, get up here,” I said, giving him a hand up to Tristy’s cockpit. “The view’s better.”

He said something like, “You don’t have to tell me twice!” which is a pretty cool thing to say under the circumstances.

And then Tristy went pew pew and zap zap zap, and I let Anaktu activate the flamespitter, but only to scare the bigger kids. Anyway, Tristy and me were awesome and I guess Anaktu wasn’t bad for a mortal, and soon the bullies were running away.

Grinning, I said to Anaktu, “This is gonna be bumpy.” Then everything shook and the air was full of rockets.

The bullies got as far as the archway over the plaza’s exit when boomboomboom the rockets slammed into the ground, flaming and zapping anything nearby, barring their escape.

So there they were, stuck between the Equalizer’s wall of fire and Runeterra’s finest mechanized pilot. I was about to demand that apology, when Anaktu climbed down, rolled up to Kesu, and asked, “Why are you so mean?”

Kesu whined something about his new Noxian dad, how he wanted to impress him. It was pretty boring, really.

The rockets sputtered and died, and the other bully kids fled, leaving Kesu behind. He started to back away, too.

“Hold it!” I yelled, harpoon at the ready. “What about my apology?”

As I pulled back my hood, he finally figured out I wasn’t just some old man, because his eyes were buggin’. He bowed down in the dust, saying, “Master Yordle, I’m sorry I threatened you—”

But I stopped him. “You think I care about threats? Ha! Try again.”

He said, “I’m sorry for fighting—” but I cut him off there, too.

“Nope. I’m ready for round two if you don’t apologize for the right reason.”

“I shouldn’t have been so mean to Anaktu—”

“You disrespected junk!” I shouted. “Junk is not garbage. It’s pure potential! Dumb people don’t see its worth, but with imagination and hard work and love, junk can be turned into the finest mech a yordle could dream of! And other stuff.”

Kesu was obviously awestruck at my logic, because he was speechless. When he found words, he said, “Uh… I’m sorry…?”

“Thank you!”

So I finally got the apology that junk deserved.

Anaktu helped Kesu out of the dirt. They clasped arms and there were tears or something, but I’d had enough of mortals, so Tristy and I turned to head home.

“Obujan, your mace! You must want it back.” Anaktu rolled over to hand it to me.

Wouldn’t you know, a mortal who respects junk.

“Keep it,” I said. I mean, if you can’t spoil your grandkids, what’s the point?

Keelo always cried “Surprise!” when he attacked.

Kayn supposed it was the equivalent of Keelo pulling his punches out of respect, or perhaps some artifact of his ancient, preset protocols.

The warning cry was never necessary, nor was it especially amusing after all this time. And a three-quarter ton fightmek shouting “Surprise!” as it swung a hook-handled titanium halberd with a fifty centimeter blade edge at your head was still a three-quarter ton fightmek swinging a hook-handled titanium halberd with a fifty centimeter blade edge at your head.

“Not now,” Kayn sighed.

“But I have surprised you,” said Keelo dolefully. He looked down at Kayn’s onyx desk, now split cleanly in two pieces and lying on the floor. Then he looked at Shieda Kayn himself, who was still in his seat, reading an official communique.

And not even remotely split into two pieces.

Keelo narrowed his optics in confusion, and waved a huge metal paw through Kayn’s form. The image rippled. “A holo-lure?”

“Yes,” said Kayn from the other side of the chamber. “A holo-lure.”

“This was a trick?”

“Uh huh.”

“You have tricked me.”

“I heard you coming four decks away,” Kayn replied. He occupied the chamber’s window seat. Beyond the thick, tinted port, the hard neon lines of slingspace rasped by. Kayn was reading the document intently. His pose and activity exactly matched the hologram figure in the chair.

Keelo looked from one to the other.

“A holo-lure is clever,” he said. “But how did you hear me coming? I was stealth-moded.”

Kayn did not look up from his work. “Figure of speech. I put a tracer on you last week. I’ve been mapping your movements,” he said, distractedly.

The fightmek paused, then twisted awkwardly to look at himself, trying to find the tracer, like a dog trying to examine its own tail.

“That is not very sporting,” he grumbled.

“You win a fight by any means at your disposal,” said Kayn, rising to his feet. He was a tall man, lean and lithe, clad in the black suit of an imperial officer. But he wore no pins or insignia—just plain black, indicating the highest status of all. His long mane of hair was shaved away from the side of his head in the style of the coreworld nobility, and a polished gold interface of ornate design covered his left eye and cheek. He looked at the fightmek. “You taught me that. First lesson.”

Keelo shrugged. “I suppose.”

“So, the lure was entirely fair.”

“But,” said Keelo, “how will you learn if you cheat? Humans learn through action-response. If you know I am coming, you—”

Kayn looked the fightmek in the eyes.

“Keelo,” he said, “my old and good friend Keelo… Do you really think I have anything left to learn?”

Keelo’s huge, scarred bulk, heavy with green and orange ballistic plate, sagged slightly. “I suppose not. I suppose you are now a high lord of the empire, and proven in battle. I suppose you are now one of the emperor’s own Ordinals. I suppose there’s nothing a rusty old fightmek can teach you now. I suppose it’s the scrap heap for me, or grot-work in the Bedlam Mines.”

“Keelo…”

“I suppose I might get my servos melted down for transuranics, or they could donate parts of me to younger fightmeks—”

“Keelo!” Kayn strode up to the big machine. “No supposing. And no feeling sorry for yourself, okay? I still need to maintain my edge. I need you to keep me on my toes. A surprise here, a surprise there, just like always.”

Keelo’s optics swivelled up hopefully. “Yes?”

“Yes. How can an Ordinal keep in prime form without his loyal fightmek to test him?”

“So… you won this bout?” Keelo asked.

“Well, you did cut my desk in half, so we’ll call it even.”

Keelo nodded. He shuffled around and emitted a sub-sonic pulse that opened the arsenal suite built into the wall of Kayn’s quarters. The lacquered black panels slid aside, revealing racks of blade and projectile weapons bathed in a red glow. Every design under the many suns, and some so exotic they had never seen sunlight at all.

“We will spar now,” said Keelo. “Select your weapon.”

“Not today.”

“But it is the scheduled time.”

“Something’s come up that requires my attention,” said Kayn, gesturing with the communique in his hand.

“A message? You were reading that when I came in.”

“Which is why I really didn’t want the interruption,” said Kayn. “We’ll need to re-route.”

“Sling-course is set for—”

“I know. I’m changing that.”

“The emperor awaits your return to the Armada,” the fightmek said, “to report on the Kloa policing action.”

“This is too important. Nakuri’s found something on an edgeworld, out past the Raen Cluster.”

“I am sure Commander Nakuri can deal with it,” Keelo objected. “He is a first class officer of the Demaxian Empire. A decorated—”

“Commander Nakuri is an old friend and comrade in arms,” said Kayn. “I respect his judgement, and if he says something requires the direct attention of an Ordinal, then I trust him. Inform Captain Vassur I need her to reset our course.”

Keelo hesitated.

“Go on,” said Kayn.

The fightmek nodded, and began to clomp towards the exit.

“Wait,” Kayn called after him. He walked over to the big machine, and plucked a tech-fleck off the fightmek’s broad back. “That’s the tracer gone. See? All gone. You can surprise me again later.”

“Okay,” said Keelo. Renewed enthusiasm glowed in his optics. “I’ve got this special mallet I’ve been waiting to—”

“Shh! Shh!” Kayn silenced him. “It’s a surprise, remember?”

Alone again, Kayn woke the astral portolan unit built into the corner of his quarters. The console rose from the deck, opening its steel petals to project a tri-dimensional local system chart into the air. He reached out and rotated the image, moving through stars, selecting and enlarging. A swipe of his fingers brought Ionan into view. His golden ocular interface engaged with the projection, and augmented it to a real-time display of exquisite detail.

Ionan was an edgeworld. A nothing place. Unpromising.

Nakuri’s team had been out that way for months, hunting for ora, or for renegade Templars trying to steal that vital and precious power source from under imperial noses.

The Demaxian Empire, operating out of the vast Locus Armada, was the supreme authority in known space. Its power, influence and technological prowess were such that no one could stand against it. There were no more wars. In the name of the emperor, forces under the Ordinals and the generals maintained absolute control.

Except that space, however well pacified, was very, very large. Moreover, it was annoyingly full of species and rogues who fought on anyway, resisting that control. No matter the size and military might of the empire, which quite eclipsed any other power, subversive behavior was persistent.

The emperor, Jarvan IV, was a good man; indeed, his great-grandfather had been the first human to wear the crown. He and Kayn were close, in both age and friendship. In private, Jarvan had confided to his friend that he disliked the way imperial policy had been forced to become less tolerant in recent years. The empire was seen as a monolithic force, unyielding and authoritarian. It was, to many—especially the outliers, the subjugated, the Templars, and the notorious criminal wretches of the Syndicate—a domineering and oppressive thing to kick against.

This perception made Jarvan sad. He’d come to the crown with a heart full of progressive ideas and hopes. Instead, he’d been forced to implement tighter restrictions.

“I always thought,” Kayn had told him, “that holding on to this society would be harder than winning it. War is simple. Peace is harder.”

“It pains me, Shieda,” Jarvan had replied. “No one seems to respect the great work we are doing, the future we represent. There’s always someone squirming to evade us. To disobey.”

“Like herding cats.”

“Cats?”

Kayn smiled at the memory. “Cats, my emperor. A feline species. Infamously willful.”

Of course, the problem was ora. The substance, like liquid gold, was a source of vast, almost mythical power. Whoever wielded it successfully could have great influence, which meant it was essential that the empire controlled its sources, distribution and use. Especially illegal were the bio-hacking purposes it could be put to, techniques practiced by the damnable Templars. Such behavior was dangerous, as well as subversive. It was an ongoing struggle to contain their fringe activities and maintain order. It was an unending battle to keep ora in the hands of the empire, where it belonged.

Kayn had solutions for this problem, and—like all the Ordinals, the most singular beings in the emperor’s service—he had laid these out to Jarvan.

Jarvan had recoiled. Kayn’s proposals were ruthless and pragmatic. Hardline suppression, heavier penalties, military annexation of resistant worlds. Kayn knew that an empire organized under his philosophies would be much more aggressive and unforgiving than the society Jarvan supported. Still, it was his duty to suggest these things, his duty to offer the emperor alternatives. He was an Ordinal, Kayn reminded him. That was what Ordinals did.

He was not surprised when the emperor backpedaled, and almost chided Kayn for his brutal proposal. That’s why Jarvan was emperor and Kayn an Ordinal. Kayn was the attack dog that Jarvan kept on a leash. He only let him hunt when there were no other alternatives.

And Jarvan liked to keep testing his attack dog, to measure his loyalty and his aggression.

Ionan… edgeworld…

Kayn wondered just what it was his old comrade Nakuri had found there.

He felt a tremor run through the deck. Their warship, the mighty Fractal Shear, had altered course. Captain Vassur would have ordered its slingspace engines to re-shape the singularity sphere surrounding it, so that they could turn out to Ionan.

The streaks of light flashing past the window ports changed hue. Ora powered the ship’s sling-engines, creating the sphere that warped space-time around the hull, allowing it to skate through the upper layers of subspace at transluminal velocities, like a stone skipping across a lake, unencumbered by current or surface tension. The portolan display told him there was a six hour journey time.

Kayn heard a laugh behind him. A low chuckle.

He looked around, half-expecting to see Keelo bearing down on him. But there was no shout of “Surprise!”

There was no one there at all.

“What armament do you require?” asked Keelo. He had returned to find his master staring at the open arsenal suite.

Kayn shrugged. He’d trained with every one of the weapons a hundred times. They bored him. Only a few felt right in his hands... and even they had their limits.

“Discretion,” he replied.

“What?”

“Commander Nakuri recommended discretion,” said Kayn.

“Is that why we have coasted out of slingspeed short of the target world?”

“Yes. I’ll go down alone. Tell the captain to prep my ship, and hold station.”

“But a deployment squad has been assembled,” said Keelo. “Fifty seasoned slingtroopers. And I have cleaned my favorite axe.”

“I’m going alone,” said Kayn. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

He selected a chrome photann pistol and a sleekly decorated fighting lance—two weapons he knew well. Then he paused, and looked back to Keelo.

“Did you say something?”

“Me?” the fightmek replied. “No.”

“I thought I heard you laughing earlier, too.”

“No. Not me.”

With a brief flare of thruster light, Kayn’s craft left the carrier bay on the upper hull of the Fractal Shear. His craft was a DEMAX-3 Superiority, a small interceptor used for interdiction flights and border work. An Ordinal was supposed to use a more regal fleet transport, something that would impress the locals, something with ceremonial heft and a payload space that could carry trooper squads and combat vehicles.

But Kayn liked the speed and firepower of the little DEMAX-3. He had liked them since his rookie tours as a sub-commander in the Edge Squadrons.

He veered off from the stationary baseship with an unnecessary burst of acceleration. The arrowhead craft rotated its engine nacelles, tight-rolled through a threaded veil of asteroids, and planed down through a void of pink fog.

Distant stars shone like lamps and scattered fireflies. Tracking showed Ionan ahead.

Kayn rejected auto-helm, and took her down on manual, skimming the cold, thin vapor of the atmospheric edge as he followed Nakuri’s beacon. The beacon’s signal, along with all flight data, was channelled directly through his interface—a steady stream of information playing against his retina. Nakuri’s ship was the Gentle Reminder, a suppression cruiser half the size of the Fractal Shear. It held a high orbit on the far side of the edgeworld, like a ghost on Kayn’s range detector.

Down through the cloud level, he tore across the open flats of ochre deserts and salt plains that reflected the daylight with blinding radiance. He gunned so low, his craft kicked up a powder wake, sending small, malformed dust devils dancing haphazardly across the dry terrain.

Ahead, mountains. A long, low range. Pink and russet rock wind-carved into sharp crags and angular shapes, like a coral reef raised from the water.

The beacon signal was pinging wildly. He eased the nacelles around to braking attitude, brought the nose up, and swung in for landing.

Below him lay a high plateau beneath a block of pink cliff. An encampment. Two imperial transport shuttles, parked and anchored.

He extended the landing gear and descended vertically.

“Welcome to the buttcrack of nowhere,” said Nakuri.

Kayn jumped down from his open cockpit into the hard glare of the sun. He smiled. To Nakuri, the old dog, everywhere was the buttcrack of nowhere. They’d served together on many worlds, many tours, and that had been Nakuri’s estimation of every single outer planet and edgeworld.

“I don’t think that’s the proper form of address, commander,” Kayn growled.

Nakuri hesitated, his smile dropping. He hadn’t seen Kayn in a long time, and Kayn was now a high-and-mighty Ordinal. “I’m sorry…” he began.

“It’s ‘Welcome to the buttcrack of nowhere, sir!’”

They grinned, and embraced.

“It’s been too long,” said Kayn.

“Not long enough, Shie,” Nakuri laughed. The circular silver interface over his right eye caught the sun like a wink.

“So what sort of klagging mess have you gotten into this time?” Kayn asked him.

Nakuri turned. His squad—ten slingtroopers who, like him, were wearing full fightkit and weapon rigs—were standing rigidly to attention. Each one of them towered over Kayn in his simple black, form-fitting suit. They were hardy veterans all, and he knew most of them. Korla, Speeks, Rigo, the squad leader Vechid. He interfaced the names of the others quickly from the bio-tags on their breastplates.

It paid to know names. Soldiers responded better to Ordinals who treated them as equals.

“Let’s show him, people,” said Nakuri.

He brought Kayn up to speed as they crunched over the plateau. “It was Templars what brought us here. Two of them, and a whole pack of their believers. Chased them out of Kybol, and they fled here. We thought they might be looking for a get-out, but this is clearly where they wanted to be.”

“Why?” asked Kayn.

“Not clear. So, we got down here and rounded them all up. Well, most of them. A few wouldn’t go without a fight, so… shots fired, and all that.”

“How many?”

“Ten dead, all theirs, both Templars included. It was quite a fight.”

“And how many of their followers were taken?”

“Sixteen. Klag-sack hippy subversives. We’ve got them penned in the caves up ahead. Interrogations in progress.”

Kayn raised an eyebrow. “To find out…?”

“Anything. Templar strongholds. Ora dumps. Contacts. And of course, why they came here, hell-for-leather.”

“We know why,” said a voice behind them.

Kayn and Nakuri stopped and turned. The slingtroopers came to a halt.

“Something to say, Vechid?” asked Nakuri.

“No, commander,” replied the squad leader.

“Not so fast,” said Kayn. “I want to hear what Vechid has on her mind.”

The woman shrugged uncomfortably. “Sorry, sir. I mean, sorry, Ordinal. I spoke out of turn. Just, this heat.”

“You’re in cooled fightgear, Vechid,” replied Kayn. “Speak up.”

“Well… The thing we found. That’s what brought them. That’s what they were after.”

They ascended the gritty slope toward the caves that honeycombed the lower section of the cliffs. The glare of the sunlight was hard and intense, so it was more than a relief to step into the mauve shadows at the base of the cliff—it felt like stepping into a refrigerated cellar.

Nakuri’s interface beeped with an incoming message, and he excused himself by stepping aside. Kayn and the slingtroopers waited in the shade. The Ordinal looked up at the mouths of the caves, eroded out by millions of years of desert wind.

And, again, he heard something.

A voice. Not words, just a murmur. He edged away from the waiting troopers, toward the caves. Their darknesses yawned at him, silent.

Nothing.

Then he heard the murmur again. Half murmur, half chuckle. Something just inside the nearest opening, perhaps? Something watching him, amused, snickering in the dark.

He frowned, and took another step.

His own interface sounded. He opened the link. “This is Kayn,” he murmured.

A fuzzy image of Captain Vassur on the bridge of the Fractal Shear projected into his left eye. “Ordinal? Just an advisory. We detected a soft return moving into Ionan airspace at sub-sling.”

“Soft return, captain?”

“No solid data, and we can’t fix it. A ghost.”

“Show me.”

Vassur obliged. The retinal image switched to a live feed from ship’s main detection systems. Just a phantom track. No defined mass or density. In fact, the sort of data aberration that detection officers would usually dismiss as background distortion. But of course, Vassur was being very careful with an Ordinal on the ground.

“Various rogue agents use masking fields,” Kayn commented.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Vassur. “The Syndicate especially. We’ve seen a lot during anti-trafficking campaigns. If this is a masking field, it’s a good one.”

“Agreed. Very good.”

“Do you want me to intercept, Ordinal?”

“Negative.”

“Then should I bring us in closer? Get Ionan in battery range, in case—”

“Negative, captain. We appear to have a situation down here, subversive elements who might have come to retrieve something, maybe prior to an exchange. If this is the receiver come to collect, let’s not scare them off. Let’s have them unmask.”

“If you’re sure, Ordinal?”

“I am, captain. Let’s see who we meet. This could open deep veins of information.”

Kayn disengaged the link, and turned to see Nakuri walking over.

“Let me guess,” Kayn said. “A soft return?”

Nakuri nodded. “The Shear has it too?” he asked. “Between your ship and mine, we’ve got most of the inner system covered. And it’s probably nothing.”

“I trust you told the Gentle Reminder to hold position?”

“And take no action,” Nakuri replied with a laugh. “I remember the way you work, old friend. Bring the scoundrels in. You like to see their klagging faces.”

Nakuri turned and led him up the last stretch of slope to the largest cave mouth. The troopers followed them. Kayn felt relaxed and content. It felt good to be operating alongside someone as trustworthy and smart as Nakuri. They made a good team, and they always had.

He paid no attention to the odd sense of unease lurking at the back of his mind. That was simple, healthy trepidation, the tension of handling a potentially volatile situation.

He had no time for an encumbrance like that.

They were penned in the outer caves of the cliff system. Nakuri’s troopers had clapped the prisoners in force shackles, while a second squad under the command of an officer called Solipas was guarding them.

The prisoners were a maverick lot, with creatures of different species, their garments dirty and worn. Some had already been beaten in the hope of extracting answers, and Kayn could see that they had all been stripped of ora-derived bio-enhancements—a process that had left some ugly wounds.

As far as he was concerned, the Templars were a sect, and nothing more. A quasi-mystical affiliation of subversives who believed they were the true “guardians” of ora, that they understood the material better than anyone else, and were protecting it from the abuse of other parties. Kayn had interrogated many Templars in his long career. He found them generally ridiculous. Their manner was obnoxious and condescending, exhibiting the sort of tolerant sympathy one got from any religious order. They believed they were privy to some great existential truth locked within the ora, something too good and refined for the likes of the Demaxians, who actually got on with the business of keeping society running. They had naively mistaken a singular natural resource of undoubted value for something more spiritual, as if ora was somehow a manifestation of the gods, or of creation, or a universal soul.

Kayn had seen that kind of lunacy before. Primitives on edgeworlds worshipping trees or nature or ecosystems, or a cargo-cult so astounded by a standard fightmek that they hailed it as a god.

It was childish and ill-informed.

The Templars, however, were unusual in that they were well organized, often militant, and had somehow established a network of support across the galaxy. Their beliefs were deranged and laughable, yet their lowly followers pursued them with vigor, depriving the empire of valuable ora supplies, or actually striking at commercial holdings. They were subversives of the worst kind.

Kayn walked into the caves where they were being held, and saw the same old fierce, determined, devoted faces. People who had faith in what they fought for.

He also noticed, with some satisfaction, how the wretched prisoners looked aghast at the sight of an Ordinal. They knew this was the end of the line, and their pathetic beliefs could no longer protect them.

“I am Ordinal Shieda Kayn,” he told them. “You understand the authority I represent. I understand you have refused to answer the questions set to you.”

They cowered. He noted at least six alien species represented in their numbers. Who to pick? The skoldoi, perhaps? They were fragile creatures.

“You seem to have no fear of slingtroopers, who nevertheless outgun you, round you up, and put you in chains,” he continued. “I think that’s sad, because the experience should have demonstrated that you have no option but to comply. You will answer my questions.”

“We will tell you nothing,” snarled a large korobak.

“No?” asked Kayn. “And why is that?”

“Because what we know is not fit for the likes of you.”

Several others murmured in agreement. The korobak then, perhaps, Kayn mused. He was the biggest, the ringleader. Make an example of him, and the rest would fall into line.

No. Too easy.

Kayn smiled. “You just answered a question, korobak.”

“I…”

“I asked a question, and you answered it,” Kayn went on. “It wasn’t too difficult, was it? So it’s not questions generally you have an issue with? Just specific ones.”

“I won’t play your games, you klag,” snapped the korobak.

“Yet you expect me to play yours. I think something has to give here, sir, and I believe you’re in no position to dictate terms. So let’s begin. I want names. A list of your contacts and associates in the edgeworlds. The two Templars who led you here. The people they had dealings with before you all came to Ionan.”

The prisoner looked away.

“Let’s start with the first name,” Kayn said.

“We were not led here,” the korobak muttered. “I’ll give you nothing.”

“The first name, please.”

The creature would only glare at the cave floor. Kayn unclasped his holster and drew his photann pistol. Its long, chrome form glinted in the ruddy, twilight gloom. He thumbed the activator, and there was a whine as the cell rose to a discharge level.

“The first name,” Kayn said more forcefully.

The prisoner shook his head.

Kayn slowly raised the pistol and aimed it at the kneeling korobak’s forehead. Several of the others murmured in fear. “The first name,” he repeated.

“Shoot me if you want,” said the korobak, still glaring at the floor. “That’s the imperialist mentality. Threaten us. Brutalize us. So shoot me. Then you’ll definitely get nothing. I will pass through the Ora Gate with the blessing of all Templars, and the satisfaction of knowing you have been defied.”

“Yes,” said Kayn, “I’m sure you would. But that’s not exactly how the game works.”

He switched aim. Now the photann gun was pointing at the girl beside the korobak. She was an odd one, wide-eyed and solemn. Unlike the others, she chose to look directly at Kayn and his gun.

“Give me the first name, korobak, or it won’t be you passing through the gate to the hereafter. You’ll still be here, very alive, not blessed or satisfied at all, with her brains on your clothes.”

The korobak looked sharply at the girl, his eyes bulging in concern. “You wouldn’t,” he hissed.

“Oh, I would,” said Kayn. “I will. One by one, as many of you as it takes, until I have my list of names, and answers to all the other questions I have. It’s a very simple game. It really depends on how many dead bodies it takes for you to understand that answers are less important than lives. One? Three? Fifteen? A hundred?”

“How could you be so cruel to—”

“This is my job. I don’t like it. You think I enjoy killing people over something as simple as a question? You, and you alone, are making this necessary. You’re leaving me no choice. In fact, I don’t know how you could be that cruel. This poor girl doesn’t deserve to get her head vaporized, just because you’re slow to answer.”

The korobak swallowed hard. “I… I will not… betray…”

“Well, I suppose I admire a person with principles,” Kayn sighed. “Principles are magnificent, especially when you’re not the one dying for them.”

He looked at the girl. Her eyes were so huge, but there was oddly no fear in them. He’d never seen anyone quite so calm. It was unnerving. He felt he wanted to question her—her in particular—and learn all she knew.

But his intent was set now. He’d chosen her as the example. Backing down would be weakness, and that would simply bolster the resolve of the rest.

Still…

“You know, you can make up for your friend’s lack of cooperation,” he said directly to the girl. “I’ll give you that much. You speak. The first name. Show this fool how bloodshed can be avoided, and I’ll be lenient.”

She stared back at him, silently.

“Quickly,” Kayn said. “The first name. I don’t give such chances very often.”

“Sona can tell you nothing!” the korobak snapped, almost sobbing.

“Oh, I’m sure she can,” replied Kayn, staring into the girl’s eyes. “I’m sure she’s dying to. Sona? That’s your name? Sona, it’s very easy. One word. One name. That’s where we start. The first name.”

The girl made no response. Kayn felt his annoyance growing into outright anger, but he didn’t let it show. He’d been restrained, and given her a chance, and now she was making him look like an idiot. No one did that.

“Sona, you disappoint me,” Kayn said, and pulled the trigger.

The blastwave tore through the cave.

It took Kayn a moment to clamber back to his feet. Dust was fuming down the tunnel from outside, debris skittering from the ceiling. The concussion had lifted him off his feet, and his shot had gone wide, missing the girl’s head.

Two more loud blasts echoed from outside.

“Move it! Move!” Nakuri yelled. The slingtroopers, some of whom had been thrown aside too, scrambled toward the exit. The prisoners cowered in terror.

All except the girl.

“Keep watch on them!” Kayn yelled to Solipas. He ran for the exit, reaching the light in time to see the small fightship making its third pass. One of Nakuri’s carrier transports was already a burning mass of buckled metal. The fightship, a matt green dart, blinked in low over the plateau, and discharged its heavy cannons. Blades of light slashed down from the photann-annihilator pods, and the second carrier blew up, its bulk lifting on a column of fire that shredded it, flipped it and brought it down hard, crushing Kayn’s little DEMAX-3.

Nakuri was shouting commands, and his slingtroopers were forming a line around the cave mouth, weapons rigs engaged to fill the sky with a hail of fire.

“Wait!” Kayn shouted.

“What?” asked Nakuri.

“Hold fire. If they wanted us dead, they would’ve leveled the mountain. They want our attention.”

“Hold fire!” Nakuri ordered.

“Contact our ships,” Kayn told him. “Tell them to remain in standoff. No stupid attempts at rescue or relief.”

“You’re playing with fire, old friend.”

“Always. Now do it!”

Kayn heard Nakuri activate his interface. He walked forward. Black smoke was blowing horizontally off the mass of burning ship wreckage. Heat haze at ground level made the smoke ripple and twist. He could feel the warmth on his face.

“Come on,” he murmured. “Get on with it. Come on…”

The green fightship reappeared. It came up over the edge of the plateau at a stall-speed hover, its nacelles down-blasting to give it lift. Sunlight flashed off the tinted canopy. It edged through the churning smoke towards them. A second one appeared, gray, coming in from the left.

Then a third. This one was red, and came into view moving down the plateau’s centerline, directly towards them.

The three ships stopped at a low hover twenty meters away. “Ah, klag,” said Nakuri. “Syndicate.”

“Yes,” replied Kayn. He had recognized at once the hybrid, custom-fitted style of the aggressor craft: black market weapon systems, some illegal, some alien, disproportionately large compared to the small hulls they had been grafted to. The ships themselves were ex-imperial tech, old models undoubtedly salvaged from junkworlds, retrofitted by the Syndicate’s ingenious weaponeers.

The red ship, the largest, carried a pod on its belly. A masking field generator. More contraband. The soft return hadn’t been from one ship. It had been a vague sensor ghost generated by these three, moving in tight formation inside the mask field. No wonder there had been no hard data on mass or density—they’d made themselves fluid, probably in a tumble trajectory, and no doubt had split and separated as soon as they hit the atmosphere.

Clever, Kayn thought. Typical criminal activity, the kind that regularly got past smuggling blockades and interdiction fleets.

The red ship moved forward a little. Its tinted canopy popped and opened.

“I can take this klagger’s head off,” advised Nakuri.

“Let me talk,” Kayn replied. “But get all your troopers to lock now. When we take them down, it’s got to be instant, or they’ll cremate this whole area.”

Nakuri nodded. Kayn left the shadows, slithered down the slope and walked into the hard sunlight of the plateau top. Head high, he strode across the dust towards the lead machine.

“You have business here?” he called out.

The red fightship’s cockpit was a two-seat. A visored pilot occupied the front, staring down at Kayn through the gunsights. A figure stood up in the back seat and took off his respirator mask. “I do,” he said. “Didn’t think I’d be doing it with an Ordinal, but every day is new and exciting, right?”

It was Zago. Corun Zago. One of the chief players in Syndicate activities on the galactic edge.

Kayn’s interface identified him instantly by face and voice recognition, but Kayn knew him anyway. All Demaxian officers knew Zago’s face from a hundred thousand bounty postings. He’d remained alive and at liberty for a long time, because he so seldom showed up in person.

So what was so important about today?

“I’m honored, Zago,” said Kayn. “Seeing you face-to-face.”

Zago grinned. “Oh, the honor’s mine, Shieda Kayn. Heard so much about you.”

“Lot of damage to imperial equipment there,” said Kayn, gesturing to the burning wrecks.

“Just wanted to be emphatic.”

“You were successful. What’s the business, here? I take it you wanted the Templars and their followers? Some prearranged deal?”

Zago looked genuinely surprised. “Templars? What the klag do I want with Templars?”

“You hadn’t agreed to meet them here?”

“No, sir. Nothing to do with me.”

“What, then?”

“Same reason as you, I guess,” said Zago. “I mean, it’s not every day an Ordinal slings out to an edgeworld either. I take it it’s here?”

“It is,” said Kayn, calmly lying to cover his lack of knowledge. “How did you hear about it?”

Zago looked thoughtful. “The same way you did. I guess.”

Kayn was getting an odd read from the man. Corun Zago was infamously confident and full of swagger, but he seemed troubled. Uneasy.

“Well, I just…” Kayn shrugged, mirroring the man’s awkwardness. “You know.”

“I do,” Zago nodded, earnest. “Strangest thing, eh? It calling out like that. Like a voice in the stars. I just knew… I knew I had to come get it. Knew it had to be mine. With respect, Ordinal, you won’t stop me having it. Hand it over or stand aside, whatever. I’m taking it. Resist and… Well, we’ll cook the lot of you, snatch it, and be masked and gone before your capital ships can get within sniffing distance.”

“I have no doubt.”

This didn’t make any sense. Zago was dangerous, but not insane. His three fightships had Kayn’s small ground forces outclassed, but the Gentle Reminder and the Fractal Shear were the sort of Locus Armada vessels that Syndicate forces would go out of their way to avoid.

And Corun Zago had come in person. This wasn’t the typical bravura Kayn had read about. This was something else. A compulsion. Obsessive.

That made him vulnerable.

Kayn took a long, slow breath. Time to clear his mind. Time to do the sort of work that had made him an Ordinal.

“Well, you’ve got us tight, my good man,” he said, opening his arms in an elegant coreworld flourish—a ritual gesture that anyone would recognize as a formal submission. Then he turned that into the full bow of surrender, dropping to one knee, shoulders forward, his arms by his sides. His right hand braced the ornate lance at his side at a forty-five degree angle, base in the dirt, blade upwards, the angle of military honor. “We must give way to you, in these circumstances.”

Kayn could feel the prickle of the heat, smell the billowing smoke. He could feel Corun Zago’s gaze on him, perhaps surprised at the ease of his triumph.

Kayn was a strong man. His basic biology had been finessed by acute training disciplines, and further enhanced by science. Like all Ordinals, he was a significantly amplified being.

He waited until Zago began to speak. Just the first syllable of the reply.

“You—”

Still kneeling, Kayn cast the lance. An underarm throw with his right arm. No wind-up, just a straight pitch, hurling the lance along the angle it was already pointing in. He didn’t even look up. He was still kneeling, and bowing.

Propelled by the strength of his arm, the lance struck the underside of the hovering red fightship just in front of the mask array pod. The broad blade-head punctured the ship’s skin, and the lance kept going, through the condensers and attitude management systems contained in the belly. Through them, through the floor of the cockpit, through the base of the pilot’s flightseat, and on through Corun Zago.

When it came to rest, it was impaling the hovering ship like a meat skewer, the end of the haft poking from the underside, the head transfixing Zago, and emerging through his back.

He was pinned, upright, against his high-backed seat. There was a look of surprise on his very dead face.

Abruptly, everything was in motion. The red fightship began to wallow violently, its internal systems torn and ruptured. Its engines howled with uncorrected pressure. The Syndicate pilots took a moment to react—just a second while they processed what had happened.

And then it was too late. Nakuri had been waiting. The instant he saw Kayn hurl the lance, he had given the signal, his slingtroopers opening fire in perfect unison. Gunrigs kicked off, screaming streams of photann fire at the gray and green fightships. The first simply came apart where it was hovering, utterly disintegrated by the sustained, heavy fusillade. Its drive core exploded, and the fireball threw fragments of pockmarked, distorted hull in all directions.

Turning his kneeling crouch into an upward spring, Kayn leapt. The wildly wallowing red ship had almost lurched low enough to clip his head off, and his leap cleared the starboard wing. The craft was almost spinning as the pilot fought to regain control. The port wingtip bounced off the ground and scattered a spray of pebbles. The hover thrust was kicking up dust like a desert storm.

Kayn landed on the lurching hull, and clawed his way toward the open cockpit. Zago was still pinned in place, staring into the distance, each jolt of the ship shaking him against the flightseat. The pilot was too busy fighting with the controls to do anything else.

Nakuri’s troopers were still hosing fire, but the green fightship was proving harder to kill. It had some kind of custom shield that soaked up the photann energy. Flecks of light stippled off the greasy haze around its prow. It screamed forward, seeking retribution. Its weapon pods opened up, stitching detonations across the dust toward the slingtrooper formation.

Before Nakuri could order an immediate scatter, two of his men were incinerated where they stood. The ship leveled up, and began to pick off the others as they fled. Ground fire, even from stalwart slingtroopers, only worked against aircraft when the aircraft were unprepared.

They had lost the advantage of surprise.

Kayn grabbed the fightship’s pilot with one hand, and threw him from the cockpit. The man cried in surprise as he bounced off the dipping wing, and plunged to the ground below.

Gripping the canopy frame, Kayn dropped into the pilot position. His interface told him the stabilizer controls were utterly ruined—the lance had speared the guts of several principal systems. He made lightning-fast adjustments, compensating for overthrust and one nacelle port that had flamed out altogether. He slammed the red ship around with the cockpit still open, and limped it forward, accelerating at extremely low level, just kissing the ground.

The green fightship was strafing the slopes. Kayn could see it extending its main weapon pods to level the whole mountainside. Hauling on the stick, he activated the red ship’s fire control, armed the main battery, and locked the green fightship ahead of him.

He opened up with the primary photann array. The force of the unleashed fire rocked the destabilized craft so hard, it swung drunkenly out of true, and the last blaze of shots went wide, snaking off like lumo-tracers into the sky beyond the mountains.

But the first part of the barrage had been dead-on. The green fightship lost its rear end, and then one nacelle. Its pilot tried to steady it, but the whole thing was coming to pieces in the air, shredding from the tail forward. It began to lift, trailing a huge plume of fire and debris. Then, abruptly, as if the effort was too great, it plunged like a rock, and impacted nose first.

The detonation raised a shockwave across the sands, throwing out a large crater of heat-fused dirt.

Kayn struggled to keep his commandeered fightship airborne. Multiple fail warnings screamed from the control board. He cut power incrementally, nursing it down. The red ship hit the dust, bounced, and then slid, digging in with one lolling wing.

He killed all power. Grit was still pattering off the front screen and hull. He lifted himself out of the seat, took one last glance at Zago’s dismayed expression, and jumped back down to the ground.

As he walked away, something caught inside the hull, and fire began to flare out. By the time he reached Nakuri, the red fightship had become a blazing funeral pyre for the man skewered in its heart.

Nakuri was gathering his troops. He looked at Kayn with a mix of shock and admiration. “You’re a crazy fool,” he said flatly.

“I disagree,” Kayn replied. “But I think it’s long past time I saw what this whole mess was about.”

Beyond the caves where the prisoners were being held, there was a hole in the world. It was a rough shaft, thirty meters across, which cut straight down vertically for hundreds more.

Kayn stood at the lip, and looked down. The rock had been cut by… something, excised on a huge scale. Even the main batteries of an Armada sling-ship couldn’t have removed a slice of the planet so cleanly.

And just where was the removed mass? Had it been annihilated?

“Down there,” said Nakuri.

Kayn had begun to clamber down anyway, following the ragged contours of the shaft’s inner wall. Up close, it looked like heat had done this work. The exposed rock was glossy pink, and gleamed like a polished gemstone. But there was also a thick layer of dust on all the upper surfaces. This excision had been made a while ago, perhaps even thousands of years. Quite without warning, Kayn had the sudden impression of a red-hot metal ingot being dropped onto a glacier, melting its way swiftly downward, leaving a borehole with gleaming walls of refrozen ice…

But what could do that to rock?

He scanned for forensic traces via his interface as he made his descent. Coming down behind him, Nakuri clearly heard Kayn’s gasp of surprise.

“I know, right?” he said.

“Are these readings correct?” Kayn murmured.

“They seem to be.”

“This isn’t… here,” said Kayn, making his interface re-work the scan.

“No, it’s not.”

“It’s as if…” There was no easy way for Kayn to describe it. The quantum traces were bizarre. It was as though a piece of another reality, another spatial dimension altogether, had intersected briefly with this mountain on Ionan, negated it utterly, and left this void behind like an empty wound.

A wound that crackled with a residue of the otherness that had made it.

“You see now why I wanted an Ordinal on this?” asked Nakuri.

Kayn didn’t reply. He was speculating. Was this the result of an interspatial collision? Some quantum anomaly? Deliberate or accidental? Those phenomena were only theoretical, or the rare and catastrophic results of sling-drive failures. This could be evidentiary proof of the Multiversal Proposition…

Nakuri had done the right thing. This was Ordinal business, and Kayn’s already high standing would be greatly boosted by it. A ground-breaking discovery. It would make him the most famous man in the Demaxian Empire. Indeed, it was the sort of thing that could propel a man to the very top.

Kayn paused. He was shocked that he was thinking that way. There was work to be done here, an Ordinal’s duty. Assess, analyze, reflect, gather up everything for the good of the empire. Secure this discovery in the name of…

A new thought entered his mind, a burning thought that also disturbed him. He knew he should be consulting with Nakuri, planning the process of investigation.

But he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep it for himself. He didn’t want anyone in here, not even Nakuri. No one else was worthy—

Kayn caught himself again. It was no wonder that others had come here. The Syndicate, the Templars. This was an astonishing prize. Except…

“…how did they know?” Kayn asked.

“What?”

“I came here because you called me. You came because you were chasing the Templars. What brought the Templars here?”

“They’d heard about it too…?” Nakuri ventured.

“From who?”

“They deal in secrets, forbidden lore, all that nonsense. Maybe some legend or myth or… I don’t know, a treasure map?”

That rang false to Kayn. If anyone, anyone, at any point in time had found this, they would have used it. Used the data, the information it presented. It would have become a holy site, a shrine, or it would have gathered a culture around it, or made a man into an emperor… or been the cornerstone of a new empire altogether.

No. No one knew about this. The Templars had come here… instinctively.

“And the Syndicate?” he asked Nakuri.

“What about them?”

Zago knew, Kayn thought. That filthy opportunist hadn’t even been aware of the Templars’ presence. This was what he’d come for, and he’d come obsessively, risking everything—even a confrontation with superior imperial forces.

And he’d come because something had called him. Called out to him, across the gulf of space.

Kayn’s skin felt clammy. He skidded down the last few meters, his unease growing. There was something at the bottom of the pit. Something that looked as if it was fused into the bedrock.

“What the…”

“We think that’s what did it,” said Nakuri. “Like it fell here, and made the hole.”

His voice trailed off.

“Have you touched it?” Kayn asked.

“No, sir. None of us. None of us dared.”

Kayn crouched down. The object lay like a dark fossil embedded in the pale matrix of rock suspending it—like the bones of something impossibly ancient, now exposed to the light. He could make out a long, beautifully fashioned handle, slightly curved. A huge blade head. Handle and blade were both forged from some dark metal his interface couldn’t identify, and apparently proportioned for humanoid hands.

A scythe. A war weapon. A masterpiece that matched no known cultural template.

Kayn wondered how something could be so beautiful and yet so ugly at the same time.

He heard a low chuckle. “What?” he asked, looking at Nakuri.

“I didn’t say anything,” Nakuri replied.

Kayn tried his interface, but the signal was dead.

“We’re too deep,” said Nakuri. “Something down here is blocking communications.”

“Go back up,” said Kayn. “Signal the Fractal Shear. I want a science team assembled, with full monitor instruments. Get them down here in two hours. We’re going to take this place apart, piece by piece, and extract every last scrap of information.”

Nakuri nodded, but didn’t leave. “You’ve changed,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Now you’re an Ordinal. The tone of your—”

Kayn scoffed. “I don’t have time for this,” he said.

“That grandstanding against the Syndicate, what was that? I lost four men. Four men who didn’t need to die. Just so you could show off.”

“It was a delicate situation.”

“We could have called in the main ships. Just wiped them out. But, you had to play your show-off games. Sir.”

“We got the result I needed,” said Kayn.

“Four men dead.”

“Commander. Go and signal the ship. I will not ask you again.”

Nakuri faltered. “I brought you here because… Gods, I brought you here because I knew this wasn’t for me. Above my pay grade. I thought of you. That you’d know what to do. That you’d be worthy of it.”

“Worthy of it?”

“Of this prize! I mean, who am I? I’m not. Not worthy of…” He looked at Kayn. “But I thought you were. I thought I was doing my duty to the empire, and my friend. But I see you now. What you’re like. What you’ve become.”

Kill him for that.

Kayn looked around. Someone had spoken.

“Are we alone?” he whispered.

“What?” asked Nakuri, exasperated.

“Commander, did you post any guards down here?”

“No.”

“Then who just spoke?”

“No one spoke!” Nakuri snapped. “What’s wrong with you? I don’t know who you are any more!”

“Go and signal the ship. Now. Then come back and tell me you’ve done it.”

Nakuri glared at him, then turned and clambered away. Kayn remained crouched over the embedded weapon.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” he asked.

You know it was. I call. Some hear. Some come. I’m only interested in the worthy ones.

“People keep using that word. Who’s worthy? And of what?”

Of me. I’ll know who’s worthy when they prove themselves. Maybe it’s you.

“I don’t know what you are.”

You don’t have to. I just need to know you. I’ll keep calling until I’ve found the one. Then I’ll stop, because I won’t need to call anymore.

“I’m an Ordinal of—”

I care little what you are. What interests me is who you are. Your ambitions. Your dreams. What you’re capable of. How you think about the cosmos. How you think the cosmos should work.

“I told you I’m an Ordinal, because that’s what matters,” said Kayn sharply. “I have a job to do. A duty.”

A duty you resent. A duty you find increasingly frustrating. Following a man you think is growing weak. Pledging to a cause you think is overcautious. Frustrated, day after day, that no one shares your clarity of thought. That no one dares to act the way you want to act. That no one has the strength.

“My duty is to secure this site for the Demaxian Empire. I don’t believe I’m actually having a conversation with some antique weapon. I believe I am being exposed to quantum variance. This is my mind, playing tricks.”

So I’m a hallucination now, am I?

“This site is an anomaly of great scientific value. You’re the principal artifact within it. I am… I am imagining voices because of the exotic trace energies in this location, and—”

Nakuri’s been gone a long time, wouldn’t you say?

Kayn rose. He checked his interface’s chronometer. Nakuri had been gone for nearly an hour. An hour? How had so much time passed…?

Time is another illusion you can soon dispense with.

“If I’m worthy?” Kayn spat. He turned, and began the climb back to the surface.

He ignored the chuckle that came after him.

There was no sign of anyone.

“Nakuri?”

The communication link was empty. Something must have happened. More Syndicate? More of Zago’s men? Surely Kayn would have heard shooting.

He drew his pistol, and stalked forward.

The prisoners were still in their cave, silent and terrified. They blinked at him as he entered. “Where are your guards?” he asked. No one answered.

He crossed to the girl, Sona, and lifted her to her feet.

“I’ve seen what drew you here. I’ve seen it. Tell me about it.”

She didn’t answer.

“Sona,” he said, “you need to speak. Now.”

She stared at him. He tightened his grip on the pistol.

Don’t waste her. She’s far too valuable. Haven’t you figured that out yet? You’ll need her.

Kayn pushed the girl back down. He walked to the mouth of the cave.

The slingtrooper’s blade nearly took his head off. Kayn ducked and let the sword strike rock. Two shots from his pistol took the trooper down, his body sliding down the wall and onto the ground.

Rigo. One of Nakuri’s. A good man.

None of them are good enough, though. Are you?

They came at him from all sides. Photann blasts lit the rocky hallway. He returned fire, dropped two more, then had to spin-kick to drive off another. The trooper staggered away, clutching his splintered visor. Kayn tore the glaive out of his hand, then cut him in half with it.

He wheeled. An up-strike with the glaive’s haft knocked another trooper onto his back. Reverse. The butt-end driving into the belly of man lunging from behind him. Spin. The blade slicing home.

Someone shot at him. Photann shots. Block, block, block. The glaive was whirling in his hands, its coated titanium absorbing the power and deflecting the shots away.

“What the klag is this?” he bellowed.

“You don’t deserve it!” a voice yelled back. “It shouldn’t be for you!”

It was Nakuri.

Kayn plunged forward. He kicked the legs out from under a charging slingtrooper, then pinned him to the ground.

Vechid slammed into them both from the side. The squad leader was all armored bulk and augmented strength. She swung a fist. Kayn tried to block, but her charged gauntlet snapped the glaive’s haft. Kayn snarled, spun back to evade the next swing, then plunged the broken ends of the weapon into Vechid’s chest.

Speeks came at him. Kayn killed him with a beak-fist to the nasal bone.

“Stand your men down, Nakuri!” he yelled, moving towards the light of the tunnel mouth. “This is lunacy!”

This is the test.

“Nakuri! We’re being toyed with! This isn’t you!”

“Oh, but it is!” A voice echoed back. “This is me, the real me! Me for the first time! I see it all now! How it should be!”

“Nakuri!”

Armored fists closed around his throat from behind, and Kayn started to choke as they throttled him.

“Nakuri’s right,” he heard Solipas say. “You’re just some jumped-up fool, Kayn! So pleased with your klagging self! It shouldn’t belong to you! You don’t deserve it!”

Kayn flexed, and threw Solipas right over him. The man landed hard.

“Who then?” he asked. “You?”

“Obviously!” Solipas was springing up, ripping out a blade. “It’s chosen me! It says I’m the one! I heard it say so!”

There was a photann flash, and Solipas’s head was vaporized. His body crumpled.

“That’s a lie!” stammered Korla, edging forward. His eyes were wide. His pistol was still aimed at Solipas. “Me! It called my name!”

“We’re all being played with,” said Kayn.

Korla snapped around, aiming his gun at the Ordinal.

“All of us, Korla. All of us. It’s in our heads. It’s making us do this.”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t lie,” said Korla. “Not to me!”

“We don’t know what it does. Put the gun down.”

Korla growled. “I know what it does. It makes you what you should be. I see that, clear as day. It claims you. Makes you… perfect. Makes you see sense. Makes you know who you can trust. Who needs to live or die.”

“That’s not right,” Kayn said.

“It is! It told me! It told me I was the one!”

He fired, but Kayn was already moving. The blast scorched his hip, just as he came in under Korla’s extended arm, and broke it.

Korla dropped to his knees, clutching his elbow. Kayn snatched the pistol away.

“It told me,” the trooper whimpered.

Kayn went to walk past him, but he grabbed at Kayn’s leg. Kayn put him out of his misery with a single shot.

He reached the cave mouth. “Nakuri?”

Nakuri was waiting for him, lance in hand.

“I admit,” the commander said, “I made a terrible mistake. Calling you. You? That was an error. I just wasn’t confident enough. Didn’t think I could handle it. That I could… That I could do it.”

“Do what?”

“Be what it needed. But I can. I see that now. It doesn’t need the likes of you. You won’t do it justice. But a veteran like me? Well, that’s a different story—I’ll be everything it ever wanted.”

“Nakuri,” said Kayn. “Toss the lance. Back off. You’re out of your mind.”

“It told me you’d say that.”

“We are all being influenced by interspatial—”

“No! No, we’re not! This only started when you arrived. I’ve been here for days!”

“That’s because I’m the one it wants,” said Kayn. “It was waiting for me. Now it’s testing me.”

“Testing you?”

“To see if I’m ruthless enough for its needs. And you… Nakuri, you’re my friend. It’s using you. Toss the lance. We can secure this entire—”

“No! It’s testing me. You’re not what it wants. You’re nothing. We’re not friends. Gods, you think we were ever friends? And you think you’re the special one? The chosen one? The worthy one? That’s just like you. So klagging arrogant! So full of your own importance!”

Nakuri took a step forward. Kayn fired, again and again, but the spinning staff spat the shots away, deflecting them into the cave walls. Two more steps, and the whirling blade cleaved the barrel off the photann pistol.

Kayn back-flipped away. The blade kissed the ground where he had been standing. He threw himself into Nakuri, delivering a gut-punch, then a blow to the neck. Nakuri staggered backwards, before Kayn’s spin-kick broke his jaw, and dropped him.

“If… not me…” Nakuri bubbled, broken, “…not you either. Others… are coming…”

“Others? Just hold still. I need to get you a medivac.”

Kill him.

“Shut up.”

Prove what you are. Kill him.

“Shut. Up.”

Kayn walked clear of the cave, and into the sunlight.

You’re running out of time. Make your choice.

He could see the Gentle Reminder. Nakuri had called it in after all. It was on low approach from the west, six kilometers distant, filling the sky, skimming the mountains.

Immense. Gun ports opening for surface decimation. A whole warship full of men and women, all of them answering the call. Men and women who thought they were worthy. Men and women who had each been told that, by the same voice.

Kayn opened his communication link.

“Fractal Shear, give me Captain Vassur.”

“Speaking, sir.”

“We have a situation, captain. Priority one. A mutiny. Lock the Gentle Reminder immediately.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. Lock and fire. Full batteries.”

“Sir, she’s one of ours—”

“Do as I tell you immediately, or you’ll be letting an Ordinal die. Lock and fire. Priority one. Mutiny situation.”

“Yes, sir. We’re on approach. Engines engaged. We’ll be in firing range in eight minutes.”

Too slow. Nakuri’s ship will obliterate you long before that.

“And you,” Kayn muttered.

I’ll survive. I’ll wait. I’ll call again and see who comes next time. Unless you are worthy…

“Once you’re claimed, the call stops?”

That’s what I told you.

Kayn turned and ran back into the cave system. The Gentle Reminder was so close. How long did he have? Three minutes?

He reached the shaft and hurried down between the gleaming pink ledges. Twice, he almost fell. Stones skittered out under his feet. He jumped the last of the way.

The scythe was where he had left it.

Change of heart? Time to reflect?

“Shut up,” Kayn said, and grabbed it.

It took him a second to pull it free. As it came into his grasp, he saw it blink. An eye opened at the base of the blade, a pink fire that burned his retinas and gazed into his heart, like—

He saw silence. He saw the vast well of time. He saw a moment stretched into an eternity. He saw lingering stillness and glacial quiet. He saw dark stars and black suns frozen in a void of endless shadow. He saw monstrous, silent deities lurking in a corrupted cosmos.

He heard a name, breathed like a sigh.

Rhaast.

And he knew it was his name now, too.

“The emperor will demand a report,” said Captain Vassur, nervously. “A detailed report. I… I’m not sure what to say…”

Kayn looked up from his window seat. The rasping light of slingspace beyond the window ports cast strange shadows in the chamber around them.

“I’m compiling it now, captain. It will be full and frank. But confidential. The mutiny on Ionan, and the subsequent destruction of the Gentle Reminder, must be kept quiet. For reasons of morale. I am sure you understand.”

“Yes, sir,” said Vassur.

“Anything else?”

Vassur shook her head. “We are en route back to the Locus Armada as ordered. Maximum slingspeed.”

“And the prisoners?”

“Secure. Ready for transport to detention and interrogation as soon as we arrive. I’m sure we can get a lot out of them. Useful information on covert Templar activity across the sector.”

“Take particular care of the girl,” Kayn replied. “The one named Sona. I will deal with her personally. She is, I believe, especially valuable.”

“Yes, sir,” said Vassur. The captain saluted and left Kayn’s quarters.

What will you tell them?

“What I want to tell them.”

Good.

“What will you tell me?”

Everything.

“Good. What do you want?”

Well, perhaps I won’t tell you that… No, I will. Trust is the essential foundation of any relationship, Kayn, and I want—

Kayn flung himself to the side. Even by the standards of his agility, he was a blur. No longer anything that might be described as human.

Keelo’s axe splintered through the empty window seat.

The scythe flashed. The severed halves of the old, battered fightmek crashed to the deck and lay there, sparking and twitching, as the light in his optics died.

“Surprise…” said Kayn.

Quinn ran through the forest, moving softly and swiftly. It was past dawn, though the sun had not yet risen over the mountain peaks to the east. The light was cold and pale, casting everything in shades of gray. Quinn fogged the air with every measured breath.

There were no paths through the untamed woodlands that spread like a blanket across the foothills of the Eastweald Mountains. Ferns and ivy concealed moss-slick rocks, rotting logs, and wild tangles of roots, but Quinn was more at home here than she was in any city or town, and was not slowed by the rough terrain. Despite her speed, there were only a handful of rangers in Demacia—all of them trained by Quinn herself—who would have had any hope of tracking her, so light was her step.

She caught a flicker of movement to her right, and dropped into the undergrowth, instantly motionless. Her eyes were golden, unblinking, and intense, missing nothing.

For ten breaths she remained still, all but invisible among the brush. She glimpsed movement again, and tensed... until she saw it was a greathorn stag. Big one, too, with a rack of antlers easily two arm spans across. Already its fur was starting to change, turning pale and silvery in anticipation of the rapidly approaching winter.

Some said that encountering a greathorn was a good omen. Quinn was not sure that was true, but she’d take it. These days, Demacia needed as many good omens as it could get.

In recent months, Quinn had been helping the Eleventh Battalion hunt rebellious mages—emboldened by the king’s murderer, Sylas of Dregbourne—through the wildlands of northern Demacia. Her rangers were too few, however, and the Eleventh’s strength did not lie in chasing an enemy that didn’t stand and fight. There had been running battles and skirmishes, but it was like trying to grasp smoke.

Quinn had lost three rangers in the last weeks, and their deaths weighed heavily upon her. Thus, it did not sit well with her that she had been ordered away from the hunt for rebel mages, and tasked with escorting Garen Crownguard and a detachment of the Dauntless Vanguard on some diplomatic mission beyond Demacia’s borders. She was due to meet up with them three days hence, on the south side of the Greenfang Mountains.

It hardly seemed the time for such an exercise, and Quinn would much rather have reassigned this mission to one of the others in her command—Elmheart, perhaps. However, the writ of order, delivered by swiftwing, had named Quinn specifically.

And the seal of High Marshal Tianna Crownguard brooked no argument.

She watched the giant stag a moment longer before pushing herself back to her feet. The greathorn saw her now. It held its ground, unafraid.

“Honor and respect, noble one,” she said, with a nod.

It was a long way to the Greenfang Mountains, but the skies were clear. She was confident she would get to the rendezvous point ahead of schedule.

The sun had finally climbed over the peaks, with golden light filtering through the canopy and dappling the forest floor, when the wind changed. It carried a distant, familiar scent.

Smoke.

A keening cry cut through the morning air. Quinn glimpsed Valor above the canopy, through the branches of the immense firs.

“What do you see up there, little brother?” she breathed.

The azurite eagle circled twice, then struck eastward like a blazing blue arrow loosed toward the rising sun. Without pause, Quinn turned and followed.

A short time later, she stood atop a ridge, where a rare break in the trees revealed a valley below. It was partly cleared, and scattered livestock could be seen in dry-stone partitioned fields. Under other circumstances it would have been a peaceful, picturesque view, but Quinn’s gaze was drawn to the smoke rising from the dark shape of a cabin. Her expression hardened.

She began picking her way down the steep incline, descending into the valley.

Quinn warily circled the smoking cabin. She’d known bandits to light fires like this to lure unsuspecting targets, and so she would not approach until she was certain it was not a trap.

She had her repeater crossbow in hand, bolts loaded. It was a one-of-a-kind weapon, lovingly crafted. It was nowhere near as powerful as a traditional heavy crossbow, but she could wield it one-handed, on the move, and without the need to reload after each shot, which made it worth ten times its weight in gold to Quinn.

She frowned as she came across a series of tracks on the ground. There’d been a lot of activity around this cabin in the last day or so, but it seemed she was alone here now. Quinn approached cautiously, crossbow at the ready.

The cabin was a humble abode, but had been built with obvious care. She pushed open the heavy front door—still smoldering, and hanging off its hinges—and stepped over the threshold.

A simple ceramic vase stood upon a fire-blackened hardwood table, holding a handful of wilted wildflowers. The remnants of hand-sewn curtains, mostly burned away, hung mournfully from window frames. Those curtains had been drawn shut, Quinn noted, and the surviving shutters pulled closed. The fire had started after dark.

On a solid oak door frame, Quinn noticed tiny notches carved into the wood. That brought a memory long forgotten, of Quinn’s parents doing something similar to record the growth of her and her brother.

This was not some rarely used hunting cabin—this was a family’s home.

Chairs and cabinets had been overturned and smashed. Drawers had been ripped open, and their contents strewn across the floor. Nothing of value remained. On the wall above the hearth, Quinn noted the sun-bleached outline of a shield.

As she turned, something in the ashes glinted in the sunlight streaming through a hole in the burned roof. Kneeling, she saw an object—a coin, perhaps?—wedged between the hearth and the blackened floorboards. Quinn holstered her crossbow, and used the tip of her hunting knife to pry it free. Likely, it had fallen down there, and been lost—she’d only seen it because the fire’s heat had twisted the floorboards out of shape.

Finally, it came loose, and Quinn saw it was a palm-sized silver shield that bore the winged sword emblem of Demacia. There were words engraved on its reverse: Malak Hornbridge, Third Battalion. Demacia honors your service.

It was a Shield of Remembrance, given to the families of soldiers who fell in the line of duty. Quinn had delivered more than a few of them to grieving spouses and parents herself.

Pocketing the medallion—it didn’t feel right to leave it amid this destruction—Quinn continued looking through the cabin. In what was clearly the family bedroom, which had escaped the worst of the fire, delicately woven garlands were strung across the rafters above the main bed.

In a corner, a smaller, child-sized bed had been overturned, and Quinn’s eyes narrowed as she knelt beside it. Charcoal markings were drawn onto the floorboards where the cot had once stood. The symbols were barbaric, of a sort not generally seen within Demacia. Bones and small pebbles were placed at intentional positions upon the runes, and she was careful not to disturb any of the lines. She had seen such runes before...

Valor’s piercing call sounded, high above, drawing Quinn away from the strange and unnerving display. Keeping low, she returned to the cabin’s main room, and pressed her back against a wall. With a quick, careful glance, she peered through one of the burned-out windows.

A cloaked and hooded man was approaching the front of the cabin, a rangy, pale gray hound loping along at his heels. The dog gave a low growl, but he silenced it with a word.

Moving soundlessly, Quinn repositioned herself in the shadow behind the smoldering front door. The man stepped inside, then froze, like a deer tensing as it feels an unseen predator’s eyes upon it.

“That you, boss?” he asked the seemingly empty room.

Quinn smiled. “What gave me away?”

The man turned, lowering his hood. He had the look of someone who spent most of his time outdoors, his face tanned and his short beard unruly. Just outside the threshold, the hound whined in excitement. “Don’t see many azurite eagles anymore,” he explained with a grin.

“True enough,” admitted Quinn.

“It’s good to see you, boss.”

Quinn knelt on the ground outside the cabin, ruffling the hound’s ears. It had been over a year since she had last seen the Greenfang warden, Dalin, and his faithful dog, Rigby.

The warden had given Quinn his assessment. He’d arrived at the cabin only an hour before her, and after a quick look around, had set out to speak to those living nearby.

“A woodsman saw a group moving through the trees last night, about half a mile up the valley,” said Dalin, pointing. “The moon was full, else he wouldn’t have seen them at all. Raiders, it looks like.”

“Setting a cabin on fire is not a good way to remain unseen,” observed Quinn. Rigby rolled onto his back, looking up at her with adoring, eager eyes.

“Perhaps they were more concerned about alerting anyone to their approach than remaining unseen afterwards? Or perhaps they lit the fire to draw attention to it, while they slipped off?” Dalin glanced over his shoulder. “Careful now—I think someone’s getting jealous.”

Valor was staring at her, unblinking, from a branch of a dead tree.

“Valor knows he’s my one true love,” she said, looking at the azurite eagle, her eyes smiling, even as she vigorously scratched the hound’s exposed belly. “Has there been much banditry in these parts of late?”

Dalin shook his head. “Been mercifully quiet, until this. The unrest spreading from the capital has got people nervous, but the sight of so many soldiers has driven most of the brigands into hiding. Small blessings, I guess. I hear you and yours have been busy, though, back west. Bad times.”

“Bad times,” agreed Quinn. Her jaw clenched, and she changed the subject. “A soldier’s widow and her child lived here. Anyone know where they are?”

The warden gave her a look, then shook his head with a laugh. “I shouldn’t be surprised you already figured that out,” he said. “The woman’s name is Asta. Her man died fighting mages when everything flared up in the Great City. She lives alone with her daughter.” He glanced back at the cabin, and sighed. “I didn’t see evidence of bloodshed when I looked around here earlier, but it doesn’t seem good.”

“No friends or family nearby who they could be with?”

“Seems not,” said Dalin. “The woman’s foreign-born. Keeps to herself. Her husband was from Lissus, back west. No family in these parts.”

“Foreign-born?”

“One of the independent nations to the east, apparently. No one seems to know exactly where.”

Quinn grunted and stood. She turned around on the spot, considering, then looked back toward the forest. She paced toward the tree line, studying the ground as she went.

“Here,” she said, coming to a halt. Dalin joined her, and she indicated a number of confusing, overlapping scuff marks. “They came out of the forest, and stopped here.”

Dalin dropped to his haunches, nodding. “At first I figured they were watching for the right moment to approach,” he said. “But then I saw these tracks here.”

Quinn circled around the tracks that Dalin indicated, careful not to let her own footsteps obscure them.

“A second set, lighter than the others,” she murmured. “Our widow and her child.”

“My guess is she confronted them—then they looted and burned her cabin.” Dalin’s eyes narrowed. “I couldn’t find the woman’s tracks returning to the house...”

“They don’t,” agreed Quinn, her expression grim. “Looks like they took her with them. Her and the child. See there? The little girl’s footsteps stop. Someone picked her up.”

She looked back at the cabin. “But these raiders didn’t approach the cabin, either. The ones who burned it approached from the other side. It’s possible the raiders split into two groups before their attack.”

Dalin folded his arms, thinking. “There’s something else,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s any truth in it, but it seems at least some folk ’round these parts believe the woman was... different. A mage.”

Quinn thought of the runes drawn onto the floor underneath the child’s cot. They seemed more like archaic superstition than sorcery... though she could not be certain. This was not her area of specialty.

“The local gossip is that the raiders were allies of Sylas,” continued Dalin, “and they came to collect one of their own. It could explain why it doesn’t look like there was a fight, but why burn the cabin?”

Quinn frowned. She was missing something, she was sure of it. “Could be retaliation,” she mused, “for her husband fighting against mages. Perhaps they were looking for some payback.”

“Killing him wasn’t enough?”

Quinn shrugged.

“Whatever the case, I’ll be going after them,” said Dalin. “They’re at least half a day ahead, but if they’re carrying the child, they’ll be slowed.”

Quinn glanced at the sun, judging the time and how far she still had to travel to rendezvous with Garen. It would be cutting it fine, but...

The woman, Asta, had been made a widow by the mage conflict, and it seemed likely she’d been abducted. Quinn could not in good conscience ignore that.

“I’ll come with you,” she declared. “There’s at least five of them, by my count. You’ll need help.”

“Mighty pleased you happened by, boss.”

“Let’s get going, then,” said Quinn. “And don’t call me boss.”

Technically, as a ranger-knight, Quinn was Dalin’s superior, but rigid hierarchy and honorifics had always made her uncomfortable.

“Whatever you say, boss,” Dalin said with a wry grin, knowing exactly how uncomfortable it made her. “C’mon, Rigby! Let’s move!”

Rigby loped alongside his master, tongue lolling seemingly of its own volition, while Valor sliced between the trees, flying low overhead.

The majestic azurite eagle streaked past the two running rangers, tucking his broad wings to avoid branches. In the blink of an eye, he was gone, disappearing into the distance. A few minutes later, Quinn and Dalin found him perched on a branch, waiting. The eagle watched impassively as they ran below him. Only when they were almost out of sight did he launch back into flight, zigzagging at blinding speed, once again shooting by them.

It wasn’t hard to follow the outlaws, particularly with Rigby chasing their scent. There were five of them with the widow, and they’d made no attempt to cover their trail, choosing speed over stealth. The rangers tracked them over a ridge to the north, into a neighboring valley of unbroken forest. The trail then cut due east, following an icy stream that writhed its way down from the mountains.

For hours, Quinn and Dalin ran, closing the distance. The land gradually rose as they climbed higher into the foothills. They didn’t speak, only pausing to check that they were still following the trail. Rigby happily bounded back and forth on these occasions, snuffling through the undergrowth, while Valor watched the dog aloofly.

When the sun was just past its zenith, Quinn stopped, kneeling in the soft loam beside a few boulders. Some moss had been scraped away from one, most likely by a careless boot. Quinn inspected it, and picked something off a flat rock, looking closely.

“They broke bread here,” she said. “I’d say it was only an hour ago. Maybe a little more.”

“We’re getting close,” said Dalin, sitting down and sucking in deep breaths. Rigby was taking the moment’s respite to lap from the nearby stream, while Valor watched. “We’ll overtake them by sundown.”

“Not fast enough,” said Quinn, balling her fists in frustration. “They’ll be over the border by then.”

“You think they’re trying to leave Demacia?”

Quinn shrugged. She pulled a hard trail biscuit from her pack, bit off half, and tossed the remainder to Dalin. He caught it deftly and nodded his thanks. The rations didn’t taste the best—in truth, Quinn could imagine sawdust had more flavor—but they’d sustain them. After a moment, she broke out a second biscuit, and launched it at Rigby. The pale dog snatched it out of the air, jaws snapping, devouring it instantly.

“It’s possible,” she said. “If they were just trying to hide, they’d have done better turning north. There are chasms and ravines up there that would take weeks to scour.”

Dalin chewed his tasteless biscuit thoughtfully. “The closest border crossing’s half a day’s march to the south, though,” he said. “And there’s no way they’d get through. The gates have been locked since the king’s murder. There’s nought but sheer cliffs and watchtowers this way.”

“Unless there’s another crossing we don’t know about,” said Quinn. She glanced down at the dog, now panting beside Dalin. “You think your master can keep up, Rigby, or should we ditch him?”

The hound looked at her quizzically, turning his head to the side.

Dalin snorted. “Funny,” he said. Then, with a groan, he pushed back to his feet.

A short time later, Quinn and Dalin stood on a bluff, overlooking a ravine. A massive rocky spire rose above the forest canopy in the distance.

“There,” said Dalin, pointing.

Climbing around the circumference of the spire was a group of people. It was hard to make out any details—at this distance, they looked like ants—but it was clear that they would reach the border before the rangers.

“If I can get in front of them, I can slow them,” said Quinn.

“The only way you’d be able to do that is if...” started Dalin, but his words trailed off as he saw Quinn staring at him, a half smile on her face.

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

Quinn soared through the air, borne aloft by Valor. The eagle’s bladelike talons were latched tightly around her shoulders, and she squinted against the biting wind as they sailed over the trees.

“Take us around to the north,” Quinn shouted as they approached the spire. She leaned her weight in that direction, and Valor obligingly angled their descent.

The raiders had circled around to the south of the spire and disappeared into the trees, but Quinn didn’t intend to follow their path directly. No, she needed to get in front if she was to slow them long enough for Dalin and Rigby to catch up. Two rangers against five were not great odds, but it was better than confronting them alone.

Valor continued to come down, and Quinn lifted her legs to avoid hitting the highest branches. The spire loomed before them, and Valor banked around its northern flank, gaining a little height as updrafts buoyed them. Then the rocky ground rose rapidly to meet them. Spying a likely place to land, Valor shifted their approach, and angled his wings back to slow their descent.

Two powerful beats of his wings, and Quinn’s feet touched down, ever so gently.

“Thank you, brother,” she breathed as Valor released his grip. Then she was running again, into the cover of the forest. The azurite eagle, unshackled by her weight, took to the air once more.

Quinn leaped over tangles of roots and burst through stands of ferns and hanging lichen. She ran along the length of a fallen tree, using it as a bridge to traverse a cascading waterfall, before bounding off it and charging up the rise on the other side.

This was not her usual, mile-eating pace that she could sustain for hours on end. This was a full sprint, and her heart was hammering in her chest. After racing up the hill, she hurled herself to the ground, concealed among the bracken. Elbowing herself to the edge of the rise, she peered down into the hollow bellow.

A lone figure appeared, bow in hand. It was a man, bearded and bedecked in furs. A bronze torc around an upper arm glinted in the dappled light filtering through the trees, and Quinn glimpsed swirling warpaint or tattoos on his pale flesh.

The ranger-knight instantly knew this was no Demacian rogue mage or bandit. This was no Demacian at all.

The raider paused, surveying the way ahead, and Quinn felt his gaze flit over her. She resisted the urge to crawl back, knowing the movement of the ferns would draw more attention than if she remained motionless.

Seemingly satisfied, the outsider lifted a hand and gestured forward before continuing on. Quinn stayed where she was, waiting as the rest of the group appeared. One of them had a gleaming Demacian shield strapped across his back. That was the shield that had been stolen from above the cabin’s hearth—a shield that had belonged to a noble soldier who’d fallen in battle. Seeing an outsider wearing it as a trophy filled her with a cold-burning anger.

It wasn’t hard to pick out the widow. While the others were bedecked in furs and leather, she was wearing a simple but elegant woolen dress, rolled up to free her legs. A fur shawl was wrapped around her shoulders, and she wore a pair of practical, tall boots. She looked exhausted, stumbling forward with her head down. With a breath of relief, Quinn saw the child, a toddler with a mass of golden curls, asleep in the thick arms of one of the marauders.

The ranger-knight watched them for a moment longer, then crawled slowly backward, a plan formulating in her mind. She knew where they were going, for she’d been here before, years earlier.

In her youth, she and her twin brother, Caleb, had roamed the wilds around their home of Uwendale, several days’ march to the northwest. The pair had often disappeared into the wilderness for weeks at a time, exploring the forests and mountain foothills, hunting for their own food, and sleeping under the stars. Their father had been none too excited about it, but their mother had always encouraged them. She was a big believer in the importance of self-reliance and resourcefulness, and both children had accompanied her on hunts from a young age.

Their father had come around eventually—it probably helped that the family larder was always well stocked with venison and boar after they returned—though he never stopped worrying for them.

And it turned out he’d been right to worry.

Quinn had been here only once, a month before Caleb’s death. And so she knew that if the outsiders continued on their path, they’d have to make their way up through a narrow ravine, half a mile farther on.

Running low and fast, hidden by the crown of the rise to her right, Quinn sprinted on a path parallel to the raiders. She made it to the ravine before they did, and ran up the side. She’d just set herself up at the top of it, her back against a concealing rock, when she heard the first of the outsiders begin his ascent.

Quinn took measured breaths, slowing her thumping heart. She left her repeater crossbow holstered, but drew her large hunting knife. The blade was long and broad, almost the size of a shortsword.

The outsider was good—he made almost no noise as he climbed steadily up the rocky gulch—but not good enough to realize Quinn was waiting for him. As he hauled himself up the final, steep climb, Quinn stepped from concealment. She was to his side, and he didn’t see her until the last moment. He tried to turn, drawing back the string of his bow, but he was too slow. Quinn struck him in the temple with the pommel of her knife, and he dropped without a sound.

She hastily dragged him out of view. He was bleeding, but he was alive. With swift, practiced movements, the ranger-knight bound the unconscious man’s wrists, before yanking them back and tying them to his ankles. Then she resumed her position, back against the rock. She drew her crossbow, and flipped the knife around in her other hand so that its point was down.

With a quick glance, she peered down the ravine before ducking back. Three raiders were climbing the steep rise below, with the widow between them. The one Quinn presumed was their leader—he was bigger than the others, and alone among them wore chainmail under his furs—was at the front. He was the one who bore the Demacian shield upon his back.

Quinn ground her teeth in frustration. There should have been four of them left. Where was the last one? Was he simply acting as a rearguard, or could he be approaching from an unexpected angle? She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. It was too late to change her plan. She’d deal with him if and when he appeared.

As the leader of the outlanders neared, Quinn stepped out in front of him, crossbow leveled at his throat.

It took him a moment to register her presence. His eyes widened and he halted, reaching instinctively for his axe, hanging over his shoulders.

“Don’t,” warned Quinn. She wasn’t sure the man would understand her, but the shake of her head was a universal language, and the outlander’s hand froze.

He was a big man, two heads taller than Quinn, and easily twice her weight, but she had the higher ground, and was unintimidated. She’d brought down far bigger prey in her time.

His hair was straw-colored and long, hanging in elaborate plaits, and his beard, streaked with gray, was bound with bones and stone beads. His eyes were like slivers of slate, and he stared up at her without blinking.

There was a shout of alarm from the raiders half hidden behind his bulk, but the big man barked something over his shoulder in his own clipped, harsh language. He looked past the ranger-knight, searching. Probably trying to see what support she had.

His gaze returned to her. He licked his lips, and Quinn knew he was judging the chances of closing the distance without taking a fatal bolt.

“You speak my language?” asked Quinn. “You understand my words?”

The outlander stared at her for a moment before giving a slow nod.

“Let the woman and child go,” said Quinn, “and we won’t have to see how long it takes you to bleed out from a bolt to the throat.”

The big man snorted in amusement. “You’ve been tracking us? Alone?” His voice was deep and heavily accented. “You may kill me, if you are lucky, but my men will tear you apart. I do not think I will do as you ask.”

“I wasn’t asking,” said Quinn.

The outlander grinned. Two of his teeth were made of gold. “There is steel in you, Demacian. I like that.” His smile dropped abruptly. “Where’s my scout?”

“Alive,” said Quinn.

“Good. He is my brother, by oath. My wife would be angry if I had let him get killed.”

“What’s going on?” the widow called up.

The leader of the outlanders barked a response in his own language, though Quinn did recognize something amongst that garble of words: Asta. The widow’s name.

The woman begged. “Please, I don’t want any—”

“Be silent!” shouted the leader, half turning, his face flushing a deep crimson. When he looked back at Quinn, his expression was angry. “You should not have tried to stop us by yourself.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Quinn saw the fifth raider rising to his knees atop the ridge to her left, bow in hand. Quietly he nocked an arrow and drew the string, weapon leveled at her.

Quinn, still holding the leader’s gaze, gave him a smile. “What makes you think I’m alone?”

There was a flash of blue, moving like a thunderbolt, and the bowman gave out a strangled cry. His arrow, loosed in haste, sailed into the undergrowth, and he fell back, clutching at his bleeding hand.

The widow screamed, and everyone broke into motion.

One of the warriors threw a hand axe, sending it hurtling end over end toward Quinn. She swung aside, dodging it, but that was enough of a distraction for the leader. He sprang forward, swinging his axe off his shoulders. Quinn loosed two bolts in quick succession, but the first missed its mark, slicing harmlessly by his head. The second took the raider in the meat of his shoulder, embedding itself there, but it did nothing to slow his charge.

With a roar, he brought his weapon around in a lethal arc. It was a heavy, double-handed axe, and the strike was meant to hack Quinn in two. She swayed back from the wild swing, then reversed her momentum—she was far quicker than the outsider, for all his power—and stabbed him in the chest. It should have been a killing blow, delivered right to the heart, but the tip of her knife caught in his chainmail, stopping it from sinking deep.

The big man drove Quinn back with a swinging elbow, sending her reeling, then brought down his axe in a heavy overhead blow. Diving to the side, Quinn avoided the strike, and let loose a bolt at close range as she rolled. The bolt plunged into his flesh just above the knee, and the warrior collapsed with a growl of pain.

Quinn was on him instantly, knife at his throat.

That gave the other raiders pause, and they traded glances, unsure what to do. One of them was still cradling the woman’s child, though the infant was now wailing loudly.

The widow scrambled forward on her hands and knees. “No, no, no,” she cried. “Please, don’t hurt him!”

Quinn blinked. “You... know this man?” she asked, looking at the exhausted, tearful woman before her.

“Of course I do,” the widow said. “He’s my brother.”

“My husband was in the capital when the king was murdered,” said the widow, Asta. She held her daughter in her arms, and was gently swaying back and forth, trying to calm her. “He was defending the palace. The mages killed him.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” murmured Quinn, as she bound a length of cloth around the outlander leader’s leg. His name was Egrid. His chest wound was only minor—his chainmail had saved him from worse harm there—and he’d torn out the bolt from his shoulder himself.

The other warriors were sitting on rocks nearby. One had some ugly cuts on his hand, and was staring balefully at Valor, perched on a branch overhead, while the one Quinn had tied up was rubbing gingerly at the side of his head.

Standing near Quinn, a deep frown on his face, was Dalin.

“I met Malak when a diplomatic contingent came to my homeland, six summers back,” said Asta. “In Skaggorn, I was a chieftain’s daughter, but when Malak returned to Demacia, I came with him as his wife.”

Quinn finished tying the bandage, then sat back to inspect her work.

“You are fast, and strong, and you stitch wounds well,” said Egrid with a grin, his golden teeth flashing. “Marry me, and come back to Skaggorn with us, yes?”

Quinn didn’t even dignify that with an answer. “But why try to leave Demacia now?” she asked Asta. “You must have known that would bring trouble down upon you.”

“My people left the Freljord many generations ago,” said Asta, “traveling over the mountains and settling in Skaggorn. Yet the old blood still runs in my veins. My grandmother was a seer, one you would call a mage, or a witch. I do not have that power, but what if my daughter develops the sight? I have heard what is going on. She would be taken from me. The Frost-Bringer knows what would happen to her. I could not risk that, so I sent word to my family by hawk, begging them to get us out.”

“Mageseekers,” Quinn hissed, shaking her head.

She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. If the child manifested arcane powers, the mageseekers would take her. Were she in the widow’s shoes, Quinn would likely have already taken her child far beyond the reach of that insidious organization. She couldn’t blame Asta for what she was attempting.

“You understand we can’t let you go,” said Dalin. “The borders are closed. No one is allowed to leave without express permission from the high council itself. It’s the only way to ensure the traitor Sylas and his associates don’t slip away, and escape justice.”

“My husband died fighting against the traitor!” said Asta. “Everything here reminds me of Malak. Without him, I don’t wish to stay. And the small-minded farmers of our valley hate me. They already think I’m a witch.”

“You didn’t ransack your own home when you left, did you,” said Quinn. It was a statement, not a question. “And you didn’t set it ablaze, right?”

“What? No, of course not.” Asta paused. “Did someone truly do that?”

Quinn nodded. “And the markings under your daughter’s cot,” she said. “They were not of a... sorcerous nature, were they?”

Asta laughed, shaking her head. “A blessing of protection. A mark all Skaggorn mothers make for their children.”

Quinn nodded again, finally understanding. “But that runic blessing might seem like sorcery to those who wouldn’t know any better. Even I was suspicious of it.”

“I was careful to keep the old traditions to myself, but my neighbors were always wary of me,” Asta said. “And with all that’s been happening...”

It seemed clear now that the second set of tracks leading to the cabin had not belonged to any warrior of distant Skaggorn. Maybe the locals were seeking evidence of Asta’s sorcery. If so, perhaps they saw those charcoal runes, and set the house ablaze in a clumsy attempt to burn away what they thought was dangerous magic.

Quinn sighed, shaking her head. On the whole, Demacians were good, honorable people, but fear and distrust were spreading like a plague, and bringing out the worst in the kingdom’s scared citizens. It needed to end.

“I found something that I think you should have,” Quinn said, remembering what she had recovered in the wreckage. She handed over the Shield of Remembrance, and tears appeared in Asta’s eyes.

“Thank you,” she said, clutching the medal to her chest. “I thought it had been lost. It broke my heart to leave without it.”

“I’m sorry, but we cannot allow you to leave,” said Dalin.

“We are leaving, Demacian,” growled Egrid, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. “Do not try to stop us.”

“Egrid, enough!” snapped Asta. “These two rangers are just doing their duty.” She turned to Quinn. “But please, I beg you, at least let my daughter go. She should not have to suffer for something beyond her control. Let her go with my brother, and I will return with you.”

Dalin and Quinn traded a look. The law was firm. No one was allowed to leave Demacia, not Asta, her daughter, or the Skaggorn warriors.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” said Dalin.

“If we let them go, then we are the ones violating the law,” whispered Dalin.

The two rangers walked behind as the group trekked eastward.

“We need to know how they got across the border,” replied Quinn in a low voice.

Dalin looked troubled, but he gave a clipped nod and fell into silence.

It wasn’t long before they reached the cliffs marking the edge of Demacia. The Skaggorn party led them to a secluded location, tucked just out of view of the guard towers to the north and south. Every inch of these cliffs should have been visible to one of the dozens of Demacia’s watchtowers, but clearly this was a blind spot.

Quinn leaned over the edge. The drop was several hundred feet, but heights had never bothered her. She could see pitons hammered into the rock. “You approached the base of the cliff at night, so as not to be seen by the sentries?” she asked.

Egrid nodded. Quinn grunted, impressed.

“Quite the climb to make, even in daylight,” she said. She looked down at the big man’s strapped leg. “Sorry about the knee. Are you going to manage it?”

“Of course! We of Skaggorn are strong,” boasted Egrid. “You are strong, too. You should return with us. The two of us, we would make strong warrior children. Yes?”

Quinn stared at him without speaking, her expression unreadable. Eventually, he shrugged and turned away.

“Worth asking the question,” he muttered. With a shout, he ordered his men to retrieve the ropes, hidden in the undergrowth nearby.

“I thought you just wanted to find out how they crossed into Demacia unseen,” hissed Dalin, taking Quinn aside. “We’ll be breaking our oaths if we allow them to go!”

“I’m uncomfortable with forcing a woman to stay and risk having her child taken simply because of a quirk of her bloodline,” she said, her voice low. “Besides, our first oath is to protect Demacia.”

“And letting them go protects Demacia?”

Quinn flashed him a fierce glance. “If we try to stop them, this plays out in one of two ways,” she whispered. “Either they kill us and leave anyway, in which case Demacia has lost two of its best rangers—or we defeat them, and Demacia gains an enemy, for the people of Skaggorn will know we are holding a chieftain’s daughter against her will.”

Dalin glanced at the big warriors, and conceded the point. “Doesn’t make it right, though,” he muttered. “And still makes us lawbreakers.”

Quinn regarded him. “If you want things to be simple, then you’d be better off in the regular infantry. Things are always more complicated out on the fringes.”

“The laws—”

“The laws be damned,” snapped Quinn. “It does not weaken Demacia in any way to let them go, but it will if we try to stop them.”

“But—”

Quinn rarely enforced the power her rank allowed her... but she did so now.

“Stand down, soldier,” she growled. “I am letting them go. That is an order.”

He stiffened for a moment, then gave her a sharp salute.

“As you will it, ranger-knight.”

The sun was starting to set as the Skaggorn party commenced climbing down the cliff. Quinn waited till they were all on their way—tied to each other, with the widow Asta’s child strapped tightly upon Egrid’s back—before she turned away. As good as their word, Egrid’s men removed the pitons they’d hammered into the stone as they descended.

Quinn had less than three days to get to the meeting point with Garen. She’d be forced to run through the night to make it in time, but had no doubt that she would. She gathered herself, readying for the journey ahead.

Before she left, Quinn paused, glancing over at Dalin, who was sitting near the cliff’s edge, Rigby at his side. He was looking eastward, away from her. They had barely spoken since the Skaggorn began their descent.

“I don’t expect you to feel good about it,” Quinn said, “but letting them go was for the best.”

He looked at her. “I understand,” he said. “Matters just aren’t as straightforward as I’d like them to be, I guess.”

“For some, they are,” said Quinn, shrugging. “But we are rangers.”

The Greenfang warden gave a slow nod, then stood to see Quinn off.

“You watch out for her, Valor, you hear?” he said, addressing the azurite eagle perched nearby. “Demacia needs her.”

Valor clacked his beak in reply.

“Speak to the local garrison,” Quinn said. “See that they build a watchtower here. Best make sure this gap in our defenses is closed for good.”

“Pulling rank on me again, boss?”

Quinn snorted, and scratched Rigby behind the ears. “Something like that.” She looked the warden in the eye. “Stay safe, and stay vigilant, Dalin,” she said. “Demacia needs you, too.”

Then she turned, and started running once more.