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I’m going to die.

Every halting breath is agony. It feels like someone has torn open my chest with a rusty saw and filled the cavity with teeth. Because someone has.

He has.

I can’t look at what he’s done to me. I stare through watering eyes at a tiny vault light in the brick ceiling, desperate to see anything but what I’ve become. Beyond lies Zaun—my city—but of the thousands of bustling souls there, not one will have noticed I’m missing. No one is looking for the man I was before.

click

The recording device has clicked on, the wax cylinder turning steadily, and my breath catches again, this time against a sob. He speaks.

“Subject ‘Thinker’ is functionally impaired. Yet hearing and recognition still present.”

click

Between the tears in my eyes and the warping effect of the thick greenish glass of the observation window, the nameless man looks like a half-melted waxen nightmare. Sunken, mismatched eyes dripping across a contorted pallid face, the bandages over his mouth growing and shrinking as he restlessly paces behind the window to get a better look at my condition.

His good eye flicks from me to the source of a deep groan in the corner of my cell. I turn to look at a hulking form, rousing itself from unconsciousness. Glowing pipes and tubes snake around and through its forearms, making them more than double their already considerable size.

As I am now, withered and... changed, the brute could snap me in half without thinking.

click

“Subject ‘Breaker’ regained consciousness at six past fourth bell. Earlier than expected. Promising! Experiment begins at... seven past fourth bell.”

click

No. No, no! Not another experiment.

click

“Establishing the baseline. Subject Thinker, answer the following questions as quickly and as accurately as possible.”

“Wha—”

“First question: what is your full name?”

“I’m not doing this! Do you hear me? I demand you release me at once. I refuse to participate in whatever sick, twisted...” My words trail off.

click

He puts down the mouthpiece of his recording device, and moves to a set of valves at the edge of the window. Without even glancing at me or the thing in the corner, he spins one open, and high-pressure, ice-cold sump water slams me into the wall.

I think I’m screaming.

An eternity later, I’m trembling on atrophied hands and knees, gasping for air. I fumble at the floor, seeking purchase through the slowly draining water, when I somehow catch my wrist on something, and my elbow buckles reflexively, slamming me face first onto the ground.

I’m still for a moment, cradling my arm where the pain is hot and alien—then I feel movement between my chest and the floor. Sharp wriggling, like I’ve fallen on a Uloan scorpion and it’s about to claw through me to escape. I roll, but it follows me. It’s on me, on my bare skin, scratching and squirming, and the skittering noise repulses me. I’m kicking and clawing and yelling and desperately trying to get it off me!

“Tiresome.”

My hands are bloodied and there’s something wrong with my wrists and I can’t get the thing off me. It’s all barbs and claws and it’s like it’s burrowed into my—my chest.

The teeth in my chest.

I remember now. There isn’t an arachnid on me. He did this to me. He carved me up and turned me into something else, something with sucking fangs grafted onto each wrist, and two columns of hungry, flexing pincers from neck to waist. And he wants me to use them to bite the thing in here with me.

He’d once strapped us both down on a rusted iron gurney, needle moving quickly and without mercy as he joined us together. Then he waited. Waited for the “process” to start, for the instincts he’d given me through surgical and chemtech sins to kick in.

When it didn’t happen—when I wouldn’t do it—everything went black.

And now I am locked in this chamber with my intended “host”.

click

“Subject found initial stimulus unpleasant. Resuming baseline questions. If the Thinker subject does not state its full name—”

“Stop, I beg you. Have mercy!” I yell.

“Duration and intensity will be increased by a factor of two. Strike that—make it three.”

click

He’s looking right at me. If he’s smiling beneath those wraps, it doesn’t reach his eyes. He seizes the valve again, and I realize what’s next. There’s nothing to hide behind, nothing to grab a hold of, and as the pipes rumble, all I can do is curl up as small as I can, and take a deep breath.

The blast of water hits so hard, so cold, the air is ripped from my lungs. I smash against surfaces I can’t identify, and up and down are meaningless. There’s a shooting pain from my ankle, and when the assault eventually ceases, I twist and drop to the floor. Once the heaving stops, I lie motionless, feeling weaker than I can ever remember as the last of the water drains from the room.

I’m going to die.

Slam. I flinch when my chem-doped cellmate smashes into the observation window. It is fury incarnate—huge, empowered fists hammering at the glass, incoherent primal yells tearing from its throat.

The glass, and the monster behind it, is unmoved.

Though each movement costs me dearly, I quietly drag myself to the other side of the floor, away from the raging beast called Breaker. It’s still smashing at the glass, knuckles bloodying, despite there being no sign of weakening the barrier. Stubborn or stupid, it keeps hitting. Even when its roaring diminishes and shifts to wordless sobs, those swollen fists won’t stop.

click

“Physical strength of subject ‘Breaker’ is within expected range of pneumatochem-muscular enhancements, but he exhibits limited to no problem-solving capabilities.”

click

Emotionlessly, our torturer taps on the glass opposite the smears from Breaker’s self-inflicted wounds. Then, with a scowl, he turns to look at me.

click

“Subject ‘Thinker’, on the other hand, may have been named hastil—”

“My name’s Hadri! Hadri Spillwether. I’m a person—not this ‘Thinker’ you keep calling me.” I reach out, desperate to touch some grain of empathy in my captor’s heart, no matter what fabrications I have to concoct. “I have a son! He’s... he’s two years old, and he must miss me terribly.”

“A son?” The bandaged man raises an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”

“L-Locke. Little Locke Spillwether—cute as a button and twice as—”

“Enough. You have no family. They perished from the same hereditary disease you yourself suffer from, characterized by accelerated aging and all the miserable infirmities that come with it. For the last thirteen years you’ve been making a nuisance of yourself to anyone who’d listen at the Zaun Academy of Sciences, seeking—no, begging for—a cure.”

His words hammer into me, cold and crushing like the water.

“And yet you repay my extraordinary gift with defiance and bad data.” Now he’s angry. “Your estimates give you five years left to live. More lies, but this time to yourself. You have three wretched years at best before you become a drooling invalid. And there’s no one to take care of you as you did your sister and father.”

There’s nothing I can say. He’s right. What little hope I had for finding a cure was just that: hope. The Academy wouldn’t help me—a swarming mass of the world’s finest minds, each unreachable and distant. Everyone had their own desperate or greedy agenda, and I was just another lost cause. Pitiful. Alone.

I’m going to die.

“But you need not die.”

My gaze snaps to his. I feel... revulsion? Loathing? Outrage? Hope. How dare he say such a thing. How dare he. How—

“How?” I choke out the question. I hate that I’ve asked it.

He doesn’t reply with words. He just slowly nods his head toward the hunched form of the thing I’m locked in with—toward Breaker. The brute is cradling his bleeding hands, rocking back and forth, avoiding eye contact with either of us. Maybe he’s incapable of speech. He’s at least three times my weight, all of it muscle, and that’s before whatever those augments on his arms are doing.

I remember when we were strapped down on the gurney. Similarly trapped together. Equally helpless despite his monstrously augmented strength. The bandaged man wants me to latch on to Breaker, to use him as a... support? A living prosthesis?

My own thoughts make me gag, and I dry heave as I scramble backward, away from Breaker.

“Disappointing.” Our torturer sounds bored. “Perhaps three years is still too remote a negative outcome for you, Thinker. Let me make it more compelling—in your weakened state, you’ll likely suffer multiple fractures each time I apply this negative stimulus. Within four more applications, I’d expect you’d be classifiable as only minimally mobile, and face down in the water, you’ll very slowly drown.”

He’s leering through the glass at me. “From previous observations, I’m led to believe it will be quite excruciating.”

click

The room’s too small. I can barely breathe. My heart is throwing itself against my ribcage like Breaker pummeling the observation window.

I look to Breaker and catch his gaze on me—he immediately looks away. There was little understanding in those eyes, but I saw shared fear and something akin to sympathy. It’s the first real human connection I’ve felt in years. Far more human than our captor.

Without turning to meet his cold, calculating stare, I ask, “And what happens if I do it? If I...?”

click

“Once an ectoparasitic melding is established, I’ll run tests on the nature of the pairing, on the extent of the parasite’s behavior-altering capabilities on the host and so on, and on the resilience of the resulting merged superorganism. The experiment will be concluded, and all this...” He waves airily at the chamber, the pipes and valves, the glass observation window. “All this will be done with.”

click

I nod absentmindedly, as if this is the most normal thing in the world, but my mind suddenly reels with realization. Testing the resilience of the organism. What a clean way to say torturing to death under a scalpel.

This is no cure—not for me. It’s a death sentence.

Finger width by finger width, I manage to pull myself to my feet, hugging the cold brick wall for support. I gasp and wobble for a moment—my ankle is broken already—before turning to face my enemy through the window.

“No.”

There’s a long pause. I can hear the sounds of Zaun—water dripping from the pipes, distant pumps, and the low, comforting rumble of never-sleeping machinery. At the very edge of my senses, I fancy I can hear fifth bell chiming.

I expect nothing of my captor. Still I’m surprised when he reaches out—

click

“Subject is... uncooperative.”

click

He spins the water valve to full strength.

Pain. The water hits like a mountain and slams me against the walls, ceiling, and floor without preference. I don’t know which is which anymore. There’s only noise. There’s only darkness. There’s only agony.

Then there’s light.

A flash so bright that the world behind my eyelids turns gold. A lung-hammering boom.

And then nothing.

I regain consciousness face down on the floor, battered and crushingly cold. I look up.

Something’s changed. Water still gushes out of the vents, though at a lower pressure. Light streams in from a hole punched near the ceiling. A way out? There are more flashes of yellow, followed by distant booms.

A keening wail pierces through the ringing in my ears. With horror, I realize it’s coming from Breaker—he’s cradling his face, blood weeping between his fingers. He charges into the wall, spins, and tumbles into the water.

The water. It’s rising.

In a panic, I try to drag myself closer to the hole, but I’m not moving. The fangs on my wrists rake across the stone beneath the water, setting my teeth on edge, but even with my aching fingers clawing at the floor, I make no headway.

I twist around to see if I’m caught on something, and blanch.

A slab of fallen debris—probably the exact piece that opened that treacherous escape route—is crushing my lower back. I kick at it, and nothing happens. I push it, and nothing happens. I try everything, squirming and screaming and flailing weakly. Slowly the block tumbles from me and splashes to the side. Around me, the rising waters flush red.

I can’t feel my legs.

“Experiment ends at... two, no, three past fifth bell.”

I turn just in time to watch the bandaged man walk away from the window and out of sight. A heartbeat later, the lights go out. The sudden explosions, my paralysis, or my defiance—I wonder which variable rendered his precious experiment worthless to him, worthy only of flushing.

Curse him.

I pull myself to a sitting position against the debris, my blood now black in the dim Zaun light. It feels like the heat is being sucked out of my core, and I’m being frozen from the inside out. I have nothing left.

Sobbing. I hear sobbing from Breaker, a boulder of despair hunkered in the corner, the tubes on his arms creating their own faint green illumination.

I keep my voice low. “H-hey.”

His head snaps up. Black streaks surround his ruined eyes, underlit by what that monster behind the glass did to his arms. An expression of anguish and loss twists on his face as he frantically angles his head to listen.

“B-Breaker?” I’m shivering. It’s hard to get the words out. “Hey, I’m s-s-sorry I don’t know your real—”

Breaker rises, splashing and stumbling, his chemtech implants casting wild shadows. He charges toward me—I squeeze my eyes shut, awaiting the impact.

Suddenly I feel a hand, hot and enormous, on my head. I open my eyes, and Breaker is crouched in front of me, clumsily patting my face and shoulders, as if to make sure I’m real.

A distant flash through the gap in the ceiling, like amber lightning, illuminates him. Under the blood and swelling, he looks so innocent. So alone.

I’m going to die.

But maybe Breaker doesn’t have to.

“Breaker? B-Breaker, you ha-have to listen to... me.” He takes my hand and turns his head to point an ear my way. “There’s a way—a way out,” I tell him. “A hole in the ceiling. You w-want to get out of here, right?”

Still holding my hand, he nods so vigorously that he jerks my body back and forth. The pain is white hot against the ice cold filling me. I almost welcome it.

“Aah! All right. Good. L-listen. Listen! Now, you’re g-going to have to let go of my ha—”

His refusal is clear in his death grip on my fingers.

Water is now lapping against the column of weakly flexing barbs on my chest. They gnash, eager to latch on to a host, as if they know their intended target is near. But I’ll die before I do that to myself. Or Breaker.

With so much of my blood swirling in the water around me, I don’t have long. I have to hurry.

I bring up my other hand and gently unwrap his. “Y-you’re going to be fine, B-B-Breaker. I promise. I just need you to... to make sure it’s safe first.” Breathing’s harder now. “Y-you can do that for me? Then we can b-both get ou-out.”

Lies, but it’s enough to get him to release me.

I nudge his elbow, guiding him to stand. Stretching despite the pain, I give him a tiny shove forward, toward the blown-open gap.

I let my arms fall back into the ice-cold water, realizing that his was probably the last warmth I’ll ever feel.

“J-j-just listen to my voice. I’ll g-guide you!” The water’s at my neck now, and I’m shaking so much it’s hard to see straight. “Forward, just a few steps. Careful, th-there’s d-debris, and—” He smashes his shin into a fallen piece of wall and yelps. “All right, y-y-y-you’re all right. S-step up onto it. Good. Now r-reach out to the w-w-wall. Feel it? Good. That’s good. There are cracks between the bricks. Use them to cl-climb. Now reach up. Reach up, Breaker. That’s it—that’s the w-way out.”

I tilt my head back to get a breath of air, the water at my jaw. At least I can’t feel most of my body now.

“Climb, B-Breaker,” I gasp. Then I stretch my neck and splutter, “Goodb-b—”

The water’s over my face, and despite everything, I’m holding this last breath. My heart beats loud in my ears. It occurs to me that I like the sound of it. I’ll miss it.

My lungs start to burn. This is it. My heart roars. My numb arms thrash. My eyes flicker open and my chest heaves, hungry for air. I cough out part of that last breath and gobble a mouthful of bitter sump water.

There is only panic.

My hand hits something, and I instinctively try to push off from it. Up. Anywhere. But I’m caught. I can’t move. There’s no air and I can’t move. Suddenly my whole vision is taken up by Breaker’s face. No! Not him, too! I struggle, but there’s nothing. My body is giving up. I’m giving up. My vision narrows and darkens; grayness fills it. I see Breaker turning, and distantly hope he’ll make it.

Something’s wrong. Or right. I can’t tell. There’s warmth and movement. I feel myself being lifted up. My body convulses and my vision turns sharp for just one beat of my weakening heart. Through the water, I see the back of Breaker’s head. My chest, no, the things in my chest sense the spine pressed against them, and flex back to strike, stretching like a too-big yawn. A welcome pain.

No. Yes. No!

... I don’t want to die!

As the barbs in my chest clamp down, I plunge my fangs deep into the sides of his neck—

CRUNCH.

I/we live!

We’re still submerged, but our lungs are full of air (and empty). Our limbs are strong and powerful (and weak and broken). We can see again (like always).

I/we push off for the faint light through the water. I/we bring up our hand to shove a metal bar out of the way. Our hand is shockingly big, and farther left than we expected, and we almost overshoot. Adjust. We’ve got it now. It’s so easy to push. The bar goes flying back. We kick upward and swim toward the hole in the ceiling, pulling ourselves up the last distance. We flop onto the roof, outside.

Air.

We cough up the water in our lungs, while our other lungs breathe deeply.

No, not our lungs... my lungs. My hearts beat hard and fast. My minds reel.

I climb down the side of the building with my powerful arms. When my feet touch the ground, it seems at once far away and slightly closer, offset to the side. I can hear with a depth and precision I couldn’t have imagined.

It smells like we’re deep in Zaun. I’m surrounded by leaking containers and heaps of wriggling, sodden trash, in a courtyard behind an old factory. High above, some distance away, a segment of fallen tower is precariously leaning against a chasm wall, yellow flashes and rumbles still issuing from secondary explosions.

The source of my freedom. Of my creation.

I start at the sound of a piece of rubble falling from the cell wall behind me, and I’m reminded just how close I came to death. At his hands.

I can’t stay here (fear!).

Before I know it, I’m running.

It’s exhilarating. I’m shocked by how fast the world goes by, how easily my legs move. Quick as a flash, I duck down an alley. There’s a gate blocking my path, but I’ve already spotted an outcropping of pipes I can vault from, and a hanging railing I can use to swing over it.

Neither of my past selves could have done this, but I can. It’s so easy.

I land lightly, and barely slow down. The impact hurts—one of my spines is broken, but it’s distant, no longer a devastating injury. Now, my strengths complement each other, my weaknesses recognized and supported. I’ve never felt this way before—greater than I was, more complete. At ease with myself.

I lope onward, exiting the alleyway and running straight into a small crowd leaving a Church of the Glorious Evolved–a mass of mechanical legs, breather masks, extraneous metal arms, and other, stranger augments.

But each and every one of these unsettling, augment-obsessed cultists stops dead in their tracks to stare at me.

“He’s got something on his back,” a mechanical-eyed man says.

“What is that?” a woman with a back-mounted prosthetic lung asks.

“It’s feeding on him!” an unseen third hysterically yells from the rear of the crowd.

Expressions change from shock to revulsion. I back up, but I’m surrounded.

Someone shoves me from behind. I try to tell them to stop.

“Pleas— —eave me— —lone.”
“—ASE. LEA— —E ALO—”

The words tumble out on top of each other, issuing from two mouths. I’ve never heard my new voice before, and it sounds both familiar and strange. The Evolved don’t seem to understand. A rock flies past my head.

“STOP-op. I HAVE-haven’t done anything-THING to you-YOU,” I beg. My words are still out of sync—it’s like talking through an echo. My voice won’t do what I want, and these people won’t listen!

A yellow-haired man steps forward from the group, attaching a heavy hammer-like prosthetic to his augmented wrist. He raises it to attack.

“I said leave me alone!” It’s my true voice. Clear as a bell—harmonious in the discord. But words won’t help me now.

Frantic, I look around and find a steam pipe near me, bridging the alleyway from above. Just before my would-be attacker strikes, I leap up, hauling the pipe down to block. The hammer pierces it, and scalding vapor blasts into his face. He falls backward, screaming.

I hear their yells and threats as I run away. I don’t know where I’m going as I charge down the dark cobblestone streets. I run past tenement blocks and corner stores, past a pair of stilt-walking chem-jacks and a spring merchant. I take stairs and corners at speed. I’m sprinting across one of the smaller bridges, iron clanging beneath my boots, when I catch a half-familiar whiff from one of the street vendors. I duck behind an empty stall and inhale deeply.

From a distant corner of my mind, I remember the smell—I remember coming here with... with Mama. She’d give me two washers for the porridge lady, and I’d carry a steaming bowl home.

Home. My eyes well up at the thought. Somewhere I can hide, somewhere I can rest, somewhere safe.

It’s not far from here!

This time, I’m running with heartsick purpose. Up three flights of stone steps on the chasm side, past the old broken glasshouse, then down two streets to the edge of the Factorywood.

Before I know it, I arrive at what was once my home. A charred husk remains, long since abandoned. My mind tries to make sense of it. This was my home (no, it wasn’t). I lived here with my mama and brother (no, I didn’t). She’d painted the walls yellow and said it was liquid sunshine (I’ve never been here).

I carefully make my way up warped stairs sodden from countless rainstorms. The railing feels familiar (alien) to my hand.

I push open the ruin of the door, and my vision swims. My happy memories of bright smiles clash with the reality of burnt remains and debris. Tears stream down my faces. Something terrible happened here, but I can’t remember.

The door to the back room has long fallen from its hinges, and the roof is collapsed in, but my eyes are drawn to the left corner, where I once slept—a small cot lies blackened with soot. I approach, and for the first time, I read the name scratched into the wall beside it:

“Palo.”

That’s me. My name is Hadri—I mean, Palo. I was both, but the me that lived here, that was Palo. Hadri’s mother died in childbirth, but Palo was raised by his mama.

What happened? An accident? An attack? Did Mama anger the wrong chem-baron? Did... did I do something without realizing?

Mama’s desk is a drenched wreck, but something glints in the pile of wood. Her hand mirror. It’s cracked, likely from the heat. I pick it up. When I was Hadri, I couldn’t bring myself to look at what the bandaged man had turned me into, but that was a lifetime ago. I’m different in so many ways, and I have to know.

I look.

A nightmare looks back. A beaten, bloodied, and blinded man stands there—forearms encircled and pierced by glowing green tubes and cables. Hooked on to his back is a sickly parasite, its shriveled arms wrapped around his neck, their syringe-like fangs barely concealed. Its withered legs dangle uselessly. Bloodshot, beady eyes peer from behind the man’s shoulder, widening in horror at what they see.

Revulsion washes over me. I drop the mirror, and my largest hands scramble to tear the parasite from its host. I’m hideous. (I’m smart now!) I’m just a failed experiment. (I’m better now!) No one could ever love me. (I love my new self!) I’ll always be alone. (I don’t want to be alone!)

Alone. I was so alone.

The bitter loneliness of two lives hits me, and I throw back my heads and howl. No one person should ever feel this. No one person can. I howl for losses doubled, and losses shared. I howl in sympathy for myself, and for the depth of loss in another. Across Zaun, I hear others take up the cry—animals, humans, and something in between—who for one moment, paradoxically, are together in their loneliness.

I collapse to my knees, my feet uselessly brushing against the floor behind me.

I will live. Not as Palo or Hadri. Not as Breaker or Thinker. I’m both, or all of them. I’m better this way.

I tear one of the half-burned curtains from the wall and throw it over my shoulders, careful not to obscure my vision.

My memories are too strange, too complex, too confusing. I can’t stay here. I walk out the door and down the steps as I try to decide where a monster like me can possibly go.

click

“In spite of, or perhaps due to, unexpected and explosive complications, stage one of the host experiment has finally completed.”

click

I freeze. My captor stands on the narrow street in front of the house, a pneumatic-powered dart gun leveled at me. Vials on his belt clink menacingly, filled with unknown liquids (it burns!), and a bag on his back suggests he has many more terrible things at hand.

He did this to me.

I can feel the fury swell in both of my chests, my hearts thumping against each other with just ribcages between them. I take an instinctual step toward him.

“I don’t think so!” he warns. He casually flicks the dart thrower to the side, pulls the trigger, and spears a large viridian beetle straight through. I watch, horrified, as the liquid in the dart releases into its body, dissolving it almost immediately, its screams all too audible in my four ears.

His gun is already reloaded, and it’s aimed at me again. I raise two of my hands.

click

“The following questions are for the Thinker entity. Answer quickly, or I’ll apply motivational pressures.”

“What?”

“Quiet. First question: what is your full name?”

The dart gun doesn’t waver as his long, stained finger hovers over the recording device’s switch.

“Hadri Spillwether.” I look around for a way out. Somewhere to run. Anything.

“Good. Next question. What was your father’s name?”

My father? I didn’t know my—wait, no, I did have a father. I looked after him when the disease worsened. His name... his name was...

“Hurry up. Answer the question!” the bandaged man demanded.

“Arvon! Arvon Spillwether!” I sounded more relieved than I expected. More desperate.

“Hmph. Faster! Where did you live? What was your profession? What did I call myself when we first met at the Academy?”

“Here! I lived he—no, wait. I... I don’t... Four-five-one! Room four-five-one at the Smellbloom Lodging House! Profession? I... Was I a clerk? I can’t... I don’t remember. It was so long ago!” I’m sweating, shaking my heads. It’s all mixed up.

click

“Pathetic. What a waste. Devolved into some sort of gestalt entity, contaminating the purity of the primary mind. Unsuitable for further exploration,” he mutters. Then he turns on his heel and starts to walk away.

I feel my faces scrunch into masks of pure rage.

He made me what I am. He set my house ablaze with chemical fire—I remember now how it burned. He exploited my hope for a cure.

And now, he will pay.

I’m four paces away from him. Now two. Then he spins on the spot and smashes a vial of something at my feet. I barely take another step when I find that my boots are glued fast to the ground. He’s two fingertips out of my reach, and I claw at the air uselessly.

“So much for being a Thinker,” he says. “I really was too optimistic. I certainly won’t make that mistake again.”

He takes a long step backward, and turns to head down a narrow alleyway. Leven Wynd—I remember it clearly. The second he’s out of sight, I hunker down and quickly untie my laces, loosening them enough to step out of my boots. With one strong leap, I’m padding barefoot after him down the wynd.

It’s dark in the alley, but my hearing is sharpened. I can hear him at the end of the first turn, still muttering to himself about subjects and sources. It stinks here, and I try not to think about what I’m stepping in as I navigate past the narrow gaps and boarded-up doorways. By the time I reach the corner, he’s halfway down the next stretch, barely visible in the gloom and the smog. I lean down to wrench a broken pipe from the ground as a weapon, and feel a rush as I straighten.

He’s gone.

Impossible! I lope onward, checking doorways as I go. The air is nasty, and I try to muffle my coughs with my curtain, but I can only cover one mouth. I’m getting dizzy, and I turn around to look back the way I came. It’s hazy—too hazy.

He’s using some kind of gas! I wrap the curtain around one of my mouths and bury the other into my shoulder, trying to breathe as little as possible. This is a trap.

I try to stagger back toward home—the corner looks farther away than I remember. I need to make it. I start to run, but one of the doors—red, metal, and spiked—suddenly opens, smashing into my face. I fall.

My limbs, all of them feel so heavy. So heavy. I think I’m crushing myself with my own weight on my back, but it’s already so hard to breathe.

I’m going to die.

The bandaged man stands over me. Tears streaming from my faces, I look up at my murderer, and I remember.

Overlaid upon his face, I see a face from before—with tinted glasses and a clean-shaven jaw. When I first met him, years ago, he strode down the hallway from lab to lecture hall, master of his environment, looked upon with admiration, envy, and something I hadn’t recognized (fear!). In his wake was the faintest scent of cologne. He had stopped and looked at me—not with pity, as I was used to, but with a shadow of excitement and anticipation. He’d introduced himself.

“Singed. You said you were Professor SIN-Singed.”

The harmony drops from my voices, and in my last moment, I am alone again.

Crushingly, painfully, deeply alone.

Singed scrambles madly among his things, desperately searching for something. A cure? A mercy?

His recording device. He clicks it on and drops to his haunches to observe.

“Oh, well done, Thinker Four. That puts you... yes... more answers than even Thinker Two! You’ve been most helpful.”

He clicks off his recording device.

It’s the last thing I hear.

Born into an empire long since gone to dust and forgotten, Hecarim was a lieutenant of the Iron Order—a brotherhood sworn to defend their king’s lands.

As Hecarim won victory after victory from the back of his mighty warhorse, the commander of the Iron Order saw in him a potential successor… but also a growing darkness. His obsessive hunger for glory was eroding his honor, and over time the knight-commander came to realize this young lieutenant must never lead them.

When he was told this, Hecarim was furious. Even so, he bit back his anger, and continued in his duties.

When they next rode to war, the commander found himself surrounded by enemies, and cut off from his fellow knights. Hecarim, seeing his chance, turned away and left him to die. At battle’s end, the Iron Order, oblivious to what Hecarim had done, knelt on the bloody ground and swore allegiance to him.

Hecarim rode to the capital to take his formal oaths, and met with Kalista, the king’s most trusted general. She recognized his prowess and leadership, and when the queen was wounded by an assassin’s poisoned blade, Kalista was comforted to know the Iron Order would remain with the king while she sought a cure.

Gripped by paranoia, and seeing new threats in every shadow, the king raged at those he believed were trying to separate him from his dying wife, and dispatched Hecarim to quell dissent throughout the kingdom. The Iron Order earned a dreadful reputation as ruthless enforcers of the king’s will. Towns and villages burned. Hundreds were put to the sword.

With grim inevitability, when the queen died, Hecarim chose to sour the king’s grief into hatred, seeking sanction to lead the Iron Order into foreign lands. He would avenge her death, while earning yet more dark renown for himself.

But before they could ride out, Kalista returned. She had found what she sought upon the distant Blessed Isles—and yet it was now too late. The king would not believe this, and had Kalista imprisoned as a traitor. Intrigued by what he had heard, Hecarim visited her cell, and they spoke of the pale mists that protected the islands from all invaders… and also of the inhabitants’ immense wealth, including the legendary Waters of Life.

Knowing only Kalista could lead them there, Hecarim eventually persuaded her to guide the king’s fleet through the veil that concealed the Blessed Isles from mortal sight.

They landed at the city of Helia with the queen’s body in solemn procession. The Iron Order led the way, only to be met by the city’s masters, who now refused to help. Enraged, the king ordered Kalista to kill them, but she refused, and Hecarim smiled as he made the decision that would damn him for eternity. He drove a spear through Kalista’s back, and ordered his knights to ransack the city, looting its vaults of arcane treasures.

Amid the chaos, a lowly custodian agreed to grant the king access to the Waters of Life—but not even this could distract Hecarim from the revelry of bloodshed, and so it was that the Ruination of the Blessed Isles would take him almost completely by surprise.

A blastwave of magical force tore across Helia, shattering every last building and leaving the fragments suspended in searing un-light. In its wake came the Black Mist, a billowing hurricane that dragged every living creature it touched into its shrieking, roiling embrace. Hecarim tried to rally the Iron Order, hoping to make it back to their ships, but the mist claimed them one by one as they fled.

Alone, and defiant to the end, the knight-commander was taken by the shadows. He and his mighty steed were fused into a monstrous, spectral abomination that reflected the darkness in Hecarim’s heart—a brazen creature of fury and spite, at one with the Black Mist and yet utterly enslaved by it.

Bound forevermore to these Shadow Isles, Hecarim has spent centuries in a sinister mockery of his former life, cursed to patrol the nightmarish lands he once intended to conquer. Whenever the Black Mist reaches out beyond their shores, he and the otherworldly host of the Iron Order ride out to slaughter the living, in memory of glories long passed.

A lone figure awaited the armed convoy, standing silhouetted against the sun. His heavy cloak and the long plume atop his helm billowed in the hot, dry desert wind. A tall spear was held at his side.

The convoy was thirty strong. Most of its number were hired mercenaries—rough, warlike men and women garbed in hauberks, leather, and chain, bearing crossbows, halberds, and blades. They walked the dusty path alongside heavily laden mules, though they came to a halt, crude insults and jokes dying on their lips, as they saw the warrior standing motionless before them.

The dark-clad leader of the expedition frowned as he pulled his coal-black steed to a halt. While the others were from lands far away, he knew this place and its inhabitants, for he once counted himself one of them. While he had been raised among the mountain people of the Rakkor, he had long ago turned away from them. Now he returned, after many years of absence, drawn by the lure of the priceless wealth he knew awaited in the Seer’s temple above.

He knew and respected the fighting prowess of his former people, but a single warrior? Not even the Ra’Horak could survive such odds.

Even so, the figure atop the rocky outcrop made no move to stand aside.

“You come with murder in your hearts,” the warrior said, his voice as hard as iron. “I am of the Mountain. Turn back, or I will gladly destroy you. The choice is yours.”

The mercenaries smirked and scoffed.

“Piss off, madman,” one of them shouted, “lest we plant your head on a spike to mark our passing.”

“You are a long way from home, friend,” the leader of the convoy said. “We journey to the mountain ourselves. There need be no blood spilt here.”

The lone Rakkoran warrior was unmoved.

“We are simple pilgrims, and still have far to go,” said the leader. “And besides, there is no way back for us now. Our ships have sailed, see?” He gestured behind him.

Behind the convoy, less than a mile distant, the sea glittered like dragon scales in the dying light. A trio of galleys could be seen, sails unfurling as they turned north on the long journey home.

“We come with no ill intent, I assure you,” the leader continued. “We merely seek wisdom.”

“Your tongue is forked, serpent,” said the lone warrior. “You seek the blood of the Seer, and it will be your end. You were born on the mountain, and now you will die in its shadow.”

The leader’s frown deepened, and he turned away with a dismissive shrug.

“We shall see,” he said. “Kill him.”

In an instant, crossbows were hefted to shoulders and the air was filled with loosed bolts. The warrior of the Rakkor was not punched from his feet, however; the bolts clanged as they ricocheted from his heavy, circular shield. Then he began to advance.

He appeared to be in no hurry. He strode forward with grim resolve, still silhouetted against the sun, the tip of his spear lowering toward his enemies. Another flurry of crossbow bolts. Again they were turned aside by his shield.

The first of the snarling mercenaries launched herself toward him, a jagged-bladed scimitar arcing in for his throat. She died in the blink of an eye, the warrior’s spear buried in her chest. The next two died almost as quickly, a crimson line slashed across one man’s throat, and another falling with a broken skull.

“Take him!” roared the expedition’s leader, drawing an exquisite, bespoke pistol from his waistband.

A cloud passed in front of the sun, allowing the warrior to be seen more clearly. His armor was wrought with celestial imagery,and it seemed as if stars gleamed in the shimmery fabric of his midnight-blue cloak. That starlight also glittered in his unrelenting gaze, shadowed within the visor slits of his helm. For a moment, it seemed like his armor and speartip gleamed with what could only be described as divine power, and sudden dread filled the leader of the raiders, for he had heard of this power in his childhood, but had long since dismissed it as myth and legend.

The lone warrior moved like liquid, every movement smooth, efficient, and deadly. He was impossibly fast—faster than any man should be. More mercenaries died, their blood staining the dry desert ground. None could land a blow upon the deadly fighter. He moved effortlessly through the battle, closing inexorably on the horseman. One by one, the mercenaries were slain. In moments, those still standing turned and fled in the face of this unstoppable foe.

The leader of the mercenaries leveled his pistol at the lone warrior and fired. Impossibly, he swayed aside at the last moment, and the shot merely scraped across the side of his helm. The leader swore and cocked his pistol for another shot… but he was too slow.

The warrior’s shield took him square in the chest, and he was hurled from the saddle. He fell heavily and grimaced as the warrior’s foot came down on his torso, pinning him to the ground.

Staring up, the leader of the raiders realized with a shock that he knew the face of his opponent. A name surfaced in his memory, from a time when he had still lived among the Rakkor.

“Atreus,” he said. “Is it you?”

In answer, the Rakkoran’s spear drove down, punching through the leader’s chest.

“Atreus is gone,” said the warrior. “I am the Pantheon, now and forever.”

Blood bubbled from the dying man’s lips, and he shuddered. When finally he was still, Pantheon pulled his weapon clear and turned away. Twilight had given way to dusk, and countless stars lit the night sky.

A comet of burning fire streaked down toward the distant mountains, a hundred miles east.

Pantheon’s eyes narrowed. “It is time, then,” he said to the darkness, and began the long journey back to Mount Targon.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The appearance of a comet in the night sky is often said to portend upheaval and unrest. Under the auspices of such fiery harbingers, new empires rise, old cultures fall, and even the stars themselves may vanish from the heavens…

The truth is, perhaps, more unsettling.

The almighty being known as Aurelion Sol was already ancient before the rise of the mortal races of Runeterra. Born in the first breath of creation, he and those like him roamed the vast nothingness of a pristine celestial realm, seeking to fill this canvas of incalculable breadth with marvels whose twinkling spectra would bring fulfillment and delight to all who witnessed them.

As he wandered, Aurelion Sol seldom encountered any equals. The eternal Aspects were dispassionate and incurious things, contributing little to existence, content only to compose amusingly self-centered philosophies on the nature of creation.

But then, bathed in the light of a fairly unremarkable sun he had crafted eons earlier, he discovered something. A world. New realms.

He did not know who had created this world, or why—only that it had not been him.

The Aspects, who seemed unusually invested in it, implored him to come closer. There was life here, and magic, and fledgling civilizations that cried out for guidance from beings greater than themselves. Flattered by this new audience to his supreme majesty, Aurelion Sol descended to bask in their adulation, in the form of a vast and terrible dragon from the stars.

The tiny inhabitants of the insignificant land of Targon named him for the golden light of the sun he had gifted them, and the Aspects commanded them to bring forth a suitable offering in return. The mortals climbed to the peak of their tallest mountain, and presented him with a splendorous crown, crafted with careful and cunning magic, and etched with the inscrutable patterns of the celestial realm.

From the moment it touched Aurelion Sol’s brow, he knew this was no gift at all.

The accursed thing clamped in place with unimaginable force, enough that even he could not remove it, and he could feel his knowledge of the sun and its creation being stolen and scrutinized by intelligences vastly inferior to his own. Worse still, the power of the crown hurled him back into the heavens, and prevented him from getting any closer to that world again.

Instead, he was forced to watch as the duplicitous Aspects of Targon set the mortals to work in the construction of a great, gleaming disc. With this, they channeled his celestial power to raise up immortal god-warriors, for some unknown conflict that was apparently still to come.

Outraged, Aurelion Sol could see other stars fading across the firmament for lack of care and maintenance, and he strained to break free of the crown’s control. It was he who had birthed their light into the universe! Why must he be shackled, now, by the Aspects and their lowly pawns? He roared with glee when the Sun Disc failed… only to see a second, more powerful one take its place. Eventually, resigned to his fate, he saw the god-warriors cast down their rivals, then chittering creatures of pure darkness, and eventually each other.

Then, in little more than the blink of a star dragon’s eye, the world was ravaged by a succession of sorcerous catastrophes, and Aurelion Sol finally knew that Targon and the hated Aspects were all but defenseless. As he cautiously circled back, he realized the magic that bound him was weakening. Flecks of gold began to fall from his crown, each one blazing across the skies like a comet.

Driven by the tantalizing possibilities of freedom and revenge, Aurelion Sol now regards Runeterra with simmering, eternal fury. Surely, it is here, upon this world, that the cosmic balance will tip in his favor once more—and with it, the universe itself shall bear witness to the fate of those who dare steal the power of a star forger.

The fog had come in swiftly, eclipsing the afternoon sun over the crossroads. Jonath had tried to find his way between the thick tendrils, the world around him darkened by an impenetrable shroud. Shapes pushed at the fabric of the mist, grasping for purchase. Reaching for him from beyond.

He fumbled with the reins in his hands, trying to find the nerve to do what he had to. So he could mount up and ride for safety.

“Don’t do this, boy. We all have a duty.”

Jonath blinked the fear from his eyes, fixating on the knight slumped over the steed. He had found her like this, still mounted but unable to even right herself in the saddle. Her armor was pierced and slick with blood, although Jonath didn’t know what manner of weapon could have inflicted these wounds. The knight was dying all the same.

In her eyes, he saw judgment—they found him weak. Unworthy. She gripped the reins firmly in one plated fist, pulling him in close.

“We must carry word to the capital. You... the heir must know. Tell Prince Jarvan what is happening here, the garrison cannot hold them off.”

Faint sounds of battle from the south told Jonath that the beings in the mist had reached Havenfall. The air around him grew colder, darker. The inky mist pulsated, inching close. Havenfall’s knights were none of his business. The supposed elite of the crown had never done anything for him. And the people there...

Screwing shut his eyes, Jonath ripped the reins from the knight, trying to ignore her pained gasp as she rolled out of the saddle and hit the ground.

“Protector forgive me,” he whispered, his voice wavering. This was no worse than the other times he’d taken horses, he tried to tell himself as he mounted.

The war steed’s bulk instilled a measure of calm in him. Running a hand down the stallion’s muscled neck, Jonath looked around the crossroads to get his bearings. The eastbound road led to the Great City, with its high walls and countless soldiers. What warning did they need? Surely, whatever foul magic urged the claws and voices in the mist would be no match for the capital’s defense of stone and steel. Just to the south lay Havenfall, his home. Moments ago, he could see its glinting rooftops and rows of masts from where he now stood. Behind the town lay open country, as far as a horse could carry him.

Jonath had spent days beyond count riding across those rolling hills, racing incoming ships along the white cliffs overlooking the bay, letting the sea stiffen his hair with salt, rejoicing in the thrills of unchecked freedom. He’d never kept any he took. He was no thief who deserved to be exiled to the Hinterlands. He borrowed horses, always returning them at the end of his excursions, tired but unharmed.

How will I return this one? If I leave her to—

No. It wasn’t his fault she had gotten in the way of this mist and squandered her chance at survival—for Jonath to take his did not make him guilty of her death. No matter what he did, he had always been deemed insufficient. He had a hand with horses and the will to work, but even his elders—horse breeders and traders—had shunned him for his unwillingness to put the demands of others ahead of his own needs. No use in talent if he couldn’t be relied on, they said. No use in the approval of people who didn’t value true freedom, thought Jonath. Not to mention the garrison, who glorified obedience above all else, sneering at him down gilded lances even when he came to prove his mettle on the recruiting fields.

Well, out in the hills, chasing the wind on the back of an unbroken steed, he was the exemplar. He would outrun this unnatural mist, and lose himself among the ranging herds.

Jonath spurred the stallion, making for the southern path, as time slowed down around him. The stallion flattened his ears, suddenly rigid under Jonath. Whatever had scared it was beyond the natural din of battle, something that didn’t belong here; Jonath felt it, too. Primal fear seized him, squeezing his chest with an unyielding grip. The mist pulled close, then pulsed clear of the crossing, as if limbs within were pulling the veil aside. Jonath heard nothing in the deathly stillness.

Then came the sound of steeled hooves on hard-pack road.

As the veil parted, Jonath made out riders in the gloom. Even though he could hear the mounts at full gallop, the clatter of plate armor, and the whipping of stirrups, the echelon appeared immobile—like a framed tableau of nobles on the hunt, or the crown’s elite on the charge, come at the last second to defend the citizenry against the dangers beyond the border. But these were not Demacian knights, nor saviors from fairy tales. These riders were not here to protect. They were girded in black-iron plate, and an evil light glowed in their motionless eyes. A bannerman carried a still pennant, the beating fabric audible nonetheless. A hornblower, lipless mouth deadlocked around his instrument, sounded the attack.

The mist shrieked. Heeeecaaaariiiim.

It was a name—somehow, Jonath knew. The mist heralded his coming.

It was the name of death itself.

As this realization staggered Jonath, he noticed the rider at the lead. He was gigantic, towering over his retinue, shaking the ground with each unmoving stride. His eyes, bright with inner fire, took in all before them. Even staring ahead, they seemed to bore into Jonath, searing through him, filling him with an ancient dread.

The rider turned his head, and smiled.

Jonath let out a cry, recoiling with instinctual fear. He flailed, kicking back to stay in the saddle, startling his stallion. The mount reared, throwing Jonath to the ground with a dry thud. Galvanized by the shock, the animal bolted into the darkness. Jonath groaned, his head ringing with the impact. He pressed his forehead against the dry earth, dust packing his nostrils with each panicked breath. He wished he could pray away what he would see when he looked up.

“Rise, squire,” a grinding voice said, a smile pulling the syllables taut. “Find your courage... Look at me.”

The words were guttural, each syllable slowly surfacing as if rising from the depths of a furnace. Jonath could not place the accent, but he had heard its mocking tone before. A sting of old spite made him raise his head.

Crudely shod hooves burned the soil where they stood. The rider’s horse seemed to be made entirely of blackened iron, glowing from within with green fire. Jonath’s breath caught in his throat as he saw the rider was not saddled on this unnatural steed—he was fused with it. What was he? Had he come as punishment for Jonath’s crime? The monstrosity laughed, slowly raising an infernal glaive.

Tears ran down Jonath’s face, his mind seizing hold of the only thought it could. Protector forgive me. Protector forgive me.

But the blow never fell. Instead, the monster called one of his ghostly riders closer. The rider, too, was not a horseman at all, but fused at the midriff with the body of a horse. The entire echelon was deformed like their leader. Hecarim gripped the rider’s neck and slowly, effortlessly, ripped his torso from the equine trunk. The rider, trailing green smoke, made no sound, twitching erratically. Where his body had been, there was now the head of a withered, armored destrier.

“We’ll be back for you later,” the leader chuckled as he released the rider’s spirit. The spirit floated mid-air, aimless now that it had been severed from its animal half. The rest of the undying echelon remained utterly motionless, frozen in time.

Hecarim turned his gaze to Jonath.

“I claim this land by decree of King Viego, regent of the Shadow Isles. Let my loyal knights witness that Hecarim, Conqueror of Helia, Grand Master of the Iron Order, honors his foes with a fair fight.” The words twisted around his smirk. “So, find your courage, noble squire, and mount up. War has come.” He presented the reins of the spectral destrier to Jonath.

Jonath took in Hecarim, the tone of his offer betraying it for the lie it was. He looked around him, the echelon of knights looming, immovable rictus grins carved into their skeletal faces. His mind screamed in tune with the whispers behind the veil. Let soldiers deal with these monsters. He grabbed the reins and, with one motion, swung up into the saddle.

The steed’s body was solid yet incorporeal at the same time, the heavy barding hissing where it moved against the beast’s bulk. Where he would sense a horse’s character, Jonath felt only emptiness. Where he should feel a union of kindred minds, he teetered on the edge of a ravenous void. Jonath let his fear take over and hammered his heels into its flanks. He ripped at the reins and turned south, piercing into the wall of black mist...

Hooked nails scoring my skin. Long-dead grimaces accusing me.

...and bursting out the other side into the clear. Ahead, the path was open. The sun was setting over the bay, the sea glittering calmly beyond the cliffs.

Behind Jonath, hollow, furnace laughter echoed through the crossroads.

“Give chase,” he heard Hecarim order.

Jonath clung to the steed, speeding down the path faster than he had ever seen any stallion gallop. In his wake, a thin trail of the unnatural mist lined the packed earth. The sun was setting into the bay, giving way to the deep blue of dusk. It had been a beautiful day for a ride; if he kept its pace, he might see another. Looking up, he saw the Protector’s Shield coming into view in the darkening sky. Jonath’s smile at the constellation turned stale as he heard the long call of a hunting horn.

His heartbeat quickened as he saw thick tendrils of mist closing in behind him. The monstrous Hecarim and his Iron Order rode within. Tendrils of darkness flanked Jonath, and he thought he could see shapes coalescing inside. His mouth fell open in horror, his vision blurring from sudden tears. He could see her nonetheless. The knight he had left to die, now a ghostly form trapped in the mist. She raised an arm that ended in a ragged stump—the hand that had held the reins, missing.

“You have no honor,” she wailed. “You are no true Demacian!”

“Please, no,” Jonath whispered, forcing his gaze ahead. He frantically kicked the steed’s flanks, willing it to get him away from this horror. He glanced down at the reins. The knight’s severed fist was gripping them, yanking the mount into a stall.

“Flee, coward,” the voice echoed from the mist.

Whimpering in anguish, Jonath ripped the reins out of the fist and threw the plated gauntlet toward the riders at his heels.

“So quick to take offense, squire,” Hecarim jeered. “I did not think you had the courage. If you are challenging me to a duel, then I accept. We noblemen have a code to follow, after all.”

Jonath raised his arm in front of his face as Hecarim closed to striking distance, but instead of being beheaded by the glaive, Jonath was engulfed once more in cloying darkness. The faces of the dead surrounded him, their scornful laughter an anthem to their twisted master’s trickery. Jonath spurred his spectral steed, and as he burst from the mist, Hecarim and the riders disappeared from view.

Night had fallen over the coast as Jonath passed the stables at the edge of Havenfall. The sound of battle had stopped, and the approaches to the town appeared largely untouched. He felt a brief wave of relief. He would find soldiers here who could fight. Commander Tyndarid and his garrison would see off the riders on Jonath’s trail—for all his imperious arrogance, the castellan was an indomitable warrior.

Jonath saw war horses, some half saddled and barded, some still tied to their hitching rails near the trough, lay dead. His heart sank.

As Jonath’s destrier carried him further into the settlement, the true horror of the black mist around him became apparent. Jonath slowly turned around. All of this... couldn’t be real. It had to be a figment of his troubled imagination, or some dark sorcery worked by a vengeful hedge mage.

But his eyes told him otherwise.

In the streets, the spirits of newly dead townsfolk lingered above their own corpses, cowering in fear, wailing silently, reliving the instant they were ridden down by the Iron Order. Proud knights of the crown stood mute where they had died battling. As Jonath passed, one by one, spirits fixed their hollow eyes on him. A knight, his killer’s spear still pinning his shield to the shade of his body, made a step toward Jonath. A gasp escaped his lips as he recognized Commander Tyndarid. A group of dead shipbuilders haltingly gained their feet and tumbled toward Jonath in agitation. He kicked his steed and made his escape. A voice inside him whispered that even in death, they knew he didn’t belong.

Wraithlike raiders coursed through the merchant quarters, corralling survivors and putting torches to the roofs of the smithies and trade posts. Green fire engulfed the buildings and cast a deathly light across the square—the thatching and wood somehow remaining untouched by the flames. The townsfolk inside... Jonath looked away as he rode, willing himself not to hear.

By the harbor, fishing boats and river barges lay low against the white-stone pier, scuttled and ablaze. Jonath looked out over the bay, his gaze drawn across the still water by the long, mournful note of a hunting horn. A squadron of spectral riders raced across the calm water in the moonlight, lowering their spears as they neared the last sailship still afloat. The charge hit home, followed by the faint clash of weapons and the cries of sailors dying. The ship disappeared from sight in a mass of writhing fog.

The entirety of Havenfall was under siege—who knew how much of Demacia was affected by this invasion.

Circling his mount, Jonath tried to control his fear and find a way out. Perhaps he should race his own steed off the pier and ride the waters across the bay. He was unable to outpace these deathless monsters, but he might slip away unnoticed and escape this terrible nightmare...

Jonath was brought back to the present by the sound of footfalls. He noticed a gaggle of survivors picking their way through the ruined market square. There were four of them. A pair of brown-haired youths, clearly siblings by their features, held on to short blades, their eyes darting fearfully across the square. They protected an elderly woman who followed in their wake, dressed in the garb of the Illuminators and carrying a steel cudgel. Jonath knew the powerfully built figure at the head of the group—it was the blacksmith Adamar. He held a heavy blade and shield, still unadorned and blackened with the soot of its forging.

“Jonath!” Adamar called out quietly. “We thought we were the last ones left alive. We’re getting away from here. You are welcome to joi—” The blacksmith fell silent as he saw Jonath’s steed. His eyes hardened with fury, and he ushered the others behind him, soot-matt shield held high. “You’re in league with these monsters!”

The old Illuminator placed a hand on Adamar’s shoulder. “Look at his eyes, Ada. He’s just as afraid as we are. He’s not with them.” She addressed Jonath directly. “Get off that abomination, child, and come with us.”

“I wish I could,” Jonath heard himself say. The guilt of his actions washed over him, making his head swim. He saw the dying knight’s face again, accusing him. “But Adamar... he’s right. I don’t belong here, and I don’t deserve your mercy. You don’t know what I did today, who I really am. I am no Demacian.”

“Enough of that. You are Jonath of Ropemaker’s Row, not some stranger. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you pray at the Protector’s shrine after dark. I know your heart wants to lead you back to righteousness. I cannot tell you if it will, but tonight all that matters is survival. There are not many of us left here, and you are one of us. One of the living. Now get off that... thing, and let us leave this place.”

Jonath grabbed the saddle, swinging his leg up to dismount. “Thank the Protector for your mercy—”

Coils of mist ripped open above the town square, spectral riders bursting forth. Hecarim was at the fore, galloping through thin air, swinging his jagged glaive wide. Before Jonath understood what he was looking at, the blade struck the Illuminator in the chest, cleaving her in two. Hecarim’s riders unceremoniously ran through Adamar and the two youths, before cantering to a halt. Like the first time Jonath saw them, they became completely still—their spears held rigidly upright, their banners and pinions frozen, only the sound of their motionless regalia piercing the deathly quiet.

Ever the first of their number, there was Hecarim, hooves scraping the ground, his animal body pacing back and forth, his eyes burning with ancient intellect. Grand Master, conqueror. Despoiler of Havenfall. How was Jonath meant to stand against the might of this infernal warmaster? How was anyone?

Hecarim closed the distance, riding up alongside Jonath until they stood shoulder to shoulder. Slowly, he reached down toward the bridle of Jonath’s borrowed steed, arresting it in place. The Grand Master was taller than Jonath by half.

“You acquitted yourself well today,” Hecarim said, the deep, furnace-roar softened to a growl. His gaze wandered, settling on the moonlit bay behind Jonath. “I have seen kings lose their minds when faced with the Black Mist and the eternal anguish that it brings. Everyone you ever knew perished this night, yet your will to survive remains unbroken. Who else are you willing to sacrifice so you can live? Are you willing to let even your liege die?”

Jonath’s heart pounded, his vision blurred as tears of helpless panic threatened to overwhelm him. Moments ago, Hecarim had slain the last survivors of his hometown, and now he was conversing with him as if they had sparred in some practice duel on the training grounds.

“The... the king is already dead. The crown prince, Protector guide his hand, is next in line, and there could be no one more deserving. I... do not want to put him in peril for my own gain.”

Hecarim remained still for a moment, then scoffed with soured mirth. “In the line of succession, the crown does not always go to the most fitting heir. And what do I care for the frail kingdoms of the living. We all have to make do with the hand fate deals us.”

Up close, Jonath could see the countless pits and scratches in Hecarim’s armor. He could see endless years of conflict scored into the black-iron plates encasing the flames that made up his body, and understood a fundamental truth about this creature... He had been created by war, and he was made for war. He had done nothing but battle for centuries, condemned to relive his worst transgressions. Whatever crimes he had committed in life, this was his punishment.

And he relished every interminable second of it.

Wherever the unnatural mist went, Hecarim and his Iron Order followed—pillaging, killing, and reveling in the atrocities they inflicted on the living. What would become of Demacia if no one stopped this evil? Jonath finally understood something that had eluded him his entire life. Courage wasn’t some unique quality infused into true Demacians at birth, or a measure of his worth to the world. It was a question of realizing what must be done, and choosing to do it no matter what. He felt calm for the first time since the crossroads. He remembered the wounded knight’s dying words, one last time.

There were no soldiers left in Havenfall to warn the crown prince, and soon there might be none left in the entire kingdom. Fixing the Grand Master with his gaze, he pulled the reins from Hecarim’s mailed fist, taking control of the destrier. Hecarim indulged him, his posture changing from introspection to curiosity.

Jonath wheeled, gaining a few paces of distance. “I have seen how you ride down defenseless villagers, reveling in the screams of the helpless. I know you are bound to your basest instincts for eternity, but there is more to you. If a shred of your living self remains, if you have any honor at all, abomination, you will let me pass!”

He collected himself. He knew he would not make it to the Great City, but he was going to try. The bulk of his tireless mount tensed as it sensed what was about to happen. With all his might, Jonath gave it the spurs, and his spectral steed charged. For the first time in his life, Jonath truly believed the words as they sprang from his lips.

“For the uncrowned king! For Demacia!”

Hecarim smirked with delight as the boy charged willingly toward the spears of the Iron Order. The folly of youth had stayed with him until death, a flaw all too common in Hecarim’s experience. But as long as Viego chased his own foolish obsession across the oceans of the world, trailing the Mist in his wake, Hecarim would enjoy the spoils of war.

Around him, as far as he could see, his riders spread terror and death. A cast-iron grin widened across his burning skull.

“If but our hands were not bound by fealty...” he mused, as he watched the last living soul of Havenfall perish.

The sword-wife stood amid the burnt out ruin of her home. Everything and everyone that mattered to her was gone, and she was filled with fathomless grief... and hate. Hate was now all that compelled her.

She saw again the smile on his face as he gave the order. He was meant to be their protector, but he’d spat upon his vows. Hers was not the only family shattered by the oath-breaker.

The desire to go after him was strong. She wanted nothing more than to plant her sword in his chest and watch the life drain from his eyes... but she knew she would never be able to get close enough to him. He was guarded day and night, and she was but one warrior. She would never be able to fight her way through his battalion alone. Such a death would serve no purpose.

She took a shuddering breath, knowing there was no coming back.

A crude effigy of a man, formed of sticks and twine, lay upon a fire-blackened dresser. Its body was wrapped in a scrap of cloth torn from the cloak of the betrayer. She’d pried it from her husband’s dead grasp. Alongside it was a hammer and three rusted nails.

She gathered everything up and moved to the threshold. The door itself was gone, smashed to splinters in the attack. Beyond, lit by moonlight, lay the empty, darkened fields.

Reaching up, the sword-wife pressed the stick-effigy to the hardwood lintel.

“I invoke thee, Lady of Vengeance,” she said, her voice low, trembling with the depth of her fury. “From beyond the veil, hear my plea. Come forth. Let justice be done.”

She readied her hammer and the first of the nails.

“I name my betrayer once,” she said, and spoke his name aloud. As she did so, she placed the tip of the first nail to the chest of the stick-figure. With a single strike, she hammered it in deep, pinning it to the hardwood door frame.

The sword-wife shivered. The room had become markedly colder. Or had she imagined it?

“I name him twice,” she said, and she did so, hammering the second nail alongside the first.

Her gaze dropped, and she jolted in shock. A dark figure stood out in the moonlit field, a hundred yards in the distance. It was utterly motionless. Breathing quicker, the sword-wife returned her attention to the unfinished task.

“I name him thrice,” she said, speaking again the name of the murderer of her husband and children, before hammering home the final nail.

An ancient spirit of vengeance stood before her, filling the doorway, and the sword-wife staggered back, gasping involuntarily.

The otherworldly being was clad in archaic armor, her flesh translucent and glowing with spectral un-light. Black Mist coiled around her like a living shroud.

With a squeal of tortured metal, the spectral figure drew forth the blackened spear protruding from her breastplate — the ancient weapon that had ended her life.

She threw it to the ground before the sword-wife. No words were spoken; there was no need. The sword-wife knew what was being offered to her — vengeance — and knew its terrible cost: her soul.

The spirit watched on, her face impassive and her eyes burning with an unrelenting cold fury, as the sword-wife picked up the treacherous weapon.

“I pledge myself to vengeance,” said the sword-wife, her voice quivering. She reversed the spear, aiming the tip inward, towards her heart. “I pledge it with my blood. I pledge it with my soul.”

She paused. Her husband would have pleaded for her to turn away from this path. He would have begged her not to condemn her soul for theirs. A moment of doubt gnawed at her. The undying specter watched on.

The sword-wife’s eyes narrowed as she thought of her husband lying dead, cut down by swords and axes. She thought again of her children, sprawled upon the ground, and her resolve hardened like a cold stone in her heart. Her grip tightened upon the spear.

“Help me,” she implored, her decision made. “Please, help me kill him.”

She rammed the spear into her chest, driving it in deep.

The sword-wife’s eyes widened and she dropped to her knees. She tried to speak, but only blood bubbled from her lips.

The ghostly apparition watched her die, her expression impassive.

As the last of the lifeblood ran from her body, the shade of the sword-wife climbed to her feet. She looked down at her insubstantial hands in wonder, then at her own corpse lying dead-eyed in a growing pool of blood upon the floor. The shade’s expression hardened, and a ghostly sword appeared in her hand.

An ethereal tether, little more than a wisp of light, linked the newly formed shade to the avenging spirit she had summoned. Through their bond, the sword-wife saw her differently, glimpsing the noble warrior she had been in life: tall and proud, her armor gleaming. Her posture was confident, yet without arrogance; a born leader, a born soldier. This was a commander the sword-wife would have willingly bled for.

Behind the spirit’s anger, she sensed her empathy — recognition of their shared pain of betrayal.

“Your cause is our cause,” said Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance. Her voice was grave cold. “We walk the path of vengeance as one, now.”

The sword-wife nodded.

With that, the avenging spirit and the shade of the sword-wife stepped into the darkness and were gone.

Visions pour in.

No mercy from my mind tonight.

I stand in a glade and imagine it drowning in sights unreal. Grass melts. Rocks swirl into twisted faces. Leaves turn to liquid and drip down branches, bleeding into pools.

The moon is a closed eye.

Brush in hand, my ethereal palette emerges.

Memories resurface.

I repaint, relive...

A man burned before me in his own armory.

Around us sweltered a painted fire with flames the color of daybreak. Its golden core beat with pain—with every wound his weapons had ever inflicted. The blaze climbed the walls, but did not catch, shedding neither ash nor smoke and spreading only as far as I willed it.

Yet it flared more vibrantly, more violently, than any real fire.

The man writhed. His senses scorched deeper than bone. He reached toward a weapon rack lined with serrated carvers—Noxian steel with Kashuri handiwork.

Kashuri, the thought arises. Still far, each step farther from Koyehn.

These blades were used to maim and kill. He caused suffering; he deserved to suffer.

Rendering the flames of a forge, I drew answers out of him. Who he worked with, for how long, why. His fury strained through every gasp. My painting thrashed in his eyes, mirroring every drop of wrath.

To make it stop, he offered everything. Money. Arms. Revenge, by his hand. But the only thing I cared about was this moment between us. Every vision that burdened me became his burden. The fire surged from my imagination into his, lightening the weight of my mind.

I kept my art from destroying him. We both now live with the marks of this, but while he chokes within flashbacks of the inferno, I survive in it.

The tide pulls me away. I repaint, relive...

A woman ferried me across troubled waters.

Around us, a golden-drawn breeze—dappled lights with specks of lantern bugs.

We sat across from each other. Gulfweed clambered from the surf and gripped the oars. Water lilies grew from the wellspring of my mind, an offering; I shaped them. The gulfweed took the painted blossoms instead, prying them apart.

The woman’s hands found rhythm. The course was not always like this, she said. She had been forced to carry marauders, arms runners, assassins, all with dark intent that seeped into the channel, which grew sick with chop and murk.

In her voice, a deep-stained guilt.

I listened. I gathered color from my palette and matched the sweeps of her oars, creating lilies and life anew—carps in the plums and oranges of sunset. I inspired her to recall kind memories from beneath layers of pain. Everything that burdened her became my burden.

The canal turned from lashing the pieces within itself to cradling them. The lines of the woman’s eyes furled with gentle joy. Somewhere in our minds, birds sang.

Our steadied thoughts, steadied hands, brought us to safer shores.

There’s light to what lives in my mind, and I can choose to paint that way. But... light always casts a shadow. I repaint, relive...

An artist stood beside me in a Koyehn studio.

Around us, inky blackness broken by candlelight. Far below an open window, the ocean—a violet gorge with seafoam for teeth, consuming itself over and over. The Temple of Koyehn stood for what would become its last night.

“All things must end,” said Jhin.

He watched a candle burning. I looked to the tide.

“I hope you enjoyed your time here,” I said.

He was still as death. “What does a wave feel for the rock upon which it crashes?”

Everything, I thought. Nature is emotional—capricious and harmonious.

“Nothing,” I said, shrugging. “You feel more for Koyehn than that, surely?”

“This place showed me all I desired to see,” Jhin said, “except one, final piece.”

He turned toward me, and I, him. “Which is?”

“Your... painting, Hwei. The truth of it. I know forced performances, and you’ve always hidden something. I’d like to know what.”

My eyes widened. What color they were then, I couldn’t tell. What Jhin found churning within, I dreaded.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m true to myself.”

An eye opens on my canvas, searching for anything from Jhin—some envy, resentment, passion, sorrow... Any feeling to explain him.

When we meet again, I’ll greet him like before. Eat together. Watch as he shifts in a new light. Ask, “Why Koyehn? Why me?” And I’ll paint what I know of him, returning life to his murders, putting colors back on agonized faces—surrounding us with a darkness so bright, it becomes blinding, and so blinding, it becomes freeing.

Art saves me, yet it can shatter me. Sometimes, I think I’m already lost—

“No,” Jhin said. “You are not.”

I remember how he convinced me to reveal my art. But I still paint arms to hold my past self back. Eyes to glower. Mouths to scream. At the same time, the arms push, the eyes behold, the mouths goad.

In past and present, I lift the brush...

I’ve finished tonight’s paintings.

Around me, black and gold—fractures of earth, light emitting from the chasms, songbirds in gilt cages, the infinity of an eye, straining with full veins.

The moon witnesses. Blot everything beneath it—Koyehn, Jhin—and I’m still left with myself.

The vision erupts. In its place, the forest is just the forest, holding itself together.

Tears draw down my face. My palette dissipates.

Awake, I dream of my next piece.

Mazier is sprawled on the rotten planks, waves lapping at stone underneath. Her slowing heartbeat pumps blood into the seawater. She stares, unblinking, at the shanty-dwellings above, and the stars beyond.

Pyke studies her face once more. Mazier’s dead eyes stab at his mind.

A jaulling vessel. Four-master with tattered sails. Waves the size of mountains.

Long hair in high-sea wind. Dozens of faces on deck. Watching. Blue eyes. Mazier’s blue eyes, wide in disbelief.

Then, teeth.

Not Mazier’s pearly whites. Gunky, sword-sized teeth. Criss-crossed the boat. Losing light. Closing. In the jaull’s mouth. Lifeline slack. Cut.

The tongue was too slick. Eyes stung with sweat. Fingers finding no purchase. Get to open water. Swim, swim...

The jaull’s teeth clamped shut. Then pain. Then darkness.

Ship was gone. So were the eyes.

Mazier’s eyes.

An able-bodied sailor. Aye. She was there. She cut my line.

Pyke nudges the body with his boot, gazing downward all the while. He nudges her until she reaches the edge of the dock. One more kick, and Mazier is floating. The sharks are quick to feast. Circling. Snapping. The ocean never wastes time.

Gulls shriek, their warbled cries caught on the wind, as Pyke finds Mazier, abled-bodied sailor, on the list. Red ink strikes her name from the parchment.

The last name on the Terror’s crew manifest.

That’s it. No more names, just a lot of red crosses. Where did I get all that ink...?

A feeling gnaws at Pyke. Restless, unsettled, unsatisfied. The churning lurch of bile in his belly. He can’t be done. There were too many of them there, on the decks. Maybe he got the wrong manifest. Maybe it doesn’t even matter.

They let me die. So many hands. So many times.

Another sound. Not gulls. Not waves. Not teeth closing. Not the voice in the back of his mind screaming out “You’re not done!” over and over and over. Not the music he remembers from the swimming city, all those years ago.

It’s a new sound. A real sound. A here-and-now sound.

Pyke looks with his living eye, and sees wooden stairs sagging under heavy bootfalls. A thickset man, walking down toward the moored, bobbing vessels.

He stops when he sees all the blood. His hand disappears into his jacket, pulling a flintlock, keeping the barrel of the gun close to his chest. Ready to aim and fire. Like a bloody idiot.

Pyke steps into the moonlight. The man looks like he’s seen a ghost. The skin around his mouth clams up tighter than a dock banker’s coin-purse. His eyes go wide and quivery, like jellyfish, like calm water catching a breeze.

“Who’s that?” he yells.

Come find out.

The flintlock is aimed at Pyke’s head. Then comes the flash and the bang. The shot is true, but it splinters wood because Pyke is no longer where he was.

He’s in the mist.

He falls apart, into salt and drops of water—a fine man to a fine mist. He heard they call him a phantasm. They’re half right.

The heavyset man reloads. Sweat beads his wrinkled brow.

In those precious few seconds, Pyke is all around him, in the in between, somewhere behind the air itself, studying him. Those fearful eyes, crap-brown. His beard wild and white. Sagging jowls, crooked nose, cracked lips, the way his earlobes are cauliflowered from countless dirty tavern fights.

Looks like a captain.

The man reeks of sweet, prickly fear. Good old boot-quaking terror.

Smells like a captain.

Pyke needs to be sure. He takes form—he was always a big man, now with the baleful, glowing eye that the sea gifted him, he feels larger still. Tell me your name, he rumbles.

The man didn’t expect anyone to appear behind him. Nobody expects that. Maybe they do in fantasies or nightmares or the stories they tell in bars. But in reality, everyone just craps their pants and falls flat on their face, and this heavyset captain is no rule-breaker on that count. He trips on his own stupid boots, and rolls down the stairs like a sack of tinned victuals.

Pyke takes each step slowly. A Noxian galleon is moored at the dock. Trader ship, or traitor ship? Is there a difference? He guesses not.

You got ‘til I get to the bottom of these steps to tell me what I want to know.

The man wheezes, his wind knocked clear into someone else’s sails. Gasping. A fish on land. Chubby hands reaching out.

I remember you...

Step.

White-knuckle grip on the deck rail...

Step.

The man tries to stand, but his knee bends the wrong way.

Step.

You were watching.

Step. A wharf-rat scurries close. Dinner time soon.

You were smiling.

Sputter. Tears coming now. “P-please… I don’t know what you’re talking about...”

Step.

Name. Now.

“Beke! Beke Nidd!”

Pyke pauses to consult the manifest, one step from the bottom. All the red marks. All the crossed out names.

There. Beke Nidd. Midshipman.

Uncrossed. Clear as day. Must have had the paper folded wrong.

Beke Nidd. Yeah, I remember you. You were there.

“I’ve never seen you before! It’s my first night in Bilge—”

People can’t lie with a hookman’s barber lodged in their cheek. They can’t beg or trade facts they don’t have.

Fine tool, the barber-blade. Made of tempered sharkbone. Keener than steel. Sticks in real good, snagging on bone and flesh. Struggling only hooks it deeper, as Beke is learning. His eyes are really afraid now.

Those eyes stab at Pyke’s mind.

The memory rises like a tide, and he opens up to let the waters come crashing through, drowning out Beke’s gurgled pleas.

A jaulling vessel. Four-master with tattered sails. Waves the size of mountains.

Ragged beard in high-sea wind. Dozens of faces on deck. Watching. Crap-brown eyes. Beke Nidd’s crap-brown eyes, wide in disbelief.

Then, teeth.