LoL Universe Indexing and Search

From an early age, Lucian wanted nothing more than to be like his father, Urias, who was a member of the ancient order of the Sentinels of Light. While Lucian remained home in Demacia, Urias ranged far and wide, protecting the living from the wraiths of the Black Mist.

Urias would regale Lucian with tales of his adventures, where courage and ingenuity carried the day. Lucian hung on every word, picturing himself saving the people of Runeterra at his father’s side. But Urias did not want his son to follow in his footsteps, hoping to keep his family safe from the dangerous life he had chosen.

Lucian waited for the day he would become Urias’ apprentice, but it never came.

Instead, Lucian stayed in Demacia, where he found himself increasingly at odds with the kingdom’s culture. It especially rankled him that Demacia would exile peaceful mages to the hinterlands. Lucian found fulfillment in safeguarding the banished on their perilous journey. Where his countrymen saw only outlaws, reducing the world to good or evil, Lucian looked closer, and saw people in need of help.

After returning home from one such journey, Lucian found a stranger waiting at his door. She introduced herself as Senna, a Sentinel of Light. Cradling Urias’ relic pistol in her hands, Senna explained that Lucian’s father had died, falling in battle against the the long-dead wraiths of the Black Mist.

Senna had been Urias’ apprentice, fighting at his side for years.

Lucian reeled in shock—not only was his father dead, but before him stood a woman who had lived the life he had wanted for so long. As Senna made to take her leave, Lucian stopped her at the door, insisting he join her. He knew what came next—the vigil for lost Sentinels. Senna reluctantly allowed Lucian to accompany her.

Along the way, the two traded stories of their time with Urias, Senna comforting Lucian with her plainspoken wisdom, and Lucian easing her pain with fond remembrances. They arrived at Urias’ birthplace, far away from Demacian lands. There, they held the vigil for lost Sentinels.

As they prepared to depart, dark clouds rolled in over the coast, and wraiths manifested from the foulness, attacking them. Where Lucian was horrified, Senna drew her weapons with a grim familiarity—this was her curse. Since she was a child, tendrils of the Black Mist had stalked her wherever she went, unleashing its horror should she tarry anywhere for too long.

As Senna fought one of the creatures, it clawed Urias’ pistol from her grip. Lucian retrieved it, sensing his fate opening up before him. The blazing sorrow in his heart manifested in a bolt of light that blasted from the pistol, distracting the wraith so Senna could banish it. Senna fought off the remaining spirits before the pair left, the Mist ever on her trail.

Never before had one of the uninitiated fired a Sentinel’s relic weapon. For the first time, Lucian had shown Senna his potential to join the order.

Eventually, Senna entrusted Lucian with his father’s pistol, and instructed him in the tactics and doctrines of the Sentinels. He proved himself worthy of the lessons. A bond slowly formed between them, Lucian’s warmth and charm the perfect balance to Senna’s discipline and unbreakable resolve.

Lucian and Senna battled the myriad evils that ushered forth from the Black Mist, and their reliance upon each other blossomed into love. The closer Lucian grew to Senna, the more he witnessed the curse she bore. Each conflict hardened him, splitting the world apart into light and shadow, good and evil. Lucian’s urge to heal Senna became a crusade he pursued with reckless zeal.

Scouring a forgotten vault for a cure, the two Sentinels were attacked by the monstrous wraith Thresh. The ghoulish Chain Warden was a dangerous foe, and when Senna called to withdraw and regroup, Lucian refused to turn back. Throwing himself blindly into the attack, Lucian realized his mistake as Thresh gained the upper hand. Senna stepped into Thresh’s path, imploring Lucian to run.

As the dust settled, Senna lay dead before him, her soul claimed by Thresh’s eldritch lantern.

Senna’s sacrifice was nearly Lucian’s undoing. For years, he stalked Runeterra, a husk of the man he once was, his former warmth replaced with anger and bitterness. Wielding both his pistol and Senna’s, Lucian hunted Thresh in the hope of destroying the lantern and granting oblivion to his captive love. On the day that battle finally came, Lucian shattered the lantern—but instead of finding her eternal rest, Senna reemerged.

Lucian and Senna’s love is a bond even death could not sever. As Lucian struggles to grasp Senna’s altered form, he is forced to confront his own. Lucian now fights to return to his former self, while grappling with the reality that the dark forces he hates are all that keep Senna with him.

While Senna has returned with knowledge of a new mission, Lucian remains obsessed with exacting vengeance from Thresh, as he is certain the Chain Warden’s machinations have only begun.

Even amongst yordles, Rumble was always the runt of the litter. As such, he was used to being bullied. In order to survive, he had to be scrappier and more resourceful than his peers. He developed a quick temper and a reputation for getting even, no matter who crossed him. This made him something of a loner, but he didn't mind. He liked to tinker, preferring the company of gadgets, and he could usually be found rummaging through the junkyard.

Rumble showed great potential as a mechanic, and his teachers recommended him for enrollment at the Yordle Academy of Science and Progress in Piltover. He may very well have become one of Heimerdinger's esteemed proteges, but Rumble refused to go. He believed that Heimerdinger and his associates were ''sellouts,'' trading superior yordle technology to humans for nothing more than a pat on the head while yordles remained the butt of their jokes.

When a group of human graduates from the Yordle Academy sailed to Bandle City to visit the place where their mentor was born and raised, Rumble couldn't resist the temptation to see them face-to-face (so to speak). He only intended to get a good look at the humans, but four hours and several choice words later, he returned home bruised and bloodied with an earful about how he was an embarrassment to ''enlightened'' yordles like Heimerdinger.

The next morning, Rumble left Bandle City without a word, and wasn't seen again for months. When he returned, he was at the helm of a clanking, mechanized monstrosity. He marched it to the center of town amidst dumbfounded onlookers and there announced that he would show the world what yordle-tech was really capable of achieving.

Senna’s journey to become a Sentinel of Light started with darkness. It started with the Black Mist…

Senna first encountered the Mist at an early age, when wreckage from a distant Harrowing washed onto the shores of her home island. The Black Mist within the wreckage awakened upon contact with life. She and her village survived the ensuing storm of souls, thanks to the intervention of a nearby Sentinel… but in the wake of the attack, the Mist was still mysteriously drawn to Senna.

She was cursed, marked by the Mist so its horrors pursued her endlessly, the darkness drawn to her like dying moth to living flame. She could never know when it would strike next—but worse was when it didn’t come, and Senna had to imagine what awaited in every shadow.

The Sentinel who saved Senna, a brusque veteran named Urias, did not understand why the Mist was drawn to a solitary girl—but he knew if she was going to survive, she had to learn to fight back. And so, Senna joined Urias in the Sentinels of Light, a sacred order that could be traced back to the Blessed Isles, where the Black Mist originated. She proved to be a deadly enemy of darkness, mastering the relic-stone pistol Urias gave her, learning to channel her soul into light.

Yet even as Senna grew comfortable working with Urias, relying on him for gruff guidance, she learned to keep others at gun’s length. If she allowed them to get too close, they would only be hurt when the Mist came again. Senna could never stay in one place for long, something she and Urias learned when those who offered them shelter inevitably found themselves under siege. After even Urias was slain, Senna wasn’t sure if she could let anyone get close again.

Reluctantly, Senna sought out Urias’ family in Demacia, to tell them of his fate. There, she met his son, Lucian, who would not relent until Senna allowed him to join Urias’ parting vigil. From the very first moment she found herself flustered, wondering if her walls were enough to keep out someone so stubborn, full of humor and love. It became clear over time that Lucian’s place was with the Sentinels, as Senna’s partner, and Senna as his.

The more they served together, the deeper their bond became, and Senna realized that the value of her walls wasn’t what she kept out, but who she let in. Yet as Lucian’s love for Senna grew, so did his desire to save her from her curse. In time, it became his only focus, the light in his eyes passing into his gun—making Senna wary that Lucian would only see sorrow where there was love.

It was while researching a cure that Senna and Lucian came into conflict with the sadistic wraith Thresh. So close to answering mysteries about the Ruination and Senna’s curse, Lucian refused to turn back…

Thresh’s chains whipped toward Senna as she stood between the wraith and her husband. More painful than the scythe was seeing the look of anguish on Lucian’s face. With her last breath, Senna screamed for Lucian to run.

But as Senna felt the deathblow and knew she had lost, she realized there was a glimmer of hope. Her whole life, the Mist had haunted her—she didn’t need to fear it anymore. She could ride it into the darkness of Thresh’s lantern, and see what was inside.

Her curse had become her only chance for salvation.

While Lucian spent years seeking to grant his beloved peace, Senna explored her spectral prison. She learned that life had been the origin of her curse. Its spark shone brighter within her than in anyone else—she’d been infected with it when she first encountered the wreckage that brought the Harrowing. There, she’d been touched by a powerful, lingering soul, given its unnatural life…

It was life that the Black Mist could never let go.

She could use this force to pull the Mist into herself, empowering her to sever its hold over others in the lantern. Among the souls she freed were Sentinels who possessed lost knowledge of the Ruination’s origins, of her curse… and the love that created it.

When Lucian drove his broken pistol into the lantern, intending to end the torture of the souls within, Senna was waiting. She escaped, shrouded in Mist she’d drawn from other souls. She was dead, but also alive, thanks to her curse, wielding a relic-stone cannon that could channel darkness along with light, forged from the weapons of fallen Sentinels.

No longer running from the Mist, Senna now understands the suffering of the souls within. Though it is painful, she draws their Mist into herself, liberating them, and blasting darkness with darkness. Embracing her death every time she transforms into a wraith, she becomes like those she fought, only to be reborn again thanks to the life infecting her.

Though Senna and Lucian’s love survived even death, now they face the consequences of her rebirth. Senna knows what they have to do next, a secret gleaned within the lantern.

Find the Ruined King, and stop him at any cost…

They came at Lucian in a blur of shadow, lunging at him with insubstantial talons and ancient, rusted blades. They moved fast… but he was faster.

He moved like a dancer, turning and spinning, ever in motion, the relic pistols in his hands lighting up the rotting interior of the inn with their blazing, arcane light.

Lucian’s long leather coat and tightly bound locks whipped around him as he moved, effortlessly avoiding the frenzied attacks coming at him from every direction. Every shot he fired burned with the intensity of the sun, banishing one of the screeching spirits, sending them reeling back into formless darkness.

He took no satisfaction in this duty. Not anymore. All the light in his world had been snuffed out when she had been taken.

Dark talons raked across one of Lucian’s forearms, making him hiss in pain. Cursing himself for being momentarily distracted, he destroyed the offending spirit with a blast of light to its head, and focused upon the task at hand. Standing firm in the center of the inn, he gunned down the tide of spectral forms rushing at him, every shot lighting up the darkness.

At last he was alone, arms spread wide, weapons pointed in opposite directions, their stone tips still glowing. He glanced left and right, awaiting another attack. The fire in the inn’s hearth seemed to burn more brightly, banishing the deeper shadows, and the icy chill retreated.

Suddenly weary, Lucian righted a fallen bench and sat with a groan. He placed his pistols upon the table, then turned his attention to his wound.

Wincing, he slid the long, black glove from his left hand. The leather was unmarked, but the flesh of his forearm was blackened where ghostly talons had slashed him—almost like frostbite.

He caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, and Lucian was instantly on his feet, both pistols aimed at… a dark-haired girl, barely into her teenage years, who had emerged from her hiding place in a back storeroom.

She froze, staring up at him, eyes wide and unblinking.

“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

“Shouldn’t sneak up on people,” Lucian said, lowering his guns.

He made to turn away, but caught a shadow of movement reflected in the girl’s eyes. He spun, swinging his weapons around, but this time he was not fast enough.

A wraith lunged from the receding gloom—an emaciated, insubstantial creature, swathed in shrouds. Pale, blue-green light spilled from its eye sockets and gaping mouth, and it lashed at him with talons the length of daggers.

Lucian was hurled backwards by the force of the blow, flying over the bar, some fifteen feet distant. He slammed into the wall, shattering dozens of empty liquor bottles lined up on the shelves, and fell to the floor in a shower of broken glass. His chest burned where the wraith had struck him, and an icy chill clutched at his heart, making him gasp for every breath.

He searched frantically for his weapons. He spied one, lying on the uneven floor ten paces to his left. Too far. The other had spun across the floorboards, before coming to a halt at the girl’s feet.

She picked up the ancient weapon and aimed it at the wraith, clutching it with shaking hands as the thing lunged towards her, its mouth opening impossibly wide.

“It won’t fire!” she wailed, backing away. “There’s no trigger!”

An echo of memory rose in Lucian’s mind, as sudden as a knife strike.

“But how do you fire it?” Lucian said, looking down at the exquisitely crafted weapon, a look of puzzlement on his face. “There’s no trigger.”

“It doesn’t need a trigger, my love,” said Senna, her eyes glinting with amusement. She touched him lightly on the side of his head. “The trigger is in here.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lucian.

Senna aimed her own weapon—a more elegant version of the one he held—at the target twenty feet away. Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowing. “You have to will it to fire,” she said, and the target exploded in a searing blast of yellow flame.

“Right. Will it to fire,” said Lucian, leveling his pistol at the next target. Nothing happened. He shook the pistol, and snorted, partly in frustration, and partly in bewilderment.

“It requires control,” said Senna. “It requires focus. You need to will it to fire with every fiber of your being.”

Lucian laughed and turned to Senna, one eyebrow raised. “Every fiber of my being?”

“Try it!” she urged.

He did, but couldn’t keep a smile from curling at the corners of his mouth. “I give up,” he sighed. He stepped in close to Senna, and drew her into an embrace. “How do you expect me to focus on anything else when you are near?”

Senna pushed him away, laughing. “You’re not getting out of this that easily,” she said. “Again. And actually try this time.”

The girl was backed up against a wall now, the slender relic gun—Senna’s gun—a useless weight in her hands.

“Throw it to me!” Lucian barked, darting forward.

The girl shrieked as the spirit flew toward her, and hurled the gun in Lucian’s direction. It spun end-over-end through the air, passing straight through the wraith. Lucian deftly caught it in mid-sprint, simultaneously dropping to one knee and sliding across the floorboards to scoop up his other weapon. He came to his feet with both pistols ready, and opened up.

The wraith screamed and tried desperately to escape, coiling and spinning through the air away from him, but Lucian was relentless. He dashed sideways, maintaining his strafing torrent of fire. The blazing light tore through the ghastly apparition, and its cry became piteous as its dark form dissipated, like mist beneath the rising sun.

Lucian came to a halt, though he kept the pistols raised. All was silent once more.

“Is… it gone?” the girl said.

He didn’t answer immediately, his narrowed eyes scanning the room. At last, he holstered the two guns. “It’s gone. You are safe.”

“I… I couldn’t make it fire,” the girl said, staring at the darkness. “I thought I was going to die. Like the others.”

Lucian remembered his own difficulty with the weapon—it felt so long ago now.

It requires control. It requires focus.

“I certainly have focus now, my love,” Lucian murmured, under his breath.

“Did you say something?” asked the girl.

“No,” Lucian replied. He cocked his head. The sound of rattling chains was coming from somewhere nearby. “Do you hear that?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t hear anything.”

Lucian frowned, eyes narrow. “He taunts me, still…”

He turned to leave the inn, cursed to follow that distant, tormenting sound.

“Bolt the door,” he ordered. “And pray for dawn.”

Rengar hails from a tribe of Shuriman vastaya known as the Kiilash, whose society venerated the honor and glory of the hunt. Rengar was born the runt of the litter to the tribe's chieftain, Ponjaf. Ponjaf believed Rengar's diminutive size would make him a worthless hunter. He ignored his child, assuming the runt would starve to death.

Eventually, the young Rengar fled the camp, ashamed that he had disappointed his father. He subsisted on grubs and plants for weeks until, one day, he was nearly killed by a legendary human hunter named Markon. Upon seeing Rengar's state, he took pity on the creature and let it live. Besides, this was no mighty vastayan warrior worthy of Markon's blade.

Rengar spent months following Markon, feeding off the corpses the hunter left behind. He still hoped to one day rejoin his tribe, and so took great care in observing how Markon took down his quarries.

After some time, Markon grew sick of the pathetic Kiilash following him around. He put a knife to Rengar's throat and informed him that the only way to be a hunter was to hunt. He tossed Rengar the blade and kicked him down a ravine, where he was forced to make his first kill to survive.

From then on, Rengar spent years pushing himself almost to breaking point. He scoured Shurima for the most powerful and dangerous prey. Though he would never be as big as other Kiilash, Rengar was determined to be twice as ferocious. Over time, instead of coming back to his camp each time with fresh scars, he began to come back with trophies. He polished a sandhawk's skull to a sheen; he braided the teeth of a shrieker into his hair.

Then, when he decided the time had come, Rengar returned to his tribe, ready to be accepted as a true hunter.

Ponjaf scoffed at Rengar and his trophies. He decreed that only by bringing back the head of the elusive and legendary Void-abomination known as Kha'Zix would Rengar be welcomed back into the tribe.

Blinded by his eagerness, Rengar allowed this cunning beast to get the drop on him. The Void creature ripped out one of Rengar's eyes and escaped. Furious and defeated, Rengar admitted his failure to Ponjaf. As expected, his father chastised him.

But as Ponjaf spoke, Rengar noticed all the trophies adorning his father's hut were dusty and old. The chieftain had not hunted anything in a long time—he had likely sent Rengar after Kha'Zix because he was too afraid to do it himself.

Rengar interrupted his father and called him a coward. Many Kiilash were blessed with strong bodies or comfortable homes. Rengar, conversely, was born facing death. He had taught himself how to hunt, and had the trophies and scars to prove it. Even his own bloody eye socket was a trophy: proof that though Rengar was born with disadvantages, he never gave up.

Rengar leapt onto his father and gutted him from neck to belly. The fiercest hunters of the tribe crowned him with flame-roses, marking him as their new chieftain.

But Rengar didn't need his village's acceptance. All he needed was adrenaline pumping through his veins as he chased down his prey. He left the village, without even pausing to take a trophy from what was left of Ponjaf—his father was not a kill worthy of remembering. Instead, he set off determined to find and slay the Void creature that had tried to blind him.

Not to satisfy the Kiilash, but to satisfy himself.

“You the marshal?” the river man said, his features an unreadable patina of lowland dust and dried bottlebrush needles, caked together by mud from the bottom of an old lakebed. He stood in the doorway of Lucian's private train cabin, small and large at the same time, dressed in gold-panning rags that had been picked from a dead claim jumper on the outskirts of Progress.

The river man didn't breathe in or out. Didn't have to.

Lucian had heard about them before, the river men, but never seen one up close. They needed moisture or they'd dry out, never venturing far from the mudholes and gulches they spawned in. If a traveler was unlucky enough they’d try to fill a flask with a river man's putrid water, or dig a pan into the silt where one lived. Without warning, it would snap up like an alligator, pulling you into the suffocating muck with wide, earthen arms, and just like that you were gone. Another ghost of the Old West.

“Not anymore,” said Lucian.

Lucian looked at the river man and the river man looked back, the gunslinger comfortably resting against the floral draperies of his cabin. Flecks of light occasionally entered through the curtains as their train rattled along, illuminating the river man's dark, piscine eyes, nearly hidden beneath the earthen cracks in his face.

“I want your badge,” he said.

Lucian nodded. A federal's badge would get the thing past Fort Nox, away from its government monster hunters, and down by way of caravan to the mangrove swamps just south of Bandle. Probably thought it could take up shop there, now that more and more east coasters were settling the low desert. Didn't make the creature's gamble less desperate, but Lucian appreciated when the stakes were clear.

“Must not be many of you left,” said Lucian.

“Ain't too many of anything left,” said the river man.

The boxcar's springs clicked once as they compressed against a couplet of uneven rail lines, and in the instant that the cabin shifted, the river man spread his arms wide, the mud on his face giving way to dozens of needle-sharp teeth as great spines burst from his shoulders. Before the springs clicked again a gunshot rang out, a thin ray of hellfire erupting through the side of the train and into the setting sun, and before the river man hit the floor Lucian's sidearm was already back in its holster.

The creature's head, split down the center and burnt beyond recognition, smoldered with the faint scent of sulfur and blackthorn. Its body contorted on the ground, flame roasting its membranes from the inside, and Lucian straightened his hat as he leaned back into the darkness of his room. The darkness shuddered softly around him, and smiled.

No one came to check on Lucian. No one came to take the dessicated body of the river man. The two traveled in silence together, door open, all the way down to the last stop at Angel's Perch.

And then out to the preacher who spoke with the dead.

Progress had been alive with whispers that this was the lawman what tangled with the devil and lost, and now he was headed up to New Eden to meet with the holy reverend. Both were ill portents in the Old West, so nobody would deny the aims of the man with the grinning shadow. They didn't need another Twin Reeds or Redriver, entire towns swallowed up and gone with some foul twist of happenstance. They needed Lucian out of their settlement and fast, and would give him anything he needed with all speed.

This had been the game ever since his last job with the federals, when they'd sent him out to reckon with the devil himself and drag him back to civilization. They would ‘put the devil on trial’—or that was the play, at least—and prove to the world that the frontier was safe to claim.

Of course, Lucian knew there wasn't just one devil, but the public thought better in singulars. He’d seen how the desert was crawling with strange creatures from every end of the world: demons in clean pressed suits, angels holed up in mountain crags, witches and ghosts and all manner of beast that might cloak itself in moonlight and tear an unsuspecting pilgrim to ribbons. The western natives and their alien weaponry; the skull-faced colossi who fed on ripened flesh; the mechanical men built by human hands, long gone rogue. And always, always devils.

This devil, though, was different. He went by many names—The Reaper, The Slaughter God, Old Turnkey, and Great Horn. He collected souls, or so the stories said, and went from town to town conducting his dark business, tearing the spirits out of the living and leaving their flayed skins behind. A creature of the Old World and demon of the wild frontier who, like his kin, sated his terrible hungers on an endless river of fresh-faced pioneers. Enough so that folks were starting to take notice, and for a government aimed on expansion, folks taking notice was bad for business.

Three marshals were dead at his hands, all told. Lucian had known two of them.

“They call it Thresh,” his handlers revealed. “Think you can catch him?”

Lucian looked over the sketches, noting the monster’s brazen, bovine skull, alight with the flames of all seven hells. He figured the lantern hanging curiously nearby was the source of its power, and if he could get in a clean shot, the fight would be over before it started.

Yet it was never that easy with devils, especially devils with a federal bodycount. He remembered tangling with a particularly nasty specimen near Chuparosa that moved with the speed of a desert storm, kicking up whirlwinds as it went. It was too fast to hit with a bullet, and if it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of his partner, Lucian might not have made it out alive. This hunt required backup.

“Not alone,” said Lucian. “I’ll need Senna.”

“Last stop, Angel’s Perch,” the conductor uttered, so gently it was almost a whisper. The heat of the journey had shriveled the river man’s corpse nearly into rawhide, but in the long shadows of the cabin a worse creature had perched itself upon Lucian’s seat.

It was smoke and fire, teeth and flames, its arms the artillery of a demon general cast up from the bottom of the abyss. It had the rough shape of a man, were a man made from campfire ash, with the glowing sigil of the federal marshals inverted upon its breast. Its legs were the incinerated spires of ancient, burning elms. Its red heart pulsed with the rage of all the earth.

“God,” spoke the conductor, not knowing which god he was invoking. The thing stood on its curious, spindling legs, leaning against the train’s still air. Its face seemed to peel apart, mouth broken in horrific ecstasy, as hellfire illuminated a ragged, mocking grin.

In that moment the ash fell away, and Lucian stepped out from the darkness.

“Sorry, friend,” he spoke. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

The conductor quivered in silence for a long while before Lucian brushed past, down the steel halls of the cabin car and out into the twilit evening. He figured the man would make a good story of it.

Angel’s Perch. A boomtown at the edge of civilization, where the trees grew tall and the air was thick with the scent of honey and wine. No one knew what lay beyond the ring of gargantuan pines at the foot of the mountains west of town, but they did know they had enough guns and men to hold off anything the far frontier could throw at them. Or at least they assumed. The creatures who made a home of Angel’s Perch would only reveal so much about what lay beyond, and no other living thing what had ventured that far west had returned sane, or at all.

Lucian made his way through the Perch’s bustling train station and into the center of town, past no less than three snake oil salesmen, each hucking the artificial magic ointments of the industrial east, and a saloon girl with the body of a cobra. Her milky eyes were hidden behind a veil, lest a paying customer turn to granite before they ever sat down to drink.

Near the mouth of main street, beyond the loggers and lamplighters, the general stores and the brothels, and the reclusive gunsmith rumored to be a fallen deity, there stood the town’s famed saloon. Popular myth held it had been in business since the founding of the settlement, or perhaps even before. It was called The Earthly King: be you man, woman or beast with a fate to outrun, its kingdom was open to you… as long as you had cash to spare.

It was, in many ways, the kind of place where a man might lose himself. But Lucian didn’t have much of himself left to lose, always feeling the tug of invisible strings against the weight of his soul, the shadow grinning behind him. He couldn’t stay for long.

Humans had little knowledge of settlements in the far west, and creatures living in town wouldn’t spill their precious secrets without a fight. The natives, if they spoke at all, would never reveal anything about anything, the few who tolerated settlers busying themselves with their strange machines.

Lucian had to rely on friends. Most could have been counted among the federal marshals, but they didn’t take kindly to demons, and like it or not that was what Lucian was fast becoming. He had to reach even further back, before the government contracts and the cobblestone streets of St. Zaun, to his days as a brash young gunfighter for hire. There he’d met many friends who lived and died with a revolver in their hand, but one figure remained as steadfast and obstinate as always, too big to kill and too old to die. He wasn’t a man per se, but he’d been fighting long before the first ships landed on the continent, and would probably be fighting long after everything else was dust and whispers.

Lucian stepped through the wide-set doors of the King and, for a moment, the bar grew quiet as its unsightly patrons sized up the harrowed stranger. “I’m looking for the longhorn,” he said, and they at once turned back to their card games and beer, the high shrill of an out of tune piano crashing against a dozen incomprehensible hoots and hollers.

Lucian soon spotted the longhorn at the far end of the bar—his massive bulk was hard to miss, even amid the carousing of the King’s clientele. Despite his frame he liked to keep to himself, though it was not uncommon for cocky young fighters to call him out over some perceived slight, hoping to down the beast for fame and glory. This never ended well, and more nights than not a boisterous challenger would have their skull pulverized with a single, swift butt to the head.

Alistar was a minotaur, easily ten feet tall and six feet wide. If you picked a fight with him, you got what was coming.

“Longhorn,” said Lucian.

“Marshal,” replied Alistar.

“I’m making my way to New Eden,” said Lucian.

“Aren’t we all,” replied Alistar, as Lucian sat beside him.

Alistar was old, now—few of his kind remained, and he would no doubt outlive them all. He spent his days as a glorified thug for other, weaker creatures, and his nights on a bar stool built for beings half his size.

The pair gazed solemnly ahead. Not a man came to Angel’s Perch without a reason, and fewer still walked through the doors of The Earthly King unless that reason was dire. It was the drinking hole of renegades and dead men, a drain where the aimless slowly circled downward, and those seeking a final battle spilled their coin before vanishing into the wilderness.

Lucian was heading deep into the uncharted northwest, where no trains ran and vicious gods walked among the trees, seeking a rumor on borrowed time.

Both knew the stakes, and the favor, though none had been asked.

“What do you think she’ll say?” asked Alistar. “When you get there.”

“I don’t know,” answered Lucian. “I don’t rightly know.”

The longhorn sighed into his drink, a thick aluminum tankard about the size of a child. He never had liked long goodbyes.

“Let me draw you a map.”

Lucian had first met Senna at the end of a gun—her gun—during a bloody shootout in one of Buzzard Gulch’s most squalid drinking parlors. Not that shootouts in Buzzard Gulch were uncommon, but this one had involved some fool bounty hunter drawing on an Outsider with his back turned. It got ugly.

The Outsiders, so they claimed, were from everywhere and nowhere at once, creatures in clean pressed suits whose love of gambling had made them infamous among outlaw clans and desperate homesteaders. Beating one meant riches beyond compare, conjured from nothing and guaranteed by an Outsider’s wax seal—itself worth a small fortune. Losing was another matter, as they accepted no wager less than a man’s most deeply cherished possession. Farms, watches, children, souls… a favorite knife—the bet was always steep, even if you didn’t know it yet.

Rumor had it this specimen had beaten Jeremiah James, a millionaire railroad baron Lucian had once done small jobs for. Jeremiah was a giant, and a mean one at that, who’d posted a sky-high bounty the moment he lost whatever dire prize he so foolishly put up for collateral—enough to bankrupt him twice over.

And as almost every gunfighter knew, once a reward swung out of the piss-pot, gully stabbing, prairie-shotgun-ambush fare of Buzzard Gulch’s wanted board and into the realm of jilted industrialists, bounty hunters would come calling. The whole lot of them loved money and killing, and not much else.

The hunter drew with little warning, and instantly the room went quiet. The Outsider sipped his whiskey with a calm that suggested the absence of all intent. Senna, a handful of federal marshals and the longhorn were present, among the town’s usual collection of heavily armed scoundrels and murderers. Everyone waited to make a move.

“Now, friend,” the hunter cooed, her voice sugar tinged with blood, “I know you’ve got what I came for. Turn it over, and everybody walks out the way they came in.”

The Outsider said nothing—his face was as placid as a porcelain doll, unmoved and unperturbed by the threat of his assailant’s twin six-guns. He’d known she was coming the whole time. Probably knew before she even took the job. But in the heat of the low sun, plied with drink at the edge of the world, it was hard to tell who was itching for a fight, and who was just bluffing.

The hunter broke the silence with a bullet, and a heavy round exploded from her pistol and into the center of the creature’s chest. The Outsider’s body billowed outward, the hole rippling black smoke in the shape of crows, and from the smoky mass a great, vicious claw burst into a table of poker players. Cards, chips, and searing blood sprayed across the room as the hunter started unloading.

Lucian drew on the hunter, the marshals drew on Lucian, and the longhorn tore through the bar to get as many pieces of the action as time would allow. Every gun in the place lit up, and as bullets ripped through fastgun and marshal alike, Lucian took cover behind a pool table—where he found himself in quite a different predicament.

“Hello, stranger,” said Senna, her gun squarely aimed at Lucian’s forehead. Her eyes were the color of a gentle prairie, mottled with specks of black, and Lucian almost forgot he was speaking into a loaded firearm.

“Ma’am,” he replied.

“I assume you choose to associate with these upstanding individuals?” she asked, as the lead-riddled body of a barkeep collapsed limply beside them. Black smoke drifted softly out of his mouth.

“Some of them,” Lucian answered.

Senna ducked as another shell ripped past the backside of the bar, taking a chunk of a pool table with it. The motion was so quick Lucian almost didn’t see it—then again, he’d never seen anyone dodge a bullet. Certainly not with such confidence, and Senna had plenty to spare.

She smiled warmly, her badge glinting in the light. The star of a chief marshal, one of the deadliest quickdraws in the known world.

“Well, to each their own,” she grinned, gingerly confiscating Lucian’s pistol. “Don’t worry, I’ll give it back… if you’re not dead when this is over.”

And with two quick shots from cover, she swung back into the fight, leaving Lucian wondering what had just happened.

The rest of the shootout was a blur. At one point the bounty hunter ripped some sort of oil-soaked object from the Outsider’s roiling body and ran out the saloon doors, and the creature went screaming after her. With most of the clientele dead and nobody left to shoot, the survivors went across the street to finish their drinks. Buzzard Gulch never found itself wanting for corpses or liquor.

It was there, the marshals like to say, that Lucian decided to hang up his hat and hunt monsters for the government.

Though they’ll also mention it was less about saving people from beasts, and more about a pretty girl who dodged a bullet with a smile.

The longhorn’s map had been useful, if sloppy. Lucian had followed it on foot for what seemed like a hundred years, further north from Angel's Perch than most living souls would ever dare to venture. Here colors seemed more vivid, the air itself breathed with strange magics, and when Lucian drifted off, he could swear gargantuan creatures lurked just beyond the edge of his vision, watching. Yet Lucian did not feel afraid. He made camp as the sun dipped over the horizon, and steeled himself. The shadow grew strongest at night.

He would sense its evil dragging him downwards, pulling him out of himself. Soon Lucian’s skin would itch and flake away, his mouth twisted into a hungry grin. He would feel the flames, hear the demon whisper in his own voice. He would drown in the crackling inferno of indigo sagelands erupting into a sea of hellfire. And he would feel the anger. The terrible, ageless anger, the shame, the disgust. Hateful bile born the from the darkness of his own soul. Only then would the battle begin—the demon assuming Lucian’s body, while what was left of the man tried to wrestle it back.

Lately, the transformations were beginning to last longer than Lucian liked.

He felt his skin begin to prickle, and watched as it cracked against the cool night air. Lucian rested himself against an old log, as comfortably as he could. His muscles froze in place—awaiting the change, and the struggle, and the promise of morning.

His eyes glazed over. The sky twisted into deep crimson—overtaken by a perpetual sundown, ringed with flame, and the trees around him stood as ghastly totems against thick, otherworldly fog. Only the campfire illuminated the world as it was, the greens and browns of patchy grassland. The change had begun.

Or if not the change, something worse.

Deep in the forest, a train whistle sounded. It rang hollow, a warped and yawning sound that spilled out from the demonic vision’s umber mist. This was something new, a creature Lucian had not prepared to face—and locked in combat with himself, he could not turn or draw. He tried to stand as thick metal legs splintered the primeval woodlands like they were toys, dragging a colossal torso awkwardly behind them. He could not move, nor turn his eyes from the glowing core of hungry coals, or grisly flesh, or smoke from bulbous locomotive valves that lined the shoulders of a long-dead giant.

A devil, Lucian thought. Another devil.

The hulking thing stepped before him, still obscured by fog, and bent its massive legs down until a familiar face leaned into view of the firelight.

“Lucian,” it spoke.

Lucian recognized it—him—instantly. The millionaire, long thought missing or dead, who so many years ago had wagered his own heart in an Outsider’s game of chance.

“Jeremiah?”

The old industrialist chuckled. He was hideously malformed—gone were even the last glimpses of his humanity, replaced instead by infernal steamwork and the gutted skeletons of a dozen ruined cargo trains. His belly swelled with heat of a devil’s furnace, and the campfire between the two travelers seemed to draw towards it, as though Jeremiah were breathing it in.

“I have shed that name, my good marshal,” he spoke, his voice melting over the land as Lucian sat paralyzed before him. “You may call me Urgot now, for that is the name I have taken.”

“I know what you are wondering,” he continued. “Understand that I was laid low in my efforts to civilize this desperate land, and divorced from my plans for a great steel empire. No, I made a mistake of hubris—I took a deal, as you once did… and paid so, so dearly for it.”

The colossus motioned towards where his heart might have been, now nothing but a tangled mass of white-hot copper. The rumors had been true. Jeremiah had died.

“It was not death,” he said, as if snatching the thought from the air. “Though by the time my treasured property was returned, it was far too late to call myself alive. My body was abandoned at the edge of the desert by some… associates… who have come to know the dire price of treachery. Yet as you are aware, there are many devils… and unlike the monster you failed to destroy, I was visited by one with a particularly tantalizing offer.”

Urgot was close now, the campfire pouring endlessly upwards into his stomach. The grinding of a thousand starving gears echoed from somewhere within him, and Lucian imagined a devouring maw, chaining the sky down before swallowing it whole.

“I know you will lose the duel within yourself, marshal. I did. Brought low by my losses I turned to common banditry, and the darkest hollows of my sadly mortal imagination. When you follow me down that trail—and you will—I intend to meet with the creature wearing your body. We have… a great many things to discuss.”

With that, the enormous metal legs pulled Urgot away, until even his illuminated hellmouth disappeared from view. The sky buckled, and broke—bitter sun replaced once more by cold, lightless midnight, and Lucian was alone.

The shadow would claim him soon.

He had to move quickly.

Lucian had been careless.

Forgetting what a devil was, the kind of power one could wield, he and Senna had rushed into an alpine tundra on horseback, determined to take Thresh with a single shot. Lucian was one of the greatest marshals the outfit had ever seen; Senna was the greatest. They were brave, and impetuous, and in love—and Thresh had been waiting for them.

The devil called Thresh was not an ordinary monster of the high frontier. Ravenous and cruel, he had lived for eons before the men of the Old World landed on his continent’s eastern shores.

The cosmic beings who birthed the gods grew old and died, their ancient bodies fell to earth to become the mountains and valleys and primordial seas, but Thresh continued on, his unnatural life sustained by a bottomless, ravenous thirst for destruction. Before spoken word could give shape to his name, all living things knew his face—the skull of a beast, hateful and burning, gazing balefully down upon them. His malice was woven so deeply into his ancient form that it could never be purged, and he walked across the broken bodies of the vast things he had outlived, devouring the souls of their sad and forgotten children.

Lucian didn’t even see his opponent before a razor whip sliced cleanly into his shoulder, knocking him from his mount and crippling his shooting arm. Senna leapt for her lover’s pistol, but she too was struck low by the devil’s power, walls of flame erupting from the earth as laughter echoed from his bleached, lidless skull. His voice rattled within their heads, a deep and primordial howl, and Lucian saw in his mind the beast sinking his blade deep into Senna’s throat. The fight had lasted only seconds, and already Thresh had won.

The devil stood over Senna, flames within his ancient body twisting against the chill air, and he drew a jagged blade from somewhere inside of his ragged, billowing coat. Lucian had seen the skinned corpses of a dozen frontier towns on the way to Thresh’s den, and the piles of twitching muscle where unlucky wagon trains had drawn his hellish gaze. Lucian was prepared for the devil to take him, and always had been—but he would not let Senna share the fate of a young and foolish gunfighter.

And perhaps, momentarily amused after so many years of dark, sumptuous slaughter, that was why Thresh offered him a deal.

Such a simple thing, Lucian had thought. So easy to accept.

His soul for the life of the girl.

Then the shadow took hold, the hate and shame within the young marshal coming alive, hijacking his senses, his body corrupting before Senna’s pleading eyes. The bargain had been struck, the pact sealed. As Lucian’s vision turned to flame, he watched the monstrous devil he had been sent to hunt turn to Senna’s defenseless body—laughing hideously as he ripped out her heart.

The holy reverend of New Eden was little known or understood, but the rumors of his supposed power had spread even as far as the eastern territories. A man who could speak with the dead, as many liked to say, though few did survive the pilgrimage into the unexplored northwest to see if the rumors were true. Those who struck out for New Eden never returned—and now, looking down upon the enclave from a nearby hill, Lucian understood why.

Untouched by the elements and unspoiled by the beasts of the forest, the modest church commune was small and thriving, surrounded by bountiful crops and quaint homes that seemed to swell with life. Children ran across dirt roads as shopkeeps and townspeople passed peacefully by, far removed from demons and Outsiders, gorgons and giants, and the machinations of bandit clans that should have long ago picked every building clean. It was a place from a storybook, bright and clean. Lucian wondered for a moment if he had lost the duel with the demon already, and this was his reward.

He descended from the hill, and the villagers turned to see the newcomer in their midst.

“You’ve come to meet the holy reverend?” asked a fresh-faced young man.

Lucian nodded.

“Then hallelujah, stranger,” he smiled. “You’ve come home.”

No town in Lucian’s memory accurately compared to the sights of New Eden. A bakery filled his nostrils with the scent of fresh bread, as young women danced and fiddlers played in the street. Songs of salvation drifted from mead halls that had never for a moment known the Old West’s violent madness. Ordinary people greeted him as he passed by, offering him food and water, asking where he came from and where he was going.

The demon raged inside him, but in the light of day Lucian could overpower it, control it. And there was something about this place that calmed him, in a way he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

“No one fears death here,” someone spoke. Lucian turned to find a kindly old man, dressed in a modest preacher’s frock, possessing a youthful glint in his now-faded eyes. “A fear of death is a fear of life. We accept death for what it is, and live a life free from the snares of its uncertainty.”

Lucian liked the way the man spoke. His speech lilted softly, like a song.

“I don’t know if I believe that,” replied Lucian.

The man smiled. “Of course.”

He continued on, walking in no particular direction. Lucian followed.

“We live in a land of angels and demons. We see their influence every day, for good or evil, and the calamities they wreak. The world is old, but many of our gods are still alive, watching over their progeny even now.”

He motioned to the center of town, where a picturesque church with white walls and a blue roof stood. The building was immaculate—even the stained glass windows seemed to glow, polished to a radiant sheen. Villagers milled in and out, talking and laughing, as children crowded around their legs. The building could have been erected yesterday.

“And they bestow the faithful with many gifts. The gift of life, the gift of love.”

The man turned to Lucian, a knowing smile upon his face.

“And the gift of death.”

Something rang curiously in Lucian’s ears. It was the way the man said death, the way the sound was shaped by his lips, much like a secret whispered to a lover. The passersby, too, had become still, their eyes closed as if dreaming, and they only opened them again when the odd melody had finished washing over them.

“Meet me inside, when you’re ready,” he said. “They call me Reverend Karthus, and I have so much I want to show you.”

The interior of the church was clean and white—its pews were polished, its pulpit modest. Karthus shooed the rest of his congregation outside, and they looked lovingly at Lucian as they passed. Some whispered a passing “welcome,” others clapped their hands together in quiet reverence. To Lucian, New Eden seemed to be a sleeping child that hadn’t yet awoken to the monsters in the world outside its door. The fact that it stood at all was testament to whatever powers Karthus claimed to possess, real or not.

Deep within Lucian, the shadow raged. He once again felt the itch beneath his skin, the flames bubbling up from some dark corner of his soul, and his mouth twisting into a forceful, mocking grin. But something was different—the creature was frightened, and Lucian couldn’t understand why.

“My, my,” Karthus spoke, a smile still crossing his face. “We can’t have that now, can we?”

The reverend picked up a small, black-bound book, emblazoned with the symbol of a golden key. With a gentle wave and some intangible words, the demon was suddenly silenced—but not before Lucian felt something else, something the creature had not done before. It whispered softly in his ear, the low and crackling whimper of a dying fire.

“They are monsters.”

“In a land of angels and demons, I wonder what you will become?” continued Karthus, resting a faded stole over his shoulders. The reverend then motioned for Lucian to kneel before him, and to Lucian’s surprise, he did.

“Why do you fight this battle? What do you have to gain?”

Lucian did not answer. The light had begun to fade, as New Eden’s hopeful music slowly twisted into a strange, lopsided dirge. Karthus nodded slowly, his smile widening, and Lucian kept his eyes locked ahead. A curious skittering echoed from the floorboards behind him. It was a sound he knew well.

“We give so much of ourselves to fear,” spoke Karthus, his voice growing deeper and darker. “And you have given most of all.”

Energies swirled about the old man—luminescent blues and greens in the rough shapes of friends Lucian had lost, things he had killed. They danced against the rafters of the now decrepit church, its paint peeling away to reveal black, moldering rot.

Lucian sensed the presence of at least a dozen shapes behind him. Some were crouched on all fours, others clambered softly over the warped and ruined pews, and still more waited outside the church, their human disguises melting away. Lucian now knew why the town lay untouched, why its people seemed so good and kind: they weren’t people at all. Or if they had been, they’d been dead a very long time.

Lucian’s hands moved slowly towards his pistols.

The reverend now loomed over him, lifting off the ground as he gripped the book with the golden key, his sermon exploding into a rapturous chorus of overlapping voices: “Our souls will be purified in the cool waters of death! Our broken spirits will be repaired, the things we lost shall be returned!”

The creatures behind Lucian crawled forward, slavering and starved, as Karthus floated ever upwards, his arms outstretched, ascending into the musty air. Images of Lucian’s past twirled all around him, men and women whose deaths played out again and again.

A familiar voice brushed against his ear, almost a word, but not.

“Do you hear her?” asked Karthus.

Lucian listened.

The sound was crackling sage, the ashes of a campfire, the striking of a match. It spoke of Senna’s death, and how Lucian had fallen into despair. For years the ruined marshal had wandered from place to place, dead in everything but name and emptied of all joy. As each day had passed, another small, cruel thing filled his mind, and the shadow had grown wild within him, his inner darkness yearning to seize control. Any offer of peace had to be investigated, no matter how dangerous or foolish.

Lucian had heard of a man who could speak with the dead, and gone without question. He had given himself to a shadow that took the shape of his own monstrous hatred, and allowed it to rule him utterly.

Lucian found himself alone with the demon—away from the church, and far from the streets of New Eden. The two stood apart, facing one another, in a moonlit field of white flowers. Lucian could feel the cool air against his skin. He could see the distant lights of a town, high in the mountains, and the moon hanging low in the sky. Beneath the demon the flowers burned, but the creature stood calmly, its face twisted into a familiar, ravenous grin.

Lucian breathed. So much of himself had been lost to the shadow—to Thresh, and the spectre of the unforgiving west. But he still ruled his own soul, half-corrupted as it was, and the shadow was a part of it—a part of him.

It drew closer, slowly, each step burning more flowers away.

Lucian reached out his hand, and the shadow rested a charred limb upon it. It whispered: “Would you cast your enemies into the fire?”

Lucian was silent. His skin crackled at the shadow’s touch, but he said nothing. It already had its answer.

It whispered once more, now in Lucian’s own voice, as its ashen body bonded with his mortal flesh: “Then we will go together.”

“Do you hear the love you have lost?” Karthus sang.

Lucian drew his pistol. “No.”

His arm elongated, stretching into the hellish cannon of the demon within him, and a ray of unholy flame ripped through Karthus’s forehead. As the preacher’s body fell, Lucian spun around, melting into shadow as a screaming ghoul leapt at him from one of the broken pews. He fired again, obliterating the creature, and launched a third shot into the crowd of its shriveled, wide-mouthed brethren—the fiddlers and bakers, dancers and farmers now shrunken, twisted, and hollow. The bullet exploded among them, blasting their bodies apart, and at once a swelling sea of horrors flowed in through the doors, windows, and broken cracks in the church’s ruined facade. New Eden had risen to greet him.

Lucian’s body gave way to the shadow, and it lifted its arms high as a stream of liquid fire tore through the crowd of monsters. The demon shrieked with joy, its voice melding with Lucian’s own, and it soared into the air as hellfire sprayed in every direction. Burning wood fell from the ceiling as shots tore outward through the church’s brittle walls and across the sprawling wastes of New Eden, setting the town alight. Ghouls shrieked in terror, their hordes turned to flee, but the demon was quick—springing through the crumbling roof and into the delipidated streets, firing the cannons of hell into the creatures’ still-open mouths.

Then, Lucian surged outwards from within the demon’s form, its body bursting into ashen mist. He clapped his pistols together as the undead hordes scattered in every direction. Artificial magics woven into the gunmetal bubbled, their intricate filigrees spiraling outward as the barrels hungrily fused. A concentrated beam of light surged from somewhere within them, cutting across the plains as screaming undead melted beneath its fury.

Soon the light faded, and the metal unwound itself as Lucian scanned his surroundings.

He waited. The shadow within him was quiet now. No more ghouls lept from the burning, derelict homes, or rose from the beds of rotten crops. Karthus lay dead as his church collapsed around him, flames consuming even the memory of his fell magic. Though from the corner of his eye Lucian swore he could see the old preacher, grinning among a crowd of New Eden’s townsfolk, as the burning roof finally caved in over their heads.

The former marshal turned back towards civilization and began to walk, the shadow grinning close behind.

He’d been close to speaking with Senna again. Closer than he’d ever been. But Lucian no longer needed the comforts of old rituals and incantation—he would see his love once more, one way or another, the day he was lowered into the dirt. That was the rightful end of a true and valiant gunfighter. Until then, there were terrible things lurking in the darkness, which could only imagine the demon soon to knock upon their doors.

Out there, somewhere in the wild expanses of the great frontier, Lucian had a devil to kill.

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.”

Senna woke with a gasp, her breath pluming in the frigid night. Slicked with sweat, her arms, legs, neck, and back were covered in a mantle of sand. A single thought tumbled through her mind.

You need to reach Bilgewater.

She sat up, and saw the dark waters of the Holnek streaming past the lonely riverbank. Her instincts were pulling at her again, speaking to her as they had since childhood. She had learned long ago to trust those feelings and hunches—and now they were telling her to leave.

Lucian stirred in his sleep. He turned and pulled their bedroll away, leaving her bare. A gentle breeze chilled her skin even more, and she burrowed her toes in the sand, searching for warmth.

There was an unusual ebb in Harrowings, and so they had traveled north, to south-east Valoran, sailing upriver until they neared the Noxian border. The pair had spent a short respite together in solitude, far from the storm that was their lives, a chance to rediscover one another after years of being apart. It was comfortable, like a well-worn cloak. Her instincts were ripping her away from the only refuge she and Lucian had known since they were reunited.

She swallowed the knot growing in her throat, and closed her eyes, searching her heart, hoping that she had misunderstood, that her instincts weren’t so cruel, that they could be bargained with.

But the feeling remained.

She stared at the vast darkness and felt the glare of countless stars—each one like a wretched soul waiting for deliverance, watching in silence as she lived the life they were denied. She had no right to squander salvation, these precious moments spent with Lucian.

He’ll understand.

Lucian moaned softly in his sleep, head resting on a leather-bound tome. His breath quickened as he tossed beneath the bedroll, the moans growing louder. Senna shook his shoulder until he startled awake. He pushed himself up on his elbow, breathing heavily. As he readjusted to the waking world, he stared at her, through her, still seeing the woman from his nightmare, the one he failed to save from Thresh’s lantern, her years of imprisonment and torture. He took another deep breath, and relief settled in his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said, offering her the bedroll.

They watched the horizon. A radiant edge of purple and indigo heralded the approaching dawn.

You need to tell him.

Reluctantly, Senna turned to Lucian. “It’s time to go.”

“We were just getting settled in,” he said, still looking out across the water. He let out a heavy sigh. “Where to?”

“Bilgewater.”

He shook his head. “If there’s a Harrowing, it’ll be over before we ever reach port.”

There’s still time.

“If we leave now, we could be there in a few days,” Senna said.

“There’ll be nothing to do but bury the dead.”

Senna tensed at the bluntness of his words, the easy disregard of their duty as Sentinels of Light. But she knew it wasn’t that simple—his feelings ran deeper, and his lapse would be momentary. “There’s still a chance,” she insisted. “I can feel it.”

Lucian said nothing.

His heart is elsewhere.

She looked at the codex lying on the sand, its bronze clasp broken and pitted with age. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have come this far north,” she said. “It was careless.”

The ancient manuscript was Lucian’s latest acquisition, and the reason they had initially sailed to the region. He had procured it in Krexor, hoping it would reveal a way to end her curse, to free her of the Black Mist that had pursued her relentlessly since childhood—drawn to a spark of unnatural life that had infected her when she meddled with a force she didn’t understand. There were dozens of such volumes on their ship.

She’d often awoken at night, alone in their bedroll. She, shrouded in darkness. He, illuminated by candlelight, hunched over a tome, desperately seeking answers to questions she had long stopped asking.

Lucian finally turned to Senna. “There hasn’t been a Harrowing in months,” he said. The warmth had returned to his face, along with a tinge of remorse. “I wanted us to rest, if only for a while.”

A piece of Senna’s heart wanted nothing more. She longed to forget the horrors of the Black Mist, to look up at the night sky and see only stars.

“I know,” she said. “We both did.”

Lucian picked up the heavy codex and started to rise. Senna felt the chasm widen between them, leaving her alone on the other side. She took his hand, holding him fast. “We’ll start after dawn,” she said.

He sat back down on the sand, and they watched the sunrise.

They had broken camp shortly after dawn. Senna was hauling the last of their provisions up a narrow gangplank while Lucian untied the halyard, preparing to hoist the mainsail. They worked in silence, each lost in their own thoughts as the ship swayed in the calm waters of the Holnek.

She planted a wooden crate on the weathered deck, next to their other supplies. Their stores had dwindled during their stay. “We’ll need to resupply before heading to Bilgewater.”

Lucian nodded. “We can sail down the coast and provision in Holdrum, but we’ll also need to anchor at Mudtown.”

She gave him a curious look.

“There’s a weaponsmith in the Buhru Quarter that works with silver grenades,” he said.

“We’ll lose at least half a day in port.”

“If we’re headed into a Harrowing, Thresh will be there,” he said, eyes cold and flat.

Senna gazed at the deep waters of the river, its current flowing gently toward the sea. Her gut feelings were leading her to Bilgewater, but something didn’t seem quite right.

“The mist has been reaching out farther with each storm, like it’s searching for something,” she said. “Why return to Bilgewater?”

“Those islands are his favorite haunts.”

“This is bigger than Thresh,” she said, more sharply than she intended.

Lucian didn’t respond. Instead, he opened his canteen, took a long drink of water, and then slowly pushed the stopper back inside.

“He’s constantly scheming,” he finally said. “And all the other spirits are trapped in their suffering. Who knows what obsessions permeate what’s left of their minds?” He looked away, jaw clenched, lips pressed into a rigid line.

Senna thought of the chaotic patchwork of maps and lengths of twine that stretched across the walls in their cabin. Lucian had used them to track the Black Mist for years while she was imprisoned in the lantern.

He can’t see past his hatred.

Senna shook her head. It was more than just anger. Lucian viewed the mist as a horrific blight upon the world, a scourge of wraiths needing to be purified. But her time in the lantern had shown her a different way. She could use her powers to redeem those wretched souls, liberating them from suffering.

“The Ruined King is behind these Harrowings. There’s longing there... an intelligence,” she said. “I can feel it. He’s—”

Something’s wrong!

A light flashed in the east.

Lucian opened his mouth to speak, but his words drowned before they reached Senna’s ears. Her legs weakened as an overwhelming weight pressed against her chest. She lunged for the ship’s railing but found Lucian’s hand instead.

Dark lightning slammed into Senna. The jolt sent her crashing against the deck, every limb contorted in searing pain, her body tensing and twisting as bones threatened to snap. A chorus of screams breached her mind. The anguished cries resounded and swelled until the world shattered in fragments of blinding light. She felt herself being torn away from Lucian and the boat and the shore, and the anchor that held her life in place.

Sadistic laughter ushered in the silence.

Ash fell gently on Senna’s face. She cracked open her eyes, flinching as she saw pinpricks of dark lightning crawling down her arms. Tortured screams still resonated in her mind. Slowly, her thoughts cleared, and the arcs of energy dissipated. Only the echo of laughter remained.

No. No. No... Something’s wrong... You need to get up.

She struggled to a knee, braced her arm on her leg, and rose in a scattering of ash and cinders. Air, thick and sweltering, rushed past her face like heat from an open furnace, the tang of a burning world on her tongue. She tottered on baked clay—the ship had disappeared, leaving her alone on a plain of sun-cracked mud that stretched across a desolate wasteland, veiled in a haze. A triad of mountains towered in the distance, their fiery crowns spewing smoke into the ruddy sky.

Senna was back in the lantern.

Dread rose in her chest, hammering her heart and hitching her breath. She clutched her hands to ease their trembling, and inhaled deeply.

You’re wrong. This can’t be the lantern.

But she had seen this before, or something similar: scorched wastelands, frozen tundras, bustling streets in chaotic cities. The landscape perpetually changed and warped in the spectral prison, as varied as its tortures.

No, this is something else.

Senna shook away the doubt and squeezed her eyes shut. “Do not deny this truth,” she whispered to herself. “Not again.”

In the early days of her imprisonment, she had wasted precious months, perhaps years, unable to accept her own death, trapped in a cycle of misery and loneliness. She wouldn’t repeat that mistake. She had escaped once—she would do so again. Her eyes opened, and she looked for a way out.

A scream sounded from somewhere far away.

Senna called to the Black Mist, but drew smoke and embers instead. The poor substitutes rushed in, transforming her into a wraith, shrouded by death. She moved, and the world blurred in a smear of color, hues shifting rapidly as the landscape changed.

She stopped with a jolt, and Bilgewater snapped into place. But it wasn’t the Bilgewater she knew. The harbor lay ruined, overrun by a massive Harrowing. Rotting timber, slime-coated stonework, the bones of decaying leviathans, all melded into twisted spires. The warped amalgamations floated in midair among the broken hulls of ravaged ships and hundreds of charnel coffins once submerged in the sea. A fortune in tithes drifted amid the debris, glittering like ghostly stars.

Senna released the darkness, and her body returned, the waterlogged planks of the boardwalk creaking beneath her weight. She walked along the causeway and came across the wreckage of a hunting vessel run aground, its copper-tipped prow skewering the remains of a seaside tavern.

A figure stood at the center of the destruction. It was a statue of a woman, its arms raised in supplication, mottled face frozen in terror. Senna felt a strange familiarity, like a half-remembered dream, and a deluge of sorrow poured over her. Hand quivering, she reached out and lightly brushed the statue’s cheek. The face collapsed, and the entire figure began to break apart. Slowly at first, and then all at once, the stone woman crumbled into a heap of ash.

He found her!

An unfamiliar fear swelled inside Senna, urging her to take flight. She pushed it away. Of course he had found her, whoever she was. There was no hiding from Thresh; this was his domain. She had witnessed countless tortures, each soul an endless opportunity for the Chain Warden to delight in their suffering. Senna regarded the pile of ash.

This isn’t Thresh.

It didn’t feel quite right. In all her years in the lantern, she had never encountered anything like this. Perhaps he had refined his technique. If there was one constant, it was his pursuit of perfecting misery.

She looked out at the dark waters of Bilgewater Bay. The fiery mountain range loomed from afar, spanning the horizon. She knew this to be untrue, a construct of the lantern. There were no mountains south of Bilgewater. She would have had to sail around—

A stray thought flitted through her mind. She reached for it, grabbed it, and turned it over. The vault unlocked, releasing a memory.

She had been going to Bilgewater—no, they had been going to Bilgewater. Lucian! He would be fighting out there, desperate to free her from the lantern, suffering alone, as he had for years. It had almost broken him.

Senna’s consciousness reached out across the great expanse. She smiled, feeling Lucian’s love nearby. But there was something else, profound and urgent. It was panic. She had felt it in Lucian only once before—when Thresh had killed her.

Pushing away her mounting dread, she narrowed her focus and spoke. “Lucian... I’m here.”

Silence.

She tried again, and again, and again, every attempt yielding the same result—Lucian remained unmoved by her call. In the past, she had been able to communicate with him from within the lantern, but Thresh must have found a way to suppress her voice.

Her body trembled in desperation and fury. She shut her eyes, whispering the mantras she’d learned long ago. “Carve away the unwanted. Keep only the stone. Carve away the unwanted. Keep only the stone.”

She opened her eyes with renewed determination. Thresh hadn’t beaten her yet.

The rules of nature didn’t apply in the lantern. The ancient relic was an ever-shifting realm crafted for suffering. It appeared infinitely vast, but Senna knew the truth—she had discovered the lantern’s terminus and pressed against its walls, feeling its seams.

As she studied the sky, her stomach quivered.

This isn’t the lantern.

She paused, reflecting again on those early days and the hard facts she had come to accept. She quelled the denials and continued searching. Dark plumes erupted from the fiery peaks, sending black tendrils of soot to mar the sky. She needed to pierce the cinereous veil.

Drawing smoke and embers into her, she transformed once again, and Bilgewater blurred away as she took to the heavens. Senna flew across the ocean, ascending ever higher. But the mountains rose up as well, rumbling and spewing vapor in her path. She veered to avoid the acrid clouds, but the blazing peaks altered course with her, ever present and unavoidable.

Darkness spread across the horizon—a great fog threatening to consume all in its path. Unable to evade the shifting billows, she plunged into the gloom. A storm roared around her, the wailing of countless souls pushing against her like a headwind.

This isn’t the way. You need to turn back.

Hand outstretched, she pressed even higher. A light flickered beyond her fingertips, and her doubts faded as she sought the edge of the lantern. The light sparked brighter and suddenly snapped at her fingers. She pulled back her hand, but the sting was already flaring into searing pain, stiffening her spectral form. Dark energy surged and leashed her in midair.

Senna fell from the sky.

She awoke on hard-packed dirt. Her human form had returned, an aching, knotted cord covered in a dusting of cinders and ash. She rolled onto her back, groaning and wincing as arcs of lightning crackled down her clammy flesh. They dissipated, leaving behind a stinging numbness.

Physical torture was foreign to the lantern. Thresh rarely resorted to such debased forms of suffering. The mind and soul were richer fields to plant seeds of torment. Perhaps this was her punishment for escaping. And yet, it still felt wrong.

You need to get up!

She staggered to a knee, but her leg gave under her weight, and she crumpled back to the ground. The world dimmed as clouds stretched across the sky, pushing away the last remaining color.

You need to fight... You’re dying!

Senna laughed at the absurdity of the thought. There were fates worse than death. She had endured them for years—she would bear them again.

But as the shadows grew, she began to fear what was in store for her this time. Her brief taste of freedom would make her captivity more desolate, her loneliness and torments greater than before.

And then, she had an even more sinister thought.

No! Don’t think that!

Perhaps she had never escaped. What if she had watched Lucian suffer defeat after defeat, and her broken mind had imagined a different outcome, one that lifted her from this pit of misery? Perhaps her escape had been nothing but a delusion.

As realization flared, Senna wailed, a primal sound filled with rage and despair. No. She hadn’t created this deception—it was made by Thresh.

It’s not true!

She shook her head, furious for clinging to false hope.

You need to get up!

“No,” she said, clutching her temples.

You need to fight!

“No, he’s won. This was his plan.”

If you stay here, you’ll die!

“I’m already dead!” she screamed. “I’m just a dead thing that’s cursed!” Her voice broke, along with something inside. She folded over, curling herself up to become small. Her cries of grief echoed through the great expanse.

It wasn’t meant to be a curse, Senna. What I gave you was a gift.

Senna bolted upright. The words had been heavy and sharp, piercing her mind like a dagger. They weren’t her own.

She swayed on her feet, ignoring the numbness in her legs. “Stay out of my head,” she said. “Do you hear me, Thresh?!”

No laughter. No admission. Nothing.

The mountains had receded, their fiery peaks muted in gray. Senna stood alone among the falling embers. Energy crackled on her skin, bolts raking down her body.

“Is that all you have, Chain Warden?” she asked through gritted teeth. “You’ve lost your touch.”

I’m not the Warden, sweet Senna. But I’ve also known his tortures.

The voice was melodious and sorrowful and resonated with fragile tenderness. Senna had met others in the lantern, communing with them over their shared loneliness and suffering. Perhaps...

“Who are you?”

Silence, and then...

A friend. Someone who can help you get back to Lucian.

Bitterness rose in Senna’s throat. “How do you know that name?”

I know your whole life. I’m here to help, but you’ll need to trust me.

“You’re here to offer hope?” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I was wrong. You haven’t lost your touch. It’s more refined.” Senna whirled around, searching for the specter. “Your games are done, Chain Warden,” she said. “The cycle is broken. Here and now. Show yourself!”

The world unfurled and changed, revealing clear skies over white sands and an emerald sea. Waves lapped at her feet, her ankles, her knees. She cast her gaze inland and gasped. Beyond a ridge of white dunes sat a dense grove, its wide-fronded trees native to her island. Senna was home.

She heard a soft melody coming from beneath the canopy, evoking memories of her mother singing by the fireside. Senna held her breath, watching as a young girl exited the treeline, humming the long-forgotten hymn.

She recognized the child—it was her.

The girl strolled toward the shore, probing dunes with a carved walking stick. A cold swell washed over Senna. This was the fateful morning. The day everything changed. By evening, her innocence would be lost. She took a step toward the girl.

It’s only a memory, Senna. You can’t change anything.

“Then why bring me here? Is this another trick?”

There’s something I need you to see.

The girl’s eyes brightened. She bent down and plucked a seashell from the sand. Plump fingers caressed the pink husk before placing it in a pocket—one of dozens on her pant legs, each sewn by her mother, in different fabrics and patterns, to hold the countless treasures she found. The girl turned toward Senna and smiled.

Senna hesitated, then offered a timid wave.

She can’t see you.

The girl dashed at Senna, but then at the last moment, she swerved and splashed into the water next to her. Senna whirled, and dread knotted her stomach.

A shipwreck was washing ashore.

The girl poked inside a dark hollow in the broken hull with her staff, declaring she had “rights of salvage”. She giggled at the words, convinced their power gave her claim to the ship’s bounty.

Hands slicked with sweat, Senna grappled with the urge to snatch the girl and run. From her vantage point, she saw the danger the child did not—a tendril of Black Mist stirring in the wreckage.

“She doesn’t know of the darkness she’s about to unleash on all the people she loves,” she said.

But Senna’s angle also revealed something she hadn’t seen before. As the mist uncoiled and sought to prey on the child, beneath the water, a glowing sphere approached, its filaments of light breaking the surface, searching. The sphere flitted toward the girl and seeped into her spine. The girl stiffened for a moment, eyes wide with fear and confusion.

Do you remember what happened next?

“I-I sensed the danger before I saw it... My mind was screaming... A voice was telling me to run.”

The girl flung her wooden staff at the dark tendril, and bolted into the woods.

Senna grew thoughtful, recalling the warning that saved her life. “But it wasn’t my voice. It was yours.”

The water stirred at Senna’s feet as a trio of luminous filaments rose from the sea. They turned and twisted, knitting together into a brilliant silhouette of hallowed light that gradually formed into the spirit of a young woman. The radiance washed away the details of her face, leaving only an impression of kindness and love. A rush of sorrow and joy overwhelmed Senna, like waters from a broken levee.

“The attack wasn’t your fault,” said the spirit. She spoke with her true voice and not through Senna’s mind. “You were alive. And that’s the one thing the Black Mist cannot abide, for it abhors all life.”

The words lifted a weight Senna had carried all her life. Unburdened, she was able to see the moment in a different way. “I should’ve died on that beach. I’d be another wraith, screaming in the mist, if you hadn’t warned me.” She paused to consider. “Why did you help me?”

The spirit’s thoughts seemed to go far away, and although her face remained hazy behind the hallowed light, Senna saw the hint of a smile on her lips. “I was a girl once, playing with dolls, singing as I made believe.” She fixed her gaze on Senna. “Life should be preserved.”

“But you stayed afterward,” Senna said, her voice shaking. “All these years, the Black Mist wasn’t drawn to me—it was you. The unnatural life. You’re the curse.”

“If I could have spared you that pain... ripped myself out... I would have. I tried for years, but I didn’t know how.” The spirit turned and looked down at the water. “And then... to watch you grow, from that frightened girl into this fierce woman, a Sentinel of Light fighting back the mist—I had to see it through.”

Senna arranged the pieces. That first night. Her village. Her home. All those loves swept away in dark waves. The chasm between her and those who survived. The fear in their eyes. Years spent running in terror. Losing people who tried to protect her. Losing Urias, her mentor. The walls she’d built to guard against the horror and the guilt, believing she had brought the curse upon herself.

“I was a little girl—if I had known the truth...”

“It was best that I didn’t interfere,” the spirit said, wringing her ghostly hands. “To learn you were conjoined to some unwelcome passenger, it would have robbed you of your own heart.”

“But you did interfere,” Senna shot back. “The itch down my spine. The wrench of my gut. Even the whispers in my mind. It’s always been you!”

The spirit hung her head in shame. “I was only helping you... when it was necessary.”

“Help? Is that what that was? All these years, you let me suffer alone!” Senna hardened, venom lacing her voice. “Why reveal yourself now?”

The spirit met Senna’s glare, her eyes tender but resolute. “You were never alone, Senna. I just couldn’t reach you through the veil, until now.”

The world shifted once again, as the white sands and emerald sea were blown away by a sulfurous wind. The pair remained on the island, but now the waters raged, and the mountains towered much closer than before. Ash rained down.

Senna thought about these new revelations, as well as the discoveries she had made in the lantern, secrets learned from other fallen Sentinels. This spirit’s presence had marked her, leading her down a path to death and captivity. But that unnatural life had also kept her alive in the lantern, empowering her to escape. And now, it was still helping her. She knew in her bones that her life was tied to this spirit.

Senna had many questions and lingering resentment, but she let them burn away like dying embers. Escape was the only thing that mattered.

“You’ve been warning me that this isn’t the lantern,” she said, watching the waves crash against the shore. “This is all in my mind, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But the threat is very real. It was Thresh’s powers that struck you down,” said the spirit. “His reach extends across the world, but Bilgewater is his goal for now.”

“Then he’s the key. Lucian was right.”

“The Warden is of consequence. But his cruelty only helped set things into motion... for him,” she said, motioning toward the horizon. Senna followed the spirit’s gesture to the mountain peaks. They rumbled across the ocean, pouring out thick gouts of darkness. “You’ve seen him in catacombs, and temples, and distant shores.” The spirit smiled wanly. “Trust your instincts.”

“What does he want?”

“To possess what is no longer his,” she said, the softness gone from her voice, the hallowed light flaring with her words. “He’s a child with a bitter heart, who would rather make the world share his misery than face it alone.”

“How do we stop him?”

“You’re the best hope. The years of training, the powers you wield, even your time in the lantern, all helped you become a formidable weapon.” The spirit looked away, eyes pooling with remorse. “I’ll be with you, every step of the way... Yet I fear, in the end, it may take all we have.”

Senna simply nodded. “I’ve lived. I’ve fought. I’ve died. And still, I feel the warmth of Lucian’s arms, even now,” she said. “This curse is a gift.” She had come to accept it, even if Lucian had not. Squaring her shoulders, she turned her attention back to the mission. “Can we make it to Bilgewater in time?”

The spirit seemed to ponder the question. “The attack is already under—”

Before she could finish, the spirit’s form tensed with fear.

Arcs of dark light spiked through Senna, driving her to one knee. She gasped for air as color drained from the sky. The heavens pressed in, and the world collapsed into a cavern of swirling ashfall. Every blistering jolt narrowed the cave even more—eventually it would become her tomb.

Senna twisted, fighting the contortions of her body, and looked to the spirit. The apparition was folded over, writhing, trembling, sharing in the misery. Lightning pulsed across her ghostly form, searing away her hallowed light.

“What... is... this?” Senna wheezed.

“Thresh... His attack is still destroying your body... You must drive out his power.”

Senna focused on the dark energy, bound it with her own light, and pushed it away as she would the Black Mist. It flowed out in a steady stream. But as it reached the tipping point, the power resisted and rushed back in, dousing her in pain. She crumpled to the ground.

Her strength was rapidly fading, but underneath her dwindling light, she felt an untapped reserve of radiant power. It belonged to the spirit.

“You say I’m never alone? Then prove it!” Senna grabbed the woman’s spectral hand. “Channel your light and add it to my own.”

She turned toward Senna, though it looked painful to do so. “I’ve never—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll help you,” she said, forcing a smile through the agony.

Together, they channeled their light and pushed against the dark energy. They met resistance, but only for a moment, and then the nightmare exploded in a blinding flash of white.

Senna woke with a gasp. She sat up, dark lightning still erupting from her chest. It dissipated in the cool morning air, and she collapsed in Lucian’s arms.

“No, Senna... Not again, please...” Lucian’s voice quavered, his body shuddering as he held fast.

“It’s—it’s passed... I’m okay.” She waited for a moment, feeling his heartbeat gradually slow, his trembling subside. Then she gently pulled away.

“What is that?” Lucian asked, confusion and fear in his eyes.

A faint light glowed in her chest. Senna remained perfectly still, until the light faded away. She waited, listening, feeling, hoping for the slightest hint. “Are you still there?” she finally asked, her voice tremulous.

“Yes,” said Lucian and the spirit, in her mind and in her ear.

Senna exhaled and smiled.

Lucian was staring at her, nodding, searching for answers. She met his gaze, and said, “We need to get to Bilgewater—something terrible has happened.”

He was about to speak, to rattle off a litany of questions, but she reached for his hand. “I’ll explain what I can, but we need to leave, now.”

Lucian sighed, a heavy and reluctant sound, but he helped her to her feet and prepared to launch. The ship gently creaked and swayed on the river, tugging against its anchor, ready to set sail. Senna looked toward the east, breathing in the new day, sunlight shimmering off the water.

For the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel alone.

Bilgewater’s White Wharf had earned its name thanks to the layer of bird waste covering it from end to end, which was only to be expected at a resting place for the dead. Folk here didn’t bury corpses; they returned them to the sea. A grave of the sunken dead hung suspended in the cold depths, marked by hundreds of bobbing grave-buoys. Some were merely name posts, while others were elaborate tomb markers carved to resemble rearing krakens or buxom sea wenches.

Miss Fortune sat on an empty crate of Rapture Rum at the end of the wharf, legs crossed and a noxious cheroot dangling from her bottom lip. In one hand, she held a length of breathing tube connected to a half-submerged coffin floating low in the water. In the other, she grasped a length of frayed rope running through a rusted pulley block and tied to the coffin lid. Both her pistols were holstered within easy reach.

Moonlight cast a weak glow through the mist rolling in from the sea, staining the water’s scummed surface tobacco yellow. Cawing carrion gulls lined every swaybacked roof on the quayside, which was always a good omen. They knew better than any the signs of fresh pickings.

“About time,” she whispered, as a shaven-headed man in a drake-scale frock coat emerged from the narrow, debris-choked alley. A pack of needle-toothed wharf-rats stalked him, hoping he was drunk and might pass out to become easy meat. The man’s name was Jakmunt Zyglos, one of the Painted Brothers. Any corsair worth his salt had tattoos, but every inch of Zyglos was inked with clawed serpents, lovers’ names, and a record of every boat he’d sunk, every man he’d murdered. His skin was as good a confession as any she’d known.

He marched purposefully along the wharf, but his eyes darting warily from side to side gave the lie to his confidence. His hand gripped a long cutlass with a shark-toothed edge that hung low on his hip. He too boasted a firearm, a stubby carbine with glassy pipes running the length of its barrel.

“Where is he?” demanded Zyglos. “You said you’d bring him.”

“That a Piltover hex-carbine?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“Answer me, damn you!”

“You first,” said Miss Fortune, letting some rope out through the pulley and allowing the coffin to sink a little more. “After all, I’m not sure how long this breathing tube is, and you wouldn’t want your brother to go without air, would you?”

Zyglos took a breath, and she saw the tension go out of him.

“Yes, damn you, it’s from Piltover,” he said, drawing the weapon and holding it out by the trigger guard.

“Pricy,” said Miss Fortune.

“I guess you’d know,” he sneered.

She let out even more rope. Bubbles of air escaped the now fully submerged coffin. Zyglos held up his hands, instantly contrite.

“Alright! Alright!” he pleaded. “It’s yours. Pull him up. Please.”

“You’ll come quietly?”

Zyglos gave a bark of fatalistic laughter.

“What choice do I have?” he asked. “You sank my ships and killed all my men. You’ve sent my kin to the poorhouse or the gaol, and for what? A stolen hex-gun? A bounty?”

“A little of both and then some?”

“So how much am I worth to you, bitch?”

“Coin? Five hundred silver serpents.”

“All this mayhem for a lousy five hundred serpents?”

“It’s not the money that’s got you killed. It’s the fact that you’re one of Gangplank’s sworn men,” said Miss Fortune. “That’s why I want you dead.”

“Dead? Wait, the warrant says alive!”

“True, but I’ve never been very good at following instructions,” said Miss Fortune, releasing the rope and the breathing tube. The coffin plunged into the darkness of the sunken dead, trailing a froth of frantic bubbles. Zyglos screamed his brother’s name and ran at her, drawing his serrated sword. She let him get within spitting distance before drawing her pistols and blasting him with both barrels, one through the eye, one in the heart.

Miss Fortune spat her cheroot into the sea and blew the smoke from each muzzle.

“Self defense,” she said with a smile, rehearsing her lie for the bounty pursers. “Crazy fool came at me with that fang-sword of his. I didn’t have a choice.”

Miss Fortune bent to retrieve the fallen hex-carbine. She turned the weapon over in her hands. Too light for her tastes, but artfully made and absurdly lethal. The ghost of a smile twitched the corner of her mouth as she thought back to the warmth of the old workshop, the smell of gun oil, and the touch of her mother’s hand on her shoulder. Miss Fortune sighed and shook off the memory before it turned sour. She threw the pistol out over the water, sending it down to the dead. The sea demanded its due, after all, and she’d not lied; the weapon was worth a small fortune.

She stood and strolled back into Bilgewater. She knew she ought to throw Zyglos’s corpse into the water too, but the wharf-rats and the carrion gulls had to eat, didn’t they?

And fresh meat was a rare delicacy on the White Wharf.

The first sound I heard was the scrape of sharp metal against rock. My sight was blurred, my vision still swimming in murky darkness, but something in the back of my mind registered it, that knife-edge slide on wet stone. The rasp was the same as my mason when he marks out which rock to cut away from the cliff. It set my teeth on edge. The fog in my brain receded, but it left me with only one panicked thought as I strained at the ropes binding my hands:

I was a dead man.

In front of me, there was a grunt and a heavy wooden creak. If I squinted, I could make out the bulk of what I guessed was Gordon Ansel sitting across from me. So much for hired muscle. It looked like he was coming around as well.

“Oh good. You're both awake.” A woman's voice, refined, polished. “I was just about to put the tea on.”

I turned toward her. Half of my face felt fat and bruised. The corners of my mouth were stuck together. I tried to move my swollen jaw and a coppery taste pooled on my tongue. I should have been thankful I was still breathing. The air had a lingering chemical smell, like it would singe off your nose hair if you inhaled too deeply.

Just my luck. I was still in Zaun.

“One of you knows who is responsible for the explosion at the docks,” the woman continued. She had her back to us; a flickering bluish light illuminated her slim waist and inhumanly long legs. There was a faint slosh of water as she set a glass kettle above the near-invisible flame of a chem-burner.

“Go pound a sump, lady,” Ansel groaned.

Leave it to Ansel to make a bad situation worse.

“Baron Grime's men always have such a way with words.”

The woman turned to face us: It wasn't a lamp that lit her figure, but something within her that gave off an unsettling light. “You will tell me what I want to know as if your life depends on it.”

“I ain't saying nothing,” Ansel snarled.

Metal scraped the floor as she shifted her weight. She was deciding which of us to carve from the quarry first. The sound made no sense until she began walking toward Ansel, and then I understood. Her velvet shadow separated from the silhouette of the table. Mystifying blue light pulsed from her hips, leading my eye down her lithe form... to twin blades. She was a high-end chimeric, unlike any I'd seen in Piltover or Zaun.

“Do not insult my courtesy, Mr. Ansel. Others have. They are dead now.”

“You think them legs of yours scare me?”

The woman stood in front of my thick-headed acquaintance. I could hear the water in the kettle start to boil. I blinked and there was a flash of silver and blue. The rope that bound Ansel's hands fell to the floor.

A hoarse laugh escaped my bodyguard. “You missed, darling.” Our captor seemed to be waiting patiently. Ansel leaned forward a few inches, an arrogant smirk plastered across his weather-beaten face.

“You can lick my—”

The woman spun around. This time, the razor-sharp blade of her leg sliced cleanly through Ansel's neck.

The severed head rolled to a stop in front of me just as the kettle whistle blew. Ansel always had a big mouth. Now it lolled open, silenced at last.

I kept telling myself Ansel was dead, but his eyes still stared at me in horrified surprise. The fear in my brain climbed down my spine, stopping to throttle my gut until I was convinced whatever was left inside was going to end up on the floor.

“Now, Mr. Turek, we are going to have a cup of tea, and you will tell me what I wish to know,” she said, her words unhurried.

The woman sat down at her table and smiled. A whisper of steam escaped as she poured the boiling water into her porcelain teapot. She looked at me with an imperious pity, like I was a schoolboy too slow at his figures. It was that smile that I couldn't look away from. Deadly. Knowing. It scared the piss out of me.

“Tea?” I nearly choked on the word.

“Oh, my boy,” she said. “There is always time for tea.”