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Jayce is a brilliant inventor who has pledged his life to the defense of Piltover and its unyielding pursuit of progress. With his transforming hextech hammer in hand, Jayce uses his strength, courage, and considerable intelligence to protect his hometown. While revered throughout the city as a hero, he hasn’t taken well to the attention it brings. Still, Jayce’s heart is in the right place, and even those who envy his natural skills are grateful for his protection in the City of Progress.

A native son of Piltover, Jayce was raised to believe in the principles that made the city great: Invention. Discovery. Not going to Zaun if you could help it. With a knack for understanding machinery, Jayce earned the honor of being the youngest apprenta to ever be offered patronage by Clan Giopara, one of Piltover’s most respected ruling clans. Utterly unsurprised, Jayce took the offer, and spent most of his early years constructing potential hextech devices and designing transformable multi-tools for Piltover’s working class: a wrench that transformed into a prybar, a pickaxe that could morph into a shovel, a hammer that could turn into a demolition beam, if only it had a sufficiently powerful battery. Everything Jayce touched put his contemporaries to shame.

Most things came easy to Jayce, and he could never understand why his peers had so much trouble with what, to him, were simple concepts. As a result, nearly everyone who worked alongside Jayce found him arrogant, dismissive, and unwilling to slow his pace to help his colleagues catch up. As time went on, his patience became shorter, while at the same time, a chasm grew between decorum, charm, and Jayce’s natural demeanor.

Only one person ever managed to match Jayce’s intelligence while also maintaining a healthy indifference to his superior attitude.

His name was Viktor.

The two met at a mandatory Progress Day party, and immediately bonded over how little either of them wanted to be there. They started working together shortly after. Viktor expanded Jayce’s intellectual horizons and challenged many of his assumptions. While Jayce sought to improve humanity via versatile technology, Viktor sought to solve problems inherent to humanity itself, such as physical decay or illogical prejudices. They constantly argued with one another, but their conflicts never got personal – though their methods were different, the two colleagues knew their ultimate goals were very much the same. More than that, they both knew what it was like to be ostracized by their colleagues: Viktor because of his unconventional thinking, Jayce because of his rudeness.

Together, Jayce and Viktor invented a mechanized construction suit for Piltover’s dockworkers – something hearty enough to enhance the wearer’s strength, but light enough that its wearer wouldn’t immediately drown upon falling overboard. However, the two reached an impasse when Viktor’s design for the next version of the suit included a chemtech implant that would increase the wearer’s strength output by tenfold, while also preventing them from getting tired, panicking, or disobeying instructions from their superiors. While Viktor considered this feature a brilliant means of reducing the frequency of construction accidents, Jayce found its indifference toward free will immoral. The two nearly came to blows over the design and ultimately, after Jayce warned the academy of Viktor’s invention, Viktor was stripped of his honors and ostracized from Piltover’s scientific community.

Viktor was the closest thing Jayce had ever really had to a friend, and distraught over their falling-out, went back to working on his own. He grew more insular. His patience toward others grew even thinner.

As Jayce studied in solitude, Clan Giopara’s explorers discovered a raw, blue crystal deep within the Shuriman desert. Though Jayce volunteered to experiment on it (specifically by suggesting the clan’s other scholars wouldn’t be smart enough to get anything out of it), his lack of tact in doing so prompted Clan Giopara to give it to their better-mannered scholars as a form of punishment. Yet, after many months, the scholars reached a unanimous conclusion: the crystal was worthless. A power-drained hunk of rock. The disappointed clan leaders finally handed the crystal over to Jayce, assuming that even he, with his remarkable intelligence, wouldn’t be able to learn anything from it.

Something inside the crystal called to Jayce. No, more than that – it sang to him. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew the Shuriman gem still held mysteries yet to be discovered.

He spent many months running every variety of test on the crystal. He braced it into a cogwheel centrifuge; he superheated it and deep-froze it; he tinkered, and observed, and hypothesized, and beat his head against his copper pantograph. Quite simply, Jayce wasn’t used to working hard: this damned crystal was the first thing that had ever resisted his considerable mental aptitude. For the first time, he realized how his peers must have felt, trying so hard to solve a problem, only to bump against your own limitations. It felt frustrating. It felt unfair.

And it probably felt much, much worse if you were working alongside an arrogant inventor who dismissed your every effort.

Jayce realized that despite how dismissive he’d been toward his fellow scholars, none of them ever gave up. None of them ever stopped seeking the very things that defined Piltover: Progress. Discovery. If they wouldn’t give up, Jayce decided, he wouldn’t either.

And maybe he’d try to be nicer.

Maybe.

Jayce approached the problem from a completely different angle. Rather than trying to experiment on the crystal as a whole, he wondered, why not run more invasive experiments on a smaller shard? Jayce chiseled off a piece of the crystal and suspended it in a liquid alloy. As he sent a voltaic current through the liquid metal, Jayce’s eardrums nearly shattered from the booming baritone note that blasted from the shard. Heat radiated from the crystal and, with a flash, it glowed bright enough to nearly blind him. This was unexpected. This was potentially dangerous. But this was progress. Jayce couldn’t erase the smile from his face as he worked well through the night, into the dawn.

The next day, Jayce was surprised to find his old friend Viktor on his doorstep. Alerted by the massive power spike from the crystal shard, Viktor had a simple proposition.

Since his expulsion from the Piltovan scientific community, Viktor had commenced work on a secret project in Zaun. He’d finally learned how to achieve his dream – how to eradicate disease, hunger, hatred. If Jayce joined him, the two would accomplish more than anyone from Piltover or Zaun could have dreamed of: they’d save humanity from itself.

Jayce had heard a monologue like this before from Viktor. He never liked where it led.

Viktor told Jayce that he only needed one thing for his Glorious Evolution – a power source like Jayce’s crystal. Jayce disagreed, informing Viktor that what he truly needed was a moral compass. Viktor, who had long grown tired of Jayce’s rudeness, leapt upon him, grabbed the crystal and knocked Jayce unconscious with it. When Jayce awoke hours later, he noticed that though the Shuriman crystal was gone Viktor hadn’t seemed to notice or care about the smaller shard.

Jayce knew whatever Viktor was planning, he would only resort to these measures if he were close to completion. Even though he didn’t know what Viktor’s Glorious Evolution consisted of, it probably didn’t have a lot of respect for the free will of others. Without wasting a second, Jayce retrieved the suspended shard and installed it into a massive, transforming hammer – a demolitions invention he’d abandoned years ago for lack of a strong enough battery to power it. Though he had no idea where Viktor might have taken the crystal, he could feel the hextech hammer vibrate, pulling him not north, south, east or west, but down, toward the undercity of Zaun.

The shard, eager to be reunited with the crystal from which it was chiseled, eventually led Jayce to a warehouse in the depths of the sump. Within the cavernous building, Jayce found something horrifying. Dozens of corpses, their skulls sawed open and hollowed out, their brains transplanted into an army of immobile metal soldiers, hooked up to the now-pulsing crystal.

This was the first step in Viktor’s Glorious Evolution.

Jayce’s stride grew less confident as he approached Viktor. He and Viktor had not always seen eye to eye, but this was something else entirely. For the first time, it occurred to Jayce that he might have to kill his old friend.

He called out to Viktor, flinching as the army of robots stood to attention. Jayce asked him to look around – to see what he was doing. Whatever this was – this Evolution – wasn’t the progress they fought for in their youths. He even, to Viktor’s surprise, apologized for acting like such a jerk.

Viktor sighed. He had only two words in response: “Kill him.”

The automatons sprinted toward Jayce, breaking free of the wires connecting them to the crystal and introducing Jayce to another new emotion: panic. He gripped the hammer tight, realizing he’d never actually used it before. When the first golem was within reach, he swung as hard as he could, feeling the shard’s energy surge through his muscles, accelerating the hammer’s movement until Jayce was worried it might fly out of his hands.

It slammed into the automaton, all but exploding it into a hail of metal. Despite the obliteration of their comrade, the other machines didn’t even pause as they rushed at Jayce, trying to pummel him into unconsciousness.

Jayce analyzed the formation of the mechanical wave coming at him and attempted to quickly calculate how to take out the largest number of them with the fewest amount of swings. It was pointless; they were on him before he could swing even once. As he fell to the ground under a storm of their blows, Jayce saw Viktor looking on, not with triumph, but with sadness. He’d outsmarted Jayce and ensured humanity’s future, but he knew that future came at a cost: he couldn’t let his old friend live. Jayce vanished under a sea of swinging metal limbs.

That’s when Jayce, for the first time in his life, decided to stop thinking and just break stuff.

No longer caring for his own safety, Jayce used every last bit of strength he had to break free from Viktor’s automatons. He sprinted to the glowing crystal, and struck it with all of the hextech-enhanced force his hammer could muster, crushing the mystical object.

Viktor cried out in horror as the crystal shattered to fragments, the shockwave blasting them all backward as the army of automatons collapsed lifelessly to the floor. The very foundations of the warehouse shook, and Jayce barely managed to escape before the entire building toppled.

Viktor’s body was never found.

Upon his return to Piltover, Jayce informed his clan masters of Viktor’s nefarious plans. Soon, Jayce found himself a topic of discussion in both Zaun and Piltover alike. Hailed for his quick thinking in a time of crisis, Jayce became a beloved figure (at least, amongst those who hadn’t met him), earning himself a nickname: the Defender of Tomorrow.

Jayce cared little for the adoration of his fellow Piltovans, but took the nickname to heart. He knew that Viktor was still out there, plotting his revenge. One day – maybe someday soon – an awful lot of trouble was headed for Piltover.

And Jayce would be waiting.

The herald of a new age of technology, Viktor has devoted his life to the advancement of humankind. An idealist who seeks to lift people to a new level of understanding, he believes that only by embracing a glorious evolution of technology can humanity’s full potential be realized. With a body augmented by steel and science, Viktor is zealous in his pursuit of this bright future.

Viktor was born in Zaun on the borders of the Entresol level, and, encouraged by his artisan parents, discovered a passion for invention and building. He devoted every waking minute to his studies, hating to interrupt his work even to eat or sleep. Even worse was having to rapidly relocate if there was a nearby chemical spill, accidental detonation or incoming chem-cloud. Abandoning his work, even for a short time, was anathema to Viktor.

In a bid to impose a level of order and certainty on his world, Viktor researched Zaun’s many accidents and came to realize that almost all of them were the result of human error, not mechanical failure. He offered his services to the local businesses, developing inventions that made them far safer working environments. Most turned him away, but one - the Fredersen Chem-forge - took a chance on this earnest young man.

Viktor’s inventions in automation reduced the number of accidents in the forge to zero within a month. Soon, other establishments sought his work and Viktor’s designs became common in Zaun, improving production with every innovation that removed human error from a process. Eventually, at the age of nineteen, he was surprised to be offered a place in Zaun’s prestigious Academy of Techmaturgy. But Viktor’s work had attracted the eye of Professor Stanwick of Piltover, who convinced him to leave Zaun and travel to Piltover’s academy instead. There, he could work in the most advanced laboratories and gain access to all the resources the City of Progress could offer. Thrilled to be singled out, Viktor accepted his offer and took up residence in Piltover, where he refined his craft and sought to perfect his theorems in ways that would benefit everyone.

Viktor worked with Piltover’s best and brightest; including an insufferable genius named Jayce. The two were equally matched in intellect, but where Viktor was methodical, logical and thorough, Jayce was flamboyant and arrogant. The two worked together frequently, but never truly became friends. Often, the two would butt heads over their perceptions of intuition vs logic in the process of invention, but a level of mutual respect developed as each saw the flawed brilliance in the other.

In the midst of his studies in Piltover, a major chem-spill devastated entire districts of Zaun, and Viktor returned home to offer his help in the rescue efforts. By grafting a sophisticated series of cognitive loops upon existing automata-technology, he crafted a custom-built golem, Blitzcrank, to help in the clean-up. Blitzcrank was instrumental in saving scores of lives and appeared to develop a level of sentience beyond anything Viktor had envisioned.

Even with the spill contained, Viktor remained in Zaun to help those afflicted by the released toxins. With the golem’s help, he attempted to use his techmaturgical brilliance to save those whose lives had been blighted by the spill. Their attempt was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing more deaths, and the two parted ways. Though Viktor was distraught at the loss of life in Zaun, the work taught him a great deal about the merging of human anatomy with technology and how mortal anatomy could be enhanced with technology.

When Viktor returned to Piltover, weeks later, it was to find that Professor Stanwick had held a symposium on Blitzcrank and presented Viktor’s researches as his own. Viktor lodged formal complaints with the masters of the college, but his impassioned claim that he had designed Blitzcrank fell on deaf ears. He turned to Jayce to verify his claims, but his fellow student refused to speak up, further widening the rift between them, and the matter was decided in Professor Stanwick’s favor.

Bitter, but resigned, Viktor returned to his studies, knowing that his ultimate goal of making people’s lives better and enhancing humanity was more important than one stolen project and a bruised ego. He continued to excel, finding ever new ways to eliminate human error and weakness from his work, a facet of his researches that came to dominate his thinking. He saw human involvement in any part of a process as a grossly inefficient aberration - a view that put him at odds with a great many of his fellow students and professors, who saw the very things Viktor sought to remove as the source of human ingenuity and creativity.

This came to a head during a reluctant collaboration with Jayce to improve the diving suits used to keep Piltover’s docks clear of underwater debris and lingering chemical waste. Viktor and Jayce’s enhanced suits allowed the wearer to go deeper, remain underwater for longer, and lift heavier weights. But many wearers claimed they saw phantom corpse lights in the depths or suffered from chem-induced hallucinations. When divers experienced such symptoms, they panicked and often got themselves or their fellow divers killed. Viktor saw the problem was not technical, but with the wearer’s nerves unraveling in the inky depths. He devised a chem-shunt helm that allowed an operator on the surface to bypass the wearer’s fear response and, effectively, control the diver. A heated discussion between Viktor and Jayce on free will and mental enslavement turned bitter - almost violent - and the two vowed never to work together again.

Jayce reported the incident to the college masters, and Viktor was censured for violating basic human dignity - though, in his eyes, his work would have saved many lives. He was expelled from the college, and retreated to his old laboratory in Zaun, disgusted by the narrow-minded perceptions of Piltover’s inhabitants. Alone in the depths, Viktor sank into a deep depression, enduring a traumatic period of introspection for many weeks. He wrestled with the ethical dilemma he now faced, finding that, once again, human emotion and weakness had stood in his way. He had been trying to help, to enhance people beyond their natural capabilities to avoid error and save lives. Revelation came when he realized that he too had succumbed to such emotions, allowing his naive belief that good intentions could overcome ingrained prejudice to blind him to human failings. Viktor knew he could not expect others to follow where he did not go first, so, in secret, he operated on himself to remove those parts of his flesh and psyche that relied upon or were inhibited by emotion.

When the surgery was done, almost no trace of the young man who had traveled to Piltover remained. He had supplanted the majority of his anatomy with mechanical augmentations, but his personality had also changed. His idealistic hope to better society was refined into an obsession with what he called the Glorious Evolution. Viktor now saw himself as the pioneer of Valoran's future - an idealized dream where man would renounce flesh in favor of superior hextech augmentations. This would free humanity from fatal errors and suffering, though Viktor knew it was a task that would not be completed easily or quickly.

He threw himself into this great work with a vengeance. He used technological augmentations to help rebuild Zaunites injured in accidents, perfected breathing mechanisms, and worked tirelessly to reduce human inefficiency by decoupling physicality from emotion. His work saved hundreds of lives, yet seeking Viktor’s help could be dangerous, as his solutions often brought unexpected consequences.

But if you were desperate, Viktor was the man you went to.

Some in Zaun, hearing fragments of his philosophy and seeing the successes of his work, saw him as a messianic figure. Viktor couldn’t care less for them, viewing their quasi-religious cult as an aberration; yet another reason to eliminate emotional foibles and the belief in that which could not be empirically proven.

After a toxic event in the Sump saw hundreds of men and women in the Factorywood transformed into rabid psychotics, Viktor was forced to use a powerful soporific to sedate the victims and bring them back to his labs to try and undo the damage. The toxins had begun to eat away portions of their brains, but Viktor was able to slow the degenerative process by opening up their craniums and employing machinery to slowly filter their bloodstreams of poison. The technology available to him wasn’t up to the task, and Viktor knew many people were going to die unless he found a way to greatly enhance his purgative machinery.

As he fought to save these people, he detected a surge in hextech energy from Piltover and saw immediately that this could give him the power he needed. He followed the powerful energy surge to its source.

Jayce’s lab.

Viktor demanded Jayce hand over the source of this power, a pulsing crystal from the Shuriman desert. But his former colleague refused, leaving Viktor no option but to take it by force. He returned to Zaun and hooked the strange crystal to his machinery, readying a steam golem host for each afflicted person in case their body gave out under the stress of the procedure. Empowered by the new crystal, Viktor’s machines went to work and, gradually, the damage from the toxins began to reverse. His work would save these people - in a manner of speaking - and had Viktor retained more than a fragment of his humanity, he might have celebrated. As it was, the barest hint of a smile was all he allowed himself.

Before the process could complete, a vengeful Jayce burst in and started smashing the laboratory with an energized hammer. Knowing an arrogant fool like Jayce would never listen to reason, Viktor ordered the automatons to kill Jayce. The battle was ferocious, and only ended when Jayce shattered the crystal Viktor had taken, bringing the entire warehouse down in an avalanche of steel and stone, thus ending the existence of those Viktor was trying to save. And for this, Jayce returned to Piltover, feted as a hero.

Viktor escaped the destruction of the laboratory, and returned to his mission of bettering humanity by ridding it of its destructive emotional impulses. In Viktor’s mind, Jayce’s impetuous attack only proved the truth of his cause and strengthened his desire to unburden humanity of the failings of flesh. Viktor did send chem-augmented thugs to raid Jayce’s laboratory not long afterward. This was - Viktor told himself - not for revenge, but to learn if there were any more shards of the Shuriman crystal he could use for the advancement of mankind. The raid was unsuccessful, however, and Viktor thought no more of Jayce.

Instead, he intensified his efforts to find ways in which humanity could be shepherded beyond their emotional weaknesses and brought into a new, more reasoned stage of their evolution. Such researches sometimes transgress the boundaries of what would be considered ethical in Piltover (and Zaun), but they are all necessary steps in bringing about Viktor’s Glorious Evolution.

Viktor’s third arm emitted a thin ray of light that welded metal into his left arm with steady precision. The smell of burning flesh no longer bothered him, nor did the sight of his left wrist splayed open, veins and sinewy muscle fused with mechanical augments. He did not wince. Instead, he felt a sense of achievement gazing at the seamless blend of synthetic and organic materials.

The sound of children shouting gave Viktor pause. Rarely did anyone venture down the fog-bound confines of Emberflit Alley. He had chosen this location for that very reason — he preferred not to be interrupted.

Keeping his left arm immobile, Viktor adjusted a silver dial on his iridoscope. The device contained a series of mirrored lenses that angled light to allow him full view of the street outside his laboratory.

Several children were violently shoving a malnourished boy toward Viktor’s wrought iron gates.

“I doubt Naph will last a minute in there,” said a girl with imitation gemstones embedded above her eyes.

“I bet he comes back with a brass head,” said a boy with a shock of red hair. “Maybe then his brain won’t be dull as the Gray.”

“You better return with something we can sell, or we’ll be the ones to give you a new head,” said the largest one, grabbing the small boy by the neck and forcing him forward. The other children backed away, watching.

The young boy trembled as he approached the towering gate, which screeched as he pushed it open. He passed the front door encrusted with interlocking gears and shimmied through an open window. An alarm blared as he fell to the floor.

Viktor sighed and pressed a switch that quieted the ringing.

The skinny boy stared at his new environment. Glass jars, containing organic and metal organs floating in green fluid, lined the walls. A leather gurney stained with blood, upon which lay a mechanized drill, sat in the center of the chamber. Dozens of automatons stood motionless against every wall. To Viktor, his laboratory was a sanctuary for his most creative and vital experiments, but he could imagine it might seem frightening to a child.

The boy’s eyes widened in shock when he saw Viktor at his workbench, arm splayed open on the table. He ducked behind a nearby crate.

“You will not learn anything from that box, child,” said Viktor. “But on top of it, you will find a bone chisel. Hand it to me, please.”

A trembling hand reached to the top of the crate and grasped the handle of the rusted metal tool. The chisel slid across the floor to Viktor, who picked it up.

“Thank you,” said Viktor, who wiped off the instrument and continued work on his arm.

Viktor heard the boy’s rapid breathing.

“I am replacing the twisting flexor tendons — ahem, the broken mechanism in my wrist,” Viktor said, reaching into his arm to adjust a bolt. “Would you like to watch?”

The boy peeked his head around the crate.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” said the boy.

“No,” said Viktor. “When one eliminates the anticipation and fear of pain, it becomes entirely bearable.”

“Oh.”

“It also helps that my arm is almost completely mechanized. See for yourself.”

The boy stepped away from the crate and sat across from Viktor without a word, eyes fixed on his arm.

Viktor resumed welding a new boltdrive onto the tendons beneath his skin. When he had finished, he sealed the flaps of dermis onto his arm. He drew the beam of light across the seam, cauterizing his flesh and fusing the incision.

“Why did you do that?” the boy asked. “Didn’t your arm work fine as it was?”

“Do you know what humanity’s greatest weakness is?”

“No...” said the boy.

“Humans consistently ignore the endless infinity of possibilities in favor of maintaining the status quo.”

The boy gave him a blank stare.

“People fear change,” Viktor said. “They settle with fine when they could have exceptional.”

Viktor walked to his stovetop. He mixed a blend of dark powder and Dunpor cream into a saucepan, heating the liquid with his laser.

“Would you like a glass of sweetmilk?” said Viktor. “A weakness of mine, but I have always enjoyed the anise flavor.”

“Um... you’re not going to saw off my head and replace it with a metal one?”

“Ah. Is that what they think of me now?” Viktor asked.

“Pretty much,” said the boy. “I heard one kid had theirs replaced just because they had a cough.”

“Did you get this information directly?” said Viktor.

“No, it was my neighbor Bherma’s cousin. Or uncle. Or something like that.”

“Ah. Well in that case.”

“Would replacing someone’s head even get rid of a cough?” asked the boy.

“Now you are asking the right questions,” said Viktor. “No, I imagine it would not be much of an upgrade. Coughing stems from the lungs, you see. And to your earlier point, I am not going to saw your head off and replace it with a metal one. Unless, of course, you want that.”

“No thanks,” said the boy.

Viktor poured the thick liquid into two mugs and passed one to the boy, who stared longingly at the hot drink.

“It is not drugged,” said Viktor and took a sip from his own mug. The boy gulped down the sweetmilk.

“Are the others still watching outside?” said the boy through stained teeth.

Viktor glanced through his iridoscope. The three children were still waiting by the front entrance.

“Indeed they are. Do you wish to give them a scare?” Viktor said.

The boy’s eyes lit up, and he nodded.

Viktor handed him a sonophone and said, “Scream as loud as you can into this.”

The boy gave an exaggerated, blood-curdling shriek into the sonophone. It echoed along Emberflit Alley, and the other children jumped in terror, quickly scattering to hide. The boy looked at Viktor and grinned.

“I find that fear is more often than not a limiting emotion,” said Viktor. “Tell me something that scares you, for example.”

“The Chem-Barons.”

“The Chem-Barons are feared because they project an air of dominance and often the threat of violence. If no one feared them, people would stand up to them. And then where would their power go?”

“Uh...”

“Away. Exactly. Think of how many Chem-Barons exist compared to how many people live in Zaun. Fear is used by the powerful few to control the weak because they understand how fear works. If someone can manipulate your emotions, they can control you.”

“I guess that makes sense. But I’m still afraid of them,” said the boy.

“Of course you are. Patterns of fear are carved deep into your very flesh. Steel, however, has no such weakness.”

Viktor retrieved a vial containing miniscule silver beads floating in milky fluid.

“That is where I may be able to assist,” he said. “I have developed an augmentation that eliminates fear altogether. I could let you try it out for a short time.”

“How short?”

“The implant will dissolve in twenty minutes.”

“You’re sure it’s not permanent?”

“It can be, but not this one. You might find that without fear, your friends out there lose their grip. Bullies feed on fear, you see. And without it, they will starve.”

The boy nursed his drink, considering the offer. After a moment he nodded to Viktor, who inserted a thin needle into the vial and injected one of the silver beads into the skin behind his ear.

The boy shuddered for a moment. Then he smiled.

“Do you feel your weakness falling away?” Viktor asked.

“Oh yes,” said the boy.

Viktor walked him to the door and twisted a dial to unlock it before waving him out.

“Remember, you can always return if you wish a more permanent solution.”

A wave of fog created a ghostly silhouette around the boy as he emerged from the laboratory. Viktor returned to his workbench to watch the experiment through his iridoscope.

Emberflit Alley was empty, but as soon as the boy walked out his companions emerged.

“Where’s our souvenir?” asked the red-haired boy.

“Doesn’t seem like little Naph has held up his end of the deal,” said the girl.

“Guess we have to punish him,” added the large boy. “We did promise him a new head today, after all.”

“Don’t you touch me,” said Naph. He raised himself to his tallest height.

The bully reached for Naph’s neck, but Naph turned and punched him square in the face.

Blood streamed from the bully’s nose.

“Grab him!” the bully screamed.

But his companions were no longer interested in grabbing him.

Naph stepped toward the bullies. They stepped back.

“Get away from me,” he said.

The bullies eyed each other, then turned and ran.

Viktor closed his iridoscope and returned to his work. He stretched the fingers of his newly repaired arm and tapped them on his desk in satisfaction.

What’s the difference between law and order?

Can you have one without the other? And what does either have to do with justice? Maybe it depends on who you ask. If you asked me, well, the young me, justice comes by cracking skulls.

Guess I’m feeling young today.

It’s still dark when I finally reach the Hall of Law. As is often the case, though not usually so early in the morning, I’m bringing guests with me. A pair of them, two from the seven I had caught vandalizing a row of shops and cafes down on Horologica Avenue. One is snoring from the light tap I gave him, but the other is wide awake, and quite the fan of colorful language.

“Pipe down—you’re disturbing my peace.” I tighten my metal fingers around his collar and nod to his accomplice, slung over my shoulder. “If I were you, I’d take a hint from your friend here.”

“This is brutality,” he hisses. “Where are we? In Noxus?”

“Noxus?” I have to stop myself from laughing. “I wish. If we were in Noxus, I’d be taking you to the Reckoning pits, not a shaming cell.”

The imagery gives him a jolt, and I get a few moments’ quiet before he’s back at it.

“You think you can silence us, but you can’t. We are going to expose your system of oppression and tear it down.”

“And breaking all the windows in a tea room accomplishes this, how? You’re just another bored, spoiled brat, looking for a reason to smash things. You aren’t helping anybody.”

“We’re speaking up for those without a voice!” he snaps. “For the poor and the downtrodden.”

I look at his clothes. New, clean. There hasn’t been a day he’s wanted for anything. “Well, I am one of those poor, downtrodden Zaunites, and my voice works just fine.”

“And now you’re part of the system.” He spits pink onto the street. “Put a few cogs in your pocket and you turn on anything. How do you sleep at night?”

There’s an itch I get, wearing these gauntlets. The urge to feel a ribcage wrap around my knuckles that on some days is damn near overpowering. Try as I might, his words have my blood getting hotter, and my hextech fists begin purring in response, ready for a scrap that’s usually sure to come. But I tamp it down.

“When I’m not rounding up idiots for smashing up tea rooms? I sleep like a baby.”

Mercifully we reach the doors.

“Here, help a poor Zaunite in need.” I use the talker’s head to knock. I confess letting a touch of my frustration slip into the last rap—it’s loud enough to get someone to work the lock from the other side.

“Warden Kepple.” I grin at the blinking face behind the slowly opening door.

“Getting an awful early start, eh, Vi?” he grumbles, pawing sleep from his eyes.

“Injustice never rests, my friend.” I drag my arrests through the door, giving Kepple the quick version of the morning’s events.

“I’ve apprehended two of them,” I finish. “Both suspects are…” I look at each of them, now both snoring in tandem. “Subdued.”

Kepple raises an eyebrow. “Sure seems like it. Sheriff Caitlyn’s already looking for ya, upstairs.”

“I trust you can handle the processing for this pair of recreational revolutionaries, then?”

“I’ll get it logged,” Kepple grunts as I dump one of the punks in his arms, and the mouthy one at his feet.

I flash a smile as I pass him. “You’re an asset to the force.”

Caitlyn’s office is a mess. The creaking wooden desk is smothered, hidden beneath a forest of brass pneuma-tube capsules and the endless forms, messages, and edicts that they contain. The sheriff is lost somewhere in that forest, rummaging through warrants and mandates and the demands of her bosses and the merchant clans. It doesn’t look like she’s left the room in days, leaving me to guess at how short her temper might be as I close the door behind me.

“Sit down,” she says without looking up, still digging around for something.

Straight to it, then.

“What, this about those punks?” I clear off a chair and sit, flexing the mechanical fingers of my right hand and propping my boots up on the corner of her desk. “They’ll be walking around again in a few days. If you ask me, I went easy on them.”

“This isn’t about that,” she answers, each word somehow more tired than the last. “There is something that has been brought to our attention, developments that are… complicated, that we need to look into. It’s about Zaun.”

I see then that it’s not all lack of sleep weighing Cait down. Something’s got her guard up, an apprehension that’s rare in a woman who can put a bullet through a silver cog from three streets away.

“Is it her?” I ask. Can’t keep the acid from my voice.

Cait finally stops hunting around her desk. Those sapphire eyes flick up to me. “No. This is something different. Something new.”

“New,” I repeat, though no more sense comes out of it.

Cait takes a slow breath. “Something is happening in the Sump.”

I cock my head. “That’s pretty damn far from our jurisdiction.”

“Ever since the split,” says Cait, “our cities have existed in symbiosis. Despite appearances, one can’t survive without the other, so a balance must be maintained.”

Split, they call it. Usually a split is clean and even. In this case, some rich merchants got excited about digging a canal, too excited to make sure the land was stable. They put half of Zaun under water. Drowning people in service of commerce, and the way that commerce has been divvied since, is pretty far from clean or even.

“A real easy way to break that balance would be to reach down into lower Zaun and start shaking things,” I point out. “But we aren’t talking about the Promenade here—there’s no overlap in the Sump where we can massage events after the fact and make matters slide.”

Cait sighs. “These are all topics that have been discussed and considered.”

“By who?” I ask. “Care to clue me in?”

“I am able to tell you as much as you need to know, and right now you don’t need to know that.”

“So what does this have to do with us?” I ask, fiddling with an empty pneuma-tube capsule. “What the undercity does is its own business.”

“Not this time.” Cait plucks the capsule from my hand, setting it down as she sits back against the desk. I frown. She isn’t normally this tight-lipped.

“What’s changed, then?”

“We don’t know,” Cait answers. “To find out, we need eyes down there, someone who knows Zaun. That’s where you come in.”

“This is all pretty vague, sheriff.” I shake my head. “What about the barons? You think they’re just gonna sit back and let Piltover send wardens down to their turf and start flipping tables?”

Cait gives me a tired grin. “Is that the big, bad Vi I hear, scared of a few little chem-barons?”

I cross my arms over my chest. “I just like to know who’s going to be looking for my scalp, is all.”

“The barons won’t be an issue.”

“Oh, really?” I raise an eyebrow. “And why is that?”

“Because they’re the ones asking for help.”

I sit up straighter at that.

“You’re right. This is new.” I shake my head. Something is very off with this, and I’m not getting anywhere close to the full picture. “Still a lot of bad blood between the barons and the Wardens. There’s a dozen ways this can go wrong.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much on that account,” she says, “because you won’t be going as a warden. Those kids you tuned up happened to have spawned from Clan Medarda, and their parents want your head.”

She holds up a sheaf of vellum missives. I can make out the calligraphy through the light coming in from the window. From that same window I hear the beginnings of a crowd gathering—an angry one.

“Lucky for you,” Cait says with a smile, “I talked them down. You can keep your head, so long as you’re out of the Wardens. You’re leaving town, going home to reflect and reconnect with your roots.”

“Cute story.” The word home sticks out, whether she meant it to or not. All these years here, guess I’m still a visitor—one who’s getting the boot for doing her job, because someone has enough cogs to think they’re above the law. “Convenient, too.”

“This means you’ll be on your own down there.” The levity drops from her voice. “No backup. And appearances must be kept up. I’ll need your badge, and your hands.”

“Go down to Zaun…” I work the clasps on my gauntlets and take them off. “Don’t know what I’m looking for, only that it’s bad enough that the chem-barons can’t handle it.” I drop the bulky hextech fists on Cait’s desk with a thunk that crushes capsules and scatters papers onto the floor. “And I can’t even bring my hands. This is getting better by the minute.”

“There’s no one else I could trust to do this,” Cait says.

“So you’re really not gonna tell me who’s pulling the strings on this one?” I ask, biting back on my temper. “Not every day I’m asked to provoke an international incident.”

“I’ve told you all I can, Vi. Believe me.”

“You could always come with me,” I say with a grin. “Take a little working vacation to Valoran’s most scenic tourist destination.”

Cait doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t have to. I know she can’t go, but it’s always fun to tease. And it keeps me from punching a hole in the wall.

Dawn settles into morning by the time I reach the Rising Howl. The crowds outside the Hall of Law gave me jeers and a few tossed stones as I left, but they knew better than to get too close. They clung to the Hall where they could stay seen, and keep their teeth in their heads.

It feels strange to walk the city without my gauntlets, my hands still wrapped up from the day before. I left anything that could tie me to the Wardens back at the Hall, anything to tie me to Piltover, really. I’ll need to lay low—I’m far from forgotten in Zaun, and there are plenty of folks whose memories I’d rather not refresh. I’ll go down, see what’s got the barons so spooked, and be back in a few days, tops.

The conveyor fills near to bursting as the conductor whistles herself hoarse and the doors finally lock. Hexdraulic winches loosen their grip on the great chains holding us, and the descent begins. I find a seat on the bottom level of the pod, staring out through the bottle-green window panels as we sink.

The morning light has spilled across all of Piltover, glittering off towers of iron and glass, but only teases the lips of the chasms. The light will reach the Promenade—Zaun’s highest level—but won’t be much more than a glimmer any lower than that.

I shift my boot, seeing a symbol scratched crudely into the floor. Some kind of spider.

The air already starts to slicken as the conveyor slides through the Promenade, and I taste chem fumes and feel a low sting in my nostrils. The new spire comes into view, a giant tower of pale stone and shimmering glass starting all the way down at the Entresol. Mechanicians, laborers, and menials toil in its base levels, synthesizing and refining their hex-crystals before shipping them up to the city above. Of the process, all that remains in Zaun is the concentrated runoff, more dangerous than the Gray by tenfold, at least by the smell of it.

I’m not sure who owns this spire—Ferros isn’t the only player in the synthetic hex-crystal game anymore, though they still make the strongest, purest kind. Word is even chem-barons, like the Poingdestres, are trying to make their own brands of cheap knock-offs, without the merchant clans. But most likely, this spire is yet another joint venture between the barons and the clans.

As we descend to the Entresol, something catches my eye through the window. The conveyor shafts are no stranger to graffiti, but one mark stands out bright and new against the faded tags it’s covering.

A spider.

I look down at the floor. The mark is the same. My eyes go back to the window and I find it again, and again.

I stand up, pressing my back to the wall as the Howl shudders to a stop at the Entresol. The conveyor empties, and more than one pair of eyes look at me with alarm when I don’t exit.

A bell chimes, a signal the Rising Howl is due to depart. The conductor descends the stairs, peering this way and that before spotting me.

“Lift’s going down soon,” she says, the unease clear in her voice. “You’re heading Sumpward, then?”

I take a look around, seeing an empty platform beyond the doors. “Looks like I’m the only one.”

“May not pay to be unique in this regard, dear.” She takes a step closer, pushing her goggles up to her brow. I can see the fear in her eyes. “Sump’s not right these days. Best to stay further up.”

“You know anything about it?” I ask.

The conductor looks down, fidgeting with her sonophone. “Enough not to trifle with it.”

I consider her for a moment. “I think I’ll take my chances.”

She lingers, hoping I’ll have a change of heart, before giving a slow nod and clambering back up the stairs. Soon the Howl begins its slow rumble downward, down to the Sump, where I will see what everyone is so afraid of.

The light gets poorer once you clear the Entresol. Chem-lamps appear fewer and fewer, like fireflies rising up the farther down we go. The light from the Howl itself is enough to see the immediate surroundings of the conveyor, though the worth of that might be dubious.

The Sump has never been pretty. Maybe a long way back, before the Flood turned half of it into a graveyard and the other half became a landfill, it might have been different. But that’s long gone, and from what I see, even compared to what I remember, it’s only getting worse.

Make the wrong enemies, break one too many promises, back a loser with your last cog, you’ll end up down here. Desperate people scratching out a living, safe from those above who won’t stoop to look for them. That makes it almost a haven for them, if not from each other.

The lights flicker out. I stand, walk over to the window, and lean against the railing to glimpse through the green glass. After a few moments, the lights return, bathing the conveyor shaft in enough illumination to show me what’s covering every inch of it.

Spiders. Nothing but spiders.

That same crude mark as before, but where above it was rare, here it has been etched, carved, or sprayed over everything. An unending swarm, as though marching and climbing up from the dark they had already claimed as theirs.

I feel something cold in my stomach, a tiny flare of adrenaline. Whatever it is that Cait sent me down here to find, it has to be connected to this.

“This is as far as I’ll go,” I hear the conductor’s voice scratch from the sonophone as the Rising Howl comes to a halt in a groan of protesting iron. The doors unlock and I peer out at an abandoned platform, the only light a single chem-lamp pulsing faintly at the far end. I step onto the platform and the doors lock fast behind me, the conveyor already rising as I look back at it over my shoulder. Soon it’s just one more firefly, rising from the chasm.

There’s no such thing as silence in Zaun, even down in the Sump. I hear steam coughing out of corroded pipework, factories and scrapyards growling in the distance… and a trio of voices muttering in the dark.

The spider symbol crawling all over the conveyor shaft is on the gangers, too, splashed on threadbare clothes, still raw and red on their faces and necks from new tattoos. They’re armed, and making no effort to hide it. One has a chain, another a length of pipe. I see the dull sheen of a tarnished blade in the hand of the last.

They’re young, young enough not to recognize me. Whatever gang this is, these are new pups, the most likely to do something stupid in order to prove themselves.

“You lost?” one of them says, the one holding the knife.

“Can’t say that I am,” I answer, playing off a bored calm as I take in every detail. Posture, health, temperament. I know in a few seconds which of them take the orders and which one gives them. Which are most likely to run, and who is willing to spill blood.

I make to pass them. The blade flicks out ahead of me, catching the yellowed light from the chem-lamp.

“I think you are.” He looks me over. “Tell me, sister, have you come to hear the Voice?”

I take a slow quarter step to keep all three of them in view. “Whose voice might that be?”

Knife wrinkles his nose. “Believers and pilgrims would know, and that’s all who’s welcome here.”

“Time to turn around and go back home, sun-stained filth.” Another of them spits. He gets a hissing chorus of agreement from his mates.

I could probably get more out of them. The name of their gang, who this Voice belongs to, how exactly they have the whole of the Sump running scared. But the urge to lay hands on them wins out.

“Boys, boys.” I shake my head, smiling. I make a fist, and my knuckles crack loud enough for them to hear. “I am home.”

A quick side glance to each other and they rush me. My eyes go to weapons, flicking from blade to chain to pipe to see who I need to drop first. The air tastes like ammonia and grease as the tension cracks open.

Adding a splash of blood won’t hurt.

I throw the first punch, forgetting I had left my hands behind. Wear them long enough, and you get used to the power a pair of hextech Atlas fists can give you. When my knuckles find the side of Knife’s skull, I feel something flex sideways, between my fingers. The pain is sharp and immediate, making me hesitate enough for the pipe to swing in low and take me in the ribs.

The third circles, chain lashing my legs, but my focus is on the blade. My punch had sent him to all fours. A knee to the jaw and he sprawls.

I snatch hold of the chain, wrenching the ganger holding it into a headbutt. His nose mashes flat against my forehead. He topples, clutching at his face. The whistle of the pipe makes me duck, throwing its owner off balance, and I add to his momentum to send him crashing into a wall.

Pipe springs up to his feet, and freezes. His eyes dart from me to Knife, back to me, then to Chain. The pipe pings as it hits the ground, almost drowning out the pounding of his boots as he runs for it. I lunge after him, but I’m stopped cold by a spike of pain in my ribs squeezing my lungs shut. I let him go.

Knife and Chain aren’t worth the trouble. I snap the blade beneath my boot and fling the weapons off the platform, ignoring my ribs as I start making my way deeper into the Sump.

They say that when something’s hurt and on the run, it heads back to what’s familiar. A nest or warren, some kind of sanctuary where you know you’ll have some walls to put around you.

Precious few sanctuaries in the Sump, for me at least. There might have been a handful of places I could go, but now everywhere I look there’s that mark, the spider that’s swallowed everything. I need somewhere to catch my breath, and down here there’s only one place I can think of.

I’m hazy on when and how I first ended up at Hope House for Foundling Children. I haven’t thought about the orphanage in awhile, but I still know the way by heart. You always remember how to get home, even if you ran away from it.

I stay out of the open, keeping to shadows and side streets to avoid any more encounters. I watch clots of gangers moving around, every one of them armed, but no chaos. They aren’t breaking or wrecking a thing down here.

Why smash up what you already own?

My hand is getting distracting, joining my ribs with a sharp poke each time my heart beats. I can feel it swelling up under the wraps, not broken but damn near close. I just pull them tighter.

Round a corner and there it is, Hope House, in all its dull, crumbling glory. It was far from in good shape when I left it, and the years since haven’t been any kinder. I’m amazed it’s still standing. For a second I’m a kid again, coming home banged up from a scrap or a heist. I can’t keep the smile off my face seeing it.

Kids chase each other around the front of the building, the faster, healthier children outpacing those with a missing limb or wheezing through third-rate esophilters. They see me coming and scatter. Trust is a hard thing to come by this far down, one of the first lessons the abandoned are forced to learn.

One of them makes for the front door. He hurries up the worn steps leading to the entrance, nearly stumbling face first before reaching it. His fist pounds on the door until it opens, and a young woman looks down, too young to be his mother, but old enough to be responsible for him.

“Now what did I tell you about playing on those stairs?” she scolds, thumbing away a smudge of grime from the boy’s cheek. “I’ve told you they’re tricky, and if you’re not careful, one of these days—”

“One of these days,” I say, stopping at the foot of the steps, “you’ll collect a crack in your skull.”

Her eyes go wide. I knew her voice the second I heard it, and it’s enough to sting my own eyes a touch. My mind fights to reconcile the young woman standing there with the shy little girl I once knew.

“I used to have to warn a little girl here about that all the time.” I smile. “She was trying her hand as a tumbler, when her head wasn’t buried in a book.”

“Gave up on the tumbling,” she replies, gently guiding the boy through the door before stepping outside and closing it behind her. “But I still like to read, when I can find the time.”

“Roe?” The first stair creaks under my weight as I place a foot on it. “Is that you? Can’t be.”

“It’s me.”

I climb another stair. “You can’t be Roe. Roe’s just a kid, barely reaches my hip. Look at how you sprouted.”

“Nobody stays a kid down here for long,” she says. “You should know that better than anyone.”

Another stair. “It’s good to see you. Been a long time.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks down. “I’m not the one who went anywhere.”

I stop my climb, and take a step back. The hurt is clear in her voice. When I left, she was just a kid, one I had looked after from the day she first showed up at Hope House. I had never let her run with me, kept her clear of the scraps and the stealing and the gangs. I protected her.

And then I left.

“Heard you’re with the law now,” Roe says, leaning back against the door.

“You see a badge anywhere?” I spread my arms out wide. “I was a warden for a little while, yeah, but we’ve gone our separate ways of late.”

“Seems to happen a lot.”

I dip my head. “Hey, if you wanna brawl, we can brawl. You’re old enough now.”

Despite herself, a thin smile slips through.

“Maybe. Can it wait until I get back?” Roe asks. “I’m gonna go in just a moment.”

“Go where?”

Roe looks back toward the door, then to me. She is silent for a moment, considering me. I glance at her and notice a pin on her collar, little more than an etching on a chip of scrap metal. It’s of a spider.

“Have you ever heard the Voice?”

I leave with Roe, walking through the crumbling neighborhoods toward the gathering. I listen to her talk about her life, learning about this new person she’s blossomed into. The shyness is still there, and she’s still smart from all those nights I saw her with her head hidden in books, but there’s more to her now. There’s conviction in her, an intensity that shines in her eyes.

I stick to asking questions, skirting around mentioning what I’m doing down here. All the talking starts a coughing fit that nearly doubles me over.

“What?” Roe laughs. “Spent too long up out of the Gray, huh?”

“I took a pipe to the ribs.” I wince, pressing a hand to my side. “A message of welcome from your friends when I stepped off the Howl.”

Her smile dulls. “We all want the same thing. An end to the oppression. Liberation from the barons and the clans. Clean air. Just not everybody agrees on how we should get there. Most are coming from life in the gangs, so they’re on edge. There’s great people here, kind people who just want a better future for us.”

I’d spent years in Piltover, walking among those who saw Zaun as nothing but a prison, a wasteland, an underworld. Piltover looked down and saw Zaun’s eyes looking back at them, and they either pitied them or hated them—or tried to speak for them, like that punk I arrested.

“They certainly seem preferable to the lot I’ve met already,” I say.

Roe nods. “I’ll show you.”

The closer we get, the more people we see. There are all kinds, young and old, members of rival gangs who were out to slit each other’s throats only weeks ago, all walking together. Every one of them has the spider on them, on a patch or tattoo or on a pin like Roe’s. They’re filing into an old factory with only three walls upright, and no ceiling, waiting in patient lines to gain entry.

We reach the door, barred by a pair of brutes. They are armed, one augmented with a claw of burnished iron, but they know each person by name, greeting them warmly as they come in.

“Roe, my sister, you are welcome,” one of them says, his voice low and soft despite his aggressive bulk. He then looks to me. “But this one, no.”

“Let her in,” Roe tells them. “She’s with me.”

“She is sun-stained,” says the other, lifting his chin with a sneer. “Not to be trusted.”

They want to turn me away for the joke of a tan I’ve gotten upstairs in Piltover, not because I joined the Wardens. These guys must be new.

“She has come to hear the Voice. I vouch for her, Togg.” Roe stares the guard in the eye, not backing down. “Get out of the way.”

The pair convene, muttering, before turning back to us. “The Voice is for all to hear, so you are welcome, too. But we will be watching.”

I feel their eyes on me as we step inside, and the static’s enough to have me taking in the room for ways out if this goes wrong. The place is a wreck, full of holes and collapsed masonry. If things turn red, I can get out. The only question is whether Roe will run with me, or after me.

There’s no pomp or ceremony. No music or votive candles, no dish passed hand to hand for contributions to the cause. There’s just a mass of people, surrounding a mound of rubble in the center where a man sits, calmly waiting.

“Is that him?” I whisper to Roe. “The Voice?”

She nods. I look over at him, this man who conquered the Sump, and I don’t understand.

He’s young, barely older than Roe, little more than a kid himself. Scrawny and gaunt, he has the look of a ganger in his eyes, eyes that have seen his share of horror. But there’s a strange warmth there, too, like he has a secret to tell, just to you. The last of the assembly enters, and the Voice begins to speak.

“I see many new faces.” His voice is gentle, almost quiet, though it carries to every ear. “You are all welcome here. Each one of us found our own way to this place, countless paths leading to where they become one. Know now that you are no longer alone.”

I scan the crowd. All are hanging on his every word. I wonder how many have never had those words spoken to them before. The rejected and abused, the forgotten, seen as people for the first time.

“We all bear scars,” the Voice continues. “The marks of the lives we’ve had to live, our trials and our suffering. The world has done all it can to beat us down, to convince us to stay there and be grateful for what little we have. That has been the reality here for far too long, and it is time that changed.”

Murmurs of affirmation wash over the gathering. You don’t need to have worked as a warden to feel the tension ratcheting up. The Voice is dredging up wounds, making them raw again. He isn’t lying—these people have borne more than their share of hurt, but I can see the game he’s playing, hidden beneath that truth.

“How long have their boots been on our throats?” His voice begins to rise, its edge sharpening. “The chem-barons. They use our home to build their wealth, and what do we get from it? We get poison in the air we breathe, in the water we drink. Sickness, pain, death—is this what we deserve?”

“No!” The crowd is angry now, playing right into his hands. I glance at Roe beside me, and see the same rage on her and every other face. Maybe it’s the contrarian in me, but I feel like they should have found a theater to hold this performance.

“I say, no more,” growls the Voice. “No more will we weep for brothers and sisters too weak to stand, or watch our children’s lives waste away. The barons will pay for what they’ve done, but more than that, we will bring justice to those they truly serve.”

Here it comes.

The Voice stabs an accusing finger skyward. “The corrupt merchants in that city towering over us. A city where the sun shines so bright it blinds them to the crimes they have committed here. The pain they have caused you, and the ones you love. They hide in that blindness, because they think it will protect them. But it will not, not after he arrives.”

Awed whispers fill the room, like he has just spoken of a god. Roe brushes a tear from her eye. They’re all drawn in, but nothing about this feels right, and I’ve yet to trust a word that’s come from this Voice.

“Who is he talking about?” I ask, but Roe nods back to him as he continues.

“I am his Voice, and we are all of us his sons. I have seen his face. I have heard his words and survived his test. He laid his hands upon me as his chosen, to seek out his flock and make ready for his return. That day is soon to dawn, my brothers and sisters. Not one of retribution, but of justice.”

“And who will pay the blood price for that?”

Silence descends. All eyes turn to me as I find myself standing.

“What are you doing?” Roe hisses, tugging at my hand.

Damn my temper. Vi, you’re a terrible spy. Well, no going back now.

“I’ve heard this kind of talk before,” I say, both to the Voice and the crowd. “Glib talkers who prey on the pain of the wronged and the dispossessed. They rile them up in the name of justice, when all they want is to see their puppets dance, because they want to be a god.”

The Voice listens, without any change to his patient facade. “I have not seen you here before, sister. You are new to our ways—none can fault you for not seeing them clearly.”

“I see clearly.” I glare at him. “I see a cult getting whipped up to spill blood. I see a liar promising freedom and prosperity, but putting armed thugs at every entrance to his territory.”

“They are what will win our freedom,” he answers plainly. He looks me over. “If our brothers attacked you, then I am sorry. You must understand that a dog can only be kicked so many times before he bites back. We’ve waited and we’ve waited, but now there is another way.”

He walks down from his mound of rubble, slowly approaching with his arms spread wide.

“I see much pain in you, a hurt you keep hidden behind your eyes. I see a child of Zaun who has strayed from her rightful home. Piltover has its corruptive mark all over you. You think strength lies in helping our oppressors to change, but they won’t ever change. You have strength, strength that could be used to help liberate these people.”

He certainly has a way with words. I realize I’ve made fists, and exhale to slowly release them. As much fun as making a crater out of his head would be, I wouldn’t last five seconds after.

“Whatever pain I have is mine.” I thump a fist against my chest. “I carry the weight of the choices I made. I don’t push them onto others. I don’t make scapegoats, and I don’t believe the wrongs done to me justify my inflicting them on someone else.”

The Voice looks down, chuckles softly before meeting my gaze again. “He would like you. But, if this is not your path, then leave now, and no harm will come to you. Return, though, and I can make no promises.”

I glance down at Roe, at every face staring at me. “I’ll go, and so should all of you. There is no one coming, no great being to deliver you. All I see is a man, looking for lost people to do his bidding.”

Again that soft smile, almost sad and without a hint of malice. “No, my child. He is very real. And soon enough, you won’t have to rely on my words to know that.”

True to his claim, no one touches me when I leave. Not even a threat. I don’t hear a harsh word until I am clear of the place, and Roe catches up to me.

She cuts me off. “Who do you think you are?”

“I—”

“You left,” Roe snaps. “Years pass, and all of a sudden you just walk back in and think you know what’s best for me?”

“I heard enough. You can’t tell me you actually believe all of this.”

“What’s so hard to believe? That there’s someone out there who gives a damn about what happens to the Sump?”

I take a deep breath. “I know a demagogue when I hear one, Roe. They talk, and they say anything to spin folks up, but in the end it’s never their hands that get bloody. He’s manipulating all of you.”

“He’s trying to help us.” She shakes her head bitterly. “Do you even remember what it’s like down here? You got out, but the rest of us aren’t so lucky. We stay separate and alone, and nothing will ever change. He’s going to set us free!”

“How?” I try like hell not to sound like a warden just now. “And how many are going to be left alive when it’s done? Do you know what he plans to do? If you know something, Roe, please, it is very important that you tell me.”

Something changes in her eyes. “Why? Who are you going to tell it to? Why are you even here?”

“I want to understand what has happened.” I raise my hands, trying to walk back the suspicion curdling our talk. “What is happening now, so that I can keep two cities from falling apart.”

Roe laughs, but it comes out as half a sob. “You’ve been in the sun too long. You’ve lived up there for all these years, you say you care, but what the hell have you done for us?”

“Roe.”

“Just name something,” she presses. “One single thing you’ve done to help these people, to help me, instead of keeping us all locked where we are.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

It’s a simple question, but it hits me like a knife in the gut. A child might ask it, trying to figure out why the world doesn’t make sense.

“Forget it. Go back up. You don’t belong here. He’s coming, Vi, and then you’ll see. All of you up there will see.”

“Who?” I grip her shoulder. “Roe, who is he?”

Her expression goes cold. “Everyone knows who the Voice is talking about. Everyone but you. It’s the Dreadnought.”

“Dreadnought?”

It’s night up in the Promenade. Cait’s left behind anything that might make her stand out, to be recognized as a sheriff of Piltover in the bustle of where the two cities touch.

“Mean anything to you?” I ask.

Cait shakes her head once. “I’ll do some digging, see what I can turn up. What else can you tell me?”

I explain all that I had seen. The marks on every wall. The complete control over the Sump. The Voice’s words when they gathered.

“They are organized,” I tell her, “and they are angry. It’s not a matter of if this boils over, but when.”

“Okay.” She takes a breath, processing. “And when it boils over, do we know where, or how?”

“I don’t know.”

Cait’s voice changes with the next question. It’s lower, quieter. “Have you heard any of them mention hextech?”

“Hextech?” I frown. “What does that have to do with—”

“Hextech,” she repeats, locking my gaze to hers. “You hear anyone start talking about gems, crystals, magic, that is news I need to know immediately.”

A question surfaces in my head, one I don’t want to ask, but will stay lodged there until I do. “Do you already know what you’re looking for, Cait?”

She looks at me. “We’re on the same side here, Vi.”

“And what side is that?” The fact she has to say such a thing puts me even further on edge. “It isn’t just the barons involved with this, is it? We’ve watched them feud with the gangs for years, and never lifted a finger. Suddenly there’s a new player on the scene that the barons can’t keep on a leash, and now you’re talking about hextech. The clans get spooked about their margins, so they need us to go down and keep Zaun in line?”

Cait doesn’t answer. My blood’s up, and I push out a slow breath. “Guess I’ll have to find out myself.”

“I told you what I could, what you needed to know.” She looks me over, her eyes falling on my hand. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ll manage.” I stand, and start walking.

Dawn’s light doesn’t reach this far down. The flickering chem-lamps make a poor substitute as I climb the steps to the front door of Hope House, where that little boy sits, alone.

“Hey,” I say softly. “Remember me? I’m Roe’s friend. My name’s Vi. What’s yours?”

Both of us are careful as I close the gap. He’s pouting, cheeks flushed and arms crossed over his chest. “Yulie.”

“Yulie,” I say, stopping a few stairs shy of him. “Do you know where Roe is, Yulie?”

He nods his head. “She’s gone.”

Something goes cold in my stomach. “Gone where, Yulie?”

The boy looks at me, the hurt making his eyes shiny in a grimy face. “She came home mad. Then she left with some of her friends.”

“Now, Yulie, this is very important.” I reach out, very slowly, and place a hand on the stair he’s sitting on. He watches me, but doesn’t flinch away. “Do you know where they went?”

“She said they were done waiting.” Yulie sniffles. “I wanted to go, but she said I had to stay here.”

“Where did they go?” I try to keep my voice soft so as not to spook him, but I’m getting impatient.

“The new tower.” Yulie nods up toward the Entresol. “She told me they make the magic rocks there. I asked if she would bring me one, and she promised that, when she got back, she’d have enough for everyone.”

I’m already running.

It takes time to make it up to the Entresol, but once I’m there, I know where to go.

The spire. A symbolic and literal image of the common Zaunite’s oppressors. It spans both cities, but while all the sweat and blood are shed in Zaun, most of the money is spent in Piltover. At the very tip of the spire is a dome, where the merchant clan’s representatives lord over the workers below.

What a sight will greet them today, if they bother to look down. To see the base of their tower turned red with blood.

The ground is already thick with dead when I arrive. Piltover may be the destination for the hex-crystals, but the chem-barons get their cut for having the spire on their turf, and they make sure they have enough brutes on hand to keep the factory secure.

The cult must have run at the gates, dragging down the guards like a tide. I see corpses from both sides littering the way. The security force had chemtech weapons, training, and experience, but they couldn’t stop a wall of fanatics, armed with little more than blunt objects and the chance to get a little payback.

The gates have been thrown open, and I see men and women that I recognize from the gathering, hauling crates and inspecting racks of round metal canisters. I keep my distance, blending into the crowds. I find my way to where most of them are massing, around a pile of crates seized from the spire. I can’t see Roe anywhere.

Standing atop the crates is the Voice. His face is bloodied and bruised, his clothing torn. He looks like he had been in the thick of the fighting. Using a pry bar, he levers open the nearest crate, revealing racks of small, gleaming blue stones.

Synthetic hextech crystals.

“This is a momentous day!” The Voice holds up one of the crystals in triumph. “Behold, the instrument of our freedom. For so long we have given everything, and received nothing in return. Today, with these, we will balance those scales, and take what is rightfully ours!”

His celebration is interrupted by the terrible screech of metal against stone.

All eyes turn upward to the walls of the spire, where a dark shape can be seen descending in a great shower of dirty sparks. Even from a distance it is enormous, an entire arm replaced by a massive cannon, the body perched upon a multitude of splayed mechanical legs, segmented and ending in sharpened claws gouging deep wounds into the spire. As it gets closer, I can see that the top portion is vaguely human, pallid flesh fused to metal and lambent green medical tubing, but the legs belong to a monster.

Or a spider.

Dreadnought. I hear the name flicker through the crowd, whispered like a prayer.

I had believed that the Voice was deluded, or a charlatan. That the creature was something he had conjured up to rally an army for himself. But he is real. Things have suddenly become far more dangerous.

The Dreadnought crashes down to the ground, making impact in a cloud of dust and rock splinters. The people fall to awed silence, parting before him as his clicking spider legs bring him to loom over his prophet.

“You’re here,” the Voice says, an ecstatic whisper. “You’re finally here.”

“Indeed, my witness.” His true voice is thunder, rendered through furnace iron. “I am here.”

I push into where the onlookers are thickest, my eyes darting, going from searching for Roe to watching what is unfolding. The Voice leaps down from the crates, his hands full of hex-crystals.

“Mighty Dreadnought,” the Voice says, beaming, “I offer these, hard won with the blood of your children. The key to our liberation.”

The Voice pours the crystals into his master’s flesh hand, stepping back in preparation for praise.

“Why do you bring these before me?” The Dreadnought tilts his hand, and the crystals spill to the ground.

Silence. Then: “I don’t understand,” the Voice stammers, watching the priceless gems scatter into the dust.

“That is clear.”

“We’ve won you a fortune. With these we can buy weapons, armies.”

“You think as they do.” The Dreadnought says it like an accusation. He looks out to the crowd. “Hate Piltover for what they have become, but revere their forebears. Industrious, committed, those people possessed the strength to harness the magic within our world, and bend it to their will. Truly they were mighty.”

I can feel the crowd’s confusion, because I share it. Of all the things they expected their savior to say, I can’t imagine it was this.

“Yet over time, the tool they had forged bore more weight. It became a crutch, and then it became their master. They have made themselves into slaves. They awoke so shackled to these gems that in their absence, the civilization they had inherited would end.”

He turns to the Voice. “Wealth is a vice—it is not strength. The boy I found that day appeared worthy. Was I mistaken?”

Unease sweeps over the crowd. We all become very aware that nearly every facet of the Dreadnought is lethal, bladed, and weaponized as his hand cups the Voice’s jaw.

“I was chosen,” the Voice pleads. “That day. You spared me.”

“Indeed.” The monster nods slowly. “Though I am not infallible. I can only seek out my failures, and correct them.”

The Voice screams, a sharp, short sound. A yelp of agony and it’s over. The Dreadnought discards the body, immediately forgotten.

“I am Urgot,” the creature says, turning to address the crowd. “And I have heard you, Zaun. The whispers of your hearts, the things you have hoped and dreamt for me to be. The names, the titles. A liberator. A god. I speak before you now to say that I am none of these things. I am greater. I am an idea.”

Every person there flocks to him, ringing his monstrous form like a congregation. He reaches for one of the metal canisters, and I notice dozens more of them within the gates. “I am a reflection of this world, an echo of the great contest between strength and weakness waged in each of our souls, with every breath we draw. I cannot be a god to you—that offering is not within my power. What I can offer you is a test to learn if you bear the strength needed to be your own god.”

A sick feeling creeps up my spine. Urgot gestures to the medical tubing linking his mechanical body to the mask covering his mouth and nose, and holds up the canister. It’s covered with warning sigils: toxic, poison.

“What lies within this metal shell is the very air I have come to breathe. I took it in, and conquered it, for true liberation comes from within. That is the message we will take to our enemies, our would-be oppressors.”

Urgot scans the crowd. “Who among you has the strength to follow me? To take this misery within yourself, and endure?”

Every one of them sinks to their knees, yearning to be baptized.

“Urgot!” they roar. “Urgot! Urgot!”

“Very well.” Urgot closes his hand over the canister’s safety valve, pale fingers forming a claw. “Let us see.”

The gas bursts out from between Urgot’s fingers as he crushes the valve. He tears a rent in the canister, and a green cloud rushes out to envelop his followers. I’m near the back, away from the greatest concentration of it, but almost immediately people begin to die.

“Roe,” I whisper, pushing through the crowd as panic begins to set in. Men and women collapse, pinkish froth boiling from lips and noses. I find a breather mask discarded by the wreck of an equipment shed, and pull it on as I feel the air begin to claw at my throat.

Visibility devolves into a putrid greenish haze. I see silhouettes all around me, shivering and thrashing and toppling over. I have to find Roe. I have to get her out. I have to find her.

And I do.

She is kneeling with a group of others, tendrils of mist rolling up their chests as it finally reaches them.

“Roe!”

She looks up, seeing me. The shy little girl I used to know. Roe stares me in the eye, vision clear with absolute belief, and breathes in.

“No!” I skid to her side. Her skin begins to blacken, dark webs of corrupted veins filling with poison. She gags. Bloody foam rings her lips. I tear the breather mask from my face, trying to press it to hers. Roe spends the last of her strength fighting me, even as she sags to the ground. Her conviction, that ironclad belief, never leaves her eyes until the life does.

Less than half of them are still alive when the cloud finally dissipates. Many of the survivors are those who are half augmented, their jaws bracketed in clunky brass esophilters and prosthetic windpipes. My mouth tastes like blood and burnt sugar. Tears cut through the grime on my face.

“Arise.” Urgot lifts a hand, and his army clambers to their feet. “Those who have passed the test bear the right, and the duty, to grant that trial to the world.”

He turns his eyes to the peak of the spire. “For too long have they been separated from the full fruits of their labor. It is time we return it to them.”

Urgot had sealed the spire, his followers opening every canister inside the air-filtration system. The toxic mist is coiling up the tower like a sickly green snake to fill floor after floor with choking, paralyzing death.

I had managed to sneak in before they locked the gates. My heart pounds as I climb the stairs toward the top, clutching the breather mask to my face. I don’t know how many dead I pass on the way, but a feeling settles in my gut that I may join them before this day is done.

If that’s the cost of a reckoning, then I’ll pay it.

It’s a race now. The cult and their monstrous leader are swarming up to reach the dome. The men and women at the peak are clan folk, and if they die, so will many more from both cities. The symbiosis, that fragile peace, will end, and those waiting for an excuse to use violence will finally have one. That’s not a fight Zaun ever wins.

I’m ready to give my life to see that prevented, to protect these people so that the true innocents might be spared. But when I throw open the doors to the clan’s sanctum, all I see makes me want to hate them.

The peak of the tower is a shimmering glass dome, painted in painstaking detail to resemble a clear, clean sky. Opulence is heaped upon opulence, from the richly appointed furnishings to silver trays of sugared fruit. The clan representatives here do not reside in a laboratory or workspace—they are in a palace.

I hurry toward the knot of frightened Piltovans, trying to suppress my anger, when a familiar face steps forward from their midst.

“Cait?”

The sheriff tips her cap. “Up here in the Promenade, it can get murky where Zaun ends and Piltover begins. Sometimes you just aren’t sure where your jurisdiction is.”

I tell her of what has happened, of what is coming.

“Well, then.” She produces a bulky case and hands it to me. “You’re going to be needing these.”

The gauntlets purr as they come to life. I make a fist, my aching bones a memory as I wait for the scrap that’s coming. Toxic mist tumbles in, immediately stinging the eyes and biting the lungs. Several of the clan folk begin to vomit.

Cait’s face goes stony and her rifle snaps up high, faster than I can track. I hear the shot and the ring it leaves in my ears. I feel the air tear as the bullet strikes the reinforced glass of the dome.

Cracks radiate out from the hole left by the bullet, rushing across the surface like lightning. The dome shatters. Colored glass rains around us, spinning and slicing. The pressure change lashes at the gas, whipping it out of the tower.

It buys us a second to breathe, but no longer. The mist fills the entrance, darkening as cultists skulk through. They pace and rattle their weapons, but hold back, waiting.

The doorway darkens again, this time entirely. It solidifies into Urgot’s titanic silhouette as he arrives, stooping to enter the dome’s bucolic splendor, his followers parting before him.

Urgot watches the gas dissipate and chuckles, a sound like gravel and slipping gears. “You think you have denied these people their test? That you have denied yourselves? No. I shall deliver it to you, and after you are destroyed, I shall deliver it to them.”

Cait grips her rifle, the hextech crystal in its chamber pulsing with rose-tinted light. She looks over her shoulder at the Piltovans behind her. “Get clear, now. Take the bridge to the Promenade. We’ll handle this.”

Energy dances across my gauntlets as I crash them together. “Behold!” Urgot cries, gazing at me. “Such precious weapons. Your masters give you strength, but underneath you are broken. Weak.”

“I don’t need these to be strong.” I laugh, bitter and quick. “I won’t need them to break you. They’ll just make it more fun.”

“I saw you with the girl.” Urgot gives a slow nod. “You cling to two worlds, child of Zaun. The day will come when you will have to choose.”

“I’m tired of listening to you talk.” My rage finally slips. “I’m tired of doing anything other than beating you to death for what you did.”

I can’t tell if the fight lasts seconds or hours. I only remember it in flashes. Crushing metal. Ribcages wrapping around my knuckles. Thunder from Urgot’s cannon-arm, stitching explosions. The sound of blood, fizzing and popping as it cooks on my gauntlets.

Between Cait and me, we whittle down Urgot’s followers, until it’s only him left standing, a metal monster of fire and bullets and slashing chains. It’s unclear who will leave the broken dome alive, until Cait sees an opening with her bola net.

Urgot roars as it envelops him, pinning his arms to his sides and distracting him just long enough for my charge. I put everything into the blow, sending him teetering off the edge of the dome. But I won’t let him fall, not yet.

I gather up the end of the net, straining against his appalling weight as my boots slip and skid to the edge. I want to look him in the eye once more, before I drop him.

“Let’s see how fast a spider flies.”

“Wait!” I hear Cait shout behind me.

“This ends here, Cait,” I hiss.

Cait stops beside me, a metal spar in her hands. “True strength is being able to choose whether you use it. You let him die now, you make us no different than he is.”

She threads the spar through the net to pin Urgot to the tower. I don’t want to listen to her. I want justice. But I know it won’t replace what he has taken.

I spit, and hammer the spar into the ground.

It would take a very generous perspective to call the stacks of wind-blown rock just off the isthmus islands. Barren and lashed by salt-spray, they’re far from any place someone would want to make their home. Seems a few generations back, someone in a position of authority in Piltover agreed, and built a prison there.

After my reinstatement into the Wardens, I told Cait that I trusted her to see that Urgot would be transported and interred to the letter. I was headed for the Sump, to visit Hope House and use these heavy hands to build instead of break. But I think she saw what it meant to me, and she wanted me here to see with my own eyes that he would face justice.

“I know this was difficult for you,” Cait says. “But I wanted you to see the end result of all that you did. So you know that you made a difference.”

Difference. The word catches in my throat, and my head fills with the image of all those people, suffocating on the poison left in the wake of progress.

“Putting him away, we saved both Piltover and Zaun a lot of chaos.”

“Do you ever think that something better might come out of that chaos?”

She looks at me, sighing softly. “Maybe, or maybe something even worse. A lot of people would have to die for anyone to find out, and I can’t let that happen. So we fight, and we do what we have to, to keep things together. That’s what the law does, what we do. We preserve order.”

Law. Order. Can you have one without the other? And what does either of them have to do with justice? If you had asked the younger me, she might have had an answer. Ask me now, and I’m not so sure anymore.

“Urgot’s following will wither,” Cait says. “Ambitious folks will fracture it, looking for power. They’ll be too busy fighting each other to give us any trouble.”

“You weren’t there, Cait.” I shake my head. “Not like I was. You didn’t see the numbers, the commitment. We aren’t finished with them, not by a long shot.”

We’re standing on a gantry overlooking the cell block. Cells flank us on either side, the cages cleared as wardens and prison guards bring Urgot down a central passage to his new home, an immense tube of reinforced iron running from floor to ceiling like some gigantic piston.

Urgot is in chains. He makes no move to resist as the procession reaches his cell.

“How much of him can we remove before he dies?” Cait asks me, loud enough for the Dreadnought to hear. “I bet most of him.”

“Step forth and test your theory, then.” Urgot’s eyes glimmer. “Unless all you have brought with you are idle threats.”

“Let’s speak plainly.” Cait slings her rifle. “You exist here on our sufferance alone. You will eat when we tell you, sleep when we tell you, breathe when we tell you. Nothing more, nothing less. Deviate from this in any way, and I will have you destroyed. Is that clear?”

Urgot laughs. “You believe you have the power to destroy me? You don’t. You never did. That is a door that will never be open to you.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll just have to settle for closing this one.” Cait nods to a technician. He throws a switch and the tube descends over Urgot, clanging to the floor and locking fast.

I can still hear him laughing through the iron as we walk away. I pause at the door to the cell block, looking back over my shoulder, a dread I can’t shake sneaking up my spine.

Urgot didn’t look like a prisoner to me.

He looked like a spider, waiting patiently in his web.

The golden hour between fifth and sixth bell. That’s my favorite time of day. It’s when most people in the Factorywood finish their work shifts. They’re bone tired, but they’re done for the day. Work is behind them. A hot meal and home are ahead. The people here are nice, and I always feel good squeezing my gelatinous body through the cliff-cracks seaming the rocks around the Factorywood. I feel love emanating from a man going home to his newborn son. I relish the anticipation of a married couple looking forward to a romantic dinner in the Boundary Markets.

Their thoughts soak into me. It’s nice, like a warm bath, though I tend to stretch out pretty thin when things get too hot. There’s always a few people in the mix who aren’t so happy. After all, life in Zaun can be hard. Some people are nursing broken hearts, while others can’t stomach the thought of another shift and feel nothing but seething resentment. I absorb the good and the bad, because that’s the way I was made. The bad feelings sometimes make me angry, but there’s nothing I can do about that. My parents taught me it’s okay to feel bad sometimes. Without the bad you can’t properly savor the good.

I follow the crowd until people start to go their separate ways. A few lingering bad feelings drift through my thoughts, so I decide to do something good to push them out. I seep down through a network of cracked vents I’ve been meaning to fix for a while, but just hadn’t gotten around to. I collect fragments of metal in my body as I go, extruding them from my amorphous form wherever there’s a crack, then heating my outer layers to weld them in place. With the cracks sealed, clean air from the pump station higher up in Piltover flows once again. Which hopefully means fewer cases of lung blight in a good many of the streets below.

The bottom of the pipe brings me out in the upper reaches of the Sump level. Things aren’t so nice here. Lots of people don’t have much of anything, and there’s plenty who want to take even that from them. The sump pools, full of toxins and runoff from the chem-forges, remind me of the time I spent alone as a specimen in a laboratory. I try not to think of that time, because it makes me angry. And when I get angry I sometimes break stuff, even though I don’t mean to. I don’t like feeling like that, so I ease myself into my favorite cleft in the rock, the one running beneath the twisting rookeries of the Skylight Commercia. It’s always nice there. People out together, browsing the galleries, meeting friends, dining or going to see one of the companies of players that tour the undercity with their satirical works. The atmosphere warm and friendly, it’s the perfect place to bask in all that Zaun has to offer.

But as I pass beneath the outlying streets, a spike of anguish ripples through me. A tremor of fear and pain disturbs my liquid flesh. I don’t like it. It feels out of place, like something I’d expect to find deeper down in the Sump. That’s the place where bad things happen more often than good things. It shouldn’t be happening here! I get angry as more of the bad feelings soak into me. I follow them down, wanting to stop them from spreading.

I push my body from the corroded pipes running below a metalsmith’s shop. My bulk fills the space under the warped floorboards. Light shines in angled beams through the louvers of a grille set in the floor. Angry voices come from above. Shouts and the sound of a weeping man. I press my body against the grille. My gelatinous mass breaks apart, only to reform on the other side. I push hard and quick, re-establishing my form inside the shop.

The owner of the shop is on his knees beside a woman who bleeds from a deep wound in her belly. He kneels at her side, one arm outstretched toward the four men standing in the wreckage of his shop. I know these kinds of men. I see them all the time in the Sump; thugs who force good-hearted people to pay up or face seeing their livelihoods smashed.

The interior of the shop is lit by chem-lanterns, one of which is held by a man wearing a butcher’s apron and who has a meat-hook crudely fixed to the stump of his other hand. The other three are mere brutes, slab-muscled simpletons in canvas overalls and thick magnifier goggles. Their eyes grow stupidly wide with shock at the sight of me rising over them. I bloat my body, greenish limbs swelling with power as I form a mouth where I think it ought to be.

I want to really hurt these men. I know it’s their emotions I’ve been feeling, but I don’t care. I just want to hurt them as badly as they hurt these people.

“This is gonna get messy,” I say.

My right arm shoots out, smashing the first thug from his feet. He slams into the metal stanchion by the door and doesn’t get back up. A second thug swings a heavy iron club, a sump-scrapper’s oversized wrench. It hits me in my middle and is promptly swallowed by my pliant flesh. I reach down and pluck him from the ground, hammering him up to the latticework girders of the ceiling. He drops back down, his limbs bending in ways even I can tell they shouldn’t. The third thug turns and runs, but I reach up and stretch my arms toward the girders. I spring forward and hammer my feet into his back. I squash him to the ground as their leader slices the blade of his butcher’s hook down the center of my back.

It hurts! Oh, how it hurts. The pain causes my body to lose cohesion. I fall to the floor in a shower of liquid green ooze. For a moment, I lose all sense of spatial awareness, seeing and feeling the world from a thousand different perspectives. The thug stands over me, a gap-toothed smile splitting his stupid face. He’s glad he killed me, filled with pride at his destruction of a living thing.

His pleasure at this destruction courses through me like a hateful elixir. I don’t want to feel like this, it’s not what I was taught, but to help these people I need to use the wrath that fills me. I must turn it against these men. My scattered globules reform in the time it takes him to realize he hasn’t killed me as thoroughly as he thought. I surge from the floor and crash into him, altering my density to that of a thundering piledriver. We smash into the wall of the establishment, the flesh and bone beneath me disintegrating at the force of impact.

I peel myself from the bloody wall, feeling the anger slowly drain from me. I form my body into something man-shaped as I feel the mixed emotions emanating from the couple behind me. The man looks at me with a mixture of fear and trepidation. His wife smiles at me, though I can feel her tremendous pain. I kneel beside her and she takes my hand. It is soft. I am immediately soothed by her gratitude.

I nod and place my hand on her stomach. Heat spreads from me as I ease a sliver of my form into her wound. I’ll be leaving a piece of me behind, a piece I’ll never grow back, but I give it willingly, knowing she will live because of me. The portion of my body within her repairs damaged flesh, knits ruptured tissue and stimulates regenerative growth in her stomach lining. Her husband wipes his hand over her wound, and gasps to see her skin is pink and new.

“Thank you,” she says.

I do not answer. I cannot. Expending such power drains me, leaves me thin. I allow my cohesion to loosen, flowing back down the grille and into the pipes. It is all I can do to maintain my form as I pour down through the cracks in the rock, heading toward the places I know will be awash with good emotions. I need to renew myself. I need to feel all the good Zaun has to offer.

I need to feel alive.

I need to feel.

Zaun is a place of wondrous experimentation and vibrant, colorful life where anything can be achieved—but not without a cost. For all its boundless creativity, there is also waste, destruction, and suffering in the undercity, so pervasive that even the tools created to alleviate it cannot escape its corrosive grasp.

Designed to remove the toxic waste claiming whole neighborhoods of Zaun, lumbering mechanical golems toiled in violently hazardous locations. One such golem worked alongside its fellows, fulfilling its programming to reclaim Zaun for the people. But the caustic reality of their mission soon wore away at its robust form, and before long it was rendered inoperative and discarded as useless.

Useless to all but one person. The inventor Viktor discovered the abandoned golem and, seeing the potential still within the inert chassis, inspiration struck. Viktor began a series of experiments, seeking to improve the automaton by introducing a new element that would elevate it far beyond the original scope of its creation.

Hextech.

Implanting a priceless hextech crystal sourced from the deserts of Shurima into the chassis of the forsaken golem, Viktor waited with baited breath as the machine rumbled to life.

Viktor named the golem Blitzcrank after the fizzing arcs of lightning that danced around their frame, an unexpected side effect of the hextech crystal, and sent them down into the most toxic regions of Zaun. Not only did Blitzcrank prove as capable as any of their steam-powered brethren, but they accomplished their tasks with vastly improved speed and efficiency, and as the days turned into weeks, Viktor began to watch something miraculous unfold…

His creation was learning.

Blitzcrank innovated, interpreting and extrapolating on their daily directives. As a result, they did far more to serve the people of Zaun, and even began to interact with them on a regular basis. Seeing his golem progress to the cusp of self-awareness, Viktor sought to replicate his achievement, but found only frustration and failure, as the key to Blitzcrank’s blossoming consciousness eluded him.

Not all of Blitzcrank’s growth was cause for celebration. Concepts like moderation and nuance escaped them, and Blitzcrank would pursue any effort with the entirety of their being, or none at all. They would occasionally overdo or misinterpret the requests of Zaunites, such as smashing down the front of a tenement to admit a single resident who had lost their key.

Or even tearing an entire factory apart.

Dispatched by Viktor to clear a neighborhood of toxic chemicals, Blitzcrank traced the caustic runoff to its source. Reasoning that the most efficient means to prevent further pollution was to eliminate the source of said pollution, Blitzcrank proceeded to destroy the factory, their lightning-wreathed fists not stopping until it was reduced to a mound of rubble and twisted iron.

Enraged, the chem-baron who owned the ruined factory descended upon Viktor, demanding that he destroy the golem or pay a steeper price in blood. Viktor was devastated, having come to view Blitzcrank as a living being rather than simply a tool to do his bidding. He concocted a scheme to smuggle his creation to safety, ready to accept the dangers and consequences of doing so—but as he returned to his laboratory to set his plan in motion, he discovered that Blitzcrank was already gone.

Blitzcrank’s evolution beyond the constraints of their original programming had yet to cease. Having grown into full self-sufficiency, they resolved to take up their mission independent from their creator. Rumors abound that the golem has even begun to upgrade their own form as they labor tirelessly to assist and protect Zaunites without pausing for instruction.

They now patrol the undercity, deciding for themselves how best to shepherd Zaun down the path to becoming the greatest city Valoran has ever seen.

Ryze would have been cold if his body wasn’t simmering with nervous energy. With all that weighed on him that day, the harsh Freljordian elements scarcely seemed to have an effect. Neither was he daunted by the distant howl of a hungry ice troll. He had come to do a job. Not one he relished, but one that had to be done, and one he could no longer avoid.

As he approached the gates, he could hear the rustling of fur cloaks over pine timber as the warriors of the tribe rushed to inspect him. In seconds, their spears were poised atop the gate, ready to kill, should he prove unwelcome.

“I’ve come to see Yago,” said Ryze, pulling back the hood of his cloak just enough to reveal his violet skin. “It’s urgent.”

The stoic faces of the warriors atop the fence flashed with surprise at the sight of the Rune Mage. They climbed down and worked in unison to open the heavy hardwood gates, which seemed to croak apprehensively at the sight of the interloper. This was not a place that saw many visitors, and those it did see usually ended up on pikes as a deterrent to others. Ryze, on the other hand, had a reputation that granted him access to even the most hostile regions of Runeterra—

—For a few minutes, anyway, if no problems arise, he thought.

His face betrayed none of those uncertainties as he walked between the columns of fierce, wind-chapped faces that seemed to judge him, looking for any reason to try him. A young boy, no more than five, gaped at Ryze, bravely leaving his grandmother’s side for a closer look.

“Are you a warlock?” asked the boy.

“Something like that,” replied Ryze, barely glancing at the boy as he continued his stride.

He found the path that led toward the rear of the fortification. To his surprise, the village had hardly changed since he had last seen it, many years before. He made his way to an unmistakable structure of domed crystalline ice, its brilliant azure hue standing out among the dull surroundings of wood and earth.

He was always a wise man. Maybe he’ll cooperate, thought Ryze as he entered the temple, steeling himself for whatever lay in wait.

Inside, an old frost mage was pouring wine into a dish on an altar. He turned to see Ryze approaching, and seemed to judge him silently. Ryze felt his heart sink in dread. After a moment, the man smiled, and embraced Ryze like a long-lost brother.

“You look thin,” said the mage. “You should eat something.”

“You shouldn’t,” replied Ryze, nodding to Yago’s slightly sagging paunch.

The two friends laughed long and easily, as if they had never been apart. Ryze slowly felt his guard begin to drop. There were very few people in the world he would call friend, and it did his soul good to talk to one. He and Yago spent the next hour reminiscing, eating, and catching up. Ryze had forgotten how good it felt to converse with another human being. He could easily stay a fortnight with Yago, drinking wine and sharing tales of triumph and loss.

“What brings you so deep into the Freljord?” asked Yago at last.

The question jolted Ryze back to reality. He quickly recalled the words he’d carefully prepared for this point in the conversation. He told a story of his days in Shurima. He’d gone to investigate a tribe of nomads that had swelled in wealth and land, to the size of a small kingdom, almost overnight. On closer inspection, Ryze found a World Rune in their possession. They resisted, and…

Ryze lowered his tone to suit the silence of the room. He explained that sometimes awful things must be done for the world to remain intact. Sometimes those awful things are better than the horrible cataclysm that would otherwise unfold.

“They must be kept safe,” said Ryze, finally coming to his point. “All of them.”

Yago nodded grimly, and the warmth that had been rekindled between the two friends instantly evaporated.

“You would take it from us, knowing it is all that keeps the trolls away?” asked Yago.

“You knew this would come,” said Ryze, offering no solution. “You’ve known for years.”

“Give us more time. In the spring, we will head south. What chance do we have in winter?”

“You’ve said those words before,” Ryze said coldly.

To his surprise, Yago took him by the hands, making a gentle plea.

“There are many children among us. And three of our women are swollen with child. You would doom us all?” asked Yago desperately.

“How many are in this village?” asked Ryze.

“Ninety-two,” replied Yago.

“And how many are in the world?”

Yago fell silent.

“It can wait no longer. Dark forces gather to take it. It leaves with me today,” Ryze demanded.

“You would use it for yourself,” accused Yago, erupting in a jealous rage.

Ryze looked into Yago’s face to see that it had been transfigured into a scowling visage—that of a fiend, no longer recognizable as the man Ryze once had once known. Ryze started to explain that he had learned long ago not to use the Runes, that doing so would always come with too high a price. But he could tell this madman before him was not one to be reasoned with.

Suddenly, Ryze felt a severe pain, and found himself writhing on the floor, saliva dripping from his mouth. He looked up to see Yago in a casting stance, his fingers crackling with power that no mortal being should possess. Coming to his senses, Ryze rooted the frost mage in place with a ring of arcane power, giving himself just enough time to get to his feet.

Ryze and Yago circled each other, clashing with powers the world had not seen in ages. Yago seared Ryze’s flesh with what felt like the power of twenty suns. Ryze countered with a potent series of arcane bursts. After what seemed like hours, the combined power of their attacks breached the walls of the temple, and brought the thick ice dome crumbling down upon them.

Badly wounded, Ryze dug himself out of the rubble and got to his knees. He saw a blurred image of Yago, battered, and fumbling to open a lockbox that he’d dug out of the debris. Ryze could tell by the lust in his eyes what he was reaching for, and what would surely happen once he had it.

With his magic energy drained, Ryze leapt on the back of his old friend and began to garrote him with the belt from his own robe. He felt nothing; the man who he had loved deeply just minutes ago was now merely a task in need of completion. Yago struggled mightily, his legs flailing, searching for a foothold. Then he fell dead.

Ryze pulled a key from Yago’s necklace and unlocked the box. He removed the World Rune, its otherworldly pulse beating with a warm orange glow. Wrapping the Rune in a scrap of his dead comrade’s robe, he gingerly placed it in his satchel and hobbled out of the temple, breathing a mournful sigh at the loss of another friend.

The Rune Mage limped toward the village gate, past the same wind-chapped faces that had watched him arrive. He looked askance at them, expecting an attack, but the villagers made no move to stop him. These were no longer fierce defenders; these were people who looked stunned to be facing their own end. They looked at Ryze with big, helpless eyes.

“What are we to do?” asked the grandmother, with the young boy still clutching her furs.

“I’d leave,” said Ryze.

He knew if they stayed, the trolls would descend on the village come nightfall, leaving none alive. And outside the village, worse dangers lurked.

“Can’t we come with you?” called the young boy.

Ryze paused. Part of him—a vestige of irrational compassion deep within—screamed, Take them. Protect them. Forget about the rest of the world.

But he knew he couldn’t. Ryze trudged into the deep Freljordian snow, choosing not to look back at the faces of those he was leaving. For these were the faces of the dead, and his business was with those who could still be saved.

Kai’Sa peers out from the mouth of the tunnel and feels like she’s standing at the edge of the world.

A chasm, so deep that sunlight doesn’t hit the bottom. Surrounding it are the openings of dozens of other tunnels. All are carved into rock that sits deep below the surface, now exposed and crumbling.

Once, this had been home to a vast colony of Void creatures. These had been their burrows, formed with the randomness of unmade matter. Sharp corners, dead ends, coils upon coils... all constructed without a plan beyond “eat the world.” That is the Void—mindless organic machines, driven by instinct to fight and consume and unmake with no thought beyond the present. She’s killed enough to know there is nothing deeper to the creatures than that.

But the tunnel Kai’Sa stands in is different. It is not random unmaking. It is practically a straight line running north, one she’d followed for nearly four days. This tunnel, this passage, was made with intention. With a goal. It doesn’t make sense...

Kai’Sa would make it make sense, starting with where this passage led.

So far, it has led to this chasm.

Kai’Sa eyes the openings on the opposite side. Hard to tell how deep any of them go. But she would bet her second skin that one of them is a piece of the same passage she stands in now.

She rolls her shoulders. Her living armor wakes, pulling its flesh tightly against her own. It has been her only constant, growing with her from the time she was a little girl. It had been one of the voidling beasts that killed her family, her village. Covered in its carapace, Kai’Sa would always be seen as a monster. But without it, she could not keep the world safe from the Void.

Without it, she would be nothing.

The scaly pods at her shoulders flex, and the embedded crystals illuminate as she selects her first target. The heat from the crystals spawns a plasma missile; she launches it down the mouth of a tunnel deep below the surface. It takes six seconds to cross the chasm. Massive. Another second, and the missile hits a curve. Nope. Not what she’s looking for.

From here, it’s point and shoot, over and over. Most missiles hit something a second or two in. But Kai’Sa is nothing if not patient. She will go at this as long as it takes.

She finds the tunnel she’s looking for just as the sun begins to set. She waits for her missile to cross the chasm, then starts the count. One. Two. Three.

Four. Five. Six. This is it. This one’s the other end of the passage.

Grinning, she fires a barrage around the opening to mark it. Her earlier missile is still going... until she hears the horrible screech from whatever it struck.

She turns her shoulder pods inward, pressing them together to hide their light. She waits silently for her prey to show itself.

Another screech. A voidling creature emerges from the other side of the passage. Kai’Sa has spent years fighting and observing and cataloging voidlings. This is not one she’s seen before. The creature’s smooth, rounded body, injured from her missile, deforms as it opens its long lower jaw. Its mouth is filled with translucent needle-like teeth jutting out at dangerous angles. Its sides expand and contract like it’s breathing.

Or taking in scent, she thinks as it turns. No eyes, but it can still find me. She takes aim as the sun dips below the horizon. The voidling begins... to glow. Something—a tongue?—emerges from its mouth and emits a soft bluish light, looking like the hanging lamps in humans’ mines. Haven’t seen a voidling do that before. She notices that its injury is glowing, too.

Guess I’ll call it a Lamplight. She lets a missile fly. The Lamplight’s posture changes. It lets out a high, sustained shriek and dodges Kai’Sa’s blast. Dammit. Kai’Sa lines up another shot.

The entire tunnel behind it blooms with blue light. Hundreds of Lamplights join the first, mouths open, tongues raised and glowing. Kai’Sa forces herself to breathe slowly. She’s fought worse odds. All in one spot. Excellent. Kai’Sa unleashes a barrage, hoping to take out all the voidlings at once.

In the time it takes the missiles to cross, the voidlings spill out like dust, clinging to the walls of the chasm as the barrage whistles past them harmlessly.

What...

Led by the injured Lamplight, they move as one. Toward Kai’Sa.

... the hell?

She raises her hands and fires rapidly at the swarm. She hits a few, but not enough to make a dent in their numbers. And they are already a quarter of the way to her. Kai’Sa looks around wildly. Not many options. Fight from her current location. Run back down the passage. Take her chances and dive down. Try to climb, fight them from the surface.

She glances above, then at the swarm. They’re halfway around. Climb. Kai’Sa shoots into rock four times in a zigzag—one for each of her hands to grip and her feet to balance. Pulling herself up, she begins the climb.

Shoot, grab, pull. Shoot, grab, pull. As fast as she can, Kai’Sa makes her path. Her shoulder pods shoot at the swarm. They’re near, but Kai’Sa’s pace is good. She’s more than halfway to the—

And her hand hits sand.

She shoots again. There’s nothing for her missile to pierce. It blows through the sand, and more seeps down to fill in the empty spot. There’s nothing to grab. Can she jump the rest of the way? Jaw clenched, Kai’Sa turns toward the monsters. If she’s going to die, she’ll take as many of them with her as she can.

Suddenly, the wall around the voidlings cracks.

And crumbles.

Hundreds of Lamplights drop with the falling stone, their light swallowed by the darkness of the chasm. Only three of them still rush toward Kai’Sa. That’s a number she can handle. They’re close enough that she can see barbs on their tongues.

Three shots fire. Two Lamplights fall. One left.

It smacks its thorny tongue against Kai’Sa’s ribcage. Her ribs crack beneath her armor as she slams against the rock. She struggles to take a breath while the suit repairs over her injury. Gripping the wall with her left hand, she grabs the creature’s tongue just below the barbs with her right. Violet power surges. The Lamplight’s tongue melts around her hand. Screaming, it backs away. Kai’Sa takes aim.

This time, she doesn’t miss.

Okay. Kai’Sa breathes. Okay. Next step. She’ll have to find a way to the surface.

That’s when she notices the stone cube sticking out from the sand.

That wasn’t there before. Kai’Sa reaches out and grabs—it is exactly the right size for her hand. She tests part of her weight on it. It holds. Curious, she leans to one side and looks farther up. Jutting out every armspan or so is another one of these stone cubes. She’ll question this turn of good luck later.

Kai’Sa scrambles up, one cube at a time, until she’s out. Looking around in the moonlight, she sees no landmarks, just dunes and rocky cliffs. A sand storm kicks up in the distance. She glances down into the chasm. If she squints, she can almost make out a glow...

The wind gets loud. Storm’s approaching fast. She turns to face it. At the center of the storm is...

A girl?

The ground explodes under Kai’Sa’s feet. She hurtles through the air toward the storm, an arm in front of her broken ribs. She shifts position mid-air, her shoulder pods folding in front of her like a battering ram. If Kai’Sa’s attacker wants to bring her closer, that’s their mistake.

Something wraps around her shoulder pods and wrists, pulling her down, slamming her to the ground. Her ribs feel like they’re on fire, and her helm cracks where her head meets the earth.

She gets to her feet and forces her wrists apart. A red scarf, studded with stones, falls away. With a guttural yell, she sets her hands alight.

She’s stopped by the look of surprise and horror on the girl’s face. Even all these years later, she is still taken aback when someone looks at her and sees only a monster.

Push past it, Kai’Sa. She brings her hands up again, ready to attack...

“You’re human?”

Kai’Sa realizes she’s looking at the girl through the crack in her helm. Oh.

“You... see me?” It doesn’t matter. Humans are always afraid of her, whether or not they know she is one of them. But the girl’s expression gives Kai’Sa a foolish hope. Maybe this time could be different. Cautiously, Kai’Sa lets the helm pull away from her head, revealing the rest of her true face.

The girl drops to her knees, and Kai’Sa’s breath catches in her throat. “I am so sorry,” the girl says. “I thought you were—”

“A monster?”

“Well, yeah.” The girl gestures toward the chasm. “People tend not to survive long in these collapses.” She gazes at Kai’Sa’s second skin. “And you don’t... look human? At first glance.”

The girl is not as young as she’d thought; she must be around her own age, or older. Kai’Sa stares as the scarf lifts from the ground by its stony ends. “The stones,” she says quietly. “You control the stones.” The girl nods as the scarf wraps itself around her neck as though by magic. “You made those cubes come out of the sand.”

The girl shrugs, smiling. “I could feel someone was down there with those monsters. So I tried to help.” Her smile slips. “It’s all I’ve been doing for weeks now. Months? Hard to keep track.”

Kai’Sa blinks, eyes suddenly stinging. Someone else is fighting the Void, she realizes. Not the same way I am, but... “Who are you?”

The smile returns. “My name is Taliyah.”

The tents, cobbled from scraps of fabric and solid slabs of rock, look like Taliyah’s work. A group of thirty or forty, mostly children and elders, surround a large firepit at the center of the camp. The way they look at her—silently, with wide eyes and hunched shoulders—is horribly familiar.

Fear. Kai’Sa doesn’t meet anyone’s gaze. It’s for their comfort. But really, it’s for her own.

Taliyah’s arms are open wide as she introduces Kai’Sa, diving into a dramatic retelling of their meeting. The only movement in the crowd is the flickering of flames. Stillness, and silence, is their only response as Taliyah finishes her tale.

“I don’t have to stay,” Kai’Sa mumbles.

Taliyah shakes her head. “You’re injured. I can’t send you back out there when you haven’t eaten or rested. I won’t.”

A child half her height, a red cowl wrapped around his shoulders, stands. “You sure she’s human?” He squints. “Maybe it’s just some kinda disguise.” He almost falls backward from the force of two older girls pulling him down into his seat.

Taliyah laughs. “Have you seen a Void monster that can smile, Samir?” she retorts. “I haven’t.”

Everyone looks at Kai’Sa expectantly. She does her best approximation of a smile, close-lipped so as not to look too aggressive. It doesn’t seem to scare the children. A victory.

The boy, Samir, stands again. “Fair enough,” he says as he walks toward Kai’Sa. He offers her a half-eaten piece of meat on a stick. “Want the rest of my sandsnake?”

Everyone else seems to breathe easier as Kai’Sa accepts the food. She rips the meat from the stick and swallows without chewing, her suit purring in relief. Zaifa, one of the older girls with jade beaded through her hair, offers her more. This time, Kai’Sa slows down enough to appreciate the flavoring of cinnamon, sour lemon, and smoky ul-tawaat berries.

The taste brings back old memories, of life with her parents, of her father cooking over an open flame while her mother ground the ul-tawaat with her pestle...

Kai’Sa shakes her head to clear her mind—no good can come from dwelling in those memories. She really doesn’t need the rest, and she’s already eaten enough for her ribs to start healing.

But the camp has already started to relax, with people chatting over their own meals. Some have even turned their back to her. A show of trust. And the hope in Taliyah’s eyes is unmistakable. Please stay, they seem to say. Don’t leave us yet.

“I’ll stay awhile,” she concedes. “To heal.”

The passage will still be there tomorrow.

They are dead. Killed by the Void, as my own family was. Kai’Sa does not say what she is thinking.

Some of the elders speak of the sun-blessed Ascended warriors. Others tell the story of the last emperor, and the chaos that followed his death. Zaifa describes the darkness that infected the Ascended and drove them to madness and evil. None are believable, but Kai’Sa listens intently.

The story told by Kadira, an older girl with rocky arm braces, is by far the most outlandish. She talks of a place called Xolan, across the Sai Kahleek, that has been magically protected for millennia. “It is said to be a paradise,” she sighs. “With libraries, and gardens, and water that flows as far as the eye can see. And everyone is safe, without fear.”

Kai’Sa does not realize that she has scoffed until Kadira and the children look at her. “No place is safe from the Void,” Kai’Sa says. “Especially so close to the Sai Kahleek. It’s a myth.”

“It’s real,” Kadira insists. “Where do you think we’re all headed?”

Without another word, Kai’Sa stands and leaves the storytellers to their tales.

She finds Taliyah leaning against one of the tents, deep in conversation with Zaifa and Samir, lit more by moonlight than by firelight. Zaifa traces her finger across an open scroll.

“You aren’t actually searching out this Xolan.” Kai’Sa doesn’t frame it as a question. “You’d be putting yourselves in real danger, crossing the Sai Kahleek over a fantasy.”

Taliyah exchanges a look with Zaifa, who hands Kai’Sa the scroll—a map of eastern Shurima. She points to a dot to the north of the Sai Kahleek. Xolan. North. The same direction as the passage. Kai’Sa frowns.

“It’s the best chance we have of finding safety for these people,” Taliyah explains. “Their homes have been destroyed, their families... separated. They need hope that things will be okay.”

“False hope helps no one. When it comes to the Void, the only thing you can do is run and hope you’re fast.”

Taliyah shakes her head. “If we go around the sai, we’ll run out of food. Stay where we are, we run out of food. Go back, and all we’ll find are the towns that fell. Where else do we run?”

Kai’Sa stares at Taliyah. “Do you know what lives in the Sai Kahleek? What hunts there?”

“The xer’sai. We’ve all heard the stories.”

“No. Xolan is a story,” Kai’Sa says. “The xer’sai are real. I’ve fought them before, many at a time. This is their nest. Trying to cross it is a death sentence.”

“I’ve fought Void creatures too. Or did you forget that I saved you?”

“Those weren’t xer’sai.”

“Whatever they were, I defeated them when you couldn’t.” Kai’Sa can see determination in the set of Taliyah’s jaw. “If Xolan is our only hope, then that’s where I’m going to lead everyone.”

“Besides, we’ve got a plan,” Samir says, excited. “Taliyah’s going to build a bridge or wall or something over the sand, and we’ll take people across together.”

He can’t be that much older than I was when the Void took me. Aloud, she asks, “What, can you move stone too?”

“I’m the best rock hopper you’ve ever met,” Samir says with a confident grin. “None of those monsters can move as fast as my sandboard. And if they try?” He mimes a blast from the ground. “Taliyah drives ’em back with some rock-splosions.”

“You sound like a child,” Kai’Sa spits. Samir’s smile drops. “The children of Rek’Sai... all they do is devour. Anything that gets in their way? Gone.” She leans in close. “When they hear you, they hunt you. They don’t stop until their teeth close around your bones.”

“You’re scaring him,” Zaifa accuses as she puts a steadying hand on Samir’s shoulder.

“Good. He should be.”

“So come with us,” Taliyah says confidently. “You can help keep everyone safe.”

“No. Because you’re not going.” Kai’Sa points to Samir. “You are not putting these children in that kind of danger. They’ll die. Make your way around the sai. Take as many as you can. Leave the slowest behind, use their rations to—”

“We won’t!” Samir stands toe to toe with Kai’Sa, glaring up at her. “Taliyah will protect us. I will protect us.” He puffs out his chest. “I’m going to help these people, and they’re all going to make it across because... because each of their lives means something.” He stomps back toward the firepit, with Zaifa chasing after him.

“It’s your only chance,” Kai’Sa says quietly. “Otherwise, you’re condemning them all to death.”

“No.” Taliyah steps in front of Kai’Sa, refusing to let her look away. “Our world is a tapestry, and every life is a thread of a different color. Each one makes the whole more beautiful.”

Ugh. Metaphors. “Then the Void is a flame,” Kai’Sa replies. “It unmakes everything it touches. If your tapestry catches fire, the entire thing will burn... unless you cut the smoldering threads away. Then you still save most of it.”

“You’re wrong. Any threads that drop make it all unstable, easy to unravel.” Sunlight appears at the horizon, and Taliyah’s eyes flash gold. “I’m not willing to let any of them go.”

Taliyah collapses the stone structures back into the earth, leaving little sign that they were ever there. Kai’Sa watches and nibbles at her bread, trying to make it last.

“I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind,” Taliyah says, “and decided to join us.” Kai’Sa sees the sheen of sweat on the girl’s brow. This exhausts her more than she lets on.

“No. I have somewhere else to go.” She sighs. “And you haven’t changed yours.”

Taliyah shrugs. “I have somewhere to go, too.” She turns back to her work. “I’m disappointed. You know what you’re doing with these Void monsters. You could help these people.”

The best way I can help is to figure out what made that Void passage. It was made with a purpose in mind... and that scares me. But she doesn’t say that. Instead, she says, “I hope you can help them yourself.”

Except it feels lonely now. Kai’Sa wonders if she shouldn’t have spent so much time with Taliyah. She’s been alone for more than half her life, just her and the Void monsters that dwell below the surface world. She didn’t realize how good it would feel to be a person again.

Alone with her thoughts, she hardly notices the time pass. Soon, she sees older tunnels, enormous holes punctuating the passage walls and leading elsewhere. Xer’sai tunnels. I’m below the Sai Kahleek. But she still doesn’t see or hear any xer’sai.

She spots a bluish glow down one of the tunnels. Quietly, and with as little motion as possible, Kai’Sa peers down the opening into the darkness.

She sees a few smaller xer’sai of a kind that she has encountered and named before. A group of Callers, reedy bipedal creatures with four prehensile jaw-talons, chirp softly to one another. Their shrieks can cut through the desert, alerting others to the presence of fresh prey. Spiky hatchlings, already larger than the Callers and due to grow much larger still, stand beside them. Together, they encircle dozens of Lamplights.

One of them has a glowing blue mark like a burn on the side of its body. That’s the one I shot, Kai’Sa realizes in horror. Taliyah’s attack didn’t kill it. It might not have killed any of them...

As she watches, one of the hatchlings stalks over to the marked creature. It extends its tongue and touches it to the hatchling’s horn.

A soft blue light engulfs the hatchling. It glows.

The sudden chattering of Callers drowns out Kai’Sa’s gasp. What are they doing? Her heart beats in her throat as more hatchlings and Callers go toward the Lamplights to receive their own glow. Are they making the xer’sai more powerful? She shakes her head to clear her thoughts, and takes aim at the marked creature.

Whatever it is, I’m going to stop them.

That’s when a loud boom shakes the earth.

An enormous xer’sai Dunebreaker cuts through the stone wall with the bladed horn above its eight eyes. The talons along its jaw scratch into the rock, leaving deep gashes. Every step shakes the ground to drive fear into its prey. It hisses, swiping its horn at the Lamplights. It slices three of them at once, their deflated bodies leaking bright blood.

The Dunebreaker doesn’t like what the Lamplights are doing.

The Lamplights screech and flee toward the passage—toward Kai’Sa. She feels the familiar rush of power as she and her suit become invisible just in time for the Lamplights, then the Dunebreaker, to rush northward past her. The Dunebreaker’s horn rips a deep gash through the top of the passage. It bows inward.

The passage is going to collapse.

She dashes ahead, trying to keep up with the massive xer’sai while it can’t see her. I need to know where this leads. I have to understand.

But then, from somewhere behind her... Screams. Human screams.

Kai’Sa drops her invisibility and dashes up toward the surface before everything crumbles beneath her. She blinks as her helm readjusts to the sunlight. The dust clouds make it hard to see, and the crash of rockfall pierces her ears, but she can still hear the sounds of panic. She runs toward them.

Ahead of her, she sees the crevasse that formed where the Dunebreaker’s horn tore through the ceiling of the passage. A stone platform is dangling over the edge, though most of it remains on the sand, refusing to fall into the fissure. The people standing atop the platform are screaming, but a lone figure remains calm. Taliyah. Her stone bridge. She’s the only thing keeping it up. Her arms shake from the strain, but slowly, she lifts the front of the platform back toward the surface.

A child’s shout comes from below. Someone fell into the passage.

Kai’Sa sprints toward Taliyah. “You need to get back!” she shouts as the bridge rises. “The whole thing is going to collapse beneath you all if you don’t move!”

“Samir’s down there!” Taliyah screams as the bridge finally makes it to the surface, settling onto the ground with a thud. “I’m not going to leave him!”

She lets out a strangled yell and pushes against air with one hand. The bridge groans as it scrapes away from her, pushing it a good distance away from the collapse. Then she dives into the crevasse.

Kai’Sa stares over the edge. She’s going to die down there if I don’t help her.

Kadira and Zaifa come running from the bridge. Kai’Sa fires at their feet.

“What are you doing?!” Kadira shouts, jumping back.

“That huge xer’sai could turn back any minute,” Kai’Sa says. “Get the others out of here.”

“We’re not going anywhere until we know Taliyah and Samir are safe,” Zaifa says with clenched fists. “We can help you.”

I don’t have time for this, Kai’Sa thinks as her shoulder pods unfold, crystals crackling with power. If I kill these two, the others will run.

Kadira and Zaifa join hands, but they do not move. Kai’Sa remembers the stories they told around the firepit. The food they shared with her. Their fear of her, and how it left them over the course of the night.

... I don’t want to hurt them. “I’ll go down and help them. Please, go back to the others. They need someone to be strong for them.”

“Fine. But you have to bring them both back,” Zaifa spits out as she and Kadira run back toward the bridge.

I will. I promise. Without glancing back, Kai’Sa leaps into the growing hollow below.

Her feet hit the bottom hard enough to snap any normal person’s bones. In the distance, she sees glowing voidlings—not just the Lamplights, but the hatchlings and Callers they’ve converted—surrounding a smooth stone dome. That must be where Taliyah and Samir are.

She hears a subtle shift in the rumbling sound from afar. The Dunebreaker’s turned around, she realizes. If it’s after the Lamplights... it’ll be coming right back here.

Kai’Sa digs deep into the power of her living armor. Her wrists are surrounded by violet light, until they’re not. Invisible again.

She fires on the Callers. All five die without making a sound. The hatchlings turn, looking for the source of the attack. Only the blind Lamplights, tasting the air, can sense her. Before they can pinpoint her, she’s already taken out the hatchlings.

Now she’s in trouble. Dozens of Lamplights rush toward her. She fades back into visibility and dashes away as fast as she can.

They’re on her in a matter of seconds. She fires wildly, but only a few of them drop. One catches her by the ankle, slicing through her suit with the barbs on its tongue. She falls as she attempts to dodge more attacks. But they slice at her from all sides, faster than her suit can knit itself back together. Blood drips from her arms, her legs, her cheek. She tastes the tang of copper as it runs over her lips...

And then something explodes from beneath. The Lamplights are propelled back and away.

They pause, confused. Kai’Sa looks beyond them. Taliyah’s head pokes through the top of the dome. She’s shouting something. Kai’Sa’s helm reforms, and she hears Taliyah shout, “Come toward me!”

Kai’Sa crouches. “Give me a running start!”

The earth explodes beneath her, propelling her through the air, over the voidlings and toward Taliyah. She lands on her good ankle, and tries to sprint—she can’t. So she dips back into her suit’s power, letting it drain her reserves of energy to speed the healing of her ankle. She can’t run for long.

But she’ll try to make it count.

As the monsters get closer, Taliyah propels Kai’Sa toward her again. The ground she lands on is different, with sharp bumps dotting the earth. Kai’Sa runs over them, trying to get the Lamplights to follow her rather than go toward Taliyah. The one in front bears her mark, and gets close enough to reach for her again...

An explosion tears it to pieces, staining the earth with glowing blood. Kai’Sa stops in shock.

“Keep running!” Taliyah shouts. “That’s what triggers the explosions!”

So she does, circling around Taliyah.

A few Lamplights get too close. Taliyah’s “rock-splosions” tear through them. The others seem to learn, slowing down, but they become a target for Kai’Sa’s missiles.

It doesn’t take long to thin their ranks. But the rumbling grows louder as the Dunebreaker bores its way back. We don’t have much time.

There’s only a handful left. Kai’Sa stands near the dome, exhausted, and fires the last missiles she has the energy to make. Slowed by the minefield, each voidling takes the hit.

Grinning, she turns to Taliyah. The girl is pale, coughing from the dust in the air. Her arm is around a frightened Samir’s shoulders, as he struggles to keep her upright.

“I can’t...” Taliyah pants. “The ground... It’s unstable. Can’t keep holding it up...”

Kai’Sa takes Taliyah in her arms. She beckons for Samir to cling to her back, then runs toward the walls of the hollow. I’m at my limit. I don’t know if I can make it up to the surface like this.

Suddenly, Taliyah twists out of Kai’Sa’s grip and leaps, summoning a rising platform beneath her feet. She pulls Kai’Sa toward her and propels them all upward. Her strength gives out just short of the surface. Kai’Sa and Taliyah grab the ridge and do their best to hold on...

A dozen hands reach down, covered in dirt and dust. Is this real? Kai’Sa wonders as she stretches up toward them. Two hands pull her up. It is. She looks up, recognizing some of the faces from Taliyah’s camp. One of the hands around her wrists belongs to Kadira. I’m being rescued.

“Zaifa!” Taliyah cries once they’re all on solid ground again. “Kadira! You came back for us!”

“And brought help.” Kai’Sa nods at them both. “Smart. Thank you.”

Below, the Dunebreaker bursts back into the hollow. Kai’Sa holds a finger to her lips and mouths don’t move. Dunebreakers can only sense things they can hear or feel or see moving. If we stay still and quiet, we’ll live.

The creature prods the deflated bodies of the Lamplights with its horn. It shuffles around, finding the corpses of the glowing Callers and hatchlings.

Satisfied that its enemies are dead, it burrows back through the rock and down into the earth.

Kai’Sa waits until they can’t hear it anymore before she lets anyone move. Then Taliyah, exhausted and pale, lifts another bridge of stone from the ground and takes them all back toward the others. A drained Kai’Sa and an only somewhat humbled Samir bring up the rear.

“I would have made it back up on my own,” Samir says with a tired grin at Kai’Sa. “But it was nice of you to come help. What with me slowing everyone down and all.”

Kai’Sa gives the kid a sidelong glance, and can’t help but smile. “Couldn’t sit back and lose the best rock hopper I’ve ever met, could I?”

Kai’Sa lies beyond the light, not willing to let on how sore her body still is. Better to rest than to eat, she thinks miserably, the scent of charred cabbage floating toward her.

Taliyah sits and silently offers Kai’Sa a bowl full of cabbage and millet. Kai’Sa pushes it away.

“You’re not hungry?” Taliyah asks.

“I’m angry.”

Taliyah looks surprised. “Why?”

“You should have listened to me,” Kai’Sa says bitterly. “Instead? You couldn’t protect your people—those voidlings you thought you killed were the ones attacking us. You almost lost everyone. If I hadn’t been there, you would have.” She sees the regret in the twist of Taliyah’s lips, the set of her jaw. “And when they needed you most, you abandoned them. You left them all to die so you could try to maybe save one person.”

Taliyah is quiet for a moment. “Not that I’m not grateful, but... you know you did the same thing when you came down to help me, right?”

Kai’Sa doesn’t know how to respond to that.

“Don’t go toward Xolan,” Kai’Sa says after a few moments of awkward silence. “The Void passage that collapsed, the one I’ve been following, was directly below your route there. I’m pretty sure that Xolan is where it leads. That means the Void already has it.”

Taliyah nods, her shoulders slumping. “I’ll tell them they need to find another place.”

“They? What about you?”

“Well. I’m going to Xolan.”

“Taliyah—”

“That’s where you’re going, right?” Taliyah sighs. “I thought I could protect these people. Get them to safety. But you were right—there is no safe place. So... we’ll have to make one.”

“Uh. What do you mean?”

“If the Void is in Xolan... then we take it back! Make it safe enough to lead everyone to it... and try to help whoever is already there.” Taliyah sounds so optimistic.

“If the Void has taken the town... there’s not going to be anyone left to save.”

“We can’t know that from here. Even if there’s one person who needs our help, that will be worth it to me.” Taliyah steps forward and takes Kai’Sa’s hands in her own. They feel warm and calloused, even through Kai’Sa’s second skin. “I can’t do it without you, Kai’Sa. I didn’t kill those Lamplights on my own... but I was able to when you were there with me. Let’s find this place together.”

If she had been there when my home fell to the Void... maybe I could have been something different. Kai’Sa looks at the hope in Taliyah’s eyes, the strength in it. But I am who I am. The world needs me like this. So does she. I’ve seen what we can do together. I think I need her, too.

So does whoever might still be alive in Xolan.

Kai’Sa takes a bite of the charred cabbage and nods. “Fine. Another thread for the tapestry.”

“Be safe and be well,” Taliyah had said, hugging her tightly. “The blessings of the Great Weaver upon you all.”

Now, they are out of sight. She turns back to Kai’Sa, her only companion for the next leg of this journey. I know she’s happy to have the company, Taliyah thinks with a secret smile. Even if she won’t admit it.

Together they set out across the Sai Kahleek on a floating stone bridge, their destinies momentarily woven into one.

Helia, the Blessed Isles

Erlok Grael stood separate from his peers, awaiting the Choosing.

They waited within a small open-air amphitheater, the architecture all gleaming white marble and gold-encased capstones. Helia wore its opulence proudly, as if in defiance of the brutalities of life beyond the shores of the Blessed Isles.

The others joked and laughed together, their collective nervousness drawing them closer, yet Grael stood silent and alone, his gaze intense. No one spoke to him or included him in any of the whispered japes. Few even registered his presence; their gazes slipped over and around him as if he didn’t exist. To most of them, he didn’t.

Grael did not care. He had no desire to swap inane small talk with them, and he felt no jealousy at their juvenile comradery. Today would be his moment of triumph. Today he would be embraced into the inner circle, apprenticed within the secretive upper echelons of the Fellowship of Light. He had more than earned his place there. No other student present came close. They might hail from wealth and nobility, while he came from a line of illiterate pig farmers, but none were as gifted or as worthy as he.

The masters arrived, filing down the central stairs one by one, silencing the gaggle of hopefuls. Grael watched them, eyes burning with a hungry light. He licked his lips, savoring

the prestige and glory that were soon to be heaped upon him, anticipating all the secrets that he would soon be privy to.

The masters shuffled into place upon the lower tiers of the amphitheater, their expressions solemn, staring down at the cluster of adepts on the floor below them. Finally, after an overlong pause to build suspense, a pompous, toadlike master, his skin pale and wet-looking—Elder Bartek—cleared his throat and welcomed the graduating students. His verbose speech was heavy with gravitas and self-congratulatory asides, and Grael’s eyes glazed over.

Finally, the time came for the masters to choose which of the graduates would be taken under their wing as apprentices. There were leaders here from all the major disciplines and denominations of the Fellowship. They represented the Arcanic Sciences, the various schools of logic and metaphysics, the Blessed Archives, the Astro-Scryers, Hermetic Oratory, Esoteric Geometry, the Seekers, and other branches of study. All served, in one way or another, the greater purpose of the Fellowship—the gathering, study, cataloging, and securing of the most powerful arcane artifacts in existence.

It was an auspicious gathering of some of the world’s most brilliant minds, yet Erlok Grael focused on only one of their number: Hierarch Malgurza, Master of the Key. Her dark skin was heavily lined, and her once-ebony hair was now mostly gray. Malgurza was a legend among the adepts of Helia. She didn’t appear at every year’s Choosing ceremony, but when she did, it was always to embrace a new apprentice into the inner circle.

The Baton of Choosing was brought forth. It was passed first to Hierarch Malgurza, the most honored master present. She took it in one gnarled hand, causing a ripple of murmurs among the students. Malgurza would indeed choose an apprentice this day, and the ghost of a smile curled Grael’s thin lips. The elderly woman cast her hawkish gaze across the gathered hopefuls, who held their breaths as one.

Whoever was named would be marked for greatness, joining a hallowed, elite cadre, their future assured. Erlok Grael’s fingers twitched in anticipation. This was his moment. He was already half stepping forward when the hierarch finally spoke, her voice husky, like oak-aged spirits.

“Tyrus of Hellesmor.”

Grael blinked. For a second, he thought there must have been some mistake, before the cold reality of his rejection washed over him, like a bucket of frigid water to the face. There was a delighted whoop from the chosen student, along with a burst of whispers and gasps. The newly named apprentice stepped forward amid a flurry of slaps on the back and ran up the steps of the amphitheater to take his place behind Hierarch Malgurza, a broad smile on his smug face.

Grael made no outward reaction, though he had gone dangerously still.

The rest of the ceremony went by in a dull, surreal blur. The Baton of Choosing passed from master to master, each choosing a new apprentice. Name by name, the crowd of hopefuls around Grael dwindled, until he stood alone. The sea of masters and former peers stared down at him, like a jury ready to announce his execution.

His hands did not twitch now. Shame and hatred writhed within him, like a pair of serpents locked in a death struggle. With a click of finality, the Baton of Choosing was sealed back within its ceremonial case and borne away by golden-robed attendants.

“Erlok Grael,” announced Bartek, his eyes smiling. “No master has spoken for you, yet the Fellowship is nothing if not benevolent. A place has been secured for you, one that will, it is hoped, teach you some much-needed humility, and at least a modicum of empathy. In time, perhaps, one of the masters may deign to take you on—”

“Where?” interrupted Grael, eliciting murmurs and tuts, but he did not care.

Bartek looked down his bulbous nose at him. His expression was that of a man who had inadvertently stepped upon something distasteful. “You will serve as a minor assistant to the Wardens of Thresholds,” he declared, malice gleaming in his eyes. There were smirks and stifled laughter among his former peers. The Threshers, as the student body derisively called them, were the lowest of the low, both literally and figuratively, those who guarded and patrolled the lowest depths of the vaults beneath Helia. Their ranks consisted of those who had earned the ire of the masters, whether through gross political misstep or misdemeanor, and any others whom the Fellowship wished out of the way. Down in the darkness, they could be forgotten. They were a joke. An embarrassment.

Bartek’s patronizing voice droned on, but Grael barely heard his words.

In that moment, he swore that this was not the end. He would serve among the wardens and ensure that his worth was noticed, such that none of these pompous, sniveling masters or his snobbish peers could deny him. He would serve a year, maybe two, and then he would take his rightful place within the inner circle.

They would not break him.

And he would remember this insult.

Alovédra, Camavor

It was dark and cool within the hallowed Sanctum of Judgment, and Kalista appreciated the reprieve from the scorching Camavoran summer outside. Standing at attention, bedecked

in form-fitting armor and a high-plumed helm, she waited for judgment to be rendered.

Despite being out of the sun, the slender young heir to the Argent Throne, kneeling at her side, was sweating, and his breath was shallow and quick.

His name was Viego Santiarul Molach vol Kalah Heigaari, and he waited to see if he would be crowned king, or if this day would be his last.

Absolute rulership, or death. There could be no middle ground.

He was Kalista’s uncle, but she was more like an older sister to him. They had been raised together, and he had always looked up to her. He was never meant to be the next king.

That should have been Kalista’s father, the firstborn, but his unexpected death had placed Viego, his younger brother, next in line.

The sound of the massed crowds outside was muted within the cold walls of the sanctum. Hooded priests, their faces obscured by shadow and blank porcelain masks, stood anonymous in the gloom, forming a circle. The incense from their censers was cloying and acrid, their whispering chant monotonous and sibilant.

“Kal?” breathed Viego.

“I am here,” Kalista replied, standing at his side, her voice low.

He glanced up at her. His patrician face was long and handsome, yet in that moment he seemed younger than his twenty-one years. His eyes were panicked, like those of an animal caught between fleeing and fighting. Upon his forehead, three lines had been drawn in blood, coming together to a point just between his eyebrows. The blood trident was traditionally drawn only upon the dead, to help speed them on their way to the Beyond and ensure that the Revered Ancestors recognized them. It spoke of the lethality of what lay ahead.

“Tell me again of my father’s last words,” whispered Viego.

Kalista stiffened. The old king had been the Lion of Camavor, with a fearsome reputation in battle—and on the political stage. But as he lay dying in bed, he hadn’t looked anything

like the robust warrior-king who had so terrorized his enemies. In those final moments, his body was wasted and thin, all his vaunted power and vitality sapped from him. His eyes

had still radiated a small measure of the power he’d had in his prime, but it was like the last glow of a fire’s embers, one final glimmer before the darkness claimed him.

He clutched at her with the last of his strength, with hands that more closely resembled a vulture’s talons than anything belonging to a man. “Promise me,” he croaked, burning with

a desperate fire. “The boy does not have the temperament to rule. I blame myself, but it is you who must bear the weight, granddaughter. Promise me you will guide him. Counsel him.

Control him, if needed. Protect Camavor. That is now your duty.”

“I promise, Grandfather,” Kalista said. “I promise.”

Viego waited expectantly, looking up at her. The faint roar of the crowd outside rose and fell like the crashing of distant waves.

“He said you’d be a great king,” Kalista lied. “That you’d eclipse even his great deeds.”

Viego nodded, trying to take comfort in her words.

“There is nothing wrong with being afraid,” she assured him, her stern demeanor softening. “You’d be a fool if you weren’t.” She gave him a wink. “More of a fool, I mean.”

Viego laughed, though the sound had an edge of hysteria to it and was too loud in the cavernous space. Priests glared, and the heir to the throne gathered himself. He pushed a wayward strand of his wavy hair behind one ear, and was still once more, staring into the darkness.

“You cannot let fear control you,” said Kalista.

“If the blade claims me, it will be you kneeling here next, Kal,” Viego whispered. He reflected on that for a moment. “You would make a far better ruler than I.”

“Do not speak of such things,” hissed Kalista. “You are blessed of the Ancestors, with power flowing through your veins that your father did not have. You are worthy. By nightfall you will be crowned king, and all of this will be just a memory. The blade will not claim you.”

“Yet if—”

“The blade will not claim you.”

Viego gave a slow nod. “The blade will not claim me,” he repeated.

There was a change in the air, and the priests’ incessant chanting quickened. Their censers swayed from side to side. Light speared down into the sanctum through a crystal lens

set in the center of the dome high above, as the sun finally moved into position directly overhead. Motes of dust and ribbons of cloying scented smoke drifted in the beam of light,

revealing... nothing.

Then the Blade of the King appeared.

Its name was Sanctity, and Kalista’s breath caught in her throat as she looked upon it. Hovering suspended in midair, the immense sword existed only in the spiritual Halls of the Ancestors, except when called forth by the rightful ruler of Camavor, or when summoned by the priests for the judgment of a new sovereign.

Every monarch of Camavor wore the Argent Crown, a belligerent tri-spiked circlet perfectly befitting the long line of belligerent rulers, but Sanctity was the true symbol of the throne. The primacy of whoever held Sanctity was undisputed, and to possess the Blade of the King was to be soul-bound to it—although not every heir to the Camavoran throne survived

the ritual of binding.

Kalista knew that was not some vague, mythical threat, either. Down through the line of history, dozens of heirs had perished here in the Sanctum of Judgment. There was a good

reason some called the blade Soulrender, and it was rightly feared by Camavor’s heirs and enemies alike.

The crowd outside had fallen silent. They waited in hushed anticipation, ready to welcome a new monarch or mourn his passing. Either the doors would be thrown open and Viego would stride forth in glory, blade in hand, or the bell atop the sanctum would toll one singular, mournful note, signaling his end.

“Viego,” Kalista said. “It is time.”

The crown prince nodded and pushed himself to his feet. The blade hung before him, waiting for him to take it. And yet, still he hesitated. He stared at it, transfixed, terrified. The priests glared, eyes wide behind their expressionless masks, silently urging him to do what they had instructed.

“Viego...” hissed Kalista.

“You’ll be with me, won’t you?” he whispered urgently. “I don’t think I can do this alone. Rule, I mean.”

“I’ll be with you,” said Kalista. “I’ll stand with you, as I always have. I promise.”

Viego gave her a nod and turned back to Sanctity, hanging motionless in the shaft of light. In seconds, the moment would be lost. The time of judgment was now.

The priests’ chanting reached a fevered pitch. Smoke coiled around the sacred blade, like so many serpents, writhing and twisting. Without further pause, Viego stepped forward

and grasped the sword, closing both hands around its hilt.

His eyes widened, and his pupils contracted sharply.

Then he opened his mouth and began to scream.

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“Hurry up, Wyn!” shouted Janke. “The Rising Howl’s on its way!”

“I know!” he shouted back. “You don’t need to tell me!”

Wyn could hear the squeal of greased iron and the taste of metal tingling on his teeth. The interior of the vent pipe he was climbing vibrated with the hexdraulic elevator’s approach.

He pushed his back against the beveled ironwork, keeping his cramping legs braced on the opposite side. Looking up, the square of light that was the way out of the pipe seemed impossibly distant. A head appeared above him; his older brother, Nico.

“Almost there, little man,” said Nico, reaching back to offer his hand to Wyn. “You need me to come down?”

Wyn shook his head and dug deep, pushing with his spine straight as the muscles in his legs burned. Step by step, he inched upward until he was close enough to reach for his brother’s hand.

Nico grabbed his wrist and hauled, pulling him from the pipework. Wyn landed badly and stumbled, falling flat on his face in the cliff-side alcove known to every kid in Zaun. The space was barely wide and tall enough for them to stand next to each other with a sheer drop at the edge. Maybe ten yards beyond the edge were the elevator’s three support columns, each two yards wide and wrought from heavy ironwork.

Feen stood at the farthest part of the ledge, looking down with a manic grin. The wind billowed around him, his patchwork clothes flapping and his hair wild. Kez stood next to Nico, her cheeks flushed with excitement. Janke beat a nervous tattoo on his thigh with the palm of his hand, glowering at Wyn.

“You almost made us miss it.”

“Howl ain’t here yet,” snapped Wyn. “We ain’t missed nothing.”

Janke glared at Wyn, but with Nico here, he didn’t dare say or do anything. Back at Hope House for Foundling Children, Janke was a bully, but a bully it was sometimes handy to have around when low-rent Chem-Baron thugs fancied kicking downward.

Kez reached to help Wyn up. He smiled and took her hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“My pleasure,” she said, leaning in to be heard over the noise.

Wyn smelled the caustic soap she’d washed with that morning - like chemical lemon juice. Given the nature of this excursion, she’d made an effort with her clothes too, digging out an old dress from the boxes of clothes discarded by kids who’d outgrown them, or who’d left the foundling home when they got too old. Wyn had beaten the worst of the dust and grime from his own threads, but he suddenly felt acutely scruffy next to Kez.

“I’ve never ridden the Howl,” she said, still holding tight to his hand. “Have you?”

The screeching roar was getting louder. The clattering rattle of the elevator’s mechanisms echoed deafeningly from the dripping, algal-green walls of the alcove. Feen was looking back at him and Janke had an ugly grin plastered over his face. Fear of looking like a dumb kid made the lie easier to tell.

“Me? Yeah, loads!” he said, knowing instantly it was a mistake. Wyn glanced over his shoulder. The others were gathered at the edge; legs braced, leaning into the wind.

Wyn leaned close to Kez’s ear.

“Sorry, I don’t know why I said that,” he said. “I ain’t done this before. Not never once. Don’t tell the others, but I’m crapping it.”

She let out a relieved breath.

“Good. I didn’t want to be the only one.”

Riding the Rising Howl was one of many rites of passage for the kids of Zaun. Like reaching the top of Old Hungry with all your limbs intact, cutpursing a baron’s man or playing knock-and-run with a stilt-walking sump-scrapper. Zaun had a seemingly endless procession of insanely dangerous tests you had to pass to truly count yourself a hard-bitten street kid.

But gathering his courage to leap from the rocky ledge, this test seemed to Wyn to be the craziest. The scream of the approaching elevator was getting louder, filling the alcove with the shriek of metal on metal and the boom of ratcheting gears.

Nico stood, leaned out and stared down, turning back with a crooked grin and a thumbs up. He bent his knees and threw himself out from the cliff. Arms and legs flailing, he vanished from sight. Not wanting to be shown up, Janke went next, hurling himself from the ledge with a wild whooping yell. Feen followed his friend, laughing like a maniac.

“Ready?” yelled Wyn, his words drowned out by the Rising Howl.

Kez nodded. No way she could hear him, but she got the message. She still hadn’t let go of his hand. He grinned, and they ran toward the cliff edge. Wyn’s heart was in his mouth, beating like a pneuma-hammer against his ribs. His step faltered, but it was too late to stop now. He reached the edge of the cliff and leapt into the wind, yelling a defiant roar of fear and bravado.

The ground vanished beneath him. Only empty air between him and the lower levels of Zaun, hundreds of yards below. Sheer, undiluted terror seized Wyn. It clamped him in a smith’s vice and squeezed the air from his lungs. Wyn saw himself tumbling to the ground, windmilling his arms as if he might suddenly learn to fly like the cliff-shrikes. He looked down. The ovoid, glass and iron shape of the Rising Howl was below him, coming up fast.

Nico, Janke, and Feen were already on it, clinging to its baroque latticework frames or braced against its structure. Wyn slammed into the thick glass and rolled. He flailed for a handhold, sliding down the curve of the outer windows. His sweaty palms slipped. His feet scrabbled for purchase. Anything to slow his descent.

Nothing.

“No, no, no...” he gasped, sliding over the curved topside toward the edge. “Janna’s mercy!”

An updraught of wind flipped him over onto his front and he saw a bronze hook standing proud on the giant elevator’s side. He threw himself at it, and it seemed the wind at his back gave him just enough of a push to reach it. His fingers closed on the metal and his sliding descent to oblivion halted.

With the threat of a long fall, followed by a hard stop, averted, Wyn was able to get his feet under him and looked around for Kez. He saw her higher up, laughing hysterically at having survived. Wyn felt the urge to laugh, and couldn’t stop grinning like a lunatic as he clambered up to where the upper surfaces of the Rising Howl were less angled.

Nico gave a whoop when he saw him and punched Janke in the arm.

“See? Told you he’d make it!”

Wyn clambered to his brother, his legs rubbery as a shimmerfiend’s after an all-night bender. He sucked in a great draught of clean air. Down in the Sump, the air had texture, but getting higher, it had a sharp clarity that made him pleasantly light-headed.

“Not bad, little man, not bad,” said Nico, giving him a slap on the back. His older brother coughed and spat a wad of gray phlegm onto the glass. Nico wiped his lips with his palm and Wyn couldn’t help but notice the brackish residue left on his hand.

“Yeah, no bother,” said Wyn.

Nico laughed at his bravado. “Worth it though, eh?”

“It’s beautiful,” said Kez.

Wyn had to agree. Far below, this part of Zaun spread over the rocky floor of the canyon in a glittering, bottle-green swathe of light and color. Vapor rainbows arced over the Factorywood and spiraling plumes of shimmering smoke danced over the chem-forges. From up here, sump pools wavered like emerald mirages and the winking hearth-lights in the darkness were like the stars he rarely saw from Hope House.

Tears pricked Wyn’s eyes, and he told himself it was the keenness of the wind. High above, Piltover shone in towers of ivory and bronze, copper and gold. Beautiful also, but Zaun’s beauty was lived in. Its streets were filled with life and vitality, every one bearing a heaving, bustling mass of humanity. Wyn loved Zaun. For all its faults, and there were many, its sheer unpredictability and exuberance gave it a pulse you didn’t often find up in Piltover.

Wyn looked down through the glass beneath his feet to see scores of people staring up at him. The passengers of the Rising Howl were used to folk hitching a lift upward, but that didn’t mean they liked it. A few were Zaunites, but most of them were well-heeled Pilties, returning after an evening spent in the gaslit commercia arcades, glass-ceilinged food parlors, or pounding music halls of Zaun.

“Bloody Pilties,” said Janke. “Coming down to slum it in Zaun. Think they’re living dangerously, but at the end of the night they run back up to Piltover.”

“Be a lot less coin flowing down in Zaun if they didn’t,” pointed out Kez. “Pilties do well outta Zaun, and we do well outta them. And how many grand days out we had up in Piltover? Remember the fireworks over the Sun Gates last Progress Day? Remember that Piltie girl you were sweet on? You talk big, Janke, but you’re the one always wants us to head up top.”

They laughed as Janke went red.

“I’ll give ‘em something to look at!” said Feen with a grin. The scrawny lad shucked the braces from his shoulders, dropped his trousers, and planted his ass on the glass ceiling. “Hey, Pilties, there’s a new moon out tonight!”

And like a dog dragging its backside along the ground, Feen let himself slide down the glass with his ass-cheeks splayed for the viewing pleasure of the people below.

They laughed uproariously at the horrified expressions of the elevator’s passengers - men covering the eyes of children and shaking their fists at the filthy Zaunites.

“We’re not going right up top,” said Nico, getting his breath back and wiping tears from his eyes. “Babette’s is on the Entresol level.”

“We ain’t even sure Mama Elodie’s gonna be there,” said Janke.

“She’ll be there,” said Wyn. “I saw the playbill on her desk. Painted picture of her singing on stage, sure as Gray follows Day. But we gotta hurry, she goes on at eight bells and it’s already gone six!”

Mama Elodie was the mistress of Hope House, a foundling home dedicated to the welfare of the many orphans created in the wake of the disaster that tore Zaun apart. Initially funded by the families who would go on to become Piltover’s clans, more than two hundred orphans had been cared for within its walls. But in the century or so since its opening, the institution’s fortunes had waned as the money from the newborn city on high stopped flowing. The wealthy upsider families eventually decided they’d assuaged their guilt with enough gold, and that was that.

Mama Elodie was the only member of staff to stay on when the funds dried up, a dark-skinned woman who said she was an Ionian princess. Wyn suspected that might just be a story to charm donations out of the Chem-Barons, but he liked it when she told how she’d chosen to see the world instead of living a boring life in a palace. Wyn couldn’t imagine turning your back on wealth like that, but he’d never met anyone else from Ionia - even when he’d run errands for seafarers down at the docks.

Every waif and stray in Hope House had heard Mama Elodie singing as she cooked and cleaned. Her voice was extraordinary, and Wyn had fallen asleep to her lullabies more than once as a babe in arms. Wyn had been delivering a cup of herbal tisane to Mama Elodie when he’d seen the folded playbill for Babette’s Theatrical Emporium tucked under a sheaf of dog-eared letters. He’d only had time for a quick look, but swore on a chest of golden gears that it was Mama Elodie, dolled up in her best finery and singing on a footlit stage. She’d seen his look and sent him on his way with a cuff round the ear and a sharp rebuke for being nosy.

He told the others what he’d seen, and within the hour they’d formed a plan to sneak out and see her sing.

“Look!” yelled Wyn, nudging Nico in the ribs.

Nico looked down and nodded, seeing the uniformed conductor shouting into a flexible speaking tube.

“He’s warning the staff above to watch out for freeloading Zaunites,” said Nico. “But it don’t matter. Remember, we ain’t riding it all the way to the platform.”

“So where we getting off then?” asked Feen, clambering to his feet and, mercifully, hauling up his trousers.

“There’s an old winch mechanism just below the embarkation platform,” said Nico, pointing upward. “The cowl’s nice and flat and wide, and next to it, there’s a vent pipe that’s lost its cover.”

“We’re going to have to jump again?” asked Wyn.

Nico grinned and winked.

“Yeah, shouldn’t be a problem for a seasoned pro like you, eh?”

Wyn let out a shuddering breath, his palms bloody where they’d grabbed the rusted cowl of the winch. His second jump into thin air had been just as gut-wrenchingly terrifying, but at least this time he’d known he could do it. The Rising Howl continued upward on its way, and Wyn was glad to see it go.

At least heading back down to Zaun would be easier. They’d take the steps cut into the sheer rock or slide down the dizzying screw-stairs plunging through the overhanging structures cantilevered from the side of the cliffs.

The winch cowl was right next to an open vent, just as Nico had said it would be. The inside reeked of toxic runoff, but at least it was mostly dry. Thankfully, it was large enough to stand upright, which meant it had likely carried a whole lot of gunk and deposited it down into Zaun.

“Where does this end up?” asked Kez, careful to avoid the greenish slime that pooled in depressions in the iron.

“Comes out just behind the Bonscutt Pump Station, I think,” said Nico.

“Don’t you know?” said Janke. “I thought you’d done this before?”

“I have, but it was about a year ago and I ain’t too sure the layout’s gonna be the same as it was.”

They followed the pipe as it rose and twisted through the rock. The metal groaned and creaked with the movement of the cliffs.

“The cliffs are muttering again,” said Kez.

“What are they saying?” asked Wyn.

“Nobody knows,” she answered. “Mama Elodie once told me the rock was still sad about what happened when they split the land to make the canal. She said that every now and then, when the rock’s sorrow gets too much, it sobs, and that’s what shakes the earth.”

“So for all you know, this might end in a wall of rock or a barrier of twisted metal?” said Janke.

“Could be,” said Nico. “But I doubt it. Look.”

Nico pointed to thin spars of light up ahead. Swirling motes of dust hung in the air, and Wyn saw a rusted ladder rising into a square-cut channel in the pipe.

“Looks like we got ourselves a way out,” said Nico.

Wyn had only traveled to Zaun’s Entresol level a couple of times in his life, and on each occasion it had left a singularly vivid impression on him. Situated just below the notional border between Piltover and Zaun - a fluid and ever-changing line at best - the Entresol was a flourishing hub of cosmopolitan commercia arcades, supper-clubs, recital halls and joy houses, making it one of the most populated districts of the cities. It was also widely regarded by the people that lived and toiled there as the place where the real work of Zaun got done.

Emerging from the pipework, they’d quickly got their bearings and navigated toward one of the main thoroughfares. Wyn and Kez were the only ones who could read well enough to decipher the cursive street signs, and Kez led them to a wide boulevard thronged with the most amazing people Wyn had ever seen.

Men and women from Piltover and Zaun happily mingled on the cobbled street, dressed in colorful finery and plumed hats. The women wore pleated dresses with scoop-lined necks and brightly colored sashes. The men looked dashing in their long frock coats and polished boots that wouldn’t last a day in the muck below.

“Everyone is smiling,” he said, feeling the corners of his mouth twitch upward in imitation. “And laughing.”

“You’d laugh too if you weren’t struggling every day to feed yourself,” said Janke.

Wyn started to reply, but Nico shook his head. Janke had come to Hope House older than most foundlings, and was on the verge of having to leave and find his way in the world. Small wonder he was bitter.

Wyn understood that bitterness. After all, who didn’t want more than they had? Who didn’t want to live somewhere nicer if they could? The harsh reality of the world was that folk lived as high as they could afford. Most folks were content with their place in the grand scheme of things, but Wyn yearned for a life spent in a place where he could walk hand in hand with a beautiful girl, take in a show, and eat a meal under the moonlight whenever he wanted.

On impulse he took Kez’s hand, and when she didn’t pull away, his heart beat harder than it had when he made his first jump. With Nico in the lead, they strolled down the center of the street like they had every right to be there. Which, of course, they did, but the stares their grimy attire attracted made it clear that, while no one was going to kick them back down, they weren’t exactly a welcome sight.

For a moment, Wyn fantasized that they could stay here forever, walking along a street of glowing chem-lumens, surrounded by people who could direct them to the best delicatessens with the creamiest crag-duck confit, or advise which plays they simply had to see. He pictured himself dressed like a dandy, greeting his fellow citizens and doffing his hat to visiting clan representatives.

“Is that a cultivair?” said Wyn, pointing to a latticework dome of smoky glass leaning out from the edge of the cliff.

“I think so,” said Kez. “I’ve only ever seen them from below.”

An iron bridge and taut cables tethered the glass dome to the rock, and they paused to take in the beauty of what it contained. Behind the glass, a small forest of tall trees with broad leafy canopies were tended by a robed gardener with a tattooed and shaven head. A riot of flowers, with petals of red, gold, and blue stood out in contrast to the greenery within. Wyn had never seen anything quite so beautiful in all his life. He waved to the gardener, wishing he could walk with Kez through the forest, smelling the perfumed blooms and feeling the soft grass between his toes.

The gardener smiled and waved before returning to his duties.

A series of bells rang out. Wyn counted seven in total.

“Come on,” he said urgently. “The show’ll be starting soon.”

Janke turned to Nico. “You sure you know where this place is?”

“Babette’s? Yeah, I know it,” said Nico, covering his mouth as he coughed again. “I took Aleeza there once, when I had a few coin to my name after I beat that merchant from Bel’Zhun in a drinking contest.”

Wyn remembered that night well, watching in disbelief as his brother threw back shot after shot of kouaxi, a potent spirit the Shuriman had said was made from fermented goat’s milk. They reached twenty shots before the merchant finally keeled over. Nico was hungover for a week before he could spend his winnings.

“It’s just up here,” said Nico, as they entered a cavernous plaza hollowed out from the cliffs.

People thronged the wide open space, talking, negotiating and haggling over who knew what. A few people with metallic augments strolled through the plaza, each bearing the sigil of one of the Chem-Barons, but they were few in number and attracted more than their fair share of wary glances.

At the far end of the plaza stood a grand structure of vivid color and noise. Barkers shouted inducements to enter and handed out playbills. Fluted columns of black marble veined with gold formed the building’s giant portico, over which was a series of statues of wild animals, dragons, and armored warriors. Greenish chem-lights illuminated them, and the wavering flames made it look like they were alive.

“I give you Babette’s Theatrical Emporium,” said Nico, taking a deep bow and pointing to the brightly-lit structure.

“What do you mean we can’t come in?” said Nico.

The two doormen were well-dressed, but no amount of finery could conceal their experience in hurting people. Snaking tattooes covered their necks and wrists, and one of them had a mechanized arm that buzzed with something energized. A shok-club maybe? Or something even more deadly? Or perhaps it just wasn’t working very well.

“We can pay,” said Kez.

“It ain’t the money, girly,” said the first doorman, a man Wyn mentally christened Chem-Breath.

“Then what is it?” she demanded.

“You ain’t dressed right.”

“Indeed,” chimed in the second doorman, the one with the buzzing, mechanical arm. “Mistress Babette expects a certain level of... hygiene in her guests’ sartorial selections. Your attire falls somewhat below the expected standard, I fear.”

“Yeah, so go and crawl back to where you came from,” said the first.

“Where we came from?” said Kez, incredulous. “This is Zaun ain’t it? This is where we come from, you stupid sump-sucker!”

“Get lost, ya snipes,” said Chem-Breath. “This part of Zaun ain’t your Zaun.”

“Fine,” said Nico, turning and walking away. “Let’s go.”

“Wait, what?” said Wyn, as he and the others followed Nico. “We’re just going home?”

His brother waited until they were out of earshot before responding, making sure the crowds at the entrance obscured them from the two doormen.

“‘Course not,” said Nico. “Stupid of me. Forgot the first rule of the Sump: Only marks go in through the front door.”

They traversed the length and breadth of the plaza for ten minutes before finding what they sought. Wyn kept one eye on the theater doors. People were still going in, so the show probably hadn’t started.

“There,” said Feen, pointing to a sudden plume of emerald smoke gusting from a nearby roofline. Feen worked for Gray-Scrape Malkev, a ductwork maintenancer who threw a couple of cogs the scrawny lad’s way to worm through the narrow ducts and clean off the scum when the breather pipes got too clogged.

The source of the smoke was an eatery that looked as if it served a fusion of Zaun street food and upscale Piltovan cuisine. The diners were languid, artist types, and the food looked almost too beautiful to eat.

“That’s a shared pipe if ever I sniffed one,” said Feen. “See, you can smell the food from the kitchens and the burn-off from the crystal burners up at Babette’s.”

“I knew there was a reason we brung you along, Feen,” said Nico, leading them down the alley cut through the rock between the eatery and the theater. Heavy crates hauled up from the docks were stacked against the wall, and hissing, groaning pipes sagged overhead. Burly men hauled crates inside, grunting with the effort. None of them paid the kids so much as a second glance.

Feen traced the routes of the ducts with his fingers, counting and listening as they gurgled and rattled. He sniffed the air and grinned.

“That’s the fella,” he said, pointing to a narrow vent that passed into the rock-face.

“You sure?” asked Janke. “I don’t wanna find you picked it wrong and we get flushed out over Zaun.”

“I ain’t wrong, sump-raker,” said Feen. “You crawl through enough soot and slime like I have, you get a nose for what leads where.”

They waited until the men working for the eatery took a break before using the crates to climb up onto the roof. Feen quickly found them a crawl-hatch on the side of the pipe and prized it open. Wyn blanched at the fumes leaking from the hatch.

“Is that safe?” he asked.

“Safe enough for a sump-snipe,” said Feen. “Trust me, you’ll get more grit on your lungs walking the Black Lanes than you will from the fumes in there.”

Wyn wasn’t so sure about that, but Feen crawled inside, swiftly followed by Kez. Janke went next, and Nico gestured to the pipe.

“Your turn, little man,” said Nico.

Wyn nodded and climbed inside, following the sounds of scraping knees, cursing and coughing. Feen was right about one thing; the air in here was pretty rank, but nothing like when the Gray closed in and made every breath a battle. Nico climbed in behind him and he settled into a rhythm of shuffling forward on his elbows and knees. Light filtered in through cracks in the metal where it had split, but that ended the minute the pipe plunged into the cliffs.

“How much farther?” called Nico from behind him, the sound resonating weirdly in the pipes. He received no answer, only echoes. Wyn tried not to think of all the reasons why there was only silence. Had the pipe emptied them out over the cliffs as Janke had feared? Had the others hit a pocket of gas that had knocked them out or suffocated them? Or maybe the rock hereabouts was sad too, and had chosen to crush the tiny figures crawling through it.

Just before the thought of being crushed to death by melancholy cliffs paralyzed Wyn with fear, a hand reached down from above and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

“Got ya!” hissed a voice as he was hauled up through a hatch that had been invisible in the darkness. He cried out in alarm and struggled before he realized it was Janke pulling him up. He was deposited on a wooden floor in a lightless room. No, not lightless, a thin bar of light shone from beneath a nearby doorway. As Wyn’s eyes adjusted, he saw the myriad paraphernalia of the performer’s art stacked haphazardly around the room; shelves upon shelves of masks, garish costumes, theatrical backdrops and fake props.

Feen was laughing as he pranced around the room with the top half of a horse costume on his head. Kez wore a golden crown with paste-gems studded around its edges and a bright red stone at its center. Janke swung a wooden sword, its blade painted to look like gleaming silver.

Wyn grinned as Nico climbed from the pipe behind him. He felt light-headed, but couldn’t tell if it was from the fumes or the elation of getting inside.

“Nice work, Feen,” said Nico, dusting himself off and coughing out a wad of gray phlegm.

Feen threw off the horse costume and beamed at this unaccustomed praise. He started to speak, but then they heard the beat of drums and the skirl of pipes.

“It’s starting,” said Kez.

The interior of Babette’s was no less impressive than its exterior. The main hall was adorned in colorful fabrics, gilded balconies, and a vaulted ceiling decorated with stunning vistas of sweeping forests, soaring mountains, and achingly blue lakes. An enormous chandelier of sparkling crystals hung from the center of the ceiling, wheeling constellations that sent beams of splintered light through the chamber.

Hundreds of people filled the space, revelers in fashionable attire and dancers who had shed their coats and inhibitions both. A raised stage at one end was home to musicians who played from the heart, a pounding, driving beat that shivered the blood and got your feet tapping. The music was infectious and Wyn laughed as Kez dragged him onto the dance floor. The sight of five sump-snipes anywhere else might have provoked a reaction, but here, amid the spinning dancers and singers, it barely raised an eyebrow.

They moved with the ease of those who knew how to slip out of a Piltover warden’s grip in a heartbeat. Feen stomped and threw his arms around like a madman, all elbows and knees. Janke shuffled and bobbed his head, lost in his own private world of music. Nico danced in a weaving pattern, smooth as you like, pausing every now and then to flirt with a pretty girl. Wyn waved as he and Kez twisted across the dancefloor, spinning each other around with euphoric abandon.

The music was so loud they couldn’t speak.

He didn’t care.

Chemlights threw a rainbow at the chandelier and it exploded in a dazzling borealis of colors in splitting lozenge patterns. Wyn lifted his hands, as if trying to catch the light. Kez threw her arms around his neck and reached for the lights as well. He smelled her soap and sweat, the perfume of her hair and the heat of her body. He never wanted this moment to end.

But it did.

A meaty hand came down on Wyn’s shoulder and he felt the crushing disappointment of a moment that might never come again being snatched away from him. He cursed at the interruption, but the swears he was about to unleash died when he saw Chem-Breath the doorman looking down at him.

“Didn’t I tell you to go back to the Sump?”

He glanced over at Kez and saw her chest heaving with excitement. She nodded, and the answer to his unasked question was in her outstretched hand.

Wyn laced his fingers in hers and yelled, “Run!”

He squirmed from Chem-Breath’s grip and they bolted toward the heart of the dancefloor. Kez gave a wild yell and they wove through the dancers as if they were playing hook-dodge in the Sump. They ran hand in hand, Chem-Breath right on their heels. He barged through the dancers, but Kez and Wyn had run the streets of Zaun since they’d learned how to use their legs. They’d given the slip to wardens, chem-thugs, and vigilnauts alike.

A fat doorman was no challenge at all.

They heard Chem-Breath’s enraged shouts even over the music, as if he were singing along to it. They led him on a merry chase, ducking between the gyrating dancers and singers. Kez held tight to his hand. Wyn couldn’t help but laugh even as they let Chem-Breath get close. Then, just as the man’s hand reached for his shoulder, Chem-Breath fell to the dancefloor, smashed in the face by Feen’s flailing elbow.

They left him rolling on the ground. Wyn couldn’t remember a feeling this intoxicating. His every dancing, running step was in time with the beat of the music. Each soaring chorus felt like it had been written especially for this moment. They laughed like lunatics through the light and sound, united in a way they’d never known before.

Then the music stopped. The lights were extinguished and a single chem-burner focused its illumination upon the stage. The suddenly stilled dancers gave a collective sigh as a woman rose from the center of the stage. Magic or stagecraft, Wyn didn’t know or care, it was a magnificent entrance.

“Mama Elodie,” said Kez.

Wyn knew it was her, but still couldn’t match the stern, matronly mistress of Hope House with this goddess before him. She wore her long hair tied up in an elaborate series of braids threaded with beads of mother-of-pearl and jade that glittered like newborn stars. She wore a radiant green gown that hung in sweeping folds and which shimmered like silken spider-skin.

She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Mama Elodie raised her head, and the music built from a slow, glacial pace to a rising heartbeat. Her head lifted in time with the music and her dark skin shimmered with diamond dust. Her eyes swept the crowd, seeming to fix everyone in Babette’s with her soulful gaze. She smiled, as if surprised to see so many people, and the warmth of her almond eyes reached everyone who saw her. Wyn felt her goodness enfold him, feeling as if burdens he didn’t know he carried were being peeled away, layer by layer.

And then she began to sing.

The words were unknown to him, but they flowed like honey, half spoken, half sung. Every note drifted like leaves on a warm, summer night, flowing in spirals around the room. Her voice rose in pitch and volume, and Wyn felt his skin tingle with its touch. He let Mama Elodie’s song wash over and through him. Wyn felt a swelling feeling of connectedness between him and Kez. Her eyes met his and he knew she felt the same.

But it was more than that.

Wyn felt a connection between him and everyone in the audience, a sense of oneness and harmony he’d never known or dreamed was possible. Mama Elodie’s hands sculpted the air as her powerful voice filled the chamber with harmonies that penetrated skin and bone and made every edge within them smooth. Sweat sheened her skin, and veins stood out on her neck.

However she was making this music, it was clearly taking a toll.

The light filling the chamber dimmed as her voice grew softer and softer. The notes melted like snow in spring, sunset over a winter ocean. Tears flowed down Wyn’s face, and he knew he wasn’t the only one crying. Dozens of men and women wept, reaching toward Mama Elodie and imploring her to continue. She swayed on the stage, the song nearing completion.

Slowly, so very slowly, she descended through a trapdoor into the stage until she was gone. Mama Elodie’s voice grew softer and softer, until it was little more than a whisper.

Soon, even that was gone.

The chamber was entirely dark now. Wyn let out a shuddering breath as the house lights gradually came up. He blinked as his eyes adjusted, seeing how low the chemlights had burned. How long had Mama Elodie’s song lasted? Hours? Minutes? He had no way of knowing for sure. Wyn felt exhausted, but renewed at the same time. His thoughts were lighter, his lungs feeling clearer than than they had in months. He turned to Kez, and saw she too felt the same sense of rejuvenation. The audience members were smiling; friends and strangers alike embracing in the shared magic of what they had just experienced.

Nico, Feen, and Janke came over, and every one of them had experienced some profound revelation. What that was, Wyn couldn’t know, but that every one of them felt changed was clear.

“Did you...?” said Wyn.

“Yeah,” said Nico.

They hugged, five orphans from Zaun, sharing a brief moment of belonging they would never know again. By the time they broke apart, it was to see the two doormen, Chem-Breath and Buzz-Arm, standing with their hands balled into fists. Chem-Breath’s nose was askew on his face. An improvement, thought Wyn.

“I believe we told you to go home,” said Buzz-Arm.

“Bloody sump-rats,” snapped Chem-Breath, still nursing a bleeding nose. “Think they can give us the runaround.”

He thumped one meaty fist into his palm for extra emphasis.

“It’s time for you to leave, and I can’t promise it won’t be painful,” said Buzz-Arm, sounding almost apologetic.

“There’s no need for that,” said a melodious voice behind them.

Wyn let out a relieved breath as Mama Elodie put a hand on the back of his neck. Her fingers were warm and he felt a calming sensation flow through him at her touch.

“They with you?” asked Chem-Breath.

“They are indeed,” replied Mama Elodie.

The two doormen looked as though they wanted to take this further, but came to the conclusion that arguing with the headline act in front of her bewitched audience probably wasn’t a good idea. The doormen backed away, making eye contact with each of the kids to let them know that they may have escaped a beating this time, but coming to Babette’s again would be a really bad idea.

Wyn turned to face Mama Elodie, but whatever magic she had woven on stage was now entirely absent. The Ionian princess was gone and the Zaunite housemistress was back. She glared at them with hard, flinty eyes.

“I should have let them give you a good beating to teach you all a lesson,” she said, ushering them toward the front door of the theater. The others nodded in mute acceptance of her anger, but only Wyn caught the glint of amusement in her eye. Even so, Wyn could see a great deal of menial labor in all their futures.

“You were amazing,” said Kez as Mama Elodie marched them from the theater and turned toward Drop Street. The late-running descender to Zaun had a station there, so at least they’d be spared more jumping onto elevators or a lot of stairs. Nico, Feen, and Janke waved and ran off, old enough to head home on their own without needing to ask permission. Wyn didn’t mind; he was with Kez and Mama Elodie, so he’d enjoy this moonlit descent to Hope House.

“Where did you learn to sing like that?” asked Kez.

“My mother taught me when I was a girl,” said Mama Elodie. “She was of... an old Ionian line, though her voice was far superior to mine.”

“It was a beautiful song,” said Wyn.

“All the vastaya songs are beautiful,” said Mama Elodie. “But they are also sad.”

“Why are they sad?” asked Wyn.

“True beauty is only beautiful because it is finite,” said Mama Elodie. “That is why some of their songs are too sad to sing now.”

Wyn didn’t really understand. How could a song be too sad to sing? He wanted to ask more, but the farther they walked from Babette’s, the less important it seemed.

He looked up. Chemlights and reflected stars shimmered on the city of iron and glass as they navigated the cliffside streets toward home. Wyn saw a sliver of moonlight peeking out from behind the clouds, and took a deep breath of clean air, knowing it might be his last for a while.

“You know you’re all scrubbing floors and pots for the rest of the week, yes?” said Mama Elodie.

Wyn nodded, but didn’t mind. He was still holding Kez’s hand. A week of scrubbing seemed like a small price to pay.

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds good.”