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Though now a powerful player in Ionia’s flourishing criminal underworld, Sett had humble origins. Born from an Ionian vastaya and a Noxian human, the “half-beast” child was an outcast from the start. His birth appalled his mother’s vastayan community, which expelled the family for violating its tribal norms. The humans of Ionia were no more accepting of the taboo union, though Sett’s father’s infamy as a local pitfighter usually kept them from voicing their disapproval.

What little security the family enjoyed vanished the day Sett’s father disappeared. All of a sudden, those who had bitten their tongues at the sight of young Sett felt free to express their contempt. The boy was bewildered, wondering where his father had gone, and why trouble suddenly seemed to be following him.

Sett grew up quickly, becoming calloused in the face of the taunts and threats he endured, and before long, he began using his fists to silence the insults. When news of his fights reached his mother, she made him swear not to go near the Noxian pits where his father had fought.

But the more Sett fought, the more he thought of his father.

Longing to find the man he only vaguely remembered, Sett snuck away to the pit late one night, after his mother had gone to bed. Immediately, he was enthralled by the spectacle. Scores of Noxian soldiers, fresh to the shores of Ionia, roared with bloodlust from the stands around him. Down in the center of the arena, fighters from all backgrounds and martial disciplines clashed in gruesome duels with a variety of weapons—the winners handsomely paid in Noxian coin. When the event was over, Sett inquired about his father, and learned a hard truth: his father had bought out his contract and left to tour more profitable pits abroad. He had deserted his family, to seek fortune on the other side of the world.

Burning with rage, Sett asked the arena’s matchmaker for a fight, hoping that somehow his father would return from his tour—and be the opponent standing across the pit from him. The matchmaker assigned the boy a fight on the next card, figuring he would be easy fodder for one of his star combatants.

Sett would prove him wrong.

From the moment he threw his first punch, “The Beast-Boy Bastard” was a pit-fighting sensation. Though Sett had no formal martial arts training, his primal strength and ferocity more than compensated, and he leveled his more technically sound opponents like a battering ram. Never abandoning hope that he might one day fight his father, he soon became the undisputed “King of the Pit”, with a swollen coffer of prize money—and a trail of broken opponents—to his name.

Night after night, Sett brought money and comforts to his mother, always lying about how he had acquired them. It warmed his calloused heart to see her so proud of his success, no longer forced to toil at menial jobs. Still, Sett couldn’t help but feel he could do better. Being the King of the Pit was good, but being the person who owned the pit… that was where the real money was.

Late one night, after defending his title in front of a record-breaking crowd, Sett presented his new demands to the Noxian matchmaker and his cronies. He suggested they grant him control of the arena and its revenue. When they refused, Sett barred the doors. Minutes later, the doors re-opened, and the Noxians emerged, badly maimed, with a message on their bloodied lips: the half-beast was the new boss.

With the promoters out of the picture, Sett took control of the pit he once fought in. Ionians, who had only recently been conditioned for war, flocked to the arena, paying to satisfy an urge they only now knew they possessed. Sett took full advantage of their newfound bloodlust, accumulating wealth and power beyond his wildest boyhood dreams, as he transformed the pit into the hub of an underground empire of gambling and vice.

The half-beast who reigned supreme in the pit now runs his illicit enterprises with the same iron fist. Any time someone challenges his authority, he personally reminds them where they stand. Every punch Sett throws is a blow to his old life of poverty and ostracism, and he intends to make sure that old life stays down.

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

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

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

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

In Ionia, magic is woven into the land. Forests spread vibrantly, and trees often boast nearly as many colors as leaves, touched by the wonders of the spirit realm.

But there is one forest, hidden away, that draws on a different kind of magic—a garden with a tree at its heart that gathers humanity’s dreams in its blooms.

The Dreaming Tree grew from a seed of the God-Willow, which towered over the ancient grove of Omikayalan. Cast loose when the God-Willow was tragically felled, the seed took root in what came to be known as the Garden of Forgetting. Nurtured by the Green Father, Ivern—as many of the descendants of Omikayalan were—the Dreaming Tree spiraled up, spreading the magic of humanity’s desires each time the dream-laden buds bloomed.

Lillia was born when one of the tree’s own dreams was captured in a bud that fell to the ground before it could bloom—something that had never happened before. Sprouting into an awkward fawn creature with the flower bud still on her head, Lillia’s only company was her mother tree, and the dreams that drifted to the garden each night.

Lillia helped tend the buds, and learned about humanity through them. Enchanted by the people and places she glimpsed, she spent every waking moment experiencing a swirl of emotions and desires that mortals could only see when they closed their eyes.

In caring for the dreams, Lillia also cared for the dreamers. She came to consider each of them a new friend, wanting nothing more than to one day greet the people who imagined such wonders. Lillia wanted it so badly that her own desires eventually gathered in a bud on the tree.

But when Lillia finally did meet humans, it wasn’t like remembering a familiar dream. It was more like waking up.

Something was happening in the world outside Lillia’s forest. War blazed like a fire through the land, and in time, fewer dreams began to reach the garden. The tree itself grew sick, and became infected with burls—writhing tangles in its trunk, which oozed darkness.

Lillia did her best to nurture her mother tree and the dreams that remained in its buds, but it was not long before the garden became so weak that the violence of the world spilled in. One night, warriors entered the forest and chased a lone figure all the way to the Dreaming Tree. With a single errant blade’s slash, the branch containing Lillia’s unrealized dream came thudding to the ground.

Lillia panicked and forced them all to sleep, shocked at the difference between the mortals she thought she knew, and the ones she had found.

They were so afraid—more tangle than sparkle. They were like the burls…

But as the warriors slept and Lillia wept, a dream emerged from the lone figure the others had been chasing. Weakly, it floated toward the broken branch on the ground and moved into the bough’s bud.

Lillia picked it up. She could feel the dream. As she whispered to it and soothed it, it glowed ever brighter—and so did she. The bud upon her head unfurled, and magic swirled around like sparkling pollen. In that moment, swept up in possibility and wonder, Lillia herself bloomed… until, with a sneeze, she sent the magic curling into the surrounding forest.

The humans awoke one by one, unable to remember what had brought them to the forest, or what they had done. None noticed the timid fawn behind the tree. With relief, Lillia watched the humans go, still seeing only confusing tangles—but knowing now that there was still a sparkle beneath it all.

And if their dreams wouldn’t come to the tree, she would have to bring the tree to them.

Taking up her branch, Lillia left the garden and entered the world of humans—a world she had always wanted to know, but one that frightened her now more than anything. It was so unlike what she understood.

Hiding just out of sight, Lillia now helps people’s dreams be born, drawn forward by glimpses of who they could be, and by what may be trapped beneath their tangles. By helping humans realize their deepest wishes, Lillia realizes her own, the bud on her head blooming as she is filled with joy.

Though darkness may be encroaching on Ionia once more, it is but a mask, and beneath it lies the familiar sparkle of hope. Only by braving the world, and braving herself, can Lillia hope to untangle its burls.

The fire was crackling away nicely, spreading a warm glow throughout the forest clearing. Tristana lay on her back with her head pillowed on her pack, watching a comet streak across the starlit sky. The winking lights glittered prettily through a swaying canopy of birch and oak leaves. The humans liked to name the patterns in the stars – she’d seen some in an old book in Heimerdinger’s laboratory – but she decided it would be more fun to give them names of her own invention.

“You can be the Growling Badger,” she said, pointing to one group of stars. “And you can be the Cheeky Changeling. Yes, that’s much better than boring names like The Warrior or The Defender. And anyway, I can’t see those ones anymore.”

Her stomach rumbled and she sat up. Hunger was still something surprising to her, even though she’d ventured beyond Bandle City more than most of her kind. A pair of spitted fish were roasting nicely over the flames and the smell of them was making her mouth water. She’d shot them in the stream to the west of her campsite with a single, exceptionally carefully-aimed bullet from her cannon. Not a bad feat of marksmanship, even if she did say so herself. Too bad no-one was around to see it! She leaned over and patted the polished drakewood stock of her exquisitely crafted cannon; a weapon any sensible observer would say was far too large for someone of her diminutive stature to even carry, let alone shoot.

“Let Teemo have his cute little blowpipes, eh, Boomer?” she told the cannon. “I’ll stick to something with a bit more oomph, thank you very much.”

The fire crackled in a ring of stones, burning with cerulean flames, thanks to the pinch of her custom powder she’d sprinkled on the kindling to get it started. She knew now just how little she needed to use after her first time in the Upplands had cost her a perfectly decent pair of eyebrows. Sometimes it was hard to remember that things were so different in the human world compared to back home.

Deciding the fish were ready, she slid one from the spit onto a wooden plate she removed from her pack. She unwrapped a golden knife and fork from a rolled dreamleaf and cut the fish into slices. She might be on a mission, but that didn’t mean she had to eat like a savage. She took a mouthful of fish and rolled it around her mouth, savoring the taste and licking her lips in satisfaction. Mortal food was usually bland and tasteless compared to the smorgasbord of flavors she was used to, but the fish in this part of the world – Ionia, she’d heard it was called – wasn’t half bad. Perhaps it was the magic saturating every element of this landscape that made them extra tasty.

Tristana heard the crack of a twig. One of many she’d laid in a circle around her camp. The sound and type of twig told her exactly how far away the humans were and from which direction they were approaching.

She cleared her throat and called out, “I have another fish if you’re hungry.”

A man and a woman emerged from the forest in front of her. Both were tall and lean, with fidgeting hands and cold eyes. They didn’t look friendly, but she was still learning how to read human expressions and she’d been taught to always be polite. Human languages were so unsophisticated that she often wondered how they managed to communicate at all.

The man took a step forward and said, “Many thanks, old one, but we are not hungry.”

“Old one?” said Tristana with a playfully indignant grin. “I’m a young slip of a girl!”

The man blinked and she saw what might have been a look of puzzlement cross his face.

“The old crone’s insane,” said the woman, looking sidelong at her, as if not quite sure what to make of what she was seeing. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t her true form…

“You’re sure you don’t want a bit of fish?” asked Tristana, taking another bite. “It’s really tasty.”

“We’re sure,” confirmed the man. “But we’ll take any coin you’re carrying. As well as that gun of yours. I suspect it will fetch a pretty penny at auction.”

“You want to steal my Boomer?” said Tristana, sensing movement to either side. “You know, I just don’t see that happening.”

“No? You’re alone and there’s two of us,” said the man. “And we’re bigger than you.”

“Size isn’t everything,” said Tristana. “And there’s four of you. Why don’t you ask your two bandit friends to come out? Maybe they’re hungry?”

The woman shook her head. “He told you, we’re alone.”

“Oh, come on,” said Tristana. “What sort of commando do you think I’d be if I didn’t know you had two friends in the bushes with arrows aimed at me right now? You came in from the north and split up a hundred yards out. There’s a fat man to my left and a man with a limp to my right.”

“Good ears for one so old,” said the man.

“I told you, I’m not old,” said Tristana. “I’m actually pretty young for a Yordle.”

The man’s mouth dropped open in surprise as something of her true nature became apparent to him.

Finally! An expression she had no trouble in reading.

Tristana ducked and rolled to the side as a pair of black-fletched arrows slashed from the undergrowth. They passed harmlessly overhead as she swept up Boomer and chambered a round. She fired into the bushes to her right and was rewarded with a cry of pain.

“Blast off!” she cried, vaulting toward the nearest tree and bounding higher. Tristana landed on a branch halfway up its trunk. Another arrow flashed toward her, thudding into the bark a handspan from her head.

“Hey, you’re pretty fast for a human,” she said, racking Boomer’s crank and priming the barrel with a bunch of shells. She sprang away to another branch as the archer rose from the bushes – the fat one, which almost made it too easy. Tristana somersaulted from tree to tree and fired twice more. Both shots caught the man in his meaty thighs, and he fell back with a wail, loosing his arrow high into the air.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she laughed. “I barely grazed you!”

Tristana landed by her fire as the two humans she’d first seen rushed her with drawn swords. They were likely fast by human standards, but to her they moved like lumbering giants.

“Time for some up and over!” shouted Tristana, unloading the rest of Boomer’s barrel in one almighty blast into the ground. She gave a wild, whooping yell as she sailed over their heads. Even as she arced through the air she was reloading. She pushed off from the trunk of a tree and spun back to the ground.

She landed right behind the bandits with a giggle.

“Boom! Boom!”

Tristana fired two blasts, and both humans cried out in pain as they each took a wound to the rump. The woman fell flat on her face, beating her britches as powder burn set them alight. She managed to pick herself up and flee into the bushes with her backside on fire. The man twisted as he dropped to the ground, scrambling away as she cranked Boomer’s loading arm.

He was making hand gestures he probably thought were some form of magical protection.

“You’re no old woman,” he said.

“I kept telling you that,” said Tristana.

The man opened his mouth to answer, but before he could speak the arrow loosed from the fat man’s bow finally came back down to earth. It thudded into the man’s chest and he fell back with a look of intense annoyance.

The other bandits were dragging themselves away as fast as their wounded limbs would carry them. She let them go, grinning as she gathered up her things before stamping down the fire.

“I was just trying to eat my dinner and have a quiet night,” she said to herself. “But I guess four bandits who won’t trouble anyone again soon isn’t bad going!”

Tristana slung Boomer over her shoulder and set off once more, whistling a jaunty tune as she looked for more stars to name.

Xayah jumped upward into the trees’ foliage, dodging the gunfire that exploded from the temple’s walls. The humans called their weapons “Kashuri rifles”. They were deadly, and the town’s guards were obviously trained warriors. But they were too late. Too late to hit her. Too late to stop the tribesmen she commanded, who had already climbed the ancient temple and reached what it guarded: a quinlon.

It was a circle of five massive rocks, orbiting around each other, floating in the sky. A great ward, it contained ancient enchantments, which held back and limited the natural magic of this land.

From the quinlon’s gray stone hung a dozen ropes, attached to spikes that the vastayan tribesmen had cast and hammered into it. The tribesmen were the Kepthalla vastaya. Their bodies were feathered, like Xayah’s own tribe, but their heads were long, and from their crown grew great horns.

Hanging from some of those lines, with ropes tied to their waists, were the bodies of the slain. And on the ground far below were more dead bodies. A dozen comrades who had died trying to reach the stone—killed by the humans’ cruel missiles. But their sacrifice had, at least, secured the line Xayah needed.

She nodded to Rakan, her lover and partner. He stole a kiss from her as he took the bundle she held. Then Rakan bounded into the treetops.

“Whooo!” He screamed in joy as he skipped from tree to tree before jumping into the sky with breathtaking speed.

His final leap traversed the height of the tower, a distance greater than a dozen men standing on each other’s shoulders, and still he was rising higher and higher into the air.

Xayah felt her lungs empty. So many had died for this moment… and in it she feared her lover might join the dead. Everything seemed too bright. Rakan’s cape glittered like the sun through the thin autumn clouds. The guns were tracking him. Aiming. It all came down to this. But the energy of his leaps was slowing…

Above him, on one of the ropes, a Kepthalla tribesman swung down from his hiding place, toward Rakan. But Rakan was slowing. And the guns began firing at him.

It was a ludicrous plan, based on some idiotic circus move she’d seen Rakan perform. Xayah knew she shouldn’t have used it. She was risking the battle, the fate of this tribe, and her lover’s life all on Rakan’s luck and athleticism. He was a warrior and an acrobat certainly. But there were so many guns. If he failed—if he hesitated—if he slowed… if he got hurt…

The tribesman hanging from the stone held out his hands and Rakan grabbed them, propelling himself even further upward.

And then he was on the side of the quinlon. He ran up its near-vertical surface, his cape flowing behind him majestically. And he was laughing. Laughing and mocking the mortals firing at him.

“You beautiful bastard,” Xayah whispered joyfully. She felt her hands unclench at last.

“What, warleader?” said the diminutive Kepthalla messenger-singer beside her.

“Sound the retreat! Get everyone off that rock,” Xayah roared.

The messenger blew the horn he carried. Its strangely deep and melancholy sound echoed through the forest and off the temple’s walls.

The Kepthalla tribesmen began to flee from the quinlon. Rappelling, jumping, falling, before running for the forest. They were easy prey for the human marksmen… but they didn’t take the bait. The mortals knew that Rakan was the only target who mattered now. But now he was alone.

Gunshots exploded around him, peppering the stone of the quinlon with tiny holes. When he reached the top, Rakan set down the package, then glanced around in confusion. He looked down at Xayah and shrugged.

“No, you damn idiot!” Xayah screamed. “The matches! The fire sticks behind your ear!” But her words were lost in the gunfire and distance.

Xayah leapt to the top of the trees, exposing herself to the marksmen, and mimed reaching behind her ear.

The bullets were impacting all around him, sending up tiny shards of shrapnel and dust. But Rakan only covered his eyes from the afternoon glare and looked to Xayah. Seeing her gesture, he seemed to suddenly remember the rest of her plan.

He yanked a match from the feathers behind his ear. Struck it on the rock. Leaned over the bundle with it. Then jumped clear.

He used his cape to direct his fall, gliding and banking, somehow always evading the gunfire directed at him. He was a battle-dancer, and their true skill was feeling what an enemy would do, even before they did.

He crashed through the treetops, lost control briefly, hit a tree limb, then somehow backflipped and landed gracefully beside her.

“I am gorgeosity in motion!” Rakan shouted in triumph. He held the smoking match out to Xayah. “Do we still need this fire stick?”

“Ashai-rei,” Xayah swore while rubbing her forehead. “No, we don’t need the match anymore.”

“Now what?” Rakan asked.

“Watch as one of the humans’ own weapons—a bomb used against our people in Navori—watch as it destroys our prison!” Xayah shouted, not to Rakan, but to the Kepthalla tribesmen gathering around her.

Only silence replied… followed by another round of gunfire raking the woods.

“Rakan, did you remember to light the fuse?” Xayah asked with all the calm she could muster and wondering, not for the first time, why she trusted him with these things.

“Fuse?” Rakan asked.

But before Xayah could scream, an explosion cracked overhead.

The largest rock of the quinlon broke apart. It was larger than any house, and its remains crashed into the other floating stones around it. And then the other, surrounding rocks stilled, no longer rotating.

“I put the fire stick on that little string,” Rakan said as the remaining stones of the quinlon began to quiver. Then, all at once, they plummeted downward. The earth shook as they crashed into the valley and monastery below.

The giant quinlon was gone, and the countless centuries of magic it had held back was suddenly released, like a dam crumbling and releasing a flood.

Around Xayah, the forest shone with light. Will-o’-the-wisps pulsed to life like miniature stars. Oddly-shaped beings of wild magic, glimmering with the light of the spirit realm, faded in and out of existence all around her. It was glorious.

She looked to Rakan, and he smiled back at her. His cape shimmered, crimson and gold. His feathers ruffled and peacocked. As the magic swelled, the faint impression of horns grew out from his sharp cheekbones, but he batted them away in favor of darkening his face to a color matching Xayah’s.

“There’s so much, I can feel it. I can feel it changing us,” Xayah said as she breathed it in. It was as if a great iron bar had been clamped tightly around her chest, throat, and skull for years, and now she was finally free of it. Her feathers rose around her and she realized with only a passing thought she could effortlessly change their color, shape, and size. Though the initial wave of freed magic was ebbing, it took only a flick of her consciousness for her to rise into the air, high above the ground.

“We are born from here. On these edges of this world. Half of spirit, half of form.” The Kepthalla tribesmen gathered beneath Xayah, and her voice boomed as she spoke. “This is what we have fought for. This is the land of your ancestors. As it was. As it is meant to be.”

Xayah slowly floated back down to the ground. The tribesmen around her, with their mouths open in wonder, were also transforming. Invigorated by the magic suddenly available to them, they cheered, laughed, and roared in joy.

Xayah’s Kepthalla messenger-singer—a previously shy runt—grabbed her and spun her around in a hug without warning. “You did it!” he screamed in joy. “You did it!”

“Now, you must defend it,” Xayah laughed as she gently pushed from him, allowing herself to float away.

The messenger, with the slightest twist of the magic available to him, transformed his sounding horn. Now it was longer than a tiger, and a dozen bone pipes grew from the instrument. Into it he blew a song as joyful as it was overwhelming.

Behind Xayah the forest was moving. The trail they had taken here, which turned right then left, now also turned the other left, into the spirit realm. A direction that went through places-past, places beyond the forests—and would transform any who took it.

“An ancient pathway has opened!” Xayah whispered in awe. She had not expected the magic here to be so strong. She turned to where Rakan had been, but found him missing.

She spotted him at the forest edge, his cape glowing like the afternoon sun. He was looking outward.

“Mieli?” she asked as she approached, using the ancient word for lover.

“We destroyed it,” Rakan said solemnly.

“Yes. We are free—that quinlon is no more.”

“No, their town.” He indicated the temple and the human settlement around it.

Vines larger than wagons churned the earth. They ran like massive waves from the forest, smashing a dozen houses into flinders.

The other woodwoven houses in the town were growing uncontrollably, folding in on themselves and crushing all inside, as they transformed into colossal trees.

A mortal woman, clutching a small child, ran from her home to a horse cart. Behind her, a man barely escaped being squashed by a huge vine that fell and crumbled his house.

He was carrying an armful of their possessions. He threw them into the cart, but as the wave of powerful freed magic overtook them, the vehicle burst to life, reforming itself as the plants from which it had been fashioned. Xayah watched as it changed into a giant insect-like creature made of wood and vines. The man slashed at the creature with a walking stick, before fleeing from it with the woman and child.

An old man with a long braid struggled on the undulating earth. He scrambled for a few paces before a pair of glowing forest spirits, shaped like ghostly butterflies, grabbed him. The spirits dragged him into the air. Then, growing tired of his struggles, they dropped him as they rose over a tree. He landed with a thud. His soul shuddered against the confines of his body, seeking to escape its own shell and join the forest.

Other mortals were running past him. Xayah could see their souls buffeting against the confines of their bodies too. An old woman grabbed the old man with the braid, lifting him to his feet, and together, limping, they fled… as the earth and spirits churned around them.

“The humans’ greed brought this to them,” Xayah said finally.

Rakan’s said nothing in reply. Xayah followed his gaze back to the destruction her plan had wrought.

After their victory, Rakan and Xayah had received a call for aid from the Vlotah tribe, and it had taken three moons to travel to their main village.

It wasn’t much to look at. The Vlotah had always been a small tribe, even in ancient times. The town was little more than a couple dozen warping trees that surrounded a crystal pool. As Xayah and Rakan were led into the village by a guard, a few of the trees grew openings and Vlotah tribesmen stepped outside to see who the visitors were.

The Vlotah were lithe and narrow, but with massive shoulders that protruded vertically from their backs like wings of bone. Their iridescent fur glittered in the light, first green, then purple, all over their bodies—save for their faces, which were creamy-white and vaguely feline in aspect.

But tints and vapors of sickly yellow and black seemed to be weeping from the trees, the vastaya, and even steaming from the pool. It was the color of hunger and sickness.

Xayah whispered that she thought the vastaya here looked too weak to fight, or even help her and Rakan fight.

“The magic here is unclean,” Rakan observed. “We should leave quickly. It’s upsetting my coat.” He ruffled his feathers.

“Rakan, a victory here would raise awareness of our cause across Zhyun. We need another success to prove a rebellion is possible.” Xayah looked again at the tribesmen around her, pitying them, and confirming her suspicions that they were too sickly to fight for themselves. “The Vlotah tribe asked for our help. And clearly they need it, my love.”

“Is helping them more important than me looking amazing?!” Rakan said incredulously, then flashed a smile to reveal he was joking.

“Obviously not,” said Xayah, playing along and finding herself cheered by his humor.

“We have to pri-or-i-tize!” Rakan cried, emphasizing every syllable.

“Rakan and Xayah, I presume?” a voice rumbled.

In the center of the village, sitting cross-legged on a boulder shaped like an eight-legged turtle, was an ancient Vlotah. He was white-furred and wearing a crown shaped to look like elk horns.

“I am Leivikah, the Vlotah tribe’s elder,” he said, before coughing.

Xayah and Rakan bowed. A crowd formed around them. Dozens of the Vlotah tribesmen were whispering in their own tongue.

“We have heard of how you saved Consul Akunir and Speaker Coll at Puboe. I am hoping you can help us,” Leivikah said, with a weak voice that barely rose above the crowd’s whispers.

Xayah glanced over to her partner and he took his cue.

“I am Rakan,” he confirmed with that deep voice he used sometimes. It was loud and certain, and somehow it held a smile behind it. Its confidence silenced the crowd. Then, with his shoulders squared and his back arched, Rakan turned so as to make eye contact with everyone around them. “And this is Xayah, the Violet Raven. You have heard of her triumphs, and her call for rebellion.”

And just like that, the crowd and elder were hanging on his words, excited he was here. Xayah shook her head, amazed how Rakan could so often say almost nothing, but with exactly the right feeling. She secretly nudged him in the back, keeping him focused.

“Oh, uh… We have answered your summons and we are happy to visit you as friends, or… as comrades. Tell us how we can help.” Rakan finished by flashing his glowing smile.

“Thank you, Rakan and Xayah, our need is great.” Leivikah rose unsteadily with his staff, then pointed toward the mountains. “North of here is the Kouln temple. It contains a small crystal quinlon. For many generations it has conditioned the magic of this region, and we have lived in peace with the mortals who tended it.”

He coughed and indicated the sickness around him. “But black-and-red-clad warriors calling themselves Yanlei have taken over. Now the magic here has dwindled and darkened. We attempted to retake the temple with the good monks of Kouln, but were driven back. Now we are too weak and too few to fight. It is our hope that, with your help, our allies can reclaim their sacred place.”

Xayah frowned and looked at the poverty around her. She began speaking then stopped herself, before finally saying with irritation, “You want us to help some humans retake a quinlon?”

“We have heard of your great successes,” Leivikah said.

“You heard we destroyed the quinlon in the valley of Houth and freed the Kepthalla tribe,” she said.

“The monks of Kouln are—”

“Human,” Xayah snapped, interrupting the elder. “Why would we—and why should any of you—care about squabbles between the mortal races? You ask us to help those who strangled the magic of these lands? Are you a fool?”

Elder Leivikah snarled and then looked to Rakan. But Xayah’s partner didn’t appear to be paying attention. He was humming and balancing a twig he’d just found on his index finger.

“We will help you. But only by destroying the quinlon—not by surrendering it to some monks,” Xayah said finally.

“That will destroy the valley town!” the elder exclaimed.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Many people will die!”

“Many humans will die,” Xayah said, correcting him.

“And when the humans try to take back their lands? What will—”

“With magic, you can defend it.”

“This is no way to speak to an elder!” Leivikah roared at Xayah, spittle coming from his mouth. “You do not have rights here, child! You make demands without knowing our tribe’s ways. Your fame as a warrior does not make you an elder!”

As Leivikah ranted, Rakan stepped away from Xayah and darted along the edge of the crowd, like a predator circling its prey. What few warriors this town still contained quickly backed away from the challenge Rakan was implying. Suddenly he leapt up onto the giant stone, landing beside the elder. Rakan stood over him for a moment.

“Do you want me to slap you off that rock?” Rakan asked.

Leivikah saw all of his guards had stepped away from the famous battle-dancer. Then he stammered, “I… I meant no disrespect.”

Rakan continued, “My lady speaks wisdom, fool. And she speaks only the truth. Listen. And watch your tone. Or we’re gonna have a problem.”

Rakan leapt back down from the rock as the elder pleaded. “My tribe only wants to return to the way it has been. The monks of Kouln have never broken their promises to us, and have protected us. We are not war-seekers like you.”

Rakan walked over to Xayah, adjusted his feathers, and then scratched his ear.

“What do you think?” Xayah asked quietly.

“About what?” Rakan replied in a whisper.

“About what he was saying?”

“I wasn’t listening to the words,” Rakan shrugged. He kissed her on the cheek and said, “You were both yelling. You were angry, but he is just scared.”

Xayah smiled, realizing Rakan was right before whispering, “Thank you, mieli.” Then she gave him a quick kiss on the lips.

“I’m sorry, Elder Leivikah,” she said apologetically with a bow. “I also meant no disrespect.”

Then Xayah placed her hand over her heart and said, “You are afraid. There is no shame in that. But as long as you rely on humans to keep their promises, your tribe will never be free. And that is what I truly fear. How many generations has it been since you saw a child in this village? More than most of our people? Look around you. Your numbers were dwindling long before these new warriors appeared. But in the Kepthalla forests they have hope for the future. They hope that children will be born again—because, at last, the magic there is free!”

She looked around the crowd—like Rakan had—making eye contact with as many tribesmen as she could. “Rakan and I have fought these Yanlei before. Many know them as the Order of Shadow, and they are dangerous. Very dangerous. But we are willing to fight for you. We want to help you!”

Then Xayah let her shoulders drop, and shook her head. “Neither honor nor oath-magic binds you to those Kouln monks anymore—so we offer you a chance to take back your lands. You need only the courage to accept our offer and protect what is yours!”

The elder stared at her for a long moment before replying, “You are truly as fierce as your reputation, Xayah of Lhotlan, and we thank you. We will consider your words, and I will have our answer for you in the morning.”

As the elder rose to his feet, Rakan asked Xayah, “Are we staying the night?”

“Looks that way,” she replied.

Rakan pointed randomly at the crowd. “Which one of you wants to make me dinner? And… do you have chocolate?!”

Unsure of the human substance he was seeking, the crowd exchanged confused looks. Rakan turned back to Xayah and with annoyance cried out.

“No chocolate?!”

In the morning, Elder Leivikah made his decision. He swore his people would defend any lands reclaimed by the wild magic released, and he assigned the few warriors he had to Xayah’s command.

After looking at their weakened and sickened condition, and because she knew the Vlotah tribe would need its warriors to defend their lands later, Xayah decided it was best to use them only as a diversion.

So while Xayah and Rakan were attempting to retake the temple alone, the Vlotah warriors would instead attack the Yanlei patrols—and hopefully draw some of their numbers away from the temple.

It took Rakan and Xayah a day to walk from the Vlotah’s forest to the giant village the elder had spoken of.

Looking down on it from the hilltops, Xayah and Rakan saw it was far larger than any they had encountered in years. It was a small city, which dominated the entire valley with hundreds of dwellings.

“Can we go around it?” Rakan asked.

“No. Not unless we climb on the bare cliff walls surrounding the city.”

“Climbing could be fun.”

“We would be exposed the whole time we were on the cliff’s face. If the humans have ballistae, or their Kashuri rifles…”

“I hate tubebows,” Rakan grumbled. Then he gestured to the hills beyond the town. “I can hear the quinlon disturbing the magic. But I can’t see it. A forest is after the town.”

“We can rest there. But we must pass through the town without being spotted by the black-and-red-clad ones. They will know of us from what happened at Puboe and with the Kepthalla. We must try to look like humans.”

“Perhaps some of the Vlotah can circle back to help us get around it,” Rakan suggested.

“They are too scared and too weak, Rakan,” she replied. “And they would only draw attention to us.”

Xayah began pulling items from a bag she had taken from the village. “The Vlotah gave us human-style foot coverings. And we’ll wear big hoods.”

“That cloak is gray,” Rakan said with breathless horror. “That’s not even a color!” He snapped a twig off a tree and threw it with great force into the forest.

Xayah looked down at the garments, and then she too shuddered at the thought of putting these coarse human fabrics over her feathers.

Guards dressed in black and red were closing the gate and waving the last visitors into the city as night fell. Xayah ducked her head down as she and Rakan walked past them.

As she entered through the gate, she stole a glance at the great town’s wall. It was massive, many times the height of the tallest tree in the forest.

“Rakan, could you jump over this wall?” Xayah whispered.

“Why?” he asked.

“If we had to get out of here quickly,” she said.

He looked up at the wall, judging the distance, before saying, “No—too little clean magic here.”

She could feel the ill magic used to construct the wall. It was alien, even for mortal magic. Dark and angry. She had only felt its like once before… at Puboe.

The enormous thorn vines, each wider around than a horse, hadn’t been asked or coaxed into dragging these stones into the wall—they had been goaded and forced. And the magic that held the wall and ramparts above her wailed and growled.

The wall would be a powerful barrier against invaders, but she wondered what would happen when the vines, which had been holding this magic, were suddenly let free.

The gates closed behind them and locked. Xayah and Rakan hid amongst the travelers and peasants who walked down the main road toward the town’s center.

“There is a mage here,” Rakan said.

“I hear their magic,” Xayah replied, “but I can’t see them.”

“Above us.”

On a tower made out of cut and dead trees, a man stood in burgundy robes. From his eyes a strange darkness emanated, and he held an ornate brass bell which misted a dark vapor.

“He is looking for vastaya and yordles,” Rakan said with certainty.

Xayah grabbed Rakan’s arm and pulled him into an alleyway, as the mage screeched a horrific sound. He had seen through their disguises. Horns of alarm blared from the walls answering the mage’s cry.

Footsteps and guards shouted behind them. Xayah and Rakan ran, dodging from alleyway to alleyway, but soon discovered the streets formed a labyrinth.

They could feel the mage scrying to find them. He was swinging the magically touched bell. It chimed softly but let free an invisible lash of magic in their direction. Again and again, it released a sound no mortal would hear—or feel the pain of—but which cracked like a giant’s whip in the ears of the vastaya. One of his strikes crashed down the alleyway, just missing Rakan as he dove against a wall.

The bell’s magic vibrated their feathers and for a moment Xayah thought they had been discovered. But then the mage rang the bell in a slightly different direction, down another alleyway. He was searching blindly, clearly uncertain what and where they were.

Ahead, at an intersection, the Yanlei guards were grabbing townsfolk and dragging them out into the open where the mage could see them.

One of the guards, a leader, was dressed differently than the rest. He wore a dark gray vest of rough cloth, unbuttoned. To the vastaya, he seemed malformed, touched by some sort of corruption. Rakan nodded to the black-within-black tattoos covering both of the man’s arms.

“Shadow magic,” Rakan growled.

Xayah nodded. “They are insane.”

“Let’s see if he can dance,” Rakan said. On instinct Xayah grabbed her lover’s hand and held him back.

Just then, the man’s tattoos came alive. They rose from his body like smoke. Their darkness solidified into barbed talons like a spider’s legs, each holding a cruel hook-sword. Then these shadow forms slashed a villager who had resisted being pulled out into the open. The man hit the ground screaming, a red gash along his back.

Rakan and Xayah swung against the wall under the overhang of the building next to them, then slipped into another alleyway that stank of rot and garbage. Then seeing it free of guards, they ran with everything they had. Bounding off the walls and drawing on some of the reserves of magic they held within themselves for greater speed. But the alleyway curved around. They discovered it led only back to the wide street.

Behind them several of the black-and-red-clad warriors appeared on a balcony and leapt down.

Rakan scanned the street, looking at each of the houses and inhabitants. Then he grabbed Xayah’s hand and dragged her around the corner toward a nearly ruined house with failing timbers.

“What are you doing?” Xayah asked.

“This one is good,” Rakan responded, indicating the house’s recently swept entranceway and clean windows.

“What?!” Xayah responded.

One of the guards down the street spotted the desperation of their pace, and indicated the pair to his commander. The tattooed brute was still standing over the wailing peasant.

“What’s wrong?” a woman’s voice asked.

Xayah turned and saw an elderly woman dressed in yellow. She had long white hair held up in an elaborate braid, and her eyes were narrowed in suspicion.

“Nothing,” Xayah replied. “We were just—”

“The guards are looking for us,” Rakan interjected. “We need help.”

The woman looked to the guards, then back to Xayah and Rakan. Rakan gave her a hopeful smile. “We mean no harm,” he assured her.

“Quickly, come through the side door,” she said, gesturing to the alleyway beside her house. Then she closed and barred the front entrance behind her.

Rakan and Xayah ducked into the alleyway and ran along the side of the house. It was a dead end… and they couldn’t see any doors.

“Damn it, why would you say that to her?” Xayah cursed. She could hear the mage scrying above them—his magic cracking loudly through the spirit realm. They could see the shadows of the guards in the street, heralding their approach.

But then, a wall suddenly moved, as a hidden door into the house slid open. The old woman leaned out and gestured for them to come inside.

Once the pair was inside, the old woman slid the smugglers’ entrance closed, hiding its existence.

The two vastaya looked around and discovered they were in a storage room with a low ceiling and dirt floors. It was dark and illuminated by only a single oil lamp and the glow of a pair of dying ekel-flowers.

Beneath her cloak, Xayah formed two feather blades and readied them.

Perhaps sensing the danger, the woman backed away toward a full-moon spear resting against the wall. It was a fine weapon, well-oiled and touched by ancient magics that purred happily inside of it.

“You are vastaya?” the woman said cautiously.

Before Xayah could stop him, Rakan nodded and said with the deep voice, “I am Rakan, battle-dancer of the Lhotlan tribe.”

To Xayah’s surprise, the woman let out a deep breath, and laughed. “Leivikah told me he was seeking your help, but we have heard no word from the Vlotah tribe since then. I am Abbess Gouthan.”

There was a loud banging on the front door.

“Stay quiet, I’ll get rid of them,” Gouthan said as she hurried to the front room, sliding the hallway’s door closed behind her.

While the abbess checked who was at the front door, six young mortal acolytes appeared from the house’s other rooms. Many wore bandages and appeared injured. They nervously exchanged glances with each other. Xayah could sense them gathering what little magic they could muster.

Xayah slid one of her hands inside the woolen cloak she wore and willed a new feather blade into existence. If the monks attacked, it would be too close for her to throw the daggers, so she altered the blade’s handle, shaping it into a short falchion.

When Abbess Gouthan reappeared, the woman held a finger to her lips to indicate they should stay quiet. Then, almost silently, she sent her more heavily injured monks back into their rooms, while she and her two remaining students readied a cooking fire. They quietly sang and hummed a haunting tune as they began to prepare food.

Rakan put his arm around Xayah’s shoulder and led her to a low table in an adjoining room. The couple sat down together. While the monks cooked, Xayah slowed her breathing before cautiously reabsorbing her blades and their magic back into her feathers.

As she waited, Xayah wrapped both her winged and woolen cloaks around her legs—only a few beeswax candles and the cooking fire illuminated their side room and barely held back the evening chill.

When the candles had burned down to a thumb span, the abbess and her two attendants finished cooking and quietly joined Rakan and Xayah with several plates of food.

“We hid in the hills for a few weeks after they took our temple,” Gouthan whispered. “Then, like you, we snuck into the city.”

She and one of her students passed the meager food they had prepared from the fire pit of their kitchen to the table Rakan and Xayah sat at.

“This old house was my family’s long before I became the abbess of Kouln temple. We managed to avoid detection only because the Navori—”

“Who is the warrior with black tattoos?” Rakan asked.

“The warriors with tattoos are the Order of Shadow. They are a part of the Navori Brotherhood… or they were, when—”

“Their tribe is at war with yours?” Rakan interrupted again.

“Not exactly,” Gouthan replied patiently. “They took our temple but let most of us live, I suppose to keep the local villagers from revolting against them. The peace ensures they can gather the foul shadow magic they are harvesting. But I’ve been sneaking my students back into the city. Readying ourselves.”

Rakan bit into the stone-cooked bread. “You sang ‘Theln and the Falling Leaves’ while cooking this?”

“Yes,” Gouthan replied. “When vastaya cook, the song is important, right?”

“It is important,” Xayah said without emotion. Her plate sat untouched in front of her.

Rakan explained, “For stone flour bread, it is traditional to use a happy song that you can drum with.”

“And you can taste that?”

Rakan shoved another piece of bread into his mouth and nodded.

“My apologies, we have so little to offer you, and even less skill in your customs,” the abbess said before bowing her head. She was clearly ashamed of what her order had been reduced to.

Rakan patted her on the shoulder. “It’s good! It’s not a song used for stone bread, but it goes well with this flour.”

“You are too kind.”

“He is hungry,” Xayah said.

“Now that we have shared food, can we discuss how we will take back our temple?” the abbess asked hopefully.

“Your help will not be needed,” Xayah responded.

“My students can lead you there. I myself can stand against more than a few of the shadow warriors. Also I sent word to the Kinkou Order—surely they will send reinforcements.”

Xayah and Rakan exchanged a glance. Then Xayah asked, “How many of these Yanlei warriors are in the city?”

“Perhaps a hundred.”

“And at the temple?”

“Perhaps fifty.”

“We can handle that number,” Xayah said.

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“They are bad dancers,” Rakan murmured, while grabbing another piece of bread.

“But surely, if we wait for the Kinkou—”

“The Vlotah cannot wait for the Kinkou’s help. That is why we are here.”

“I understand,” the abbess said. “I failed them. Allow me to at least join you against these Yanlei bastards.”

“You should wait here in the city,” Xayah said flatly.

“I can show you where they have set up patrols—”

“You can show us in the morning,” Xayah said. “But if you don’t mind, I would like a moment with my partner.”

“Oh… uh, okay.” The abbess rose with her attendant. Rakan followed them to the door, gave each of them a hug and handed them a couple pieces of bread as they returned to the rooms at the front of the house.

Then Rakan closed the door, and sat back down beside Xayah. She whispered, “We should leave as soon as they fall asleep.”

“We should warn them about what will happen when we destroy the quinlon,” he responded, shoving another piece of bread into his mouth.

“If they knew what we were going to do, they would betray us to these other mortals. Or the Kinkou.”

“Many mortals will die,” Rakan said.

“The Vlotah tribe will die while waiting for help. My love, we are on this path. They settled on vastayan lands. They raised a wall with magic which they barely control and do not understand.”

“If you say so. But I prefer this abbess to Elder Leivikah. At least she’s not scared.”

“You’ve just been seduced by their food.”

Rakan took another mouthful and shrugged. “It was made with care and a song sung truthfully.”

“I don’t trust her. Not with our lives on the line.”

“This is why you said we didn’t need their help?”

“Fifty warriors is a lot,” Xayah admitted. “And that’s before you add shadow magic.”

Rakan shrugged. “You don’t have a plan?”

“Of course I have a plan.”

“Then I trust it,” Rakan said softly.

Xayah shook her head. “We’re going in alone. If my plan goes wrong—”

“You are never wrong about those things.”

Xayah ran her fingers through her feathers and bowed her head, running through every detail she had learned about the terrain—the black-and-red-clad warriors, the town, the mountain temple, and the crystal quinlon—from the Vlotah elder.

Then after a long silence, she asked, “Why did you trust this monk?”

“Because I know about these things,” Rakan replied.

Xayah lay awake for many hours that night, studying the maps the Vlotah had provided her with. She was able to deduce where the warriors had probably set patrols and pickets, and charted a path that would allow them to avoid detection until they were only a few hundred paces from the temple.

They left after the moon rose and were able to sneak out of the house without incident.

The town was still, save for the sound of insects, making it easy to avoid the Yanlei warriors by listening for their footsteps. After Xayah deduced where these warriors were, it was simple for her to find a pathway through the sentries’ patrols.

They left the city and past the last of the farmhouses leading up the mountain as dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky.

The forest on the mountain was the color of ash. Rakan and Xayah could feel the magic they held inside them being tugged away from them.

The quinlon here wasn’t just dampening the power of spirit magic to create change, or limiting its life-giving vitality by holding back the wild magic mortals found too dangerous; this one was actively absorbing magic, leeching it from the landscape and the spirit realm at a rate Xayah had never experienced before. It was as if the normal function of the quinlon had been turned upside down, allowing only the darkest magics to ebb out from the spirit realm.

For most of the day, Rakan and Xayah marched through the woods, concealing themselves in what remained of the bone-colored underbrush of the forest, keeping a few dozen yards from the trail. They stayed motionless as the enemy warriors went past. At first they seemed to be on regular patrols, but soon large groups of warriors were marching downhill with an obvious urgency.

Xayah surmised the Vlotah tribesmen had begun the diversionary raids she had directed. Certainly, she and Rakan could defeat these humans—but Xayah knew it was safer to conserve what scarce magic they had.

Weakened and sick from the lack of magic, the Vlotah who had volunteered to draw these Yanlei away had shown great bravery. Xayah assured herself these new comrades would be safe for at least a while. But if she and Rakan failed to take out the quinlon soon? Xayah could feel her fingernails digging into her palms as she and Rakan lay hidden behind a wagon-sized boulder.

After a while, the patrols of red- and black-clad warriors significantly dwindled in size and frequency, enabling her and Rakan to travel more quickly than they had before.

They reached the temple by late afternoon. The building was ugly, and it hated the world. It was tall and as pale as a corpse. Leafless branches and thorns had grown from its woodwoven walls, forming battlements and defensive spikes.

Rakan whistled, drawing the attention of the first guard he saw. The man turned just in time to take one of Xayah’s feather blades in the chest. Rakan caught him before he fell—showing off.

A distant horn sounded, and Xayah knew they had been spotted. From hiding places scattered around the temple, a dozen more of the black-clad warriors appeared.

Rakan dashed into their midst, kicking, spinning, and throwing them up into the air, while Xayah’s blades took their toll. They were moving fast now. They cut a path to the temple’s entrance.

Xayah used her magic to pull her feather blades back to her, killing the warriors that stood against them, while Rakan took a bow.

She rolled her eyes at his antics and left him to keep these black-clad warriors busy.

She pushed through the vines at the gateway of the temple, then walked into its grand entranceway. With doors broken and strewn on the ground, dark curving passageways lay open on both sides of her. She ignored them, and instead followed the path the sunlight cut toward a vine-covered doorway at the far end of the room.

She paused as she passed a small stack of crystal boxes, hidden against a wall. They were odd things, perfectly square and completely soulless, somehow holding no magic at all. In some great act of sacrilege against the world, it was as if their maker had managed not to let any of his essence—or the essence of their base materials—pass into them. She gave them a wide berth, and crept through a doorway overgrown with black roots.

She found the center of temple bathed in red light. Xayah looked up to see the quinlon glowing above her. Like many quinlons, it was an arrangement of rotating stones, but this one appeared to be made of giant shards of ruby, each larger than a horse. It glowed. She could feel its pull as it took in magic.

And she watched in horror as it pulled tiny forest spirits up into it.

There was a shift in the air, and she knew she wasn’t alone. She ducked just as an armored warrior appeared from the shadows. He vaulted above her, bouncing off the walls and pillars as a battle-dancer might—but he was appearing and disappearing in puffs of smoke.

She had known vastaya, touched by the clouds, with similar techniques. But this man’s magic was strange. Even the shadows inside him were touched by something else, an echo of the magic of the twilight. He was powerful—more powerful than any mage, any mortal she had encountered. Weakened as she and Rakan were, Xayah knew defeating this armored warrior was unlikely.

She threw feather blades, but he simply cut them apart, and with each movement she was getting weaker and he closer. She stared as the warrior parried the next of her attacks and sent one of her feather blades up into the quinlon.

The red stone cracked instantly.

It was then the reason this small quinlon had been set inside the temple became clear. The strange ruby-like mineral it was made from gave it its unusual power… but it was fragile. Especially now that it was overloaded.

She couldn’t defeat this warrior, not under these conditions… but if she kept him distracted, she could still destroy the quinlon.

She willed as many feather blades into existence as she could. The effort of it drained her limbs, making her feel as if she was being held underwater. But she threw blindly, forcing her opponent to dodge, to duck—knowing that every blade that went past him would sink into the quinlon, cracking it, or fly beyond it into the roof of the temple.

But her breathing had become short and desperate, and her foe circled around her like a shark. He had been letting her tire—and now he was ready to finish their duel.

In her exhaustion, Xayah clenched her jaw, preparing herself for what she knew she must do. She would die, and so would this warrior… but the Vlotah would survive.

And then for the briefest of seconds she realized she never again would see Rakan. Feel him against her. Hear his laughter. See his sly smile… And in her distraction the armored warrior struck at her. Barely she turned his blow, but the impact knocked her to the ground. The warrior backflipped away from her, then, without pausing, jumped back toward her with blades ready for his killing blow.

This was her chance. Instead of parrying, she drew back her magic blades and… ripped the quinlon and the roof of the temple apart! As the shadow warrior fell onto her, the quinlon’s giant shards and the stones of the roof began to fall onto them both, as certain as death.

And then, suddenly… Rakan!

His arms were around her, holding her, embracing her. A swirl of golden energy wisped from his cape and surrounded them. She could feel the impact of the shadow warrior’s blades slam against its magic—unable to deliver the killing blow. She felt Rakan’s chest against her cheek. She could feel it rising as he took in a breath.

Bigger pieces of the temple’s roof and the quinlon were falling now—whatever magic Rakan had held on to glowed as a bubble of energy, holding back the stones. But Xayah could feel him weakening under the shield’s weight. He roared, screeching like a tiger in a trap, as the entire building collapsed. His chest shuddered, and he fell to his knees.

And then there was darkness.

When Xayah opened her eyes, Rakan was helping her to her feet in the ruins of the temple. The strange warrior was gone, and his cohorts were running down the trail, fleeing as the first wave of wild magic crashed free into this world.

The forests glowed, flowers bloomed, and the great spirits were awakening. The light from the other world washed around them.

She looked at Rakan, smiled, and wiped a smudge from his cheek.

They embraced and took in the magic— it was different here than in the Kepthalla’s forest. Despite, or perhaps because of, how it had been caged and abused, it was bursting with vitality and joy.

The Vlotah tribe would be free as the Kepthalla tribe were. And there would no longer be a question of whether destroying the quinlons was possible or right. More tribes, even Xayah’s, would see the future she believed was possible for her people.

The ground rumbled—something giant beneath the mountain was awakening, and the two lovers danced across the great cracks forming in the landscape.

Rakan kissed Xayah gently, then said, “The humans cannot live in our lands, but I’m going to see if I can help that abbess escape. If I dive down that pink stone cliff, I might get there in time.”

“Go, save your bread-maker, my love. But I think she will have already fled the town.”

Rakan tilted his head in confusion.

Xayah cupped his face with her hands. “I left her a message, telling her what was about to happen, and that she should flee with as many of her kind as she could.”

“You told her what would happen?” Rakan asked, smiling as he held her hands against his face.

“You trusted her,” Xayah replied. “And I trust you in these things.”

Sivir watches leaves fall outside her window, and sips tea flavored with rose petals. The liquid dances gently across her tongue. Its petals are delicate, pink, and soft. The air is still, and the sky is gray, and beneath Sivir’s thatch floor lies hard earth, grounding her upon a single and unnassailable reality.

It is the dirt and the grass and the homes and the villagers she has been accustomed to for the majority of her life—here, in her small dining room, in her small cottage, in the small village of Sugiru. The world, she believes, cannot be a mirror. It is rigid. Concrete.

Sivir’s world is a reflection of nothing.

She avoids looking at the corner of the room.

There is an object there, now. Perhaps it was there before. Perhaps it will be there tomorrow. A golden ring of immaculate, intricate design—or a monstrous wheel whose spokes are sharpened to a wire-thin killing edge. It is a compass, a star, a weapon, a key. It was buried once, someone told her, and now it is not.

Hours pass between Sivir and the golden ring. She drinks tea flavored with rose petals, her cup never emptying as it rises and falls from her lips. Day never breaks, and the leaves outside her window never cease to fall. Hours become days. Days become years. Sivir grounds herself in her small dining room, in her small cottage, in a small village on a tiny island far out to sea, her vision locked in place, her muscles screaming.

Sivir steals a glance at the corner of the room. The ring has begun to widen.

Every synapse in her body freezes. The wheel’s empty center collapses into an ocean of liquid night. Framed with gold, a starless nothing stretches outward beyond an infinite, black horizon. An old fisherman, his shape stark within the ring’s abyss, awaits Sivir’s living eyes as they rise to meet his own. He grins, his mouth blooming into hundreds of teeth.

The fisherman turns to cast his spear into space, each step ponderous, and the needle arcs endlessly upward, then down beneath the surface of glistening, obsidian waters. The ring continues to expand as ichor pours from its center. It fills the room, it fills the cottage, it bursts from the windows and doors. The ring slices into the roof of Sivir’s home, cutting the building’s facade from its foundation, cutting the cliff face it is stood on from the island itself. As she crashes into the sea, Sivir is reflected against the absence of nothing beneath her, the nothing all around her, and she watches the fisherman as his line catches on something, deep below their feet.

Steadily, surely, he begins to drag it towards them.

Sivir runs her finger across the edge of the golden ring. There is no pain as the cut opens, merely a sigh, a release. Sivir studies her blood as it sinks into the metal—a deep, blossoming vermillion that seems to stretch along its surface, down its labyrinthine engravings towards the ever-spreading emptiness at its center. The ring retracts; the portal closes, and the darkness burbles meekly before it is banished.

Sivir drinks tea flavored with rose petals, and watches the leaves outside her window. The clouds begin to dissipate as morning turns to day, and the trees slowly settle against the wind. Blood is smeared along the side of her cup. Black fluid trails along her floor.

It is three days before the rise of the blood moon, and a pair of twin girls has vanished along the beach at night. The day stretches. Sivir remembers how the elders wailed, how their cries punctured the evening air, and how their elaborate burial rites filled the waves with sputtering paper lanterns—an old tradition intended to guide lost souls home. The girls’ bodies were never recovered.

Sivir watches the ring as it rests against the corner of her home.

It is silent. Sated, for now.

It took Sivir hours to dig the ring out of the woods. She hadn’t even known to stop until it almost cut her hand in half, its gleaming edge jutting from the foot of an old stone. When she looked up the day had fully passed, and it wasn’t clear how or why she had found herself there.

Sivir took it into the village, maybe? It is hard to recall. Her memories seem distant, unfamiliar, as though they rest at the bottom of a clear lake she can’t breach. Sivir takes the ring to the other side of the island and buries it with sand. Sivir takes the ring to the sea throws it in.

The ring always returns. Resting quietly against the dusty corner of her home, hungrily awaiting only her. And when Sivir gazes into it, the ring opens again and again, the old fisherman locking eyes with her against a still, atramentous midnight, and he begins to pull some nameless horror up from the bottom of the world.

Sometimes Sivir thinks she is dead. She rubs her thumb along the matching shell bracelets in her pocket in those moments—each one small and delicate—and finds in some half-remembered nightmare a pair of girls, hand-in-hand, drifting crimson against the moonlit sea.

Sivir lives on a coastal road overlooking a small archipelago, on the far edge of a quiet island. She is remote enough from Sugiru to enjoy respite from its daily squabbles, and close enough to be accepted as a part of its community. When Sivir looks over the cliffs she sees herself smashed against the rocks below. A different Sivir will look up from the beach, her hands black with the blood of hundreds of people.

Sivir awakens on a bed made of cotton and straw, on the second day before the rise of the blood moon. She peers down the hall at still another Sivir, clutching the golden ring so tightly that her fingers hang by fleshy threads. Her free hand carries a horned, wooden half-mask emblazoned with the visage of a demon, and she begins to place it over her face. Sivir closes her eyes, and when she opens them she is alone.

Sivir’s memories often overlap. Great lengths of time vanish behind her, and recently she has begun to find herself standing outdoors, gazing upwards at a blank and yawning sky. She walks through the village and greets its inhabitants; she walks through the forest and savors its quiet. She looks at her feet and finds the lacerated skull of a man she saw only an hour before, but when she shakes herself awake he stands in front of her at the harborside, brow furrowed in concern. Sivir imagines her hands wrapping around his neck, and ripping his throat out with her teeth.

Her fingers stretch and bend, her bones piercing through flesh in blighted indigos and reds. Great horns burst from her skull; her skin cracks apart as the chrysalis of her mortal body finally gives in, finally gives way to the true body beneath, and she howls through her single flaming eye as sad, small creatures run for safety. She moves against the turning of the world, her feet pounding across time as serrated claws cut through tiny, gnawing, pleading things. She peels the walls off a building and falls upon the craven figures inside, drinking in their screams as thick rivers of blood pour past her monstrous shadow and into the sea.

Sivir finds herself suddenly on the beach, rubbing dead girls’ shell bracelets between her fingers.

The night creeps in softly. Moment by moment, the sun’s rays vanish beneath a blanket of cold stars, and Sivir stands before the black static of the ocean, its lightless waves roiling against her reflectionless mirror world.

The fisherman’s spear sings across a vast emptiness. Light and sound fail as he casts his line, its heft sinking down into the bottomless chasm above which he stands. His is a sea without end, twin reflections of an infinite nihility, the grave of a lost and nameless epoch. He smiles with the hunger of an ancient shark.

His hook sticks fast, and he begins to pull a great shape up from far below.

Inch by inch, second by second, a mountainous silhouette emerges from beyond the edges of the fisherman’s black horizon. It is a tower, a fortress, a sun; thick ichor sloughs from it without end, a great wall of impenetrable darkness dragged along from some forgotten pelagic abyss. The spear tears loose from the object’s surface, a wooden mask impaled along its tip.

One day before the night of the blood moon, Sivir places the mask over her face.

Sivir is Sivir, and Sivir is not.

In the red light of the blood moon, Sivir walks the paths of a long-deserted Sugiru, clutching the golden ring in one hand, and a mask in the other. Her muscles twitch at the slightest sound. Her organs pop unnaturally, pebbles washed smooth by the timeless advance of a biological sea.

All around her are bodies. A thousand broken dolls, their arms outstretched in hideous ecstasy, frozen in some grotesque invocation of long-absent patrons, house gods, and ancestor spirits. These victims are a delicate garden—these offerings, their curled palms, are the blossoms of a dark and sumptuous harvest given in the name of entities too terrible to understand. Some aren’t completely dead, and their fingers grasp gently at nothing.

The blood moon descends.

It is larger than Sivir imagined it—too large, looming as a great crimson sphere over her lost and rudderless island. It casts no reflection against the sea, for it has no equal; it shadows the true moon and devours it whole, its hunger colossal, unending, unquenched.

Sivir drops the wooden mask and the golden ring. She falls to her knees beneath this mirrored cradle, its center a bounding main of beating wings and boiling, rippling blood. A great figure stirs within: the lone demonic progeny of humanity’s twinned soul, a great demon in the shape of a man, sliding from his womb of light as the moon’s embryonic shell breaks open. The massive figure falls into the waves—a wicked blade in his hand, wings flapping with the sound of cracking glaciers. Buried once, and now not.

Briefly, Sivir imagines the leaves outside her window, and tea flavored with rose petals, and a small cottage on a small island that seems now so, so small. She imagines the girls by the sea, their shattered bodies floating past the reflection of some pale, inadequate pretender, and the dark whispers of an ancient, unnameable thing, standing before her in the bloodstained night.

She raises her head, and imagines the world as a mirror.

The moon caresses Sivir’s two faces, and envelops them.

Ah, Bilgewater.

It’s a hateful, stinking cesspit of murder and treachery at the best of times… and damn, it’s good to be home.

My back’s to the open ocean as I row out across Bilgewater Bay, so I’m facing the lights of the port city, shining like fool’s gold in the distance.

We’d been running jobs in Valoran, in the City of Progress and its uglier, downtrodden sister, but things started getting hot. And besides, the Prince reached out to us with this contract, and the money was too good to ignore.

Far too good, really, for what looks to me like a wild-eel chase. There’s gotta be a catch—always is—but as I said, the coin on offer weren’t to be sniffed at.

Still can’t believe we’re back. Last time we were here, things got a little, well, explosive.

Sarah Fortune played us all like a fiddle—me, T.F., Gangplank. No one’d ever taken on that gods-damned psychopath like she did. Blew him and his ship to smithereens, with all Bilgewater watching. And T.F. and I, we got a close-up view. Just dumb luck we survived. Of course I hold a grudge against her, but I have to admit, it was mighty impressive what she pulled off. She’s running the place now, from what I hear. Just a few more captains to bring into line, or see to the bottom of Bilgewater Bay. Only a few left who still reckon they can make a play to claim the unofficial throne themselves. Like our old friend, the Prince…

“Can you at least try to keep your mind on the job? We’re drifting off course.”

I glower at T.F. While I’m working up a sweat, the smug bastard’s sitting back, absently flipping cards through his slippery fingers. He’s far too scrawny to be of use on an oar anyway, but him criticizing me while lounging like a fancy Demacian high lord rubs me the wrong way.

The fact that he’s right—current’s pulled us a couple hundred yards south, meaning I gotta row that extra bit harder to get us where we need to be—just riles me even more.

“Feel free to take over any time you want, m’lord,” I growl.

“Can’t,” he says, as he lays three cards face down on the upturned barrel in front of him. “Busy.”

Scowling, I glance over my shoulder to get my bearings. We’re passing through a forest of sharp rocks, jutting out of the ocean like knife blades. ’Course, it ain’t the ones above the surface that are the problem. Just like always, it’s the blades you can’t see that are the real killers.

They’re called the Widow Makers, and they’ve claimed scores of victims over the years. You can see the remnants of the ships that’ve smashed on ’em: broken masts wedged between rocks, shattered planks circling in eddies, rotted boarding nets strung up on razor-sharp pinnacles.

Most of those wrecks are caused by damned fool captains not wanting to pay a Buhru wave-whisperer to guide ’em into port. Not too clever, that choice.

Thankfully, we ain’t trying to navigate the Widow Makers in anything more than ten feet from bow to stern. The leaky rowboat’s name is Intrepid, and I must admit I’ve grown more than a little fond of her since we met an hour past. She’s not much to look at—a bit rusty around the edges, and she could use a lick of paint—but she hasn’t let us down yet, which is something. And she ain’t complained about my rowing.

T.F. turns over each of the three cards, one by one. He frowns, and shuffles ’em back up in his hands. He’s been doing this since we ghosted off the White Wharf. Something in the cards has got him spooked, but I don’t give it any more thought. Tonight’s little paddle into the harbor ain’t gonna amount to nothin’, but we gotta make a show of giving it a solid try. I’m just damn pleased we got half the gold Krakens up front.

Far as I’m concerned, that’s all we’ll be getting, and that’s fine by me. Easiest coin we’ve ever made.

A splash of seawater from my oars slaps T.F. in the face. He stops shuffling his cards and looks up, glaring. “Do you mind?” he says.

Nope, I don’t mind one bit.

“My bad.” I give him a shrug, and keep on rowing.

He takes off his hat and wipes his cheek. Once done, he gives me another glare and puts it back on. Pulls it down low in front, tryin’ to seem all mysterious. Looks like a damn fool to me.

I try to keep the smirk off my face as I dig one of my oars into the water again. Get him good this time, right in the side of the head. Smack.

“Oh, for Luck’s sake,” he snaps, glowering at me. Sticks one finger in his ear and gives it a good waggle. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

“Can’t help it,” I says. “It’s your own fault, tryin’ to look fancy, with your mighty fine coat and your having a bath once a week. Brings out somethin’ mean in me.”

I get him again, perhaps a little more than I intended to. Soaks him to the skin. Infuriated, he starts to stand up, leveling a finger at me, but that just sets Intrepid rocking wildly. He sits down in a hurry, clinging to the sides of the little rowboat, a hilariously terrified expression on his face. For all his show of fanciness, in that moment all T.F.’s cool just got thrown overboard.

I shake my head, chuckling. Still makes me laugh that he’s one of the river folk, one that lived half his life in Bilgewater, no less, and he still can’t swim.

He’s staring daggers at me, his perfumed and carefully oiled hair now hanging limp and dripping like seaweed. I try not to, but it sets me giggling again.

“You’re an imbecile,” he says.

I row on. After a time, the tolling of Third Bell reaches us, drifting across the harbor from Bilgewater.

“We’re here,” T.F. announces, finally, consulting his cards once more.

I look over my shoulder. A jagged rock big enough to be a small island is looming before us, but it doesn’t look much different from any of the others.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” he replies, sharply. Still annoyed about the water, I guess. “I’ve checked and re-checked. The cards keep telling me this is the one.”

There’s quite a few little tricks T.F. can do with those cards of his. He can use ’em to get in and out of places we’d otherwise never have access to, which is mighty handy when tryin’ to pull off a job. I’ve even seen him hurl a card to make a wagon explode like it was packed with gunpowder. But what he’s been doin’ tonight is proper old-blood river folk stuff. Must say it’s usually pretty accurate.

At T.F.’s direction, I pull Intrepid in close, rowing around to the leeward side of the sheer rock face. The swell rises and falls, threatening to smack us against it, but I keep her steady and drop anchor when T.F. tells me we’re at the right spot.

The rock towers overhead.

“So… How do we get up there?” I ask.

“We don’t,” he says. “The cards tell me the shrine’s inside.”

“I don’t see no cave entrance.”

Then I see T.F.’s grin, and my heart sinks. He points overboard, down into the water.

“You ain’t serious,” I mutter.

Last time we were in Bilgewater, I thought I was gonna drown, chained to a cannon kicked overboard. T.F. saved me, but it was a close thing, and I ain’t too keen to relive the experience.

“’Fraid so, partner,” he says. “Unless you want me going in by my lonesome…”

“So you make off with the loot and claim the rest of those Krakens without me? I don’t think so.”

I ain’t forgotten that this son of a dung-worm has left me high and dry before, running off with the coin and leaving me to face the consequences. Those years locked up ain’t ones I’m getting back.

“I thought you didn’t believe the shrine existed,” says T.F. “If I recall correctly, you described it as a ‘wild-eel chase’, right?”

“Yeah, well, I still think it’s a load of superstitious horse manure, but on the off chance it ain’t, I want my cut.”

He’s the one smirking now, as I start taking off my coat and boots. I make sure my shells and cigars are secured and watertight. Then check and re-check that my big double-barreled shotgun, Destiny—newly forged in Piltover, to my own specifications—is tightly wrapped in oilskins, and strapped snugly across my back. I roll up my sleeves.

“So where’s this tunnel, then?”

I dive in. Hope I ain’t jumping right into a school of frenzied razorfish.

It’s bastard cold and bastard dark, but I kick down, going deeper. Fish and gods-know-what-else dart in front of me, flickering at the edge of my vision.

There. While it’s all dark down here, there’s a patch that’s, well, darker, further below. A tunnel entrance. Guess T.F.’s cards were right. I swim into it, and soon realize the water outside weren’t dark at all, not compared to this. I can’t even see my own hands in front of me. It ain’t too wide, neither—my fingertips scrape the smooth stone on either side with every pull.

Glancing back, I see the little circle of blue marking the tunnel entrance. I reckon I’ve got just enough air to turn around and make for the surface. I go on any further, and I ain’t getting back out that way.

T.F. better be right about this. If I drown down here, I swear, next Harrowing I’ll be back to haunt the bastard.

There’s light up ahead, and I kick off the tunnel floor toward it, thinking I’ve found a way out… but no. It’s just a bastard glowing jellyfish, tentacles drifting like deadly towlines. Ain’t going near that thing.

I swim on, now completely blind. Panic’s slowly rising like a Blood Moon tide. I hit a wall in front, and for a horrible moment I think I’m at a dead end. Instinct kicks in, and I push straight up, searching for air, but all I achieve is smacking my head on the rock above. Hard. The cold numbs the pain, but I reckon there’s blood in the water. Not exactly ideal to be bleeding. Berserker sharks can smell that miles away…

I feel trapped, like a rat in a water-filled barrel. I might drown for real this time.

There’s gotta be a way through. I scrabble around desperately, feeling blindly at the walls. Seems like there’re curving spirals carved in the stone, but that ain’t too interesting right now. The air in my lungs feels like poison, and my strength’s starting to fade when I find the opening.

Kicking through, I suddenly see moonlight overhead. I swim up. Break the surface. Suck in a deep, ragged breath. I’m alive!

Treading water, I take stock of my surroundings. I’m inside a cave, partially open to the sky, with the moon shining down.

I paddle over to a rocky ledge and clamber out. Crabs the size of my head skitter out of my way. They’ve each got one overgrown blue claw, and they’re waving ’em at me like they begrudge my presence here. Well, that’s fine with me. Never liked crabs. Make my skin crawl, they do. Too many legs.

First things first. I unsling Destiny and unwrap her oilskins. In the moonlight I give her a quick inspection, checking the loading mechanism and trigger. Looks good. I load a couple of shells, and suddenly things feel a whole lot brighter. Not much that gives me the fear when I’ve got the good lady Destiny locked and loaded in my hands.

“Took you long enough,” says a voice.

I almost unleash both barrels before I realize it’s just T.F. He’s leaning against a rock, trying to look all detached and suave since he took the easy way in with his cards.

“Damn near shat myself, you stupid bastard,” I growl.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

I touch my scalp. My hand comes away red. “I’ll live.” Hope I’m right about that.

He might try to play it cool, but T.F.’s still looking at me, and I can tell he’s concerned. I won’t admit it, but I appreciate that.

“Don’t get all excited. I’m fine!” I look around, noting that every inch of the walls is inscribed with curving patterns. Buhru carvings. Takes me a moment to realize what they are.

“That’s a lot of serpents,” I say, stating the obvious.

Huh. Maybe there’s something to this wild-eel chase after all.

“Still think this is nothing but a myth?” T.F. asks.

I just grunt in reply. Even if I am startin’ to come around, I ain’t giving him the satisfaction yet.

See, the thing we’ve been hired to find is a Bilgewater legend, something any sane individual would dismiss as no more real than the Tidal Trickster, or the legends of the Summoners.

The Abyssal Crown.

It’s said that whoever wears the crown commands the Beasts Below. And whoever commands the Beasts Below would control the waters around the Serpent Isles. Control them, and, well, you’d naturally control Bilgewater.

That’s why the Prince is so desperate to get his golden hands on it. Not much Missy Fortune could do to dispute his claim if he was wearing the Abyssal Crown.

“So, where’s the shrine?” I say.

“There’s a passage leading farther in, back over there,” T.F. says, gesturing deeper into the cave. “Perhaps it’s through there.”

“No more swimmin’, I hope,” I mutter.

The “passage” T.F. found ain’t much more than a crack in the rocks. He’s got no meat on his bones and slips through like a flounder. Mine is the more robust—and I daresay, more admirable—physique, and I lose a few buttons tryin’ to squeeze through.

I’m grumblin’ and swearin’ under my breath, cursing that double helping of chowder I scarfed down earlier in the night, when T.F. shushes me, forefinger tapping pointedly on his lips.

With a final grunt I’m through, almost falling flat on my face. Then the smell hits me like a fist. It’s a stink not dissimilar to the vile offal-and-fish-guts reek of the slaughter docks. Makes the eyes water. Brings back bad memories, too.

Moonlight filters down through a gap in the cave ceiling, but it’s still dark. Takes me a moment to register the sheer amount of flotsam and jetsam piled up around the place. It looks like a hoarder’s paradise, with all manner of junk and refuse filling every nook and cranny.

This cavern’s larger than the last, and every part of it—well, every part that doesn’t have random crap heaped up against it—is also covered in Buhru carvings. More serpents. I’m sensing a theme here…

There’s a big old pool of black water to one side, probably connected to the same bastard tunnel that tried to drown me, but there’s no way all this refuse and junk got washed in here. Nah, this was brought here by someone. In truth, there’s a strange kinda order to it, even if it’s the kinda order imposed by a mind twisted like a sailor’s knot.

There’re barrels and boxes, chests, and nets. Fishing tackle and rusted harpoons, lengths of long-rotted rope. Piles of shells and stones are arranged in strange stacks, and jars of fetid liquid and gods-know-what-else are lined up on crude shelves made from driftwood.

A rusted anchor leans against a wall, and a ship’s barnacle-covered figurehead—a buxom lass with a fish tail—is wedged between a couple of boulders. Her flaking paint makes it look like her skin is coming off.

Broken masts criss-cross overhead like crooked rafters. Seaweed hangs from them in long strands, alongside little bundles of slowly spinning fishbones and twigs, tied with twine and hair, and torn ribbons of rotting sails.

And there, in the shadows toward the far wall, half hidden among the bric-a-brac, there’s something that looks an awful lot like…

“You think that’s it?” I whisper.

It’s an altar of sorts, carved straight outta the stone wall. Made to look like a swarming mass of sea serpents—red fins, bile belchers, ebony spine-throats, the lot of ’em. It’s surrounded by hundreds of unlit candles, melted wax everywhere, as well as dozens of skulls from all manner of beasties. More than a few human skulls in there, too.

“The Abyssal Shrine.” There’s awe in T.F.’s voice. He’s always been a superstitious type, being river folk and all. “Yeah, that’s it, all right.”

T.F. starts picking his way over to the shrine. I follow a little more slowly, eyeing the shadows. Feels like about now is when something bad would usually happen. That tends to be the way these things go for us. ’Course, I’m also watching T.F.

“You better not be tryin’ to pocket that crown on the sly,” I growl. He gives me a dirty look, but doesn’t bother replying.

Something catches my eye, then, and I think my heart stops for a second.

There’s an elderly woman lying on a knee-high rock shelf nearby. I almost missed her, scanning right over her before I realized what I was seeing.

“Ah hells,” I breathe. Now my heart’s going again, beating like a Noxian war drum.

She’s on her back, hands clasped in front of her, like a statue of the dead. Actually, by the looks of her, she might well be dead, or damn close. Her clothes are half rotten, and she’s the color of a week-dead fish. Might be the light, or lack thereof, but it also looks mighty like the veins in her see-through skin are ink black.

“There’s, ah, an old lady over here,” I hiss.

T.F.’s at the shrine, giving it the once over. “Huh?” he says absently.

“I said there’s an old lady over here,” I repeat, a little louder, glancing over at her to see if she wakes up. She doesn’t.

T.F. glances back. “What’s she doing?”

“Sleepin’,” I whisper. “Or being dead. I dunno which.” I give her a sniff and almost retch. “But she stinks somethin’ fierce. So probably dead.”

T.F. is making his concerned face, his brows meeting in the middle. He usually reserves that for a really bad hand of cards, or finding a fresh stain on the ridiculously overpriced tailored jacket he got in Piltover.

“I guess… just leave her be, then?” he says.

Brilliant. I change the subject. “Any sign of the crown?”

“No.” He turns back to the shrine. “It should be here…”

I move toward him, to help with the search, when the woman gives a rasping snort behind me. I turn fast, shotgun leveled, but she doesn’t stir. Alive, then.

I look at what I’m doing, and shift my aim toward the sky. What was I gonna do, shoot a sleeping old grandma? No matter how bad she smells, that seems like it would just be inviting a whole shipload of bad luck down upon us.

Turning back, I keep a wary eye on the old bat, just in case. Then I step on something. Something that moves. Something that gives out a muffled shriek.

There’s another person in here, completely buried beneath a pile of rotting sailcloth.

He scrabbles away from me like a cornered dog, panicked eyes wild. By the cut of his clothes and the gold earring, he has the look of a sailor, but one that ain’t had a good feed in a while. It’s then that I see the rusted shackle around his leg, connected to a chain, which in turn is bolted to the wall nearby.

Seeing he’s no threat, I ease Destiny’s barrels up. I nod to T.F., who’d spun around, glowing cards at the ready.

“Easy now,” I say to the captive, holding up a hand. “Ain’t here to do you no harm.”

“Get me out of here,” he whispers, eyes dartin’ between me and the sleeping old woman. “I don’t want to be no sacrifice. Was just sent to look for the crown! Get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out—”

His voice is gettin’ louder as his panic builds. Who knows how long the poor fella’s been chained to a wall down here? Or why?

“Now then, son, keep it down,” I say, trying to be all calm like.

“—get me out of here, get me—”

“Shut him up,” hisses T.F.

“Why you always got to order me around, huh?” I snap, makin’ a show of turning toward my partner in crime and jabbing a finger at him. “I got this, alright? It’s just like when—”

It’s a simple misdirection technique, one I learned from T.F., actually. Get your mark’s attention with a sudden movement, direct their focus where you want ’em to look, and they won’t see the thing you don’t want ’em to see.

Case in point: the prisoner’s frantic gaze shifts to T.F., and he don’t notice me stepping in close ’til it’s too late. I slam the butt of Destiny square into his face. I ain’t tryin’ to kill him, but I want him to have a good long sleep.

I throw a glance over my shoulder, but it seems the old bird didn’t hear anything. Probably stone deaf. Still, the sailor seemed pretty worked up. I’m startin’ to get the feelin’ there’s somethin’ mighty wrong about her…

“Nicely done,” T.F. says.

I give him a nod, and kneel down beside the unconscious captive. He looks a bit familiar… “Think I recognize him,” I say. I yank down his collar, popping a few buttons. Yep, there it is—a small tattoo, a pair of crossed hand cannons. “Yeah, this is one of Missy Fortune’s boys. High-ranking one, too. Reckon she’d pay handsomely to have him back.”

T.F. grunts in amusement. “Seems the Prince isn’t the only one after the crown.”

“Looks like. Wonder if she’d pay better?”

“Need to find it first,” he says.

“What did he say about being a sacrifice?”

Far as I’m concerned, if that old woman is strong enough to overpower Miss Fortune’s man, she’s either got help—which could be close by—or there’s much more to her than it seems. Either way, I ain’t keen to stick around.

“Let’s just get out of here,” I mutter. “This don’t feel good.”

“But we’re so close!” T.F. says. “It’s right here, I know it! Give me a little longer.”

Feels strange, me wanting to cut and run and him wanting to stay. That ain’t the way these things usually play out.

I cast another uneasy glance at the old lady, but give a reluctant nod. “Alright. But be quick.”

T.F. seats himself on the floor, and starts dealing out cards before him, face down, in a symmetrical pattern. I leave him to it, and start poking around, prodding into dark spaces with Destiny’s barrels, and being a bit more cautious of where I plant my feet. I find some old, tarnished coins, and am more than a little surprised to see a few gold Krakens among ’em. I pocket those, sliding a glance over at T.F. to make sure he doesn’t notice.

“You certain it’s here?” I say.

T.F. lifts up a card so I can see it. The picture looks like… well, it looks like a gold crown in the shape of a serpent.

“Don’t think I’ve seen that card before,” I say.

“Nor have I,” says T.F. “It’s never existed, ’til now. The crown’s here. Somewhere.”

I’ll never really understand those cards of his.

I keep searching, but after a while, I get the sense we’re being watched. Can’t say I much like the feeling. I turn around in place, looking into the darkness. There’re flickers of movement at the corners of my vision, but it all goes still when I focus on them. I try to shake it off. Probably just more crabs. Still, it seems like getting out of here would be a good idea, sooner rather than later.

T.F. mutters to himself, then scoops up his cards. He looks around, frowning. “You get the feeling we’re being watched?”

Not just me, then. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. I catch another glimpse of movement, and find my eye drawn to an upturned bucket on the floor.

Did it—did it just move?

I keep focused on it, and after a moment, the bucket does indeed inch along the floor, just a smidge, before stopping again. I reckon I’ve seen a few odd things in my life, but can’t say I’ve ever seen a bucket acting sneaky before.

I take a step closer, leaning down toward it. There’s a hole in the side of it, and it looks like… yep, there’s an eye staring out, right back at me. A big, yellow, staring eye.

“Got you now, you little—” I say, leveling Destiny at it.

Seeing its ruse is up, whatever’s within flips over the bucket and makes a break for it. I almost shoot, before I see it’s nothing but a damn octopus. I hear T.F. chortle as the rubbery thing goes squelching across the cave floor, hauling itself along with a surprising turn of speed.

It’s only got a single eye, and it’s still staring at me as it scoots backward.

“That’s… not something you see every day,” T.F. says.

The gangly green thing flops along to the base of the rock shelf where the old woman sleeps. It reaches up with a pair of tentacles and starts climbing.

“Well, don’t let it wake her up!” hisses T.F.

“What d’you want me to do, shoot it? Don’t you think that might just wake her up?”

T.F. has a card at the ready, but doesn’t throw, probably on account of not wanting to risk hitting the old woman. “I don’t know. Grab it or something!”

“I ain’t touchin’ no one-eyed octopus, Tobias.”

He gives me a look at the use of his real name. “I’ve told you not to call me that,” he says. “It’s Twisted Fate now, all right?”

I roll my eyes. “I ain’t callin’ you that. It’s stupid an’ pretentious an’—”

The old woman gives a shuddering snort, and we cease our bickering instantly. We look over to see the slimy beastie wrapping its tentacles around her face. There’s an unpleasant squelching sound as it pulls itself onto her head, like a grotesque bonnet, and attaches. Its big yellow eye blinks.

“That ain’t right,” I murmur.

Then the old woman sits bolt upright.

Now, I’m secure enough in myself to admit the sound I made when the old lady sat up was perhaps a little more shrill than I’m proud of. But to be fair, T.F.’s cry was even less dignified than mine.

The old woman’s eyes snap open. They’re as white as serpent milk. Blind she might be, but she turns toward us all the same.

“More little rats, sneaking and thieving?” she says. Her voice sounds like, well, exactly how you’d imagine an old sea witch with an octopus on her head would sound. “Naughty rats, nothing here for you, oh no…”

“Now hold on just one moment, lady,” I say, as she swings her legs around and plants her bare feet on the cave floor. I’ve got Destiny leveled at her, but she don’t seem to care. “We ain’t no rats, and we ain’t no thieves. Well, we are thieves, but, well—”

I look over at T.F.

“Help me out, would you?” I hiss.

“We’re looking for the Abyssal Crown,” T.F. says. “If you’d be so kind as to hand it over, there doesn’t need to be any trouble.”

The old witch stands up with the aid of a serpent-headed staff. Didn’t notice that earlier. She turns her blank, cloudy eyes toward us, and gives a toothless smile. “Silly, silly rats,” she says, drooling. “Already drowned. Promised to the Beasts Below, and don’t even know it.”

She slams her staff down on the floor. Reverberations shudder through the cave, and ripples spread across the black water. There’s a clicking sound, like lots of sticks and twigs breaking, and the walls come alive with movement.

Things detach from the surrounding darkness.

Big things.

“Crabs,” I mutter. “’Course it had to be crabs.”

These ain’t normal crabs, though—not that I’d describe anything with that many legs as normal under regular circumstances, but these things are something else. They’re about the size of small wagons, for starters, and they seem mighty intent on ripping us limb from limb.

They come skittering toward us, each waving a giant blue claw. Gotta say, it looks a whole lot more threatening when that claw’s big enough to snip a man in two. More of them break the surface of the water, chittering and snapping, scuttling sideward up into the cave.

“Eat this, you leggy son of a…!” I roar, and unleash both barrels into the first to come at us.

The blast is deafening, and hurls the giant crab backward with satisfying violence. A flash of red, and T.F. sends one of his cards slicing into the middle of a cluster of them. It explodes, catching the lot of ’em in a burst of sorcerous flames.

I reload just in time to pump a shot into another of the skittering beasts, blasting its overgrown claw to pieces. Shards of crab shell and wet meat splatter outward, and the behemoth staggers. My second shell disintegrates its eyestalks and clacking mandibles, and it’s thrown onto its back. Kicks like a damn mule, does Destiny.

One tries to flank T.F., and I give a shout of warning. He dives, sliding underneath a snapping claw, and flicks another card. It hits the creature with a golden flash. The crab goes instantly still, frozen in place. Freshly reloaded, I step up and blast it back into the water in a shower of crab bits.

“We gotta get out of here!” I holler.

“Not without the crown!” T.F. calls back, dodging a claw.

Feels to me like he’s trying to make a point. See, T.F.’s got a history of taking off as soon as things start to look dicey, leaving me to pick up the pieces. But he swears that’s not his way anymore, and I guess he’s willing to die to prove it. Well, that’s just damn stupid. Admirable, but stupid.

“Ain’t no good to us if we’re dead!” I shout.

I take another shot, but one of the damn crabs grabs Destiny in its claw as I squeeze the trigger. It drags my aim off, and I hit the Abyssal Shrine, blasting it apart.

The sea witch—who, I might add, has been cackling away like a fiend this whole time—screeches in fury.

I’m wrestlin’ with the crab that’s got Destiny in its claw. I ain’t releasing my grip, and the crab don’t seem inclined to, neither.

I snarl. “That’s mine, you scuttling—”

A pair of cards slices through the air, taking off each of the crab’s eye stalks. That makes it let go, and it staggers off blindly, bumping into walls and other scuttlers.

I nod my thanks, but T.F. ain’t lookin’. He’s starin’ over at the shrine. Well, where the shrine was. Now it’s mostly a pile of rocks. Seems it was hollow the whole time, and that my wayward shot bust it wide open.

“Well, would you look at that,” I say.

Seems someone was entombed inside. They’re nothing more than dried bones now, sticking out of the rubble. There’s a tarnished crown circling their skull, too, a crown that glints like gold, and is fashioned in the form of a hissing serpent…

I cast a glance over at the witch. She looks mighty displeased with this turn of events. Scowling, she starts to rise up off the floor. For a second I wonder if I hit my head harder than I first thought, and I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m seeing things right.

But I’m not imagining it. She’s now hovering a good two feet off the ground.

“Huh,” I say.

With a snarl, the witch jabs her staff toward us, and a hole opens up in the air. Now, admittedly that doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s the best I got to describe it. The hole’s about the size of a cannonball, at least to start with, but it quickly expands, like a rip in a ship’s hull. A torrent of frigid seawater spills through it, and I go down to one knee as I lose my footing.

There’s movement in the hole as well, and a massive yellow eye appears, iris contracting sharply as it peers through. Looks just like the eye of the octopus thing latched atop the witch’s head, only a hundred, no, a thousand times bigger. I get the feelin’ it’s somewhere deep, deep down in the darkest ocean depths, but here it is, eye-balling us like we’re bait on the end of a line.

Next I know, the eye pulls away, and two giant tentacles lash through the hole. I unleash both barrels, and blow one of those tentacles clean off. It flops to the cave floor, spraying blue blood all over as it thrashes and wriggles. The other one wraps around a giant crab, lifting it easily, and whips it back into the hole.

The old sea witch remains floating in place, with an evil grin. Seems she’s happy to hang back and watch her beast finish us off.

“Get the damn crown!” I bark, pushing back to my feet and fumbling with a pair of fresh shells.

Again the yellow eye races up to the hole, peering through. It looks at T.F., but I shout and wave my arms, and its giant pupil snaps toward me.

A tentacle darts through and wraps around me. Damn near crushes my ribcage as it squeezes and lifts me off my feet. It starts pulling me in, but before I’m dragged through the hole to gods-know-where, I manage to get Destiny up, and level it at the eye.

Seems to me there’s a certain level of intelligence in that gaze, more than one’d expect of a big ol’ sea monster. It sees Destiny and has an inkling of what’s coming, ’cause the eye pulls back, fast. Not fast enough, mind. Destiny roars, barking fire and brimstone, and I hear—and feel—the great beast’s roar of pain.

I’m dropped abruptly to the floor. Water continues to pour into the cave, sending me tumbling head over arse before I’m slammed against the wall. Thankfully, I’ve still got a hold of Destiny—I’m none too eager to head back to Piltover to get another made just yet—but she likely took some water during my little spill.

I come up spluttering. Feels like I’ve swallowed half of Bilgewater Bay. I see T.F. lift the crown off the skeleton, and he gives me a quick nod.

“Now we go,” he says.

I scramble to my feet. Seems like, for the moment at least, the beast behind the hole has backed off, though water keeps pouring through. The whole cave’s knee deep, and refuse and junk are floating around. The giant crabs—those few still here—are milling around, confused as to what’s going on.

The witch’s captive is awake now. He’s climbed up onto a rock, and is staring around him, terrified. Can’t say I blame him. He’s still chained up as well, which ain’t ideal for him with the rising water.

I aim Destiny at the chain and pull the trigger—least I can do is give the fella a fighting chance—but nothing happens. Seems water did get into her workings.

“Sorry, friend,” I say with a shrug.

The witch sees T.F. with the crown, and hisses in fury. She starts floating over toward us, toes dragging in the frigid brine.

T.F. tosses the crown to me, and I awkwardly catch it.

“Why you givin’ it to me?” I have to yell to be heard over the sound of the roaring water.

“Figured you wouldn’t want to let it out of your sight,” he shouts back. “That you wouldn’t trust me to shift out with it.”

I consider that for half a second. Gotta say, I’m a little surprised, and a little impressed. If T.F. keeps this up, I might just have to reassess my opinion of him.

Still, the witch is now focused on me, and it looks like she’s mouthing a curse. As I said, I ain’t the superstitious type, but I ain’t stupid, neither. I toss the crown back to him.

“I trust ya,” I shout. “More or less.”

I take another glance at the witch. Behind her, the big old yellow eye is peeking through the hole again. I feel a moment of satisfaction to see an angry red mark where Destiny bit.

T.F. flicks out a trio of cards, each trailing sorcerous flame, but the witch makes a dismissive gesture. An invisible force knocks them off course, and they fail to hit home. On she comes, floating closer.

She’s smiling her toothless grin now, exposing rotting gums. Seems to reason she thinks she’s got us dead to rights.

“Go, get out of here!” I shout to T.F., even as I swing Destiny over my shoulders. No time to see her wrapped and watertight. If I get out of this mess, she’ll need some tending.

“See you on the other side,” T.F. says with a wink. I believe him, too. Who would have thought?

“Take them, now!” shrieks the witch.

She points her staff at us, and the giant behemoth hurls itself forward, trying to push itself through the hole. A mass of tentacles squeeze out, reaching for us.

Time to leave. T.F. starts doing his thing, cards dancing, focusing on making his exit. Then he and the crown are gone.

My turn. I take a running jump into the dark pool even as tentacles whip toward me. Really hope this does connect to the tunnel I swam through, else that heroic leap’s gonna seem mighty daft.

I hit the water, diving deep, and start swimming. Can’t see anything worth a damn, but the time for caution is long past. If I smack straight into a wall, so be it. Right now that’s the least of my problems.

Thankfully, seems my hunch was right. I swim under a dark rock, blind, and come up on the other side. Back in the first cavern. I can hear the sea witch screeching in rage, echoing around the cave. Any moment, I expect some big damn tentacles to snake through and pull me back.

Sucking in a deep breath, I dive again.

I surface with a gasp. Shoulda been easier coming back, knowing where I was going, but it damn near killed me.

Hands grab me and haul me up. After more than a little swearing and grunting, both T.F. and I flop into the boat, Intrepid.

“Why you gotta be so damn heavy?” he groans.

“Why you gotta be so damn scrawny?” I throw back.

I have no idea if the sea witch or her pets are coming after us, but it don’t seem like a good idea to stick around and find out. I grab hold of the oars and start pulling.

There’s a ship waiting for us, just beyond the Widow Makers. It’s a sleek cutter, built for speed—the Ascended Empress. It’s a gaudy thing, decked out with gold leaf and a cat-headed woman for a figurehead, presumably the aforementioned empress.

“Guess the Prince’s eager to get a hold of his prize, eh?” says T.F, as the cutter turns toward us.

“Seems like.”

Within minutes, the Empress is alongside us. A net’s thrown down, and eager hands haul us aboard once we clamber to the top.

The Prince and his crew are there to greet us. He’s an odd one, the Prince, always has been. Claims to be descended from the lost rulers of the Shuriman sandlands, and waltzes around wearing gold paint caked on his face. Always pays well, though.

“You have it?” asks the Prince. He’s so eager, he’s practically licking his golden lips.

“You got our coin?” I say.

A pair of purses, bulging with Krakens, are thrown at our feet. I stoop down to inspect them. Got a good heft. Like I said, the Prince’s always been one to pay well.

T.F. hands over the crown, and the Prince takes it, full of reverence. “The Abyssal Crown,” he breathes. He stares at it a moment longer, then places it atop his smooth, golden head.

A broad smile creeps across his face. He gives us an appreciative nod, and strides onto the foredeck. He steps up to the bow and leans out, facing the open ocean, and lifts his arms high.

“Rise!” he bellows, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hear my command, oh dwellers of the deep! Rise and come to me!”

The Prince’s crew are watching expectantly. I catch T.F.’s eye, and nod down toward Intrepid.

I really didn’t expect the crown to work—and part of me figured we’d best not be around when I was proved right—but after everything else I’d seen tonight, I wasn’t dismissing the chance that it might. And if it did, well, that seemed like an even better reason to be far, far away. Besides, that old sea witch probably ain’t gonna be too impressed with someone messin’ with her property.

Still, it’s more than a little surprising when the biggest damn creature I’ve ever seen breaches some hundred feet or so off the Ascended Empress’ starboard.

T.F. and I, we’re already half a league away, heading madly for port, but even from here, the scale of the thing is almost impossible to comprehend.

“Huh,” I grunt.

T.F. can’t even manage that. He stands, all fear of tipping overboard momentarily forgotten, and stares, mouth agape, at the distant sea monster.

I can just make out the tiny figure of the Prince, standing on the Ascended Empress’ deck, arms still lifted to the sky.

The beast continues to rise. It could be mistaken for a small island, though to be fair, not many islands have bloody great glowing lures atop their heads, or teeth the length of a ship’s keel, or masses of coiling tentacles, or pallid dead eyes the size of the moon.

Almost lazily, the gargantuan beast reaches out and wraps the Ascended Empress in its tentacles. The cutter lists to the side, cannons and crew falling into the sea. I can still see the Prince, clinging to the foredeck. Then the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw snaps, biting off the front half of the ship, swallowing it whole—along with the Prince.

It’s over in moments. Before Fifth Bell tolls, all evidence of the Ascended Empress is gone, and the great beast has disappeared beneath the surface.

“Huh,” I say again. Don’t think either of us expected that.

After a while, I start rowing. It’s only once we’re tied up at the White Wharf, and are back on solid ground, that we speak.

“Well, that was really… somethin’,” I say.

“It was.”

“Reckon that sea witch is gonna be comin’ after us?”

“I reckon so.”

I grunt, and we both stand in silence, staring back out across the bay.

“Drink?” says T.F., finally.

I suddenly remember those extra Krakens I pocketed in the witch’s cave. Might not be a bad idea to be rid of them sooner than later.

“Drink,” I agree, with a nod. “And it’s on me.”

Sarah Fortune reclines, boots up on the table. She sips from an ornate goblet, making a show of being casual… though hidden unseen in one of her deep coat pockets, she clasps a loaded hand cannon.

A veritable mother lode of old coins, artifacts, and precious gemstones are piled upon the table before her. Even encrusted in verdigris, barnacles, and dried seaweed, it’s clearly enough to buy up half the Slaughter Fleets. Nevertheless, Sarah Fortune pretends to be unimpressed. No need to seem too eager.

“So, in return for my man, and this lot,” she says, gesturing languidly at the treasure, “what exactly is it you want?”

The sea witch stares at her with her blank, milky gaze. The golden eye of the creature affixed to her head, however, blinks.

“Two rats, promised to the Beasts Below,” the witch hisses. “Find them for me, and all this, and more, shall be yours…”

Kennen had not slowed since setting off from the Great Temple of Koeshin.

The colors of the land formed a swirling palette as he flitted over hills and cliffs, plains and plateaus. The yordle was like a speeding dot amid broad strokes painted on canvas.

As the Kinkou’s Heart of the Tempest, he had delivered the judgment of the order’s leadership thousands of times before. But this time it’s different, Kennen thought. This time it’s about the lives of my Kinkou brothers and sisters.

An urgent request had come from a branch of acolytes to the south. Their temple had been corrupted by an unknown evil spirit. They could find no way to repel it, and so they sought aid from the Kinkou triumvirate.

With Akali’s former role as Fist of Shadow currently unfilled, this “triumvirate” consisted of just two leaders: Shen—the Eye of Twilight—and Kennen. They had made a decision, and now, Kennen raced to distant Raishai, on the southern coast of Zhyun.

When Noxus invaded Ionia many seasons ago, the triumvirate ruled that the Kinkou would not be involved in the war. The Raishai acolytes had been among the order’s most faithful, supporting the edict without question.

And for that, I must save them.

Kennen followed a churning river and dashed across ample golden grassland. Bolting through the misty forests of the southern Shon-Xan mountains, he was like lightning zipping through clouds. He passed a series of ruins, including the village of Xuanain.

It wasn’t until he reached the harbor town of Evirny that Kennen came to a halt under the morning sun. Zhyun’s shore was across the strait, beyond shimmering blue waters.

Kennen boarded the first ferry just before it set sail. Its mast was a living tree grown out of the hull, branches arcing backward, massive leaves catching the sea breeze like membranes on the wings of a southern-isles wyvern.

There was a loose crowd on the ferry, with Kennen the only yordle. The humans tipped their heads to him.

Yordles were treated with respect among Ionians, even when the spirit creatures appeared in their true form, as Kennen did now—as he always did, for he had achieved a state of balance through his Kinkou training. Especially through the teachings of the first Great Master, Tagaciiry, the first Fist of Shadow.

When Kennen joined the Kinkou centuries ago, Tagaciiry had inquired what the yordle admired most about humans.

“Your stories. You have so many.” Kennen’s eyes were wide. “Your lives are short, but your stories preserve what you hold most dear. That’s why you’re better suited for safeguarding the realms than any of the undying.”

Under that clear sky and the blazing sun, Kennen had shared his thoughts on what role he could play for the Kinkou. The Great Master listened, and considered his words.

“Someday, all of you will die,” Kennen added cheerfully. “I’d like to bear your stories. The story of the Kinkou.”

Great Master Tagaciiry had smiled then. “That is a noble idea, and not a small responsibility.”

“I can begin now, by delivering our verdicts to the people.”

“Very well,” said the Great Master. “Your role shall be Coursing the Sun—to shine the light of our judgment, and be the force that mediates between that light and its shadows.”

Kennen stirred from his reverie as the dock came into view, under chalky white cliffs crowned by an emerald expanse of trees.

He waved a clawed hand at the passengers behind him, and they wished him fair winds and swift travel. He jumped off the ferry even before it slowed to dock, skipping over water and onto land.

A storm was beginning to brew. Kennen’s Kinkou robes and mask were soaking wet as he charged through pouring rain, and he went on without food or rest.

I hope I’m not too late.

Dark clouds whirled low, pierced by lightning as the yordle leader arrived.

Kennen noted twenty acolytes sitting in front of the Raishai temple. The building appeared unremarkable, solid and intact.

“Master Kennen, you’re here.” The head of the acolytes, Hayda, stood in deference, but his limbs quaked, his knees buckling under him. “You need to help us fight the baleful spirit that plagues our temple…”

The rest of the acolytes slowly rose, their eyes glassy.

Kennen was hoping that he and Shen had been wrong, but now their worst fear was confirmed. He felt a pang of sadness. They’ve been so loyal.

“There is nothing to be fought,” Kennen told Hayda, his voice soft with grief. “The temple isn’t corrupted. It’s you. All of you.”

A riot of noise broke out. Several acolytes tilted their heads, glaring.

“Corrupted?” Hayda’s eyes bored into Kennen. “We have always obeyed… Long ago, when you told us not to fight the Noxian invaders, we stood by while our people were slaughtered!” His face contorted unnaturally, as if it had melted. “And then, when our fellow Ionians in Tuula, Kashuri, and Huroi called for aid, you bade us not to heed them, and again, we obeyed! We’ve forsaken the opportunity to bring justice to Noxus!”

“You’re filled with anguish,” Kennen said, “and malevolent entities of the spirit realm are feeding on it. They’re feeding on you.”

Kennen could see what the humans could not: dark smoke emanated from them, like tentacles bursting from their bodies. They were surrounded by inky tendrils that sought to devour, creatures clawing out of the spirit realm with greater force as their prey grew more agitated—eventually, they would consume these Kinkou and wreak havoc in Raishai.

“The world is changing,” he said. “Zhyun has descended into turmoil, and you’re torn between what the Kinkou demands of you and what your hearts desire.” He paused, then said what he came to say. “I’m releasing you from the order.”

“You’re banishing us?” said an acolyte in the back row.

“You can’t preserve the balance between realms in this state.” Kennen looked at each acolyte in turn. I need to get through to them. “Leave the Kinkou now. This is the only way you can heal. Do what you will, so your dark emotions won’t destroy you.”

“You want to get rid of us now that we’re no longer useful to you. This is dishonor!” Hayda flashed his blade. The acolytes howled in unison, unaware that shadowy talons were grasping at them with voracious intent.

Kennen could feel their pain, the kind born out of the rift between two worlds of belief. The kind Akali had felt before she left. Yet, he let lightning crackle between his hands. “Don’t think to test me.”

Snarling, Hayda and several acolytes charged forward.

The small yordle waltzed between the clumsy humans, easily evading all attacks. He clicked his clawed fingers, and arcs of electricity rippled out, dropping his attackers in one ferocious burst.

They moaned as they twitched on the muddy ground. The rest stopped, uncertain about what to do. Grief, guilt, shame—the acolytes’ faces were masks of agony, the rain washing over the ichor oozing from their eyes.

Kennen flipped away, out of range, and sighed. Then he remembered something he had learned from humans.

Sometimes, to tell a story is to lie.

“Let your story be mine to tell.” He pulled down his mask. “Go now, in peace. The sinister influence will remain in Zhyun, but the Kinkou will hear you fought hard against it before you left the order, with honor.”

To fabricate truth. To preserve what you hold most dear.

The acolytes’ eyes cleared for a moment, and the dark vapor began to dissipate. No one spoke, but some nodded their understanding to the yordle. Eventually, those who could gathered their wounded.

It was always tough to watch old comrades go, but Kennen knew it was for the best. They had devoted themselves to the Kinkou, and now they were free to find a new purpose. Their mental state could regain balance, and the malevolent entities would have nothing to feed on.

The yordle watched as the former acolytes stumbled away into the gloom. The rain did not abate. The drenched humans looked small and vulnerable.

Someday, all of you will die, Kennen thought, sorrow gripping his heart.

But I will bear your story.

H.I.V.E. Incident Report
Code Violation: Industrial Homicide
Casefile Status: Unsolved
Investigating Agent: Rol, P.

Team responded to report of suspicious character, criminal activity; proceeded to Sump Works, Sector 90TZ. Sector 90TZ notably absent. In its place: sinkhole, smoke, noxious fumes. Interviews with private security indicate urgent need for better private security.

Response team entered sinkhole. Toxic runoff had melted away building wreckage. Two survivors located, one partially liquefied and dripping off catwalk. Six deceased bodies found among wreckage, three of them partial; two appear to predate incident. Causes of death include acute deceleration, caustic liquidation, and/or fatal crossbow wounds. Unclear if lab's destruction was itself the perpetrator's motive or an attempt to cover tracks.

Survivor #1 (Ra Qintava, facility researcher) brought up for interview, but unable to provide statement due to 1) post-traumatic stress and 2) liquefaction of tongue and lower jaw. Awaiting toxin screen and prosthesis fitting.

Search-and-rescue discovered apparent shantytown constructed from refuse. Recovered items include:

57 waterlogged romance novels, illegible, with edits made in crayon
108 bottles, unlabeled (possible toxic runoff or discarded shampoo remnants)
200 pounds chewing gum (possible installation art project)
1 jar toenails, labeled by toe/finger, date, and mood

Survivor #2 (Valori Olant, Sludge Analyst) in recovery; regained lucidity following prolonged therapeutic electrocution. Statement transcript excerpt follows:

V.O.: GOT TO DO SOMETHING -
NURSE: She's lost so much blood --
P.R.: Her co-workers lost a lot more than that --
V.O.: IT'S STILL OUT THERE!
P.R.: Ma'am, I need you to focus. Tell me what he looked like.
V.O.: LIKE A RAT! (pause)
NURSE: Like a what?
P.R.: You mean, small? Beady-eyed? Sorta rat-faced -- ?
V.O.: I MEAN IT LOOKED LIKE A GIANT GODSDAMNED RAT! (pause). WITH A CROSSBOW! (pause).
P.R.: (to nurse) Can we moderate her painkillers?
V.O.: YOU'RE NOT LISTENING! IT'S A HOMICIDAL, PSYCHOPATHIC, GIANT FREAKING RAT!
IN A WAISTCOAT!
P.R.: Nurse?
NURSE: (injecting Olant's arm with sedative) On it.
[EDIT]
V.O.: We were just scientists, working on refining human waste into inexpensive baby formula... [EDIT] I saw - I don't know how else to - this crazed, enormous RAT - screaming at us! Kicking over vats! Spitting on our food! [EDIT] The lab was sealed. Industrial waste was spilling everywhere. Nowhere to run. [EDIT] I woke up in the dark. Well, the acid had melted my eyeballs. I could SMELL the twitchy bastard inches from my face. It said, “NOBODY STEALS TWITCH'S JUICE!” cackled wildly, and skittered off... I can still smell it in my mind. OH MY GODS, I CAN STILL SMELL IT-

End transcript. At this point victim began screaming; has yet to stop.

[UPDATE: Qintava, Written Testimony]
Suspect summary, as reported:
NAME/KNOWN ALIASES: ''Twitch.''
SEX: Male (unconfirmed).
AGE: Unknown.
HEIGHT: 4'9'' (hunched)
WEIGHT: < 99 lbs. (wet).
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Is a giant rat.
STATUS: At large; armed, extremely dangerous; DO NOT ENGAGE.

H.I.V.E - Enforcing Progress!

It was the stench of Bloodharbor that hit you first.

Like a gut-punch that took the wind right out of your sails.

The stink always got inside you, making you feel like you’d never get it out.

A noisome reek of opened leviathan bellies, dripping entrails you could crawl through, and weeks-old offal sticking to the cobbles like gory mortar left to rot in the sun. Mix that with the shit of ten thousand scavenging seabirds and the piss of the Slaughter Docks’ bloodied workers, and it was a smell strong enough to turn even the strongest stomach inside out.

You could wear a bandanna soaked in enough rum to souse the Bearded Lady herself, and it’d still get you.

Yes, it was awful, but Sarah Fortune loved what it represented.

It was the smell of prosperity, of a plentiful catch, and monster bounties earned.

A red tide meant people with coins in their pockets, ready to spend them all in the quayside taverns, gambling dens, and fleshpots, all of which paid a cut of their takings to Sarah.

Prosperity, yes—by the Bearded Lady, it was just the worst smell in the world.

Her small landing boat eased out into the sludgy water, its passage through the deepening evening lit by a storm lantern swaying from a wrought-iron tentacle at its bow.

Seated in the back of the boat, Sarah draped her hand over the gunwale and let her fingertips carve a path through the fatty layers on the water’s surface, drawing undulant spirals that rose and fell with the red tide.

“Even for you, that’s pretty damn reckless,” grunted Rafen, sweating as he leaned back and forth on the oars. Rafen was an old salt of the islands, with a craggy face weathered by ocean spray and hard winds, and a keen mind the rum hadn’t managed to take the edge off. He was, by turns, her conscience and right-hand man, and had seen pretty much every dark nook and cranny Bilgewater had to offer.

“How so?” asked Sarah.

“There’s ripper fish and flaying lampreys lurking just under the surface.”

“Scared I’ll get my fingers bitten off?” replied Sarah.

“Can’t pull a trigger without your fingers.”

“You worry too much, Rafen.”

“That’s my job, to worry about the things you don’t worry enough about.”

“Like this boat ride out to the Moon Serpent?”

“Exactly,” said Rafen. “I have a saying, and it ain’t steered me wrong none since I heard it at my papa’s knee. If it smells bad, leave it damn well alone, you idiot!”

Sarah shrugged. “Pretty much everything smells bad out here.”

“Maybe so, but that don’t change the truth of it,” said Rafen, glancing over his shoulder into the mist rising up from the water, where the Moon Serpent lurked like a dark secret. “The sea has an evil cast to it this night. Feels like hungry eyes are looking up from the deep.”

“Your bones talking to you again?”

“You mock, but I been listening to ’em for more’n forty years now, and I’m still alive, ain’t I?”

“Let it go, old man,” said Miss Fortune. “It’s a Captain’s Requiem, I have to be there. And if I have to be there in this ridiculous getup, then my second in command has to be there too.”

Said ridiculous getup consisted of a—literally—breathtaking whalebone corset of cobalt blue and golden lace beneath a gloriously long-tailed scarlet frock coat. In addition, she wore linen breeches of pale cream tucked into heeled boots of polished black leather with silver kraken buckles running from ankle to knee.

An absurdly impractical outfit, but in a gathering of captains it didn’t do to look anything less than obscenely wealthy. A poor captain was a weak captain, and like every kind of predator, Bilgewater reavers would ruthlessly prey on the weak.

Rafen hadn’t escaped the need to smarten up, either, and—under duress and threat of a demotion—wore a borrowed suit of sealskin leather, a scaled waistcoat whose buttons threatened to split from the fabric with every pull of the oars, and a stovepipe hat with a pressed tentacle headband.

“I might have to be there, but that don’t mean I got to like it,” said Rafen.

“True, but I need you to watch my back,” said Sarah. “Aligh had a large crew, and with him dead every captain will be circling like a wharf rat in heat. Last thing I need is his old crew going over to a rival captain or falling in with the likes of the Jackdaws or Butcher Blades.”

“Aye, there’s that,” begrudged Rafen. “Lot of powerful captains’ll likely be here to see Aligh off to the Bearded Lady, but do you really trust all of them to abide by the Truce?”

“Not even a little bit,” said Sarah, opening her coat to reveal a pair of exquisite ivory-handled pistols holstered under each armpit. “But it’s not like I’m going in unarmed.”

“They’ll take those off you, sure as eggs is eggs.”

“Please, you think they’re the only weapons I have?” she said, tapping the side of her head.

“Fair enough, but this still feels like a risk.”

“It surely is, but what’s life without a little risk?”

“I’ll remind you of that if this all goes under fast.”

Sarah grinned. “If it does, I promise you can haunt me from our watery grave.”

Rafen made a quick sign of the horns over his heart and shook his head, but returned his effort to rowing. He’d made his point, and Sarah had made sure he knew better than to press her when her mind was made up. Besides, she knew he was right, and there was nothing more irritating than a man who believed he was right.

But in deference to Rafen’s words, Sarah lifted her hand from the surface of the water and flicked the scum from her fingertips. Something toothy broke the surface where it landed and the old man raised his eyes in a told ya fashion.

Behind her, the ramshackle crags of Bilgewater shimmered in the fog, flickering anthills where people—her people—lived upon the flotsam and jetsam the ocean provided. Its structures clung to the rocks and mountains of the island chain like persistent barnacles that neither storm, Harrowing, nor the occasional probes of Noxian war-barques could ever entirely dislodge.

Like Sarah Fortune, Bilgewater was a survivor.

Since Gangplank’s death, she’d fought the unquiet spirits of the Shadow Isles and survived countless attempts on her life. Consolidating her rule over Bilgewater had been a messy, bloody affair, and her grip was still as shaky as an apprentice rigger on their first climb of the ropes. But she was still alive despite the venom—and firearms—aimed at her for putting her head above the parapet.

“Ship ahoy,” said Rafen.

Sarah looked past him to see a looming shape emerging from the rising mist.

Much like its former captain, the Moon Serpent was an old, unsubtle ship; broad in the beam and glowing with the dim light of dozens of hooded lanterns hanging from its many masts. The brigantine’s reinforced timbers were thickly caulked and carved with scales like a snake. Crusted salt in the grooves shone silver in the moonlight, and though its sails were still furled, Sarah knew they were woven from shimmering white cloth that must have cost Aligh a small fortune. Its ramming prow figurehead was a fanged serpent forged from the melted-down cannons of his enemies.

“By the Bearded Lady, I always forget how big it is…”

“She’s a beast sure enough,” said Rafen as the brigantine’s cold shadow fell across them.

“How in the world did a tight-fisted miser like Aligh pay for this?” said Sarah. “That cheapskate bastard never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat. I heard he skipped out on his dues to the ocean, never so much as a drop of rum or a copper coin for the lords and ladies of the deep.”

“And ain’t that yet another reason for me to turn us around and not set foot on its deck,” said Rafen. “If even a bit of that’s true, then this here’s a doomed ship. The ocean needs its due, any captain worthy of the name knows that.”

“I gave a hex-carbine to the waters off White Wharf after claiming Jakmunt Zyglos’s bounty.”

“I remember,” said Rafen with a resigned shake of his head. “You promised that weapon to me.”

“Decent craftsmanship too. Wasn’t a Fortune Manstopper, but it was pretty nice.”

“Now you’re just being cruel.”

“A queen must be cruel only to be kind,” said Sarah with mock affectation, as Rafen eased the boat up to half a dozen others moored beneath a wide cargo net strung from the gunwale. The glossy hull of the Moon Serpent rose up like a black cliff and dark silhouettes moved through the lamplight high above.

“She’s sitting high in the water for such a big ship,” said Rafen, nodding toward the mottled green tide lines on the ship’s black hull as he tied the boat up with a loose slipknot.

“Her holds will be empty and most of the crew will be ashore getting three sheets to the wind on whatever cheap rotgut Aligh left them for his wake,” said Sarah.

“Lucky them,” said Rafen, pulling the oars in from the rowlocks and securing them along the gunwale. “You sure about this?”

Sarah rose and took hold of the cargo net, tipping her head back.

“Not really,” she said. “But when given the choice of going forward or back, a strong woman once told me that it’s always better to go forward, so let’s go.”

Hand over hand, Sarah and Rafen climbed to the Moon Serpent’s deck.

A pair of unsmiling twins in leather breeches and scaled shirts took Sarah’s guns and Rafen’s marlinspike dagger as soon as they clambered over the gunwale. Both women were heavily muscled and angrily sober, no doubt wishing they were ashore partaking in Aligh’s wake-rum instead of forming a skeleton crew for a bunch of captains who would, like as not, dance a jig to see one another dead.

One of the twins wore a helmet made from the skull of a scuttle-crab and matching patchwork armor of boiled shells, while the other had a face covered with tattoos of unblinking eyes. When the latter grinned at the sight of the gun-dame forged pistols, Sarah saw her mouth was filled with teeth prized from a razorscale’s jawbone.

Sarah followed them as they made their way to the raised foredeck, and marked which of the three chests they put the confiscated weapons into—cannonball dent in the right side.

An enormous bronze cannon sat on a carved ebony gun carriage just in front of the chests. The weapon’s flared muzzle was sealed with wax, and the sail-shrouded body of Captain Aligh would be entombed within, pickled in rum, vinegar, and camphor for its journey to the bottom of the sea.

“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said Sarah. “The cannon, I mean.”

“Aye,” agreed Rafen. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see, but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”

“Right…” said Sarah, turning her attention to the broad-shouldered figure standing immobile next to the ship-wrecker. “Lady help us if we ever buck tradition, eh?”

He was swathed in a robe of iridescent scales with a wide-mouthed fish-head hood ringed in razor teeth. He carried a tentacle-wrapped billhook, and Sarah immediately knew him for what he was.

“A rare honor to have a serpent caller at a Captain’s Requiem,” she said.

“Amazing what enough gold krakens can buy you, eh?” replied Rafen.

Within the jagged hood, the serpent caller wore a mask of perforated coral over the lower half of his face, while his eyes and forehead were obscured by a dried-out squid’s body with crudely cut eye-holes through which the priest surveyed the gathered captains.

The wide deck was thronged with a host of Bilgewater reavers in all their finery: long coats, polished boots, tall hats, and archaic pieces of armor that would drag them straight to the ocean floor if they fell overboard. Sarah saw a wealth of gold and silver sigils and medals, Buhru fishhook amulets, and lucky talismans to honor the lords and ladies of the deeps.

Some captains she knew from fighting or drinking—often both—and some she knew only by reputation.

They, of course, all knew her.

With her blood-red hair, creamy skin, and confident swagger, Sarah Fortune would be a hard woman to miss in any circumstance, but on this ship she was a wild rose among poisoned thorns.

“Quite the gathering, eh?” said Rafen.

“Nothing like death to really bring people together,” said Sarah.

Rafen nodded and said, “Now I know how a fat waverider feels when it finds itself surrounded by a pack of hungry longtooths.”

Sarah shook her head. “You have it backward, old man. I’m the longtooth here.”

Rafen didn’t reply as Sarah marched to the ship’s centerline and back, adjusting each stride for the motion of the ship’s deck. Just as every pistol had its own unique character, so too did every ship; its own way to crest the tides and heed the wind. She moved with the anchored ship’s roll and sway, letting the creak and groan of seasoned timbers tell their secrets from her boots on up.

“A shallow-riding wallower,” she said. “Surprising for such a wide-beamed vessel.”

“I like ’em broad in the beam,” said Rafen, instinctively adjusting the width of his stance.

“So I heard.”

“Not as nimble as a cutter,” said Rafen, ignoring her jibe, “but I’ll wager a bottle of Myron’s Dark she’ll hold you tight to her bosom in rough seas.”

“That she will, Rafen,” said a slender woman dressed in a long coat of pale blue, with gold edging at the cuffs and bronze fringed epaulettes. “She’s a grand old dame, right sure. Sank Darkwill’s Glory and even poked a few holes in the Red Noxtoraa before the Mudtown fogs closed in and saved its cursed hide.”

A salt-stiffened bicorn flopped at a rakish angle on the woman’s shaven head, and the state of her eyes—two poached eggs wobbling in a bowl of fish soup—told Sarah she’d been hitting the rum hard already. Her skin had the waxy, yellowish complexion of someone only recently returned from a long sea voyage.

“Captain Blaxton,” said Rafen. “I heard you were dead.”

“Rumors of my death fly around Bilgewater with every sunset,” said the woman. “And with them, men weep, and their wives curse the morn of their disproving. I assure you, I am in the rudest of health.”

She turned to Sarah and gave her an elaborate bow before offering her a hand.

Sarah took it and was instantly on guard. Despite Blaxton’s drunken appearance and feather-light grip, she felt hard-earned calluses and powder burn ridges on the heel of her palm.

“Marla Blaxton, at your service, Captain Fortune,” she said, releasing Sarah’s hand. “Recently returned from a year of raiding the Amarantine Coast, where the sea is clear, the sky blue, and the coastal settlements fat with more gold than a captain could spend in ten lifetimes.”

“How wonderful,” said Sarah. “Why would you ever choose to return from that?”

“Good times can only last so long, you know. The inhabitants of said settlements had some strange ideas about ‘ownership’ and ‘not being dead’. Also, they were able to summon some curious mage-types who turned the sea and sky against me in ways I’d never seen before.”

“Ah, so you lost all your ships,” said Rafen.

“A few,” allowed Blaxton, waving her hand dismissively. “A temporary setback, Rafen. One from which I expect to bounce back any day now.”

“Perhaps with a new crew and a shallow-riding wallower of a brigantine?” suggested Sarah.

Blaxton laughed and said, “Anything is possible,” before giving her another bow and rejoining a group of captains gathered around a leaking barrel of rum by the foremast.

And Sarah’s heart skipped a beat as she saw a face she recognised, an enemy face.

Rafen saw him too and gripped her arm.

“Remember the Truce,” he hissed urgently.

Sarah didn’t answer, too focused on the man before her.

She pulled her arm free and strode toward him, keeping her face expressionless.

Blond hair, tied back in a rough ponytail, a loose strand hanging, just so, over his handsome, clean-shaven features. He looked up and met her gaze, the ice in his eyes frosting at her approach.

“Sarah,” he said, opening his arms to her. “Look, I know we—”

She didn’t let him finish, hammering her fist into his gut without breaking stride.

He buckled like he’d been hit by one of the twenty-four pounder balls, and his handsome face met her rising knee with a sickening crunch of bone.

He flew back and Sarah pounced on him before he could rise, straddling him and reaching for her pistol before remembering it was locked in a chest next to the mainmast.

Cannonball dent in the right side.

Instead of shooting him, she hauled his head up by his collar and cocked her fist back for another punch. He coughed blood, and lifted a forge-crafted hand of whirring bronze cogs, leather straps, and clicking mechanics out in front him.

“Please,” he wheezed through a broken nose and a mouthful of blood.

“Hello, Petyr,” she said. “I told you what would happen if I saw you again, didn’t I?”

Captain Petyr Harker.

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been cradling the splintered, bloody ruin of his hand, the hand he’d always boasted killed the Crimson Blade.

Petyr, along with Captains Crow and Bragg, had conspired to strip her of her hard-won gains in the wake of her killing Gangplank. Both Crow and Bragg were now dead, one from a pistol ball to the head, the other with one lodged in his liver.

Her pistol balls.

Walking out of the gunfight at MacGregan’s Killhouse, she’d promised to take more than Petyr’s other hand if she ever saw him again.

The Truce of the Sinking Soul was a long-standing tradition in Bilgewater.

More of an unwritten rule than a strictly enforced custom, but it allowed rival crews to gather without bloodshed when their captains attended the all too frequent funerals of old sea-legends.

That violent men and women would abide by such an archaic custom always struck Sarah as somewhat quaint, and until now she’d always kept it in the if it ain’t broken… part of her mind.

An iron grip seized her right elbow and pulled her clenched fist back.

Rafen appeared on her left, dragging her off Petyr.

“Easy, captain,” he said. “Easy now…”

Part of her wanted to land another punch, but by the time Rafen had her back on her feet, the anger had gone out of Sarah. She’d made her point, and so let herself be pulled away.

“Upon our last descent,” said a rum-sodden voice in her ear. “All gathered heed this oath.”

“Peace be upon us all,” she repeated automatically. “No harm to body or soul.”

“No shot nor blade, no serpent nor spell,” added Rafen.

“Observe the Truce of the Sinking Soul!” finished Petyr, scrambling away from her.

Sarah let out a long breath, and turned to see who, along with Rafen, had pulled her off.

A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat, fresh octopus-tentacle tie, and glistening stingray flat-cap that was well above the tattered sackcloth she normally saw him wearing.

“Thorne?” she said, shrugging off Rafen’s touch.

“It’s Captain Thorne these days,” he said, spitting a wad of expensive dried-seaweed tobacco to the deck and missing the polished toe of her boot by a finger’s breadth.

Sarah laughed. “You? A captain? Since when?”

Thorne preened, looking like a powder monkey with a freshly stolen mango. “Got me a ship now, and a crew of hearty sea-rats off the back of what you done to Crow and Bragg.”

His breath was like a bucket of rotten clams. Thorne could parade in expensive clothes, but he could never change who he truly was.

“You always were a bottom feeder, weren’t you?” said Sarah. “Now get out of my way.”

Thorne stood aside, and said, “Mark my words, Sarah Fortune, you’ll get what’s comin’ to ya.”

“Promises, promises,” said Sarah, and in two quick steps she was standing over Petyr Harker.

She held her arm out and rippled her fingers, like she was flipping a coin along her knuckles.

“Can I give you a hand?” she said with a grin.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“It is funny,” said Sarah. “Look how I’m smiling.”

Petyr looked at her gloved hand through an eye that was already swollen and purple. Despite the obvious pain of his bleeding nose and winded gut, he grinned.

“If I give you my good hand, are you going to shoot it off?” he asked.

“I’m not planning to, but the day’s yet young.”

He took her hand, and Sarah hauled him to his feet.

“Why are you here, Petyr?” she asked.

“There might not be a Corsair’s Conclave anymore, but traditions need to be upheld, yes?”

“So I keep hearing,” said Sarah, glancing at Rafen.

She pulled a handkerchief from her coat and handed it to Petyr. He nodded gratefully and wiped the blood from his lips and chin before handing it back.

“Keep it,” she said, then nodded admiringly at his new hand. “Nice work. Doesn’t look like Bilgewater craft.”

“It’s not,” said Petyr. “Well, it is and it isn’t. A new apprentice down at Bitterbelt’s forge made it for me. Zaunite lad named Gysbert.”

“Looks expensive.”

“It was.”

Sarah looked him up and down, taking in his tailored clothing, the well-fed cheeks, and the empty scabbard that looked like it might hold a fine blade. Whatever had become of Petyr after losing his hand, he’d clearly bounced back well enough.

“I keep wondering if I should have killed you back at MacGregan’s,” said Sarah.

“I’ve often wondered why you let me live,” said Petyr. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you didn’t kill me, but let’s be honest, I’m just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme.”

Despite herself, Sarah laughed. “That you are, Petyr, that you are. But if you want the truth, I didn’t kill you because killing you would have been Gangplank’s way of doing things, and I always try to be better than he was.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“It’s a work in progress,” admitted Sarah as Rafen stepped between them, holding tin mugs hooked over his fingers in one hand, and a large bottle of rum in the other.

“Here,” he said. “If the Truce is holding, and we’re not going to start killing each other, then we might as well have a swig of Aligh’s rum, eh?”

Sarah passed a mug to Petyr before taking one for herself as Rafen poured them all two fingers of the syrupy brown liquid.

“Keep your powder dry and your cutlass sharp,” said Rafen.

“And the world will turn,” finished Sarah, and the three of them touched mugs.

Sarah tipped her head back and took a mouthful, wincing at the gritty, overly sweet taste.

“Oh, that’s bad. That’s really bad,” she said. “You sure they didn’t put Aligh’s body in the rum barrel instead of the cannon barrel?”

“Aligh was known for many things—being a cruel old bastard, a ruthless captain, and a seasoned killer—but one thing he wasn’t known for was his largesse in vittles,” said Petyr, pouring the remains of his rum onto the deck.

“I didn’t know you knew Aligh.”

Petyr shook his head vigorously. “I didn’t. I mean, I knew him by reputation, of course, but it’s not like I ever set foot on the Moon Serpent before today.”

“The man was an enigma,” said Thorne, sidling up to Rafen and holding out his own mug. “A regular man of mystery, but who cares about that? He’s dead, and we ain’t.”

Sarah shrugged and nodded to Rafen, who poured Thorne a generous measure.

“Aye,” continued Thorne. “There’s none here gathered who knows much of the man. They say he never came ashore neither. Always sent one of them vicious twins. So, did you hear how he died?”

“I heard he was stabbed in his sleep by a cabin boy who’d taken one too many beatings,” said Captain Blaxton, arriving mug in hand.

Rafen duly poured her a measure.

“May all your lookouts be sober,” she said, taking a drink. “Ah, some of the good stuff.”

“That’s what you heard?” said Sarah. “I heard he choked to death on a barb-squid that wasn’t quite dead in his dinner.”

Rafen shook his head. “No, that’s just what the cutters on the Slaughter Docks are saying. I heard it from one of the chandlers down the grottoes that he was so drunk he fell overboard. His pockets were so laden with gold that he sank all the way down, straight into the waiting grasp of the Bearded Lady.”

Instinctively, they all looked over the gunwale to the ocean far below.

The waters swirled around the ship, deep and black like a liquid mirror. She saw her wavering reflection, splintered by the water and lapping at the barnacled hull. Hard waves broke against the hull—the kind you saw when something large was coming up from below.

“Told you it had an evil cast to it tonight,” said Rafen.

Sarah let out a breath and tapped her left eye twice with her right thumb, an old sailor’s tradition to ward off evil influences.

“Ach, he was an old man, maybe he just died,” said Sarah. “That’s what old men do best.”

“Fog’s rolling in,” said Blaxton, nodding out to sea.

A chill passed through Sarah as she saw the fog was coming in from the southeast; cold, clammy, and freighted with the smell of the deepest ocean trenches.

“Don’t matter none how the old bastard died,” said Thorne. “All that matters is what happens to his ship and his crew. That’s why we’re all here, ain’t it? Every one of us wants to claim that big prize, don’t we?”

All four captains studied one another, each knowing that was exactly why they were here.

“No one ever found his serpent sigil, did they?” said Blaxton.

“His sigil?” scoffed Rafen. “Like as not, it’s sealed away in that cannon with him. Doesn’t matter anyway, no one pays any heed to a captain’s sigil these days.”

“Maybe they should,” said Sarah. “Maybe there’d be a lot less bloodshed if you could just claim a ship and crew with the previous captain’s sigil.”

“Scared of a little blood, are ya?” grinned Thorne. “Not got the stomach for it, eh?”

Sarah took a step toward him and said, “Truce or not, talk to me like that again and I’ll show you how much stomach I have for bloodshed.”

“Didn’t mean to go upsettin’ ya, Captain Fortune,” laughed Thorne, exposing black teeth and rotten gums. “Just wondering how many of ’em here gathered would have even the slightest hesitation of trying to claim Aligh’s crew if they could get their hands on that sigil…?”

Sarah looked past Thorne at the other captains gathered on the Moon Serpent’s deck, wondering the same thing. Most of them were small fry, with crews that were too green to make a serious play for Aligh’s ship, but the three drinking rum with her… Now that was a motley crew indeed, and any one of them might be a rival she needed to worry about sticking a knife in her back.

Before any of them could say anything in answer to Thorne’s question, Sarah felt the deck shift underfoot, a slow roll and dip.

She reached inside her coat and pulled out a silver coin, flicking it over the side of the ship.

Thorne watched it tumble end over end to the waters, and for a moment she wondered if he might dive in after it.

“Why’d ya do that?” he said. “This ain’t your ship.”

“Someone has to,” said Sarah, as the Moon Serpent’s white sails unfurled. “We’re getting underway.”

The ship sailed eastward out of Bilgewater Bay, taking a gently curving route to avoid the many jagged reefs, treacherous sandbanks, and jutting wrecks that could see a ship foundered. The fog Blaxton had spotted had fully enveloped them now, and the ship sailed in an almost dead silence, interrupted only by the occasional shout between the skeleton crew.

Despite the awfulness of the rum, Sarah, Rafen, Thorne, Petyr, and Blaxton worked their way through the rest of the bottle. After a couple of shots, the sweetness became bearable, and Sarah felt her mood loosening.

With the bottle empty, Rafen threw it overboard and Sarah sent him below deck to find another.

The Moon Serpent sailed onward, deeper into the fog.

More theories as to how Aligh had died were offered, each more ridiculous than the last, and Sarah found herself wiping tears of laughter from her eyes as Petyr finished a preposterous tale of Aligh falling afoul of the Trickster and being led out to sea in a golden narwhal costume only to be carved up by the Bloodharbor Ripper in a tragic case of mistaken identity.

A distant voice, muffled by the fog, called out from the crow’s nest.

“What did he say?” she asked, peering up through the rigging. She held on to the gunwale rail as her vision spun a tad. The rum was bad, but it was strong. Time to ease up.

“I think he said ‘Land ho!’ or possibly ‘Sand Lo!’” said Blaxton, bleary eyed from the rum.

Sarah blinked. “Sand Lo? Why would he say that?”

“I believe it’s a traditional Shuriman greeting,” giggled Petyr, taking another belt of rum.

Sarah fought the laughter bubbling up from her gut as she heard the clatter of iron chains spilling off the deck, swiftly followed by the heavy splash of an anchor hitting the water.

“We’re here,” said Thorne, spitting a viscous wad of tobacco into the sea.

Sarah peered through the mist, seeing a craggy spur of black rock rearing out of the water. Salt crystals glittered in the weak light of the stars.

“Moonshard Reef,” she said. “Why in the name of the Lady’s Beard are we here?”

“Aligh always claimed he was part Marai on his mother’s side,” said Petyr.

“Horse dung!” said Thorne. “The man’s never even seen a Marai, let alone been birthed from one.”

“Makes for an exotic tale though,” said Blaxton. “Mystic origins, magical blood, that sort of thing. Kind of backstory every captain wishes they had. Wish I’d thought of it.”

The thumping of wood on wood halted further discussions, and Sarah turned to see the serpent caller hammering the raised foredeck with his tentacle-wrapped billhook.

In his other hand, he held a flaming torch that burned with a brilliant silver light.

“The sea is this world’s cemetery, and its souls sleep best without monument,” said the serpent caller, his voice a grating hiss through the coral mask. “All other graveyards show symbols of distinction between great and small, rich and poor—but the king, the fool, the prince, and the peasant are all the same to the ocean. Now, fellow travelers of the Sea… heed my words, it is time to pay the ocean its due!”

“About damn time,” said Sarah. “Let’s get this done and go home.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Petyr.

Sarah and the other captains gathered before the wax-stoppered cannon as the serpent caller’s eyes swept over them all. She felt the potency of the rum swimming around her body, and saw a number of the other captains swaying with more than the motion of the ship.

Where in the eight seas is Rafen?

She didn’t want any more rum. She just wanted him here by her side.

The twins who’d met her and Rafen as they came aboard to confiscate their weapons worked a block and tackle over to the center of the deck. An enormous hook on a thick rope loop was lowered and secured to the lifting ring on the cannon just behind the oiled fuse.

“What a waste,” said Blaxton, tears streaming down her face.

“I didn’t realise you and Aligh were close,” said Sarah.

“What? Gods, no! I mean the cannon. That’s an Orban thirty pounder,” said Blaxton. “Probably one of only a handful left in existence. One hit from that would punch a hole clean through a Noxian warship from stem to stern. Crying shame to see it go to waste.”

Thanks to her mother’s teachings, Sarah knew more about pistols and rifles than she did about the intricacies of ship-borne weapons, but even she had to agree the bronze cannon was far too good for the likes of a miserly soul like Aligh. Was that a final insult to those left behind, that his most beautiful weapon would serve as his tomb and never belong to anyone else?

Something niggled about that, though—a nagging feeling she was missing something.

Crab Hat secured the hook to the cannon, then she and her twin stood back as the serpent caller began to speak.

“Captains of Bilgewater, it does my heart proud to see so many of you here today,” he said. “The best and the worst, the scum and the cream of our city’s reaver-kind.”

A few mutters went through the captains at so harsh an opening, but serpent callers were known to be touched by the Bearded Lady, and their ways were unknowable to most people.

“Our fair isles stand at a pivotal moment in their history, and many paths lead into the future, as tangled and inconstant as the many limbs of Nagakabouros, but I have seen the way forward! On many of these paths, I see the peaks and coves of the Serpent Isles ablaze, its people dying as our enemies close in. But on one path, one singular path, I see us proud, stronger than ever, a united people under a great leader!”

Sarah’s brow furrowed. Yes, the serpent callers were a strange bunch, but this was beyond anything she’d heard any of them say before.

“You have gathered here to see Captain Aligh down to the depths, a man whose boots none of you were fit to clean. A man of vision, a man who knew what needed to be done!”

The twins began hauling on the pulley ropes to lift the cannon, their muscles bunching and straining as the rear end of the cannon, gun carriage and all, began lifting from the deck. The barrel tilted downward, and were it not for the waxed stopper, Sarah felt she could have looked right down its length to see Aligh’s dead body.

“You all have failed Nagakabouros! You all have fought and betrayed one another, like Rat Town scum scrabbling over a copper sprat. None of you has the vision to raise a fleet like the ones of old and make Bilgewater ruler of the waves! You all throw your coins and your tributes into the water, and for what? For safety? A blessing? No, it’s a sacrifice you’re offering, a blood price for the ocean to lend you its wrath. But what does the ocean care for copper coins or the smallest fish of the catch? No, for Bilgewater to prosper, it needs a red tide of offerings!”

Sarah surreptitiously glanced around at the other captains to see what they were making of the serpent caller’s lunacy, but clearly the rum had numbed them to just how insane this was. She felt eyes upon her and saw Petyr looking right at her.

He gave her a terse smile, and her unease ratcheted up several notches.

She saw he was easing, half-step by half-step, toward the gunwale.

Sarah looked back down the cannon barrel.

And then she knew.

“Oh no…”

She ran toward the raised foredeck, tearing off her hat and reaching up to pull out twin stilettos masquerading as hairpins. Each was a slender needle of blackened steel with a rounded skull-pommel, and she knew just where to stick them to kill a man stone dead.

“So I offer the sea your blood, your sacrifice!” screamed the serpent caller, tearing off his mask and hood so everyone could see him. So everyone would know who had brought them here to die.

Sarah saw a grey-bearded face, furrowed by old age and aglow with madness. A long scar bisected his leathery face from right eyebrow to left cheek, and the wisps of his beard were twisted into thin braids entwined with pearls and fishhooks.

His eyes were the eyes of a man who never paid a kraken if he could spend a sprat.

Who skipped out on the ocean’s tithe on every voyage.

A man she knew from reputation and decades of bloody legend.

“Aligh, you treacherous bastard!” she yelled.

The twins saw her coming, but couldn’t yet release the chains holding the cannon’s rear aloft.

Time slowed for Sarah, her heartbeat like the slow tolling of the bell upon the Widow’s Manse whenever a ship was lost to the ocean. It felt like she was running knee deep in sticky guts in the carving bays of the Slaughter Docks.

“You’re too late, Captain Fortune,” said Aligh.

He swept the torch down to the back of the cannon, and roared in triumph.

She pulled back her hand to throw one of her stilettos.

She knew she wouldn’t make it.

The silver flame lit the oiled touchpaper.

And the world exploded in a deafening blast of fire and thunder.

That she wasn’t dead was Sarah’s first surprise.

Her second was that the Moon Serpent was still afloat.

A cannon that big ought to have holed the ship all the way down to the ocean, and broken its keel.

She couldn’t hear anything, not really. Her ears were filled with a high-pitched whine, maddeningly shrill and muffled at the same time.

She rolled onto her side, wincing as she felt blood streaming down her arm.

A dull awareness of foggy, distant sounds coming from behind made Sarah turn her head.

A scene of utter carnage, worse than anything she’d seen in a long time.

And suddenly she knew why the ship wasn’t sinking. The cannon had been primed with canister shot.

It was a load designed to shred and maim flesh, but leave a vessel intact, and it had worked its lethal power with horrifying potency.

Sarah’s mad dash toward Aligh had carried her mostly clear of the wide fan of red-hot fragments, but the other captains weren’t so lucky.

Men and women lay sprawled on a deck slick with blood.

Those closest to the gun were almost unrecognisable, transformed from living, breathing human beings into scraps of bloody meat. Shorn arms and legs lay scattered in gory heaps, and it was all but impossible to tell which limb belonged to which body.

But not everyone was dead.

Those captains toward the rear of the throng writhed in agony, bleeding from scores of deep lacerations and screaming the name of the Bearded Lady. Sarah could still barely hear them.

She saw Blaxton lying in a lake of blood, her fine blue coat cut to pieces, as if someone had given her a hundred lashes from a barbed cat-o’-nine-tails. Sarah couldn’t tell if she was dead or alive, but she was lying very still. Thorne slithered out from beneath her, and with the luck typical of that lowlife, it looked like he’d escaped the worst of the blast using Blaxton as a human shield.

Rafen! Where’s Rafen?

She couldn’t see him, and could only hope that he’d found a way to survive.

He must have, he’s Rafen. He survives everything, doesn’t he?

Then her eyes settled on a figure lying sprawled against the railings, bloodied, but mostly unhurt.

Petyr Harker.

He grinned, and hate filled Sarah as she knew that somehow, in some way, that smug, conniving sea-slug had known about Aligh’s trap. He had to have been part of setting it up, a glittering, silver-tongued lure for captains who didn’t know him well enough to send him packing.

Sarah saw the deck hatch swing open, and the skeleton crew that had sailed them out to Moonshard Reef emerged with long gutting knives to finish what their vile captain had begun. They moved as if in a languid dream, skewering bellies and cutting throats with sadistic relish.

Anger surged through Sarah, and she sat upright, blinking through tears of pain.

You’re alive, damn it! Do something!

With that thought blazing in her mind, sounds rushed back and her vision cleared.

The screams of the dying drove her to her feet, and she swept up her stilettos once again.

Aligh stood far behind the smoking cannon, arms aloft and surveying his bloody handiwork with the eyes of a zealot. Sarah sprinted toward him again, but this time the twins rushed past their captain to intercept her.

She vaulted over the cannon, and hammered her boots into the face of the twin with the tattooed eyes all across her skull. Razorscale teeth splintered under Sarah’s iron hard boot-heels, and sent the woman flying backward.

Sarah landed lightly and leapt to the side as Crab Hat swung a monstrous, fang-toothed club at her head. It smashed the deck boards to splinters, and Sarah rolled to her feet hammering her daggered fist into the woman’s back. The crab-shell armor was hard and smooth and the stiletto slid clear without penetrating.

The woman wrenched the club from the deck and spun around, the weapon slashing just over Sarah’s head. Her tattooed twin was back up, blood streaming down her face of many eyes, turning it into a hideous grimace. She held a pair of long punch daggers with razor-toothed sawfish blades.

She came at Sarah in a flurry of blows, elbows, and high kicks.

Sarah tried to parry and dodge, only barely avoiding each killing blow. She could hold her own in a fight, but she’d take a pistol over a pair of thin daggers any day. By the time they’d backed up toward the cannon, Sarah’s shirt was soaked in blood and she was seriously reconsidering the wisdom of her plan to fight hand to hand.

From the corner of her eye she saw the armored twin winding up for another strike.

Two to one, this fight would only end badly for Sarah.

Tattooed Eyes slashed her dagger low, and Sarah grunted as it cut a line of fire across the side of her thigh. She dropped to one knee as a reverse stroke came for her throat.

She lifted her arm to parry, and the slashing blade cut straight through the fabric of her coat.

The impact sent searing bolts of pain up Sarah’s arm, but the iron rods specially woven into the back of the sleeve halted the blade before it bit flesh.

Her foe let out a “Ha!” of triumph, but the grin fell from her face as she realised Sarah was unhurt.

“Gedian and Sons, Battle Tailors and War Clothiers,” said Sarah, and hammered her stiletto up through the soft flesh on the underside of her foe’s jaw. Her eyes flew wide in shock, and Sarah saw the black needle of the blade behind her razor teeth as it punched up into her brain.

Sarah rose and kicked the dead body away as her twin screamed in anguish.

Stiletto versus war-club—bad odds. Really bad odds.

Sarah risked a glance behind her.

Cannonball dent in the right side…

This was her chance to even those odds.

The armored twin launched herself at Sarah in fury, her huge, toothed club rising up for a strike. The weapon slashed down in an executioner’s arc, and Sarah dived aside at the last instant.

The iron head of the club smashed the chest behind Sarah apart. She spun inside the twin’s guard and drove her blade into a gap between the plates of crab-shell armor.

The woman grunted and stumbled backward, tearing the weapon from Sarah’s hand.

Sarah turned and began frantically searching through the shattered ruin of the chest, sweeping aside damaged knives, brass-knuckles, and iron-tipped cudgels.

“Come on, come on, where are you…?” she hissed, hearing the scrape of a club being lifted from the deck. A broken handle, a bent blade.

Had one of the twins hidden them somewhere else, hoping to keep them for themselves…?

No, no, no…

And then her palm closed on the smooth, ivory-handled grips she knew better than anything.

Sarah spun the twin pistols into her grip, and snapped the firing mechanism into place.

She twisted and dived to the side, pulling the triggers in a storm of shot.

Crab-shell armor was proof against blades and hooks, but against gun-dame-forged weapons, the tattooed woman might as well have been naked.

Red-hot pistol balls blasted through her armor, and she toppled over the cannon, leaking vital fluids from more than a dozen neat holes.

Sarah rose to her feet and tensed as she felt the roll and sway of the deck change. It was a subtle change, almost unnoticeable, a change in the angle of the anchored ship’s prow as the swell of the ocean shifted…

“Oh, now that’s not good…” she said, as Aligh limped toward her, distraught at the sight of the dead twins.

“You killed them!” he cried.

Sarah fired a shot into each of his kneecaps. “That’s for all the captains you killed tonight.”

Aligh screamed, writhing on the deck. He wept and feebly tried to swing his billhook at her.

Sarah easily batted it aside and jammed a pistol under his chin.

“Any last words?” she asked. “Now this really is your funeral.”

The deck shifted again, and a deathly silence fell over the ship.

Even the wounded seemed to recognize the strange quality of the darkness closing in around them as a deep rumbling sound rose up from the water.

Sarah sensed fearful tremors running through the ship’s timbers.

“What’s happening?” she demanded, jabbing the pistol harder into Aligh’s throat. “What else did you have planned tonight?”

“This is none of my doing,” wept Aligh, and despite his obvious agony, he laughed with the hysteria of a man who knew his time had come. “My bill to the sea is due. And you’re going to pay it with me…”

Sarah had felt something like this in the bones of a ship once before.

Nine years ago, just north of Bilgewater and making the last, hooking sprint to the inner bay. They’d been returning from a bounty run up by Drakkengate and spotted a smuggler running a slimmed-down carrack out of the Ironwater coves, fleeing the Serpent Isles with treasures looted from a Buhru temple.

She still remembered the mournful rumble of the titanic serpent horns as they echoed over the ocean, and the terror as her crew watched an abyssal kraken rear up from the water to smash the carrack to matchwood and drag all aboard to their deaths.

The shift in the deck as the kraken had passed under their ship felt just like this.

She ran to the gunwale and searched the fog and ocean.

The sea swirled around the crags of Moonshard Reef, dark and keeping their secrets. No one knew just how deep it got around here, but any ship that sank out this way was never seen again, never washed up on the isles.

What’s out there…?

And then she saw it.

Two hundred yards out, huge and unyielding, a titan rising from the deep.

The vast dome of its helmeted head broke the water, twin eyes glowing with the orange light of a smelting furnace. The water boiled around it, frothed to madness by a dark miasma surrounding its wavering outline, and leaving an oily slick in its wake.

Its body was huge, encased in plates of corroded iron, looped with chains torn from countless sunken vessels. Across one shoulder it carried a colossal, hook-bladed anchor, dripping with black water and garlanded with rotten weeds from the deepest, darkest abyss.

Sarah’s mind refused to process what she was seeing.

This is impossible.

It was a dark legend come to life, a scare story told around the beer-soaked tables of the wharf-side taverns by drunken rakes hoping for a free drink. She knew its name, had even laughed at the impossibility of its existence.

But here it was, rising from the ocean with booming, ponderous strides.

The drowned tallyman, come to claim the ocean’s due.

Even his name was said to be a curse.

“Nautilus…”

The water exploded as Nautilus hurled his anchor at the Moon Serpent.

A tidal wave made stagnant and rotten by its time in the darkness washed over the ship, as the anchor crashed into the deck. It smashed clear through the timbers, and the ship tilted wildly to port as the impossible weight of it pulled it over.

Sarah fell against the railing and jammed her pistols home in their shoulder holsters as the ship tilted downward. Crew screamed as they slid down the angled deck or were thrown overboard. The anchor ripped clear of the ship’s side, and the ship violently righted itself. Sarah looked up at the sound of splintering masts overhead. Silver sails billowed as the topmast and mizzen snapped like twigs, falling to the shattered deck to crush a dozen men or more.

She struggled to her feet, hearing the groan of a keel bending under stresses it had never been designed to endure. Caulked timbers split and geysers of black water erupted all along the length of the deck.

Sarah turned to Aligh, who clung to the bronze cannon that ought to have served as his tomb.

“You did this!” she yelled, as the looming shadow of Nautilus reared up from the water.

The carved wooden railing smashed to splinters as a massive hand, surely too large to have once been mortal, slammed down on the foredeck. Another swiftly followed, trailing a length of chain that slithered with a black, oily substance.

“He’s not real!” screamed Aligh, his mind undone by the sight of Nautilus. “It was just a story!”

“He looks pretty damn real to me!” shouted Sarah over the cacophony of smashing wood, tearing sails, and terrified screams. Fiery heat washed over her as Nautilus hauled his bulk over the gunwale, and turned his infernal gaze upon her.

She felt the deathly heat of it crawling over her skin, its touch loathsome and invasive, as if the titan of the deeps could see into her very soul.

His titanic weight heeled the ship over again, and Sarah grabbed hold of the looped pulley ropes as the deck tilted crazily. The front of the cannon slid sideways as the block and tackle swung wildly and its knotted end strained to bear its colossal weight. The wooden pegs securing the wheels of the gun carriage in place creaked ominously.

Aligh pulled his way along the cannon toward her.

“I won’t go alone!” he screamed. “If the ocean wants me, I’ll drag you down with me!”

The man was a lunatic, like the crippled sailors raving in Bilgewater’s alleys with a mind destroyed by the foulest rotgut. His fraudulent serpent caller robes had come loose, and dangling from his neck on a leather thong was a silver-and-brass sigil of three intertwined serpents.

Swinging on the pulley, Sarah tried to kick him away, but he had a madman’s strength, clawing at her throat with his free hand. Cracked fingernails drew blood, and she struggled to find purchase as the ship tipped over onto its side, its port side now completely underwater.

Far above them, Nautilus drew back his anchor once again and brought it down like a colossal woodsman’s axe.

Its unnatural mass sheared through the deck amidships, and Sarah heard the thunderous crack of the keel finally splitting. The vessel’s stern rose up sharply, and the sounds of Aligh’s screaming crew echoed in the mist.

On the ocean, we are all equal, went the old saying, but right now Sarah didn’t give a wharf-rat’s shit for those murderous, traitorous bastards.

Let them all drown.

The front half of the ship sprang up with the force of the blow, then slammed back down onto the ocean, tilting back upright as seawater poured into the bow section. The weight of it was dragging the prow deeper underwater with every passing second.

In moments, nothing would remain on the surface.

A body slammed into the deck next to her; Aligh’s tattooed daughter, the one with Sarah’s stiletto still jammed in her brain.

Slicks of black fluid spilled from her mouth and swirled in her eyes.

With a groan of screeching metal, Nautilus reached for Aligh with a massive, corroded gauntlet. His crushing grip fastened on the treacherous captain’s torso and pulled. Aligh held fast to Sarah with lunatic strength, as though they embraced like lovers.

She couldn’t shake him loose.

“All because you wouldn’t pay the damn tithe,” snarled Sarah, as Aligh fought to hold on to her.

“The ocean will take you as well as me!” he screamed.

“Not today,” said Sarah, reaching up and back to grip the skull-pommel of the stiletto wedged in the soft tissue under the tattooed twin’s jaw.

She pulled hard, and the blade slid free in a welter of fluids.

“You want him?” said Sarah, reversing her grip on the weapon. “He’s all yours!”

She rammed the blade into the side of Aligh’s neck, driving it hard through to the other side. His head snapped back and Sarah’s hand flashed out to catch a falling leather thong cut loose from around Aligh’s throat. His grip spasmed, and the metal titan wrenched him back just as the deck hook securing Sarah’s rope loop snapped.

The full weight of the cannon yanked on the block and tackle, lifting Sarah away from the weapon and Aligh. Swinging wildly above the sinking ship, she watched as Nautilus turned and sank back into the ocean, the screaming Aligh clutched in one iron fist.

The water closed over him, a trail of frantic bubbles following Aligh down as Nautilus returned to the darkness below with his bounty. As Aligh was dragged down, Sarah took grim pleasure in seeing the look of terror in his eyes at his fate; condemned to an eternity in darkness without so much as a pauper’s marker to his name.

The Moon Serpent’s prow rose almost vertically in the ocean, and Sarah swung on the rope to reach the jutting, serpent figurehead. Her booted feet caught the silver fangs, and she managed to remain upright as the ship slowly sank into the ocean.

With a moment’s pause, she saw the back half of the boat was almost entirely underwater, with only a few sailors crowded in around the upright stern, so close she could likely have swung over to reach them. One of the survivors was Petyr Harker, and she felt bilious hatred rise in her gorge.

“I did tell you I was just the sort of fellow to seek dramatic revenge in some stupidly elaborate scheme,” said Petyr. “Admittedly, I didn’t quite see it turning out like this, but at least—”

Sarah didn’t give him a chance to finish, throwing the rope loop toward him like a lasso, and no harpooner had ever cast so perfect a throw.

The loop settled around Petyr’s neck like a noose, but before he could lift it clear, Sarah drew her pistol and aimed upward.

“Say hello to Aligh on the way down, Petyr,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

The shot smashed the block and tackle straining to hold the cannon’s enormous weight, and it immediately fell into the ocean. Sarah had a fraction of a second to savor the look of horror in Petyr’s eyes before the rope snapped taut and wrenched him from his perch.

His scream was cut short as he hit the water and vanished into the depths as the cannon dragged him all the way down.

Standing atop the serpent figurehead, Sarah watched the Moon Serpent’s stern finally go under in a swirl of foaming water and cracking timbers. The few sailors still clinging to the wreckage paddled frantically on the surface before the suction of the wreck finally pulled them down with it.

Looking down, she reckoned she had a few seconds at best before the prow did the same to her.

“Shame to send something so beautiful to the deep,” said a voice behind her, and Sarah smiled.

She looked over her shoulder to see Rafen in their landing boat, soaked to the skin and covered in cuts, bruises, and bites. The storm lamp on the prow bobbed like a welcome beacon of safety.

“Thank you kindly, old man,” she said.

“I meant the cannon,” said Rafen, carefully rowing toward her. “A finer thirty pounder I’ve yet to see.”

“Aye,” agreed Sarah, “but it’s tradition, and you don’t go messing with traditions, right?”

“Right indeed,” said Rafen.

“So where in the name of the Bearded Lady did you get to?” asked Sarah, “I needed you on the damn deck when everything went to shit.”

Rafen shrugged and said, “Went below to get another bottle of rum and ran into Aligh’s crew fixing to get a-murderin’. They didn’t take kindly to being discovered and tried to cut my damn head off. Managed to gut a couple with some borrowed steel, but had to jump out of a gunport before they shanked me good. Swam around to get our boat, getting feasted on by all that lives under the surface, thank you very much. But I’m here now, so do you want to get on board or are you planning to go down with the ship?”

“This ship’s captain’s already gone with her,” said Sarah, stepping casually from the figurehead to the landing boat.

With her safely aboard, Rafen rowed them away from the doomed Moon Serpent as the figurehead and its topmost mast finally went under in a swirl of bubbles, rope, and broken spars.

Sarah moved to the back of the landing boat, now seeing she wasn’t the only passenger Rafen had picked up. A bloodied body in a lacerated coat of pale blue, gold cuffs, and frayed bronze epaulettes lay slumped in the landing boat’s bilges.

“Blaxton?” said Sarah. “She’s still alive?”

“Just about,” said Rafen. “She’s a blowhard, but she didn’t deserve to go down with scum like Aligh. Didn’t feel right to leave her to drown, right?”

Sarah said nothing, too exhausted to do more than nod.

“So you going to tell me what in the eight seas happened up there?” asked Rafen.

“You’d never believe me,” said Sarah.

“I’m guessing it was you that sank the ship firing the damn cannon into the deck?” said Rafen.

“Wasn’t me. What happened up there was all Aligh’s doing,” said Sarah, with a look that told him not to ask more.

“Fair enough.”

“Though I did manage to get this.” She opened her palm to reveal a disc stamped with three intertwined serpents of silver and brass.

“Aligh’s sigil,” said Rafen.

“Might not mean much these days, but we’ll see what happens when I show it to the rest of his crew, once they’ve sobered up.”

Rafen grinned. “Well, at least this trip wasn’t a total waste of time.”

Sarah slumped in the back of the boat and watched as the rearing crag of Moonshard Reef began to fade into the mist. She narrowed her eyes as she saw a lone figure climb from the water and shake itself dry.

A hunched wretch in an expensive kraken-skin coat.

“Thorne,” she whispered. “It’s always the bloody rats that make it out.”

“What’s that?” said Rafen, mid-row. “Someone else made it out?”

“No,” said Sarah, turning away. “No one at all.”