LoL Universe Indexing and Search

The humidity of Tonnika market and the crowd’s fragrant odor usually rushed buyers into hasty decisions, but Hatilly stood transfixed. Her eyes had fallen upon the strange, tangled bud encased with red withered leaves, a specimen she had never seen before.

“You don’t want that,” the old florist said. “It’s a rare Night-Blooming Zychid. Plucked from the southern jungles, where sunlight never touches the forest floor. It’s more for potion brewers or alchemists…”

The merchant directed her gaze to a bouquet of Sapphire Roses. “Now, these are from fair Ionia. Adapted them to our robust Kumangra soil myself… Or perhaps some Pearls of the Moon?”

Hatilly was not swayed. Sapphire Roses and Pearls of the Moon flashed their colors for any eyes to see. This zychid held exotic potential like the Kraken Lilies along the Serpentine Delta, or Parethan Corpse Tulips. Rare flowerings were precisely her and Cazworth’s type of indulgence.

“I’ll take the zychid.”

The florist welcomed the gold pressed into his palm, despite the doubt scrawled across his face. He deftly cradled the bud in a nest of damp silk, and planted the parcel into Hatilly’s waiting hands. She noticed the aerial rootlets clinging to a shard of something hard and chalk-white.

“What’s this?”

“Zychids cling to foreign objects,” the merchant said. “That one’s grafted to a bit of bone.”

Cazworth was bent over his antique desk, scribbling notes in the margins of his ledger by candlelight. He didn’t look up until Hatilly set the ceramic upon his table. The strange zychid, half buried in a mound of wetted soil, already seemed happy, its reds and greens vibrant and slick with life.

“A budding gift for a blooming businessman.” She planted a kiss on Cazworth’s cheek, feeling clever. He smiled and turned to examine the specimen.

“When you said you needed flowers to brighten the place up, I assumed they’d be colorful.” Cazworth jabbed the plant with his quill. “What is this curious fellow?”

“A most extravagant gift to celebrate the opening of the upper Kumangra’s newest trading supplier… Cazworth’s Exotic Goods.”

Cazworth pulled his wife onto his lap.

“Well, if you say this is a rarity indeed, then we are in for a treat.”

He kissed her sweetly. A single petal opened up, unfolding into the darkening room.

“It’s beginning,” Hatilly said. “Will you be up all night?”

“Most likely. There are still several invoices that need rubber stamping—the partners still have concerns about the shipping lanes…”

Hatilly yawned.

“Don’t let me bore you, dear wife. Run along to bed. I’ll wake you when it starts to flower.”

“Thank you, sweet husband.”

Hatilly awoke to a creeping sensation on her ankle.

Infernal skitter-ants were everywhere, this near to the jungle. She kicked it away. Sleepily blinking, she turned to the empty pillow next to her. Cazworth hadn’t come to bed.

The nagging insect was undaunted, and was crawling further up her shin. She flung off the bedsheets and saw that there was no insect, but rather a tendril vine weaving through her toes, entangling her ankle, and twining around her leg.

Panic shoved sleep from her mind.

She kicked but could not get the green and red shoots to release her leg. They tightened, biting into her flesh. She pried them off with her fingernails. Her hands bled from thorny splinters.

The snaking stalks wound a trail from under the bed chamber door, where they sprouted aerial rootlets to climb the bed frame. Her mind immediately flashed to Cazworth.

Armed with a flickering lantern and a pair of sewing shears, Hatilly followed the vines through the hallway of their manse. Their circumference widened the closer she stepped toward its source, which she now saw was in Cazworth’s study.

The door took several tries to open. Hatilly hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this.

The room was covered, floor to ceiling, with floral growth. A riot of obscene colors danced in her lantern’s flicker. Exotic bulbs dangled from the walls, their finger-like leaves undulating as if drawing breath. Flowers seemed to mock her through the darkness, flashing their rainbow petals like signal fires. All had sprouted from a singular dark nexus: an enormous closed flower bud, which lay on the fainting couch by the fireplace, where Hatilly herself often read while Cazworth worked. Bits of ceramic and soil lay strewn about. The zychid had outgrown its habitat.

All manner of protrusion crept from its pulsating petals. Everything in Hatilly’s mind screamed for her to flee her home, put it to the torch, and burn that hideous bouquet. But not without Cazworth. Vines twisted around the legs of the chair, the legs of the study table, the legs of…

Her husband.

Still sitting in his chair, Cazworth was cocooned from head to toe by a writhing mass of leaves. Hatilly reached his side, bare feet slipping on the foliage underfoot. She cut frantically at the strangling vines, but each snip of the shears only made them tighten their grip and produce little thorns that pierced her and her husband. Blood trickled out. Where the drops landed, zychid blossoms burst forward to feed.

Hatilly freed one of Cazworth’s hands—it was pale, and cold to the touch.

A stench filled the air, like a rotting corpse. With tears in her eyes, she turned her head toward the fainting couch, where the zychid bud was flowering.

The stench grew worse. Hatilly retched. The gargantuan petals peeled backward in colorful layers, revealing oblong petals of striking scarlet and deep green, garlanded in black tips, revealing a woman in place of the stamen. Her hair was red as blood. Her flesh like leaves. Vines and petals wreathed her in deadly beauty. Her eyes opened. They reminded Hatilly of a panther’s—narrow irises seeing only prey.

The woman who blossomed from the flower arose.

Hatilly clutched the shears like a dagger.

“You wish to prune me already?” the thing said, its deep voice ensnaring Hatilly.

“What are you?”

“The bloom you longed to witness.”

The stench turned. Gone was the reek of death.

Hatilly inhaled sweet fragrances—orange blossoms, the aroma of Sapphire Roses, the fruity scent of Kraken Lilies, the musk of Pearls of the Moon, the delicate hints of wisteria. There were more, secret flowers, but she somehow knew their names—they smelled of colors her eyes never saw. A name formed in Hatilly’s mind…

Zyra.

“Thank you for the lovely garden,” Zyra said, nodding toward Cazworth’s remains. “You tended me well, but we need more sustenance. To make the soil here more… fertile.”

Hatilly saw visions of a world covered by a bouquet of colorful death. It was a beautiful riot of hues, soft and fluttering, choking cities. There were no graves, no war, no money… Hatilly was breathless. She didn’t even feel the vines pull her down, nor the thorns bury themselves in her flesh, rending her skin, spilling her blood.

“Step into the garden that ever grows…” Zyra whispered through the stems and petals. “Death blossoms, and you don’t want to miss the colors, do you?”

Hatilly did not respond, for she was with the flowers.

General Miesar slid an ivory cone across the map. Jarvan wondered at the simplicity of the white piece. No head, no features denoting a face. Just a simple rounded shape, neutral and plain, with no resemblance to the hundred Demacian soldiers it represented.

“If we lead our knights south now, we can attack the argoth head-on before they reach Evenmoor,” said General Ibell, a stout woman with commanding eyes.

“The argoth are fiercest in swarms,” said General Miesar as he paced the length of the tent. “They rely on overwhelming numbers to defeat direct attacks. If we cannot divide them, they will slaughter us long before we reach their queen.”

Jarvan strode to the edge of their tent, parting the fabric and gazing out across the valley. He might have enjoyed the view – morning light made the verdant landscape sparkle with dew, and the village of Evenmoor looked peaceful from a distance. But an ominous gray shape swelled on the horizon as the horde thundered in the distance.

The argoth were not enormous creatures; fighting one alone would be easy enough, but in large numbers, they were subject to the dominating will of a queen, able to move and fight as one vicious unit. This swarm was bigger than any Jarvan had seen before.

Miesar wiped sweat from his brow. “They’ll be here by this evening?”

“Sooner,” said Ibell. “We have an hour, maybe two if we’re lucky, until the argoth overwhelm Evenmoor.”

Jarvan turned back to the map. Ten ebony cones representing the argoth stood at the outer edges of Evenmoor, overshadowing the single Demacian cone. The queen was marked by a smaller figurine of red jasper, right in the heart of the ebony mass.

“Any charge would need to fight through hundreds of argoth to get near her,” said Jarvan, gesturing to the red stone. “What do you propose?”

Miesar halted his pacing. “I’m afraid you won’t like this, my lord, but we could retreat. Surrender Evenmoor. Return on the morrow with forces strong enough to cut through the horde and slay the queen.”

“Leave Evenmoor to the argoth?” asked Ibell. “That’s a death sentence for these people. They will be overrun in a matter of hours.”

Jarvan stared at the ebony and ivory until they merged in his mind’s eye. All he saw was the red queen stone.

Ibell raised her eyebrows. “You see something?”

“A desperate plan,” Jarvan replied, “but it is all we have. We conceal our fiercest fighters within Evenmoor and lay an ambush. With such a small band they won’t anticipate our attack. Then, when the queen is within reach, we strike hard and fast. With her death, the swarm’s unity will be broken.”

“Into the center of the argoth, my lord?” Miesar said. “That, too, may be a death sentence.”

“But we give Evenmoor a chance of surviving the attack,” said Ibell.

“No plan is without risk,” Jarvan said. “I will lead only those willing to join me, and will not engage until our hope of victory is greatest. We bide our time until the eye of the maelstrom is upon us, and then strike from within. With the queen dead, it will be a simple matter to fight our way out.”

Ibell slid a single ivory cone to the village on the map, then moved the circle of ebony pieces forward until they overlapped Evenmoor entirely. The jasper queen stood at its center. With a flick of her finger, she tipped the red stone over. That done, she slid two more white cones to join the fight.

“This is our plan,” said Jarvan. “Ibell and Miesar, you and your troops will lead the second wave.”

“Aye,” said Miesar.

“And you, my lord?” Ibell asked. “Where will you be?”

“I have a queen to kill,” Jarvan replied.

A gust of wind blew cold night air from the garden, carrying with it enticing scents of overripe fruit and blooming flowers. Ahri stood before the garden's entrance, where stone transitioned to soil and narrow labyrinthine caves opened to the sky in a deep caldera. Thickets of trees and brambles grew wild beneath the moonlight, while flowers bloomed in lush abundance. Ahri hesitated, knowing well the twin nature of danger and beauty. She had heard legends of the sacred grove since childhood, but had never before traversed the southern caverns to find it. According to the stories, those who stepped over the threshold of the garden began as one person and left as someone else entirely, or did not leave at all.

Whatever the truth might be, Ahri had made up her mind. As she stepped into the garden, the back of her neck prickled as if someone were watching her. No figure was visible amongst the trees, but the garden was far from still. Everywhere Ahri looked, new flowers bloomed with each passing second. Ahri walked a winding path through the tangle of plants, stepping over roots rumbling beneath the soil. She ducked under hanging vines that reached out to her as if clamoring for affection. She could have sworn she heard a hush from the soft rustling of leaves.

Moonbeams shone through the canopy above, revealing trees bearing leaves of silver and gold. Flower stalks entwined around their trunks, curling to display dazzling buds brighter than any gemstone. Plump spicecherries coated in a layer of frost chimed softly as they swayed amid an untamed thicket.

A snow lily stretched toward Ahri’s face and caressed her cheek gently. It was too alluring to resist. Ahri pressed her face into its petals to inhale its heady scent. Her nose chilled and she took in the faint smell of oranges, the summer breeze, and the tang of a fresh kill. The blossom trembled as it blushed with color, and Ahri’s breath caught in her throat. She swayed, dizzy at the flower’s perfume.

Snip.

The snow lily fell to the soil, severed at its stem. A viscous liquid seeped from the cut. Ahri let out a breath, her nine tails twitching as her head cleared.

Ahri startled as a woman with wisps of gray-white hair stood before her, shears in hand. She was wrapped in colorful shawls and her eyelashes sparkled with dew.

As the woman turned her sea-green gaze to Ahri, Ahri felt a strange unease, as if this woman could slice through her gut just as easily as a fibrous stalk. The woman’s face, wrinkled like tree bark, was impossible to read. But Ahri was no longer concerned for her own safety.

“You startled me, Ighilya,” said Ahri. In the stories, the old woman was known as the Eater of Secrets, the Forgotten, or the Witch Gardener. Wanting to show respect to one with such power, Ahri decided to call her Ighilya. Great grandmother.

“The flowers want something from us,” she said. “Just as we seek something from them. It would be wise to keep your nose to yourself. I would know. I have to feed these hungry babies myself.”

“So you are the Gardener,” said Ahri.

“One of my kinder names, yes. But quite beside the point. I know why you’re here, Iminha.”

Little one. Ahri felt uncomfortable at the word, often used in a familial relationship, though she was not sure why.

“You seek absolution. Freedom from your pain,” said the Gardener.

She stepped over a shrinking fern and beckoned to Ahri.

“Come.”

As they walked through the moonlit garden, flowers turned to face the old woman as if she were the sun itself, warming their leaves and helping them grow. Or perhaps the flowers did not wish to turn their backs to her.

The old woman waved Ahri to a bench in front of a gnarled cloudfruit tree, and sat opposite her.

“Let me guess. You were in love,” the Gardener said, a smile crinkling the corners of her lips.

Ahri’s brow furrowed.

“Don’t worry, you’re far from the first,” said the old woman. “So, who was he? A soldier? An adventurer? A warrior in exile?”

“An artist,” said Ahri. She had not uttered the syllables of his name in over a year and could not bring herself to say them now. They were like swallowing broken glass. “He painted... flowers.”

“Ah. A romantic,” the Gardener said.

“I killed him,” Ahri spat. “Is that romantic enough for you?”

As she spoke the truth aloud, Ahri could not disguise the sharp bitterness on her tongue.

“I sucked the life from his lips as he lay dying in my arms,” she said. “He was kinder, more selfless than anyone had a right to be. I thought I could suppress my urges. But the taste of his dreams and memories was too enticing. He urged me on. I did not resist. And now - now I cannot go on knowing what I did. Please, Ighilya. Can you give me the gift of oblivion? Can you make me forget?”

The Gardener did not answer. She stood and picked a ripe cloudfruit from the tree and peeled it slowly, carefully, so the rind remained in one piece. The flesh fell into six vermillion segments, which she offered to Ahri.

“Care for a slice?”

Ahri stared at her.

“Don’t worry, this one doesn’t want anything from you. Not like the flowers. Fruit never does. Fruit is the most generous part of a plant - it strives to be luscious and juicy - and tempting. It simply wants to attract.”

“Food turns to ash in my mouth,” said Ahri. “How can I feed myself when I am no more than a monster?”

“Even monsters need to eat, you know,” the Gardener said, smiling gently.

She placed one of the cloudfruit segments into her mouth, and chewed before making a face.

“Tart! In all my years in the garden, I’ve never gotten used to the tang.”

The old woman ate the remaining pieces while Ahri sat in silence. When she was finished she wiped the juice from her mouth.

“So you stole a life that was not yours to take,” said the Gardener. “Now you suffer the consequences.”

“I cannot stand it,” Ahri said.

“To be alive is to be in pain, I’m afraid,” the Gardener said.

A vine dripping with snow lily buds wound its way around the old woman’s arm. The woman did not flinch.

“I can’t go on knowing that I killed him,” Ahri pleaded.

“There are greater consequences to losing yourself, Iminha.”

The Gardener reached for Ahri’s hand and squeezed it. Her sea-green eyes glinted in the moonlight, and Ahri detected something she had not seen before - longing, perhaps?

“You will be broken,” said the old woman. “You will never again be one.”

“I am already in fragments,” Ahri replied, “and every second that passes, I split myself anew. Please, Ighilya. I must do this!”

The old woman sighed.

“This garden will not refuse a gift freely given, for it always hungers.”

With that, the Gardener offered her arm to Ahri, still entwined with the vine of snow lilies. Buds unfurled like outstretched hands.

“Give your breath to this flower as you think on the memories you wish to be rid of,” the old woman said, gesturing to the bell shaped lily. “The flower will consume them. Do not inhale again until you feel nothing.”

Ahri held the flower gently between her fingers. The Gardener nodded. Ahri took a deep breath and exhaled into the flower.

...Ahri stood next to a raven-haired man at the edge of a lake. Together they leapt into the water and screamed as they frolicked over endless waves.

Ahri’s suffering dissolved like a cloud along with the image in her mind.

...in a forest silenced by winter, Ahri watched a raven-haired man painting a single blossom. “Am I not your flower?” she asked, pulling the strap down from her dress. He lifted his brush and smeared paint over her bare back. The bristles tingled as he recreated the flower atop her spine. “You are, you are,” he repeated, kissing her shoulder with each word.

Ahri knew she should dread what would happen next, but her heart was growing cold and numb.

...she stood at the center of a lake, holding the lifeless body of the man she once loved. He dipped beneath the water, becoming contorted through its glassy refraction.

Once, this vision would have caused stabbing pain, but Ahri felt no more than a dull ache.

...Ahri leaned over a fallen woodcutter in a stone cavern, consuming his life. At the sound of boots crunching on snow, she startled. The raven-haired man stood, watching. Ahri despaired; she had not wanted him to see this.

“I can't be good enough for you,” Ahri said. “Look at me, greedy for the soul of a dying man. Please, leave me. I am not good. I cannot be good.”

Her raven-haired love responded. “I don't care.” This was the first time Ahri remembered someone loving her wholly, in spite of her nature. His voice was warm and deep with emotion. “I am yours.”

The memory caught in Ahri’s throat and she stopped breathing, breaking the flower’s spell.

No, she thought. I can’t lose this.

Ahri tried to inhale, but the air felt like a noose around her neck. It choked her and stifled her throat, as if she were breathing poison. Her vision blackened, but she gasped until her lungs were nearly bursting.

Losing this would kill him all over again.

Ahri’s knees gave out and she collapsed on the ground, still gripping the snow lily. The unnatural perfume she inhaled from the flower percolated through her mind, conjuring strange and disturbing visions.

Ahri hallucinated. In a snow-silenced forest, she envisioned each of her nine tails ripped from her spine, only to grow back so they could be torn off again.

In a stone cavern, she saw dozens of portraits of herself painted in inky black brushstrokes. In each of the images, her face was blank and cold.

She floated, weightless, at the center of a lake, and looked down to see that the lake was filled, not with water, but blood.

Where are you?

In her mind’s eye, she saw a face warped by the endless folds of her memory, one she was already forgetting. The face was blurred, like a painting of a man rather than the man himself. He looked at her, stared into her, but she could not meet his gaze.

Ahri opened her eyes. The Gardener was standing above her, holding the vine of snow lilies, which had turned raven-black.

“Can you still see him?” asked the old woman.

Ahri focused on the hazy shapes in her mind and focused until they materialized into a face. His face.

“Yes. It’s cloudy, but... I remember,” said Ahri. She fixed the image of his face in her mind, memorizing every detail. She would not let it dissolve.

The old woman’s eyes flashed - not with longing, but regret.

“Then you did what many had not the strength to do. You did not succumb to peace,” said the Gardener.

“I couldn’t,” said Ahri, choking over her words. “I couldn’t give him up. Even if I am a monster. Even if each day I fall apart and each day I must bear the pain a hundred times over. Oblivion is worse, much worse.”

Oblivion was a thousand blurry faces staring at her with empty eyes.

“You cannot take back what you gave, Iminha,” the Gardener said. “The flowers do not relinquish what was freely given. But you may keep what remains. Go, go. Leave this place before it takes hold,” she whispered. Vines coiled around the Gardener’s shoulders, revealing lilies of a deep sea-green. “As it’s done to so many others.”

Ahri tried to stand, but a vine of snow lilies had wound its way around her tails. She struggled against their tightening clutches, prying barbs from her fur, then scrambled to her feet and ran. Knotted roots broke loose from the soil, trying to ensnare her as she leapt between them. A tangled curtain of thorned moon roses swerved to block Ahri’s path, but she held her breath and dove beneath the flowers, which caught wisps of her hair as she tumbled.

The path from the garden was overgrown with snow lilies of all colors. Their leaves, sharp as knives, slashed at Ahri’s skin, while thick stalks coiled around her face and neck, binding her mouth. Ahri bit down and ripped through the fibers with her teeth, tasting sour blood. She tore through the archway to the stone caverns beyond.

She could just make out the Gardener’s voice.

“A piece of you lingers here, always,” the old woman called. “Unlike us, the garden does not forget.”

Ahri did not turn back.

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.

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 child slowly makes her way into the forest. And sometimes beneath the forest as the canopy of leaves weaves a green blanket against the clouds. Oh! And sometimes over the forest when there are roots! Don’t trip, little girl, don’t trip. And now… she’s going through it.

Toward me.

Eep!

I stand in the shadows beyond the path leading away from the girl’s village where countless humans have gathered. The small bud on my head peeks out from behind a bush. My hooves dig nervous furrows into the ground, and I hug the branch from Mother Tree tightly to my chest, comforted by the familiar, swirly feeling of the bark.

It’s safe here, in the trees. Or maybe a few more steps behind them.

J-just a few more…

Even with so many humans in the village filling the hillside with life, the girl is alone.

I hold my branch tighter, reminding myself of what I have to do. It’s time to move forward, Lillia. Just one step. You can do this—Mother Tree is sick. She needs the girl’s dream. I take the step. Or, at least, my hoof shifts a little. Oh. That didn’t go very far. Okay, Lillia, another one. This time I lift one shaky hoof up, and before I can get too afraid, I slam it back down.

Whoopsie. That was backward.

The girl stops to sit beneath a tree not far from where I’m watching, just close enough that I can hear her crying softly into a ragged doll cradled in her arms.

There’s no one to wipe away her tears… but she’s not entirely alone. Beneath everything, vibrating with potential in my branch… I can feel it—her dream.

The bud dangling from the tip of the bough shudders to radiant life now that it senses the child and her dream. Like the small flower on my head, the glowing bud and branch are also from Mother Tree—drawn to dreams just as much as the slumbering magic is drawn to them. Glittering pollen drifts from between its petals, and the shadows around me recede, fleeing the light before I can.

My— My hoof is showing? Eep!

I sprawl and contort all four of my legs to fit in the shrinking shadow, wobbling as my balance threatens to give. The glimmering bud swings wildly as the bough sways with me, casting clouds of dust-like pollen that drift toward the girl through the leaves. And then, as the shadows move again, I stumble into the clearing where she awaits.

All I can do is peer at her from behind my branch, too afraid to blink.

But she doesn’t see me. She presses her face into the doll, hiding her tears. Her sobs turn into whimpers, her whimpers into sighs. The pollen from the bud gradually settles around her, twinkling as the girl’s eyes slowly flutter closed. She slumps against the tree, the doll sliding from her grasp.

I’m still afraid to move. Something twirls out of the bough’s bud and dances above my head. It’s my old friend, a little dream that’s traveled with me since I first left Mother Tree’s mystical garden. As if sensing the other dream still snuggled inside the girl, my glittering friend dances through the air toward her.

“That was a close one,” I say as the dream flits back and forth.

It skims above the girl and leaves a trail of sparkles that tickle her skin until she smacks her lips and wrinkles her nose. She snorts so loudly that I leap again, landing with a blush. I touch the petals of the small bud on my head, wondering if they’re flushing as red as my cheeks. The child remains fast asleep.

Why isn’t her dream coming out?

My friend continues to spin around the girl, trying to summon the other dream. But my eyes are drawn to the doll on the ground instead, the girl’s hand hanging as if she still reaches for it, her fingers squeezing tight.

Before I left the garden—the place that was my home—I used to think that dreams were the things people wanted most every time they closed their eyes. But now, I see that the things they want, that they reach for and hold on to… only make them sad. The thing I wanted most, which was to meet the dreamers, hurt Mother Tree.

What if dreams aren’t the things we want?

I put down my branch. This time you can do it, Lillia. Just close your eyes, like you’re sleeping. Stumbling forward, I kneel beside the girl and take up her doll.

What if dreams are the things we need?

I start to hand the doll back to the girl, wary of getting this close, even to such a small human. Instinctively, she rolls over as she feels it against her chest, sitting up to pull the doll into a hug. Her tiny arms are just long enough to wrap around me as well. As she hugs the doll, she pulls me in closer, and closer.

And in that moment, we both find what we need to bloom.

The girl’s dream finally emerges in a luminous swirl, spiraling and dancing alongside my old friend, and filling the forest with so much wonder that I can feel it all the way down to my hooves.

I want to prance!

Like a color that has no name, each dream is so hard to describe. Is this dream the girl’s sister, wrapping her in its arms although the sisters have already said goodbye? Is it the doll she pretends is her sister before she put on armor and left everything else behind? Or are these only the things the child grasped too hard while hugging her doll, and her dream is something deeper—something truer?

“You miss your sister, don’t you?” I whisper into her ear. “You need her love.”

Giving her that love, seeing it and feeling it, is what I need, too. I melt into the hug, and send dream dust spiraling as the small bud on my head twirls open.

Both dreams curl into the large bud on my branch. “I’ll whisper your dream to the tree. I’ll remember,” I tell the girl. “I’m glad I got to meet you,” I add.

I hope her dream hears me, too.

I let go of the girl and lay her down gently. With her sighs, she releases all that’s been trapping her dream.

Like so many mortals, her sister may never come back to give her the love she desires. That’s why she needs to dream. That’s why it will always be there, and she’ll never be alone, as long as she remembers to close her eyes.

That’s why dreams are magical… and the little girl is, too.

I sneeze, and the dust-pollen in the bud on my head swirls away, carrying the magic of the child’s dream into a wind that blows toward Mother Tree.

“Whoopsie,” I blush, realizing I’m in the open. And before the feeling of wonder completely fades, I prance back into the forest.

The girl opens her eyes with a well-rested yawn. The sun is shining through the leaves above her. She’s surprised to find herself still in the forest, and drops her doll in shock. Then, slowly, she remembers what it means to her—who gave it to her—and picks it back up.

She holds the doll tight and starts to run through the clearing.

“O-Ma, O-Ma! Has sister returned?” she cries to her grandmother. “I just saw her. I saw her!”

The girl’s small outline disappears, but in her wake, following the path where she ran, dream blossoms sprout from sparkling pollen.

Perhaps when the child returns, she will pick one of these flowers. And know that in her heart—though it can’t be held—the love of her sister will always bloom.

Akali could see the stars. They shimmered above her, each one a flickering flame over Valoran City.

Pretty, Akali thought, focusing on those distant lights, forgetting for just a moment that she couldn’t breathe. She forgot the feeling of gravel pressing into her back as she lay prone where they’d left her. Forgot the way the other kids had turned on her when she’d tried to stop them from hurting the small, grimy puppy they’d found in the alley. She forgot everything but the stars, until a soft voice broke her focus.

“Are you okay?”

Akali tried to turn toward that voice, curious as to who’d been brave enough to break up a five-on-one fight. Awareness of where, exactly, those punches and kicks had landed, however, kept her on the ground.

“Did they knock you out?” the stranger asked, concerned.

“Knocked down, actually,” Akali corrected her with a wince. Talking hurt. “But then I figured I’d just stay down here. It’s cozy, you know?” The girl laughed, making Akali smile... and then grimace. Smiling hurt, too.

The girl stepped forward to stand above Akali. She offered a hand, and smiled. “As comfy as that seems, maybe we should get you off the ground? This place is gross.”

Akali couldn’t argue with that, grabbing the girl’s arm and pulling herself up.

It was only then that Akali realized she recognized this girl! Tall, pink hair, prim clothes... It was Kai’Sa! Pretty, perfect Kai’Sa. Akali had never spoken to her, but she knew Kai’Sa had been popular ever since she transferred to Valoran City Middle School earlier this year. The teachers wouldn’t shut up about her. Polite, excellent in every subject, quiet. Basically Akali’s opposite, or so she had thought, right up until Kai’Sa had stormed into the alley. Akali heard Kai’Sa tell all five assailants that if she ever caught them picking on anyone, human or otherwise, she’d personally make them regret it. They’d fled without another word. Akali was as impressed as she was in pain.

“I’m gonna have bruises on my bruises,” she admitted.

“You do this often? The fights, I mean, not the losing.” Kai’Sa grinned.

“Neither,” Akali hedged. “Well, not usually. Sometimes? But they were picking on a—oh, crap! The dog!”

Kai’Sa helped her dig through the nearby bins, and Akali marveled at her willingness to get her hands dirty. Literally. They were elbow-deep in trash and muck until—

“There you are!” Kai’Sa said, pulling the trembling pup from beneath a sodden bag. The creature was filthy, more dirt than dog, but it gave a small wag of its tail as Kai’Sa held it.

“I think you made a friend,” Akali said.

“And here I was thinking I’d made two,” Kai’Sa mused. It took Akali a moment to understand.

“Me?! Why would you wanna be friends with me?” Akali wasn’t good at... well, anything, really, unless you counted playing video games. Which Akali did, of course, but Kai’Sa didn’t know that.

“Well, for starters,” Kai’Sa said as she stood, still holding the dog, “I saved your life. Figure that makes us friends. Plus, you got your butt handed to you trying to save a puppy. Means you have good character.”

Akali laughed. “All right, new friend. What are we gonna do with the dog? No way my mom would let it in the house. She barely lets me in the house!”

“My dad runs the shelter down the street. I volunteer on weekends.”

“Of course you do,” Akali said dryly as Kai’Sa set off.

“Come on,” she called over her shoulder. “We can drop this little guy off, and then I’ll walk you home.”

“Huh? I don’t need a babysitter!”

“You napping in an alley says otherwise.”

Akali realized she’d never win an argument with this girl.

Kai’Sa was true to her word. After settling the dog in one of the plush shelter beds, Kai’Sa walked Akali straight home. The journey was surprisingly pleasant, despite Akali knowing what awaited her at home. She marveled at how easy it was to talk to Kai’Sa. They made plans to grab ramen tomorrow after school, and that alone was enough to drown out the lecture that began as soon as she shut her front door. However, her mother’s admonishments of “useless” and “delinquent” failed to hit their mark for once, banished by the word “friend” blazing in Akali’s heart like a newborn star.

Valoran City Park was busier than usual. Everyone seemed to have reached the same conclusion, opting for the longer, more scenic route to the mall to soak in the beautiful day. After all, who wouldn’t want to bask in the sunshine, birdsong, and Kai’Sa’s yelling.

“You don’t even know what it’s for!”

Kai'Sa never shouted, not in the years Akali had known her, and especially not in public, so Akali couldn’t really blame the passerby for staring. Not when she shouted right back.

“I don’t care what it’s for! No petition thing is worth burning out over!”

“It’s worth it to me! And I’m not burnt out! I’m just tired!”

Akali rolled her eyes. “Tired?! Kai’Sa, tired is you forgetting your homework, not sleeping through class!”

“Look, I don’t need a babysitter, Akali.” Their old joke now felt like a jab.

“You’re right,” Akali spat. “What you need is someone who isn’t going to let you lie to yourself. You’re pulling double shifts at the shelter on top of everything else!”

“Dad needs the help,” Kai’Sa and Akali said in unison.

“Well, it’s true,” Kai’Sa said softly.

Kai’Sa was selfless to a serious fault. It was something Akali usually admired, but now...

“There’s always someone else to help.”

“Oh, so now it’s wrong to help people?” Kai’Sa demanded.

“That’s not what I meant!” Akali knew she should rein in her temper, but— “I’m not gonna sit here and watch you sacrifice yourself for other people!”

“I thought you of all people would—you know what? Never mind.” Kai’Sa’s lower lip trembled. “I need to be alone right now.”

Akali knew she shouldn’t leave. She wanted Kai’Sa to trust her to be there when things got tough. The worst thing Akali could do was go to the mall without her best friend.

It’s official. I am the worst.

Guilt and shame had been no match for pride as Akali had made the trek to the mall alone. This couldn’t all be her fault, right?

That was all my fault.

Whatever else Kai’Sa had going on, she’d always been there for Akali. When things at home had gotten really bad, Kai’Sa was there for her. They’d taken to wandering Valoran City together after school, looking for trouble and trying to stop it if they could. “A bona fide crime-fighting duo,” Kai’Sa called them. Sure, it was mostly to keep Akali out of trouble, but they’d saved a few kids, too.

See? Akali reasoned. I help people!

But Kai’Sa was the one who helped her, no matter how tough it got.

And I just left her there!

“I’m the worst!”

“The worst? Seems a bit dramatic, dear.” A little old lady at the flower kiosk was smiling at her. Akali had been talking to herself. Great.

“S-Sorry. Just... being stupid.” Akali turned to leave, but her gaze snagged on a bouquet of delicate pink and blue blossoms. She recognized them. Kai’Sa loved those little flowers so much that she’d bought matching friendship bracelets with them as charms. Akali could feel the delicate metal against her wrist.

“Forget-me-nots.” The flower seller nodded, knowingly. “They represent an unbreakable bond of love and friendship. They also make a lovely apology.”

A gift! Maybe that would help smooth things over with Kai’Sa! Akali pulled out her wallet, oblivious to the strange rumbling that began above her.

Don’t look. You know she hasn’t called! Sarah Fortune clutched her phone so hard it was a wonder it didn’t shatter. How was not hearing from Ahri worse than fighting monsters?

Don’t look. Don’t—

“Sarah?”

“What?!” she snapped.

“S-Sorry, Fortune. I mean, er, Sarah. I—you looked sort of... angry? I was w-worried.” Lux’s face had turned the same shade as her bright pink hair, and guilt needled Sarah’s conscience.

“Sorry, Lux. I was thinking. About stuff.” Oh, yeah. Very reassuring.

But Lux sagged with relief. “I know you said yes to shopping with us and everything, but I was worried.”

“I’m glad you invited me, Lux. This is a welcome distraction,” Sarah offered with a half-hearted smile. “Now hurry up. Ez looks like he’s going to implode.”

They turned to see Ezreal waving excitedly, gesturing to a Lights & Lamps store, of all places. Lux blushed.

“I’m okay, so go have fun,” Sarah said.

She wasn’t okay, but Lux didn’t need to know that. Instead, Sarah watched Lux smile before running past the flower kiosk to catch up with Ezreal. Jinx, rolling her eyes, followed them.

Sarah didn’t mind coming with them to the mall, not really. From where she sat on her bench, she could see Poppy carrying two ice-cream cones to Lulu, who might have been drooling. She spotted Janna and Soraka being as awkward as possible at the front of a line in the food court. They’d been there for ten minutes, engaged in a polite battle of wills, with many an “Oh, after you!” and “No, please, I insist,” as an irritated crowd formed behind them. Sarah almost smiled at the thought of how long Jinx had been glaring at Ezreal without blinking.

Syndra wasn’t there, of course. She’d been “busy,” but everyone else had made it. Except Ahri.

Yup. Not hearing from Ahri was worse than fighting monsters.

She’s probably in space. Or she’s dead. Or she’s dead in space!

But Sarah knew Ahri would be fine. Fine, and aloof, and unwilling to confide in anyone. Not even her own lieutenant.

It had been like this ever since... that battle. With her.

No! Sarah wouldn’t think about that, even as memories of that lonely planet threatened to rise to the surface. She couldn’t think of Ahri dragging her away from their fallen friends. Not as guilt whispered that they were dead because of her. Nope. Sarah buried that pain deep. And when she couldn’t bury it, she distracted herself from it. She had her new team. She had her phone. Easy! Except when it wasn’t. Like now.

And this is why you can’t get close to the others, Sarah reminded herself. She was barely keeping it together after losing one team. Sarah didn’t think she’d survive losing another. Not if she saw them as more than the mission.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she whispered to herself.

Sarah’s training made it impossible to truly be lost in thought. That’s why one moment she sat, trying to forget, and the next she was standing, every muscle in her body tense.

A keening whistle, the sound of something moving far too fast, was followed by a rumble from somewhere above her.

“What the—?” But Sarah was cut off as something crashed into the flower stand.

Akali could see the sky. She could make out the pinks and purples of sunset through a hole in the ceiling. Petals and debris fell, and for some reason, they reminded her of Kai’Sa.

Forget-me-nots. That’s right. She had been talking to the flower seller, but she couldn’t remember why. Her head throbbed. If only her thoughts weren’t so sluggish. If only the people around her would stop screaming—people were screaming! Panic cut bone-deep. Something was wrong, and awareness, mingled with adrenaline, broke through the haze in her head.

Uh-oh, she thought dimly. This isn’t good.

“Now this isn’t good,” a male voice agreed from somewhere above her. Akali could just make out two figures in front of her, obscured by clouds of dust.

“Where are the banners? Where are the parades and adoring fans?” the voice went on.

“Looks like no one planned a party for your homecoming, Rakan.” A girl’s voice now, bored and mocking.

“I think you’re right, Xayah!”

As the dust began to settle, Akali could see who’d spoken, but—that couldn’t be right. They looked, well, ridiculous. Feathered capes? Gemstones? They were facing away from her as Xayah patted Rakan’s arm.

“Not even a balloon,” he whined. “Babe, do you know what this means?”

“That I’m going to have to coddle your fragile ego?” Xayah asked dryly.

“Well, yes, but no! It means we’re gonna destroy the city. What do you say?”

“It’s a date,” she said simply, before the pair unleashed themselves.

It was what Sarah had been waiting for—less thinking, more action. Past the clouds of dust, she could just make out Lux, Ezreal, and Jinx sprinting toward whatever had crashed through the roof. Poppy, pulling her hammer from Light only knew where, shielded Lulu, who was still eating her ice cream. Sarah couldn’t see them, but she could hear Soraka and Janna ushering panicked shoppers away from the epicenter.

“See anything?” Sarah shouted at Lux.

“Not a thing! There’s too much—Janna, help!”

A gust of wind cleared the lingering dust to reveal two figures. The taller one gave a gracious bow in Sarah’s direction, but the other only glared, hatred clouding her violet eyes. Familiar eyes. But they were the wrong color. They were wrong. They were—

Buried memories clawed their way through Sarah’s psyche. Green eyes were filled with tears. He wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t moving. Fuchsia feathers fell into puddles of black. Someone grabbed Sarah around the waist, pulling, pleading. A child’s laugh, horrible and cruel.

No! They couldn’t be here. They couldn’t be...

“Xayah? Rakan?” Sarah whispered.

“Looks like she remembers us after all,” Rakan mused, glancing at his partner, but Xayah only had eyes for Sarah. She snarled, and Sarah’s instincts took over.

Looking back, she would wonder if things might have gone differently had Ahri been there. She, at least, would have cautioned against transforming in front of hundreds of panicked patrons. She would defuse the situation in that calm, level-headed way of hers. But Sarah wasn’t Ahri.

“STAR GUARDIANS!” Sarah and Xayah shouted, Sarah’s words a command, Xayah’s a curse, as a kaleidoscope of color exploded from them all.

Sarah couldn’t say she fully believed in the First Light. She wasn’t keen on some unknowable, cosmic force manipulating her life. But she believed in the mission, in protecting those who couldn’t protect themselves, no matter the cost. That molten core of belief fueled her transformation, her world becoming one of color, light, and white-hot power. She channeled it, allowing starlight to replace doubt, replace fear. She could see the gem now glowing on her chest, her uniform twinkling like a galaxy. The old Sarah Fortune had melted away, leaving only a Star Guardian.

The light of eight transformations momentarily blinded Xayah and Rakan, and Sarah seized her chance.

“Boki! Baki! It’s showtime!” Sarah cried.

Her familiars popped into being. A small frown replaced Baki’s usual smirk, and Boki glanced with his good eye past Xayah and Rakan to where Saki and Riku, their familiars, fluttered nervously. Boki let out a sad squeak.

“It isn’t them,” Sarah said, whether to herself or her familiars, she wasn’t sure.

“Still making a habit of lying to yourself?” Xayah asked before hurling her feathers like knives. Sarah took them out with two precise pistol shots, but Xayah had already thrown a second volley.

“Not today, lady.” Ezreal teleported in front of Sarah, firing bolts at the oncoming darts, only to be caught off guard by Rakan. One of his feathers clipped Ezreal’s gem, missing his heart by inches.

“There can only be one leading man, you know,” Rakan offered, almost amicably.

“Yeah,” Ezreal agreed, taking aim with his gauntlet. “I’m pretty sure it’s me!”

“I’m pretty sure it’s ME!” Jinx shouted just as her familiars, Kuro and Shiro, unleashed a storm of bullets.

The battle became a blur of light and color, Xayah and Rakan matching the guardians’ combined attacks. How were they so powerful?! Rakan charged headfirst at Poppy, only to narrowly avoid the downward swing of her hammer. Xayah zipped toward them, but Lulu threw Pix at her face. Before Xayah could retaliate against the flapping familiar, Lux shot an orb of light that bound Xayah and Rakan in prismatic rings.

“Why are you attacking us?!” Lux demanded. “Stop this!”

“‘Stop this!’ Ugh. You guardian losers never change.” Xayah looked disgusted.

“Whatever you two are, you shouldn’t be here,” Sarah said.

“Well, you shouldn’t have—what was it she did to us, Rakan?” Xayah said as she struggled against her bindings.

“Abandoned us to die?” Rakan broke free from his ring, Xayah a beat behind.

“Abandoned us to die! Yup, that was it!” Xayah said.

Sarah aimed a shaking barrel at Xayah. “That wasn’t you! The real Xayah and Rakan are dead.”

“Is that what you’ve been telling yourself?” Xayah chided.

Sarah fired. Rakan soared to Xayah’s side in an instant, a golden shield enveloping them.

“Or is that what Ahri told you?” Xayah seethed. “That we died? Or that we weren’t worth saving!” She broke out of Rakan’s protection toward Sarah once more, but another brilliant beam of light from Lux forced her back.

“Fortu—Sarah, we have a problem,” Lux said.

“Wow, Lux. I hadn’t noticed.” Sarah rolled her eyes.

“Not them!”

Did Lux just snap at her? But Lux wasn’t looking at her, or at Xayah and Rakan. She was staring behind them, to where a small figure cowered in the wreckage of the flower stand.

“We have a problem,” Sarah agreed.

“You need to get her out of here,” Lux said.

“Me? You don’t even know what you’re up against—”

“And you’re too close to this!” Lux really did snap at her! “I watched you hesitate. You never hesitate. And we need help. Go get Ahri. Or Syndra. Anyone! And get that girl out of here.”

Sarah didn’t move, not until Lux whispered, “Please.”

She knew Lux was right. Someone had to help the kid, and Sarah... really was too close to this.

“You’re in charge,” Sarah said, jumping into the air.

“Do you ever not run away?!” Xayah threw another feather at her, but Janna knocked it off course with a well-aimed breeze. Rakan tried to intercept Sarah, but Pix hit him in the head with a smack.

“STOP THROWING THIS THING AT PEOPLE,” Rakan shouted, spinning in mid-air to land on his feet. Lulu waved at Sarah.

“Time to save a star,” she said dreamily before readying Pix for another attack.

Sarah landed next to the girl, who trembled against the only remaining wall of the flower stand.

“Hey, kid. We gotta get you out of here,” Sarah coaxed, but the girl didn’t move. She just stared at the very real, very magical fight happening in front of them.

She’s in shock.

Well, from lieutenant to babysitter. Sarah pulled the girl to her feet, half dragging her toward the exit. A swirling path of stars appeared, lighting the way. Sarah nodded her thanks to Soraka, not stopping even as Xayah shouted after her.

“Leaving your friends to die again, Sarah? You’re pathetic!”

A part of Sarah worried Xayah was right.

Akali was running, aided in no small part by an older girl she didn’t recognize right away. But then Akali remembered. She’d been one of those people fighting in the mall.

Sarah. That’s what one of them had said, right? And she had...

A gun. She had two guns.

Without hesitation, Akali kicked her in the shin. Hard.

“What the heck?!” Sarah shouted, releasing Akali and taking a startled step back. “What’s the matter with you?!”

But Akali was already outside. Had she hit her head? A concussion? That might explain why she’d seen a bunch of teenagers flinging light and bullets at each other like it was nothing. Aliens or a concussion, Akali decided. The only two options that made sense.

“HEY, KID! WAIT!”

The alien-concussion girl called Sarah was following her! Akali didn’t know what this hallucination wanted, but she certainly wasn’t about to find out.

She sprinted and—why were there so many people?! Far more than there’d been in the mall this close to closing. Akali skirted around them, veering left toward the center of Valoran City, away from the fleeing crowds.

Akali rounded a corner and stopped. She was staring at the city’s heart.

What was left of it, anyway.

Akali heard Sarah catch up to her, but it didn’t matter anymore. Not when the once unbroken skyline was now fractured under the weight of falling stars. But they couldn’t be stars. Some were made of darkest night, others glowing embers. They zipped across the twilight sky, changing course midair to crash down without warning. Where they landed, corrosive purples, pinks, and blues blossomed. Buildings collapsed, only to be swallowed by fathomless black holes that winked like all-seeing eyes. Now Akali knew why there’d been so many people. They’d been running away, not just from the mall, but from this. It was terror. It was madness. It was—

“Pretty,” Akali whispered, unable to look away.

“Snap out of it!” Sarah spun Akali away from the chaos.

Akali leaped back. “Don’t touch me!”

Sarah raised her hands. “Hey, hey. I’m on your side. I’m a Star Guardian! We’re the good guys!”

Akali laughed. “Star Guardians? Do you hear yourself?” she scoffed. “Lady, last I checked, good guys don’t destroy malls. Or cities!”

“We didn’t do this, kid!”

“Akali,” she corrected out of pure habit.

“Okay, Akali,” Sarah spat. “Back there, we were just doing our jobs! Protecting people like you from—”

“Your friends,” Akali cut her off. “That other girl... Xayah. She knew you. Which means you’re one of them!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sarah glowered. “And those two were... It doesn't matter who they were. They aren’t like us!”

“Xayah... She said you left them to die. I don’t care who’s on what side, but good people don’t do that!”

Before Sarah could respond, a loud whoosh preceded an inferno of purple fire that funneled into a swirling mass from somewhere blocks away.

That wasn’t very far. Akali had been there barely thirty minutes ago, after all.

“The park...” Akali whispered, right as Sarah said, “Syndra?!”

Akali didn’t ask what a Syndra was. She was already running.

“Hey!” Sarah shouted after her.

“You may be okay leaving your friends to die, Sarah, but I’m not!”

Akali’s gonna get herself killed. Sarah thought about letting her go. It was a terrible thought, but her shin hurt, and Akali’s words had stung. The girl was a brat. A liability.

And she’d been right.

“I’m going to regret this,” Sarah muttered, with no one but Baki and Boki to hear her. They quipped sounds of encouragement as Sarah shot into the air after Akali. She couldn’t have gone far.

As Sarah scanned the city below, her stomach dropped. This particular brand of destruction was worse than she remembered. Or maybe she’d simply tried to erase the memory of what, exactly, Zoe’s magic was capable of.

Don’t remember. Don’t remember. Sarah forced herself to ignore the memories, just as she ignored the screams from the city below. She had to focus on the mission.

“Akali! Where the heck are you?”

“Come on!” someone shouted. Was it Akali?

Sarah landed, tearing off down an alley... and there! Thank the Light. Akali was kneeling in front of a pile of rubble that had clearly broken off a nearby building.

“Come on!” Akali repeated, hurling brick after brick off the mound. A falling paddle star zoomed overhead, illuminating the rubble. Something was under there. Fabric covering what looked like—

“Akali...” Sarah took a step toward her. She could see Akali’s hands, nails cracked and fingers bruised from desperation.

Another star, but the light was too bright this time. This paddle star crashed nearby, and a piece of wall was dislodged by the impact.

“Akali!” Sarah wrapped an arm around Akali’s waist and twisted, flinging her to one side. With her other hand, she aimed her pistol. Bang! The wall broke apart, landing in pieces where Akali had been moments before.

“No!” Akali screamed as debris further buried whoever she’d tried to save.

Sarah launched them both into the air. “They’re gone, Akali.”

“You don’t know that!” Akali sobbed. “They might still be alive!”

“I had to make the call! It was you or them, and it was too late for them!”

“You don’t know that...” Akali whispered again and again, just as Sarah had to Ahri on a lonely planet a lifetime ago.

They had been a team then, stronger than they’d ever been. That must’ve delighted Zoe as she snuffed each one out like a candle. Rakan fell first, as if Zoe knew how much it would shatter Xayah. Neeko was next. One spell to the chest. That was all it took. And Xayah—

“Put me down,” Akali rasped. “Put me down now!”

“If you kick me again, I will drop you.”

“I said put me down!”

“Absolutely not.” Sarah had to get Akali somewhere safe. Had to find Syndra. Had to help her—

“—friend!”

Sarah almost did drop her. “What did you say?”

“My friend—she’s out there!” Akali pleaded. “We argued in the park, and the explosion came from there, and—”

Sarah landed, placing Akali gently on the ground in front of an arcade. Its lights flickered on and off, but the structure seemed sound.

“That’s what this is about? You kicked me, made me chase you around the city... so you could find your friend?”

Akali nodded.

“Look, ki—Akali. I can’t stop all this if I’m babysitting you.”

Akali opened her mouth to argue, but Sarah cut her off. “Even if you found your friend, do you really think you could save her?!”

Akali looked away. Sarah sighed. Don’t do it, Fortune! You don't have time!

“Look. If I find your friend—” Sarah began.

“Kai’Sa! Her name’s Kai’Sa!” The hope in Akali’s voice made Sarah’s throat burn. Fortune, you big, soft idiot. “If I find Kai’Sa, I’ll make sure she finds you.”

“Promise?!”

Sarah held Akali’s foolish hope in her heart like a counterweight.

“I promise,” she said.

Sarah worried it was a promise she couldn’t keep.

Sarah was flying faster than she’d ever flown, heading toward the park. No more babysitting. She was a Star Guardian lieutenant once again. As she soared between the last of the skyscrapers, she saw a grassy field leading up to the edge of Valoran Park. There, two figures stood at the base of the Wishing Tree.

“What took you so long?” Xayah crooned.

Sarah plummeted, Xayah’s quills passing harmlessly above her.

Where are the others? Sarah pulled up from her dive and hovered in midair, looking back to the buildings she’d passed, dread bubbling up once more. Lux. Ezreal. Her frien— Her team. What if Xayah had—

Xayah leaped, her body a missile heading straight for Sarah. There was no time to dodge! Sarah braced for impact... but it never came. Instead, gale-force winds blasted from between the buildings, knocking Xayah out of the air and into Rakan. Janna and Soraka ran onto the grass a moment later.

“That was very good,” Soraka said fondly to Janna. Poppy and Lulu rode on the older girls’ shoulders, and Sarah didn’t know if she should laugh or cry with relief. They were okay! Sarah landed just as Lulu glared from behind Soraka’s waves of green hair.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to chase people?” Lulu demanded.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude not to just let us kill you?!” Rakan countered, as Xayah rolled off him.

“Oh, shut up!” Jinx said as she shoved past a sprinting Lux and Ezreal. She fell to one knee, aiming her rocket with unusually careful precision.

BOOM! Jinx’s whoop of satisfaction was followed by Rakan’s cry of pain. The rocket had clipped his wing.

“I’m sick of you shooting at us!” Xayah swore, firing a quill at Jinx.

“Well, we’re sick of you two being jerks!” Ezreal retorted as Yuuto burst out of his

gauntlet to knock Xayah’s attack off course.

“Nice one, bolt boy.” Jinx gave him a rare grin.

“Ez! Jinx!” Sarah ran to them, fighting an insane urge to hug them. “Can you clear

me a path?”

Ezreal nodded, before teleporting right to Rakan. Sarah expected him to fire an arrow, or an orb, but to her utter delight, Ezreal simply tackled Rakan to the ground. Xayah raced for Rakan.

“Whatcha think, kiddies? Should we help out?” Jinx said to her familiars. Kuro let out an almost intimidating roar in answer. Shiro, ever in contrast, gave a small, horrifying grin that matched Jinx’s own. And then they were sprinting, Kuro and Shiro raining bullets on Xayah without mercy.

Lux gave the barrage a wide berth as she caught up to Sarah. “That purple explosion earlier... that was Syndra and Multi?”

Sarah nodded. “Can you hold them off?” she asked, watching Ezreal and Rakan roll on the ground.

“What does she think we’ve been doing?” Poppy said, leaping off Janna’s shoulders. She ran, hammer raised, to help Ezreal.

“We’ve got this,” Lux said as another plume of purple fire scorched the sky above the park. “Go!” She ran toward the others.

Sarah didn’t need to be told twice. Syndra was still alive! Sarah knew she was powerful, but against some foes, power was never enough.

I’m coming, Syndra. Just hold on.

Sarah raced through the trees, not stopping to marvel at the paddle stars that had fallen in an eerily perfect circle, leaving the heart of the park intact.

As she passed through the circle, she saw a tall girl with midnight hair.

“Syndra!” Sarah cried, though her relief was fleeting.

In front of Syndra sat a little girl on the swings. But this was no child. The swirling eddies of her purple hair were streaked with blue and adorned with shimmering stars. The girl looked at Sarah and smiled.

Laughter on a lonely planet. Friends screaming, falling around her. The taste of chaos and magic scorching her tongue. Cold, fathomless eyes. A grin that promised nothing. And everything.

Zoe.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Syndra muttered, not daring to turn her back on the Twilight Star. Fear made every step an effort as Sarah moved next to Syndra. Sarah could see her own terror-stricken face mirrored in the gem atop Zoe’s brow. Still, she chanced a glance around the park. No sign of Kai’Sa. Thank the Light for small mercies.

“I came for you,” Sarah said. It was clear Syndra and Zoe had been fighting, but Syndra seemed unharmed. Just how strong was she?!

“You need to worry about yourself,” Syndra advised, just as another voice rang across the park. Xayah had caught up to them.

“Worrying about herself is the only thing Sarah’s good at!” Xayah spat, much to Zoe’s delight.

“Xayah! Sarah! I missed you two,” Zoe said.

“Can’t say the same,” Sarah replied.

“But we had so much fun last time,” Zoe whined. “Right, Xayah?”

“I don’t know if I’d call dying fun,” she admitted.

“It was fun for me! And I bet it was fun for Sarah! She probably couldn’t wait to get away from you.”

Sarah balled her hands into fists. “I know what you’re doing, Zoe.”

“I’m telling the truth,” she crooned. “I mean, why else would you leave?”

“Rakan was gone. Neeko was dead!”

“What about Xayah?” Zoe asked, innocently. Sarah said nothing.

“ANSWER ME!”

Zoe’s shout was so sudden that Sarah didn’t have time to react as she opened a black hole between them. A paddle star shot from the void, arcing around to slam into Sarah’s back, searing the exposed skin between her shoulder blades. Sarah fell to her knees, doubled over in agony. She pressed her forehead on the cool earth, trying to calm herself against the heat and pain, but a foot pressed on her shoulder, holding her down. Xayah.

“I didn’t know,” Sarah said through gritted teeth.

Zoe cackled as Syndra fired off three orbs of dark magic.

“See, Xayah? Sarah’s got new friends now,” Zoe teased. She then yawned, summoning portals of pitch to swallow Syndra’s attack. “It’s probably because Syndra’s stronger than you, Xayah.”

The pressure vanished from Sarah’s shoulder, and she raised her head to see Xayah turn on Syndra. Her feathers soared, and Syndra sprinted out of the way. Now at a safe distance, Syndra called upon Multi. Her familiar rose to orbit around her like small, giddy moons. Mouths opened wide, Multi swallowed the feathers whole.

“Whoa! That was almost as impressive as me!” Rakan whistled, finally catching up to Xayah. He turned to Sarah. “What’s not impressive is, like, how obnoxious your friends are? They keep following me—”

“Syndra! Sarah!” Lux was first to arrive, but Sarah heard the others not far behind.

“See what I mean?” Rakan said, before the whizz of his feathers clashed with the sound of Lux’s magic.

But Sarah didn’t watch them. Not as Xayah walked back to her, kneeling down where Sarah still struggled to rise. Zoe could hardly contain her glee, a dark aura beginning to pulse around her. Just like before.

“I watched you run,” Xayah said softly.

Xayah grabbed Sarah’s chin, forcing her to look up. At her. At Zoe. She watched as grasping hands began to take shape, magic peeling off Zoe in ligaments that clawed at Xayah’s wings. Her head. Her heart. Xayah didn’t notice.

“I watched Ahri grab you and run. I called out to you. I was alive, and you left me there.”

The hands clasped around Xayah’s throat as if to choke her, and when they moved, the wound on Sarah’s back writhed in pleasure. Chaos. Corruption. Zoe.

“No...” Sarah rasped. Darkness and pain lodged between her shoulder blades and beat like a second heart, every pulse a misery.

Sarah thought someone said her name, but Zoe shushed them.

“This is the good part!” Zoe said, and the paddle stars suddenly became a torrent, a curtain cutting the others off from Sarah and Xayah.

“Do you know what it feels like... to die?” Xayah asked. The grip on Sarah’s chin tightened painfully.

“No, no, no—” Sarah was crying, not from pain, but from memory. The dark fire beneath Sarah’s skin became tendrils, wrapping around her guilt, her fear, crushing all that she was.

“Dying was nothing.” Xayah’s voice was quiet yet somehow louder than the falling paddle stars. “Nothing compared to watching Rakan die.”

Green eyes filled with tears. He wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t moving.

The tendrils thrummed, gorging on her grief, and Sarah wanted to scream.

Fuchsia feathers fell into puddles of black.

“I didn’t know, I didn’t know—” Sarah’s mantra was a discordant harmony with the pain in her back and the voice in her head screaming, It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.

Someone grabbed Sarah around the waist, pulling, pleading. Someone was shouting— Wait. Someone was shouting! Someone apart from the screaming memories.

“DON’T GIVE UP,” a voice, so at odds with the chorus in her head, rang out.

“Who are you?” Zoe demanded, and for a brief moment, the stars ceased falling.

Rakan ran at Sarah but stopped, his eyes shifting to the sky above them. A fresh host of paddle stars waited there, but they did not fall. They were suspended, trembling in midair as if held by tenuous threads ready to snap. Rakan looked from Sarah to Xayah, some war inside him raging that Sarah didn’t understand. One side must have won out as he pivoted to Xayah, pulling her out of Zoe’s line of sight and away from the petrified stars above.

“Don’t give up!” the voice said again. But Sarah was giving up. It was her fault. The darkness in her heart knew it was time to let go. But that voice...

With effort, Sarah managed to turn to see a young girl. The girl was covered in dirt and dried blood, but it did nothing to dim the fire burning in her eyes. Sarah knew, as sure as she knew her own name, that it was Kai’Sa.

“Shut up!” Zoe yelled, hopping off the swings. Sarah watched Rakan pull Xayah farther back. “Why aren’t you shutting up?! You have to listen to me!”

Kai’Sa did no such thing, her eyes fixed on Sarah’s. “Your friends are behind you, so don’t you dare give up!” Sarah’s heart swelled, and she swore the tendrils in her back recoiled.

“Stop ignoring me!” Zoe seethed.

Sarah was struck by the raw determination in Kai’Sa’s voice. It reminded her of Akali. That foolish hope. But was it foolish? It seemed so strong to her now. That unbreakable bond was only possible when—

Your friends are behind you.

And they were. Sarah’s friends had come for her. The tendrils thrashed.

“SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” Zoe screamed, stomping the ground with a rage that shook the earth. Her footfalls gave way to pools of pink and purple slime oozing from newly formed fissures in the ground. Zoe could have blasted Kai’Sa with a thought, but Sarah realized Kai’Sa had played the only card in her hand. She’d made Zoe lose her temper.

“You’re not alone!” Kai’Sa said, her eyes glowing like twin stars.

Sarah turned again, to where Xayah and Rakan struggled to avoid the fissures and slime. They, at least, weren’t a threat at the moment, but Sarah knew it wouldn’t last. She saw Lux, and the others, all their attention fixed on Zoe. They were ready to attack, but hesitating. Sarah understood. Zoe, distracted by her own fury, seemed oblivious to everyone, even Kai’Sa. An attack could very well provoke Zoe into action, and Lux knew, as Sarah knew, they might not get to Kai’Sa in time. So they waited, poised on the knife’s edge. Syndra stood slightly off to the side, but there was a small smile playing about her lips.

Sarah turned back to Kai’Sa. “You see?” Kai’Sa said. “You’re not alone. You hear me? YOU’RE NOT ALONE.”

And as if Kai’Sa summoned them, two stars illuminated the park from high above. These were no paddle stars. They hurtled past Zoe’s suspended stars, crashing beside where Sarah knelt and Zoe raged.

“Well,” a voice said from the smoldering crater. It was a voice they all recognized. “You heard her.”

“Ahri!” Lux sounded as relieved as Sarah felt.

“Listen to the little yelling girl, Sarah!” Another oh-so-familiar voice. It wasn’t possible, but what did that matter? Neeko was smiling at her, offering a hand.

“You’re not alone,” Neeko said.

And Zoe lost control.

Zoe was screaming, but it was all wrong. The stilled paddle stars above were vibrating, attuned to the tenor of Zoe’s fury. The pools of liquid at her feet began to boil and overflow, setting the ground aflame with multicolored fires. None of that scared Sarah, not until the screaming stopped. And Zoe began to laugh.

It was so much worse than the screams. The paddle stars dropped, crashing into one another, shards falling into black holes that sprang across the park. But it was Zoe herself that was more concerning. Her mouth had grown far too wide, her features distorting, and Sarah watched in horror as Zoe’s limbs began to stretch, cracking at odd angles only to spring back like a ball-jointed doll’s.

Zoe was growing, shooting up past the tree line, and Neeko trembled as she pulled Sarah to her feet. Sarah retched, corruption still churning along her spine. Neeko held her steady as the other Star Guardians ran up behind them, desperately holding off the careening paddle stars.

“I have seen her do this before. It is... not pleasant,” Neeko said, her voice carrying over the crashing stars. Sarah looked to where Rakan did all he could to shield Xayah from the deluge.

“Then let’s take her out!” Jinx shouted, taking a shot at Zoe’s leg. It passed through harmlessly, her body shimmering like a mirage. “Or... not.”

“Her body is more chaos than flesh right now. We have to wait until she solidifies,” Neeko said, and Ezreal winced.

“That’s gross,” he said.

“It is very gross!” Neeko agreed, “but it means she cannot attack us. At least for now.”

Sarah backed away from Neeko. “I’m afraid to ask what else you’ve learned since you died.” She couldn’t keep the edge from her voice. Neeko flinched as Ahri stepped in.

“We can talk about all that later,” Ahri said coolly.

“We can talk about it now!” Sarah demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me? Either of you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, it matters, Ahri—” But a yelp cut Sarah off. Kai’Sa had managed to dodge an errant star shard by centimeters.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Sarah agreed through gritted teeth.

“Hello, little yelling girl!” Neeko said to Kai’Sa. “That was very brave of you, back there.”

“You’re Kai’Sa, right?” Sarah asked, trying to keep the pain from her voice as her back throbbed.

Kai’Sa whipped toward her. “You know my name?”

“Akali told me—” Sarah began, but Kai’Sa had already grabbed her by the shoulders. Ouch.

“You saw Akali?! Is she okay? Something hit the mall and—”

“She’s fine—” Sarah started, but her voice was drowned by another shout.

“Whoa! Watch it!” Ezreal said, leaping out of the way as a girl-shaped blur ran through the trees into the park.

“KAI’SA!” The relief in Akali’s voice was palpable.

“Fine and incapable of listening, apparently,” Sarah muttered, but she wasn’t angry. Not as she watched the pain and desperation melt off Kai’Sa’s face.

“AKALI!” Kai’Sa sprinted to meet her, the danger all but forgotten, even as Zoe’s light began to envelop them.

Lux blasted a few stars apart before they could intercept the girls, who now crashed into each other in a fierce hug.

“I thought you’d taken her somewhere safe,” Lux said.

“I did, but I should’ve known she wouldn’t stay put. I guess... sometimes friendship is worth the risk.” Sarah saw Neeko look away, but Ahri was looking at the sky.

“The stars aren’t falling,” Lulu said, though her usual dreaminess failed to tinge her voice.

“Then the only thing that’ll be falling is you!” Xayah, no longer distracted by the onslaught of paddle stars, was on the attack once more.

Janna was having none of it. “I am getting rather tired of you!” she said, summoning a small tornado to encircle Xayah and Rakan, pinning them in place.

“We have, um, bigger things to worry about right now,” Soraka whispered to Lux.

“A bit of an understatement, Soraka,” Sarah offered.

Zoe glowed, a mountain of distorted chaos far above them, but the speed of her ascension seemed sluggish, as did her movements.

“Looks like she’s almost done,” Ezreal observed.

“Then we don’t have much time until she can attack again. What’s the plan?” Sarah demanded.

“The plan is you getting those two girls, and yourself, to safety,” Ahri said firmly, gesturing to Kai’Sa and Akali.

The two girls still held each other tightly as if afraid to lose one another again. Sarah should have been moved, but anger kept her attention on Ahri.

“No way! I can fight!” Sarah blustered.
“You can barely stand,” Ahri reminded her.

“I’m standing fine! And I’ll decide when I’m not fit for battle, captain. Just because you’re back, you think you can tell me what to—”

“I’m telling you I can’t lose you!” Ahri snapped.

Sarah knew the other guardians were beginning to tire, the paddle stars only growing in number. Janna’s hold was beginning to weaken, and Xayah and Rakan would be on them in a moment, but Sarah couldn’t look away from Ahri. She was caught, not just by her words, but by silver glistening in the corners of her purple eyes.

“I won’t risk you burning out,” Ahri said, her voice shaking ever so slightly. “That means I’m making the hard call.”

“Ahri is right, Sarah. You need to rest. Let us—let me help this time,” Neeko whispered.

“I can’t hold them any longer!” Janna shouted, the wind dying. Xayah was already on her feet, but Ahri held Sarah’s gaze a moment longer.

“It won’t be like last time,” Ahri promised.

“It better not be!” Xayah spat, just as her feathers collided with Neeko’s chest.

Neeko vanished. It was a clone! The real Neeko stepped out from behind Xayah, kicking her legs out from under her. Neeko sprinted back into the trees.

“You wanna play?” Rakan shot a quill at Ahri. It missed, Ahri ducking it with ease, but the feather clipped Sarah’s shoulder instead. She screamed in pain.

“You really tried to steal the show, but I think you’ll find we’re still the main attraction.” Rakan smirked.

Xayah raised her feathers, her smile the promise of death, but she stumbled.

The ground had started to quake.

Sarah couldn’t stand, not as Zoe shuddered above them, sending tremors through the earth that made balance impossible. Unable to coordinate on the turbulent ground, the other Star Guardians took to the air, their magic igniting a path to where Zoe thrashed above the city. Paddle stars continued to fall, more erratic than ever. Sarah watched as a star slammed into a purple light—Syndra or Janna, she couldn’t tell—only for them to recover and continue their ascent.

Sarah wanted to help, needed to be up there, fighting alongside them, but she couldn’t. Even if the earth and sky weren’t literally cracking around her, she still wouldn’t have been able to move. Not under the weight of hatred in Xayah’s eyes.

“This needs to stop, Xayah,” Sarah said. Her voice sounded so, so weak.

“Sarah’s right. You’re safe! Now we can—” Ahri started, keeping herself upright against the tremors through sheer force of will.

“Safe?!” Xayah shouted, Rakan holding her steady. “You think I’ve been safe?!”

Xayah laughed without humor. Zoe’s massive form turned, the tremors easing. Sarah wondered if Zoe was somehow listening in at that great height, reveling in Xayah’s anguish. But no. Like all that Zoe did, it was so much worse. As Xayah went on, each word dripping bitterness and grief, Zoe glowed brighter, drawing power from Xayah’s pain.

“I burnt out. I died my real, actual death. And you know what? It was amazing! I didn’t have to live with knowing that you two left me to her! I didn’t have to exist without Rakan! But then she brought us back. And I saw you.” She pointed at Neeko, who winced. “I saw that you were still alive. Safe. Which meant I’d come back not to two betrayals, but three!”

“X-Xayah—” Neeko tried to walk toward her, but she stumbled as the earth moved again.

“You ran away, Neeko. Just like they did.” Xayah pointed at Ahri and Sarah. “I came back to what? A life that wasn’t even mine? Well, lucky me!”

Sarah didn’t think Xayah knew she was crying.

Rakan tightened his arm around Xayah as he looked at Sarah and Ahri. “Why did you leave?” he asked softly, as if he didn’t think anyone would answer.

Ahri did. “I heard it... when your heart stopped beating, Rakan.” His mouth parted in surprise. “You were dead, and Xayah’s heart was slowing down.” Ahri faced Xayah. “Sarah didn’t care, you know? She tried to come for you. All of you were dead, or dying, and I was about to lose her, too.”

“You pulled me back,” Sarah whispered. Ahri nodded.

“You could have tried!” Xayah countered.

“I had to make the call,” Ahri said. “You know that!”
“We all would have died,” Neeko added.

“Then at least we would have been together!” Xayah cried. “But you three got to live!”

“But we didn’t,” Sarah said softly. They turned to her. “I didn’t.”

Xayah glared.

“You were right,” Sarah continued. “I have no idea what it feels like to die. I can’t begin to understand.”

Rakan tilted his head, considering.

“I didn’t know for sure you’d died,” Sarah admitted. “I thought you did, but I never stopped going over the battle in my head. I needed to know where we failed. Where I’d failed.”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Ahri interrupted, but Sarah shook her head.

“But that’s just it. I could have done something. I could have died. You were there, Ahri. I wanted to throw myself at Zoe because I knew I couldn’t live with the loss. And I was right! You were my team. You were my friends—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Xayah cut in.

“You were everything to me!”

“Shut up!” Xayah said.

“Xayah.” Rakan cupped her face with a gentle hand.

“Y-you can’t believe them! They’re liars!”

“They are,” he agreed, and Neeko began to cry. “They left us there, on that stupid planet, and all that’s left is you and me against the world.” Xayah’s lip trembled, and he chuckled.

“Xayah,” he said again, her name so gentle on his lips.

“Th-they let you die,” she whispered.

“I know,” Rakan said, brushing a tear from Xayah’s cheek. He leaned close to her ear and whispered something that made Xayah clench her teeth and curl her fists. Sarah couldn’t hear what he said, but by the way Ahri’s ears flicked and her breath caught, she knew Ahri had.

Rakan turned to Ahri, and they both glanced up to where the other guardians dodged the downpour of paddle stars. Rakan grinned, and Ahri gave him an almost imperceptible nod, just as Zoe readied her final attack.

On pure instinct, Akali had thrown her body over Kai’Sa when the earthquakes started. They’d been like that for some time, exposed under the rain of magic and stars, and Akali marveled that they were still alive. She wondered how long they could survive. Maybe longer than she thought, as both the Star Guardians and... whatever Xayah and Rakan were, leapt into action.

“Looks like she didn’t like our little chat,” Rakan mused.

Akali had to agree. The liquid that had been oozing slowly from the newly formed fissures now fell upward, drawn to Zoe by sheer gravity. In fact, much of the city seemed caught in her orbit, broken star fragments and pieces of buildings slowly moving toward her like a receding tide. Akali didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it was bad. Really, really bad.

Rakan jumped nimbly over a fallen tree that flew at him just as Xayah took out the cluster of paddle stars above.

The park afforded almost no cover, so Akali had to improvise. Whether intentional or not, the guardians had cleared a sort of path toward the jungle gym. It was close to where Zoe loomed, but at least no stars fell there. Akali pulled Kai’Sa along, dodging the bubbling color that now rained in reverse. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if that liquid touched her.

As they sprinted underneath the structure, Akali saw that the falling stars beyond the trees had started cracking like stone eggs, unleashing ominous clouds of black butterflies. The insects amassed in a huge, surging swarm, aiming for where Sarah, Ahri, and Neeko stood opposite Xayah and Rakan mere feet away.

“Look after the kids!” Ahri yelled to Sarah as she flung an orb of flame at a cluster of butterflies.

“Yeah, get outta here! Also, wait... why are these things attacking us?!” Rakan demanded, ducking under a butterfly.

“I don’t think Zoe can see us down here,” Xayah said.

“Or she doesn’t care about you,” Ahri reasoned.

“You’re literally the last person to talk right now. Rakan, don’t let those things touch you!”

“Uhh, why not?”

“Do you really want to find out?”

“Excellent point, my love.” He dodged another butterfly, then fired a feather at a cluster of them. Each one he struck broke apart... into more butterflies!

“I swear that wasn’t on purpose!” Rakan yelled.

Kai’Sa watched as the five of them were overwhelmed, butterflies pushing in from all sides, but Akali kept glancing up at where Zoe raged so close by. Akali could feel the pull as Zoe continued to suck in the destruction around her. She held onto Kai’Sa tightly. Akali saw dots of light flitting about Zoe’s face—the other guardians. How do they do it? Keep fighting, even now?

Kai’Sa placed her hand atop Akali’s and squeezed. “It’s gonna be okay,” she said, and Akali laughed. She must sound hysterical, but—

“None of this is okay, Kai’Sa. People died. People are still going to die. I mean, look at them!” Akali pointed to the butterflies. Sarah could barely hold up her pistol as the one with the lizard tail, Neeko, tried to shield her. “They’ve got magic powers, and they’re just as helpless as we are.”

“We’re not helpless. We found each other, no magic needed.”

“And there’s a good chance we’re still gonna die, Kai’Sa! Optimism can’t stop the sky from falling down.”

“But there are good people up there trying to stop this,” Kai’Sa whispered, glancing between Zoe and the butterflies. The swarm did seem a little thinner. “The least I can do is believe in them. And in myself.”

Akali wished now, more than ever, that she could be more like Kai’Sa. But she knew she never would be.

“I’ve watched them this whole time, thinking there were good guys and bad guys,” Akali said. “But they were friends, once. Just like us.” She saw Xayah take out a butterfly with a feather, almost hitting Ahri in the process.

“And now they hate each other,” Akali said. Kai'Sa didn’t respond, letting Akali work through her thoughts aloud as she always had. “Whatever is happening here, it’s strong enough to corrupt them from the inside out. It’s going to destroy them. It already is.”

Before Kai’Sa could respond, they heard Ahri shout.

“—said get to cover, now, Sarah!”

Sarah, it seemed, was finally ready to listen, the exhaustion on her face clear even at a distance. She limped toward the jungle gym, a blaze of Ahri’s foxfire igniting a pursuing cluster of butterflies.

“Leaving again?” Xayah demanded, though she didn’t look ready to attack for once.

Sarah shook her head and said to Ahri, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Instead of responding, the fox-eared girl looked at Rakan. He smirked.

“I always know what I’m doing,” Rakan said, and Akali didn’t know what to make of it.

Sarah reached the jungle gym and collapsed against a metal pole. Her ragged breathing was constant, at least. Akali shifted awkwardly.

“That was... a lot,” Akali said.

Sarah snorted. “Understatement of the millennium.” She sounded so tired.

“Sorry I didn’t stay put,” Akali offered, and Sarah opened a weary eye. She glanced at Kai’Sa and smiled.

“I’m kinda glad you didn’t,” Sarah said, and she sounded like she meant it. “Friends... Well, they’re worth fighting for.”

“So what about you? You all gonna go back to trying to kill each other after this?”

“Akali!” Kai’Sa admonished, but Sarah smiled.

“Like I said... friends are worth fighting for.” She nodded to where Rakan and Xayah faced the others. The butterflies were gone. Ahri scrutinized the two fallen guardians for a long while, and nodded.

“Do we have to?” Xayah asked, her eyes full of resentment as she stared between Ahri and Neeko.

“I don’t like sharing the spotlight, remember? Not with anyone,” Rakan reminded her.

And then Xayah and Rakan moved next to Ahri and Neeko, standing so the four of them now faced Zoe. Together.

Sarah was still angry as she watched her former team speed toward Zoe. She was furious at Ahri and Neeko for not trusting her, at Xayah and Rakan for putting the other guardians through so much to get to this point, but that anger paled in comparison to the wild, foolish hope she now held. Hope that warred with the painful memories she could no longer keep buried as Xayah and Rakan unleashed themselves upon Zoe alongside Ahri and Neeko.

Sarah knew that Zoe had broken her, with her words, with her magic, but a small voice that sounded a lot like Lux asked if maybe part of her needed to break so she could remember.

Rakan and Xayah bickering over boba, Ahri, Sarah, and Neeko laughing with them. Shopping trips and summer festivals. Battles won and lost, hopes and dreams shared, all of it together.

Sarah glanced at Akali and Kai’Sa, huddled against one another, their faces illuminated by Zoe’s horrid glow, but also by the light of the guardians fighting above them. Sarah didn’t know how to tell Kai'Sa how right she’d been—that everyone fighting out there against Zoe... they were her friends.

It was for her friends that Sarah’s heart sank. Zoe’s tantrum had faltered under the onslaught of everyone’s attacks, but now the aura around Zoe was growing again, and Xayah—where was Xayah?! She’d been right there with the others, but now—

“Look!” Kai’Sa pointed, right as Zoe lunged for a lone magenta spark twinkling by her hip.

“Xayah!” Sarah knew Xayah couldn’t hear her. Not as Zoe’s hand plucked her from the air before hurling her to the ground.

Sarah stood up, forgetting her own pain, as another speck of light followed Xayah’s descent. Rakan! His shield would protect her! Sarah watched them crash for the second time today, a mere twenty feet from the jungle gym. Rakan was soon back on his feet, but Xayah remained where she’d fallen.

“Something’s wrong,” Akali murmured.

“What’s happening to her?” Kai’Sa asked.

Sarah watched Xayah try to stand, but she was pulled down, sinister hands of chaos distorting the air around her. It made phantom tendrils in Sarah’s blood shudder.

“Corruption,” Sarah whispered.

Xayah was doubled over. Rakan reached for her, but she held out a trembling hand, and he faltered. Sarah stepped toward them.

“What are you doing?” Akali demanded.

“She’s hurt.”

“So are you,” Kai’Sa reasoned, but Sarah took another agonizing step forward, and then another. She made it all of five feet before her legs gave out.

Sarah couldn’t walk. Couldn’t fight. Couldn’t fly. Okay, then. She’d crawl. She moved, inch by painful inch, toward Xayah and Rakan.

“Sarah!” Akali shouted, but Kai’Sa shushed her.

Good girl, Sarah thought, knowing Kai’Sa, at least, could keep Akali under control. Zoe, too busy batting away the other guardians like gnats, hadn’t heard Akali shout. But Xayah had.

Xayah lifted her head, watching Sarah struggle to reach her, and for the first time since she and Rakan had returned, there was no hatred in her eyes. Only grief and... resignation?

Jinx and Ezreal crashed a dozen feet from Sarah, but they didn’t look at her before they flew back into battle. Their light, however, brought Xayah into stark relief, and that’s when Sarah saw it. Something beyond chaos had etched its way up and down her arm. Sarah fought the urge to vomit as black feathers sprung forth in clumps from beneath Xayah’s skin.

These were like no feathers Sarah had ever seen. They moved, each undulating blade dripping viscous sludge that seemed to fall in slow motion to pool in a puddle of darkness in front of Xayah. Pure corruption. Sarah pulled herself closer now, as close as she could to the edge of the crater.

Lulu landed next to Rakan. “That doesn’t look good,” she said.

“Yeah, well, Zoe’s pretty mad we joined up with you jerks,” Rakan quipped, but his heart wasn’t in it. Not as he glanced between Sarah and Xayah. Lulu patted his arm gently.

“I know what might cheer you up,” she said. Rakan quizzically looked down at her. “Mind giving Zoe a taste of my own medicine?”

Sarah wasn’t sure what she meant until Rakan picked her up by her tiny shoulders.

“You sure?” he asked.

Lulu nodded, and Rakan hurled her up at Zoe’s face. He whistled, impressed with his own aim. The green star that was Lulu grew, and grew, until she was nearly half Zoe’s size—the perfect height for headbutting Zoe right in the stomach. She stumbled at the impact, and Sarah nearly smiled in spite of herself. Lulu always knew what to do, didn’t she?

Rakan did smile, then. “Your friends are all right, I guess.”

His smile froze as he turned back to Xayah, and it nearly broke Sarah’s heart anew. Rakan had fought back, had somehow pushed against Zoe’s influence to help them, and Xayah had been hurt because of it. He knelt before her, with that false, beautiful smile on his handsome face. He took both of Xayah’s hands in his, one small and delicate, the other no more than a mass of surging, swelling feathers. Rakan didn’t seem to mind.

“What’s happening?” Xayah whispered. Rakan squeezed her hands tighter.

“Zoe’s corruption,” he answered softly. Gone was the cocky arrogance, the theatrical demeanor. This was just Rakan, a boy who loved a girl with his entire, twisted heart. He pressed his forehead against Xayah’s, and Sarah could see how bright his eyes shone in Zoe’s light.

“You fought back.” He choked on a laugh. “I am so, so proud of you... And I’m going to save you.”

Xayah’s smile faltered and then vanished. She tried to pull away from Rakan.

“No!” she screamed, but Rakan held tight.

“Come on, love. You know how this story goes.” Where Rakan’s hands met Xayah’s, a soft golden light began to build.

“No, no, no—” Xayah begged.

“The prince has to save the princess. Those are the rules.”

“Those are stupid rules! I will shred those rules with a fistful of feathers!” Xayah swore, still struggling to break his hold.

“I know you will. Breaking rules is what you’re best at. It’s one of the things I love about you.”

Ahri and Neeko flew to them, only for Neeko to smash into a shield that now shimmered around Xayah and Rakan. Ahri caught her as she bounced off the barrier.

“What is going on?” Neeko asked, dazed.

“Rakan, he’s—” Ahri began, but Rakan interrupted.
“Nope! This is my moment!” Rakan chided, but it was clear he was in pain. Still, his voice was strong... and gentle. “The star-crossed hero risking it all for love? It’s the role of a lifetime.”

“RAKAN! STOP!” Xayah begged, but with a flash, Rakan’s barrier disintegrated, golden light surging into Xayah. The corrupted feathers along her arm vanished, only to erupt across Rakan’s in turn. Xayah crumpled to the ground, but Rakan still stood, his body rigid.

Ahri took a step toward him, ready to brace him, but Rakan shook his head stiffly. Sarah gasped as black sludge began to ooze from his eyes.

“I wish there’d been another way,” Ahri said sadly.

“This is... how it has to be... captain.” His bravado was punctured by his own hacking coughs, corruption now filling his lungs and mouth. Somehow, he still managed a genuine smile as he looked between Ahri, Neeko, and Sarah.

“Protect... her.”

“We won’t leave her again,” Sarah promised, as Neeko knelt beside Xayah.

And even though dark feathers continued to pierce through him, chaos corrupting him from the inside out, Sarah was awed by how brightly he shone.

“Everyone!” Ahri shouted. “On Rakan’s signal, give her everything you’ve got.”

“NO!” Xayah screamed again, but Neeko held her back, arms wrapped tightly around Xayah’s middle.

“We promised. We promised,” Neeko cried as Xayah thrashed wildly.

Sarah tried to stand, to go to Xayah, but she still couldn’t get up.

“Not again,” Xayah wailed as Rakan shot like a spear, straight for Zoe’s heart.

His signal.

Rakan was so very small now. Barely a pinprick of flame against the night sky, but he wasn’t alone. He was never alone. Sarah watched as Lulu, still massive, held Zoe in place, the guardians one after the other firing off everything they had. Rockets and windstorms, hammer strikes and orbs of darkness, all of it rained upon Zoe’s titanic body. And still the small star that was Rakan hurtled on. He was heralded by a beam from Lux’s staff, bolstered by Ahri’s foxfire. Their conjoined attacks pierced armor made of magic itself, a crack just wide enough for Rakan to crash into.

Zoe had miscalculated. The guardians alone couldn’t stop her, but Rakan? Empowered by their attacks, Xayah’s corruption, and Zoe’s own magic? He was the quill that pierced through chaos itself.

For a moment all was darkness, before light erupted across Valoran City.

Akali couldn’t see the stars. When Rakan crashed into Zoe, the explosion had blanketed the city in a light so vibrant that she had to close her eyes against it. When she did, all she could see was magic like dark blood leaking from Rakan’s eyes as Xayah screamed. Sarah crawling, her back a scarred and bloodied wreck. Guardian after guardian swatted from the sky, falling like ragdolls, only to get back up to face death itself again and again.

Kai'Sa had been there. She’d been there with Zoe before Akali had even found her. And what did it even matter? Akali had no powers. Wanting to help meant nothing. Akali couldn't do anything. She couldn’t help anyone! She couldn’t! She—

“Akali?” Kai’Sa startled her. Akali’s heart was beating too fast, her hands shaking too much. “Akali... They won.”

She struggled to focus because what Kai'Sa was saying was wrong.

As Akali tentatively crawled out of their shelter, three things struck her. The first, and most obvious, was that Zoe was gone. So sudden and startling was her absence that Akali worried she’d dreamed the whole thing.

“They won,” Kai’Sa repeated in wonder.

They watched the guardians land where Neeko still held Xayah in her arms.

The second thing that struck Akali was that Xayah looked... different. It was subtle, but a soft glow seemed to radiate from within her, and the diamond mark on her forehead was gone. Even her uniform seemed brighter. But as Xayah looked around, Akali saw her dim, green eyes, and was forced to acknowledge the third thing. That Xayah was looking for someone who wasn’t there.

“He sacrificed himself. For her,” Kai’Sa said, and Akali could only nod. “He loved her.”

“And it didn’t matter, did it?” Akali snapped. She could feel a chasm opening inside her heart, a fissure she couldn’t stop. Friendship? Love? It wasn’t enough. None of it was enough.

“It mattered,” Kai’Sa said softly. “He saved her. Us. We’re alive because he won.”

Akali stilled.

“She’s lost him twice, Kai’Sa,” Akali said, pointing at Xayah. “Does that look like winning to you?” Kai’Sa had no answer.

“It’s terrible,” Kai’Sa said eventually, “but that monster is gone. We have him to thank for that.”

Akali looked at Kai’Sa, and saw what Kai’Sa so clearly saw in Rakan. Sacrifice. Akali knew for certain now that Kai’Sa would never keep herself safe, not if it meant saving someone else.

“Why do you always put yourself last?” Akali asked.

“Not this again. I didn’t just survive the end of the world to start fighting again.”

“I don’t want to fight!” Akali said quickly. “I just want to understand.”

Kai’Sa sighed. “It’s not that I put myself last, Akali. It’s that I’ll always put the people I care about first. You know the petition thing? The one you got mad at me for?” Akali nodded slowly. “It was for an afterschool program, I guess. Volunteers to take kids to places like the beach or the arcade when they don’t have anywhere else to go. It sounded like a good way to—”

“Keep kids out of trouble,” Akali finished. “Kids like me.”

“Like a lot of people. If I hadn’t helped you that day, you might still be getting your butt kicked trying to save stray dogs.”

Akali tried to smile. “You’re not wrong.”

“Those kids that picked on you back then... Maybe they were just jerks, but I thought... what if they had something to care about? Someplace where they had people they could rely on.”

“Like you relied on me for the petition?” Akali felt hurt settling in her chest.

“It wasn’t because I didn’t want to tell you.” Kai’Sa took a step toward her. “If anything, I wanted to do this for you.” And wasn’t that just like Kai’Sa? Endangering herself, even though Akali would never ask that of her.

“I think I get it,” Akali said, only half lying. “But, Kai’Sa, don’t shut me out next time. You can rely on me, too.” Kai’Sa nodded, but Akali shook her head. “Promise me.”

Akali lifted her finger, and Kai’Sa hooked it with her pinky, the petals of their pink and blue forget-me-not bracelets glittering in the starlight. “I promise, Akali.”

A small part of Akali worried that this was a promise Kai’Sa was going to break, another opportunity for Kai’Sa to pick Akali over herself. But Akali held onto that moment, their promise, regardless, even as she tried to forget all that had happened. All that had changed.

Akali buried her pain deep inside, where a tendril of darkness unfurled within the chasm in her heart.

Ahri led the Star Guardians as the sky began to lighten. They had spent the last several hours searching for survivors in the ruins of Valoran City until exhaustion threatened to overtake them. Syndra had already left, intent on surveying other planets for traces of Zoe’s presence.

Sarah leaned on Lux, the younger girl using her staff as a walking stick. Sarah was grateful. It hurt even to breathe. Neeko still held a dazed Xayah, and Sarah couldn’t quite accept that they were both here, alive. Her anger almost felt pointless now. Almost.

The knowledge of what still needed to be done was something none of them were willing to face. Buildings were strewn across the streets like discarded blocks. Pools of Zoe’s corruption still bubbled along the cracks in the ground, and they weren’t sure how to get rid of them, though Soraka had some theories.

People had lost their lives last night, but many more had lost their homes. Their friends. Their sense of normalcy. Innocent people who could no more defend against Zoe than they could deny the existence of the Star Guardians. Sarah didn’t know what that meant, that this planet now knew of them, but she could tell by the set of Ahri’s shoulders that it mattered.

Xayah was the first to break the silence.

“I’m going to find Rakan,” she said, surprising no one.

“We’re coming with you,” Sarah said. Everyone but Xayah stared at her.

“What if he is not—” Neeko tried, but Xayah cut her off.

“He’s alive.”

“He could be anywhere,” Ahri added.

“So we look everywhere!” Sarah snapped.

“Why do you want to find him?” Xayah’s voice was cold, and she still wouldn’t look at her. Sarah knew, somehow, that what she said next would irrevocably impact how Xayah saw her. She took a deep breath.

“Rakan is my friend. He never stopped being my friend. Not in death. Not after. And I failed him. I refuse to do so again.”

Xayah finally turned. Wariness, distrust, and doubt all warred in her gaze, but not, Sarah noted, hatred.

Still, Xayah just shook her head before leaping into the air without a word. They watched her go. Sarah wasn’t sure where Xayah was headed first, but she knew nothing and no one in the universe would keep her from finding Rakan.

“She didn’t say we couldn’t go with her,” Sarah mused.

“Are you going too?” Lux asked.

“I said I was going to protect her,” Sarah said softly. “It’s a promise I intend to keep.”

“Then we’re coming with you!” Lux said.

The other guardians turned to look at them. Sarah opened her mouth, ready to shoot her down, but Lux put a hand on her shoulder.

“Star Guardians are a team.” Lux glanced at Ahri. “We’re in this together.”

Slowly, Ahri nodded, and Sarah considered, not for the first time, how startling Lux’s transformation had been. Gone was her hesitation. Her confidence was a beacon as she leapt into the air, lighting their way. Without delay, Lulu and Poppy went with her.

“She’s becoming a real leader,” Janna whispered, before taking to the sky.

“What are we waiting for?” Jinx said, turning to Ezreal, of all people. “Ready to hog the spotlight, sparky?”

Ezreal grinned, before he and Jinx made their exit.

Soraka turned to Sarah. “Are you ready?” she asked.

Sarah nodded. “We just... need a minute. We’ll catch up.”

Soraka smiled, understanding as ever, and then she departed, leaving Ahri, Neeko, and Sarah alone.

Sarah was almost grateful for her exhaustion. It helped dampen the painful awkwardness.

Ahri, of course, took the lead. “I’m sorry,” she said simply.

Neeko shook her head. “You don’t have to—”

“Yes, she does,” Sarah interrupted. “You knew she was alive.”

“I didn’t know for sure that Neeko—”

“I’m not talking about Neeko. And I’m not just talking about now. You knew Xayah was alive when we left them there. You thought all three of them could be alive when you left me here with nothing. No way to contact you. No way to help you!”

Ahri said nothing.

“Why didn’t you trust me?” Sarah asked softly.

That managed to crack Ahri’s façade. “I trust you more than anyone,” she said.

“You don’t act like it! I am supposed to be your lieutenant!”

“You’re also my friend! What was I supposed to do? Tell you that there was a one-in-a-million chance Neeko was alive? That Xayah maybe would live long enough to watch you die if you’d tried to save her?!”

Sarah inhaled, but Ahri wasn’t done.

“You’re not the only one who lost people that day. You were the last one. My last friend. The last person I could trust. I couldn’t give you hope and have it be a lie.”

And then Ahri was sobbing. Sarah saw her own doubt and grief now reflected in Ahri’s tears. She watched Ahri collapse under the weight of overwhelming pressure. She was their leader. She did everything in her power to protect them, but she’d tried to do it alone. Star Guardians were there for each other, right? So Ahri had failed them, just as Sarah had failed them.

Sarah grabbed Neeko and Ahri, holding them tight even as it tore at the wounds in her back. Pain was nothing in the face of this moment. They stood like that for a long time, leaning on each other. Battle had become so easy for them, but they’d forgotten what it felt like to be more than the mission. They remembered now, just as sunlight began to shimmer over the wreckage of Valoran City behind them.

Sarah Fortune could no longer feel the corruption in her back, the tendrils all but gone from her heart. But dread? Doubt? That still seemed to lurk somewhere she couldn’t quite reach. Maybe it always would, but that didn’t matter. Not when her friends shone like stars before her, their blistering light holding back the darkness.

She looked up to where the other Star Guardians had vanished, to where Xayah was already looking for Rakan, and despite the rising sun, Sarah swore she could see the stars.

The boy admired the yellow dormisroot peeking through the frozen soil. It was one of hundreds growing in a tiny patch of vivid color in an otherwise barren landscape. He crouched next to the blossom and inhaled. Crisp morning air and a faint aroma greeted his nose. He reached out to pick the wildflower.

“Leave it be,” said Vannis.

The older man towered over the boy, his blue cloak stirring in the gentle breeze. Marsino stood next to him, holding an unlit torch. The three had been waiting for a while, completely unchallenged.

The younger man smiled down at the boy and nodded.

The boy plucked the flower and stuffed it in his pocket.

Vannis shook his head and frowned. “Your time with the boy has instilled bad habits.”

Marsino flushed at the remark, his smile disappearing. He cleared his throat and asked, “Do you see anything?”

The boy stood and studied the row of houses across the frostbitten field, the weathered dwellings nothing more than dilapidated shacks strewn across a hillside. Shapes and shadows moved past the cast-glass windows.

“There’re people inside,” he said.

“We can all see that,” said Vannis, his tone biting. “Do you see what we’re looking for?”

The boy searched for the smallest hint or impression. He saw nothing but the dull grey of weathered planks and hewn stone.

“No, sir.”

Vannis grumbled underneath his breath.

“Perhaps if we drew closer,” said Marsino.

The older man shook his head. “These are hillfolk. They’ll put a spear in you before you get within twenty paces of their door.”

The boy shivered at the words. The southern hillfolk’s fierce reputation was known back in the Great City. They lived in the untamed edges of the kingdom, near the disputed territories. He glanced over his shoulder and inched closer to Marsino.

“Light the torch,” said Vannis.

Marsino struck his flint, showering the oil-soaked cord with sparks. The pitch erupted in flames and chased away the brisk morning air.

They didn’t need to wait long.

Several cabin doors opened, and a dozen men and women marched toward the group. They carried pikes and axes.

The boy’s hand fell to the dagger at his side. He turned to Marsino, but the man’s eyes were fixed on the villagers.

“Steady, boy,” said Vannis.

The crowd stopped at the edge of the field, their ragged clothing in stark contrast to the royal blue and white finery worn by Vannis and Marsino. Even the boy’s own clothes were better kept.

A slight tingle ran down his spine. He touched Marsino’s arm, attracting his attention, and nodded. The man acknowledged the signal and motioned for him to step back. There was a process to be followed.

An old woman stepped out from behind the crowd. “Do mageseekers burn villages now?” she asked.

“There’s nothing here, move on!” shouted a young man with wild hair, standing next to the woman. The others joined in, jeering and barking.

“Hush!” the woman snapped, elbowing the man in the ribs.

The man winced and bowed his head. The crowd fell silent.

The hillfolk were unlike anyone the boy had seen in the Great City. They didn’t shrink at the sight of mageseekers in their traditional blue cloaks and half-masks of hammered bronze. Instead, they stood tall and defiant. A few fiddled with their weapons, glaring at the boy. He averted his gaze.

Marsino stepped forward. “A bushel of dormisroot arrived in Wrenwall six days ago,” he said, gesturing to the flowers with his torch.

“People sell things. People buy things. Is it different in the city?” the old woman asked.

The hillfolk laughed.

The boy nervously joined in. Even Marsino offered up a weak smile. Vannis remained unmoved. He regarded the crowd, hand on his quarterstaff.

“Of course not,” said Marsino. “But the flower is rare this time of year.”

“We’re good farmers. Good hunters, too,” she said, the smile disappearing.

Vannis fixed his gaze on the old woman. “Aye, but the ground is frozen and there isn’t one among you who’s ever worked a plough.”

The old woman shrugged. “Things grow where they want. Who are we to say different.”

Vannis smirked. “Aye, plants grow,” he said, as he unclipped the Graymark from his cloak. He dropped down on his haunches and held the carved, stone disk over a dormisroot.

The petals wilted and shriveled.

“But they don’t die at the sight of petricite,” said Vannis, standing back up. “Unless you use magecraft to grow them.”

The smiles disappeared from the villagers’ faces.

“The use of magic is forbidden,” said Marsino. “We are all Demacian. Bound by birth to honor her laws—”

“You can’t eat honor up here,” said the old woman.

“Even if you could, your belly’d be empty,” sneered Vannis.

The crowd stirred at the insult and pressed in closer, coming within several paces of the mageseekers.

Marsino cleared his throat and raised a hand. “The hillfolk have always honored the ways of Demacia. Keeping with law and tradition,” he said. “We only ask you do so again today. Will the afflicted step forward?”

No one moved or said a word.

After a moment, Marsino spoke again. “If honor does not compel you, then know we have a boy here that will root out the guilty.”

The crowd focused on the boy. Reproach welled in their eyes as harsh whispers flowed through their ranks.

“So the runt can invoke magic without censure, but not us?” asked the man who had shouted earlier.

The boy shrank at the accusation.

“He works in service to Demacia,” Marsino said, before turning to the boy. “It’s fine, go ahead.”

He nodded and rubbed a sweaty palm on the leg of his breeches before turning to face the hillfolk. Among the dirt-streaked faces stood a singular, radiating presence. A corona of light pulsated and shimmered around the mage.

Only the boy could see this light, and it had been so all his life. This was his gift. This was his affliction.

The rest of the villagers watched with scorn. It was the same everywhere. These people hated him for his gift. All of them—except for the old woman. Her soft eyes simply pleaded with him not to speak.

The boy hung his head and looked at the ground.

They all waited as the moment stretched in silence. He could feel Vannis taking measure, and judging him harshly.

“It’s alright,” said Marsino, placing an encouraging hand on his shoulder. “We keep the order. We uphold the law.”

The boy looked up, ready to point out the mage.

“Don’t say it, boy,” said the old woman, shaking her head. “I’ll accept it. Do you hear me?”

“Enough of this,” Vannis snapped, pushing past him, Graymark in hand.

The radiant light around the mage momentarily dimmed as the crowd closed in.

“Wait!”

“Quiet, boy. You had your chance.”

But it wasn’t the woman who was afflicted.

The boy turned to Marsino. “It’s not her! It’s the other one!” he said, pointing to the wild-haired man standing next to the old woman.

Marsino took his eyes off the hillfolk, attempting to follow the boy’s gesture. But before he could fix on the threat, the man lunged at the mageseekers.

“Mamma!” he yelled as he reached for Vannis. His hands glimmered with an emerald sheen as thorny vines bloomed from his fingertips.

Vannis spun out of the way, swinging his staff in a wide arc, and cracked the mage across the temple with the hefty wooden pole.

The mage stumbled into Marsino, clutching him by the arm. Sharp thorns pierced his sleeve. Marsino recoiled in pain and shoved the stricken man to the ground, dropping the torch in the commotion.

Flames licked the man’s tunic and ignited the tatters.

The old woman screamed and rushed toward her son.

Arms grabbed and pulled her back, holding her as she struggled. The rest of the hillfolk pressed forward, but Vannis held his ground, staff ready.

“Did he touch you?!”

Marsino fumbled with his weapon, finally unhooking his scepter, his eyes glazed and unfocused.

“Marsino!”

“I’m fine!”

“Are there any more?” Vannis yelled.

The boy didn’t answer. He remained frozen, gazing down at the dying mage writhing in the flames. Bitterness rose in his throat, but he choked back the foul taste, refusing to retch.

“Boy!”

He finally snapped to attention. The fire was spreading through the field, creating a wall between them and the mob. He searched the murderous faces behind the growing flames, the heat overwhelming his senses.

“No.”

“Then mount up!”

The boy mounted his pony. Marsino and Vannis quickly followed on their own steeds and the three raced away from the village. The boy turned to look back. The fire roared, and the field of flowers was already wilting.

Vannis had pushed them to ride well into the evening, putting as much distance between them and the hillfolk as possible. It would take three days to reach Castle Wrenwall. Vannis intended to mount a cohort of mageseekers and return. The law must be upheld, he said.

They bedded down shortly after dark, the rocky terrain too dangerous to navigate. The boy was relieved to have his own feet on the ground. Boys from Dregbourne rarely rode horses, unless they stole them from a livery stable, and he’d never been much of a thief.

He took the first watch, sitting at the base of a towering oak, back and bottom sore and stiff from hours of riding. He shifted his body, seeking a comfortable position. After a few minutes, he stood and leaned against the ancient giant. A solitary wolf howled somewhere up in the hills, and a chorus responded in kind. Or perhaps they were braget hounds—he still couldn’t tell them apart.

Distant thunderheads flickered in the night sky, their rumblings so removed they never reached his ears. Overhead, stars struggled to push through drifting billows of gray. A sheet of thick fog settled over the lowlands.

He threw another bundle of wood in the fire. It sent up a burst of embers that quickly died out.

Ghostly voices filled the stillness in his mind. They pleaded and denied a shimmering truth as memories of the burning mage danced in the campfire. He shuddered and turned away.

It had been a gruesome death. But every time those thoughts invaded his mind he pushed them away and replaced them with all the beauty he’d witnessed since joining Vannis and Marsino.

He’d been traveling with the mageseekers for months, seeing the world outside the crowded streets of Dregbourne for the first time. He’d explored the distant hills and mountains he’d once watched from the roof of his tenement. New mountains now stood before him, and he wanted to see more.

Magic had made it possible.

The affliction that once filled him with fear of discovery was now a gift. It allowed him to walk as a true Demacian. He even wore the blue. Perhaps someday he would also don a half-mask and a Graymark of his own, in spite of being a mage.

Faint rustling broke his thoughts.

He turned and found Marsino mumbling in his sleep. Next to him lay an empty blanket roll. The boy’s heart raced at the sight. He searched the treeline for the older mageseeker—

Vannis stood beneath a nearby oak, watching him.

“You hesitated today,” he said, as he stepped out of the shadow. “Made a bad showing. Was it fear or something else?”

The boy averted his gaze and remained silent, searching for an answer that would satisfy the mageseeker.

Vannis scowled, growing impatient. “Go on, say your piece.”

“I don’t understand… what’s the harm in growing dormisroot?”

Vannis grumbled and shook his head. “Every inch given is an inch lost,” he said. “It's true on the battlefield and true with mages.”

The boy nodded at the words. Vannis regarded him for a moment.

“Where’s your heart, boy?”

“With Demacia, sir.”

Marsino stirred once again. His mumbles rapidly turned into moans until the man was struggling against his blanket roll.

The boy walked over and tugged at the man’s shoulder. “Marsino, wake up,” he whispered.

The young mageseeker twisted at the boy’s touch. The moans grew louder until the man was wailing. He shook Marsino again, only more roughly this time.

“What’s wrong?” Vannis asked, looming over him.

“I don’t know. He’s not waking.”

Vannis pushed the boy aside and turned Marsino over. Sweat slicked his brow and temple, matting his dark hair. Marsino’s eyes were open and vacant and shined a cloudy white.

Vannis pulled back the heavy blanket and opened Marsino’s cloak. Dark tendrils of blight marred his arm. To the boy’s eyes, a radiant bloom pulsed beneath the corrupted skin.

They had been riding since before first light.

Vannis and the boy had managed to lift Marsino onto his horse and secured him to the saddle. The young mageseeker had remained in a fever dream as Vannis tied Marsino’s horse to his own and set off.

The boy’s pony struggled to keep the brisk pace Vannis had set—Castle Wrenwall was still over a day’s ride away.

He watched Marsino jostle with every stride. The wounded man threatened to fall over several times, but Vannis would slow down and resecure Marsino in his saddle. Every time the old mageseeker did so, he scowled at the boy before pushing on.

They reached Corvo Pass by mid-morning. Their mounts clambered up the narrow switchbacks carved into the mountainside. It would cut half a day from their travels, but the treacherous path was ill kept and the thick brush slowed them to a crawl.

The boy squeezed his legs and clutched the reins, nervously watching the precarious drop into the deep gorge below. His pony simply trudged along, instinctively keeping them from certain death.

They broke through the thicket into a flat clearing. He watched Vannis push on his stirrups, driving the horses into a canter—Marsino began inching to his right, leaning over much further than before.

“Vannis!”

The mageseeker reached out, but it was too late. Marsino fell over and slammed onto the ground.

The boy reined up and leapt off his mount, rushing to the downed man. Vannis did the same.

Blood streamed from Marsino’s forehead.

“We need to staunch the bleeding,” said Vannis.

The man unsheathed his dagger and, without asking, reached out and cut a long strip of cloth from the boy’s cloak.

“Water,” said Vannis.

The boy pulled his water skin and poured a stream over the deep gash as Vannis cleaned the wound.

Marsino shifted and muttered incoherently in his fevered state. The boy tried following the man’s ramblings but understood only a few words.

“Drink,” he said, pouring drops of water over the man’s dry lips.

The young mageseeker stirred, his tongue lapping at the moisture. He opened his eyes. Ruddy blotches stained the cloudy white.

“Are we… there?” Marsino asked, chest wheezing with every word.

Vannis shot the boy a look. He knew not to say a thing. They were still far from reaching help.

“Almost, brother,” said Vannis.

“Why build… Wrenwall… so far up a mountain?”

“'It's supposed to be hard to reach,” Vannis said, with a brittle smile.

Marsino closed his eyes and chuckled slightly. It soon turned into a cough.

“Easy there, brother,” Vannis said, watching the man for a moment before turning to the boy. “The dormisroot—do you still have it?”

“Yes.”

The boy dug into his pocket, drawing a straw horse, a polished river stone, and the yellow flower. He smiled at the sight, knowing the blossom would help Marsino.

Vannis snatched it from the boy’s hand. “At least you did something right, boy.”

His stomach tightened at the words. Vannis was right. He had faltered, and his friend had paid the price.

Marsino shook his head. “It’s not… his fault… I should’ve been… more careful.”

The older mageseeker remained silent as he picked several petals from the dormisroot.

“Chew on this. It’s not refined, but it will help with the pain.”

“What about… the magic?” Marsino asked.

“It quickened the growth and kept it hardy, but the plant is untainted,” Vannis said as he placed the petals in Marsino’s mouth. He leaned in close and whispered in the younger man’s ear, gently stroking his hair. Marsino smiled, seemingly lost in some memory.

The boy took a swig from his waterskin. A slight shiver ran down his spine. The fine hair on his arms stood on edge.

He turned and walked to the end of the clearing—a verdant canopy of pines covered the lowlands below.

“What is it?” Vannis asked.

“I don’t know…” He gazed down at the valley. Nothing appeared out of place, even the sensation had disappeared.

“I thought—”

He stopped short. Plumes of dark smoke rose in the distance.

The boy stared at the charred and smoldering husks lying in the pasture. The smell of burnt animal flesh hung in the air. His stomach rumbled.

“What do you think did that?” he asked, tending to Marsino. The young mageseeker lay on a makeshift litter made from a blanket roll and lengths of rope.

“Don’t know,” said Vannis. “Stay there and keep watch.”

The older mageseeker inspected the dead cattle. They all bore fist-sized puncture wounds in their thick hides. Vannis prodded one of the scorched cavities with the tip of his stave, measuring its depth. A third of the shaft disappeared.

“Maybe we should go,” the boy said.

Vannis turned to him. “Do you feel anything?”

The boy studied the cattle. Traces of magic radiated underneath the seared flesh. Whatever had killed them was powerful enough to mutilate the immense creatures. A man couldn’t fare any better. Even one with a quarterstaff.

The boy turned his attention to the farmstead. It held a small log cabin, a weathered barn, and an outhouse at the far end. The property was tucked against the hills, surrounded by dense forest. They never would have seen it if not for the smoke.

The sound of footfalls approached.

Vannis spun around and raised his staff.

An old man rounded the corner of the barn. He stopped at the sight of the unannounced visitors. He wore trousers and a tunic fitted for a larger man, and he carried an old, beaten halberd, its edge gleaming and sharp.

“What are you doing on my farm?” The man asked, shifting the grip on his weapon and remaining well outside Vannis’ reach.

“My friend’s hurt,” said the boy. “Please, he needs help, sir.”

Vannis gave the boy a sidelong glance but said nothing.

The farmer looked down at Marsino. The young mageseeker stirred in his litter, lost to a fever dream.

“They have healers in Wrenwall,” the farmer said.

“It’s over a day’s ride. He’ll never make it,” said Vannis.

“A beast prowls these woods. You best ride out,” the old man said, gesturing to the dead cattle.

The boy glanced at the dense treeline. He sensed nothing at the moment, but he remembered the shiver he’d felt earlier. At that distance, it had to be a massive creature.

“What kind of beast? Is it a dragon?”

“Steady, boy.” Vannis said as he stepped toward the farmer. “You have a duty to quarter a Demacian soldier.”

The farmer stood his ground. “You wear the blue… but a mageseeker is not a soldier.”

“Aye, but I was once. Like you.”

The farmer’s eyes narrowed, and he angled the spearpoint of his halberd in Vannis’ direction.

“It’s that pole cleaver,” Vannis said. “A gut ripper of the old Thornwall Halberdiers, if memory serves. Far as I can see, neither it nor this old soldier have lost their edge.”

The farmer regarded his weapon with a faint smile. “That was long ago.”

“Brothers are for life,” said Vannis, softer this time. “Help us. And we’ll hunt your beast down after we’re done.”

The boy glanced down at Marsino. The mageseeker’s eyes remained shut as he drew shallow breaths.

The farmer regarded Vannis, considering the offer. “That won't be necessary,” he finally said. “Let’s bring your man inside.”

Vannis and the farmer carried Marsino inside the cabin. A small fire burned in the firepit and the modest room smelled of cedar and earth. The boy cleared a table standing in the middle of the room, tossing wooden bowls and hardtack biscuits onto a nearby sleeping pallet. The men eased Marsino down onto the wooden planks.

“Who else is here?” Vannis asked, using his dagger to cut off Marsino’s tunic.

“I live alone,” the old man said, examining the wound. The boy could see the blight had spread. Dark tendrils reached out toward Marsino’s neck and heart.

“We have to have cut it out,” said Vannis.

Marsino started to convulse, threatening to fall off the table.

“Hold ‘em down,” said Vannis. The boy pinned Marsino’s legs, using his weight to secure them in place. The man thrashed against the restraint. A heavy boot kicked free and cracked the boy in the mouth. He stumbled back, nursing his jaw.

“I said hold him!” Vannis yelled as he wiped down the blade of his dagger.

He reached for Marsino’s legs again, but the farmer stepped in.

“It’s alright, son,” the man said. “Try talking to him.”

He moved around the table. Marsino’s tremors had eased, but his chest rattled with each ragged breath.

“Marsino?”

“Hold his hand, let him know you’re there,” said the farmer. “It helps with injured animals. Men aren’t much different.”

The boy grasped Marsino’s hand. It felt warm to the touch and slick with sweat. “It’s going to be alright. We got help.”

Marsino seemed to focus on his voice, turning toward the sound, his cloudy white gaze now a deep red.

“Are we in Wrenwall?”

The boy looked at Vannis, and the magehunter nodded.

“Yes. The healers are working on you,” the boy said.

“The dormisroot… it bought me… some time,” Marsino said, squeezing his hand. “You did good… You did good…”

The boy clenched his teeth, fighting back the grief swelling in his throat. He held Marsino’s hand tighter, not wanting to let go.

“I’m sorry, Marsino. I should’ve—”

“Don’t… it wasn’t… your fault,” Marsino said, every word labored and pained. He strained to lift his head. Searching the room with eyes that could no longer see.

“Vannis?”

“Right here, brother.”

“Tell ‘em… tell ‘em it’s not on him.”

Vannis fixed his stare on the boy. “Aye, bad luck is all,” he finally said.

“See…” Marsino said, offering a wan smile. “You don’t need… to carry it.”

Vannis gripped Marsino’s shoulder and leaned in close to the man’s ear. “We need to cut it out, brother,” Vannis said.

Marsino nodded his head.

“He’ll need something to bite on,” said the farmer.

The boy unsheathed his dagger, the carved wooden handle perfectly suited for the task. He placed it in Marsino’s mouth.

“Good,” Vannis said, holding his own blade inches from the wounded arm.

The tendrils slithered beneath the skin. To the boy’s eyes, they radiated a soft, pulsating light the others couldn’t see.

“Stop,” he said.

Vannis looked up at the boy. “What is it?”

Marsino bit down on the dagger’s handle and released a stifled scream. He squeezed the boy’s hand and thrashed against the table until the movement underneath his skin subsided.

The blight stretched across Marsino’s neck.

“It’s too deep,” said Vannis. “I can’t cut it out.” The mageseeker stepped back, unsure of what to do next.

“What if you burn it out?” The boy asked.

“You can’t cauterize that close to the artery,” Vannis said. He turned to the old man. “Do you have any medicinals?”

“Nothing that would help that.”

Vannis gazed down at his injured partner, weighing something in his mind. “What about a healer?” he said, the words no louder than a whisper.

“They would have medicinals, but the closest one—”

“Not that kind of healer.”

The old man remained silent for a moment. “I don’t know anyone like that.”

It appeared Vannis wanted to push the matter, but he bit his tongue and searched the cabin instead.

The boy followed the mageseeker’s gaze. He found a stack of hides in one corner, a netted hammock in another, and a carver’s workbench crowded with dozens of wooden drakes against a wall. Nothing that would help.

“The cattle,” said Vannis.

The farmer blanched at the mention of the dead livestock. “What of them?”

“Did they ever suffer from tinea worm?”

“Yes. We burn it out with a pulvis of lunar caustic.”

“If we cut the source and use a thin band of the pulvis for the rest, it might work,” Vannis said. “Where is it?”

The farmer looked out the window. He seemed to hesitate, perhaps trying to remember where to search in all the clutter.

A deep guttural sound rose from Marsino’s throat. He violently convulsed and teetered toward the edge of the table, dagger clenched between his teeth.

Vannis held the wounded man down by the shoulders. “Where’s the pulvis?”

The farmer wrestled with Marsino’s flailing legs. “It’s in the barn, but—”

Marsino wailed.

“I got it!” the boy said, as he turned and ran outside.

Crisp mountain air rushed past his face as he raced toward the barn, the heat building in his legs and lungs. The barn door was less than twenty paces away when a shiver ran down his spine.

He slid to a stop.

The surrounding forest stood dark and silent. He searched the dense thicket for the slightest hint of magic but found nothing in the brush. Steam and smoke still rose from the smoldering heaps in the pasture. The tingling sensation spread across his back—there was something nearby.

He needed to warn Vannis but knew better than to shout.

Should he go back?

Another agonizing scream erupted from within the cabin. Marsino needed him to be brave.

He took a deep, sobering breath and darted to the outbuilding. His trembling hands fumbled with the latch until he finally got the door open, then he slammed it shut behind him.

A jolt rushed down his spine.

He stumbled back and fell, crashing into a rack of ditching tools. Shovels and spades clattered on the floor.

It was inside the barn.

The boy reached for his dagger but found the sheath empty. He had given it to Marsino. A silvery brilliance radiated from one of the stalls.

He tried to stand, but his legs refused to act. The glow flourished as a shape exited the stall and rounded the corner. He’d never witnessed a light so blinding. It distorted the very air in waves of colors.

The shape approached.

A droning rose in his ears, like an army of nettle bees swarming inside his head. The boy scrambled back, one hand shielding his eyes as the other searched the ground for a weapon. He found nothing.

The world vanished behind a sheet of light and color.

A sound tried to break through the hum as the shape pushed through the radiant glow. His mind struggled to piece it together until a single utterance made everything clear…

“Papa?”

With a word, the entire world resolved back into place.

It was a little girl.

She stared at him, eyes wide in fear. The corona around her flared brighter again. It pulled at the boy, compelling him to reach out and touch its radiance.

“W-Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m… I’m Sylas.” He rose to his feet, holding out his hand. “I won’t hurt you… if you don’t hurt me.”

The girl balled her hands and pressed them to her chest. “I would never hurt anyone…” she said, her gaze falling to her feet. “Not on purpose.”

The boy recalled the cattle in the pasture. He pushed the thought away and focused on the golden-haired child. She seemed tiny and lost, even here in her own home.

“I believe you,” he said. “It’s not always… easy.”

The light around her dimmed, and the pull on him diminished.

She looked up at the boy. “Have you seen my papa?”

“He’s inside the house. Helping my friend.”

She timidly reached out to grasp his hand. “Take me to him.”

He drew back. “You can’t go inside,” he said.

“Is something wrong with papa?”

“No. It’s… He’s helping a mageseeker.”

The little girl recoiled at the word, and the inside of the barn brightened once again. She understood the danger.

“Are you a mageseeker?” She asked, her voice quivering.

The question wrenched at something deep inside the boy.

“No,” he said. “I’m like you.”

The girl smiled. It was genuine and warmed his heart in a way that no praise from a mageseeker ever had.

Another scream came from the main house.

“Papa?”

“It’s my friend. I need to go back,” he said. “Can you hide until we’re gone? Can you do that?”

The girl nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Do you know where the lunar caustic is?”

She pointed to a clay jar sitting on a narrow shelf.

The boy snatched the container and bolted from the barn. Another agonizing wail broke as he approached the cabin. He pushed harder for the last few steps and burst through the door.

“I found it,” he said, holding the jar like a prize in hand.

Silence filled the room.

Vannis was staring at Marsino’s lifeless body. Only the farmer turned toward the door.

There was fear and resentment in the old man’s eyes. It was the same the boy had seen in all those desperate souls trying to hide their affliction.

The old man slowly reached for his halberd, his gaze sweeping from the boy to Vannis, who still hadn’t moved or said a word.

The boy shook his head, silently imploring the man to stop.

The farmer paused and looked toward the barn before looking back at the boy.

He offered the father a reassuring smile.

The old man regarded him for a moment and then rested his weapon against the wall.

Vannis finally snapped from his trance. “What took you so long?” the mageseeker asked.

“It’s not the boy’s fault. Your friend was too far gone.”

Vannis stepped back from the body and sat down on the sleeping pallet.

“The cur is the reason we’re here,” he sneered. “He’s one of them, you know. Pretending to be normal.”

“Your friend didn’t believe so,” said the farmer. “Honor that memory.”

Vannis looked away from Marsino’s body. He fixed his attention on the dozens of carver’s tools and wooden figures strewn about the floor beneath the hammock.

“He was a young fool who felt things far too deeply,” he finally said. Vannis fell into a deep silence after that, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere.

The farmer and the boy joined him in the uncomfortable stillness, unsure of what to do next.

“So it’ll be the two of us hunting the beast, then?” Vannis asked the old man.

“It’s not necessary,” said the farmer. “Tend to your friend. I have a wagon. It’s yours.”

“Doesn’t seem proper to leave you here… alone,” said Vannis. “I’d be abandoning a brother.”

The mageseeker’s voice carried a subtle sharpness that made the boy uneasy. Sorrow transformed into suspicion. The grieving mentor had become the interrogator once again.

“I’ll manage,” said the farmer. “Been doing so since my days wearing the blue.”

“Of course,” Vannis said, smiling.

The mageseeker leapt from the cot, rushed the farmer, and slammed him against the wall—his dagger tip poised inches from the man’s throat.

“Where is it?”

“What?” The farmer asked, his voice trembling and confused.

“Your beast?”

“I-It’s in the woods.”

“Does it bed down in your cabin at night?”

“What?”

“Your hammock,” said Vannis, gesturing to the netted cord. “Spend enough time on campaign and it becomes your best friend.”

Vannis pressed the dagger to the man’s flesh. “So why the cot?”

“It… belonged to my daughter,” said the farmer, his gaze momentarily flicked to the boy. “She passed last winter.”

The boy looked at the sleeping pallet. It was built for a child.

But it wasn’t only the cot. There was a wooden bowl and spoon, and a practice sword too small for a grown man. If he could see through the lie, then…

“Let’s visit her grave,” said Vannis.

“We can’t,” said the farmer, averting his eyes in shame. “The beast took her.”

“Like it took your cattle?” Vannis sneered. “I wager if we search carefully we’ll find it on your farm.”

“There’s nothing here,” the boy said. “We should go.”

“What do you see on that table, boy?”

He stared at Marsino’s body. The bloodstained eyes wide and lifeless. The blighted tendrils had choked off his neck and webbed his face.

“What do you see!”

“Marsino… I see Marsino.” he said, the words choking his throat.

“A mageseeker, boy. One of my own,” Vannis said, anger and pain seeping from each word. “What is he to you?”

Marsino had been the only mageseeker that showed him kindness. He had accepted him as a true Demacian, despite his affliction.

“He was my friend.”

“Aye… and he was killed by a mage,” Vannis said. “This man hides one from us. A dangerous one.”

The boy remembered the intense glow of the little girl and the scorched flesh of the dead cattle.

“What do we do?” Vannis asked.

The boy wiped the corners of his eyes with his sleeve.

“We keep the order. We uphold the law.”

Vannis led the boy and the farmer outside, driving them with his staff. The three stood in the pasture, watching the barn and the outhouse. He jabbed the man in the ribs with the stave.

“Call your daughter.”

The farmer winced at the blow. “She’s not here,” he said. “She’s gone.”

“We’ll see.”

The old man looked at the boy, silently pleading.

“I’ll search the barn,” the boy said.

“No. Let her come to us.” Vannis slammed the farmer’s head with the edge of his staff, driving the man to the ground.

“Come out! We have your father!”

There was no response. No movement. And then the man wailed.

The boy turned to find the farmer tottering on one knee, clutching his temple. Blood pooled underneath the man’s fingers, slicking his hand with blood. Vannis stood over him, ready to strike again.

“What are you doing?”

“What needs to be done,” said Vannis, his face contorted by anger and grief.

A jolt raced down the boy’s spine. And once again, all the fine hair on his arms and neck stood on edge.

The barn door creaked open.

“That’s right, come on,” Vannis said.

Darkness framed the doorway. Tiny footfalls approached. The little girl crossed the threshold and stepped outside. Her panicked eyes fixed on her injured father.

“Papa…” she said, tears cascading down her face.

“It’s alright,” the bleeding farmer stammered. Papa’s just talking to these men.”

They all watched as the child inched toward them, the men were unaware of what only the boy could see.

She glowed like the midday sun.

The power inside her pulsated and shifted colors. It shimmered with a radiance that appeared to bend light itself. She was a living rainbow.

This was his affliction. This was his gift.

He alone could see the fundamental beauty and nature of magic. It lived in this frightened child as it lived in every single mage in Demacia, and perhaps all across the world. How could he betray that? The boy had seen all he needed to see.

“She’s… normal.”

“Are you sure? Look again!”

He turned to the mageseeker. To Demacia, Vannis was a venerated bulwark, guarding against the threat of magic. But to the boy, he was a simple man clinging to tradition.

“You were wrong. We should go.”

Vannis regarded him for a moment, searching for deception. The mageseeker shook his head and scowled.

“We’ll see if she passes the trials,” he said, removing the Graymark from his cloak.

The farmer’s eyes went wide at the sight of the petricite emblem.

“Run, child! Run!” the old man shouted as he leapt to his feet and lunged at Vannis.

The mageseeker moved fast, thrusting his staff into the farmer's midsection. The man staggered back from the blow, creating some distance between the two. Vannis darted forward and drove the stave down onto the man's head. His crown shattered in a bloom of crimson.

The little girl screamed. Her hands crackled with sparks of lightning—this time, for all to see.

Vannis held out his Graymark, capturing the flickering arcs in the stone and suppressing the magic. But the petricite rapidly darkened and cracked, overwhelmed by the little girl's power. Vannis dropped the ruined disk and spun around, swinging his wooden stave at the child’s head.

“No!”

The boy rushed toward the girl, throwing himself between the heavy quarterstaff and the flaring streams of light. The hairs on his arms singed and his fingers blistered as he touched the little mage.

A twisting arc of lightning pierced his hand, and a blazing current rushed through his flesh, contorting his entire body. The boy's heart clenched and all the air inside him rushed out. He gasped for breath but drew only emptiness.

The edges of his vision blurred and the colors drained as deathly magic flooded him. Vannis appeared motionless, staff in mid-swing, like ancient statuary depicting a hero of old. The little girl was also frozen, her tears dull crystals as the radiant glow around her dimmed and faded…

And then his lungs filled with air.

His heart raced, pumping a numbing calmness throughout his body. The blaze inside him remained, but no longer threatened to consume him. Instead, it flowed calmly throughout, and for the briefest moments it felt malleable to his thoughts. Then it suddenly sparked and flared hotter until he could no longer contain it inside.

Light erupted from his hands, and the world disappeared.

Sylas opened his eyes. Three smoldering husks lay strewn on the scorched ground. One of them held a warped and splintered staff in hand. The other two had fallen near each other, their arms splayed and reaching, but forever apart. His eyes welled at the sight of his failure, and regret gripped his heart. He rolled over onto his back and shuddered.

Countless stars stretched across a cloudless firmament. He watched them arc across the darkness and disappear behind a black canopy of trees.

The night sky turned a purple hue before he finally staggered to his feet.

His legs trembled as he limped away from the carnage. He stopped after a short distance, but didn’t look back.

There was no need. Those images would remain with him for the rest of his life. He pushed them from his thoughts and gazed at the spine of mountaintops spanning the horizon.

He had no intention of riding to Wrenwall, or any of their strongholds. No amount of pleading would save him from their punishment. In time, they would seek him out, not stopping until he was brought to justice. After all, the law must be upheld.

But he knew their ways, and Demacia was vast.

Glowing flitterwings danced through the twilight, leaving trails of luminescence in their wake, but she swatted them out of her face, oblivious to their fleeting grace. Eyes downcast, she kicked a rock, sending it skidding over the roots twisting across her path, blind to the glorious sunset glimpsed through the canopy. The delicate violet petals of a blooming night-sable unfurled to release its glowing pollen into the warm evening, but she reached out and twisted the flower off its stem as she passed.

Her face burned with shame and anger. The scolding from her mother still lingered, and the laughter of her brother and the others seemed to follow her.

She paused, looking back at the broken petals on the path, and frowned. There was something strangely familiar about all of this… almost like she’d lived it before. She shook her head and continued on, deeper into the forest.

Finally, she stood before the sacred ghost-willow. Its limbs moved languidly, as if underwater, accompanied by the faint, musical whisper of bone chimes.

While the anger still coursed through her, hot and fierce, she closed her eyes and forced her fists to unclench. She breathed in, slowly, just as the old master had taught her, trying to push back her rage.

Something hit her, hard, in the back of the head, and she fell to her knees. She touched a hand where she’d been struck, and her fingers came away bloody. Then she heard the laughter, and her fury surged to the fore.

She stood and turned towards her brother and the others, her eyes dark and glaring. Her breathing was heavy and short, and her hands clenched into fists at her side once more, all the effort to calm herself a moment before lost in a flash of anger. As it built within her, compounding and growing like a malignant sickness, the air around her seemed to shimmer, and the ghost-willow began to fade and wither behind her. It wept red sap, its leaves curling and blackening.

Since time immemorial the magic of this land had nourished the ghost-willow, just as it in turn nourished the land and its people, but now it was dying, its supple limbs turning bone-dry and brittle, its roots curling in pain. Its chimes tolled a mournful death-rattle, but the girl didn’t hear it, lost in the moment of her seething fury.

As the ancient, primordial tree perished, the little girl began to lift off the ground, rising into the air. Three light-swallowing spheres of absolute darkness began to orbit around the child.

Her tormentors were not laughing now...

Kalan stood upon the battlements of Fae’lor, looking across the narrow sea towards the mainland of the First Lands—what humans now called Ionia.

It was a dark, moonless night, but he saw as clearly as if it were daylight, the pupils of his feline eyes fully dilated. Occasionally, they caught the gleam of torch-light and reflected it back brightly; the mirrored eyes of a night predator.

Kalan was vastaya, of the ancient bloodline. His fur was russet-red and hung down his back in long, intricate, knotted braids that now had more than a few streaks of grey in them. His proud face was akin to that of a great hunting cat, and criss-crossed with scars from a lifetime of battle. The left side of that face was furless, and angry red welts bore evidence of the horrible burns he’d suffered as a young warrior. Curling horns sprouted from his temples, each engraved with spiralling runic patterns, and his three tails swished behind him, each covered in segmented plate. The armor he wore was Noxian dark iron, and he wore the trappings of his adopted empire with a scowl.

Some called him a traitor, both to Ionia and his vastayan heritage, but he didn’t care. What they thought didn’t matter.

The fortress of Fae’lor was built upon the westernmost island of Ionia. Highly defensible, this place had remained for centuries, standing against countless foes, before being finally overrun after a long siege during the Noxian invasion.

That was before Kalan had joined Noxus, before the fateful Battle of the Placidium when he’d pledged himself to Swain. Before he’d requested this post as governor of Fae’lor as reward for his service.

The Noxians laughed at him behind his back, he knew. He could have had a far more prestigious posting—but he had chosen Fae’lor, at the forgotten edge of the empire.

They didn’t understand, and that mattered nothing to him. He needed to be here.

Noxus had not won the war, of course… but nor had Ionia. Nevertheless, many seasons after the end of the campaign, Fae’lor remained under the invaders’ control.

Thirty-three warships were currently docked here, as well as perhaps half that number of trader vessels and merchant ships. Over a thousand warriors of Noxus—a mix of veteran warbands hailing from the far corners of the empire—were stationed here under his leadership.

A guard patrol stomped along the battlements. They saluted, fists crashing against breastplates, and he gave a nod in return. He didn’t fail to miss the dark looks they gave him as they marched by. They hated him almost as much as his own people did, but they feared and respected him, and that was enough.

He turned to look back across the sea once more, brooding on the past. Why was he here? It was a question he saw in the eyes of his subordinates every day, and one that crept up on him the darkest of nights, those nights when the forest, and the hunt, called to him. The answer was simple, however.

He remained here to keep watch over her.

A pair of dark-clad figures—one female, one male—emerged from the sea, unseen, and as silent as death. Swiftly, moving like spiders, they scaled the near-vertical hull of the warship Crimson Huntress, and slunk over its gunwale. Their blades glinted, and the ship’s night wardens were silently dispatched, one after another, without any alarm being sounded.

Within moments, all five Noxians were dead, their lifeblood leaking out onto the deck.

“Neatly done, little brother,” said one of the pair, now crouched in the shadow of the upper deck. Of her face, only her eyes and the swirling indigo tattoos that surrounded them were visible.

“I had a passably decent teacher,” replied the other. He too was fully clad in black and crouched in shadow, though in place of his sister’s swirling tattoos, his skin was a solid block of etched flesh.

“Passably decent, Okin?” she replied, one eyebrow rising.

“No need to feed your ego, Sirik,” her brother replied.

“Enough fooling around,” said Sirik. She opened a black leather pouch at her hip and delicately removed an object, tightly bound in waxed leather. She unwrapped it, gingerly, revealing a fist-sized, black crystal.

“Is it dry?” whispered Okin.

In answer, Sirik gently shook the crystal. A hint of an orange glow lit it from within for a brief moment, like a fanned ember.

“It would seem so. I’ll find a suitable place for it,” she said, nodding to the nearby door leading below deck. “You signal the others.”

Okin nodded. Sirik ghosted below deck, and her brother moved silently back to the gunwale. He leaned over the edge and beckoned. Seven other black-clad figures rose from the dark water below, climbing soundlessly up onto the deck of the ship, hugging the shadows.

They were the dispossessed—the last remaining warriors who had served here at the fortress of Fae’lor, before the Noxians had wrested it from them. The shame of that defeat still burned in their hearts, as did the desire to see every Noxian pushed from their ancestral homelands.

Once all were on deck, they waited a moment for Sirik, who emerged after a few minutes.

“It is done,” she said.

The nine dispossessed Ionians flowed over the ship’s side, following the leading pair. They moved as fluidly as water, and ran lightly along the stone dock towards the fortress of Fae’lor.

From shadow to shadow they darted, like specters, until they reached the first wall. Hugging the darkness, they remained utterly motionless as a patrol marched by, the Noxian warriors speaking in their guttural language and laughing, utterly oblivious to the nigh-invisible Ionians crouched mere feet away.

As soon as the patrol turned a corner, the infiltrators snapped into motion once more, climbing the sheer surface of the wall, moving swiftly, hand-over-hand. They made it look easy, like climbing a ladder, though in truth there were virtually no handholds.

Sirik reached the crenellations first. She peered over, then ducked swiftly back and went perfectly still, clinging one-handed to the battlements. The others below her froze, then hurriedly climbed to join her as she made a series of swift hand-movements. She made a fist, before climbing atop the wall, joined by her brother, Okin. None of the Noxians saw the pair of Ionians ghosting along behind them, hopping lightly across the top of the battlements in their wake.

Then Sirik and Okin leapt among the enemy, and the four guards were killed before a single one drew a blade.

The last of them clutched his throat, blood welling beneath his hand, and teetered on the edge of the wall. Sirik grabbed him, like a lover enfolding her paramour in her arms, and lowered him gently to the ground; if he’d fallen, the sound would undoubtedly have raised the alarm.

Two other guards nearby were swiftly dispatched, silently and without mercy, as the other Ionians came over the wall. Then, as one, the nine moved on, darting across an open courtyard and scaling a second, inner wall.

Each of them knew their target, and each knew the precise layout of the fortress, for it had been their own people who had constructed it. The Noxians were merely its current occupants.

They scrambled up the inner wall, and flowed over the parapet, their timing almost preternatural as they avoided two pairs of sentries atop the wall. They ducked into the shadow of the jutting stone bluff Fae’lor abutted, and became as one with the darkness.

That was when a shout sounded, echoing up from the docks.

Okin cursed under his breath. “They know we’re here,” he hissed.

“I had hoped to be further in before they discovered the first body,” said Sirik, “but this changes nothing. We continue as planned.”

The first shout was echoed by others, and a bell began to toll, sounding out across the fortress.

“Time for our distraction,” said Sirik. She closed her eyes and silenced her inner thoughts. In her mind’s eye, she saw the black crystal she’d secreted below the deck of the Noxian warship, and she reached out to it, fanning it to life.

She was no conjurer or soul-mage, but like many of her people, she could feel and subtly manipulate the magic of the land in minor, fairly insignificant ways. Hers was just a small, common gift, akin to that of the farmers of her village who spun a little magic into their crops. To outsiders this was shocking, but among her people, such simple gifts were not at all unusual, nor regarded as anything to be held in awe. It was like being able to whistle, or curl your tongue—some people could do it, others couldn’t.

Sirik deepened her breathing, and intensified her silent entreaties, encouraging the fyrestone to do what was it its nature to do.

Her gift might have been minor, but the effect of it as she nudged the crystal to life was not. That had more to do with the volatile nature of the fyrestone crystal than any innate power of her own, of course, but nevertheless, the result was impressive.

In the harbor below, the Noxian warship Crimson Huntress exploded, lighting up the night in a billowing fireball. Soldiers who were responding to Fae’lor’s warning bells stopped in their tracks, turning towards sudden inferno.

Sirik opened her eyes. “Let’s go,” she said.

Kalan stalked onto the stone dock, flanked by guards, his three tails swishing dangerously.

“The work of Ionian saboteurs, I would guess, my lord,” said a nervous-looking officer, trotting to keep up with Kalan’s long strides. “A black powder detonation, most likely.”

Kalan halted and frowned deeply as he surveyed the mayhem on the docks.

The Crimson Huntress was no more, reduced to the waterline. What timbers remained still burned. Three other nearby vessels were ablaze, and while crews worked to put out the flames, Kalan could see at a glance that at least one of them was a lost cause, and he snarled in frustration, exposing his teeth.

“We’ve secured the docks, and a thorough search of all other ships is currently underway,” said the nervous officer. “If there are more explosives, they will be found.”

Kalan ignored him, eyes narrowed. He dropped to one knee and scratched at the ground, then lifted his hand to his nose, sniffing.

“If they are still here, lord, we’ll find them,” said the officer, clearly uncomfortable with his superior’s silence. “I’d guess they are long gone, though.”

Kalan stood, and looked back along the dock, away from the sea, towards the towering walls.

“A cowardly act,” the officer remarked. “They know they can’t take us in a siege, so they try to hurt us in other ways. But we will not be deterred! We are Noxus! We—”

“Be silent,” growled Kalan. He was looking at the officer for the first time now, his yellow eyes unblinking. The man paled under his gaze, and seemed to shrink a little, like a toad retreating into its hole. “It was fyrestone, not blackpowder. And they are still here. This was not an act of cowards.”

The officer gaped silently, like a landed fish. “No?” he managed, finally, his voice little more than a squeak.

“No.” Kalan swung away from him, and strode back towards the fortress of Fae’lor. “This is a distraction.”

Kalan seethed. He would deal with that fool later. Right now, he had something far more important to focus on.

“They are going for the Dreaming Pool,” he snarled.

Sirik kept her hand clamped across the Noxian’s mouth until his struggles ceased, then dropped his lifeless body to the ground. She wiped her bloody dagger clean on his tunic and glanced around to see her brother and the others deal with the remaining Noxians within the lower level of the tower.

They were close, now. A rocky bluff reached up to the night sky in the courtyard beyond their position, and Sirik’s eyes were drawn to its peak. A jutting structure, blotting out the stars, marked their target.

Tolling bells were sounding the alarm, echoing all across Fae’lor.

Sirik led the way out into the courtyard, breaking from the tower and sprinting towards the stone steps carved into the bluff. She didn’t care who saw them now. The time for subterfuge was passed. Now speed was the best ally.

Shouts erupted from above, and arrows chased the Ionians as they darted across the open space. None hit home, skidding off the cobbled stone at their feet. A handful of guards emerged from a nearby gate, rushing to intercept them. Sirik and her companions didn’t even slow as they drew weapons; curved swords, sickles, poisoned darts and bladed fans. In a heartbeat they were among the Noxians, sliding under and somersaulting over heavy blows, dancing through them, blades wreaking a bloody toll.

The first of the Ionians fell, then, hacked down by a heavy halberd blow to the neck. Sirik pushed her instant pang of grief within, and pushed on, breaking through the enemy with her brother at her side, leaving a handful of them bleeding in their wake.

They reached the carved, uneven steps—far older than the fortress itself—and began sprinting up, toward the peak, taking the stairs three at a time. Votive lanterns carved into the rock on either side of the stairs remained dark.

Before Noxus had taken this holy place, those would never have remained unlit, day or night.

Another Ionian fell, two arrows thudding into his chest. Without a sound, he toppled from the path, falling to the courtyard below. On and on, the remaining Ionians ran, climbing the spiralling path encircling the stone bluff towards its peak. More arrows clattered against the rock wall beside them, but thankfully no more of her companions were struck.

They rounded the curve at speed. A flash of metal in the night was all the warning Sirik had, and she threw herself instinctively into a roll. A heavy spear, thrown with great force, sliced scant inches over her to strike one of her companions behind. It took him in the chest and lifted him off his feet, hurling him off the bluff.

Two guards stood before the entrance to the shrine at the top of the bluff. Both were immense slabs of muscle and heavy black armor, with huge shields and heavy, jagged cleavers clutched in their brutish fists.

The six remaining Ionians attacked as one, sprinting, leaping and somersaulting towards the towering Noxians, blades glinting.

Moving at speed, Sirik ran up onto the side of the bluff, taking two steps across its vertical surface before leaping off, her short blades seeking the neck of the first guard, even as her brother attacked low. Okin rolled under a heavy swinging blow and came up behind the Noxian, slashing a backhanded blow across his foe’s leg, making him stumble. Sirik speared through the air, leading with her blades, carving a pair of deep furrows through the solid meat of the Noxian’s neck.

Still, he did not fall, and as Sirik landed lightly in a low crouch, one hand touching the ground for balance, the injured warrior roared and smashed one of the dispossessed Ionians to the ground with the flat of his tower shield. Before Sirik could intervene, the brute slammed the ridge of that shield down onto her fallen comrade’s neck, killing him instantly.

The other Noxian was proving equally difficult to put down, bellowing like a wounded bull and flailing about wildly, even as she bled from wounds that would have killed most, lesser individuals.

Okin hacked into the Noxian’s ribs, just to the side of her heavy breastplate, and danced aside as his enemy turned on him. Sirik darted in then, landing another strike, and as her enemy swung in her direction, another of her companions did likewise, hitting the Noxian from behind. They fought like a pack mercilessly taking down large prey, and at last the other Noxian dropped to her knees, lifeblood leaking out onto the stones. She stayed upright for a moment more, spitting curses, then fell facedown and was still.

Her companion roared in grief and anger, and hacked one of the dispossessed down with a brutal sweep of his cleaver. Then he ran to his fallen comrade, dropping to his knees and cradling her in his huge arms. All the fight had gone out of him, and he let out a terrible, anguished wail to the night sky.

Okin and the others encircled him to land the killing blow, but Sirik shook her head. “Leave him be,” she said. “Come. Let’s finish this.”

The Noxian didn’t understand her words, but recognized their intent. He looked up with grief-filled eyes, and regained his feet, picking up his blade. Then, with a cry, he launched himself at Sirik. He was cut down before he went more than a few steps—as he’d likely expected—and he dropped beside the other Noxian. With his last breath, he reached out to her, then went limp.

His death saddened Sirik, for all that he was an enemy. Were they kin, these two? Lovers? Friends? With a deep breath, she pushed those feelings aside, so as to focus on the task at hand.

With a silent nod, she led the four remaining dispossessed Ionians into the shrine known to her people as the Dael’eh Ahira—the Dreaming Pool.

Fae’lor was not originally intended as a fortress. Far from it, it was once a center of tranquility and guidance, where gifted young Ionians came, from far and wide, to learn how better to harness their own innate gifts. All that had ended years before Sirik had been born, and the island that had once been teeming with life, study and peace, became little more than a barren prison. Barely any vegetation grew on the island around the fortress now—only dry, brittle thorn-bushes and ghost-gray lichen was able to thrive. Birds and other wildlife, so abundant on the nearby islands, also shunned it now, except for the dark, hateful crows and ravens that had come with the Noxians.

For all of Sirik’s time here, before the invasion, she and other guards had stood sentinel, watching over the Dael’eh Ahira. It was their duty to ensure that the one held within it was never released.

Sirik led the way down into the darkness within the rock, holding aloft a glass sphere filled with glowing flitterwings to light the way. She shivered, skin prickling, as the temperature dropped the deeper they went.

The stone steps were slick with moisture, but she picked her way down swiftly, for it would not be long before the Noxians arrived in overwhelming force. None of them had expected to make it back from this mission; all that mattered was completing the task they’d come to achieve, and ending the threat imprisoned down here within the Dreaming Pool once and for all.

They reached the deepest point of the Dael’eh Ahira, finally, sliding down the uneven rocks the final ten feet, and landed with a splash in the shallow waters below.

Once, this shrine had been beautiful, but disaster had brought the cavern down in years past.

Here was imprisoned the one they had guarded for so many years.

The one Sirik now came to kill.

Kalan leapt toward the top of the the stone bluff in powerful bounds, clearing ten steps with each one, quickly outpacing his soldiers. He arrived at the peak alone, and growled in frustration as he saw the corpses there: two Noxian, two Ionian.

Without waiting for his warriors, he plunged into the Dael’eh Ahira. Into the darkness he descended, his feline eyes instantly adjusting. He could taste the scent of the humans on the air, leading him on.

Padding silently into the gloom, Kalan began the hunt.

The darkening forest was full of beauty, but the girl saw none of it as she stomped along the winding path.

Glowing flitterwings danced through the twilight, leaving trails of luminescence in their wake, but she swatted them out of her face, oblivious to their fleeting grace. Eyes downcast, she kicked a rock, sending it skidding over the roots twisting across her path, blind to the glorious sunset glimpsed through the canopy. The delicate violet petals of a blooming night-sable unfurled to release its glowing pollen into the warm evening, but she reached out and twisted the flower off its stem as she passed.

Her face burned with shame and anger. The scolding from her mother still lingered, and the laughter of her brother and the others seemed to follow her.

She paused, looking back at the broken petals on the path, and frowned. There was something strangely familiar about all of this… almost like she’d—

Dark shapes appeared in her peripheral vision, and she looked around, trying to see them clearly. There were four of them, but she could only just make them out if she didn’t look directly at them.

Her brow furrowed in confusion. This wasn’t how it was meant to be.

Something was very wrong.

Sirik and her three companions stood in a circle, looking down into a deeper section of the water. A woman lay there, beneath the surface, her pure white hair, long and flowing, drifting around her languidly.

Syndra. That was her name; a byword for destruction, for giving in to your darkest fears and anger. A name still cursed throughout the provinces.

Sirik pulled off the dark hood hiding her face and tossed it aside. The delicate, indigo tattoos surrounding her eyes seemed to writhe in the shifting light emitted by the flitterwings in the glass sphere she held aloft. The others removed their head-coverings as well. All of them bore similar tattoos upon their faces, tattoos that marked them as guardians of Fae’lor. All of them looked down at Syndra, their expressions hard.

The roots of an ancient tree—the only thing holding the immense stones from crashing down upon this already half-collapsed cavern—curled around her limbs. They might have been cradling her, like a protective mother, or holding her down, trapping her, depending on your point of view. She could easily have been mistaken for being dead but for the steady rise and fall of her chest as she breathed the water.

Syndra didn’t look at all dangerous, but Sirik knew well how deceiving such an impression was. This one had been responsible for the destruction of the once-peaceful temple at the heart of Fae’lor. She had only been contained when the spirit of the land itself had drawn her down here, pulling her in and ensnaring her within this strange, suspended existence.

Sirik had once voiced aloud her confusion as to why they let Syndra live. Why not just end her life, and end the threat of her waking from her slumber? Her old master had smiled, and asked her why, if the land wanted her dead, did it sustain her? Sirik had no answer to that, not then and certainly not now. Her old master talked of balance, but he was dead, killed by a Noxian blade, along with almost all of those who had served here as this slumbering woman’s jailors, yet the one they had guarded still lived. Where was the balance in that?

As long as she lived, Syndra was a threat, yet that threat was contained while she and the others had stood watch over the Dael’eh Ahira. Now that it was within Noxian control, however… The fools would likely release her, either accidentally or in some ill-advised attempt to utilize her destructive power.

No, that danger was too great to risk. Syndra must die. Tonight.

Sirik tossed her flitterwing-filled glow-globe to her brother and stepped into the deeper pool, blade drawn.

“Wait,” said Okin.

“We have no time, brother,” said Sirik. “The Noxians will be upon us momentarily. We must end this now.”

“But she may be our best weapon against them.”

Sirik froze, then turned slowly towards her brother, her expression one of disbelief.

“She is Ionian, after all,” continued Okin. “She could be a great ally. With her, we could push Noxus from Ionia, once and for all!”

“And what then, brother? You think she could be controlled?”

“We wouldn’t need to control her.” Okin stepped forward, his voice full of passion. “We could strike against Noxus, in its heartland! We could—”

“You are a fool, brother,” Sirik interrupted him, her voice thick with derision. She turned away, and began to wade towards the motionless figure of Syndra.

“I can’t let you do that, sister. We can’t let you.”

It was only then Sirik realized her brother and her other two companions had fanned out around her, weapons drawn. “You can’t let me?” she said.

“Don’t make us do this, sister.”

Her gaze flicked between them, judging their distance from her, and whether she would be able to kill Syndra before they reached her. It would be close.

“I’m not making you do anything,” she said. “We came here to end a threat to Ionia—not unleash it.”

“This could be our chance to—”

“No,” said Sirik. “Don’t you see? This sort of division within Ionia is killing us, and it’s playing into the Noxians’ hands. We are all divided, arguing and working against each other, when we need to pull together.”

“So work with us,” begged Okin.

Sirik pointed at the motionless figure of Syndra. “She is a greater threat to this land than Noxus. It’s a foolish act of desperation to think otherwise.”

“Just stop being so stubborn, for once in your life!”

“You’re not going to convince me, brother,” she said. “So what now. You’re going to kill me?”

“Please, don’t let it come to that,” said Okin.

The four of them stood frozen for a second, none quite ready to escalate the situation just yet.

Then a shadow detached itself from the surrounding darkness, and sprang at them with lethal intent.

Sirik gave a shout of warning and lurched forward. The move surprised Okin and their other two companions, who raised weapons, thinking she was attacking. One flung a pair of throwing blades with a sweep of his arm, the move instinctual and reactionary.

Sirik swayed aside from the first dagger, but the second struck home, imbedding itself deep in the meat of her shoulder, making her hiss in pain as she stumbled backwards, falling awkwardly in the water.

Too late, Sirik’s attacker realized the real threat was behind him. The Ionian was lifted from his feet, a blade bursting from his chest, having been driven completely through him. Then he was hurled aside, and the shadowy attacker moved on, abandoning his sword and turning on Okin.

It was a vastaya, garbed in Noxian armor, and he roared, lips curling back to reveal his predator’s teeth. The sound reverberated painfully within the cavern.

Sirik recognized him, of course, as she struggled to regain her feet. This was Kalan, reviled traitor of the Placidium, who had turned away from his people and Ionia to join the enemy. He’d been given Fae’lor as his prize, a bone thrown to a loyal and subservient pet. She and her brother had lost more than a few friends at his hands.

“Noxian lickspittle!” said Okin, crouched low, blade at the ready. “You betrayed our people! You betrayed Ionia!”

Kalan gave a bitter laugh as he padded in towards Okin. He flexed his hands, and long talons emerged from his fingertips, as well as along the ridge of his forearms.

“There is no Ionia,” snarled the vastayan warrior. “There never was. A thousand mortal cultures are scattered across the First Lands, each with their own beliefs, customs, history and feuds. Your people have never been unified, never stood as one.”

“Then perhaps it is time that changed,” said Okin. “Though you have chosen the losing side.”

“Losing? The war is far from over, child,” said Kalan.

With a grimace, Sirik tore the throwing dagger from her shoulder, her blood leaking out into the water like a crimson ribbon wafting in a breeze. She tossed it deftly into the air, spinning it end over end, and caught it by its blade. With a swift flick of her wrist, she hurled it at the betrayer closing in on Okin.

It took him in the side of the neck, sinking deep, though Sirik cursed herself, for her aim was slightly off. It was not a killing blow. Nevertheless, Okin and their last companion took advantage of the moment, leaping in to strike.

Okin dashed forward, lunging, but his strike was turned aside by the flat of Kalan’s hand, who then knocked him away with a sharp kick. Their last companion came in fast from the flank, bladed fans slicing through the air, but the vastaya, even injured, was too fast, and too powerful.

He swayed aside, first one way, then the next, as the fan-blades sliced at him. Then, he lunged forward and grabbed his foe by the tunic with both hands, and slammed her head-first into a wall. An awful crack sounded as her neck broke.

Kalan’s yellow cat eyes turned back to Okin.

Sirik was too far away to help, she knew that instantly. Instead, she turned and began to slog back towards Syndra. She would do what she came to do. She had not expected to escape this venture with her life anyway, but she was determined their deaths would not be in vain.

She heard her brother shout in defiance, and the vastaya roar, but she dared not look back. She plunged deeper into the water, and reached down, fingers closing around Syndra’s throat. Her skin was warm to the touch. In her other hand, Sirik’s blade drew back for the killing blow.

This wasn’t how it was meant to be.

Something was very wrong.

The girl could still hear the sounds of the night forest around her. She could still see the ferns and twisted roots, and the last colors of the sunset beyond the thick canopy overhead.

But at the same time, she could hear shouts and roars, though they were muffled, as if she was hearing them from a distance… or from underwater?

For a moment, she felt her throat filled with liquid, and a sudden panic rose within her. She was drowning! But no, that was impossible. She was here, a child in the twilight forest outside her village. She was nowhere near water.

A shadowy form appeared before her, like a night-terror given insubstantial form. She felt a sudden constriction around her throat, and she struggled for breath.

Her eyes flickered. She glimpsed a young woman, her face covered in twisting tattoos. The vision was strange, and vague, however, as if she were looking at this person through water. A hand gripped her throat, choking her, and a blade was raised, ready to plunge down into—

No.

She was back in the forest. She was having some kind of awful waking dream. She’d just run here, shame and anger coloring her cheeks. She was going to the ghost-willow, to calm the rage surging within her.

No, she’d already done that. She’d done that over and over, hundreds and thousands of times. Reliving that moment, again and again.

What if this was the dream, and the other vision was real?

The darkness of Syndra’s hatred and anger surged within her.

And she woke from her endless dream.

Sirik saw Syndra’s eyes snap open.

With a desperate cry, she stabbed down with her blade, but struck nothing, for she was hauled into the air by some sudden, unseen force. She struggled against it, flailing wildly, but might as well have been trying to fight the rising tide. She was as helpless as a kitten in the mouth of its mother.

Syndra slipped free of the twisting roots that had ensnared her limbs for so many years, and emerged, gasping. Water streamed off her as she rose into the air, hovering several feet above the surface of the pool, shimmering and pulsing beneath her. Dark power radiated from one hand as she kept Sirik held aloft, floating helplessly, and her eyes burned with cold fire.

As Sirik watched, both horrified and fascinated, a helm—or perhaps a crown—grew into existence upon Syndra’s head. It coiled around her brow, like darkness given life, to form a pair of tall, curving horns. A bead of pure shadow formed at its center, becoming as hard as a gemstone, and burning with the same power that bled from her in waves.

Sirik twisted in the air as her brother Okin broke from Kalan’s grasp. As he did so, he saw Syndra, his expression one of awe. For his part, the vastaya looked almost as stunned, feline lips curled back in a hiss, his eyes wide.

With a horrible, sucking sound, three orbs of utter darkness materialised in the air around Syndra, and began to slowly orbit her. They seemed to swallow the scant light in the cavern, and pull at Sirik’s soul, a vile sensation of loathing and despair clutching at her.

“How long?” Syndra demanded, her voice cracked and unsteady from lack of use. “How long have I been imprisoned here?”

“Years,” spat Sirik. “Decades. We should have killed you long ago.”

She felt Syndra’s hatred surge as a painful stab within her, and she gasped. Then Syndra snarled in fury, and with a gesture sent Sirik hurtling across the cavern.

She smashed against a wall some twenty feet distant, and fell heavily, splashing painfully to the floor. Then Syndra’s dark gaze turned upon Okin and the Noxian creature.

Sirik grimaced in pain. Her left leg and more than one rib were broken, she judged, wincing as she struggled to push herself upright. She cried out as she saw her brother Okin stumble forward into the water, holding his hands up in entreaty.

“No, brother…” she managed, weakly.

“I am not your enemy!” Okin called out. “We are both children of Ionia! Join us!”

Syndra looked down upon him, her gaze radiating power.

“The Noxians attacked our lands, and slaughtered our people!” he continued. “We pushed them back, but they still have a foothold in our ancestral lands. They are not done with us yet! Ionia is divided, and vulnerable! You must help! Help us fight against this new tyranny!”

“I do not know who these Noxians are that you speak of,” Syndra replied. “But if they killed my people, then perhaps I owe them thanks. The only tyranny I experienced was at the hands of those I once called kin.”

Okin’s face was mask of horror, perhaps finally realizing his own foolishness, and he slumped to his knees, defeated.

With a sickening tearing sound, Syndra conjured another dark sphere—all of her bitterness, resentment and anger made manifest. It hovered above her hand, slowly spinning.

“And if you are Ionian, then you are my enemy,” she mused.

Sirik screamed, but there was nothing she could do. With a flick of her wrist, Syndra sent the orb hurtling toward, then through, her brother. He gasped, all the color draining from his flesh, and sank beneath the waters.

Kalan attacked then, leaping from the shadows, claws extended, but another gesture from Syndra sent the three spheres surrounding her hurtling from their orbits towards him, throwing him backward.

“You…” said Syndra, tilting her head to the side, as if trying to place him. “I recognize your soul. You shadowed my dreams.” Her expression darkened even more. “You were my jailor. You… You kept me here.”

From her position, Sirik saw the vastaya push himself to one knee.

“You are an abomination,” he hissed.

Syndra’s hand stabbed out, and the snarling creature was lifted into the air.

The waters of the Dreaming Pool were churning, and Sirik stared in wonder as the roots that had held Syndra began reaching out to reclaim her.

“Kill me, then!” Kalan snarled. “But do so in the knowledge that you will never find peace. Wherever you are, you will be hated and hunted. You will never live free.”

“Kill you?” said Syndra, her lip curling in rage. “No. That would be too clean an end for you.”

With a sweep of her arm, Syndra sent Kalan hurling down into the waters, into the grasp of the writhing roots. They clamped around his limbs reflexively, holding him under. He screamed, air bubbles billowing around him… and then went still.

Sirik stared defiantly at Syndra, knowing that she likely had only moments to live, but to her surprise, the powerful sorceress paid her no mind. Instead, Syndra turned her attention skyward. Both hands were wreathed in dark energy, and with a shout she lifted them high. The stone cracked, and a tumble of dust and rocks fell into the pool, sending crazy ripples spreading out in all directions.

With a violent cutting motion of her arms and a deafening boom, Syndra ripped apart the rock overhead. Huge chunks of stone fell around her, crashing down with titanic force, and Sirik pushed herself backwards desperately, each movement sending searing pain flaring up her leg and side.

Stars blinked in the sky far above, and Syndra began to rise, floating up towards freedom. She glanced back down, once, toward the motionless, submerged figure of Kalan, ensnared by roots.

“Your turn to dream, jailor,” she whispered, and with a sweep of her arms, she entombed him completely beneath the fallen rocks.

Wincing with every movement, Sirik crawled further away, certain she would be crushed at any moment…

The island rumbled, as if wracked by an earthquake. It went on for what seemed like an eternity.

And, when it finally ceased, an unnerving silence fell across Fae’lor.

Sirik crawled from the gloom, breathing in fresh air, and stared about her, eyes wide in shock. Easily half of the fortress was gone.

Her gaze drifted up. At first, she saw nothing but darkness where there should have been stars. With a sharp intake of air, she realized she was looking at the silhouette of the greatest towers and ramparts hanging against the night sky. It hadn’t collapsed into the sea—it had been ripped from the island, and lifted toward the heavens.

She stared, her mouth gaping. She had known Syndra was powerful, but this? This was power she could never have imagined.

As Sirik watched, frozen by the sight, she saw one of the Noxian warships moored in the harbor below lifted from the sea. Men tumbled from its deck like so many ants, falling to their deaths on the rocks below, as the ship was lifted ever higher. Then it fell, smashing back down upon two other vessels, crushing them to splinters. The destruction was catastrophic.

The ruined castle in the sky began to drift northwards. Alone at the sundered peak of the Dael’eh Ahira, Sirik watched it go, until the first rays of dawn crept over the horizon.

The import of the night weighed upon her heavily. Her brother, and the last of the guardians of Fae’lor were dead. All but her.

And while the destruction wrought against the Noxians this night would have been cause for great rejoicing at any other time, her heart was heavy.

Syndra was back in the world.

They had failed.

Kalan knelt, motionless and silent, as he waited for the seer to speak. She was a curious creature, violet-skinned, and with a pearlescent single horn growing from her forehead. Some may have mistaken her for one of his bloodline, the children of the Vastayashai’rei, but any of the kin would know otherwise.

The seer was of a people older even than his ancestors.

When she opened her eyes—those strange, kind, golden-flecked eyes that saw far more than they should—he saw they were tinged with sadness, and his heart sank.

“You are faced with an impossible choice,” she said, her voice as quiet as the rustle of autumn leaves.

“Then tell me what I must do,” said Kalan.

“That is not for me to say. Two paths lie before you, but you can only take one. I warn you, though—both lead to tragedy and sadness.”

Kalan didn’t blink. “Tell me.”

“The first path. You fight the invaders. At the Placidium of Navori, a great battle will be fought. While it will be bloody, you will be victorious. You will be proclaimed a hero. You and your heartlight live in peace for many years. You are happy. And yet, you are destined to outlive both your cubs, who will be taken before their time.”

Kalan took a deep breath. “And the other?” he said.

“You fight alongside the enemy. You never see your heartlight again, nor your children. They call you traitor, and curse your name. Your path is one of darkness, and bitterness, and revilement. You will be hated by your kin, and despised by your invader allies. After they are defeated at the Placidium, you must stand vigil on the isle of Fae’lor, guarding over the place of dreaming. And there you will stay.”

“And my little ones?”

“They live. They prosper. If not in this land, then another. But you will never look upon their faces again, and if you ever deviate from this dark path, they will be lost.”

Kalan nodded, and pushed himself to his feet. Sadness threatened to drag him down, but he suppressed it, pushing it deep inside himself.

As he looked around, taking in the details of the seer’s shrine, he felt that there was something strangely familiar about it… a vague sense that he’d been here before, that he’d felt this awful sense of grief and loss more than once.

He shook his head. To be trapped in this accursed moment forever? Now, that would be a fate far worse than death.

“I am sorry, my child,” said the seer. “It is a terrible choice you must make.”

“No,” said Kalan. “The choice is a simple one.”

In northwest Ionia, the island of Koyehn once stood beautiful and serene. Among its golden sands, seasonal bazaar, and quaint mill town sat the Temple of Koyehn, an ancient and renowned conservatory for the arts.

Lukai Hwei was born to inherit this temple.

Kind and precocious, Hwei spent his childhood putting to canvas his wild daydreams, which exaggerated the world around him into surreal, fantastical sights. He knew these visions differed from reality, but through them, he saw life itself as art. So connected was Hwei to the shades of the world that even his eye color shifted in hue to reflect his mind and mood.

Hwei expressed this vibrant imagination through paint magic, a medium that influenced the emotions of its audience. As such, it required strict control and discipline, lest it overpower both mental perceptions and bodily sensations. Among its current practitioners, those unable or unwilling to control their art endangered themselves and the community—and were banished from Koyehn.

Despite these precepts, young Hwei indulged his imagination. In a demonstration for the temple masters, he recreated Koyehn’s sea. As paint flowed around the canvas, however, his control ebbed. Emotion crashed through him, wild and fathomless as an ocean, and he surrendered himself to its beauty. His vision turned black, his last memory the awestruck masters, drowning.

Hwei awoke days later, surrounded by his masters—alive, but infuriated. They would not exile the temple’s heir, but they stressed his responsibilities. Hwei was horrified—but fascinated—by the depths of his power, and he craved to see more.

Thus, by day, he upheld Koyehn’s conventions. But alone at night, he pushed the boundaries, driven to explore the extent of his power. In time, this practice focused the intensity of Hwei’s imagination, allowing him to manifest a palette that flowed with magical paint.

Well into adulthood, Hwei mastered his craft. And with passion and humility, he prepared to inherit his birthright, surrounded by the respect and affection of his peers. But part of his mind remained forever shrouded at nightfall.

And so it remained, until the temple received a visiting artist: Khada Jhin.

Over a gilded summer, Hwei accompanied Jhin, guiding him around Koyehn. They often exchanged their creative perspectives, and, respecting their differences, Hwei recognized Jhin’s virtuosity and valued their time together.

But the night before Jhin’s departure, the man challenged Hwei. Jhin sensed that the pieces Hwei showed others were forced façades—and he wanted to see a real performance. Hwei tried to deny it, but his eyes betrayed him. Flooded by the years spent creating meaningless art, his imagination begged catharsis.

So Hwei painted. Decades of practice guided his brush. The night came alive, colored by the brilliant infinity of his mind. Emotions washed over him, harmonious and visceral, and Hwei welcomed them. Sharing these forbidden visions for another exhilarated him and illuminated the powers of his art: connection, inspiration, and unfettered creation.

Jhin witnessed all. Afterward, with eyes alight and tone inscrutable, he said farewell, stating he would be moving on tomorrow “to watch the lotuses bloom.”

At dawn, Hwei and his fellow artists awoke to a series of tragedies.

First: four historic paintings, destroyed.

Second: an arrangement of four bodies—the masters that Hwei had almost killed in his youth.

Third: the fiery eruption of the temple’s four lowest floors.

Amid the flames, Hwei imagined the air electric with color. Everything that lived within him bled outward.

It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was... art. Realizing its dark potential—of destruction, devastation, and torment—Hwei felt the same horror and fascination he had in his youth.

The temple quickly collapsed into ruins, with Hwei emerging as its only survivor.

Exhausted and guilt-ridden, he mourned. Yet his imagination overflowed, reliving every moment of the disaster.

During the day, Hwei and the villagers from the mill town held burials. At night, he revisited the ashen-gray wreckage and painted, his palette taking the shape of Koyehn’s crest—the same worn over his heart.

On one such night, Hwei found the remnants of a trap beneath the rubble—one petaled like a lotus flower.

Realizing who’d wreaked this havoc, a cascade of emotions engulfed Hwei. Fear. Sorrow. Betrayal... Awe.

A question burned within him: why?

But did he want the answer? Or would it be safer to suppress this need? He could stay here with his people—as the heir—help them rebuild... or...

Bearing little more than his paintbrush and palette, Hwei left his island, and his people, behind.

In the time since, Hwei has learned that the answers he seeks arise through revealing the full extent of his art to others. He tracks down nefarious individuals in Ionia’s darkest corners, unleashing scenes of suffering upon them to understand his own well of pain. Yet he also reaches out to Ionia’s victims—fellow witnesses—to create shared tranquility and reflection.

Both the relentless artist rising from the ashes and the kindhearted man from a once-peaceful isle, Hwei faces the conflicting hues of Ionia—and his own imagination. As he spirals deeper into the shadows, he lights a path, mind brimming with possibility.

Which shade of himself will triumph, however, is yet to be seen.